The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [83]
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a sceptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself: on close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burned finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such ‘evidence’ - no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it - is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.
Magic requires tacit cooperation of the audience with the magician - an abandonment of scepticism, or what is sometimes described as the willing suspension of disbelief. It immediately follows that to penetrate the magic, to expose the trick, we must cease collaborating.
How can further progress be made in this emotionally laden, controversial and vexing subject? Patients might exercise caution about therapists quick to deduce or confirm alien abductions. Those treating abductees might explain to their patients that hallucinations are normal, and that childhood sexual abuse is disconcertingly common. They might bear in mind that no client can be wholly uncontaminated by the aliens in popular culture. They might take scrupulous care not subtly to lead the witness. They might teach their clients scepticism. They might recharge their own dwindling reserves of the same commodity.
Purported alien abductions trouble many people and in more ways than one. The subject is a window into the internal lives of our fellows. If many falsely report being abducted, this is cause for worry. But much more worrisome is that so many therapists accept these reports at face value, with inadequate attention given to the suggestibility of clients and to unconscious cuing by their interlocutors.
I’m surprised that there are psychiatrists and others with at least some scientific training, who know the imperfections of the human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts might be some species of hallucination, or some kind of screen memory. I’m even more surprised by claims that the alien abduction story represents true magic, that it is a challenge to our grip on reality, or that it constitutes support for a mystical view of the world. Or, as the matter is put by John Mack, There are phenomena important enough to warrant serious research, and the metaphysics of the dominant Western scientific paradigm may be inadequate fully to support this research.’ In an interview with Time magazine, he goes on to say:
I don’t know why there’s such a zeal to find a conventional physical explanation. I don’t know why people have such trouble simply accepting the fact that something unusual is going on here... We’ve lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical.*
[* ‘ And then, in a sentence that reminds us how close the alien abduction paradigm is to messianic and chiliastic religion, Mack concludes, ‘I am a bridge between those two worlds.’]
But we know that hallucinations arise from sensory deprivation, drugs, illness and high fever, a lack of REM sleep, changes in brain chemistry and so on, And even if, with Mack, we took the cases at face value, their remarkable aspects (slithering