The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [84]
A friend of mine claims that the only interesting question in the alien abduction paradigm is ‘Who’s conning who?’ Is the client deceiving the therapist, or vice versa? I disagree. For one thing, there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien abduction. For another, those two alternatives aren’t mutually exclusive.
Something about the alien abduction cases tugged at my memory for years. Finally, I remembered. It was a 1954 book I had read in college, The Fifty-Minute Hour. The author, a psychoanalyst named Robert Lindner, had been called by the Los Alamos National Laboratory to treat a brilliant young nuclear physicist whose delusional system was beginning to interfere with his secret government research. The physicist (given the pseudonym Kirk Alien) had, it turned out, another life besides making nuclear weapons: in the far future, he confided, he piloted (or will pilot - the tenses get a little addled) interstellar spacecraft. He enjoyed rousing, swashbuckling adventures on planets of other stars. He was ‘lord’ of many worlds. Perhaps they called him Captain Kirk. Not only could he ‘remember’ this other life; he could also enter into it whenever he chose. By thinking in the right way, by wishing, he could transport himself across the light years and the centuries.
In some way I could not comprehend, by merely desiring it to be so, I had crossed the immensities of space, broken out of time, and merged with - literally became - that distant and future self... Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t, although God knows I’ve tried.
Lindner found him intelligent, sensitive, pleasant, polite and perfectly able to deal with everyday human affairs. But, in reflecting on the excitement of his life among the stars, Alien had found himself a little bored with his life on Earth, even if it did involve building weapons of mass destruction. When admonished by his laboratory supervisors for distraction and dreaminess, he apologized; he would try, he assured them, to spend more time on this planet. That’s when they contacted Lindner.
Alien had written 12,000 pages on his experiences in the future, and dozens of technical treatises on the geography, politics, architecture, astronomy, geology, life forms, genealogy and ecology of the planets of other stars. A flavour of the material is given by these monograph titles: “The Unique Brain Development of the Chrysto-peds of Srom Norba X’, ‘Fire Worship and Sacrifice on Srom Sodrat IF, ‘The History of the Intergalactic Scientific Institute’, and ‘The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Stardrive to Space Travel’. (That last is the one I’d like to see; after all, Alien was said to have been a first-rate physicist.) Fascinated, Lindner pored over the material.
Alien was not in the least shy about presenting his writings to Lindner or discussing them in detail. Unflappable and intellectually formidable, he seemed not to be yielding an inch to Lindner’s psychiatric ministrations. When everything else failed, the psychiatrist attempted something different:
I tried ... to avoid giving in any way the impression that I was entering the lists with him to prove that he was psychotic, that this was to be a tug of war over the question of his sanity. Instead, because it was obvious that both his temperament and training were scientific, I set myself to capitalize on the one quality he had demonstrated throughout his life... the quality that urged him toward a scientific career: his curiosity ... This meant... that at least for the time being I ‘accepted’ the validity of his experiences ... In a sudden flash of inspiration it came to me that in order to separate Kirk from his madness it was necessary for me to enter his fantasy and, from that position, to pry him loose from the psychosis.
Lindner highlighted certain apparent contradictions in the documents and asked Alien to resolve them. This required