Chapter 9: Therapy

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."~ Sherlock Holmes

     John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom Carl has known for many years. John asked Carl if there was anything to this UFO business. Carl told him that there wasn't much going on except of course on the psychiatric side. John looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. Ne now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. John said if was completely persuasive because of the emotional power of the experiences.
   Aren't powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams? Some of John's patients describe themselves as having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and psychotherapist been working with abductees made conscientious attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions. \
     Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father, stepfather, uncle, or mother's boyfriend represented as an alien. It is seemed more comforting to believe than an alien abused you than by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny this. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one in four American women and on in six American men having been sexually abused in childhood.
     Both sexual abuse therapist and alien abduction therapist spend months encouraging their subjects to remember being abused. Carl believes that the more he looks into the claims of alien abductions the more similar they seem to report of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
     How much training in scientific method and skeptical scrutiny, in statistics or even in human fallibility have these therapists received? Most therapist contend that their responsibility is to support their patients, not to question, to be skeptical, or to raise doubts.

Chapter 8: On the Distinction Between True and False Visions

" A credulous mind...finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. ~ Samuel Butler

     In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by their lawyer and made to repeat the story over and over again until they get it "right". Once on the stand, they remember the story they have been telling the lawyer's office. The witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were reprocessed.
     These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of advertising and of propaganda. This lawyer aspects applies to the therapist who assist those who where abducted by aliens. Therapist 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 onto a fabric of our own devising. We can make a memorable story easy to recall.  The situation is 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.  Our memories are almost never challenged. They can be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are or become a work in continual artistic revision.

  

Chapter 7: The Demon Haunted World

"There are demon haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness."~The Isa Upanishad

     From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a ere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men. With exhaustive citations of scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches - aptly described as on of the most terrifying documents in human history. What the Malleus comes down to is that if you are accused of witchcraft, you are a witch. Torture is n unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation.There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes.
     The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each "witch" was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted "frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive," as it was later put in America in the Salem Witch Trials.
     In Britain witch-finders, also called prickers, were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their accusations. Typically they looked for devils marks- scars or birthmarks or nevi- that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defence witnesses were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide compelling alibis for accused witches: The rules of evidence had a special character.
     The confessions of witchcraft could not be based on hallucinations, say, or desperate attempts to satisfy the inquisitors and stop the torture.Witchcraft of course was not the only offense that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serous crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In our time, withes,= and djinns are found as regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practiced by the Roman Catholic and, other churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another.  More than half of Americans tell pollsters they "believe" in the Devil's existence and 10 percent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly.
     There are no spaceships in the stories pertaining to with craft. But most of the central elements for the alien abducting account are present including sexually obsessive non humans who live in the sky and walk through walls. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?

    

Chapter 6: Hallucinations

"As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror..."~ Lucretius on the nature of things

     What is a common thread that binds headlines from an issue of UFO Universe Together? Not UFOs. Surely it's the expectation of unlimited audience gullibility. That's why they are placed in UFO magazines because by and large the very at of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader.
     Carl believes there may very well be more than on source of alien abduction accounts, just as there are UFO sightings. /let's run through some of the possibilities:
     In 1894 the international Census of Waking hallucinations was published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have shown that 10-25% of ordinary, functioning people have experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination- hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there is no one there. More rarely, people sense a haunting aroma, or hear music, or receive a revelation that arrives independent of the senses. Some hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under perfectly ordinary circumstances. Hallucinations can also be elicited: by a campfire at night, or under emotional stress, or during epileptic seizures or migraine headaches or high fever. There are also substances that the human body generates that causes hallucinations. Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. It appears that all human behaviour and experience is well attended by illusory and hallucinatory phenomena. While the relationship of these phenomena to mental illness has been well documented their role in everyday life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater understanding of illusions and hallucinations among normal people may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated to the uncanny, "extrasensory", or supernatural.
     A common psychological syndrome rather like alien abduction is called sleep paralysis, Many people experience it. It happens in that twilight world between being fully awake and fully asleep.
     There is no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There is considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist. We might argue about details, but the one category of explanation is surely much better supported than the other. The main doubt you might have is: Why do so many people today report this particular set of hallucinations?

Chapter 5: Spoofing and Secrecy

"Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified." ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

     UFO is an abbreviation for Unidentified flying object. That there are things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why should we conduct it's a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more factual possibilities present themselves.
     Many times Carl is asked, "Do you believe in UFOs". He says that he is always surprised by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. He says he is almost never asked..."How good is the evidence that UFO"s are alien spaceships?" Many people are convinced that eyewitness testimonies are reliable and that  there must be a long standing, high level government conspiracy to keep the truth form the rest of us.
     Due to some UFO reports Carl is perfectly prepared to believe that at least some of them and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public. Carl believes its times for  the files to be declassified and made generally available. If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens form us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can push for declassification of relevant information from decades ago.
     Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
     It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis-invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or and epidemic of hallucinations- teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications.

Chapter 4: Aliens

Chapter 4: Most Americans believe in aliens. Many believe that these aliens visit earth at a regular basis(according to public polls). In these polls, a percent of Americans also report episodes of missing time, awakening in  a state of paralysis, and flying through the air. Here is an article that gives a bit more of information pertaining to this topic:
Alien Abduction
Pollsters have concluded that two percent of Americans have been abducted by space aliens. The only problem with this is that pollsters never asked anyone whether they were actually abducted. Carl says that as a high school student he was "confronted" with the flying saucer mythology. In college Carl began to learn a little about how science works, and how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, and how our biases can color our interpretation of the evidence. Carl says he has remained fascinated long after his early enthusiasm for UFOs decreased, as he understood more about the scientific method. Everything hinges on the matter of evidence. The more we want it to be true the more careful we must be. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes and stretch the truth for many things like money or fame. They also misunderstand what they are seeing and sometimes even see things that aren't there.

Chapter 3: The Man in the moon and the Face on Mars

In chapter 3 Carl Sagan shows that the human body is responsible for most of the popular culture myths like the face on mars.

The face of Virgin Mary on a tortilla.

A cloud of Abraham Lincoln.

He says that these are all products of the central nervous system that is primed from infancy to recognize patterns, specifically those that are faces, especially the mothers face. If we look at 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there. We humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Skepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we will lose our way.

1.(http://moonconspiracy.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/mars_face.jpg)
2.(https://mattalltrades.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/virgin.jpg)
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