G.K. Chesterton claimed, "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." He could probably easily have imagined that "anything" could include belief in space aliens (pilots and crew of flying saucers or other "unidentified flying objects") who carry people up into their craft to perform obscene operations on them.
A recent book describing "remembered" encounters with aliens is "Summoned: Encounters with Alien Intelligence" by Dana Redfield (Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 264 pages, $13.95). The author describes the now familiar pattern of these incidents: nighttime experiences with a dream-like character, followed and thus "confirmed" by inexplicable bodily bruises and welts the next day. All the old friends are here: gray eminences with large, almond-shaped eyes, celestial surgeons harvesting human gametes, hypnotists surmounting the alien-induced memory loss.
Abductions, though, are but one kind of experience. Others include sighting flying objects or gravity-defying lights, and inspecting "wreckage." All support the presumption that mysterious creatures are cruising about the earth inspecting us while governments cover up the news.
Just who believes this stuff? There are the credulous ones -- folk who seem captivated by myths and previously searched for the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot. But the beliefs would be less interesting as social phenomena if these were their only champions.
Many highly credentialed individuals have given "ufology" (the name coined for the study of UFOs) either full support -- as has John Mack, the professor of psychiatry at Harvard -- or qualified, legitimating support.
An example of the latter is found in "Aliens: Can We Make Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence?" by Andrew and David Clark of Oxford (Fromm International, 256 pages, $25). These authors reject most claims and acknowledge that in 1968 a comprehensive report from a group of physicists led by Dr. Ed Condon concluded that the "sightings" could be dismissed and that further investigations of UFOs would be of no scientific interest beyond the psychology of mass hysteria.
Nonetheless, the Clarks call for "science" to do more and to admit the existence of "a small number of cases that might, just might, be worthy of a fuller and more open-minded scrutiny." "The Abduction Enigma" by Kevin Randle, Russ Estes and William Cone (Forge Books, 416 pages, $25.95) rejects this wishy-washiness outright and concludes that all the cases remain the scientific rubbish condemned by the Condon Report.
The convinced proponents, though, are not half-hearted. Dr. Mack has risked his academic tenure to support these ideas. He has employed his substantial powers of argument to push the burden of proof from himself onto those who would deny alien abduction.
He has even used that dubious rhetorical device, so favored by psychiatrists, of insinuating that his opponents are irrational as when he said, "the evidence ... that [these phenomena] represent important domains of reality that seem to lie behind or exist along with the one science accepts -- is overwhelming. We cannot help wondering what motivates the need to reject this domain so eagerly."
A fervor for aliens led to the 1997 mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult in California. They died believing they would "beam up" to a better, incorporeal existence aboard an alien spacecraft approaching the earth in the dust of the comet Hale-Bopp.
They left videotapes explaining what they were doing and how their human bodies ("vehicles") are to be set aside "... to be with the other members on the craft, in the heavens. Call it another dimension, call it another reality, who knows? We're kept in blind ignorance here which is kind of the state [you would expect] with these vehicles."
This is wild. How can anyone believe it, let alone die for it?
As a psychiatrist, let me emphasize that these believers do not suffer from the standard psychiatric disorders.
They are neither mentally retarded nor delusionally schizophrenic. They are functioning under the influence of an overvalued idea. Overvalued ideas differ from delusions in that they rest upon opinions circulating in a society but that, in true believers, are amplified into a ruling passion. Fanatics harbor overvalued ideas -- sometimes for good -- as in the abolitionist, John Brown -- sometimes for evil -- as in the anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler.
There is a rich historical and theological drama that's useful for examining these beliefs about space aliens. They are a contemporary manifestation of gnosticism -- a kind of cosmic paranoia that has been a regular manifestation of human thought, in different guises, for millennia.
The ancient Gnostics were the original heretics. They challenged the Judeo-Christian view that God created a good world, with humankind in it, and that what was evil in the world and disturbing in our lives was the product of human action -- the disobedience of Adam and recurrent acts of pride and selfishness on our part.
Jews and Christians believe that our lives improve as we take responsibility for them. They claim we humans not only know the difference between good and evil but can learn, as from studying the example and teachings of others, to think deeply about these matters, to become wise to ourselves, and with a chastened spirit reform our habits, repair our errors, and build the future.
The Gnostics turned that view around. The world was poorly constructed -- not by God Almighty but by lesser skilled gods -- with the consequence of entrapping us in imperfections and rendering our bodily senses misleading. Troubles do not derive from our transgressions. They are the result of the misfit between our bodies and the world.
The saving remnant is our possession of a spark of God-like knowledge (gnosis) that permits at least some of us to see these facts clearly. Redemption comes not from following the constraints of the crowd, the edicts of the orthodox, or even the assumptions of science -- as they are all parts of the misconstruction -- but from enhancing our knowledge of our true nature and following its lead.
The best of us could "know" the secret behind the appearances of this world and then act on our personal impulses as we please. The Gnostics were the original free thinkers.
Today's gnostics deny God but worship mind. They claim knowledge of properties of mind just waiting to emerge in history. This knowledge "frees" them from confidence in contemporary science and reliance on physical evidence that "blind" most people to what is happening.
They distrust the human body and know that the aliens, heralds of the future, represent superior beings, more mind than matter. Modern gnostics find comfort from the fact that UFO reports lack official sanction because they believe government sources intend to sustain the thought of the ignorant. Indeed the gnostic drift is to espouse an elect who, knowing the "truth" and rejecting the human body, will stake claims for mind over physics as do, please note, John Mack and the members of Heaven's Gate.
Not only have these ideas proven deadly in California, this cosmic heresy does other damage. It undermines the hard-won coherence of our scientific discourse. It sustains a distrust in our institutions -- particularly in our democratic institutions -- as it debases the witness of ordinary folk to favor the fantasies of an elect. Finally, it encourages the belief that we are ever the victims of circumstances rather than, more often, the sources of our own problems.
The antidote is found in St. Augustine's answers to the Manichean gnostics. There's no secret. Our senses are reliable. Science works. We're to blame.
Paul McHugh is Henry Phipps professor and the director of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He, along with Phillip R. Slavney, M.D., wrote "The Perspectives of Psychiatry," a standard text used in American medical schools. He has also written for the American Journal of Psychiatry, Medicine and Nature Medicine.
Pub Date: 06/27/99