Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

  I think, also add that some things are more nearly

  certain than others.

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL

  A R E Y O U E X P E R I E N C E D ?

  Once, a few years ago, I was lying on a beach north of Santa Cruz

  when a strange dronelike machine zoomed overhead, heading south

  down the coast. It looked like a pilotless airplane with the front sheered

  off. I don’t think I was too wasted at the time, but this was California

  so I just thought, “Whoa, dude, that’s too weird!” and assumed it was

  some sort of experimental military aircraft. It didn’t hover over me

  with an intense blue light or suddenly move away at incredible speed or

  anything like that.

  Years earlier, driving up the East Coast on I-95, I saw a glowing,

  shifting, unnaturally bright purple patch in a clear sky. It moved

  around coherently, as though it were being directed or piloted.

  When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of being taken on an alien

  spaceship. I still remember vividly the mixture of excitement and fear I

  felt, the diffuse green light, the gridlike, patterned floor, and the gravity

  that always seemed slightly off-kilter, making it awkward to stand up.

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  Most amazing of all was the view of the rapidly receding Earth through

  the porthole. I dreamed of this same ship enough times that I remember

  thinking, “Here we go again.” The aliens were mysterious, their inten-

  tions hard to discern. Though I never saw them, I knew they were

  there.

  My interpretation, if dreams need interpreting, is this: What do you

  expect from a kid obsessed with science fiction and surrounded by

  adults who talked about spaceflight all of the time?

  If I were the type prone to believe in UFOs and alien abductions, all

  these memories could form a pattern of evidence convincing me that I

  had in fact been contacted. Over a lifetime, we all see and experience

  plenty of weirdness. If you are a person who thinks, “A lot of strange

  things are happening, and it all fits together to reveal a pattern of alien

  presence,” then anything unusual you see and hear will help validate

  your scenario.

  Our beliefs and expectations mold our interpretations of experience.

  This affects what we see and how we remember it. After a while you

  have a pattern of memories that confirm your beliefs. This can work

  both ways, of course. If you think, “We can find a rational explanation

  for anything,” then you always will.

  I N T E R R U P T E D J O U R N E Y

  You know those “audience brush with greatness” segments they used

  to have on Letterman where people stood up to tell about the time

  Henry Kissinger stepped on their foot, or how their sister fixed Venus

  Williams’s carburetor? Well, I once saw Gene Simmons from Kiss eat-

  ing a hot dog at the Denver Airport.* And my dad roomed with John

  Mack at medical school.

  John Mack is the shining intellectual light of the UFO abductee move-

  ment. They prefer to be called experiencers, rather than abductees.

  Mack has published two books on his work with experiencers. In thera-

  peutic sessions he helps them to remember and come to grips with their

  (often traumatic) histories of alien contact.

  He has also elaborated a philosophical framework to explain the

  abductions, who the abductors might be, and what it all implies about

  who we really are. Mack believes this phenomenon has crucial implica-

  *No sign of the tongue.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  tions for human history, evolution, ecology, and the relationship of our

  consciousness to a deeper reality.

  John Mack is a distinguished, widely published, Pulitzer Prize–

  winning, tenured physician and professor at Harvard. Among those

  who are completely convinced of the reality and importance of the

  abduction phenomenon, Mack is uniquely mainstream and respectable.

  Or was.

  I guess it’s slightly strange that my parents’ circle of friends included

  both Sagan, the SETI pioneer, and Mack, who has become the leading

  voice of the abductee movement. The beliefs and philosophies of these

  two men were once quite similar, back in the day. But over time they

  developed radically different conceptions of alien intelligence, which

  required two entirely different worldviews. Sagan was a passionately

  rationalist astronomer fascinated by the possibility of alien contact, and

  Mack, a psychiatrist, came to believe that contact with extraterrestrials

  required nothing more than a prepared mind. Somehow, they both

  ended up in our swimming pool.

  John and my father, Lester, met in 1951, the year they both started at

  Harvard Medical School. They shared interests in literature and culture

  that went far beyond the medical curriculum. They became roommates

  and attended each other’s wedding. In some ways they have had paral-

  lel careers. They graduated from Harvard together in 1955. Both went

  into psychiatry and then psychoanalysis, and both eventually became

  professors in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

  John became a celebrity in some circles after his 1976 psychohistory of

  T. E. Lawrence won the Pulitzer Prize (the year before Sagan won his

  Pulitzer). Lester became famous in some circles and infamous in others

  for his books advocating sanity in drug policy.

  They continue to socialize, though not as much in recent years. This

  friendship, as you might imagine, has been strained by the abductee

  movement. Though John’s involvement began over a decade ago, it still

  seems like a surprising new development to his old friends.

  The topic of alien abductions was not entirely new to our household.

  We had an early brush with the concept. The first abduction case to

  gain wide attention, the archetypal case, was that of Betty and Barney

  Hill, a couple who, under hypnosis, recalled being kidnapped by the

  occupants of a UFO, taken on board, and subjected to strange experi-

  ments, all while driving in rural New Hampshire one night in 1961.

  The Interrupted Journey, a 1966 book about the Hills’ abduction expe-

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  rience, became a best-seller. In the 1975 made-for-TV movie Barney

  was played by James Earl Jones.

  At first the Hills experienced only “missing time” and had no mem-

  ory of what had happened to them. Their memories came out in hypno-

  sis sessions with a Boston psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon. Betty and

  Barney seemed to independently recall the same details of the abduc-

  tion. Betty drew star maps that the aliens had shown her.

  My father knew Simon and borrowed the tapes of the hypnosis ses-

  sions. One evening, after the kids were in bed, Lester listened to the

  tapes along with Sagan and James McDonald of the University of

  Arizona, a meteorologist who was one of the few mainstream scientists

  taking UFOs seriously.*

  After this listening session, Lester proposed that the Hills were suf-

  fering from a psychiatric condition known as a folie à deux—a joint

/>   delusional syndrome first identified in mid-nineteenth-century France.†

  It generally occurs between two people who live together and are

  closely related. One is dominant and the other passive. The dominant

  companion first develops the delusional system and the passive partner

  is gradually drawn in.

  Betty Hill was a strong-willed, outgoing, successful woman with high

  standing in her community. Barney was by all accounts dominated by

  his wife. Betty was effusive about her abduction experience. As my

  father described it in a recent e-mail to me, “She talked about it as

  though it were the defining event of her life. One might say that Barney

  could scarcely afford to express any skepticism, or, ‘if you can’t beat

  them, join them.’ ”

  Lester’s folie à deux hypothesis became a widely accepted explana-

  tion for the Hills’ “recovered memories,” at least among skeptics. So

  the concept of alien abductions was not unknown to Lester and Carl

  when John began publicly espousing his theories. Nevertheless, John’s

  acceptance of these experiences at face value was somewhat shocking.

  Not completely shocking. John always seemed to be searching. In the

  seventies he got deeply involved in EST and became close to Werner

  Erhard. In the eighties he became increasingly interested in altered

  states of consciousness. He was especially enamored of psychedelic psy-

  *I was upstairs having strange dreams. . . .

  †In the original case from which the name stems, two women remembered time-traveling to eighteenth-century France.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  chiatrist Stanislav Grof’s “holotropic breathing” technique. It is a mea-

  sure of the high esteem with which he was held by his old friends in the

  Harvard academic community that he was able to convince the arch-

  skeptics Carl and Lester to join him in a session where they were all

  “breathed” by a woman trained in Grof’s technique. Mack had visions,

  hallucinations, and transcendent insights, but Lester and Carl just got a

  little dizzy. Eventually John’s interests soared far beyond interpersonal

  or even transpersonal communication and he launched into interspecies

  communication with other humanoid intelligences—no radio tele-

  scopes required. To many of his old friends and colleagues he seemed to

  be heading for Lilly-land.

  E X P E R I E N C E R S

  I’m not going to delve deeply into abductions. Many books and articles

  have been written by believers and debunkers. The subject has been

  debated on a NOVA documentary and discussed ad infinitum on day-

  time TV, late-night radio, and nonstop coast-to-coast-to-coast Web

  chatter. As my wife Tory said tonight at dinner, “You don’t need to go

  on and on about that. People can watch that on Oprah. ”

  In fact John did go on Oprah. She introduced him by saying that

  although ordinarily she would not invite a guest who made such bizarre

  claims, she was intrigued that a respected Harvard professor and emi-

  nent psychiatrist takes abductions seriously. And that is one role that he

  has played—helping to create a mainstream venue for stories of extra-

  ordinary experiences.

  It is troubling but fascinating to see people you know head down such

  different roads of belief. All the time you hear about beliefs and ideas

  that seem like complete tabloid nonsense: UFO cloning cults in France,

  miracle cures from the dust of the Grand Wazoo, and authentic crystal

  balls. Most of this cosmic debris is easy to write off either because you

  don’t know these people and can just assume they are nuts, or because

  you do know them and know they are nuts. But although the ideas espoused by the abductee movement definitely seem pretty loopy, I don’t

  believe John Mack is crazy—which, for me, presents a puzzle.

  The experiencers and their supporters are certain their recovered

  memories of alien encounters are real. They believe that the messages

  imparted to them are important, not just for themselves but for all of

  us. Although the experiences are solitary, personal, and dreamlike,

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  there are many recurring elements that give the abduction narrative a

  certain solidity.

  These common elements include being woken up by small humanoid

  creatures in your bedroom, being transported to what seems like an

  operating room on a “ship,” being confined to a table, and having

  experiments done by alien “doctors” who seem particularly interested

  in human reproductive organs and who sometimes take samples of

  genetic material. The alien creatures also transmit various messages—

  often warnings about ecological disasters to come if we do not stop

  defiling the Earth.

  Mack believes that the remarkable consistency of the stories estab-

  lishes the reality of the experience. He and his experiencers are con-

  vinced that these are not just dreams or hallucinations, that they have

  actually been taken away to another place and encountered other

  beings.

  When I read the experiencers’ individual stories, I’m struck by how

  frightening and emotionally powerful the memories are. However,

  experiencers and their supporters lose me when they start interpreting

  the aliens’ behavior. This is when they descend toward the grade-B

  zone. The aliens are trying to alter us genetically. They want to create a

  race of hybrid alien/humans. Some investigators feel this is to be feared

  and resisted, because the aliens are creating an invasion force, and

  when enough of them are among us, they’ll just take over. But Mack

  and his followers think the aliens are benevolent. They are here to help

  us survive by assisting in a necessary transformation of consciousness,

  and human/alien hybrids will help us through the difficult decades

  ahead.

  Meanwhile back in reality, the debunkers sometimes get a little bit

  grade B themselves. They argue that aliens wouldn’t behave in ways

  that seem irrational to us, and that our encounters with real aliens

  would not seem like dreams. Why would the aliens come all this way

  from the gamma quadrant only to steal our sperm and eggs? How

  could they possibly breed with us? It doesn’t compute. Real aliens

  would have more respect for basic principles of physics and biology.

  In a harsh critique of Mack in The New Republic, entitled “The

  Doctor’s Plot,” James Gleick wrote “how infinitely unlikely it is that

  our corner of the universe should be receiving alien visitors in such

  strikingly near-human form at just the eyeblink of history when we

  have discovered space travel.”

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  In his book The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan asked why

  aliens haven’t set off burglar alarms or been captured on security

  videos. Debunkers are especially vexed by the aliens’ failure to leave

  any footprints or garbage. Sagan noted, “There is certainly no retrieval

  of cunning machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has

  filched a page from the captain’s logbook, or an examinin
g instrument,

  or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of the ship, or come

  back with detailed and verifiable scientific information not hitherto

  available on Earth. Why not? These failures must tell us something.”

  Sagan stated that he would believe in the aliens if they left behind

  unknown alloys, or materials with extraordinary properties.

  Those were, of course, his own fantasy aliens. He’d have been con-

  vinced if their technology was impressive in ways that he could imag-

  ine, and if they left us samples. But they’d have to play fair, respect the

  laws, and manifest themselves physically in a repeatable way that we

  can verify. Mistrust and verify.

  As I’ve pointed out, any aliens who came to Earth would probably be

  thousands, if not millions, of years more technologically mature than

  we. Who are we to tell them the rules? This provides a pretty good

  loophole against any debunking based on the seeming illogic of alien

  behavior and capabilities.

  Other, more promising critical arguments invoke the similarities

  between the abduction stories and pop-culture images of aliens. The

  experiencer aliens have a definite physical resemblance to movie aliens

  such as those portrayed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—the

  skinny little guys with big heads and almond-shaped eyes. Abduction

  critics also theorize about different kinds of hallucinations or sleep dis-

  orders, the power of suggestion, and therapists who are often eager to

  help experiencers remember their cosmic adventures. The skeptical

  mind wonders if the wide propagation of science fiction imagery, popu-

  lar books containing the basics of the abduction story, extensive media

  coverage, and conscious or unconscious suggestions from the therapists

  are not more than adequate to explain the consistent imagery reported

  by experiencers.

  Critics also love to make titillating hay out of the fact that many of

  the memories involve lurid interspecies sex acts or violations of the

  abductees’ private parts. You have to admit that these details do give it

  a pulp fiction edge.

  If numerous people who had never been exposed to the alien imagery

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  pervading our culture or the abduction myth itself had independently

  remembered the same experiences in detail, then it would point to some-

  thing much more interesting, although not necessarily extraterrestrials.