The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [90]
Some women, so the story goes, are impregnated by aliens or alien sperm; the foetuses are then removed by the aliens. Vast numbers of such cases are alleged. Isn’t it odd that nothing anomalous has ever been seen in routine sonograms of such foetuses, or in amniocentesis, and that there has never been a miscarriage producing an alien hybrid? Or are medical personnel so doltish that they idly glance at the half-human, half-alien foetus and move on to the next patient? An epidemic of missing foetuses is something that would surely cause a stir among gynaecologists, midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of heightened feminist awareness. But not a single medical record has been produced substantiating such claims.
Some UFOlogists consider it a telling point that women who claim to have been sexually inactive wind up pregnant, and attribute their state to alien impregnation. A goodly number appear to be teenagers. Taking their stories at face value is not the only option available to the serious investigator. Surely we can understand why, in the anguish of an unwanted pregnancy, a teenager living in a society flooded with accounts of alien visitation might invent such a story. Here, too, there are possible religious antecedents.
Some abductees say that tiny implants, perhaps metallic, were inserted into their bodies, high up their nostrils, for example. These implants, alien abduction therapists tell us, sometimes accidentally fall out, but ‘in all but a few of the cases the artefact has been lost or discarded’. These abductees seem stupefyingly incurious. A strange object, possibly a transmitter sending telemetered data about the state of your body to an alien spaceship somewhere above the Earth, drops out of your nose; you idly examine it and then throw it in the garbage. Something like this is true, we are told, of the majority of abduction cases.
A few such ‘implants’ have been produced and examined by experts. None has been confirmed as of unearthly manufacture. No components are made of unusual isotopes, despite the fact that other stars and other worlds are known to be constituted of different isotopic proportions from the Earth. There are no metals from the transuranic ‘island of stability’, where physicists think there should be a new family of non-radioactive chemical elements unknown on Earth.
What abduction enthusiasts considered the best case was that of Richard Price, who claims that aliens abducted him when he was eight years old and implanted a small artefact in his penis. A quarter century later a physician confirmed a ‘foreign body’ embedded there. After eight more years, it fell out. Roughly a millimetre in diameter and four millimetres long, it was carefully examined by scientists from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. Their conclusion? Collagen formed by the body at sites of inflammation plus cotton fibres from Price’s underpants.
On 28 August 1995, television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch ran what was purported to be an autopsy of a dead alien, shot on 16-millimetre film. Masked pathologists in vintage radiation-protection suits (with rectangular glass windows to see out of) cut up a large-eyed 12-fingered figure and examined the internal organs. While the film was sometimes out of focus, and the view of the cadaver often blocked by the humans crowding around it, some viewers found the effect chilling. The Times of London, also owned by Murdoch, didn’t know what to make of it, although it did quote one pathologist who thought the autopsy performed with unseemly and unrealistic haste (ideal, though, for television viewing). It was said to have been shot in New Mexico in 1947 by a participant, now in his eighties, who wished to remain anonymous. What appeared to be the clincher was the announcement that the leader of the film (its first