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The Moral Truth is Out There By definition, folklore is that which cannot be destroyed by mere facts. So it is unlikely that the Air Force's latest effort to convince UFO enthusiasts that aliens did not crash at Roswell, NM, in 1947 will have any effect beyond feeding the voracious paranoia that now surrounds the story. As the public is leaning from The X-Files, the truth may be “out there,” but the main purpose of the United States government is to cover it up. I began regarding the UFO fascination as something between a hoax and a fad the first time I was told the “truth” about Roswell by members of my own family in the late 1940s. I continued to view the matter with perfect skepticism until about four years ago, when I developed a rather different perspective. Cultural significance No, I did not become a true believer, but I suddenly saw a more serious cultural significance to the phenomenon. The decisive event was a workshop offered at the Omega institute in upstate New York by Dr. John Mack, author of Abduction. Mack is the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who has risked his reputation on the truth of what UFO abductees have reported. Yet, while he takes these reports to be “true,” he doubts that the abduction phenomenon will ever be explained by “the physicalist approaches of the western scientific method.” In his presentation, Mack rehearsed the standard story that abductees tell, dealing with it as analytically as he might the material from any psychiatric encounter. Among his more startling judgments was his conviction that, contrary to the standard professional reading, he did not regard the abduction story as cover for childhood sexual abuse. The other way In his experience, the relationship worked the other way. Memories of sexual abuse, which at least made some kind of human sense, often functioned as covers for the abduction experience, which, having no scientific validity, was too embarrassingly painful to face. At one point when he was severely challenged by a critic in the audience, Mack lost patience. “Look,” he said with a riveting forcefulness, “I'm a smart, well trained, New York Jewish psychiatrist. If there's one thing I feel certain about it's my judgment as to when my clients are hallucinating and when they're telling the truth. These people are telling the truth.” The retort was made with such obvious passion that one could not help but be impressed. Here was a man going out on a limb with his career. Why not at least give him a fair hearing? If Mack's heartfelt candor had not been enough to make me rethink my attitude on alien abductions, what happened at lunch that day would have. I found myself talking to a young man who claimed to be an abductee. He recounted what he had been through with a kind of wised-up sincerity that I found moving. Clearly, there was something more here than fraud — or even pious fraud. But what? The alien abduction phenomenon in the United States now embraces hundreds of thousands of abductees and their believing followers. If it is a hallucination, as I believe it is, it is assuming the dimensions of such mass delusions of the past as the apocalyptic fevers that swept Europe during the Middle Ages, the witch hunts of the 17th century, the Nazi anti-Semitism campaign of the 1930s, or various sightings of the Virgin Mary. As a historian, I have learned to take crazes like this as serious matters that can change society more dramatically than any official political policy. Skeptics find the urge to debunk such delusions overwhelming; that is understandable. But historians know that debunking never put an end to the madness of crowds. In spite of those who criticize with good sense and straight thinking, delusions change the world. They have to be understood, or at least diagnosed. That means staying in touch with some aspect of the reality that the deluded are experiencing. That is actually a lot more challenging than a simple act of dismissal, but it may allow us to salvage something of value from the seeming madness. Abductees have now developed a canonical body of lore, an iconography of alien beings and spaceships, a highly ritualized psychic methodology based on the concept of “veiled memories,” and a social stance rooted in deep distrust of authority both political and scientific. Given my own environmental activist leaning, I find one point in this welter of science fiction and pop psychology that stands out. Almost universally, abductees become ecologically concerned citizens. They return from their experience with an urgent sense that the planet is at risk and even weep for the anguish of their fellow creatures. Sometimes the aliens deliver lectures “about the bad things that would happen to the Earth and our environment if we did not change our ways” — to quote one of Mack's clients. More often, the client's enhanced environmental sensitivity is simply the emotional sequelae of the abduction, a dread that humanity (again to quote Mack) “has lost its way through arrogance and a constriction of consciousness that has become dangerous at a cosmic level.” This moral anxiety seems to stem from one traumatic aspect of the abduction experience. At some point, the abductees report being strapped down and surgically operated upon by the aliens: dissected, probed, sampled, implanted. As Mack describes it: “In the craft, a series of procedures are done, including skin scrapings, various examinations, and staring by the beings. Abductees often try to avoid eye contact with the beings because this is so powerful and creates a conviction of their reality which, at least initially, experiencers would like to avoid.” Most of the procedures have to do with reproduction. In short, the abduction experience centers on discovering what it is like to be scrutinized and rudely handled by an alien and superior intelligence whose purposes are totally mysterious and perhaps not at all benign. That remark about avoiding eye contact — that is how I remember my pet cat behaving as the veterinarian shaved him and sectioned a wound. The abductee's body is similarly violated, often impregnated; hybrid offspring are produced and taken away for study; the fear and pain of the abductee is ignored; no explanations are ever offered. Is this not what every laboratory animal undergoes at human hands in the name of scientific progress? Lab animals have no way to make even a semi-articulate protest against this prime assertion of human domination; but here are humans who may be making the protest for them. Let me put it this way: If I had to design a single experience that had the emotional power to teach people their sympathetic bond with the rest of nature, I think this might be it. Imagine yourself as a guinea pig, a “lower” animal in a zoo or a research facility. Imagine the fear, the anguish, the numbing bewilderment. But “imagining”' would not measure up to the task of transforming consciousness. It would take more. It would take a prolonged hallucination that became as psychologically potent as childhood sexual abuse is for those who have suffered it. If one can speak of a hallucination whose time has come, this is it. I would have to leave it to biologists and psychiatrists to tell us what the mechanism of such collective delusions might be. I can only speak as a historian and an environmentalist. Delusions make history, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The Nazi delusion was all bad; but even atheist skeptics would have to attribute a certain amount of good to the Christian “delusion” that brought us saintly acts of charity as well as inquisitional persecution. It is the Christian example of historically consequential true belief that I find most illuminating in this context. Even agnostic historians often credit Christianity with being a healing response to the alienation and impersonality of the Hellenistic cities. The early Christians developed a consoling lore and an inspiring iconography, a comforting vision of history, a ritual practice that included confession and catharsis, rites that touched the believer's life with solace and high purpose. All this has parallels among the abductees. If early Christianity made its way by addressing a crying existential need of the time, the same may be true of the abductee movement. Drawing upon the one form of introspection that has universal currency in our day — the psychiatric analysis — it is giving voice to the fears many of us share for the fate of the Earth. Speaking for myself, I have long since given up on hoping that the statistics of doom will suffice to persuade people to change their bad environmental habits. I don't know what will; but the abductee experience may at least be a baseline for recognizing what might. Perhaps we need to get inside the very consciousness of the non-human world that has become everybody's principal victim. Perhaps we need to feel the arrogance of our species from the other side. Of course it remains important to ask, “But is it true?” In answering that question, however, I would allow for moral truths as well as empirical truths. It was, after all, one of Freud's breakthrough insights that fictions can take on a psychological reality that has to be honored. I am chastened in my skepticism by imagining how supremely rational pagans of the early Christian period may have responded to what was then the latest in a surfeit of Hellenistic mystery cults. In those days, saviors with apocalyptic pronouncements to deliver were jostling one another in the streets. Miracles and visions abounded. Much of the popular lore and imagery may have been of no greater quality than the abductee literature that fills the bookstores. Dante and Michelangelo were still a long way off. Maybe gatherings of the primitive Christian community were a lot like the recent UFO conclave at Roswell, something between a carnival and camp meeting where raving prophets, cunning hucksters, and gullible seekers mingled in a seething psychological stew. I can just hear a suave Roman intellectual of that earlier day as he cast a cool, cynical eye over the scene. “Jesus of Nazareth? Never beard of him Give it another few weeks, Flavius, it will pass and be forgotten. Take my word for it.”
Theodore Roszak is a Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. He is the author of Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders. His novel The Devil and Daniel Silverman will be published in Winter 2002. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Award and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. © 1997 Theodore Roszak |