This blog post is going to be about my general discontent with the general unscientific and close-minded, in my opinion, approach towards paranormal subjects in academia. In psychology class, we had the pleasure of watching a documentary about the idea of alien abductions. The documentary revolved around several self-proclaimed abductees and an artist who held weekly therapy sessions with them, as well as performing hypnosis and various other forms of regression on them. Some scientists such as Carl Sagan and the late John E. Mack as well as other prominent researchers of such phenomena, and science-popularizers were interviewed as well.
Before I begin my critique, it is first important to introduce and define a concept known as Occam's Razor. This principle, often applied in critical thinking, states that the simplest explanation is the one that is most likely true. For instance, consider someone's account of seeing a strange object in the sky. Generally, the simplest explanation in this case would be that the object was an airplane (perhaps whose form looked different from a particular angular perspective or reflection), and definitely not an extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
Often Occam's razor is useful; however, there are rare exceptions and problems with this paradigm of thinking. A big problem, the way I see it, is the given perspective of examining and issue an assigning a certain label based on ones past history, bias and so forth. In other words, what is simple? Isn't something simple to us, relatively not so for another culture? And of course, often times, the simplest explanation isn't the correct one. In the above ufo sighting example, it is probably correct, but what would happen in a different culture? Consider an indigenous society, one of many such societies currently inhabiting isolated jungles in, say, South America. Such a society, primitive by our standards, will likely attribute the sighting of an unknown object as a familiar one - such as, say, a bird or an eagle. To them, this really would be the simplest explanation; Indeed, it may be turn out to be correct most of the time, but in the case of the plane, it would not. This is one of the pitfalls one could fall into when taking Occam's razor tooseriously.
This, therefore, begs the question: "Do we really know what's simple?" Can we evaluate things in such a way? Are we qualified to do so? In many cases, Occam's razor serves us just fine, but it should not be the final verdict; Rather, Occam's razor is a simple heuristical tool - nothing more, nothing less.
Now, back to the topic at hand.
So in this documentary, we have an artist, who devoid of any scientific credentials, conducts regular therapy sessions to people who have read his books about abductions and written to him about their experiences. Though not formally trained, he seems well-versed and fairly intelligent. Many of these people come with conscious memories of such experiences, often traumatic, and he uses a process of hypnotic regression to extract supposedly hidden, locked-away, memories of other encounters. It is important to note that the subjects in the cases all seem to be comprised of people from all walks of life, intelligent, mentally sane and no sign of any other problems (except, perhaps some trauma from said incidents).
Long story short, after meeting with the artist/therapy facilitator, John E. Mack - a prominent, Pulitzer-prize winning, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, agreed to do a study and analyze some of these patients and their stories. Though he was highly skeptical initially, his disbelief gradually diminished as he uncovered remarkable consistencies in each case (all the stories were nearly identical), coupled with sincerity, intense emotional states, honesty and remarkable conviction in all the subjects. Through his experience with hundreds of patients prior to this investigation, he knew something was up, so to speak.
Could it really be any other way? The subjects all had remarkably similar accounts, no prior history of mental problems or any other questionable characteristics that would make him doubt the case. After that study, John E. Mack became a proponent of the cause and believed that this was a legitimate phenomenon requiring more study.
Carl Sagan, who I also highly respect, said that one cannot easily dismiss these findings as there is an obvious phenomenon of either remarkably similar hallucinations en masse, OR legitimate encounters with alien beings. Sagan, who launched the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) many years ago, concluded that he had no doubt that these were hallucinations; After all, nobody had any concrete proof of the existence of aliens yet.
Other professors and researchers were also featured and claimed that such phenomena were often the cause of hypnagogic states, hypnagogic hallucinations, other kinds of night terror dreams and other things.
Perhaps the saddest part of this story is that of academia's general closed-mindedness and unwillingness to look deeper into the validity of such paranormal phenomena. John E. Mack, for instance, was investigated on numerous occasions by peers appointed by Harvard and this drew criticism from many people, including Harvard Professor of Law, Alan Dershowitz, as they had no grounds to do so based on ethics or any other reasons. As Angela Hind said, "It was the first time in Harvard's history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation." Eventually, of course, Harvard relented by apologizing and respecting John E. Mac's freedom to study the subject of his choosing. Sadly, many scientists and academics are unwilling to explore such issues -- an attitude which is not scientific at all. Their bias, as evidenced in Harvard's appointment of peers to check over Mack's research, remains only but a single example of the pervasive resistance of studying unorthodox phenomena in the scientific community. No matter how insane a subject appears at first-hand (needless to say, almost all scientific theories did at one point), many cases, such as this one aren't easily dismissible and require more attention and research.
The way I see, occam's razor applies up to a given point. One can, generally, attribute hypnagogic hallucinations as a cause to a handful of individuals retelling encounters with alien beings, but to what extent? What if it was 1000 individuals? 10,000? 100,000? Millions?
What is the 'simplest explanation' of hundreds of thousands of mentally sane people having remarkably similar memories who they tell with great emotional conviction? What about thousands of people who 'remember' similar experiences in an altered trance state of consciousness under regression hypnosis? Of course, many people question the validity of the aforementioned technique as some scientists study people's suggestibility and argue that people can be trained to make up and alter memories.
Many scientists are fearful for loss of their reputation to even venture to research such claims, let alone ague for it. John E. Mac was one of the brave few to do so, and a true scientist.
I couldn't have said this better than this youtube commenter:
"Rare footage of a rare man. Dr. John Mack was a brilliant and courageous pioneer in a field few would, even, consider. He challenged people's thinking, not to get them to believe what he is saying, but to explore the reasons why they themselves are unwilling to, even, consider such a phenomena.. Straight to the heart of the matter. "
