Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD eleventh and twelfth verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus talks about 'great signs from Heaven' - nothing like a UFO is described - in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32 in which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the first, not the twentieth, century. There is also a Christian tradition according to which extraterrestrial life cannot exist. In Christian News for 23 May 1994, for example, W. Gary Crampton, Doctor of Theology, tells us: The Bible, either explicitly or implicitly, speaks to every area of life; it never leaves us without an answer. The Bible nowhere explicitly affirms or negates intelligent extraterrestrial life. Implicitly, however, Scripture does deny the existence of such beings, thus also negating the possibility of flying saucers . . . Scripture views earth as the center of the universe . . . According to Peter, a 'planet hopping' Savior is out of the question. Here is an answer to intelligent life on other planets. If there were such, who would redeem them? Certainly not Christ . . . Experiences which are out of line with the teachings of Scripture must always be renounced as fallacious. The Bible has a monopoly on the truth. But many other Christian sects - Roman Catholics, for example - are completely open-minded, with no a priori objections to and no insistence on the reality of aliens and UFOs. In the early 1960s, I argued that the UFO stories were crafted chiefly to satisfy religious longings. At a time when science has complicated uncritical adherence to the old-time religions, an alternative is proffered to the God hypothesis: dressed in scientific jargon, their immense powers 'explained' by superficially scientific terminology, the gods and demons of old come down from heaven to haunt us, to offer prophetic visions, and to tantalize us with visions of a more hopeful future: a space-age mystery religion aborning. The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote in 1989 that abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural 124
The Demon-Haunted World encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of divine beings. He concludes: Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs, but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing with it seem simply to have found their way home again, where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things go bump in the night. Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content, about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? Others, who have not personally had the experience, find it stirring and in a way familiar. They pass the story on. Soon it takes on a life of its own, inspires others trying to understand their own visions and hallucinations, and enters the realm of folklore, myth and legend. The connection between the content of spontaneous temporal lobe hallucinations and the alien abduction paradigm is consistent with such a hypothesis. Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery tends. Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accurately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of how they got into our heads. '[I]n violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,' says Herman Melville in Moby Dick; 'and . . . when the mystery is probed, it turns out 125
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The Demon-Haunted World<br />
encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of<br />
divine beings.<br />
He concludes:<br />
Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs,<br />
but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the<br />
same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are<br />
new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing<br />
with it seem simply to have found their way home again,<br />
where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things<br />
go bump in the night.<br />
Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally<br />
experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content,<br />
about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who<br />
ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing<br />
cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? Others, who have not<br />
personally had the experience, find it stirring and in a way<br />
familiar. They pass the story on. Soon it takes on a life of its own,<br />
inspires others trying to understand their own visions and hallucinations,<br />
and enters the realm of folklore, myth and legend. The<br />
connection between the content of spontaneous temporal lobe<br />
hallucinations and the alien abduction paradigm is consistent with<br />
such a hypothesis.<br />
Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth,<br />
we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's<br />
incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see<br />
fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when<br />
the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial<br />
beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery<br />
tends.<br />
Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we<br />
witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accurately<br />
recalled decades later without any conscious memory of<br />
how they got into our heads. '[I]n violent fevers, men, all<br />
ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,' says Herman Melville<br />
in Moby Dick; 'and . . . when the mystery is probed, it turns out<br />
125
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