Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 2, 1994 TAG: 9406030057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: Normally, being calm and rational types, we greet tales of alien abduction with hoots, sneers and guffaws, then quickly return to our previous work on behalf of the Zorgon Empire.
But lately the alien thing has gotten out of hand. Getting abducted by little gray men with large eyeballs is to the '90s what disco dancing in white suits was to the '70s. The alien-abduction stories recently got a big boost with the publication of a book by a well-known, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist, John Mack, who says he believes that these stories, however far-fetched, are actually true.
Maybe so. How can you disprove it? The aliens are doing it secretly, remember, so the absence of footprints, photographs, or direct alien confessions merely corroborates the scenario of a covert UFO operation.
There are probably many factors at work here. Some stories are probably hoaxes. Some are probably the result of madness. A few may be artifacts of therapy, the misapplication of hypnosis or the implantation of false memories by pseudo-scientific investigators (psychiatrists, for example).
There's another explanation that we find particularly intriguing: the theory that some abduction fantasies are a function of a sleeping disorder called sleep paralysis. It so happens that a key Why staffer has this very disorder, and, indeed, the symptoms match up with some of the symptoms of alien abduction.
The aliens usually strike at night while people are in bed; so too does sleep paralysis. The abductees report that their first sensation is apprehension, the sense that someone is in the room; that is precisely what happens with sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is a screw-up of the brain's normal awake-asleep mechanism. Normally people lose muscle tone only when they are asleep. But if you have sleep paralysis this loss of muscle tone can kick in too early, before your brain is asleep, or persist after you've woken up. It's creepy! In fact it's a lot like being zapped with a suspended-animation ray from the Mother Ship. You have to shake yourself out of it, no easy task. All the while you tend to have auditory hallucinations or dream-like thoughts, usually with menacing overtones. In Whitley Streiber's book ``Communion,'' he describes waking up, being unable to move, seeing strange beings, then, incredibly, going back to sleep. Sounds just like sleep paralysis.
Our Why staffer has never imagined himself abducted. But he has felt, during these sleep paralysis attacks, that they were being done to him by someone else, some Other. It's all the more frustrating then to realize, when the attack goes away, that it is just one's own self that is doing this, that the Other is just one's own brain.
OK, so maybe that's not as interesting an explanation for alien abduction as the one that says aliens are really here and are trying to beam us aboard their spacecraft so they can do unseemly alien things to us. But you have to admit it's almost as weird.
The Mailbag:
Ever since we said the works of William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare, the ``Oxfordians'' have wanted to eat us for lunch and wave our leg bones in the air like medieval kings signaling the vassals for more drumsticks.
Here's a sample response, from James McGill of Milpitas, Calif. Like all Oxfordians McGill says that the plays and sonnets were written by Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford:
``The works of Shakespeare give evidence that their author was well-traveled, was especially familiar with Italy, was on familiar terms with the court and nobles of Queen Elizabeth I, was intimately familiar with falconry, had a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the medicine and law of his day, was completely educated in Latin and Greek, and had a vocabulary that was truly astonishing. There is not one shred of evidence associating the man from Stratford with any of the above characteristics. ... There is, on the other hand, specific evidence that all of the above characteristics applied to Edward De Vere.''
Dear Jim: A more striking characteristic of Edward De Vere, though, is that his name does not appear on the title page of Hamlet and Macbeth. Nor did he claim to have written those works. Nor did anyone until the 20th Century even suggest that he wrote them.
It's true that Shakespeare is kind of shadowy. But that very shadowiness is the answer to the puzzle: There's no evidence he knew about falconry or Italy or whatnot precisely because there's not much information about him period.
Yes, we admit, you can construct a theory that says De Vere, for social and political reasons, wrote the plays and convinced Shakespeare to put his name on them. But why do it? We'd rather worry about more pressing mysteries, like why banks put their ball-point pens on a theft-proof leash even though they don't work half the time.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB