>>The rest of us can chose to dismiss such accounts and experiences as being ridiculous or as nothing more than harmless psychological aberrations... but I think we do so at our own loss.<<
I agree with your words almost completely, but therein lies the rub. For me. I've investigated many accounts of alleged alien abductions, mostly in the 90s. I've heard some amazing stories, many of which I cannot relate because I promised never to say a word. Most of these stories - way over 90% - can be fairly quickly dismissed as personal interpretations of some kind. I am not denigrating the people I talked to; my mantra during those days was, "I believe that they believe these things happened". But there is, as usual, a small core of stories I've heard that cannot be dismissed. The people relating these tales do not want publicity - they shun it. They just want to know what happened to them to disrupt their lives. In most of these cases, the people had no connection with the UFO believers, and did not want to accept that something this outrageous could happen. (Our) Terry has gone a long ways towards convincing me there is something happening out there, to a very small portion of the population, that does not fit into the reality we expect. It may be governmental, or extraterrestrial, or perhaps it is just some sort of tie-in to the collective unconscious (perhaps a short circuit in the Matrix?). I finally have accepted at a very fundamental level that if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it might still not be a duck...but only a fool will walk away without considering it just might be a duck. Little would please me more than to have that small set of experiences definitively explained. The explanation is almost irrelevant; just having one would help my sleep patterns.
