The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [74]
intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in individuals who are disposed to esoteric beliefs in general and alien beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and imaginal experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such experiences. Moreover, such experiences were likely to be generated and interpreted as real events rather than imaginings when they were associated with restricted sensory environments... (e.g., experiences that occurred at night and in association with sleep).
What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality.
Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father, stepfather, uncle or mother’s boyfriend represented as an alien. Surely it’s more comforting to believe that an alien abused you than that it was done by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny this, saying they would know if their patients were sexually abused. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one in four American women and one in six American men have been sexually abused in childhood (although these estimates are probably too high). It would be astonishing if a significant number of patients who present themselves to alien abduction therapists had not been so abused, perhaps even a larger proportion than in the general population.
Both sexual abuse therapists and alien abduction therapists spend months, sometimes years, encouraging their subjects to remember being abused. Their methods are similar, and their goals are in a way the same - to recover painful memories, often of long ago. In both cases the therapist believes the patient to be suffering from trauma attendant to an event so terrible that it is repressed. I find it striking that alien abduction therapists find so few cases of sexual abuse and vice versa.
Those who have in fact been subjected to childhood sexual abuse or incest are, for very understandable reasons, sensitive about anything that seems to minimize or deny their experience. They are angry, and they have every right to be. In the US, at least one in ten women have been raped, almost two-thirds before the age of 18. A recent survey reports that one-sixth of all rape victims reported to police are under the age of 12. (And this is the category of rape least likely to be reported.) One-fifth of these girls were raped by their fathers. They have been betrayed. I want to be very clear about this: there are many real cases of ghoulish sexual predation by parents, or those acting in the role of parents. Compelling physical evidence - photos, for example, or diaries, or gonorrhoea or chlamydia in the child - have in some cases come to light. Abuse of children has been implicated as a major probable cause of social problems. According to one survey, 85 per cent of all violent prison inmates were abused in childhood. Two-thirds of all teenage mothers were raped or sexually abused as children or teenagers. Rape victims are ten times more likely than other women to use alcohol and other drugs to excess. The problem is real and urgent. Most of these tragic and incontestable cases of childhood sexual abuse, however, have been continuously remembered into adulthood. There is no hidden memory to be retrieved.
While there is better reporting today than in the past, there does seem to be a significant increase in cases of child abuse reported each year by hospitals and law enforcement authorities, rising in the United States ten-fold (to 1.7 million cases) between 1967