EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS, UFO'S & COMETS

Victor Bloom MD

The mass suicides of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult continues to attract our attention. In recent memory the David Kuresh cult was reduced to ashes in a conflagration at Waco, Texas and in more remote memory there was the mass suicide of the Jim Jones cult by cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

Why do people get attracted to cults and why do they kill themselves? The answer is a complex interweaving of mental illness and a distortion of religion and reality.

Sound religious beliefs are based on basically normal functioning and a good contact with reality. Various mental illnesses are associated with abnormal and deviant functioning, based on a relative loss of contact with reality. This is often due to faulty transmission of neuronal messages. Recent research has taught us that neurochemical imbalances may be genetically determined, as well as environmentally produced.

It is well known by mental health professionals that some people who are otherwise intelligent, articulate and highly functioning, may also be harboring paranoid suspicions or obsessing about needless worries.

In the case of schizophrenia, there is a mechanism we call losing boundaries, such as the boundaries between the real and the unreal, fantasy and reality, the conscious and unconscious. It is one thing to be a good Christian and pray for strength, understanding and faith, faith in the knowledge that there is an immortal soul which survives bodily existence. It is another thing to take it upon yourself to release your spirit by commiting suicide, and to think you can ride a space-ship in the tail of a comet and fly to heaven. Members of this group succumbed to a charismatic leader and to blurred boundaries between organized religion, science-fiction and New Age philosophy.

What has happened with the otherwise intelligent and intact people of the Heaven's Gate cult is that the natural boundaries between fantasy and fact were broken down. It is one thing to fantasize taking a space-ship to heaven; it is another thing to think you can really do it. Searching the shelves of Barnes and Noble, I found several bookshelves under the heading, "New Age". Within those bookshelves I found several dozen books about U.F.O.'s and people sending messages from previous lives. Their names were Seth, Michael and Emanuel, and apparently some readers are avidly searching for more information from the other world from them.

There are whole bookstores presently taken up by New Age books, which have common themes of extraterrestrial travel, extraterrestrial visitors, time warps into other dimensions and various other pseudo-scientific theories to explain supernatural phenomena and mystical experiences. What gives credence to some of these theories is archeological 'evidence' which cannot be explained any other way but to assume that we have had visitors from outer space. Of course, so far such evidence is not completely clear or convincing, but Carl Sagan has reminded us that we are probably only one habitable planet out of billions and billions, and if we are sending space probes to other planets, who can deny that other superior intelligences have not been visiting and studying us?

In fact, one of the latest media trends is the documentation of stories by individuals who have claimed to have been abducted and experimented upon by creatures from outer space in flying saucers. Spielberg's, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is an early prototype of this fantasy and recent re-releases of "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" and "2001" give further credence to the idea of space travel.

It is as if we have over-populated our planet and are killing ourselves with toxic waste and a disturbed ecology and have nowhere else to escape. It is one thing to escape in fantasy, and another to escape in reality. The media and information explosion have enabled us to push the envelope of possibilities and our creative mind knows no limits to the imagination.

Many years ago there was a popular book on psychotherapy called "The Fifty Minute Hour". In it was a story called, "The Jet-Propelled Couch". It is about a brilliant but psychotic scientist who claimed to travel to other planets. In his free-associations on the couch, he was telling his analyst all about his relations and conversations with intelligent beings on Mars and Venus, Saturn and Jupiter, and the analyst, trying to understand the mind of his patient, was enthralled. The gifted analyst gave credence to the patient's story by not challenging it, but just listening. Ultimately the therapist came to know the details of his patient's fantastic world as he came to know the depth and complexity of his mind. The story became so interesting that when the patient was finally able to relinquish it, he was cured and the analyst was able to write a fascinating case report.

The story lets us know that there is not a fine line between fantasy and reality, that the complexity and creativity of the human mind often blurs the boundaries, sometimes with tragic consequences. Shakespeare suggested that our waking life is but a dream, but still we do well to maintain a firm and clear distinction between our daydreams, our night-dreams and reality.

Dr. Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry in Wayne State University's School of Medicine. He is a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He lives and practices in Grosse Pointe Park.