The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [32]
You may not remember the incident right away. Instead you might simply find some period of time unaccountably missing, and puzzle over it. Because all this seems so weird, you’re a little concerned about your sanity. Naturally you’re reluctant to talk about it. At the same time the experience is so disturbing that it’s hard to keep it bottled up. It all pours out when you hear of similar accounts, or when you’re under hypnosis with a sympathetic therapist, or even when you see a picture of an ‘alien’ in one of the many popular magazines, books, and TV ‘specials’ on UFOs. Some people say they can recall such experiences from early childhood. Their own children, they think, are now being abducted by aliens. It runs in families. It’s a eugenics programme, they say, to improve the human breeding stock. Maybe aliens have always done this. Maybe, some say, that’s where humans came from in the first place.
As revealed by repeated polls over the years, most Americans believe that we’re being visited by extraterrestrial beings in UFOs. In a 1992 Roper opinion poll of nearly 6,000 American adults -especially commissioned by those who accept the alien abduction story at face value - 18 per cent reported sometimes waking up paralysed, aware of one or more strange beings in the room. About 13 per cent reported odd episodes of missing time, and 10 per cent claimed to have flown through the air without mechanical assistance. From nothing more than these results, the poll’s sponsors conclude that two per cent of all Americans have been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from other worlds. The question of whether respondents had been abducted by aliens was never actually put to them.
If we believed the conclusion drawn by those who bankrolled and interpreted the results of this poll, and if aliens are not partial to Americans, then the number for the whole planet would be more than a hundred million people. This means an abduction every few seconds over the past few decades. It’s surprising more of the neighbours haven’t noticed.
What’s going on here? When you talk with self-described abductees, most seem very sincere, although caught in the grip of powerful emotions. Some psychiatrists who’ve examined them say they find no more evidence of psychopathology in them than in the rest of us. Why should anyone claim to have been abducted by alien creatures if it never happened? Could all these people be mistaken, or lying, or hallucinating the same (or a similar) story? Or is it arrogant and contemptuous even to question the good sense of so many?
On the other hand, could there really be a massive alien invasion; repugnant medical procedures performed on millions of innocent men, women and children; humans apparently used as breeding stock over many decades – and all this not generally known and dealt with by responsible media, physicians, scientists and the governments sworn to protect the lives and well-being of their citizens? Or, as many have suggested, is there a massive government conspiracy to keep the citizens from the truth?
Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering –crossing vast interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through walls – be so backward when it comes to biology? Why, if the aliens are trying to do their business in secret, wouldn’t they perfectly expunge all memories of the abductions? Too hard for them to do? Why are the examining instruments macroscopic and so reminiscent of what can be found at the neighbourhood medical clinic? Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual encounters between aliens and