Surely in staged incidents there's a great deal of expectation and awareness of the pressure to remember details that does not exist in non-staged incidents. How have the staged incidents you refer to accounted for this?

The staged incidents were not announced in advance. In one example, people were expecting a lecture when suddenly an 'argument' broke out involving the lecturer. It had the appearance of a genuine dispute. The audience would, therefore, have assumed it was a real, if unwelcome, unexpected incident. As such, I think they are a fair reflection of coming across an unexpected incident in real life. Only once the lecture began did they realise they were expected to recall the incident.

The "staged" explanation is very intriguing. It's the most likely explanation for the Rendlesham case (I plan to write something on the matter as soon as I can gather the time to crosscheck references): a staged accident to observe the psychological reactions of the persons involved. Similar accidents were reported from the USSR (the Voronezh "flap" in 1989) and Spain (the "UMMO affair" in 1966). While it's hard to find confirmation in the official documentation all the evidences point in that direction.
You talked about psychology, and you may be right. In some cases it appears as the UFO (or whatever you like to call it) is able to alter the witness(es) perception of reality, and that may be the final key to unlock the chest.

There's also the issue of archetypal elements to sightings. This doesn't mean it's not "all in the mind", but suggests there may be something beyond faulty memory and pure imagination at work in some cases. Why, for example, do many UFO abduction stories seem to correlate with earlier fairy tales?

Another point about one off, single witness UFO sightings is, WHY is there only one witness? If a UFO is big and obvious and flying low over a populated area, it ought to generate many reports. When you get just one, with no other evidence apart from a witness statement, it would be unwise to let it carry too much weight in proposing theories beyond current science. Misperception or hallucination would be difficult to dismiss in such cases.

Well, the problem is that UFOs seem to prefer scarcely populated areas. I like to think that there's some kind of twisted humour on their part.
There have been a few sightings over highly populated areas and all of these have a good number of witnesses, though most of them have no time or do not care about what they saw. The only sighting I had happened in a village in the Alps and there were quite a few witnesses apart from myself.
Personally I have always favored the physical explanation (be it a cloud, an airplane or an unknown physical phenomenon) over the hallucination: in the second case we can enter a Matrix-like scenario when everything, and I mean everything, can be questioned. We could end up like that old paradox according to which our reality is just a dream in the mind of God and God is just a dream in the mind of an higher intelligence and so on.
I agree with you that some cases have a psychological basis (for example a part of the better-left-alone area of "alien abductions") but how about the cases where physical traces are involved? How about the photographs? How about the "simple witnesses" who do not claim fantastic experiences but simply seeing "something in the sky" once in their lifetime? Something physical, be it known or unknown, must be involved.

I'm not really talking about psychology here, more neuroscience. It has recently been discovered that our brains routinely 'substitute' objects we don't see well with things from our memory. See http://www.assap.org/newsite/articles/Misperception.html for more info. The substitution takes place BEFORE we are consciously aware of it, so we see it as completely real. The problem is particular acute in peripheral and night vision (see
http://www.assap.org/newsite/articles/Corner%20eye%20phenomena.html).

It doesn't mean that we all go round seeing imaginery things all the time. However, it does mean that sometimes, when we see things poorly, particularly if we are not familiar with them, our brains can alter bits of our visual field, without our being consciously aware of it. Such misperceptions combine a real physical object (balloon, plane, cloud, satellite, whatever) with an element of hallucination (in that people don't see things as they really are). Such misperception would certainly cover many 'simple witness' light in the sky cases. So it is not a question of hallucination versus physical stimulus - misperception combines both. Nor is it anything to do with psychology, as such. We all misperceive from time to time.

I have examined many UFO photos and not seen any that weren't reasonably easy to explain by natural causes. I've never examined any physical traces though I've not heard any convincing reports about them.

I think all anomaly researchers need to look into neuroscience urgently. Recent developments are completely changing our whole view of perception and how it drastically affects witness reports.

One problem with UFO/alien reports and pictures is that we're dealing with a patchwork of different possible causes and motives under the same umbrella.

Is there any persuasive evidence to show that sightings of UFO's in the sky can be linked to abduction reports? To my mind, it's largely our own cultural expectations that make the link between phenomena like this. A century or more ago, if you were abducted by a green man, shown their secret abode and plonked back with no time having elapsed you would assume you'd been taken by the fairies. If you consequently saw strange bright lights in the sky you wouldn't assume it was the fairies coming back for you. Nowadays we'd report it all as an alien abduction.

The same may be said for ghosts and the like - our historicised view of hauntings is a fairly recent development.

I like the 'big picture' approach that you're suggesting.

For instance, if we really are being visited by extra-terrestrials, a useful test could be devised to prove it. They should tell us one unknown scientific fact that we could verify.

There is still the remote possibility that the 'fact' may have come from the mind of the witness relaying the message, who just happens to be a brilliant, insightful scientist. On the whole, though, it's unlikely.

Most of the 'messages' supposedly from extra-terrestrials tell us stuff we already know, like we're messing up the planet. If they could tell us where to find a new moon of Neptune, that would be more useful.

There's certainly a marked cultural influence on reports throughout the gamut of paranormal phenomena. To my mind, the big question is why humans have had "otherworldly" experiences - regardless of era - that have intriguingly consistent aspects. For example, there are apparent links between fairies and aliens in both the "green" aspect and behaviour. This isn't really new thinking but it's a very important thing to consider, both in terms of our internal machinations and possible external factors.

To be honest I do not trust neuroscience that much. It always ends up with the usual theme of reality manipulation/substitution of reality which to me looks like a giant headsplitting version of The Matrix ("reality is just electrical and chemical impulses stimulating the brain" fair enough for me but we'd better be careful not to get entangled in very long and sterile debates). If we start question what look anomalous, why not question what looks normal? That's always the danger with using neuroscience and psychology (for which I have absolutely no sympathy, but that's a personal matter), as well as denying us the opportunity to study and understand physical phenomena, which are undoubtely part of the whole scene.

When is a UFO not a UFO........when it is the Moon. Check this out

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7489457.stm

Did I miss anything?
Sorry for the disappearance but there are times when a man... has no time for "surfing the Web".
Still not convinced about neuroscience and, possibly, will never be. To be honest it seems that ever since finishing university I have been steadily losing faith in pretty much all areas of science (or perhaps I am losing faith in the persons using them).