Richard Dolan is someone I’ll always listen to, even when I disagree with him. But his scholarly approach to the UFO phenomenon is appreciated in a field more known for yell-ers than studiers. So this came up in the Skeptiko podcast when they were talking about Rey Hernandes and his book “Beyond UFO’s”:
Maybe you can correct me and I have not spoken with Ray, so I’ll just say that, but, uh, that it was, it’s all self-reported experiences, and without any real investigation. You and I both have spoken with countless people, who have volunteered their experiences to me and they’ve told me their story, and I’ll just tell you, like on a personal level, a lot of those people seem very credible to me, and a lot of them do not seem credible to me. A lot of them do not seem credible to me. And a lot of them, frankly, seem mentally unstable and mentally ill. And this is something no one ever talks about but it is definitely a reality. The other thing is, a lot of it is very ideologically driven… new age ideology. A huge, from what I can gather, significant portion of the respondents of that survey, and I don’t know this but they seem to be from Southern California, maybe Sedona, very like New Age cultural centers. I know that’s not entirely true and I don’t know what the numbers are, but it strikes me as a very high percentage. So you’ve got a very strong ideological component already going into that where all of those people, probably almost every last one of them, will say ‘Yeah, our space brothers, or Galactic Federation are here to help us.’
I’m sure someone will weigh in with information about the data and whether it is skewed to “new age cultural centers” but credibility is a huge issue for me. I am now venturing into what is for me uncharted territory by taking seriously the accounts of people who report past lives in landscapes not in our present historical timeline, and also into non-human (or is it differently humanoid?) personalities. My criteria is interviewing practitioners who I know and respect so there is some vetting involved. I trust in my own instinct that someone I know and have traded sessions with, and who has done their homework in a healing or artistic profession, may be even more grounded than the person whose presentation I’m attending at a UFO conference. I preach discernment to such a degree that it kept me from exploring these areas in my past lives work I’m more concerned with the “strong (New Age) ideological component” Dolan refers to. But hearing him mention mental instability has made me proceed even more cautiously. I’ve walked out of a presentation at a prominent UFO conference by someone who exhibited signs of mental instability and possibly mental illness, even with an audience of rapt followers hanging n every word. So I have to trust my filter, even as I keep Dolan’s words in mind. Here’s the link to the podcast:
https://skeptiko.com/richard-dolan-ufo-disclosure-toothpaste-out-of-the-tube-438/