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

The Dragon in My Garage
Purported alien abductions trouble many people and in more
ways than one. The subject is a window into the internal lives of
our fellows. If many falsely report being abducted, this is cause for
worry. But much more worrisome is that so many therapists
accept these reports at face value, with inadequate attention given
to the suggestibility of clients and to unconscious cuing by their
interlocutors.
I'm surprised that there are psychiatrists and others with at least
some scientific training, who know the imperfections of the
human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts might
be some species of hallucination, or some kind of screen memory.
I'm even more surprised by claims that the alien abduction story
represents true magic, that it is a challenge to our grip on reality,
or that it constitutes support for a mystical view of the world. Or,
as the matter is put by John Mack, 'There are phenomena
important enough to warrant serious research, and the metaphysics
of the dominant Western scientific paradigm may be inadequate
fully to support this research.' In an interview with Time
magazine, he goes on to say:
I don't know why there's such a zeal to find a conventional
physical explanation. I don't know why people have such
trouble simply accepting the fact that something unusual is
going on here . . . We've lost all that ability to know a world
beyond the physical.*
But we know that hallucinations arise from sensory deprivation,
drugs, illness and high fever, a lack of REM sleep, changes in
brain chemistry and so on, And even if, with Mack, we took the
cases at face value, their remarkable aspects (slithering through
walls and so on) are more readily attributable to something well
within the realm of 'the physical' - advanced alien technology -
than to witchcraft.
A friend of mine claims that the only interesting question in the
* And then, in a sentence that reminds us how close the alien abduction
paradigm is to messianic and chiliastic religion, Mack concludes, 'I am a bridge
between those two worlds.'
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