The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [33]
How could humans be the result of an alien breeding programme if we share 99.6 per cent of our active genes with the chimpanzees? We’re more closely related to chimps than rats are to mice. The preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a warning flag, especially considering the uneasy balance between sexual impulse and societal repression that has always characterized the human condition, and the fact that we live in a time fraught with numerous ghastly accounts, both true and false, of childhood sexual abuse.
Contrary to many media reports,* the Roper pollsters and those who wrote the ‘official’ report never asked whether their subjects had been abducted by aliens. They deduced it: those who’ve ever awakened with strange presences around them, who’ve ever unaccountably seemed to fly through the air, and so on, have therefore been abducted. The pollsters didn’t even check to see if sensing presences, flying etc. were part of the same or separate incidents. Their conclusion – that millions of Americans have been so abducted – is spurious, based on careless experimental design.
[* For example, the 4 September 1994 Publisher’s Weekly: ‘According to a Gallup [sic] poll, more than three million Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens.’]
Still, at least hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, claiming they have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic therapists or joined abductee support groups. Others may have similar complaints but, fearing ridicule or the stigma of mental illness, have refrained from speaking up or getting help.
Some abductees are also said to be reluctant to talk for fear of hostility and rejection by hardline sceptics (although many willingly appear on radio and TV talk shows). Their diffidence supposedly extends even to audiences that already believe in alien abductions. But maybe there’s another reason: might the subjects themselves be unsure – at least at first, at least before many retellings of their story – whether it was an external event they are remembering or a state of mind?
‘One unerring mark of the love of truth,’ wrote John Locke in 1690, ‘is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.’ On the matter of UFOs, how strong are the proofs?
The phrase ‘flying saucer’ was coined when I was entering high school. The newspapers were full of stories about ships from beyond in the skies of Earth. It seemed pretty believable to me. There were lots of other stars, at least some of which probably had planetary systems like ours. Many stars were as old or older than the Sun, so there was plenty of time for intelligent life to evolve. Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had just flown a two-stage rocket high above the Earth. Clearly we were on our way to the Moon and the planets. Why shouldn’t other, older, wiser beings be able to travel from their star to ours? Why not?
This was only a few years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe the UFO occupants were worried about us, and sought to help us. Or maybe they wanted to make sure that we and our nuclear weapons didn’t come and bother them. Many people seemed to see flying saucers - sober pillars of the community, police officers, commercial airplane pilots, military personnel. And apart from some harumphs and giggles, I couldn’t find any counterarguments. How could all these eyewitnesses be mistaken? What’s more, the saucers had been picked up on radar, and pictures had been taken of them. You could see the photos in newspapers and glossy magazines. There were even reports about crashed flying saucers and little alien bodies with perfect teeth stiffly languishing in Air Force freezers in the southwest.
The prevailing climate was summarized in Life