[extropy-chat] and speaking of anal probes

[Damien Broderick]

(I've always thought that should be `rectal probes', BTW, but then I've 
also always thought that people usually mean `vulva' when they teach their 
kids to say`vagina')...

...a nicely rational and infuriated 1994 piece by James Gleick on the 
egregious and late Dr. John Mack:

http://www.around.com/abduct.html

[extracts:]

Though he is in all the machinery surrounding his book as true a believer 
as can be, still, in the actual text, he engages in a slippery form of 
rhetoric--as if somehow he still wanted to hedge his bets. He writes of 
"the actual experience (whatever the source of these experience may 
ultimately prove to be)." What does John Mack really believe (assuming that 
the whole thing isn't just a calculated scam)? Does he have any curiosity 
about the technology of this species, on the one hand capable of passing 
through walls and beaming people about on rays of light, and on the other 
hand, sometimes reduced to flagging down cars? Does he believe that 
creatures from another planet are grabbing our fellow humans, pinning them 
down, and engaging in weird sex with them? Literally?
    Well, yes--and no. Certainly he writes as though he does, but he also 
manages to avoid answering such tacky direct questions. Sometimes he 
switches over to writing in terms of "the abduction phenomenon" 
(Smartspeak) instead of "abductions" (Markspeak). Mack says, "Our use of 
familiar words like 'happening,' 'occurred,' and 'real' will themselves 
have to be thought of differently, less literally perhaps"--it's a 
sickeningly corrupt style of hiding behind language. His writing is full of 
phrases drained of all meaning: "the collapse of space/time"; "the alien 
being opened Ed's consciousness." And there is always the ultimate hedge: 
"the problem of defining in what reality the abductions occur."
    We know some realities they aren't occurring in. They aren't occurring 
in the reality Mack calls "the ontological framework of modern science." 
This is the reality where we might be tripped up by things like "accepted 
laws of physics and principles of biology." They aren't occurring in "the 
Judeo-Christian tradition"--Jews and Christians have become such 
stick-in-the-muds compared to (no surprise here) "Eastern religions, such 
as Tibetan Buddhism, which have always recognized a vast range of spirit 
entities in the cosmos . . ." Things that, after all, could not have really 
happened, are constantly happening in "converging time frames" or "another 
dimension." The game of let's-find-another-reality turns someone like me 
into such a party-pooper, having to fall back on the common-sense idea that 
reality is in fact . . . reality.
    But it's not just a game. Mack is a practicing psychiatrist, and he's 
toying with real people. There is "Ed," who first got in touch with Mack in 
1992 and "recalled" having been abducted, raped (not Mack's word), and 
lectured to about "the way humans are conducting themselves here in terms 
of international politics, our environment, our violence to each other, our 
food, and all that"--all this having supposedly occurred 31 years earlier, 
in 1961, though Ed didn't begin to recall it until 1989.
    In a chilling aside, Mack writes that Ed and his wife, "Lynn," have had 
"a number of fertility problems, which may or may not be abduction-related, 
including three or four spontaneous terminations of Lynn's pregnancies." 
It's a reminder: This man is practicing medicine. He is telling patients 
that their miscarriages may be due to imaginary aliens. Why do the medical 
licensing boards permit this?

[...]
We are not fully rational creatures.
    Our minds are not computers. We see people, we hear voices, we sense 
presences that are not really there. If you have never seen the face of 
someone you know, in broad daylight, clear as truth, when in reality that 
person was a continent away or years dead, then you are unusual.
    Our memories cannot be trusted--not our five-minute-old memories, and 
certainly not our decades-old memories. They are weakened, distorted, 
rearranged, and sometimes created from wishes or dreams. With or without 
hypnosis, we are susceptible to suggestion.