Another prominent therapist gives his patients his own articles on alien abductions to help them ‘remember’ their experiences. He is gratified when what they eventually recall under hypnosis resembles what he describes in his papers. The similarity of the cases is one of his chief reasons for believing that abductions really occur.
A leading UFO scholar comments that ‘When the hypnotist does not have an adequate knowledge of the subject [of alien abductions], the true nature of the abduction may never be revealed’. Can we discern in this remark how the patient might be led without the therapist realizing that he’s leading?
Sometimes when ‘falling’ asleep we have the sense of toppling from a height, and our limbs suddenly flail on their own. The startle reflex, it’s called. Perhaps it’s left over from when our ancestors slept in trees. Why should we imagine we recollect (a wonderful word) any better than we know when we’re on firm ground? Why should we suppose that, of the vast treasure of memories stored in our heads, none of it could have been implanted after the event, by how a question is phrased when we’re in a suggestible frame of mind, by the pleasure of telling or hearing a good story, by confusion with something we once read or overheard?
10
The Dragon in My Garage
[M]agic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public.
E.M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (1948)
A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.’ Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
‘Show me,’ you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle – but no dragon.
‘Where’s the dragon?’ you ask.
‘Oh, she’s right here,’ I reply, waving vaguely. ‘I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.’
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.
‘Good idea,’ I say, ‘but this dragon floats in the air.’
Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
‘Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.’
You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
‘Good idea, except she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.’
An so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility.
Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerges you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative, merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of ‘not proved’.
Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how sceptical you might have been about the existence of dragons – to say nothing about invisible ones – you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.
Now another scenario: suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you they have dragons in their garages, but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive: All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all …
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a sceptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself: on close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burned finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such ‘evidence’ – no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it – is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.
Magic requires tacit cooperation of the audience with the magician – an abandonment of scepticism, or what is sometimes described as the willing suspension of disbelief. It immediately follows that to penetrate the magic, to expose the trick, we must cease collaborating.
How can further progress be made in this emotionally laden, controversial and vexing subject? Patients might exercise caution about therapists quick to deduce or confirm alien abductions. Those treating abductees might explain to their patients that hallucinations are normal, and that childhood sexual abuse is disconcertingly common. They might bear in mind that no client can be wholly uncontaminated by the aliens in popular culture. They might take scrupulous care not subtly to lead the witness. They might teach their clients scepticism. They might recharge their own dwindling reserves of the same commodity.
Purported alien abductions trouble many people and in more ways than one. The subject is a window into the internal lives of our fellows. If many falsely report being abducted, this is cause for worry. But much more worrisome is that so many therapists accept these reports at face value, with inadequate attention given to the suggestibility of clients and to unconscious cuing by their interlocutors.
I’m surprised that there are psychiatrists and others with at least some scientific training, who know the imperfections of the human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts might be some species of hallucination, or some kind of screen memory. I’m even more surprised by claims that the alien abduction story represents true magic, that it is a challenge to our grip on reality, or that it constitutes support for a mystical view of the world. Or, as the matter is put by John Mack, There are phenomena important enough to warrant serious research, and the metaphysics of the dominant Western scientific paradigm may be inadequate fully to support this research.’ In an interview with Time magazine, he goes on to say:
I don’t know why there’s such a zeal to find a conventional physical explanation. I don’t know why people have such trouble simply accepting the fact that something unusual is going on here . . . We’ve lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical.*
[* ‘ And then, in a sentence that reminds us how close the alien abduction paradigm is to messianic and chiliastic religion, Mack concludes, ‘I am a bridge between those two worlds.’]
But we know that hallucinations arise from sensory deprivation, drugs, illness and high fever, a lack of REM sleep, changes in brain chemistry and so on, And even if, with Mack, we took the cases at face value, their remarkable aspects (slithering through walls and so on) are more readily attributable to something well within the realm of ‘the physical’ – advanced alien technology -than to witchcraft.