DrMatt
28th February 2003, 05:56 AM
Mack's theories were granted several pages in Oberlin Alumni Magazine in an issue last year. I got the impression that he earnestly believed that the sheer number of mentally ill people who believe they have been abducted by aliens means there must be something to it.
He offered only two possibilities:
1) He'd stumbled on a new mental disease;
2) The patients offered insight into a common reality.
I wrote the editor complaining that this was just a bifurcation, and there are many other conceivable possibilities, most notably:
3) This is just another old class of delusional behaviors which, in a pre-sci-fi era, manifested itself in ghosts and spirits, demon-posession, etc., and it's rooted in the well-studied self-other confusion which we're born with and usually mostly shed by age 2.
Aparently, many other people wrote the editor, and ultimately the editor chose to print a single letter, a longer, detailed, and more acrid debunking of Mack's assertions.
He offered only two possibilities:
1) He'd stumbled on a new mental disease;
2) The patients offered insight into a common reality.
I wrote the editor complaining that this was just a bifurcation, and there are many other conceivable possibilities, most notably:
3) This is just another old class of delusional behaviors which, in a pre-sci-fi era, manifested itself in ghosts and spirits, demon-posession, etc., and it's rooted in the well-studied self-other confusion which we're born with and usually mostly shed by age 2.
Aparently, many other people wrote the editor, and ultimately the editor chose to print a single letter, a longer, detailed, and more acrid debunking of Mack's assertions.