The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [66]
The typical modern extraterrestrial reported in America in the eighties and early nineties is small, with disproportionately large head and eyes, undeveloped facial features, no visible eyebrows or genitals, and smooth grey skin. It looks to me eerily like a foetus in roughly the twelfth week of pregnancy, or a starving child. Why so many of us might be obsessing on foetuses or malnourished children, and imagining them attacking and sexually manipulating us, is an interesting question.
In recent years in America, aliens different from the short grey motif have been on the rise. One psychotherapist, Richard Boylan of Sacramento, says:
You’ve got three-and-a-half-foot to four-foot types; you’ve got five- to six-foot types; you’ve got seven- to eight-foot types; you’ve got three-, four-, and five-finger types, pads on the ends of fingers or suction cups; you’ve got webbed or non-webbed fingers; you’ve got large almond-shape eyes slanted upward, outward, or horizontally; in some cases large ovoid eyes without the almond slant; you’ve got extraterrestrials with slit pupils; you’ve got other different body types -the so-called Praying Mantis type, the reptoid types... These are the ones that I keep getting recurrently. There are a few exotic and single case reports that I tend to be a little cautious about until I get a lot more corroborative.
Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by the failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.
8
On the Distinction between
True and False Visions
A credulous mind... finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.
Samuel Butler, Characters (1667-9)
For just an instant in the darkened room I sense an apparition -ould it be a ghost? Or there’s a flicker of motion; I see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head there’s nothing there. Is that a telephone ringing, or is it just my ‘imagination’? In astonishment, I seem to be smelling the salt air of the Coney Island summer seashore of my childhood. I turn a corner in the foreign city I’m visiting for the first time, and before me is a street so familiar I feel I’ve known it all my life.
In these commonplace experiences, we’re generally unsure what to do next. Were my eyes (or ears, or nose, or memory) playing ‘tricks’ on me? Or did I really and truly witness something out of the ordinary course of Nature? Shall I keep quiet about it, or shall I tell?
The answer depends very much on my environment, friends, loved ones and culture. In an obsessively rigid, practically oriented society, perhaps I would be cautious about admitting to such experiences. They might mark me as flighty, unsound, unreliable. But in a society that readily believes in ghosts, say, or ‘apporting’, accounts of such experiences might gain approval, even prestige. In the former, I would be sorely tempted to suppress the thing altogether; in the latter, maybe even to exaggerate or elaborate just a little to make it even more miraculous than it seemed.
Charles Dickens, who lived in a flourishing rational culture in which, however, spiritualism