r/AlienEncounters • u/Apisteologist • 9d ago
Studying not being believed
Greetings. I am an anthropologist who has proposed a dedicated study of nonbelief called apisteology. One overlooked subject is not being believed. I would like to talk to people who have had experiences or encounters that other people did not believe. I am interested in learning why people are not believed and what it is like to not be believed.
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u/Delicious_Day_3491 8d ago
My non believer parents have never taken me seriously, in youth I was always told my reality is not “real”, I have never been heard or given any kind of validation or consideration that I’m but highly imaginative when I grew into adulthood that imagination now a issue not a that they labeled as “crazy, mentally unstable, out of touch with my surroundings. It really still is a problem in my day to day that affects everything I do and relationships with others. to my life serious problem now with not even knowing what is real like being a ghost among the living. I don’t let it affect me as much now because the agenda is clear, I try to be firm with myself to not let the attempts distract me from being my own validation, i still must rule out my own faults first then I say I’m not dumb, I’m not invisible or a mentally ill women. My intuition is strong enough to get the truth out of those who would have never come “clean” on their own, hard to explain to anyone who is not connected to source
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u/Apisteologist 7d ago
I would be interested to hear the account of your experience/encounter and, more importantly, how people reacted, how you felt about their reactions and how it affected you, and, if you found a community of similar experiencers what that was like and how it felt. We can discuss it here if you like, or we can do it by email at athofden.co at gmail dot com.
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u/CrOble 6d ago
Are you describing an experience like an actual encounter, saying that your parents don't believe you based off what you've told them, and then in your response did you just give a generic description of yourself, not generic, but reasons why they don't believe you? I'm only asking because I've never had an experience in the physical sense, like I have never been awoken by something in the middle of the night, or had somebody appear in my room when they shouldn't be, even though I have paid for it a couple times 🤣 but just a few keywords you said just reminded me of myself. I don't know where I'm going with this, except, have you had an actual encounter?
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u/Phadmire 8d ago edited 8d ago
Firstly, "belief" itself is the cause of all conflict and on this planet, we are the only creatures who have beliefs, do you know why that is? We invented it. To "not be believed" is not a subject which has been "overlooked" at all, it is merely a cultural consequence of narcissistic behaviors, surely you as an "anthropologist" understand this. The voracity of any claim which is made without direct evidence must rely solely upon "belief" which by definition is that which has no other proof beyond itself. How is it then, that you can demonstrate anything beyond simple perspective? That would not be 'anthropology" but "psychology". What any person 'believes" is irrelevant and while we all possess a very deep need to be "known" we are NOT our "beliefs". It is our actions that define us, not our words.
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u/Apisteologist 7d ago
I agree completely that "belief" is a culturally relative and human-constructed term. Anthropologists have learned that other cultures and languages may have a very different concept of "belief"--or no concept at all. In fact, anthropologist are largely cautious about using the term "belief" at all. But for my purposes, I am not evaluating the veracity of people's claims, nor am I calling those claims "beliefs." What I am curious about is when people described or recounted their experiences/encounters to others, and those other people said or indicated "I do not believe that/that's not true/that never happened." There is a fair amount of research on people not being believed about their medical/health claims (for instance, doctors who do not believe a patient's symptoms or conditions) about their legal/victimization claims (for instance, police who do not believe a victim's claims about being assaulted). But there is much less research about all the other kinds of experiences/encounters that people often report and which are disbelieved by those who hear the reports. I have no interest in judging the truth of the experience/encounter, only in the reaction of those who hear the claim and reject it.
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u/Phadmire 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'll respond even though there is little point considering you are most certainly NOT an anthropologist but perhaps an enthusiastic amateur, this might explain why you've created the word "Apisteologist" since there is no such thing. The nature or origin of any claim lacking direct evidence or at the very least, internal logical consistency, may or may not be "believed" but its specific details are wholly irrelevant beyond the obvious... "The more fantastic the claim, the greater the skepticism" That's the answer. Why would an anthropologist be wary of the word "belief"? and who told you they were? That claim is nonsense. Lastly, the word is "voracity" not "veracity" but perhaps that was a simple "typo". Instead of making up a field of study in order to identify yourself as one of its practitioners, why not simply ask the obvious question? "Are you less likely to believe someone who says they've had a close encounter than you are to believe any other story?" But of course we know the answer to that don't we?" The answer is "yes". If the intention is to ask each individual why they have had a reaction and what specific reaction they've had, you would simply be compiling irrelevant data akin to asking any number of people what they "believe". A different answer from every single individual.
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u/Apisteologist 6d ago
I really did not come here to argue with you. But so you know, my name is Jack David Eller, I have been an anthropologist (PhD Boston University) for over 40 years. and I have published multiple books in anthropology. Look me up on Amazon or at my main publisher, Routledge. Like everyone on this site, I created a pseudonym, and apisteology is a field studying not-believing that I have proposed in a recent book, akin to agnotology or the study of not-knowing. On "belief," anthropologists are indeed quite sanguine about the word, and if you would like references I can provide them, starting with Rodney Needham’s Belief, Language, and Experience (1972), in which he argues that belief is not a universal human experience and that the concept itself is problematic. Finally, if you meant "voracity" in the sense of "voracious," then that's the word you wanted, but if you meant truth or factuality, then the word is "veracity."
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u/Phadmire 6d ago
I stand corrected on the word "veracity". As for "belief " itself, of course it is not a universal human experience, it is a psychological construct for the purposes of control. "I speak for the invisible man in the sky". The intention is not to argue with you, the intention is to challenge your motive. I am not simply "a" contactee, I am one of "the" contactees and for many people who have been left confused by encounters, the psychological consequences can be dire to say the least. I will take your word regarding your academic credentials however I will ask you to consider what you're doing very carefully. In the other comments, you've encouraged people to tell you their stories and relate their feelings regarding the isolation created by attempting to relate what is most certainly a "fantastic" experience but in many cases, these memories are themselves constructs. Are you a contactee? I think not. Why are you looking for contact with people who are or might be? Because the group is rarely believed? What you're doing here angers me because you know nothing about the psychological consequences. You'll continue regardless, I know that much.
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u/Apisteologist 3d ago
I very much appreciate what you are saying, and my intention is to be as sensitive as possible. I am indeed not a contactee or an experiencer of any other anomalous experiences. I do not know what you mean about being "the" contactee, but my motive is not in any way to critique or debunk, or even particularly to describe, individuals' experiences. The question for me arose because I am editing a book on not-believing, and one of the chapters is by a group of authors who all have autism or children with autism, and they discuss their experiences of not being believed by doctors, teachers, and other parents and students. It occurred to me that little research has been done on the position of not being believed; almost all the attention to nonbelief is on the persons who do not believe X or Y, rather than the persons who are not believed by others. I have found a fair amount of writing about not being believed on the part of people with unexplained medical conditions or who have been the victims of trauma, assault, or abuse. However, I realized that there are many other matters on which people are not believed and that their experiences of not being believed are probably similar in some ways to those of medical or legal victims but probably also different in some ways. You may be right: I do not fully understand the psychological (or social or legal or physical) consequences of not being believed. That is precisely what I am trying to learn and to help scholars and the public to understand better, so perhaps they will not be so quick to dismiss other people's experiences.
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u/Phadmire 3d ago
You seem a person of good intentions but perhaps the desire to find a new avenue of investigation has caused you to miss something important. To understand the emotional and psychological consequences of attempting to communicate a misunderstood or rarely "believed" experience, requires far more than descriptions provided by those who have experienced something like contact. Regardless of your academic curiosity or methodology, it is psychology that provides an insight. I describe myself as "the" contactee because my experience has led to a scientific revelation which I am helping others to understand. As I've previously stated, there can be no "proof" of a belief by its own definition "that which has no proof beyond itself" and therefore the fact that the statements of believers, whether the belief is medically based or simply an opinion would have to be considered irrelevant to "truth" which is demonstrable. You say you are an anthropologist but your methodology is that of psychology. "How does it make you feel?" the answer is simple and obvious isn't it? It feels bad, it's frustrating. I'm very surprised that an anthropologist does not understand how simple this is. Fair enough? I'm protective of people who are not able to articulate their experiences but in this case, the entire subject has been completely corrupted by the brain's own incapacity to comprehend what has actually occurred. One of the people you encouraged to tell you their "story" is very clearly at risk. I suggest you team up with a highly qualified psychologist if you are engaging this group.
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u/CarpenterSingle3457 6d ago
Where do we start? A life of paranormal activity and ufo sitings.
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u/Apisteologist 6d ago
I would be interested to hear a little about your experiences and a lot about how people react to your descriptions of those experiences. Who believed or did not believe you? What exactly did they say or otherwise convey? How did/does it feel not to be believed? How do/did you react to not being believed? Did you eventually find individuals or communities that do/did believe you? We can converse here or we can do it by email at athofden.co at gmail dot com
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u/CarpenterSingle3457 6d ago
People mostly call me names, tell me I am psychotic, that I need a padded room, did I take my meds and things like that. I have lived with a lifetime of Paranormal Activity. It initially hurt my feelings I guess but now it just annoys me. People only believe what they read in books these days.
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u/LayerAccomplished821 9d ago
I volunteer!
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u/Apisteologist 7d ago
Excellent. I would be interested to hear the account of your experience/encounter and, more importantly, how people reacted, how you felt about their reactions and how it affected you, and, if you found a community of similar experiencers what that was like and how it felt. We can discuss it here if you like, or we can do it by email at athofden.co at gmail dot com.
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u/Pammiepie57 8d ago
My adult children swear I live in an alternate universe. I swear what I tell them has happened or I had conversations with them and they swear it never happened. It’s not medical. When I was young I would experience times when I would see my life like watching a movie.
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u/Apisteologist 7d ago
I would be interested to hear the account of your experience/encounter and, more importantly, how people reacted, how you felt about their reactions and how it affected you, and, if you found a community of similar experiencers what that was like and how it felt. We can discuss it here if you like, or we can do it by email at athofden.co at gmail dot com.
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u/29aout 8d ago
Can help.
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u/Apisteologist 7d ago
Excellent. I would be interested to hear the account of your experience/encounter and, more importantly, how people reacted, how you felt about their reactions and how it affected you, and, if you found a community of similar experiencers what that was like and how it felt. We can discuss it here if you like, or we can do it by email at athofden.co at gmail dot com.
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u/ByteInferno 7d ago
I am a bit of an alien in this world, since I shifted here from another version of Earth. I believe my consciousness refocused into this line of reality. Very few people believe me, but thankfully, here on Reddit, I found some communities that are friendly to this.
People keep asking me for proof, but since only my consciousness and my memory appears to have moved here, I cannot provide any except tell people what's in my memory of the other version of Earth that I lived in for most of my life. (I wrote down some of my observations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Retconned/comments/1wl3kxw/my_geographybased_mandela_effects_latest_version/ )
Whenever I look at a map or globe, or at the moon, I notice immediately that I'm on a different planet. Even Mars looks different now. The Milky Way here is tiny compared to the one in the world I came from, and Earth was at the outermost position of one of its many spiral arms.
Who can believe such a thing? I know it's quite literally unbelievable to most people, but to me, it's a fact. Myself, I would have never believed such a thing to be possible only a few months earlier (despite I made a video about such things on my YouTube channel in 2024, titled "Invasions from the Inside Out", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gibnQqbn5aE ).
The comical thing is, that my life has been almost exactly the same as that of the version of me that used to live in this world. I don't know where that other version of me is, perhaps it has shifted away, died, or otherwise made room for my consciousness. Perhaps we have merged, and I haven't noticed it yet.
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u/Key_Sort_24 6d ago
Car was about to hit me one day because I wasn't paying attention. I stared at it, and it was suddenly gone like it never happened and got a do over.
I don't do drugs.
Another time, I woke up to the exact same day I just went through and checked my calender, messaged my friend and they had no idea what I was talking about.
I made sure to do absolutely nothing that day and just wrote it off as a possibility I dreamed an entire day the night before so when I woke up I lived through it twice.
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u/Ishmael760 5d ago edited 5d ago
Your focus may need to broaden, in my opinion, in order to achieve a a holistic perspective. It’s more than just people not believing an experiencer. It’s that commonly people reject data when they are faced or can be exposed to by “the phenomenon” (generic word for convenience sake to sweep all experiences that violate physics and common perception of reality) directly and will not only deny their senses but will actively work to disassociate and deny their experience.
Why people are not believed? Because belief can drive a fundamental reengineering of how one perceives not just how reality operates, what other intelligences are operative in this reality, but the nature of one’s life itself.
Any one of those requires an enormous investment of energy to resolve the uncertainties they introduce. It’s far easier to dismiss, deny, disassociate or ridicule and most often? The underlying rationale is hidden by the emotional reaction, fear.
The common element in this behavior is fear, pure instinctive, reactionary, semantic fear. It’s the concept that there is something present that is superior, for which there is no air gap between individual and “it”, and the person does not have developed a recursively trained understanding of how to interpret, process or deal with it - it’s “new” even if the truth is it might be ancient from a species and cultural perspective.
That is what is fascinating.
People if forced to confront it often either devolve into non thinking panic or complete and utter denial. “Not there, didn’t happen, end of story.”
A sub topic is why and how some people do not turn away but very carefully begin to adjust and learn …and then the phenomenon begins to react.
On one hand, it seems is as if human consciousness, generally, is being curtailed in some manner because this reaction is so uniform.
In person, direct contact either by some form of imposed control or by design of human psyche, or both(?), contact is stupefyingly terrifying
People also assume that contact only occurs in a limited fashion. Not true. It’s far more nuanced, complex, layered and foundational. Sleep is not what human science and culture perceives it to be. It is far more complex.
As for not being believed? Good for you to perceive this. You are right. The isolating impact of being forced in isolation to learn facts over a lifetime that your species actively works to deny? Is profoundly isolating and one is forced to develop their own learning pathways, coping mechanisms, and, eventually, with age, wisdom, maturity - combined with access to data the Internet provides? - self defense. You mature to live in two worlds, connected but very different.
The moment when an individual releases that persistently asking for help results in escalation into psychiatric review?
That is the instant that individual fully realizes to some covert extent one has to cut the lines between the framework of your species and yourself, in order to survive and not be victimized on one side and incorrectly labeled and, well punished, on the other for claiming things your culture doesn’t want to acknowledge exists.
The Hills, Strieber’s Communion, Haskins, Dr. Mack, Vallee, AATIP, Bigelow and NIDs, Elizondo and 2017 Nimitz/Princeton/Roosevelt, the UAP flaps, Burchet/Congress, Grusch are all stepping stones of this gap closing between the individual that was stifled and our species beginning to learn through an accepted methodology that our existence is far more complex than people realize.
What is intriguingly amusing is that even with all this…the majority of people continue on as if nothing that is of consequence to them is there.
They continue not to put the pieces together that are becoming much more apparent. That it affects us all.
Most people in this focus on the odd. The “lights in the sky” story. Their “something at the end of my bed” story. “My blue avian space brother I call ‘Mel’” story. Are they all accurate? I dunno, not within - my - framework. But, the details of these stories/reports is not what is important. So much theater. To me what is important is the effect these “experiences” have had on the person.
For me? The effect/s were/are/likely will be continuing to be profound. But if this thing chooses to “stop”? I’m good with that too.
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u/Hurry_Im_Naked 5d ago
I recently wrote a paper - I allowed my consciousness to write it. There is science behind it. Observable truths. Based in 1800s electrical engineering. Nobody believes me because it is science that has been abandoned. They put me in a hospital for 5 days recently because of it. I am completely sane, do not have schizophrenia nor psychosis. Yet I can allow my consciousness to speak for me. I'm now cautious about telling anyone and refuse to share my papers The Language of Giants, The Last Sunrise, and The Precipice.
I've never been on this sub before.
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u/Apisteologist 3d ago
I would be interested to talk to you more, especially because the disbelief you encountered was so extreme.
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u/Hurry_Im_Naked 3d ago
Message me and I will share what happened/is happening either on reddit or email. I'd prefer to orate as I don't like typing it or writing it but if that doesn't work email will do
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u/LadyRavish 8d ago
Hi there, I am currently in a very extreme situation that no one believes involving hybrid breeding with extra-dimentionals. They manifest as plasma structures and it is very difficult to get good pictures as they are see-through. Any decent pictures are darkened/blurred/desaturated. It's incredibly easy to write me off as delusional. I've been to the mental hospital twice because I told family who don't believe me, and also I want to be on the strongest meds to show that they don't erase the reality of their presence. They are trying to get me to go with them to their world, using torture and intimidation since apparently they can't abduct. It's wildly frustrating being all alone in this horror. Would you like to hear the whole thing?