If you’ve hit Google this morning, you’ve probably noticed that today is the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident. Seems like as good a time as any to point out the connection between the sort of skepticism that we do when looking at accounts of extraterrestrial beings who fly in spacecraft and are thought to abduct people into their ships, and the sort of skepticism that we do when looking at accounts of supernatural beings who ascend into the heavens unaided and are thought to rapture people into the skies. Chris Hallquist wrote the book on this topic, which you may download for free. Please donate as you see fit to support his work, I’ve found it quite worthwhile, myself.
As to the connection between UFO’s and rising gods, here is what fellow SINner Stephen Law has to say:
“No doubt many Biblical scholars would consider a close look at claims about ghosts and UFOs to be beneath them; but, actually, these are precisely the sort of claims they need to know more about if they are to have a genuinely balanced view of the historical evidence for the resurrection.”
That pretty much sums up one of the major shortcomings of mainstream historical Jesus research, especially within the theological seminaries. Without carefully studying the phenomenon of mass delusion and the underlying quirks of human psychology that give rise thereto, how can anyone hope to weigh the hypothesis that the resurrection of Jesus arose from human imagination? Here is an excerpt from Hallquist’s book on the subjective experiences of those who consider themselves to be abductees:
Today, a more scientific response is possible. First, let’s look at the issue of so-called recovered memories. As noted in chapter Three, human memory is not only susceptible to forgetting, it is also susceptible to implantation of false information. A number of experiments have demonstrated that this can extend to the fabrication of events that never happened. In 1977, a couple of UFOlogists hypnotized a group of test subjects who nobody suspected of being abductees, and found that with minimal prompting they could generate elaborate abduction narratives. Though it was reported that these narratives were virtually identical to those of “real” abductees, and nobody claimed that the test subjects must have been abductees after all, the UFO community continued insisting that everyone else who generated such tales under hypnosis was telling the truth. Mainstream researchers got a similar result in an experiment conducted a few years later, though the memory they tried to fabricate was less exotic: being awakened by a loud noise. Another experiment, conducted by leading memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, succeeded in implanting a false memory of being lost in a mall as a child, and this experiment did not employ hypnosis. This latter experiment is consistent with other psychological evidence that the so-called “hypnotic state” is not so special as is popularly supposed.
What about people who have strange experiences at night and remember them without hypnosis? Actually, these reports fit the pattern of a well-understood psychological phenomenon. One of these is sleep paralysis. When we dream, our brains lose control over our bodies to keep us from acting out our dreams. This mechanism can fall out of sync, causing people to wake up paralyzed. For similar reasons, people sometimes hallucinate when falling asleep or waking up. Such hallucinations are known as “hypnagogic” or “hypnopompic” hallucinations, and are one of the most common types of hallucinations that occur, though their existence is not common knowledge.
Furthermore, psychological evaluations of abductees themselves cast doubt on their claims. In 1981, a pro-UFO group arranged for nine abductees to be evaluated by a psychologist who was unaware of their status as abductees. The results were not quite as hoped for. The abductees were found not to have any full-blown mental illnesses, but were found to have “considerable sensitivity… to fantasy.”
Sensitivity to fantasy, of course, is not a particularly unusual condition among human beings. What I find fascinating in all this is that people today have no problem writing off the eyewitness accounts of literally hundreds of living people who claim to have been abducted, but at the same time take seriously the writings of the four canonical evangelists, who did not claim to be eyewitnesses and wrote anonymously some nineteen centuries ago. Unbiased observers should take seriously the possibility (indeed, probability) of an emergent mass delusion in both cases. When it comes down to it, we have ample evidence that people sometimes fabricate false memories from stories they have heard, whereas we have no good evidence that either aliens or demigods have been visiting our planet.
Your thoughts?
