I think I can see many parallels between Marian apparitions and alien abductions, even though the witnesses in the former cases are not promptly taken to Heaven and don’t have their reproductive organs meddled with. The beings reported are diminutive, most often about two-and-a-half to four feet high. They come from the sky. The content of the communication is, despite its purported celestial origin, mundane. There seems to be a clear connection with sleep and dreams. The witnesses, often females, are troubled about speaking out, especially after encountering ridicule from males in positions of authority. Nevertheless they persist: they really saw such a thing, they insist. Means of conveying the stories exist; they are eagerly discussed, permitting details to be coordinated even among witnesses who have never met one another. Others present at the time and place of the apparition see nothing unusual. The purported ‘signs’ or evidence are, without exception, nothing that humans couldn’t acquire or fabricate on their own. Indeed, Mary seems unsympathetic to the need for evidence, and occasionally is willing to cure only those who had believed the account of her apparition before she supplied ‘signs’. And while there are no therapists, per se, the society is suffused by a network of influential parish priests and their hierarchical superiors who have a vested interest in the reality of the visions.
In our time, there are still apparitions of Mary and other angels, but also, as summarized by G. Scott Sparrow, a psychotherapist and hypnotist, of Jesus. In I Am With You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (Bantam, 1995), first-hand accounts, some moving, some banal, of such encounters are laid out. Oddly, most of them are straightforward dreams, acknowledged as such, and the ones called visions are said to differ from dreams ‘only because we experience them while we are awake’. But, for Sparrow, judging something ‘only a dream’ does not compromise its external reality. For Sparrow, any being you dream of, and any incident, really exists in the world outside your head. He specifically denies that dreams are ‘purely subjective’. Evidence doesn’t enter into it. If you dreamed it, if it felt good, if it elicited wonder, why then it really happened. There’s not a sceptical bone in Sparrow’s body. When Jesus tells a troubled woman in an ‘intolerable’ marriage to throw the bum out, Sparrow admits that this poses problems for ‘advocates of a scripturally consistent position’. In that case, ‘[ultimately, perhaps, one could say that virtually all presumed guidance is generated from within’. What if someone reported a dream in which Jesus counselled, say, abortion – or vengeance? And if indeed somewhere, somehow we must eventually draw the line and conclude that some dreams are invented by the dreamer, why not all?
Why would people invent abduction stories? Why, for that matter, would people appear on TV audience participation programmes devoted to sexual humiliation of the ‘guests’ – the current rage in America’s video wasteland? Discovering that you’re an alien abductee is at least a break from the routine of everyday life. You gain the attention of peers, therapists, maybe even the media. There is a sense of discovery, exhilaration, awe. What will you remember next? You begin to believe that you may be the harbinger or even the instrument of momentous events now rolling towards us. And you don’t want to disappoint your therapist. You crave his or her approval. I think there can very well be psychic rewards in becoming an abductee.
For comparison, consider product tampering cases, which convey very little of the sense of wonder that surrounds UFOs and alien abductions: someone claims to find a hypodermic syringe in a popular soft drink can. Understandably, this is upsetting. It’s reported in newspapers and especially on television news. Soon there’s a spate, a virtual epidemic of similar reports from all over the country. But it’s very hard to see how a hypodermic syringe could get into a can at the factory, and in none of the cases are witnesses present when an intact can is opened and a syringe discovered inside.
Slowly the evidence accumulates that this is a ‘copycat’ crime. People have only been pretending to find syringes in soft drink cans. Why would anyone do it? What possible motives could they have? Some psychiatrists say that the primary motives are greed (they’ll sue the manufacturer for damages), a craving for attention, and a wish to be portrayed as a victim. Note there are no therapists touting the reality of needles in cans and urging their patients, subtly or directly, to go public with the news. Also, serious penalties are levied for product tampering, and even for falsely alleging that products have been tampered with. In contrast, there are therapists who encourage abductees to tell their stories to mass audiences, and no legal penalties are exacted for falsely claiming you’ve been abducted by a UFO. Whatever your reason for going down this road, how much more satisfying it must be to convince others that you’ve been chosen by higher beings for their own enigmatic purpose than that by mere happenstance you’ve found a hypodermic syringe in your cola.
9
Therapy
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sherlock Holmes,
in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality.
Gabriel Garcfa Marquez, Strange Pilgrims (1992)
John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom I’ve known for many years. ‘Is there anything to this UFO business?’ he asked me long ago. ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Except of course on the psychiatric side.’
He looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. He now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. Why?
‘I wasn’t looking for this,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing in my background that prepared me’ for the alien abduction story. ‘It’s completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these experiences.’ In his book, Abductions, Mack explicitly proposes the very dangerous doctrine that ‘the power or intensity with which something is felt’ is a guide to whether it’s true.
I can personally attest to the emotional power. But aren’t powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams? Don’t we sometimes awake in stark terror? Doesn’t Mack, himself the author of a book on nightmares, know about the emotional power of hallucinations? Some of Mack’s patients describe themselves as having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and psychotherapists working with ‘abductees’ made conscientious attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions? Why do they believe these witnesses but not those who reported, with comparable conviction, encounters with gods, demons, saints, angels and fairies? And what about those who hear irresistible commands from a voice within? Are all deeply felt stories true?
A scientist of my acquaintance says, ‘If the aliens would only keep all the folks they abduct, our world would be a little saner.’ But her judgement is too harsh. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of sanity. It’s something else. The Canadian psychologist Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues concluded that there are no obvious pathologies in those who report being abducted by UFOs. However,
intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in individuals who are disposed to esoteric beliefs in general and alien beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and imaginal experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such experiences. Moreover, such experiences were likely to be generated and interpreted as real events rather than imaginings when they were associated with restricted sensory environments . . . (e.g., experiences that occurred at night and in association with sleep).
What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality.
Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father, stepfather, uncle or mother’s boyfriend represented as an alien. Surely it’s more comforting to believe that an alien abused you than that it was done by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny this, saying they would know if their patients were sexually abused. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one in four American women and one in six American men have been sexually abused in childhood (although these estimates are probably too high). It would be astonishing if a significant number of patients who present themselves to alien abduction therapists had not been so abused, perhaps even a larger proportion than in the general population.
Both sexual abuse therapists and alien abduction therapists spend months, sometimes years, encouraging their subjects to remember being abused. Their methods are similar, and their goals are in a way the same – to recover painful memories, often of long ago. In both cases the therapist believes the patient to be suffering from trauma attendant to an event so terrible that it is repressed. I find it striking that alien abduction therapists find so few cases of sexual abuse and vice versa.