Blog Post 1: UFO Abduction and Past Life Hypnotic Regression

I found the UFO abduction and projective testing lecture very interesting. It is crazy to me that a person can change their memories and remember things in the past differently. People can change their memory to make it make more sense to them, and make it consistent with current expectations. It was also found that hypnosis does not recalling accurate memories, but it can actually make a person more confident in their false memory that they have. I think past life hypnotic regression is extremely fascinating. This is when people contrast past life fantasies. Their fantasies are normally very detailed and vivid. This can be seen for some people that believe they have been abducted by aliens. One of the example video in the slides discussed how a man believed he had been abducted many times since he was a kid. When he describes these experiences he goes in to vivid detail. What does not make sense to me is that his describes his first abduction at 5 years old with so much detail which is strange because I can't describe anything from when I was 5 years old.  He then uses hypnosis to unlock the parts of his memory he has forgotten, as discussed earlier hypnosis can just make a person more confident in a false memory. A phycologist in the video states that people that make stories like these usually do not feel as if they fit in and want to be socially accepted, believing they are an abductee allows them to fit in to a group of people and helps them find their identity. When movies and tv shows with alien concepts became popular the amount of abductions reported increase greatly. People that believed in alien abduction usually report having them during sleep. They also tend to esoteric beliefs and more instances of sleep paralysis. I find the ability for people to completely change their memory so fascinating and I hope to learn more about it in the future.