A friend of mine claims that the only interesting question in the alien abduction paradigm is ‘Who’s conning who?’ Is the client deceiving the therapist, or vice versa? I disagree. For one thing, there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien abduction. For another, those two alternatives aren’t mutually exclusive.
Something about the alien abduction cases tugged at my memory for years. Finally, I remembered. It was a 1954 book I had read in college, The Fifty-Minute Hour. The author, a psychoanalyst named Robert Lindner, had been called by the Los Alamos National Laboratory to treat a brilliant young nuclear physicist whose delusional system was beginning to interfere with his secret government research. The physicist (given the pseudonym Kirk Alien) had, it turned out, another life besides making nuclear weapons: in the far future, he confided, he piloted (or will pilot – the tenses get a little addled) interstellar spacecraft. He enjoyed rousing, swashbuckling adventures on planets of other stars. He was ‘lord’ of many worlds. Perhaps they called him Captain Kirk. Not only could he ‘remember’ this other life; he could also enter into it whenever he chose. By thinking in the right way, by wishing, he could transport himself across the light years and the centuries.
In some way I could not comprehend, by merely desiring it to be so, I had crossed the immensities of space, broken out of time, and merged with – literally became – that distant and future self . . . Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t, although God knows I’ve tried.
Lindner found him intelligent, sensitive, pleasant, polite and perfectly able to deal with everyday human affairs. But, in reflecting on the excitement of his life among the stars, Alien had found himself a little bored with his life on Earth, even if it did involve building weapons of mass destruction. When admonished by his laboratory supervisors for distraction and dreaminess, he apologized; he would try, he assured them, to spend more time on this planet. That’s when they contacted Lindner.
Alien had written 12,000 pages on his experiences in the future, and dozens of technical treatises on the geography, politics, architecture, astronomy, geology, life forms, genealogy and ecology of the planets of other stars. A flavour of the material is given by these monograph titles: “The Unique Brain Development of the Chrysto-peds of Srom Norba X’, ‘Fire Worship and Sacrifice on Srom Sodrat IF, ‘The History of the Intergalactic Scientific Institute’, and ‘The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Stardrive to Space Travel’. (That last is the one I’d like to see; after all, Alien was said to have been a first-rate physicist.) Fascinated, Lindner pored over the material.
Alien was not in the least shy about presenting his writings to Lindner or discussing them in detail. Unflappable and intellectually formidable, he seemed not to be yielding an inch to Lindner’s psychiatric ministrations. When everything else failed, the psychiatrist attempted something different:
I tried … to avoid giving in any way the impression that I was entering the lists with him to prove that he was psychotic, that this was to be a tug of war over the question of his sanity. Instead, because it was obvious that both his temperament and training were scientific, I set myself to capitalize on the one quality he had demonstrated throughout his life . . . the quality that urged him toward a scientific career: his curiosity … This meant . . . that at least for the time being I ‘accepted’ the validity of his experiences … In a sudden flash of inspiration it came to me that in order to separate Kirk from his madness it was necessary for me to enter his fantasy and, from that position, to pry him loose from the psychosis.
Lindner highlighted certain apparent contradictions in the documents and asked Alien to resolve them. This required the physicist to re-enter the future to find the answers. Dutifully, Alien would arrive at the next session with a clarifying document written in his neat hand. Lindner found himself eagerly awaiting each interview, so he could be once more captivated by the vision of abundant life and intelligence in the galaxy. Between them, they were able to resolve many problems of consistency.
Then a strange thing happened: ‘The materials of Kirk’s psychosis and the Achilles heel of my personality met and meshed like the gears of a clock.’ The psychoanalyst became a co-conspirator in his patient’s delusion. He began to reject psychological explanations of Alien’s story. How sure are we that it couldn’t really be true? He found himself defending the notion that another life, that of a spacefarer in the far future, could be entered into by a simple effort of the will.
At a startlingly rapid rate . . . larger and larger areas of my mind were being taken over by the fantasy . . . With Kirk’s puzzled assistance I was taking part in cosmic adventures, sharing the exhilaration of the sweeping extravaganza he had plotted.
But eventually, an even stranger thing happened: concerned for the well-being of his therapist, and mustering admirable reserves of integrity and courage, Kirk Alien confessed: he had made the whole thing up. It had roots in his lonely childhood and his unsuccessful relationships with women. He had shaded, and then forgotten, the boundary between reality and imagination. Filling in plausible details and weaving a rich tapestry about other worlds was challenging and exhilarating. He was sorry he had led Lindner down this primrose path.
‘Why,’ the psychiatrist asked, ‘why did you pretend? Why did you keep on telling me…?’
‘Because I felt I had to,’ the physicist replied. ‘Because I felt you wanted me to.’
‘Kirk and I reversed roles,’ Lindner explained,
and, in one of those startling denouements that make my work the unpredictable, wonderful and rewarding pursuit it is, the folly we shared collapsed … I employed the rationalization of clinical altruism for personal ends and thus fell into a trap that awaits all unwary therapists of the mind . . . Until Kirk Alien came into my life, I had never doubted my own stability. The aberrations of mind, so I had always thought, were for others … I am ashamed by this smugness. But now, as I listen from my chair behind the couch, I know better. I know that my chair and the couch are separated only by a thin line. I know that it is, after all, but a happier combination of accidents that determines, finally, who shall lie on the couch, and who shall sit behind it.
I’m not sure from this account that Kirk Alien was truly delusional. Maybe he was just suffering from some character disorder which delighted in inventing charades at the expense of others. I don’t know to what extent Lindner may have embellished or invented part of the story. While he wrote of ‘sharing’ and of ‘entering’ Alien’s fantasy, there is nothing to suggest that the psychiatrist imagined he himself voyaged to the far future and partook of interstellar high adventure. Likewise, John Mack and the other alien abduction therapists do not suggest that they have been abducted; only their patients.
What if the physicist hadn’t confessed? Might Lindner have convinced himself, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it really was possible to slip into a more romantic era? Would he have said he started out as a sceptic, but was convinced by the sheer weight of the evidence? Might he have advertised himself as an expert who assists space travellers from the future who are stranded in the twentieth century? Would the existence of such a psychiatric speciality encourage others to take fantasies or delusions of this sort seriously? After a few similar cases, would Lindner have impatiently resisted all arguments of the ‘Be reasonable, Bob’ variety, and deduced he was penetrating some new level of reality?
His scientific training helped to save Kirk Alien from his madness. There was a moment when therapist and patient had exchanged roles. I like to think of it as the patient saving the therapist. Perhaps John Mack was not so lucky.
Consider a very different approach to finding aliens – the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from fantasy and pseudoscience? In Moscow in the early 1960s, Soviet astronomers held a press conference in which they announced that the intense radio emission from a mysterious distant object called CTA-102 was varying regularly, like a sine wave, with a period of about 100 days. No periodic distant source had ever before been found. Why did they convene a press conference to announce so arcane a discovery? Because they thought they had detected an extraterrestrial civilization of immense powers. Surely, that’s worth calling a press conference for. The report was briefly a media sensation, and the rock group, The Byrds, even composed and recorded a song about it. (‘CTA-102, we’re over here receiving you./ Signals tell us that you’re there./ We can hear them loud and clear…’)