ALIENS: WHY THEY ARE HERE
By Bryan Appleyard
Scribner, £15.99; 336pp
ISBN 0 743 25685 9
Buy the book
It is an unfortunate law of ufology that potential audience grows in inverse proportion to credibility and intellectual rigour. Rational explanations for strange phenomena, alas, never sell as well as the X-Files. The principal market for alien investigations has always been those who want to believe rather than to understand. Such people do not much enjoy having their misconceptions debunked.
By this token, Bryan Appleyard’s Aliens: Why They Are Here will probably do well. This cultural history of little green men and their anal probes purports to be an “intellectual tour de force” that makes sense of the modern obsession with extraterrestrials. It certainly covers plenty of ground: virtually every celebrated sighting and abduction is here, along with an exhaustive survey of the science fiction. But it is largely devoid of the sceptical analysis without which such an enterprise cannot work. There is little to discomfit its likely readers.
Appleyard starts from the premise that whether or not aliens have visited us, they represent a genuine, important cultural phenomenon that begs to be better understood. This is reasonable enough: delusional beliefs have furnished psychologists and philosophers with plenty of useful insights into the human condition.
Aliens, both fictional inventions and those that people claim to have encountered, often reiterate similar themes. Human beings are a failed race, selfish, aggressive creatures bent on destroying the unique planet with which they have been blessed. Alien discourse seems to reflect our deepest concerns, and Appleyard is most interesting when musing on what this might reveal. Our fascination with visitors from other worlds is rooted in malaise about mankind’s place in the Universe, and the meaning of consciousness in a post-religious age. Figures such as the replicants of Blade Runner and Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still might be alien in origin, but the problems they highlight are distinctly human.
Where Appleyard sticks to interpreting inventions, he is on solid ground. The trouble is he does not accept that ET is entirely invented. “This book is about fictional creation and real experience and, on the credibility of the latter, it passes no judgment,” he writes. This is a critical weakness that undermines the intellectual foundations of his project.
Without passing judgment on what is true and what is imagined, it is impossible to reach meaningful conclusions about the significance of the alien phenomenon. Appleyard tells us again and again that as people genuinely believe they have encountered aliens, this makes their experiences culturally “real”. To ask whether they literally happened, he thinks, misses their point. But this will not do. A delusion, honestly believed, is still a delusion. We can certainly ask interesting questions about what generated the delusion, and about the cultural and social influences that gave it a particular form. But these questions are very different from the ones we would want to ask of someone who had actually been beamed aboard a UFO.
This leads to constant irritation. We are told, for example, that Dr Roger K. Leir, a Californian podiatrist (foot specialist), has acquired a collection of alien devices implanted into those who have been abducted. Has he really? Erich von Daniken, who believes human beings were created by aliens mating with primates between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, “cannot be refuted any more than Darwin could be”. Is the recent discovery of Homo sapiens fossils from 195,000 years ago not sufficient proof? Appleyard’s refusal to evaluate outlandish claims just makes him look foolish. The danger of too open a mind, it is often said, is that your brain can fall out.
He acknowledges the psychosocial explanation for alien sightings and abductions, but refuses to engage with it. These experiences are generally “recovered” under deep hypnosis, a technique that psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus have exposed as virtually worthless for providing reliable evidence. Appleyard, indeed, has himself been hypnotised into “remembering” an alien apparition he accepts was probably not there. But he will not go with the simple explanation to which the evidence leads: that aliens are a culturally specific manifestation of perceptual errors to which the human mind is prone. Occam’s razor is not in his toolbox.
A wealth of sceptical literature is essentially ignored, and with it many of the most convincing explanations for what the believers think they have seen. A quick glance at his bibliography makes this plain. There is no mention of Michael Shermer, the psychologist who has drawn compelling analogies between alien abductions and medieval witch crazes and angelic apparitions. The only look-in for the great Carl Sagan comes through the Robert Zemeckis film version of his sci-fi novel Contact. Stephen Webb’s brilliant Where is Everybody?, which attempts to answer the celebrated question posed by Enrico Fermi about the existence of other advanced civilisations, is also passed over. He does cite the most indefatigable debunker of UFOs, Philip Klass, but always with a sneer. The overwhelming impression is that Appleyard has done only the homework that suits his purpose.
Instead, we get a sympathetic treatment of the theories of the late John Mack, a psychologist who thought that those abducted by aliens were on to something. Mack argued, and Appleyard agrees, that alien experiences are products of a “third realm” that naturalistic science cannot handle. His belief that “we are connected beyond the Earth at a cosmic level” is quoted approvingly. “Scientism” — Appleyard likes this pejorative for seeking rational explanations of strange phenomena — impedes understanding of what Mack calls “beings, creatures, spirits, gods . . . that have through the millennia been intimately involved with human existence”.
The problem with this New Age mush is that rational inquiry works. Our knowledge may be incomplete, but science builds it cumulatively, providing ever better approximations of the truth. Newton improved on Aristotle, and Einstein on Newton, and Einstein will not be the last word. But this does not mean, as Appleyard states, that “goblins and Greys with huge black eyes . . . remain as real as quantum theory or the second law of thermodynamics”. The latter provides predictions of the world that stack up when confronted with data. The evidence for the former is pure anecdote.
A cultural history of aliens that accepts this, and tries to explain why so many people who do not appear mentally ill believe they have seen things they have not, would be an interesting project. But Appleyard has not taken it on. He has instead chosen to write an anti-Enlightenment diatribe that is profoundly unsatisfying.
Read on
Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time
- Carl Sagan: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
- Stephen Webb: (If the Universe is Teeming With Life) Where is Everybody?
- Philip Klass: UFOs: The Public Deceived
- Elizabeth Loftus: The Myth of Repressed Memory
