The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [73]
For comparison, consider product tampering cases, which convey very little of the sense of wonder that surrounds UFOs and alien abductions: someone claims to find a hypodermic syringe in a popular soft drink can. Understandably, this is upsetting. It’s reported in newspapers and especially on television news. Soon there’s a spate, a virtual epidemic of similar reports from all over the country. But it’s very hard to see how a hypodermic syringe could get into a can at the factory, and in none of the cases are witnesses present when an intact can is opened and a syringe discovered inside.
Slowly the evidence accumulates that this is a ‘copycat’ crime. People have only been pretending to find syringes in soft drink cans. Why would anyone do it? What possible motives could they have? Some psychiatrists say that the primary motives are greed (they’ll sue the manufacturer for damages), a craving for attention, and a wish to be portrayed as a victim. Note there are no therapists touting the reality of needles in cans and urging their patients, subtly or directly, to go public with the news. Also, serious penalties are levied for product tampering, and even for falsely alleging that products have been tampered with. In contrast, there are therapists who encourage abductees to tell their stories to mass audiences, and no legal penalties are exacted for falsely claiming you’ve been abducted by a UFO. Whatever your reason for going down this road, how much more satisfying it must be to convince others that you’ve been chosen by higher beings for their own enigmatic purpose than that by mere happenstance you’ve found a hypodermic syringe in your cola.
9
Therapy
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sherlock Holmes,
in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality.
Gabriel Garcfa Marquez, Strange Pilgrims (1992)
John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom I’ve known for many years. ‘Is there anything to this UFO business?’ he asked me long ago. ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Except of course on the psychiatric side.’
He looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. He now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. Why?
‘I wasn’t looking for this,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing in my background that prepared me’ for the alien abduction story. ‘It’s completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these experiences.’ In his book, Abductions, Mack explicitly proposes the very dangerous doctrine that ‘the power or intensity with which something is felt’ is a guide to whether it’s true.
I can personally attest to the emotional power. But aren’t powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams? Don’t we sometimes awake in stark terror? Doesn’t Mack, himself the author of a book on nightmares, know about the emotional power of hallucinations? Some of Mack’s patients describe themselves as having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and psychotherapists working with ‘abductees’ made conscientious attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions? Why do they believe these witnesses but not those who reported, with comparable conviction, encounters with gods, demons, saints, angels and fairies? And what about those who hear irresistible commands from a voice within? Are all deeply felt stories true?
A scientist of my acquaintance says, ‘If the aliens would only keep all the folks they abduct, our world would