Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
explanations seemed to him even less credible. In the middle
1960s I arranged for McDonald to present his best cases in a
private meeting with leading physicists and astronomers who had
not before staked a claim on the UFO issue. Not only did he fail to
convince them that we were being visited by extraterrestrials; he
failed even to excite their interest. And this was a group with a
very high wonder quotient. It was simply that where McDonald
saw aliens, they saw much more prosaic explanations.
I was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours with
Mr and Mrs Hill and with Dr Simon. There was no mistaking the
earnestness and sincerity of Betty and Barney, and their mixed
feelings about becoming public figures under such odd and
awkward circumstances. With the Hills' permission, Dr Simon
played for me (and, at my invitation, McDonald) some of the
audiotapes of their sessions under hypnosis. By far my most
striking impression was the absolute terror in Barney's voice as he
described - 're-lived' would be a better word - the encounter.
Dr Simon, while a leading proponent of the virtues of hypnosis
in war and peace, had not been caught up in the public frenzy
about UFOs. He shared handsomely in the royalties of John
Fuller's best-seller, Interrupted Journey, about the Hills' experience.
If Dr Simon had pronounced their account authentic, the
sales of the book might have gone through the roof and his own
financial reward been considerably augmented. But he didn't. He
also instantly rejected the notion that they were lying, or, as
suggested by another psychiatrist, that this was a folie a deux - a
shared delusion in which, generally, the submissive partner goes
along with the delusion of the dominant partner. So what's left?
The Hills, said their psychotherapist, had experienced a species of
'dream'. Together.
There may very well be more than one source of alien abduction
accounts, just as there are for UFO sightings. Let's run through
some of the possibilities.
In 1894 The International Census of Waking Hallucinations was
published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have
shown that 10 to 25 per cent of ordinary, functioning people have
experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination,
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