Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
role, perhaps a central role, in the UFO accounts.
But such a view is easy to burlesque: UFOs explained away as
'mass hallucinations'. Everyone knows there's no such thing as a
shared hallucination. Right?
As the possibility of extraterrestrial life began to be widely
popularized - especially around the turn of the last century by
Percival Lowell with his Martian canals - people began to
report contact with aliens, mainly Martians. The psychologist
Theodore Flournoy's 1901 book, From India to the Planet Mars,
describes a French-speaking medium who in a trance state drew
pictures of the Martians (they look just like us) and presented
their alphabet and language (remarkably like French). The
psychiatrist Carl Jung in his 1902 doctoral dissertation
described a young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover,
sitting across from her on the train, a 'star-dweller' from Mars.
Martians are innocent of science, philosophy and souls, she was
told, but have advanced technology. 'Flying machines have
long been in existence on Mars; the whole of Mars is covered
with canals' and so on. Charles Fort, a collector of anomalous
reports who died in 1932, wrote, 'Perhaps there are inhabitants
of Mars, who are secretly sending reports upon the ways of this
world to their governments.' In the 1950s there was a book by
Gerald Heard that revealed the saucer occupants to be intelligent
Martian bees. Who else could survive the fantastic right
angle turns reported for UFOs?
But after the canals were shown to be illusory by Mariner 9 in
1971, and after no compelling evidence even for microbes was
found on Mars by Vikings 1 and 2 in 1976, popular enthusiasm for
the Lowellian Mars waned and we heard little about visiting
Martians. Aliens were then reported to come from somewhere
else. Why? Why no more Martians? And after the surface of
Venus was found to be hot enough to melt lead, there were no
more visiting Venusians. Does some part of these stories adjust to
the current canons of belief? What does that imply about their
origin?
There's no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There's
considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist, frequent
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