Here's the idea: what if "encounters" with aliens really wasn't about creatures with fantastic technology flying thousands of light years to earth to visit some school children in Africa?
What if, instead, aliens were more abstract than that? Or if the explanation for their presence was a bit kookier, a bit more muddled: they're beings from another dimension. They're sort of like angels. They're from a parallel universe. They're just something that exists we can't really fathom so we call them "aliens" and tell ourselves a story that they're from other planets.
I'm being a little cheeky, but it's actually kind of interesting. And this brief docuseries tugs that thread, and does so mainly by putting the late Harvard psychologist John Mack front and center.
Mack was almost rebuked from Harvard for his work with so-called abductees. He was sued for malpractice since he didn't treat abductees like mental patients in need of medicine. Instead, Mack takes their stories at face value. He even wrote a book about it, called Abductions. I have it.
The problem is the glaring oversight that people, while not necessarily suffering psychiatric problems, do experience occasional sleep paralysis, in which they can't move and might feel presences. Mack conspicuously never addresses this. Nor does he seem to understand how coincidental it seems when someone experiencing abuse simultaneously has an "encounter" where they're whisked away to a better place.
As far as any tech goes, any UAPs, it's probably our stuff, or it's from another country. But probably ours. We spend hundreds of billions every year.
Still, I keep an open mind. So many people have had experiences. They can't all be trauma induced, or sleep paralysis, right? 60 kids seeing something? Whole towns experiencing strange events? I do think there are "more things in heaven and earth," as the Bard tells us. And, as I said, this docuseries pulls at the thread. But that's about it.
What if, instead, aliens were more abstract than that? Or if the explanation for their presence was a bit kookier, a bit more muddled: they're beings from another dimension. They're sort of like angels. They're from a parallel universe. They're just something that exists we can't really fathom so we call them "aliens" and tell ourselves a story that they're from other planets.
I'm being a little cheeky, but it's actually kind of interesting. And this brief docuseries tugs that thread, and does so mainly by putting the late Harvard psychologist John Mack front and center.
Mack was almost rebuked from Harvard for his work with so-called abductees. He was sued for malpractice since he didn't treat abductees like mental patients in need of medicine. Instead, Mack takes their stories at face value. He even wrote a book about it, called Abductions. I have it.
The problem is the glaring oversight that people, while not necessarily suffering psychiatric problems, do experience occasional sleep paralysis, in which they can't move and might feel presences. Mack conspicuously never addresses this. Nor does he seem to understand how coincidental it seems when someone experiencing abuse simultaneously has an "encounter" where they're whisked away to a better place.
As far as any tech goes, any UAPs, it's probably our stuff, or it's from another country. But probably ours. We spend hundreds of billions every year.
Still, I keep an open mind. So many people have had experiences. They can't all be trauma induced, or sleep paralysis, right? 60 kids seeing something? Whole towns experiencing strange events? I do think there are "more things in heaven and earth," as the Bard tells us. And, as I said, this docuseries pulls at the thread. But that's about it.