On 28 August 1995, television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch ran what was purported to be an autopsy of a dead alien, shot on 16-millimetre film. Masked pathologists in vintage radiation-protection suits (with rectangular glass windows to see out of) cut up a large-eyed 12-fingered figure and examined the internal organs. While the film was sometimes out of focus, and the view of the cadaver often blocked by the humans crowding around it, some viewers found the effect chilling. The Times of London, also owned by Murdoch, didn’t know what to make of it, although it did quote one pathologist who thought the autopsy performed with unseemly and unrealistic haste (ideal, though, for television viewing). It was said to have been shot in New Mexico in 1947 by a participant, now in his eighties, who wished to remain anonymous. What appeared to be the clincher was the announcement that the leader of the film (its first few feet) contained coded information that Kodak, the manufacturer, dated to 1947. However, it turns out that the full film magazine was not presented to Kodak, just the cut leader. For all we know, the leader could have been cut from a 1947 newsreel, abundantly archived in America, and the ‘autopsy’ staged and filmed separately and recently. There’s a dragon footprint all right – but a fakable one. If this is a hoax, as I think likely, it requires not much more cleverness than crop circles and the MJ-12 document.
In none of these stories is there anything strongly suggestive of extraterrestrial origin. There is certainly no retrieval of cunning machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has filched a page from the captain’s logbook, or an examining instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of the ship, or come back with detailed and verifiable scientific information not hitherto available on Earth. Why not? These failures must tell us something.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, we’ve been assured by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence – not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars, not disturbed soil, but real alien technology – was in hand. The analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer. Now it’s decades later and we’re still waiting. Where are the articles published in the refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?
Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artefacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us who use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a finding, never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion, would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.
Keeping an open mind is a virtue – but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. Of course we must be willing to change our minds when warranted by new evidence. But the evidence must be strong. Not all claims to knowledge have equal merit. The standard of evidence in most of the alien abduction cases is roughly what is found in cases of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in medieval Spain.
The pioneering psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, had much that was sensible to say on issues of this sort. He explicitly argued that UFOs were a kind of projection of the unconscious mind. In a related discussion of regression and what today is called ‘channelling’, he wrote
One can very well . . . take it simply as a report of psychological facts or a continuous series of communications from the unconscious . . . They have this in common with dreams; for dreams, too, are statements about the unconscious . . . The present state of affairs gives us reason enough to wait quietly until more impressive physical phenomena put in an appearance. If, after making allowance for conscious and unconscious falsification, self-deception, prejudice, etc., we should still find something positive behind them, then the exact sciences will surely conquer this field by experiment and verification, as has happened in every other realm of human experience.
Of those who accept such testimony at face value, he remarked
These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most elementary knowledge of psychology. At bottom they do not want to be taught any better, but merely to go on believing -surely the naivest of presumptions in view of our human failings.
Perhaps some day there will be a UFO or alien abduction case that is well attested, accompanied by compelling physical evidence, and explicable only in terms of extraterrestrial visitation. It’s hard to think of a more important discovery. So far, though, there have been no such cases, nothing that comes close. So far, the invisible dragon has left no unfakable footprints.
Which, then, is more likely: that we’re undergoing a massive but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are experiencing some unfamiliar internal mental state they do not understand? Admittedly, we’re very ignorant both about extraterrestrial beings, if any, and about human psychology. But if these really were the only two alternatives, which one would you pick?
And if the alien abduction accounts are mainly about brain physiology, hallucinations, distorted memories of childhood, and hoaxing, don’t we have before us a matter of supreme importance, touching on our limitations, the ease with which we can be misled and manipulated, the fashioning of our beliefs, and perhaps even the origins of our religions? There is genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions – but it is, I think, of a distinctly home-grown and terrestrial character.
11
The City of Grief
…how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief.
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Tenth Elegy’ (1923)
A short summary of the argument in the preceding seven chapters appeared in Parade magazine on 7 March 1993. I was struck by how many letters it evoked, how passionate were the responses, and how much agony is associated with this strange experience whatever its true explanation might be. Alien abduction accounts provide an unexpected window into the lives of some of our fellow citizens. Some letter writers reasoned, some asserted, some harangued, some were frankly perplexed, some were deeply troubled.
The article was also widely misunderstood. A television talk-show host, Geraldo Rivera, held up a copy of Parade and announced I thought we were being visited. A Washington Post video cassette reviewer quoted me as saying there’s an abduction every few seconds, missing the ironical tone and the following sentence (‘It’s surprising more of the neighbours haven’t noticed’). My description (Chapter 6) of on rare occasions seeming to hear the voices of my dead parents – what I described as ‘a lucid recollection’ – were keynoted by Raymond Moody, in the New Age Journal and in the Introduction of his book Reunions, as evidence that we ‘survive’ death. Dr Moody has spent his life trying to find evidence of life after death. If my testimony is worth quoting, it seems clear he hasn’t found much. Many letter writers concluded that since I had worked on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, I must ‘believe’ in UFOs; or conversely that, if I was sceptical about UFOs, I must embrace the absurd belief that humans are the only intelligent beings in the Universe. There’s something about this subject unconducive to clear thinking.
Here, without further comment, is a representative sampling of my mail on the subject:
• I wonder how some of our fellow animals may describe their encounters with us. They see a large hovering object making a terrible noise above them. They begin to run and feel a sharp pain in their side. Suddenly they fall to the ground . . . Several man-creatures approach them carrying strange-looking instruments. They examine your sexual organs and teeth. They place a net under you and then let it take you in the air with a strange device. After all the examinations, they then clamp a strange metal object on your ear. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they are gone. Eventually, muscle control returns, and a poor disoriented creature staggers off into the forest, not knowing [whether] what just transpired was a nightmare or a reality.
• I was sexually abused as a child. In my recovery I have drawn many ‘space beings’ and have felt many times I was being overpowered, held down, and the sensation of having left my body to float around the room. None of the abductee accounts really come as a surprise to someone who has dealt with childhood sexual abuse issues . . . Believe me, I would much rather have blamed my abuse on a space alien than have to face the truth about what happened to me with the adults I was supposed to be able to trust. It’s been driving me crazy to hear some of my friends speak of their memories that imply they have been abducted by aliens … I keep saying to them that this is the ultimate victim role in which we as adults have no power when these little gray men come to us in our sleep! This is not real. The ultimate victim role is the one between an abusive parent and a victimized child.