The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [55]
Similarly, the Harvard Mental Health Letter (September 1994) comments,
Sleep paralysis may last for several minutes, and is sometimes accompanied by vivid dreamlike hallucinations that give rise to stories about visitations from gods, spirits, and extraterrestrial creatures.
We know from early work of the Canadian neurophysiologist Wilder Penfield that electrical stimulation of certain regions of the brain elicits full-blown hallucinations. People with temporal lobe epilepsy - involving a cascade of naturally generated electrical impulses in the part of the brain beneath the forehead - experience a range of hallucinations almost indistinguishable from reality: including the presence of one or more strange beings, anxiety, floating through the air, sexual experiences, and a sense of missing time. There is also what feels like profound insight into the deepest questions and a need to spread the word. A continuum of spontaneous temporal lobe stimulation seems to stretch from people with serious epilepsy to the most average among us. In at least one case reported by another Canadian neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, administration of the antiepileptic drug, carbamazepine, eliminated a woman’s recurring sense of experiencing the standard alien abduction scenario. So such hallucinations, generated spontaneously, or with chemical or experiential assists, may play a role, perhaps a central role, in the UFO accounts.
But such a view is easy to burlesque: UFOs explained away as ‘mass hallucinations’. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a shared hallucination. Right?
As the possibility of extraterrestrial life began to be widely popularized - especially around the turn of the last century by Percival Lowell with his Martian canals - people began to report contact with aliens, mainly Martians. The psychologist Theodore Flournoy’s 1901 book, From India to the Planet Mars, describes a French-speaking medium who in a trance state drew pictures of the Martians (they look just like us) and presented their alphabet and language (remarkably like French). The psychiatrist Carl Jung in his 1902 doctoral dissertation described a young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover, sitting across from her on the train, a ‘star-dweller’ from Mars. Martians are innocent of science, philosophy and souls, she was told, but have advanced technology. ‘Flying machines have long been in existence on Mars; the whole of Mars is covered with canals’ and so on. Charles Fort, a collector of anomalous reports who died in 1932, wrote, ‘Perhaps there are inhabitants of Mars, who are secretly sending reports upon the ways of this world to their governments.’ In the 1950s there was a book by Gerald Heard that revealed the saucer occupants to be intelligent Martian bees. Who else could survive the fantastic right angle turns reported for UFOs?
But after the canals were shown to be illusory by Mariner 9 in 1971, and after no compelling evidence even for microbes was found on Mars by Vikings 1 and 2 in 1976, popular enthusiasm for the Lowellian Mars waned and we heard little about visiting Martians. Aliens were then reported to come from somewhere else. Why? Why no more Martians? And after the surface of Venus was found to be hot enough to melt lead, there were no more visiting Venusians. Does some part of these stories adjust to the current canons of belief? What does that imply about their origin?
There’s no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There’s considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist, frequent our planet, or abduct and molest us. We might argue about details, but the one category of explanation is surely much better supported than the other. The main reservation you might then have is: why do so many people today report this particular set of hallucinations? Why sombre little beings, and flying saucers, and sexual experimentation?
7
The Demon-Haunted World
There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness.
The ISA Upanishad (India, c.