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UFOs and Spirits
I suspect if you’re reading this, you probably have some beliefs in UFO or the spirit world. Maybe you’re on the fence. Maybe you’re hopeful I will make a particular argument to persuade you to my side of the fence. A few of you might be the angry skeptic wanting to know how anyone could write such rubbish. Don’t drive angry. Today, I am not aiming to persuade. I may make some fallacious arguments, not because I am trying to knock you off the fence, but mostly because I am curious about these artifacts in my own soul. These things make me wonder.
Cryptomnesia. The word itself makes me think of magic. Magical thinking? In essence it’s a bias of memory, often blamed for the details obtained in near death experiences and past life regressions where the skeptic will explain reported anomalous experiences to being linked to reading something like a history book or a movie that the reporter forgot reading or watching. It was a term used in 1874 by Théodore Flournoy, psychiatrist, critically explaining Hélène Smith’s abilities. She was a medium.
Mind you, it’s a real word. It was probably not coined to explain away metaphysics. Humans do forget they know things. We can’t hold everything in conscious memory, so we have to put some things down to hold something else…
