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

9
Therapy
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead
of theories to suit facts.
Sherlock Holmes,
in Arthur Conan Doyle's
A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories
were so convincing that they replaced reality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Strange Pilgrims (1992)
John Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom I've
known for many years. 'Is there anything to this UFO business?'
he asked me long ago. 'Not much,' I replied. 'Except of
course on the psychiatric side.'
He looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted.
He now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. Why?
'I wasn't looking for this,' he says. 'There's nothing in my
background that prepared me' for the alien abduction story. 'It's
completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these
experiences.' In his book, Abductions, Mack explicitly proposes
the very dangerous doctrine that 'the power or intensity with
which something is felt' is a guide to whether it's true.
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