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Record W2114580621 · doi:10.2466/pr0.2000.86.2.669

Flight and Abduction in Witchcraft and UFO Lore

2000· article· en· W2114580621 on OpenAlexaff
John Brent Musgrave, James Houran

Bibliographic record

VenuePsychological Reports · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicParanormal Experiences and Beliefs
Canadian institutionsSouth Okanagan General Hospital
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNarrativeFocus (optics)PsychologyAestheticsEpistemologySocial psychologyLiteratureArtPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The lore surrounding the mythical Witches' Sabbat and contemporary reports of UFO abductions share three main characteristics: the use of masks, the appearance of "Men in Black," and references to flight and abduction. We review these three commonalities with particular focus on the aspect of flight and abduction. We argue that narratives of the Witches' Sabbat and UFO abductions share the same basic structure, common symbolism, and serve the same psychological needs of providing a coherent explanation for anomalous (ambiguous) experiences while simultaneously giving the experient a sense of freedom, release, and escape from the self. This pattern of similarities suggests the possibility that UFO abductions are a modern version of tales of flight to the Sabbat.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.007

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.017
Scholarly communication0.0020.003
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.348
Teacher spread0.330 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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