You Are Getting Sleepy

I've said it before: becoming a Certified MUFON Field Investigator isn't for sissies. The number of topics in which I must achieve a level of expertise is staggering. I just got through the section on radar, and I am now fully qualified to talk a 747 piloted by a panicked 11 year-old (the only person on the plane who didn't eat the fish) in for a safe landing on a dark foggy night on the deck of the U.S.S. Nimitz in heavy seas. Really, I am.

The U.S.S. Nimitz, or, as I now call it, "child's play."

But the section on radar is nothing compared to the section on hypnotism. I just got through 40 very long, very dense, very exhausting pages in the MUFON Field Investigator's Manual dealing with the ethics of hypnotizing people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. And now I have to answer about a dozen questions on the subject in the MUFON Field Investigator's Examination.

Why does this rare almost to the point of non-existent potentiality demand so much attention from MUFON?

I'm not sure, but it reminds me of the time I went to a "naughty hypnotist" act at a night club in Vegas, where a sketchy mesmerizer got a bunch of mostly-drunk people in the audience to perform ridiculously revealing acts onstage for laughs. Trust me, you haven't lived until you've seen a dozen hypnotized people who are all convinced that they're fleeing a burning building but have been commanded to do so in super-slow motion. Good stuff. But, see, I don't recall the hypnotist making a big deal about ethics, even when he made a prim married woman behave like a wanton trollop onstage while her straight-laced hubby squirmed in his seat in the audience.

But hypnotism ethics are a really big deal to MUFON, so I guess I have to hold myself to a higher standard than that hypnotist in Vegas did.

The first thing I have learned from this chapter is that I have to refer to abductees as "experiencers," because that is a much less loaded term. I can get behind that, but beyond that point I have to admit that this chapter confuses me completely. There is page after page about "risk assessment" and "informed consent," but absolutely nothing about how or when or even why I ought to perform hypnotism. And yet there has been some assumption made on the part of MUFON that when I am called upon to investigate an alien abduction case, something I very much hope to do someday, I will immediately attempt to hypnotize the "experiencer," and thus will need to know the code of ethics for hypnotists chapter and verse, right then and there. If I read this chapter right, my initial approach to the "experiencer" will be something like, "Hi, I'm Mark, you're getting sleepy."

Something about that makes me uneasy...

Credit: ovni-news.blogspot.com