Where is the physical evidence? As in satanic ritual abuse claims (and echoing ‘Devil’s marks’ in the witch trials), the most common physical evidence pointed to are scars and ‘scoop marks’ on the bodies of abductees – who say they have no knowledge of where their scars came from. But this point is key: if the scars are within human capacity to generate, then they cannot be compelling physical evidence of abuse by aliens. Indeed, there are well-known psychiatric disorders in which people scoop, scar, tear, cut and mutilate themselves (or others). And some of us with high pain thresholds and bad memories can injure ourselves accidentally with no recollection of the event.
One of John Mack’s patients claims to have scars all over her body that are wholly baffling to her physicians. What do they look like? Oh, she can’t show them; as in the witch mania, they’re in private places. Mack considers this compelling evidence. Has he seen the scars? Can we have photographs of the scars taken by a sceptical physician? Mack knows, he says, a quadriplegic with scoop marks and considers this a reductio ad absurdum of the sceptical position; how can a quadriplegic scar himself? The argument is a good one only if the quadriplegic is hermetically sealed in a room to which no other human has access. Can we see his scars? Can an independent physician examine him? Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynaecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine”? Apparently it’s not that baffling.
Then we have the fact that one of his subjects made the whole thing up, as reported by Time magazine, and Mack didn’t have a clue. He bought it hook, line and sinker. What are his standards of critical scrutiny? If he allowed himself to be deceived by one subject, how do we know the same wasn’t true of all?
Mack talks about these cases, the ‘phenomena’, as posing a fundamental challenge to western thinking, to science, to logic itself. Probably, he says, the abducting entities are not alien beings from our own universe, but visitors from ‘another dimension’. Here’s a typical, and revealing, passage from his book:
When abductees call their experience ‘dreams’, which they often do, close questioning can elicit that this may be a euphemism to cover what they are sure cannot be that, namely an event from which there was no awakening that occurred in another dimension.
Now the idea of higher dimensions did not arise from the brow of UFOlogy or the New Age. Instead, it is part and parcel of the physics of the twentieth century. Since Einstein’s general relativity, a truism of cosmology is that space-time is bent or curved through a higher physical dimension. Kaluza-Klein theory posits an eleven-dimensional universe. Mack presents a thoroughly scientific idea as the key to ‘phenomena’ beyond the reach of science.
We know something about how a higher-dimensional object would look in encountering our three-dimensional universe. For clarity, let’s go down one dimension: an apple passing through a plane must change its shape as perceived by two-dimensional beings confined to the plane. First it seems to be a point, then larger apple cross-sections, then smaller ones, a point again, and finally – poof! – gone. Similarly, a fourth- or higher-dimensional object – provided it’s not a very simple figure such as a hypercyl-inder passing through three dimensions along its axis – will wildly alter its geometry as we witness it passing through our universe. If aliens were systematically reported as shape-changers, I could at least see how Mack might pursue the notion of a higher-dimensional origin. (Another problem is trying to understand what a genetic cross between a three-dimensional and a four-dimensional being means. Are the offspring from the 3lk dimension?)
What Mack really means when he talks about beings from other dimensions is that, despite his patients’ occasional descriptions of their experiences as dreams and hallucinations, he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what they are. But, tellingly, when he tries to describe them, he reaches for physics and mathematics. He wants it both ways – the language and credibility of science, but without being bound by its method and rules. He seems not to realize that the credibility is a consequence of the method.
The main challenge posed by Mack’s cases is the old one of how to teach critical thinking more broadly and more deeply in a society – conceivably even including Harvard professors of psychiatry – awash in gullibility. The idea that critical thinking is the latest western fad is silly. If you’re buying a used car in Singapore or Bangkok, or a used chariot in ancient Susa or Rome, the same precautions will be useful as in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When you buy a used car, you might very much want to believe what the salesman is saying: ‘So much car for so little money!’ And anyway, it takes work to be sceptical; you have to know something about cars, and it’s unpleasant to make the salesman angry at you. Despite all that, though, you recognize that the salesman might have a motive to shade the truth, and you’ve heard of other people in similar situations being taken. So you kick the tyres, look under the hood, go for a test drive, ask searching questions. You might even bring along a mechanically inclined friend. You know that some scepticism is required and you understand why. There is usually at least a small degree of hostile confrontation involved in the purchase of a used car and nobody claims it’s an especially cheering experience. But if you don’t exercise some minimal scepticism, if you have an absolutely untrammelled gullibility, there’s a price you’ll have to pay later. Then you’ll wish you had made a small investment of scepticism early on.
Many homes in America now have moderately sophisticated burglar alarm systems, including infrared sensors and cameras triggered by motion. An authentic videotape, with time and date denoted, showing an alien incursion – especially as they slip through the walls – might be very good evidence. If millions of Americans have been abducted, isn’t it strange that not one lives in such a home?
Some women, so the story goes, are impregnated by aliens or alien sperm; the foetuses are then removed by the aliens. Vast numbers of such cases are alleged. Isn’t it odd that nothing anomalous has ever been seen in routine sonograms of such foetuses, or in amniocentesis, and that there has never been a miscarriage producing an alien hybrid? Or are medical personnel so doltish that they idly glance at the half-human, half-alien foetus and move on to the next patient? An epidemic of missing foetuses is something that would surely cause a stir among gynaecologists, midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of heightened feminist awareness. But not a single medical record has been produced substantiating such claims.
Some UFOlogists consider it a telling point that women who claim to have been sexually inactive wind up pregnant, and attribute their state to alien impregnation. A goodly number appear to be teenagers. Taking their stories at face value is not the only option available to the serious investigator. Surely we can understand why, in the anguish of an unwanted pregnancy, a teenager living in a society flooded with accounts of alien visitation might invent such a story. Here, too, there are possible religious antecedents.
Some abductees say that tiny implants, perhaps metallic, were inserted into their bodies, high up their nostrils, for example. These implants, alien abduction therapists tell us, sometimes accidentally fall out, but ‘in all but a few of the cases the artefact has been lost or discarded’. These abductees seem stupefyingly incurious. A strange object, possibly a transmitter sending telemetered data about the state of your body to an alien spaceship somewhere above the Earth, drops out of your nose; you idly examine it and then throw it in the garbage. Something like this is true, we are told, of the majority of abduction cases.
A few such ‘implants’ have been produced and examined by experts. None has been confirmed as of unearthly manufacture. No components are made of unusual isotopes, despite the fact that other stars and other worlds are known to be constituted of different isotopic proportions from the Earth. There are no metals from the transuranic ‘island of stability’, where physicists think there should be a new family of non-radioactive chemical elements unknown on Earth.
What abduction enthusiasts considered the best case was that of Richard Price, who claims that aliens abducted him when he was eight years old and implanted a small artefact in his penis. A quarter century later a physician confirmed a ‘foreign body’ embedded there. After eight more years, it fell out. Roughly a millimetre in diameter and four millimetres long, it was carefully examined by scientists from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. Their conclusion? Collagen formed by the body at sites of inflammation plus cotton fibres from Price’s underpants.