Big Mack Attack

[DrMatt]

Mack's theories were granted several pages in Oberlin Alumni Magazine in an issue last year. I got the impression that he earnestly believed that the sheer number of mentally ill people who believe they have been abducted by aliens means there must be something to it.
He offered only two possibilities:
1) He'd stumbled on a new mental disease;
2) The patients offered insight into a common reality.
I wrote the editor complaining that this was just a bifurcation, and there are many other conceivable possibilities, most notably:
3) This is just another old class of delusional behaviors which, in a pre-sci-fi era, manifested itself in ghosts and spirits, demon-posession, etc., and it's rooted in the well-studied self-other confusion which we're born with and usually mostly shed by age 2.
Aparently, many other people wrote the editor, and ultimately the editor chose to print a single letter, a longer, detailed, and more acrid debunking of Mack's assertions.

 

[arcticpenguin]

I wonder how many of the 'abductees' are steered in that direction by therapists. Perhaps they are encountering some mental stability issues, and when they see a thereapist about it, the therapist guides them to an abduction explanation.

 

[kitsune]

I'm not sure about the actual percentages, but it's pretty likely that therapists who specialize in alien abductions find a much higher percentage of individuals who "remember" alien abductions than therapists who do not use hypnosis to retrieve memories, or therapists who do not believe in alien abductions.

It doesn't explain everyone, but it does explain some of them.