I have never, to my dismay, seen a UFO. Not that I haven’t tried. In my preteen years I avidly cultivated my inner alien, racing through the accumulated, um, literature on the Bermuda Triangle, cryptozoology, strange disappearances, the Nazca markings, and so on, in search of something beyond my suburban bedroom. Yet despite my best efforts I failed to bend a single spoon, read my brother’s mind, or encounter mysterious lights in the night sky.
Some of these people, however, are not so easily dismissed. Consider the furor provoked by Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who lends his considerable prestige to arguments for up-close-and-personal contacts in his recent book, Abduction, 13 long case studies of patients undergoing hypnotic regression buttressed by a learned commentary and exploration of the philosophical implications. The book has been received with the patronizing gentleness usually accorded dotty elderly relatives–a reaction underscored by the fact that Mack’s wife, apparently disturbed by his growing belief that what he was studying was real, left him while he was writing it. Yet Abduction isn’t the sad, quixotic flameout expected.
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Mack admits that he began his study of this phenomenon as a hardheaded skeptic clad in scientific armor, but was gradually converted by the deeply anguished sincerity of the contactees he met. He was intrigued by their seeming normality; these were not wild-eyed devotees of fringe causes–which he claims he verified with batteries of tests–but nervous, unsettled professional men and women who tiptoed through daily life, weighed down by the conviction that something terrifying had happened to them. Soon he was interviewing other contactees, championing their cause on television, delivering papers at scholarly symposia, and even running a support group.
But while the power and fury of the contactees’ emotions make clear how deeply troubling such experiences are (their fear of mockery is also very real–which eliminates financial gain as a motive), sincerity is not proof. The details Mack provides are so skimpy that the reader must take his word for it that his patients are normal, even though several of them appear to have endured extremely damaging childhoods. Moreover, by too quickly accepting as reliable memories recovered though hypnosis–contrary to his claim, false memories can be created–and by waving away psychiatric diagnoses in a few pages, Mack creates the suspicion that he’d rather forget about science and just get to the good parts. And his argument that the lack of tangible proof and corroborating witnesses is irrelevant isn’t likely to convince many: “It may be wrong to expect that a phenomenon . . . one of whose purposes may be to stretch and expand our ways of knowing beyond the purely materialist approaches of Western science, will yield its secrets to an epistemology or methodology that operates at a lower level of consciousness.”
Arguing that “vague, poorly defined crises” are responsible for sightings, he seems to yearn for a formula by which crises can be clearly seen to produce saucer hysteria. He plausibly offers Watergate as a prime cause of the suspiciousness that led people to believe that a shadowy cabal of government agencies and aliens was behind cattle mutilations, but what are we to make of his idea that the Korean war led to multiple flying-saucer sightings in 1952? Particularly given that the issues during the war were hardly poorly defined. Perhaps the two are related somehow, but what kinds of UFOs people see against the stars can’t be derived mechanically from the workings of culture.
Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth by Curtis Peebles, Smithsonian Institution Press, $24.95
