textfiles/ufo/UFOBBS/3000/3236.ufo

SUBJECT: WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON ?                            FILE: UFO3236






Wed 10 Mar 93 22:59
By: Don Allen
To: All
Re: Sagan on Abductees
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 * Forwarded from "UFO"

WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON?  by Carl Sagan,
published in PARADE MAGAZINE, 3/7/93
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It's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake - but, you discover,
you're utterly paralyzed. You sense someone in the room. You try to cry
out. But you cannot. Several small gray beings less than 4 feet tall are
standing at the foot of your bed. Their heads are pear-shaped and bald,
and large for their bodies. Their eyes are enormous, their faces
expressionless and identical. They wear tunics and boots. You hope this is
only a dream, but as nearly as you can tell it's really happening. They
lift you up, and, eerily, they and you slip through the wall of your
bedroom and float out into the air, rising high toward a metallic,
saucer-shaped aircraft. There, you are escorted into a medical examining
room. A larger but similar being - evidently some sort of physician -
takes over. What follows is even more terrifying.

Your body is probed with special machines, especially your sexual parts.
If you're a man, they may take sperm samples; if you're a woman, they may
implant semen or remove ova or fetuses. They may force you to have sex.
Afterward, you may be ushered into a different room where hybrid babies,
partly human, and partly these creatures, stare back at you. You may be
given an admonition about human misbehavior, especially in despoiling the
environment; scenes of future devastation are displayed. Finally, these
cheerless gray emissaries usher you out of the spacecraft and ooze you
back through the walls into your bed. By the time you're able to move and
talk, they're gone.

You may not remember the incident right away; you might find some period
of time unaccountably missing. Because all of this seems so bizarre,
you're concerned about your sanity; naturally, you're reluctant to talk to
anyone about it. At the same time, the experience is so disturbing that
it's hard to keep bottled up forever. It all pours out when you hear
similar accounts, or when you're under hypnosis with a sympathetic
therapist, or even when you see a picture of an "alien" in one of the many
popular magazines and books on UFOs.

In a recent Roper poll of nearly 6,000 American adults, specially
commissioned by those who accept the alien abduction story at face value,
18% reported sometimes waking up paralyzed, aware of one or more strange
beings in the room. Something like 13% reported odd episodes of missing
time, and 10% claimed to have flown through the air without mechanical
assistance. From these results, the poll's sponsors concluded that 2% of
all Americans have been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from other
worlds. If aliens are not partial to Americans, the number for the whole
planet would be more than 100 million people. This means an abduction
every several seconds. It's surprising that more of the neighbors haven't
noticed.

What's going on here? Could all these people be mistaken, or lying, or
hallucinating the same or a very similar story? When you talk with them,
most seem very sincere, although in the grip of powerful emotions. A few
psychiatrists who have examined them find  no more evidence of
psychopathology than in the rest of us. But could there really be a
massive alien invasion, repugnant medical procedures performed on millions
of innocent men, women and children, and humans apparently used as
breeding stock over many decades - and all this not generally known and
dealt with by responsible media and the governments sworn to protect the
lives and well-being of their citizens?

Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering - crossing vast
interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through walls - be so backward
when it comes to biology? Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual
encounters between aliens and humans? Why not steal a few egg and sperm
cells, read the full genetic code and then manufacture as many genetic
variations as you like? Even we humans - who cannot quickly cross
interstellar space or slither through walls - are able to clone cells. The
preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a warning flag -
especially considering the uneasy balance between sexual freedom and
repression that has always characterized the human condition, and the fact
that we live in a time fraught with numerous ghastly accounts, both true
and false, of childhood sexual abuse.

The pollsters never actually asked whether their subjects had been
abducted by aliens; they ___DEDUCED___ it: Those who've ever awakened
sensing strange presences around them, ever unaccountably seemed to fly
through the air, and so on, have THEREFORE been abducted by aliens. The
conclusion - that millions of American have been abducted - seems
extremely doubtful. Still, at least hundreds of people, believing they
have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic therapists or joined
abductee support groups.

So which is more likely - that we're undergoing a massive but generally
overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are
experiencing some internal mental state they do not understand?
Admittedly, we're very ignorant about both extraterrestrial beings, if
any, and about human psychology. But if these really were the only two
alternatives, which would you pick?

It's curious that emotions can run so high on a matter in which we know so
little. After all, either hypothesis - extraterrestrial invasion or an
epidemic of hallucinations - teaches us something we certainly ought to
know about. Maybe the reason for such strong feelings is that both
alternatives have extremely unpleasant implications.

The first alien abduction story in the modern era began with Betty and
Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple - she a social worker and he a Post
Office employee. During a late night drive in 1961 through the White
mountains of New Hampshire, Betty spotted a bright starlike UFO that
seemed to follow them. Because Barney feared it might harm them, they left
the main highway for narrow mountain roads. They arrived home two hours
later than they had expected. The experience prompted Betty to read a book
claiming that UFOs were spaceships from other worlds. Soon after, she had
a repetitive nightmare in which she and Barney were abducted and taken
aboard the UFO. Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends and
volunteer UFO investigators.

Several years later, Barney's psychiatrist referred him to a Boston
hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, M.D.  Betty came to be hypnotized as well.
Under hypnosis they separately described a memory of their trip home - of
seeing a UFO, watching it land on the highway and being taken partly
immobilized into the UFO, where little humanoid creatures subjected them
to unconventional medical examinations.

I was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours with Mr.  and Mrs.
Hill, and with Dr. Simon. There was no mistaking the earnestness and
sincerity of Betty and Barney, and their mixed feelings about becoming
public figures under such bizarre circumstances. With the Hills'
permission, Dr. Simon played for me some of the audiotape of their
sessions under hypnosis. By far my most striking impression was the
absolute terror in Barney's voice as he described - relived would be a
better word - the encounter. Simon rejected the notion that they were
lying. So what's left? The Hills, said the psychiatrist, had experienced a
species of "dream."

In 1894 THE INTERNATIONAL CENSUS OF WAKING HALLUCINATIONS was published in
London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have shown that 10% to
25% of ordinary, functioning people have experienced at least once a vivid
hallucination - hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there's no
one there. In some cases there are profound religious experiences.
(Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father,
in an ordinary, conversational tone of voice, calling my name. They had
called my name often during my life with them. I still miss them so much
that it doesn't seem strange to me that my brain will occasionally
retrieve a kind of lucid recollection of their voices.)

Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people. But there are
circumstances in which they can be elicited by a campfire at night, or
under great stress, or by prolonged fasting or sleeplessness, or sensory
deprivation, or through hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline,
hashish or alcohol. These hallucinations have a vivid and palpable reality.

Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn't mean you're crazy.
Indeed, they are sought out in many cultures. We would surely be missing
something important about our own nature if we refused to face up to the
fact that hallucinations are part of being human. But none of this makes
hallucinations real.

Most of us remember being frightened at the age of 3 or so by real-seeming
but wholly imaginary "monsters." If we're capable of conjuring up monsters
in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to
imagine similar things as adults?

There's a common, although insufficiently well known, psychological
syndrome very much like alien abduction: Many people have experienced
sleep paralysis. On falling asleep or when waking up - just for a few
seconds, or maybe for longer periods - you seem to be paralyzed and
acutely anxious. You may feel a weight on your chest, your heartbeat is
quick, your breathing labored. You may experience auditory or visual
hallucinations - of people, demons, ghosts, animals or birds. In the right
setting the experience can have "the full force and impact of reality,"
according to Dr. Robert Baker, a psychologist at the University of
Kentucky. Sometimes there's a marked sexual component to the hallucination.

Baker has forcefully argued that these common sleep disturbances are
behind many if not most of the alien abduction accounts. (He and others
suggest that some abduction claims are also made by fantasy-prone
individuals or hoaxers seeking fame and fortune.) Even if no known
hallucinations were to fit the alien abduction pattern, it's certain that
humans commonly hallucinate. There's considerable doubt about whether
extraterrestrials exist and frequently visit our planet. We may argue
about details, but the one category of explanation seems much better
supported than the other. The main reservation you might then have is: Why
do so many people report _THIS PARTICULAR_ set of hallucinations? Why
little gray beings and flying saucers and sexual molestation?

Demons, the early Church Fathers taught, come  down from heaven and have
unlawful sexual congress with women. St. Augustine believed witches were
the offspring of these forbidden unions. In his famous Bull of 1484, Pope
Innocent VIII declared: "It has come to Our ears that members of both
sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and
succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms,
and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the
births of women," as well as cause sundry other calamities. With this
Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution
of countless "witches" all over Europe.

Two inquisitors appointed by Innocent declared: "Devils...busy themselves
by interfering with the normal process of normal copulation and
conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it.
 The offspring of these demonic unions are also, when they grow up,
visited by devils - although not all witches are created this way.  And
witches were well known to fly through the air. There is no spaceship, but
most of the essential elements of the alien abduction story are here.

In 1645, a Cornish teenager, Anne Jeffries, was found groggy and crumpled
on the floor. much later, she recalled being attacked by little men,
carried paralyzed to a castle in the air, seduced and returned home. she
called the little men fairies. They returned to torment her. The next year
she was arrested for witchcraft. Fairies traditionally have magical powers
and can cause paralysis by the merest touch. The ordinary passage of time
is slowed in fairyland. Fairies have sex with humans and carry off babies
from their cradles. If Anne Jeffries had known about aliens rather than
fairies, and UFOs rather than castles in the air, would her story have
been distinguishable from the one "abductees" tell?

Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally experience
vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content - with the
details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the
Zeitgeist? When everyone knows that gods regularly come down to Earth, we
hallucinate gods; when everyone knows about demons, it's incubi and
succubi; when fairies are widely believed, we see fairies; when the old
myths fade and we begin thinking  that aliens are plausible, then that's
where our hypnogogic imagery tends. Snatches of songs or foreign
languages, images and stories we witnessed in our childhood can be
accurately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of the
source. In our everyday life, we effortlessly incorporate cultural motifs
and norms and make them seem our own.

Today, aliens are the subject of innumerable science-fiction stories and
novels. UFOs are a regular feature of weekly newspapers dedicated to
falsification and mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion
pictures of all time is about aliens very much like those described by
abductees. Alien abduction stories were comparatively rare until 1987,
when a purported firsthand account with a haunting cover painting of an
"alien" became a best-seller. It is striking how similar many of the
abduction accounts are now, and how little we hear about incubi and
fairies. But it might not be altogether surprising that, in our time and
society, short, gray aliens with breeding programs on their minds are what
we mainly reach for when we must describe these hallucinations.

No one would be happier than I would if we had real evidence of
extraterrestrial life. But the issue comes down to the quality of the
evidence. Proponents of alien abductions do not ask us to believe on
faith, but rather on the strength of their evidence. Surely it is our duty
to examine the purported evidence closely and skeptically. _NO_ anecdotal
claim - no matter how sincere, no matter how deeply felt, no matter how
exemplary the lives of the attesting citizens - carries much weight on so
important a question. As with the older UFO cases, anecdotal accounts are
subject to irreducible error. This is not a criticism of those who claim
abductions or of those who investigate them. It is  merely a statement of
human fallibility.

Where is the physical evidence? Some abductees allege that aliens stole
fetuses from their wombs. This is something that would surely cause a stir
among gynecologists, midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of
heightened feminist awareness. But not a SINGLE MEDICAL RECORD has been
produced substantiating such claims.

Some abductees say that tiny metallic implants were inserted into their
bodies - high up in their nostrils, for example. But no such implants have
been confirmed by physicists or chemists as being of unearthly
manufacture. No abductee has filched a page from the captain's logbook or
a strange examining instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the
interior of the ship or come back with detailed scientific information not
hithero known on Earth. These failures tell us something.

If indeed the bulk of the alien abduction accounts are really about
hallucinations, don't we have before us a matter of supreme importance -
touching on our limitations, the ease with which we may be misled, the
fashioning of our beliefs and perhaps even the origins of our religions?
There is genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions - but it
is, I think, of distinctly terrestrial origin.

---------------------------------

Carl Sagan of Cornell University has played a leading role in the  search
for extraterrestrial life with spacecraft and radio telescopes. He was a
member of the U.S. Air Force committee that evaluated the government's
investigation of UFOs. In 1966, Dr. Sagan resigned from the Air Force
Scientific Advisory Board in protest against the Vietnam War. He is the
author (with Ann Druyan) of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors."

 * Origin: You visit the zoo but you don't *contact* the lizards
(1:123/26.1)

      
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