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

The Demon-Haunted World
encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of
divine beings.
He concludes:
Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs,
but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the
same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are
new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing
with it seem simply to have found their way home again,
where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things
go bump in the night.
Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally
experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content,
about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who
ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing
cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? Others, who have not
personally had the experience, find it stirring and in a way
familiar. They pass the story on. Soon it takes on a life of its own,
inspires others trying to understand their own visions and hallucinations,
and enters the realm of folklore, myth and legend. The
connection between the content of spontaneous temporal lobe
hallucinations and the alien abduction paradigm is consistent with
such a hypothesis.
Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth,
we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's
incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see
fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when
the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial
beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery
tends.
Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we
witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accurately
recalled decades later without any conscious memory of
how they got into our heads. '[I]n violent fevers, men, all
ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,' says Herman Melville
in Moby Dick; 'and . . . when the mystery is probed, it turns out
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