McDonald’s view on UFOs was based, he said, not on irrefutable evidence, but was a conclusion of last resort: all the alternative explanations seemed to him even less credible. In the middle 1960s I arranged for McDonald to present his best cases in a private meeting with leading physicists and astronomers who had not before staked a claim on the UFO issue. Not only did he fail to convince them that we were being visited by extraterrestrials; he failed even to excite their interest. And this was a group with a very high wonder quotient. It was simply that where McDonald saw aliens, they saw much more prosaic explanations.
I was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours with Mr and Mrs Hill and with Dr Simon. There was no mistaking the earnestness and sincerity of Betty and Barney, and their mixed feelings about becoming public figures under such odd and awkward circumstances. With the Hills’ permission, Dr Simon played for me (and, at my invitation, McDonald) some of the audiotapes of their sessions under hypnosis. By far my most striking impression was the absolute terror in Barney’s voice as he described – ‘re-lived’ would be a better word – the encounter.
Dr Simon, while a leading proponent of the virtues of hypnosis in war and peace, had not been caught up in the public frenzy about UFOs. He shared handsomely in the royalties of John Fuller’s best-seller, Interrupted Journey, about the Hills’ experience. If Dr Simon had pronounced their account authentic, the sales of the book might have gone through the roof and his own financial reward been considerably augmented. But he didn’t. He also instantly rejected the notion that they were lying, or> as suggested by another psychiatrist, that this was a folie a deux – a shared delusion in which, generally, the submissive partner goes along with the delusion of the dominant partner. So what’s left? The Hills, said their psychotherapist, had experienced a species of ‘dream’. Together.
There may very well be more than one source of alien abduction accounts, just as there are for UFO sigh tings. Let’s run through some of the possibilities.
In 1894 The International Census of Waking Hallucinations was published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have shown that 10 to 25 per cent of ordinary, functioning people have experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination, hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there’s no one there. More rarely, people sense a haunting aroma, or hear music, or receive a revelation that arrives independent of the senses. In some cases these become transforming personal events or profound religious experiences. Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.
Probably a dozen times since their deaths I’ve heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name. Of course they called to me often during my life with them – to do a chore, to remind me of a responsibility, to come to dinner, to engage in conversation, to hear about an event of the day. I still miss them so much that it doesn’t seem at all strange that my brain will occasionally retrieve a lucid recollection of their voices.
Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under perfectly ordinary circumstances. Hallucinations can also be elicited: by a campfire at night, or under emotional stress, or during epileptic seizures or migraine headaches or high fever, or by prolonged fasting or sleeplessness* or sensory deprivation (for example, in solitary confinement), or through hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or hashish. (Delirium tremens, the dreaded alcohol-induced DTs, is one well-known manifestation of a withdrawal syndrome from alcoholism.) There are also molecules, such as the phenothiazines (thorazine, for example), that make hallucinations go away. It is very likely that the normal human body generates substances – perhaps including the morphine-like small brain proteins called endorphins – that cause hallucinations, and others that suppress them. Such celebrated (and unhysterical) explorers as Admiral Richard Byrd, Captain Joshua Slocum and Sir Ernest Shackleton all experienced vivid hallucinations when coping with unusual isolation and loneliness.
[* Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. (Under the closed eyelids the eyes move, perhaps following the action in the dream, or perhaps randomly.) The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever the REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they’re dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group – the ones who are prevented from dreaming – is hallucinating in daytime. It’s not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations.]
Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment. Among the Native Americans of the Western Plains, for example, or many indigenous Siberian cultures, a young man’s future was foreshadowed by the nature of the hallucination he experienced after a successful ‘vision quest’; its meaning was discussed with great seriousness among the elders and shamans of the tribe. There are countless instances in the world’s religions where patriarchs, prophets or saviours repair themselves to desert or mountain and, assisted by hunger and sensory deprivation, encounter gods or demons. Psychedelic-induced religious experiences were a hallmark of the western youth culture of the 1960s. The experience, however brought about, is often described respectfully by words such as ‘transcendent’, ‘numinous’, ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’.
Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn’t mean you’re crazy. The anthropological literature is replete with hallucination ethnopsychiatry, REM dreams and possession trances, which have many common elements transculturally and across the ages. The hallucinations are routinely interpreted as possession by good or evil spirits. The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes so far as to argue that ‘a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination’ and that ‘the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be … [a] group wish to hallucinate reality’.
Here is a description of hallucinations as a signal-to-noise problem by Louis J. West, former medical director of the Neu-ropsychiatric Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is taken from the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
[I]magine a man standing at a closed glass window opposite his fireplace, looking out at his garden in the sunset. He is so absorbed by the view of the outside world that he fails to visualize the interior of the room at all. As it becomes darker outside, however, images of the objects in the room behind him can be seen reflected dimly in the window glass. For a time he may see either the garden (if he gazes into the distance) or the reflection of the room’s interior (if he focuses on the glass a few inches from his face). Night falls, but the fire still burns brightly in the fireplace and illuminates the room. The watcher now sees in the glass a vivid reflection of the interior of the room behind him, which appears to be outside the window. This illusion becomes dimmer as the fire dies down, and, finally, when it is dark both outside and within, nothing more is seen. If the fire flares up from time to time, the visions in the glass reappear.
In an analogous way, hallucinatory experiences such as those of normal dreams occur when the ‘daylight’ (sensory input) is reduced while the ‘interior illumination’ (general level of brain arousal) remains ‘bright’, and images originating within the ‘rooms’ of our brains may be perceived (hallucinated) as though they came from outside the ‘windows’ of our senses.
Another analogy might be that dreams, like the stars, are shining all the time. Though the stars are not often seen by day, since the sun shines too brightly, if, during the day, there is an eclipse of the sun, or if a viewer chooses to be watchful awhile after sunset or awhile before sunrise, or if he is awakened from time to time on a clear night to look at the sky, then the stars, like dreams, though often forgotten, may always be seen.
A more brain-related concept is that of a continuous information-processing activity (a kind of ‘preconscious stream’) that is influenced continually by both conscious and unconscious forces and that constitutes the potential supply of dream content. The dream is an experience during which, for a few minutes, the individual has some awareness of the stream of data being processed. Hallucinations in the waking state also would involve the same phenomenon, produced by a somewhat different set of psychological or physiological circumstances . . .
It appears that all human behaviour and experience (normal as well as abnormal) is well attended by illusory and hallucinatory phenomena. While the relationship of these phenomena to mental illness has been well documented, their role in everyday life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater understanding of illusions and hallucinations among normal people may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated to the uncanny, ‘extrasensory’, or supernatural.