Why We Believe

The heyday of ancient astronauts and alien abductions has come and gone. But we can still get carried away by dreams of intergalactic encounters. Does that make us crazy? Not at all.It makes us human

BY DAVID BJERKLIE

ALIENS FROM SPACE USED TO BE A PRETTY FAR-OUT notion. Although they loomed large in our popular culture, sensible folks just didn’t take seriously the possibility of real-life spacemen. Until they did. And that’s when things got even stranger.

Sure, an original cottage industry of speculation was spawned in the 1960s by Erich von Däniken, whose books argued that not only were aliens real but that they had already visited Earth, lending a hand in building the pyramids while they were at it. Von Däniken’s theories created a huge stir among the public at large, selling more than 60 million books, but it wasn’t until decades later that aliens (or at least a dispassionate consideration of them) first infiltrated the sober halls of academia. In the summer of 1992, no less high-minded an institution than MIT hosted a small conference on the abduction experience. By 2010, no less a deep thinker than Stephen Hawking was pondering not only who could be out there, but what they could be up to. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships,” Hawking theorized, “having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

That same year, the 350-year-old Royal Society of London convened a conference called “The Detection of Extra-Terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society.” A couple of Nobel laureates sat in on the two-day affair, which birthed the publication of 17 scholarly papers in a dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. In short, the search for ET has hit the bookish big time.

What on Earth (or, more to the point, anywhere but Earth) happened? In truth, all the attention isn’t that much of a leap. We humans have always embraced at least the idea of aliens. When it comes right down to it, we really have no choice.

QUITE A STONE’S THROW Stonehenge, the giant cosmic calendar, could only have been built by intergalactic space visitors, right?

ALIEN’S-EYE VIEW Ancient line drawings, some as wide as three football fields, were made in the dry desert soil of southern Peru. But why? And for whom?

LET THERE BE LIGHT A carving in the Dendera Temple complex has led some to believe that aliens brought electricity—and incandescent bulbs!—to ancient Egypt.

SPACE ODDITY Ancient-astronaut advocates firmly believe this temple carving shows Mayan king Pakal manning the controls of a UFO.

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY HAS long argued that the Self requires the existence of an Other, and aliens are an Other in spades. As Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University, says, “They speak to deep existential questions.” In the possibility of intelligent alien life we see a reflection of our innermost thoughts, hopes and fears. Wanting to look into the face of an alien, says Scharf, “is like wanting to have a mirror to look into, a mirror we can compare ourselves to.”

But our inclination to believe in aliens isn’t a single—or necessarily simple—impulse. For some people, ETs provide explanations for what we don’t understand about our own human history. Exhibit A is the series of ancient landscape figures called the Nazca Lines in southern Peru. These figures, or geoglyphs, are shallow but enormous line drawings in the desert soil, depicting birds, spiders, monkeys, lizards and other animals. They are so large—some are two or three football fields across—that they are best discerned from a hovering aircraft. Thus, the reasoning goes, they must have been made by or for the inhabitants of flying saucers. Such fantastical visitations also “solve” Stonehenge, Mayan temple carvings that allegedly depict King Pakal sitting at the controls of a spaceship, and a symbol found in Egypt’s Dendera Temple complex that resembles a modern lightbulb, complete with a squiggly filament inside and a plug at the bottom.

This take on prior contact, which still sparks its share of spooky cable TV offerings today, was launched in 1968 by von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? The book became an international sensation and made believers of many agnostics. But the underlying premise of the book and all the other explorations it generated, says Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, is built on a logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam, argument from ignorance. Shermer describes it like this: “If there is no satisfactory terrestrial explanation for, say, the Egyptian pyramids, then a theory that says they were built by aliens must be true.”

For other people, aliens provide an explanation for otherwise baffling trauma. It too is an argument from ignorance, but this one is constructed at an acutely personal level. An otherwise rational everyman or -woman is awakened by flashing lights, rousted by hovering humanoid creatures, and teleported to a spaceship, where he or she is probed and prodded before being returned to terra firma. What else could make sense of an experience so vivid it results in measurable physiological responses comparable to those seen in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Or explain why so many people have similar experiences? Extrapolation from polls conducted at the height of the late-20th-century UFO craze shows that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans experienced “symptoms” of alien abduction.

John Mack, a well-regarded Harvard researcher and author of a Pulitzer-winning psychological biography of T.E. Lawrence, was a co-organizer of that initial MIT conference who had become become intrigued by the numerous and detailed reports of contact. He set his sights on understanding why people wanted—or needed—to believe. At first, he was appropriately neutral about the reality of abductions. As he told the BBC, “I would never say, ‘Yes, there are aliens taking people.’ I would say, ‘There is a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way.’”

Over time, though, Mack began to sound more and more like one of his more enthusiastic subjects. One headline in the Boston Herald read e.t., phone harvard. The problem, he discovered, is that while whatever connection humans may have to aliens can be compelling, it is also fraught. Eventually, Harvard initiated a review of Mack’s methodology and, though he survived it and the surrounding swirl of media attention, any semblance of Mack as a disinterested scientist was dashed forever.

No matter; other academics were eager to fill the void. At the time, “recovered” memories were also much in the news; hypnosis and other psychological techniques were being used to enable individuals to “remember” sometimes-outlandish tales of sexual abuse and satanic rituals. Were these memories real? Particularly in the case of sexual abuse, it was often impossible to prove that the remembered abuse didn’t occur. Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, who with colleagues had been studying post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans and women who had been sexually abused as children, turned his attention to memories that featured an event very likely to not have transpired: abduction by aliens.

McNally found, somewhat surprisingly, that the experience of the abductees was perceived by them to be as real as the verified traumas of PTSD victims. But what feels real is not the same as what is real. In this case, McNally suspected the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis was to blame.

During REM sleep, we do not move; this is natural and useful because it prevents us from thrashing around, jumping out of bed or possibly injuring ourselves as we act out our dreams. Sometimes, though, we wake to find we are still immobile, and that can be extremely disorienting. According to Susan Clancy, one of McNally’s former colleagues, when that happens, our brains try to help us cope with the odd feeling. “We can hallucinate sights, sounds and bodily sensations that seem real but are actually the product of our imagination,” she explains.

Researchers have estimated that approximately 30% of us have undergone at least one episode of sleep paralysis, and about 5% of the time the episode was accompanied by a full range of visual, tactile and auditory hallucinations. Most episodes subside within a minute or so, but before they do, many sufferers are overcome with terror. How a person eventually reconciles the experience, says McNally, “depends on available cultural narratives.” It isn’t entirely clear why “some people opt for an alien abduction interpretation, while others assume they are haunted by a ghost”—or demons or witches or bogeymen camping under the bed, for that matter.

PROBING QUESTIONS John Mack, a Harvard professor and psychiatrist, took stories of alien abduction very seriously.

That aliens are among those apparitions lurking just below the surface of our consciousness should be no surprise, though. By the waning years of the 20th century, our cultural script had us primed to see aliens in every dark corner. “It is little wonder that abductees throughout the country report broadly similar kinds of alien encounters,” notes McNally. Nor is it a stretch, he explains, to see that “alien contact narratives have closely tracked the appearance of aliens and their spaceships as Hollywood has depicted them through the years.”

Spindly humanoid creatures—green or otherwise—with huge eyes and bulbous heads, they travel in rotating flying saucers decked out with floodlights. It’s a tried-and-true movie trope. And it is just such a description that supplies the casting for most abductees’ experiences. We tend to imagine what we can imagine, which is, give or take a detail here and there, what we have already seen.

BUT EVEN IF SLEEP PARALYSIS and late-night movies explain abductions to the satisfaction of most of us, they don’t begin to satisfy our need to calculate whether or not inquisitive aliens actually do exist somewhere, particularly now, when their cultural throw weight is only growing. For running alongside the near scientific certainty that neither you nor your normal-seeming neighbor has ever made contact with an alien is a scientific consensus that says the odds overwhelmingly favor the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe. That we haven’t encountered it most assuredly does not mean it does not exist.

And having accepted the inevitability of extraterrestrials, we are then forced to ponder what sort of beings they might be. Many Earthlings assume that any aliens who would take the time and effort to roam the galaxy must have a malign agenda. After all, even if they are only as civilized as we are, that would clearly be alarming enough, right?

The political scientist Jodi Dean, who wrote the book Aliens in America in 1998, theorizes that this particular expression of alien life is our way of dealing with our own “anxieties over technological development and fears for the future.” Others have suggested that the earlier alien invasion was a natural redirection of our Cold War fears. As the Soviet Union crumbled, aliens flew in to fill the breach, representing a different enemy, one perhaps even more implacable and merciless.

Still, there are others who think aliens don’t have it in for us. Says Skeptics Society’s Shermer, “The ET pessimists—those who think aliens are likely to be evil—are basing their assessment entirely on just one aspect of human nature. But over the past several centuries, our better angels have been slowly but surely overtaking our inner demons. The arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice.” He adds that a successful space-faring civilization is just as likely to have learned to control its more aggressive tendencies and be willing to regard other sentient beings fairly. In short, Shermer says, “any ETs we encounter will be as morally advanced as they are technologically advanced.”

That should offer a measure of comfort, even if the counterargument continues to nag. But what about Option C? What if our credulity runs smack into a brick wall? Because in the end, we might just be met with nothing. “Even if there is life throughout the universe, maybe intelligent life always screws it up,” says Scharf with a rueful laugh. “Maybe it always gets to a point we’re at now, where the need for resources runs away from it, and so it always messes up the environment and the civilization crashes. So maybe nobody anywhere really ever goes interstellar.” Consider the impact, suggests Scharf, of finding out that there is some universal principle of intelligence: that those capable of becoming really smart get too smart for their own good. No news might not be good news.

No news also means we’re left alone with our cosmic conjurings. Until further notice, they will continue to evoke cultural connections and individual reactions. And that is OK. To paraphrase the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, aliens are good to think with. Even if they don’t always have us thinking straight.

BECAUSE IF IN THE LIGHT OF day, all this talk of aliens seems a little silly, well, that may just be the point. We humans are a rational species, but we are not a perfectly rational one. We often engage in a kind of magical thinking that allows us to believe the unbelievable, fathom the unfathomable. Each of our cultures has its own folklore, myths and legends, each of our religions its allegories, to help explain the world and give meaning to our existence. You might think that as our scientific knowledge expands, as more of the gaps in our understanding are filled, our reliance on magical thinking would diminish. Of course, that’s not how it works. Just ask the billions of people for whom religion—or art or music or anything else that appeals to our less rational parts—still very much matters.

The fact is, mystery will always have its charms. Interestingly, McNally found that as terrifying as their alien experience may have been for the majority of abductees, they would not choose to have avoided it. “They said their encounters had deepened their spiritual awareness of the universe, making them glad there were powerful beings that cared for us and for the fate of the Earth,” McNally says. “Some proudly mentioned their selection for hybrid breeding programs. Ninety percent said that, on balance, they were glad to have been abducted.”

Why do we believe? Because the alternative is way too boring.