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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
the Church, and at Garabandal, Spain, in 1961-5, where the
end of the world was threatened unless conservative political
and religious doctrines were adopted forthwith.
I think I can see many parallels between Marian apparitions and
alien abductions, even though the witnesses in the former cases
are not promptly taken to Heaven and don't have their reproductive
organs meddled with. The beings reported are diminutive,
most often about two-and-a-half to four feet high. They come
from the sky. The content of the communication is, despite its
purported celestial origin, mundane. There seems to be a clear
connection with sleep and dreams. The witnesses, often females,
are troubled about speaking out, especially after encountering
ridicule from males in positions of authority. Nevertheless they
persist: they really saw such a thing, they insist. Means of
conveying the stories exist; they are eagerly discussed, permitting
details to be coordinated even among witnesses who have never
met one another. Others present at the time and place of the
apparition see nothing unusual. The purported 'signs' or evidence
are, without exception, nothing that humans couldn't acquire or
fabricate on their own. Indeed, Mary seems unsympathetic to the
need for evidence, and occasionally is willing to cure only those
who had believed the account of her apparition before she
supplied 'signs'. And while there are no therapists, per se, the
society is suffused by a network of influential parish priests and
their hierarchical superiors who have a vested interest in the
reality of the visions.
In our time, there are still apparitions of Mary and other angels,
but also, as summarized by G. Scott Sparrow, a psychotherapist
and hypnotist, of Jesus. In I Am With You Always: True Stories of
Encounters with Jesus (Bantam, 1995), first-hand accounts, some
moving, some banal, of such encounters are laid out. Oddly, most
of them are straightforward dreams, acknowledged as such, and
the ones called visions are said to differ from dreams 'only because
we experience them while we are awake'. But, for Sparrow,
judging something 'only a dream' does not compromise its external
reality. For Sparrow, any being you dream of, and any
incident, really exists in the world outside your head. He specifically
denies that dreams are 'purely subjective'. Evidence doesn't
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