"It's not that I don't believe them and write them all off as dishonest, but I certainly believe it well in the realm of possibility that their memories are so damaged and fragmented that they may only remember their handlers as "reptiles" or "aliens" as a disguise mechanism or a natural effect of disassociative amnesia."

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Firstly, your consideration is always relevant.
But - no, there have been direct experiences.
(What can upset the mental health "regulars" is the incredible amount of them and often, similarity.)

Certainly, also, people have been both progammed, and perhaps corresponding more to your thoughts, deprogrammed after experiences in order to forget or have a different idea of them.
Without any doubt.

However, again, there has very often been clear surety of direct experiences before any possible deprogramming, not to do with altered memory or deprogramming.
Programming, or pre-programming, however, can be a possible explanation of some of these experiences, and pre-programming is intrinsic to mind control techniques.
Much government, secret experimentation was made of what intensifies mind control effectiveness, from common worts growing in meadows to more traditonal technology and as yet unpublicised technology, and everything in between.
(Indeed Mr Spiers was made a part of that experimentation.)
That may have real relevance.

Personally, when I have had such experiences, at times I knew I was clearly at least "primed".
Many have been primed.

However again, I suggest at least some of these experiences inhabit a kind of meaning or category which is rather inexplicable in itself.
Even where pre-programming can be involved, few believe this can be a full explanation for the depth and apparent realness and, in real time, personal immersion in the experience.

For me there is a potential explanation within the traditional area of demonology, as adopted by I.D.E. Thomas, John Keel, also as considered by Sitchin and Von Daniken and discussed in recent years by Christopher Partridge.
When I refer to demonology, I am thinking of the spirit world but of a more or less actual spirit world, somehow controlled by some purposive sentience(s)

In other words, this interpretation may quite agree indeed with people who talk about aliens of multi-dimensional existences, there may be few bones between the two. (Except, possibly, that Zeta-Reticuli or wherever may not quite make sense as these beings' real homes, as they wouldn't live in this universe in normal 3 dimensional space and time. Also, in seeing little green, or grey men, one might be having a consciousness control experience by a spiritual entity, wherein the little men may be representative of something conscious. Rather than individual beings of individual consciousnesses. Perhaps.)

I have to admit I am someone who has had such experiences many years ago, and, while I can't explain them, my spirit world theory unfortunately also jars with a lot of people, and indeed part of me.
However, that may just be because the experiences can have a convincing sense of realness.
At the same time, people have talked to ghosts of dead people and swear they were fully real on later discovering the person met died years before.

I am thinking of a quite real (if not corporeal) spirit world, as not so much a place of subjective imaginings based upon the effects of whatever is in one's gut at the time.
But more a controlled spirit world, and potentially a complex, controlled spirit world, such that an experience could also have a meaning or purpose which it doesn't present "on its face".
I think that is very important.

I think it is also likely there is very much predetermination indeed in this real (corporeal) world, something which, if true, kind of makes the world not even really so much of a "real" place after all. This may be the key to everything.
I suppose this also has sympathies within current well-known modes of thought (for example from Elon Musk) which express theories as that we're living in a hologram or a type of massive computer or AI control.

Considerations of little green men - coporeal or spirit world appearances - are much less seriously weird or "way out" if one considers a significantly controlled, predetermined world in this way.
Little would appear too odd at all much, probably, in such a world or world view, if one can get beyond what may be a mental conditioning to appreciate the everyday and dismiss what doesn't fit there.
The predetermined world is and has long been a staple theory of traditional (not new age) philosophers and logicians.

This area of visitation and potential off-planet experiences is not something I am much familiar with nowadays, though. Whether due to my own prior conditioning or not, it does baffle, it confounds and is so damn weird.

I think there actually is something going on, though. And, even if these experiences are created significantly incorporating human level pre-programming, I have little doubt there would be some kind of organised overall plan and actual kind of either synchronicity or synchronisation around them.

I suggest they are not to be fully trusted therefore - I mean the experiences are not to be fully trusted by the experiencers.
I don't mean that the experiencers are not to be trusted. They are going through something.

It is of course a tricky subject as meaningless delusions of course exist, and perhaps trauma can be a part of that. Further, after casually referencing demonology, one would be a fool to dismiss that demons can also cause conditions of no value but much harm, real illness bestowed upon persons.