The Nation
                               June 27, 1994
                                pp. 904-6

                    Spaced Out -- and Other Delusions

                              by Anne Bernays

    Some years ago, at the height of the antinuclear movement, John Mack, a
psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, chained himself to a
fence surrounding the testing grounds in Nevada.  This gesture was altogether
in character.  Dr. Mack is a binary sort of fellow, an enthusiast searching for
inspiring answers to big questions.  The Harvard-affiliated department of
psychiatry at Cambridge City Hospital is his creation; he's also the founder of
the Center for Psychology and Social Change.  Over time Mack has made some of
his more conventional colleagues uncomfortable by endorsing Werner Erhardt's
EST and, more recently, "breathworks," a method of breating under supervision
meant to help a patient recollect nasty things long kept under wraps.  It's
hard to imagine how he found the time, but in 1978 he published a biography of
agitated iconoclast T.E. Lawrence; it won him a Pulitzer Prize.  John Mack has
magnetic eyes and a reassuring personality.
    These days psychiatrist Mack has moved on to other worlds, spending a good
deal of time interviewing, hypnotizing and "treating" men and women who claim
to be victims of alien abduction.  They say that during their several hours of
captivity inside hovering space vehicles they are physically invaded in various
ways, including sperm and egg removal and implantation of odd matter, usually
in an arm or leg muscle.  When their space odysseys are over, the abductees are
returned to earth, thoroughly fartootst.  This is where Dr. Mack takes over,
assuring them that it's O.K. to be temporarily upset but not to worry: Their
small gray kidnappers mean well and have come from outer space only in order to
keep our planet from self-destructing.
    I saw Dr. Mack on Oprah.  He said that while he's aware all this sounds
farfetched, the abductees he's talked to are neither psychotic nor neurotic in
any conventional way.  Their stories sound authentic and are amazingly similar
to one another, even when related by people who have had no chance to meet and
compare notes.  While unwilling to go all the way and say they are telling the
truth, Mack is far more convinced by tales of extraterrestrial abduction than
he is skeptical.
    If John Mack were the local chiropractor or small-town dentist, few would
pay much attention to him or the ideas contained in his book, just published
and now orbiting its author on the nation's airwaves.  But this man is a
Harvard professor; surely a man on the faculty of the Big H knows what he's
talking about.  His credentials alone give his narrative the wings it needs to
fly; as a result, thousands, perhaps millions, believe it.
    It seems we'll believe almost anything, and the more of us there are, the
more likely we are to embrace total nonsense, a phenomenon known as mass
hysteria.  You're ashamed to admit you saw Elvis twiddling the knobs on the gas
grill, but as soon as a couple of the neighbors say they too saw him in their
backyards, you figure it's O.K. to go ahead and call the folks at The National
Enquirer.  I see nothing to distinguish alien abduction--in its high moonshine
content--from such other foolishness as astrology, Silva Mind Control (we once
had a babysitter who swore she could find a parking space in Harvard Square by
focusing her mind), pyramid power, numerology, the orgone box, phlogiston,
Scientology, alchemy and the presence of witchcraft in Salem,
Massachusetts--all of them wacko responses to the normal anxieties of everyday
life.
    Moreover, John Mack and his fellow believers want it both ways.  On the one
hand they charge us to open our closed, "Western," "rationalist" sensibilities
to other systems of "knowing" and accept the "unacceptable."  On the other
hand, they claim to have "scientific" (that is, physical) evidence that scores
of abductions have taken place--although they have yet to produce a single
producing item.  But one either buys the whole ball of wax through absolute
faith, as a Christian does the Resurrection, or, as in the case of
fluoridation, through concrete proof that children who brush with Crest have
fewer cavities than those who don't.  Are we supposed to believe in aliens in
our midst because we need to believe _or_ because space cadets have left behind
a pair of peculiar footwgear or half-eaten metal-filing sandwiches?  One way or
the other, please.
    An analogy to the belief in extraterrestrial kidnapping is the conviction
that the Holocaust never happened.  When confronted by hard
evidence--documentation, mass graves, camps and ovens, the number of
disappearances corresponding to the shrinkage of Europe's Jewish population,
and the word of eyewitnesses--the deniers persist:  The Holocaust didn't
happen.  Punkt.
    And so we have a phenomenon with two heads.  Defying--or, at the very
least, ignoring--reason, common sense and logic, the one head believes without
evidence, while the other believes _in spite_ of evidence.  Not that our age is
unique:  Historians of religion call this kind of superstitious
thinking-by-the-gut "animism," and it's been around since the first caveperson
bored a hole through a mammoth's tooth and wore it around his, or her, neck on
a length of bull's intestine.
    The specious and irrational, a huge slavering dog with fangs, has pushed
the sweet purring pussycat of sanity and reason off her bed, taken her place at
the hearth.  Impatient with rational thought, we'd rather "feel" or "believe
in" or "relate to."
    No one appreciates the imagination more than a novelist, a person who
spends at least half her waking life making up stories and writing them down.
And that's why she's aware of the risks of letting fact and fiction blur into
each other.  John Mack is a man of undeniable talent and energy, so I'm baffled
by his eagerness to groom and breed gullibility.  But I guess he's not out of
step with the animism parade.  The next thing we'll be told is that Richard
Nixon has made yet another spectacular comeback.  How many will not believe it?

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Anne Bernays, who teaches at Holy Cross College, is the author of, most
recently, _Professor Romeo_ (Penguin)