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

On the Distinction between True and False Visions
or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid
fiction.
In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by
their lawyers. Often, they are made to repeat the story over and
over again, until they get it 'right'. Then, on the stand what they
remember is the story they've been telling in the lawyer's office.
The nuances have been shaded. Or it may no longer correspond,
even in its major features, to what really happened. Conveniently,
the witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were
reprocessed.
These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of
advertising and of national propaganda. But here they suggest
that on alien abduction matters - where interviews typically take
place years after the alleged event - therapists must be very
careful that they do not accidentally implant or select the stories
they elicit.
Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments
stitched on to a fabric of our own devising. If we sew
cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy
to recall. Fragments by themselves, unencumbered by association,
are harder to retrieve. The situation is rather like the method of
science itself where many isolated data points can be remembered,
summarized and explained in the framework of a theory.
We then much more easily recall the theory and not the data.
In science the theories are always being reassessed and confronted
with new facts; if the facts are seriously discordant -
beyond the error bars - the theory may have to be revised. But in
everyday life it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts
about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never
challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how
flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.
More than gods and demons, the best-attested apparitions are
those of saints, especially the Virgin Mary in Western Europe
from late medieval to modern times. While alien abduction stories
have much more the flavour of profane, demonic apparitions,
insight into the UFO myth can also be gained from visions
described as sacred. Perhaps best known are those of Jeanne
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