abduction: jung v. the x-files

Photo credit: Corey Coyle

I've been caught up in The Phenomenon recently, watching videos, listening to podcasts, reading books. I've never been into this topic much, but after I read The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, by Whitley Strieber and Jeff Kripal, a few years ago, a little portal opened up. And then, somehow, I recently walked through that portal.

Abductions have felt like the hardest nut to crack. Not because I don't believe people like Whitley Strieber but because it feels like such a complex aspect of The Phenomenon. John Mack's book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, left me confused and mostly feeling compassion for the often deeply traumatized individuals who told of their abductions.

Then I picked up David Halperin's book, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. He devotes a chapter to the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a mixed race couple who uncovered an abduction experience through hypnotic regression. I knew of the Hills. You don't get far into The Phenomenon without learning about the Hills and their abduction experience. I hadn't, however, considered surgically exploring it with the tools of Jungian psychology.

Honestly, I laid Halperin's book aside after that chapter. He goes into great detail connecting the Hills' memories of their abduction to the experience of African people who were captured and transported in ships to the New World, implying that these experiences in the collective unconscious of Black Americans were the source of the abduction memories. (I will save my rants about Jung for another post.)

It isn't that I object to playing around with ideas. And, without a doubt, most Black Americans would be able to make this connection easily, if painfully. What I objected to and felt almost nauseated by was Halperin's presumption to understand the experience better than the Hills had themselves. What's the term of the moment? Man-splain. "Let me tell you what your experience really meant."

Just now, I was watching "The X-Files." In the closing scene of "Lazarus" (S1:E15), there's this exchange between agents Mulder and Scully:

Scully, holding a wristwatch to her ear: It's not working. It stopped. At 6:47.

Mulder: The exact time that Jack went into cardiac arrest at the hospital.

Scully What does that mean?

Mulder: It means... It means whatever you want it to mean.

Exactly.