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The more things change…
Are we on the verge of Satanic Panic 2.0, and the demon-haunted world redux?
Steven Spielberg is back with a film, Disclosure Day, sure to stoke a resurgence of belief in (or maybe just fevered discussion of) alien/demonic incursions into our realm. He was on CBS Sunday morning yesterday, and on the cover of the New York Times magazine. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland remains the indispensable guide to making some kind of sense of life in the USA.
“ask Americans today about our Satanic Panic of just a generation ago, and you’ll encounter a gaping memory hole: younger people know nothing about it, and almost nobody is aware of its scale and duration and damage… DURING THE DECADE AFTER CLOSE Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), more and more Americans claimed they’d been personally visited, probed, and temporarily taken away by extraterrestrials—abducted. Many Americans with impressive credentials started to believe them. None was more impressive or important than a distinguished Harvard professor named John Mack… In 1987, in his fifties, Mack attended a small conference of “alternative” physicians and scientists at the Esalen Institute. There he met the creator of Holotropic Breathwork™, a technique for inducing supernatural consciousness by means of hyperventilation. When Mack tried it, according to its inventor, he “remembered” one of his past lives in Russia. Then at an advanced training session up the coast in Sonoma County, Mr. Holotropic and others told Mack “about UFO abduction experience as a trigger of spiritual emergency.
At the same moment, another member of the American elite, Whitley Strieber, a former advertising executive and successful author of horror fiction, published Communion: A True Story. It was his account of the nighttime visit, the day after Christmas 1985, by “non-human beings” with dark eyeholes and circular mouths who stuck a foot-long device up his anus. Communion was a number-one Times bestseller and sold two million copies. It encouraged many more Americans to announce they too had been visited and probed by aliens.
Soon Mack, still at Harvard, was dean of an alien-abduction truther movement. In 1992 he and an important physicist from down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized an Abduction Study Conference. The premise of the five-day-long meeting at MIT was that the “abductees” were telling the truth—that creatures from outer space (or parallel universes) really had visited and examined and variously used them. The New Yorker writer C.D.B. Bryan attended and published a sympathetic book about the assembled true believers called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, further spreading the word and legitimizing the tales…”
Extraordinary claims outpace any supporting evidence, yet again. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of our peers had close encounters with rational circumspection and critical thinking?
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