Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it’s incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that’s where our hypnogogic imagery tends.
Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accurately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of how they got into our heads. ‘[I]n violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,’ says Herman Melville in Moby Dick; ‘and . . . when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing.’ In our everyday life, we effortlessly and unconsciously incorporate cultural norms and make them our own.
A similar inhaling of motifs is present in schizophrenic ‘command hallucinations’. Here people feel they are being told what to do by an imposing or mythic figure. They are ordered to assassinate a political leader or a folk hero, or defeat the British invaders, or harm themselves, because it is the wish of God, or Jesus, or the Devil, or demons, or angels, or – lately – aliens. The schizophrenic is transfixed by a clear and powerful command from a voice that no one else can hear, and that the subject must somehow identify. Who would issue such a command? Who could speak inside our heads? The culture in which we’ve been raised offers up an answer.
Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything – even that smoking cigarettes is cool. In our time, putative aliens are the subject of innumerable science fiction stories, novels, TV dramas and films. UFOs are a regular feature of the weekly tabloids devoted to falsification and mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion pictures of all time is about aliens very like those described by abduct-ees. Alien abduction accounts were comparatively rare until 1975, when a credulous television dramatization of the Hill case was aired; another leap into public prominence occurred after 1987, when Strieber’s purported first-hand account with a haunting cover painting of a large-eyed ‘alien’ became a best-seller. In contrast, we hear very little lately about incubi, elves and fairies. Where have they all gone?
Far from being global, such alien abduction stories are disappointingly local. The vast majority emanate from North America. They hardly transcend American culture. In other countries, bird-headed, insect-headed, reptilian, robot, and blond and blue-eyed aliens are reported (the last, predictably, from northern Europe). Each group of aliens is said to behave differently. Clearly cultural factors are playing an important role.
Long before the terms ‘flying saucer’ or ‘UFOs’ were invented, science fiction was replete with ‘little green men’ and ‘bug-eyed monsters’. Somehow small hairless beings with big heads (and eyes) have been our staple aliens for a long time. You could see them routinely in the science fiction pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties (and, for example, in an illustration of a Martian sending radio messages to Earth in the December 1937 issue of the magazine Short Wave and Television). It goes back perhaps to our remote descendants as depicted by the British science fiction pioneer, H.G. Wells. Wells argued that humans evolved from smaller-brained but hairier primates with an athleti-cism far exceeding that of Victorian academics; extrapolating this trend into the far future, he suggested that our descendants should be nearly hairless, with immense heads, although barely able to walk around on their own. Advanced beings from other worlds might be similarly endowed.
The typical modern extraterrestrial reported in America in the eighties and early nineties is small, with disproportionately large head and eyes, undeveloped facial features, no visible eyebrows or genitals, and smooth grey skin. It looks to me eerily like a foetus in roughly the twelfth week of pregnancy, or a starving child. Why so many of us might be obsessing on foetuses or malnourished children, and imagining them attacking and sexually manipulating us, is an interesting question.
In recent years in America, aliens different from the short grey motif have been on the rise. One psychotherapist, Richard Boylan of Sacramento, says:
You’ve got three-and-a-half-foot to four-foot types; you’ve got five- to six-foot types; you’ve got seven- to eight-foot types; you’ve got three-, four-, and five-finger types, pads on the ends of fingers or suction cups; you’ve got webbed or non-webbed fingers; you’ve got large almond-shape eyes slanted upward, outward, or horizontally; in some cases large ovoid eyes without the almond slant; you’ve got extraterrestrials with slit pupils; you’ve got other different body types -the so-called Praying Mantis type, the reptoid types . . . These are the ones that I keep getting recurrently. There are a few exotic and single case reports that I tend to be a little cautious about until I get a lot more corroborative.
Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by the failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.
8
On the Distinction between
True and False Visions
A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.
Samuel Butler, Characters (1667-9)
For just an instant in the darkened room I sense an apparition -ould it be a ghost? Or there’s a flicker of motion; I see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head there’s nothing there. Is that a telephone ringing, or is it just my ‘imagination’? In astonishment, I seem to be smelling the salt air of the Coney Island summer seashore of my childhood. I turn a corner in the foreign city I’m visiting for the first time, and before me is a street so familiar I feel I’ve known it all my life.
In these commonplace experiences, we’re generally unsure what to do next. Were my eyes (or ears, or nose, or memory) playing ‘tricks’ on me? Or did I really and truly witness something out of the ordinary course of Nature? Shall I keep quiet about it, or shall I tell?
The answer depends very much on my environment, friends, loved ones and culture. In an obsessively rigid, practically oriented society, perhaps I would be cautious about admitting to such experiences. They might mark me as flighty, unsound, unreliable. But in a society that readily believes in ghosts, say, or ‘apporting’, accounts of such experiences might gain approval, even prestige. In the former, I would be sorely tempted to suppress the thing altogether; in the latter, maybe even to exaggerate or elaborate just a little to make it even more miraculous than it seemed.
Charles Dickens, who lived in a flourishing rational culture in which, however, spiritualism was also thriving, described the dilemma in these words (from his short story, ‘To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt’):
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To his reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved.
In our time, there is still much dismissive chortling and ridicule. But the reticence and obscurity is more readily overcome, for example, in a ‘supportive’ setting provided by a therapist or hypnotist. Unfortunately – and, for some people, unbelievably -the distinction between imagination and memory is often blurred. Some ‘abductees’ say they remember the experience without hypnosis; many do not. But hypnosis is an unreliable way to refresh memory. It often elicits imagination, fantasy and play as well as true recollections, with neither patient nor therapist able to distinguish the one from the other. Hypnosis seems to involve, in a central way, a state of heightened suggestibility. Courts have banned its use as evidence or even as a tool of criminal investigation. The American Medical Association calls memories surfacing under hypnosis less reliable than those recalled without it. A standard medical school text (Harold I. Kaplan, Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 1989) warns of ‘a high likelihood that the beliefs of the hypnotist will be communicated to the patient and incorporated into what the patient believes to be memories, often with strong conviction’. So the fact that, when hypnotized, people sometimes relate alien abduction stories carries little weight. There’s a danger that subjects are – at least on some matters – so eager to please the hypnotist that they sometimes respond to subtle cues of which even the hypnotist is unaware.