Eco-Aliens from Space

If you wake up one morning to discover your pajamas on backward, it's possible, says one writer, that during the night you were kidnapped by aliens from outer space. No, I'm not talking about an article in the National Inquirer. I'm talking about a recent book entitled Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. The author, Dr. John Mack, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He's also on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and president of the International Society for Political Psychology. He's even a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. I stress Dr. Mack's impressive credentials because without them, his book on UFOs would exist only as a cheap paperback. Instead it's attracting widespread serious attention. Dr. Mack's message is that aliens are systematically abducting human beings by the millions. He bases his claim on interviews with about a hundred of his patients who believe they were kidnapped by aliens. Under hypnosis, these people supposedly recovered "repressed memories" of past experiences. Many described the aliens as short, gray creatures with spindly legs and large, triangular heads, who beam Earthlings up to their spacecraft. Most describe the aliens as more advanced than humans, both technologically and spiritually. Some patients claim they've seen babies on board who are half-human and half-alien—apparently the result of some very "close encounters." You might wonder why supposedly advanced civilizations would bother with inferior Earthlings at all. Perhaps in some distant galaxy there's a cosmic Oprah show featuring programs like "Earthlings and the Aliens Who Love Them." On a more serious note, the aliens who appear in Mack's book constantly warn Earthlings that our greed is destroying the ecosystem. In order to survive, the aliens insist, we need a fundamental shift in human consciousness and spirituality—a shift apparently to the New-Age idea that the Earth is divine and that we all share its divinity. In other words, despite all the science-fiction imagery in these stories, their message is essentially religious. That explains why even intelligent, highly educated people like John Mack are falling for UFO stories—without demanding the hard evidence that scientific researchers generally require. For most of this century, intellectual elites have predicted that science will displace religion as the main influence in our lives. Yet science, with its cold, rationalistic view of the world, is unable to fulfill people's spiritual longings. As a result, many Americans are primed for anything that keeps the trappings of science but invests them with religious meaning. UFO stories are a perfect solution: They engage the scientific imagination with spacecraft and pseudo-scientific jargon, and combine all that with an aura of spirituality and a mission to save the planet. For you and me, it's a potent reminder that human beings were made to worship God. And if people refuse to bow their knee to Him—as our secular age has indeed refused to do—then they will inevitably bow down to something else. Even to something as far-fetched as environmentally correct aliens from outer space.

03/13/95