The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [65]
Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it’s incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that’s where our hypnogogic imagery tends.
Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accurately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of how they got into our heads. ‘[I]n violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,’ says Herman Melville in Moby Dick; ‘and... when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing.’ In our everyday life, we effortlessly and unconsciously incorporate cultural norms and make them our own.
A similar inhaling of motifs is present in schizophrenic ‘command hallucinations’. Here people feel they are being told what to do by an imposing or mythic figure. They are ordered to assassinate a political leader or a folk hero, or defeat the British invaders, or harm themselves, because it is the wish of God, or Jesus, or the Devil, or demons, or angels, or - lately - aliens. The schizophrenic is transfixed by a clear and powerful command from a voice that no one else can hear, and that the subject must somehow identify. Who would issue such a command? Who could speak inside our heads? The culture in which we’ve been raised offers up an answer.
Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything - even that smoking cigarettes is cool. In our time, putative aliens are the subject of innumerable science fiction stories, novels, TV dramas and films. UFOs are a regular feature of the weekly tabloids devoted to falsification and mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion pictures of all time is about aliens very like those described by abduct-ees. Alien abduction accounts were comparatively rare until 1975, when a credulous television dramatization of the Hill case was aired; another leap into public prominence occurred after 1987, when Strieber’s purported first-hand account with a haunting cover painting of a large-eyed ‘alien’ became a best-seller. In contrast, we hear very little lately about incubi, elves and fairies. Where have they all gone?
Far from being global, such alien abduction stories are disappointingly local. The vast majority emanate from North America. They hardly transcend American culture. In other countries, bird-headed, insect-headed, reptilian, robot, and blond and blue-eyed aliens are reported (the last, predictably, from northern Europe). Each group of aliens is said to behave differently. Clearly cultural factors are playing an important role.
Long before the terms ‘flying saucer’ or ‘UFOs’ were invented, science fiction was replete with ‘little green men’ and ‘bug-eyed monsters’. Somehow small hairless beings with big heads (and eyes) have been our staple aliens for a long time. You could see them routinely in the science fiction pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties (and, for example, in an illustration of a Martian sending radio messages to Earth in the December 1937 issue of the magazine Short Wave and Television). It goes back perhaps to our remote descendants as depicted by the British science fiction pioneer, H.G. Wells. Wells argued that humans evolved from smaller-brained but hairier primates with an athleti-cism far exceeding that of