By: Carl Sagan
For just an instant in the darkened room I sense an apparition -could it be a ghost? Or there’s a flicker of motion; I see it out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head there’s nothing there. Is that a telephone ringing, or is it just my ‘imagination’? In astonishment, I seem to be smelling the salt air of the ConeyIsland summer seashore of my childhood. I turn a corner in the foreign city I’m visiting for the first time, and before me is a street so familiar I feel I’ve known it all my life.
In these commonplace experiences, we’re generally unsure what to do next. Were my eyes (or ears, or nose, or memory) playing ‘tricks’ on me? Or did I really and truly witness something out of the ordinary course of Nature? Shall I keep quiet about it, or shall I tell?
The answer depends very much on my environment, friends, loved ones and culture. In an obsessively rigid, practically oriented society, perhaps I would be cautious about admitting to such experiences. They might mark me as flighty, unsound, unreliable. But in a society that readily believes in ghosts, say, or ‘apporting’, accounts of such experiences might gain approval, even prestige. In the former, I would be sorely tempted to suppress the thing altogether; in the latter, maybe even to exaggerate or elaborate just a little to make it even more miraculous than it seemed.
Charles Dickens, who lived in a flourishing rational culture in which, however, spiritualism was also thriving, described the dilemma in these words (from his short story, ‘To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt’):
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To his reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved.
In our time, there is still much dismissive chortling and ridicule. But the reticence and obscurity is more readily overcome, for example, in a supportive setting provided by a therapist or hypnotist. Unfortunately – and, for some people, unbelievably -the distinction between imagination and memory is often blurred.
Some ‘abductees’ say they remember the experience without hypnosis; many do not. But hypnosis is an unreliable way to refresh memory. It often elicits imagination, fantasy, and play as well as true recollections, with neither patient nor therapist able to distinguish the one from the other. Hypnosis seems to involve, in a central way, a state of heightened suggestibility. Courts have banned its use as evidence or even as a tool of criminal investigation. The American Medical Association calls memories surfacing under hypnosis less reliable than those recalled without it. A standard medical school text (Harold I. Kaplan, ComprehensiveTextbook of Psychiatry, 1989) warns of a high likelihood that the beliefs of the hypnotist will be communicated to the patient and incorporated into what the patient believes to be memories, often with strong conviction’. So the fact that, when hypnotized, people sometimes relate alien abduction stories carries little weight. There’s a danger that subjects are – at least on some matters – so eager to please the hypnotist that they sometimes respond to subtle cues of which even the hypnotist is unaware.
In a study by Alvin Lawson of California State University, LongBeach, eight subjects, pre-screened to eliminate UFO buffs, were hypnotized by a physician and informed that they had been abducted, brought to a spaceship, and examined. With no further prompting, they were asked to describe the experience. Their accounts, most of which were easily elicited, were almost indistinguishable from the accounts that self-described abductees present. True, Lawson had cued his subjects briefly and directly; but in many cases, the therapists who routinely deal with alien abductions cue their subjects, some in great detail, others more subtly and indirectly.
The psychiatrist George Ganaway (as related by LawrenceWright) once proposed to a highly suggestible patient under hypnosis that five hours were missing from her memory of a certain day. When he mentioned a bright light overhead, she promptly told him about UFOs and aliens. When he insisted she had been experimented on, a detailed abduction story emerged. But when she came out of the trance and examined a video of the session, she recognized that something like a dream had been caught surfacing. Over the next year, though, she repeatedly flashed back to the dream material.
The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn’t. In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with. Loftus argues that ‘memories of an event more closely resemble a story undergoing constant revision than a packet of pristine information’.
The above article is taken from the book "THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD"
