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

The Dragon in My Garage
by a thin line. I know that it is, after all, but a happier
combination of accidents that determines, finally, who shall
lie on the couch, and who shall sit behind it.
I'm not sure from this account that Kirk Allen was truly delusional.
Maybe he was just suffering from some character disorder
which delighted in inventing charades at the expense of others. I
don't know to what extent Lindner may have embellished or
invented part of the story. While he wrote of 'sharing' and of
'entering' Allen's fantasy, there is nothing to suggest that the
psychiatrist imagined he himself voyaged to the far future and
partook of interstellar high adventure. Likewise, John Mack and
the other alien abduction therapists do not suggest that they have
been abducted; only their patients.
What if the physicist hadn't confessed? Might Lindner have
convinced himself, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it really was
possible to slip into a more romantic era? Would he have said he
started out as a sceptic, but was convinced by the sheer weight of
the evidence? Might he have advertised himself as an expert who
assists space travellers from the future who are stranded in the
twentieth century? Would the existence of such a psychiatric
speciality encourage others to take fantasies or delusions of this
sort seriously? After a few similar cases, would Lindner have
impatiently resisted all arguments of the 'Be reasonable, Bob'
variety, and deduced he was penetrating some new level of
reality?
His scientific training helped to save Kirk Allen from his
madness. There was a moment when therapist and patient had
exchanged roles. I like to think of it as the patient saving the
therapist. Perhaps John Mack was not so lucky.
Consider a very different approach to finding aliens - the radio
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from
fantasy and pseudoscience? In Moscow in the early 1960s, Soviet
astronomers held a press conference in which they announced that
the intense radio emission from a mysterious distant object called
CTA-102 was varying regularly, like a sine wave, with a period of
about 100 days. No periodic distant source had ever before been
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