Kirk Allen and the Cooperative Illusion

a minotaur in here. Now you can't see it because it is invisible to the mall. But there is a raid on gas breathing minotaur and he's right behind you. Oh well, so all I need to do is bring in say radon gas detector and then we can confirm the existence of this fantastic beast. Well, unfortunately that that would be a good id. But the rate on gas that this minataar breathes out is not detectable by normal chemical equipment. It's it's a different kind of chemical. It's

not it's not a physical chemical. Okay, Well, in that case, let's bring in some sort of infrared camera, so we can we can see this creature. Well, a funny thing about this invisible mintaur is that its body is completely consistent with the ambient room temperature, so it emits no infrared radiation at all. Okay, well, let me get some spray paint and we can sort of coat the general part of the room that it is in. Then we'll see its physical body. No, no, no, no no, you are

imposing an unfair materialistic bias on my minotaur. This minotaur doesn't need to have paint stick to it. It has a different kind of body. It has a kind of ethereal body that paint goes right through. I'm beginning to think that this minotaur has the magical ability to conveniently weasel out of any practical experiment that I can devise. Thou shalt not test the Lord thy Minotaur. No, no, no, no no, actually I can. I can prove it to you. Okay, I have a friend, you know, my friend Jeffrey. Have

you met Jeffrey? Is this another imaginary friend? No? No, no no, Jeffrey's real. Jeffrey's got a buddy who met a guy in Florida who saw the minotar and the minotar bit him on the shoulder. Oh, so you're bringing Florida man into this, but it bit him like you can even I've seen the marks on his shoulder. I saw a picture of them. I got it in an email forward. Well, clearly the most likely explanation for these bite marks is an imaginative beast. Thank you for finally acknowledging this, Robert,

Thank you. Now, I've been trying to get people on board with my minotaur for a while, and it seems like like people just don't want to go along with me. But occasionally you meet the right kind of person, the person who's willing to go the extra mile with you and say, yes, I'll follow you down that minatar road. Let's talk to you about your minotaur. Let's maybe we can spin it off into a podcast or a multi

series TV show. Now, if you have already read the books we recommended in our summer reading episodes this year, you will be recognized what we just talked about is quite similar to a chapter in the non fiction book that Robert recommended this summer, which was The Demon Haunted World Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. This was a nineteen ninety five book, and as I discussed in that episode, it still speaks to us today.

There is most of it is not dated at all, but there is this chapter where he begins by describing a scenario where he's bringing somebody in and like our minotaur saying, oh, well, there's a dragon in this garage. And when tests are proposed to examine the possible existence of this dragon, the same sort of excuses are made. Right, Well, maybe we can put some flour on the floor and see if it leaves tracks when it walks around. Oh

no, no no, no, this dragon levitates. Oh maybe we can check to see if it breathes fire with thermal detectors like you suggested, Robert, Well, no, no, no, the fire it breathes as cold fire. And so Sagan in this chapter, I think it presents a very clean, clear, positive vision

of what the skeptical minds mindset should be. And you know I've said on the show before that I think sometimes I have mixed feelings sometimes about like the skeptic identity, because like I think it's a good thing to be skeptical, and it's a good thing to be a skeptic, but sometimes I see it becoming a community on the Internet that seems to sometimes pat itself on the back a

little bit too much. Yeah, it becomes I think the way I've discussed before, it's kind of like this party pooper mentality, you know, whereas ultimately what Sagan proposes this chapter is kind of it's more like, Oh, this dragon sounds amazing, let me help you prove it. Let me help you look at the actual evidence for this. Now, unfortunately we do have to arrive at the conclusion that there probably is not a dragon in the garage, and there probably is not a rat on breathing minotaur in

the studio with us. And one of the lessons that Segan draws from this is to be wary about claims that seem to be extremely elastic, where there's always a new excuse or why this one reason you want to help investigate the claim wouldn't actually work. This often comes up in say, investigations of psychic phenomena, where people will say, no, I'm really a psychic, Yeah, I really do have dowsing powers or something like that. So you try to set up, well, okay,

let's do a test. Let's do a controlled test to see if you really can find water, and they're like, oh no, no no, no, I can't do it right now because there's static electricity in the air. No matter what, there's always some excuse for why this test, in particular this day doesn't work. But in today's episode, we wanted to get to a particular story that Carl Sagan tells

in this chapter of The demon Haunted World. That is a really fascinating development on this scenario where normally you'd have a person who's presenting something that's probably not evidence based, and then you've got an interlocutor who, in our original example is somebody who's skeptical who's pushing back. But what happens when say, social forces or biases or beliefs begin to work on the interlock hut or too well? Yeah?

For instance, what if you had been sorry, Joe, But what if you had been really convincing about that minute tar you know, what if you were just so passionate about it, give me another chance, like a try harder where I will you know, maybe I started off just kind of humoring you, and then I'm find myself actually

believing that it's here. Well, Sagan tells a story very much like this, and it concerns author and psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, who is called in by Los Alamos National Laboratory to treat a gifted nuclear physicist referred to by the pseudonym

Kirk Allen. Now, this story is as it is presented by Lindner himself, right, So he is obviously changing some details to protect the identity of his patient, and so it's not verifiable which elements of the story are fictionalized, right, But he presents this as a sort of fictionalized version of a true clinical encounter he had. Right. It's also worth noting that most of the individuals in this story, perhaps all of the individuals are now segan sadly passed away.

Linder lived nineteen fourteen through nineteen fifty six, and some of the individuals that were later presumed to be or suspected to possibly be Kirk Allen have also passed. So there's not a lot of new information out there about who who was actually being referred to, and to what degree things were fictionalized to protect the individual's identity, and also what could potentially have been tweaked just to make

a better story. Because Lindner wrote about this in his book The Fifty Minute Hour, which is published in nineteen fifty four, and also in a couple of articles for Harper's Magazine. Both of those articles, Part one and Part two Part two are available online right now. Are those the ones called the Jet Propelled Couch? Yes, the jet Propelled Couch, which is a fabulous, fabulous title. We'll try to have links to those articles on the landing page

for this episode. It's stuffed toblermind dot com. Now, Robert, I was unfamiliar with the story of Kirk Allen before you suggested this topic for an episode, and I am so glad you did, because this is really really interesting stuff. I had never come across this story before it all, and it really got my gears turning. Indeed, I was not familiar with it until I read The Demon Haunted World.

Though this story has been around for a while obviously, so I imagine some of you out there have heard about it, so hopefully you'll enjoy revisiting it with us today. So one thing we should probably point out is who is Robert Lindner. Again, he was a practitioner of psychoanalysis, right, which is somewhat controversial. Indeed, now he actually has some

pretty impressive things on his resume. Though. He wrote Rebel without a Cause, The hypno Analysis of a Criminal Psychopath, which is published in nineteen forty four, and it's the book that inspired the title, and I should say the title alone of the famous nineteen fifty five film starring James Dean, not the story, not the story, just the title, because there's a in the book where he says, quote, the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator

without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program. You're harsh and my buzz man. And he seems to have made some legitimate contributions to understandings of gambling psychology, and Rebel is also well regarded. It seems as just an early work of psychoanalysis. He had an m A and a PhD in psychology from Cornell. He served as chief psychologist at a US penitentiary in Lewisbourg, Pennsylvania, and he later operated a private practice in Baltimore, and through Rebel and

other works, he helped expand popular understanding and perceptions of psychoanalysis. Now, obviously there are lots of reasons people have for being skeptical of the psychoanalysis tradition in therapy. But he at least was a person who had real legitimate clinical practice with all these experiences, and we can learn from the experiences even if you don't necessarily say, agree with his framework for how to treat people. Correct. Now, this brings

us to Alan kirk Allen, again a pseudonym. Based on Linder's writing, we can say Alan was something of a science fiction fan a little bit. Yeah. He enjoyed a rich in her world that was just full of spacefaring adventure, and he was especially a fan of a specific sci fi book series in which the main character shared his name,

according to Lindner. So you know, we'll get into how some people have interpreted this, But obviously there are a few different, very notable science fiction heroes from literature of the time that that you know, John Carter is often brought up as a possibility, but at any rate, he had.

He has an obsession, and this obsession seems to eventually cross over into delusion or near delusion, with Alan believing that he actually pilots a spaceship in the future and that he's a lord of many worlds, and then he can think about it in just the right way and transport himself centuries into the future. Reportedly, Alan was fairly balanced. He had a reasonable work life imagination balance, but his employers eventually became concerned that he was growing too distracted

and dreamy. He was writing about everything some He apparently wrote some twelve thousand words on every aspect of this future world of his so history, genealogy, biology, etc. Sagan points out that one of these volumes had the title the Application of Unified Field Theory in the Mechanics of the Star Drive to Space Travel, which he says actually

sounded fairly interesting. Given this idea that Allan's alleged background is insist is physics and he's a gifted physicist, it would be interesting to see what sort of sci fi propulsion system an obsessed physicist came up with. That is interesting. But if that's the way we actually discover some sort of warp drive is in the science fiction works of a day dreaming nuclear physicist, well, you know, it's always important to note the importance of sci fi in the

inspiration of actual scientists. I mean, you look, for instance, just at some of the notable rocket scientists of the twentieth century, and so many of them were especially as children, just very in young people, you know, very inspired by the sci fi of the time, and I think that has continued to hold up with the scientists today. Absolutely. But okay, so we've set this up where Kirk Allen,

this pseudonym for this physicist. He's doing his work, but he's spending a lot of time daydreaming about this other world and apparently is somehow convinced that it's to some extent real and he can actually go there. He can travel through time into the future and be a space lord, flying from planet to planet and having adventures in the cosmos. Right, So it reaches some sort of a tipping point and his employers say, hey, you should go talk to somebody

about this. Why don't you talk to our friend Robert here and and he will, you know, he'll work this out with you. So that's pretty much what happened. Lynner engages with Alan, talks to him at length about his imagined world, and he realizes quote, in order to separate Kirk from his madness, it was necessary for me to enter his fantasy and from that position to pry him loose from the psychosis. This sounds like a bad road, I feel like, I feel like the guy in pet cemetery.

You don't want to go down that road. Yeah, he's said, let me, let me go out on the ledge, let me go walk into the flaming house. I don't know where we were going at. We're discussing it, knowing what's about to happen. Though, Well, I guess on the other hand, we should be humble. I mean, this guy had clinical experience and we don't exactly yes, but in retrospect it ended up being perhaps a question will move because what happened next is that, in discussions about Kirk's rich imagined

delusion became something more. He became, in Sagan's words quote the psychoanalyst became a co conspirator in his patient's delusion. Yeah.

He describes, or Lindner describes how he would go through all of these materials that kirk Allen provided for him, and he would like get into the world and he would start trying to find internal inconsistencies with like the treatises that kirk Allen was writing about these space civilizations and all that, and try to help him work out the inconsistencies, and that this eventually led to him sort of getting into that mindset of like, wait a minute,

how do I know this isn't true? How do you know that somebody else isn't mentally traveling into the future and becoming a space lord? That's right in the jet propelled couch, Lindner writes, quote, the materials of Kirk's psychosis and the Achilles heel of my personality met and meshed like the gears of a clock. Quote. The transformation of fascination into psychic distress alarmed me sufficiently to make me take the necessary steps for extracting myself from my predicament.

It acted first as a spur to self analysis. Gradually, by the use of this accustomed tool, I was able to allay the more acute symptoms and to initiate those insightful processes that lead to recovery. But before I had completed this task, an amazing event occurred which, in the space of one hour, not only broke what remained of my spell, but marked the successful conclusion of Kirk's treatment. Well, what broke the spell? So basically what's happening is that

that Allan is just sucking him into this world. Lindner is falling into this delusion. According to Lindner. This is Lenner's home take on the scenario. And then finally, Allan just comes up to him and says, I'm sorry, it's all fiction. I made it up. Stop believing in all of this, because id it? So he's he admits that I don't actually believe I travel into the future and I'm a space lord and all that. I'm just daydreaming.

I'm just making up stories. Right. The patient ends up being the one to say, I think this is because of, you know, my loneliness as a child and my difficulties with women. He broke the spell of his own purported delusion in order to save his psychoanalyst, or at least that's how Lindner framed it in his writings. Right, I guess all we have is Lindner's story to go on, so we don't know, but it I mean, assuming this

is true, that's a heck of a story. Yeah, And that's, of course one of the things about anything that is a heck of a story. We also have to engage a certain amount of skepticism. To what extent did one perhaps tweak the truth to make it a better story. That remains an open and unanswered question. Well, it does make me think about how so the pillars supporting a propositional belief like Kirk can travel into the future and be a space lord and all that, and he goes

to all these galactic civilizations. The pillars supporting a belief like that are not just the contents of the belief itself and the evidence for it, but it's also social, right.

I mean, we believe all kinds of things for essentially social reasons, because, like, it would be really socially problematic to be skeptical in some scenarios, right, Like, you may have plenty of scenarios where somebody you love tells you something that you don't think is likely true, but you kind of believe them because of your relationship with them, right, Right, And sometimes, especially if emotions are heightened, you kind of

have to play along. Right. If you're at someone else's funeral and someone tells the bereaved everything happens for a reason, you know, it's not my place to come in and start dismantling that nonsense, you know, Right, I'm more inclined to just simply nod and you know, pretend I didn't hear it, right, I mean, yeah, the relationship sort of

govern what gets said. And also we know that leaving is not always such a I don't know, such a clear transactional process, like like Sagan depicts in his chapter where he's like, well, somebody comes to you and says I've got a dragon in my garage, and you know, you get to have this dialogue with them. Well, do you really what if somebody comes to you and says I have a dragon in my garage. But there's somebody in your family and it's somebody you care about, you

don't really believe them. But also you've had this conversation before, and trying to argue with them is really difficult, and so you just kind of go along with it for a bit. And then by going along with it you start to kind of wear down your own defenses and you're like, well, how would I know if they didn't have a dragon? Yeah, I mean one of the things Sagan ends up comparing it to is is a magic trick. Yeah. You know, when you have a magic trick, you have

two sides. You have the magician, you have the audience, and there is a contract between the two. It takes both for that magic trick to happen and there's this. You know, obviously there's a with the magic trick, there's a suspicion of disbelief, but there is this relationship that's going on, and in this relationship between Alan and Lindner, we see what can happen when the energy kind of shifts.

According to to Linder himself, and when Linder asked him why he kept going on with it, Alan replied, quote, because I felt I had to, because I felt you wanted me to. That's got to be a hard blow to a therapist. Well, I mean he got part of a book in two Harper's Magazine articles out of it,

so you know, it made for a great story. Like we said, I mean, this certainly makes me think about what we've covered when we talked about the Satanic panic before the idea that children were often coming up with children or even adults were coming up with elaborate stories of Satanic ritual abuse, basically in sessions where it seemed like in retrospect, they were being led by the people

who were talking to them. You know, there was sort of a meme among some police investigators and some therapists that this kind of stuff was going on, and so they were they were almost encouraging people to hit the hit the tropes over and over again. And was there a pentagram on the floor. You know, Well, it reminds

me of Walter Stevens's book Demon Lovers about witchcraft persecution. Yeah, and he pointed out was quoting some particular individual or another who pointed out that that the the story that was extracted from suspect suspected witches were always the same because there was a particular story they wanted to extract. Yeah, you can't. You can't imagine that all of these suspected

witches came up with the same story. Yeah, it had to be there in the people who were extracting it, right, right, and they and it had to be a story that fit existing motifs and and sort of supported existing arguments. Now, I guess that's not exactly analogous to hear because Alan had his own mythology. But it seems like Lindner once he got into it, as saying he was coaxing it. He was asking, you know, keep it coming. All right. Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break.

Can we come back. We'll discuss some ideas about who Kirk Allen might have actually been all right, we're back, all right, So Robert, you've got some theories to present on who Kirk Allen might have been. I assume it was not William Shatner. No, I think the shad is in the clear on this one. But yeah, so we've had a few suspects pop up over the decades since

this case first came up. What were the possibly fictionalized, possibly true clues that Lindner gave that he had the same name as the hero of a science fiction story, right, so we have that to go on. And of course Lynner said that he was a nuclear physicist, which some theories like stick to that and say, all right, let's look for a physicist. Others say, well, that could be

the fictionalized element. Let's look for other individuals who say, may have worked somewhere where they had a particularly high security clearance or in other or were engaged in something simil but not identical to the work described in the jet propelled couch. I wonder if it was the pivotal Manhattan Project researcher Flash Gordon's. Well, see, that's the kind

of thing that would be a red flag. Of course, the other aspect being the idea that kirk Allen wrote a lot, and therefore it makes sense to look at writers individuals who were highly published in sci fi of the time. And so for this reason, one of the key candidates that's been brought up over the years was a man by the name of Paul Line Barger aka Cordwainer Smith. That was his pseudonym his writing name. Oh and by the way, Line Barger was born in nineteen

thirteen died in nineteen sixty six. He was a prolific sci fi writer of stories all set within a single, expansive and interconnected universe. And in his day job he wasn't a nuclear physicist, but he was an East Asia scholar and a psychological warfare expert. Now not quite a physicist, obviously, but one could see where the kirk Allen story might well have hit the same key points without exposing his identity. Plus, who better to dupe a psycho analyst into borderline delusion

than an expert in psychological warfare? Right. However, there's no real solid proof to back this idea up. Yeah, so I had never heard of this guy, and I looked up his stories to see what kind of stuff he wrote about. If he kind of went along with the Linener story, and a lot of Cordwainer Smith's sci fi stories were set in a future earth after a nuclear war, where humanity is ruled by a system of government almost like a kind of priesthood known as the instrumentality of mankind.

Huh interesting. You know, I've never read any of his work, but I would be very interested to because another author of note with a background as an East Asian scholar was Mr Barker, who I've mentioned on the show before I lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty twelve, who wrote The Man of Gold and created the early RP world of Tekumel. So I would I would just be very interested to see, like how he incorporates East Asian motifs

into this sci fi universe potentially. Oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Cord Wayner Smith sometimes is said to have had an unusual writing style, where some of his stories are almost more like Chinese folk tales. Oh. Oh, interesting, Now, I was really interested in this idea of the instrumentality of mankind. If this is too much of a horrible tangent, we can cut this out. But I looked it up and I was like, what does he write about the instrumentality

of mankind. I've got to know more about that. So this is from a story called drunk Boat, where Cordwayner Smith writes, quote, the instrumentality was a self perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a plenium of the low, the middle, and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the instrumentality and keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake or committed

a wrong ah, then it was suddenly different. Any lord could put another lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of a death and disgrace himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while those who killed other lords rightly, as later examination might prove, were listed on a very

honorable list, but still killed. With three lords, the situation was different. Three lords made an emergency court. If they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to civilian status. Seven lords, or all the lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove

them wrong. So my two thoughts on this are that one, this sounds like complex and very interesting, but on the other, I am afraid that this is what I sound like when I explained my fiction to someone. You know that they're just going to set there saying what the three lords run? All this by me? Again, it's so many rules, but also it's like, I don't know, I was wondering.

It's almost like a weird combination of what you've described of Ian m Banks the culture, but also with elements of like honor culture and bearing individual responsibility for the action for one's actions. Now, again, without having read into his work, I also have to assume that this is just a bit of exposition and that most of a lot of the rest of the text is going to be more of a like an old fashioned sci fi adventure swashbuckling kind of thing. Yeah, I think, well, there

are obviously characters. I think some of the Lords of the Instrumentality are characters in this But but I haven't read it yet, so I'm interested to check it out. Might be worth a look. One more quick excerpt here from the same passage. This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan watch but do not govern, stop war but do not wage it, protect but do not control, and first survive exclamation point.

I like that. Yeah. So much sci fi of the present is very pessimistic, especially about the power of governments. I mean, with quite good reason. I understand that pessimism, but sometimes it's kind of refreshing to see somebody engaging in at least some moderate utopianism about future governing systems. I think of, like, what's an example, Oh, the culture

is kind of like that, isn't it. Yeah, And Star Trek has always been a classic example of that, especially you know, original Trek was very much an optimistic, almost a religious idea of where science could take us. Just don't think too hard about the teleportation right of where science could take somebody, ain't quite you, Yes, Now, there are a couple of other potential candidates that have been

brought up over the years. For instance, some amateur detectives point to an actual physicist who had the name John Carter, as in John Carter of Mars. So obviously, when you have that name as common as it is, one might say, hey, maybe that's our kirk Allen. And then there's another possibility that has been brought up, a man by the name of Francis Burton Harrison the Second aka Kiko, who worked at Los Almost National Laboratory, much like kirk Allen supposedly

did from fifty two to ninety two. And this idea was proposed by Saul Paul Seirig in The New York Review of Science Fiction. But of course, in all this we have to recognize that the real kirk Allen could have been none of these men, and we don't know to what degree the details were changed in the writing to either protect the patient's identity and also perhaps make the story a little more engaging for some reason or another. Yeah,

it's true that we don't really know. I mean, it's hard to know to what extent Lindener's story is true, which elements are fictionalized, how much he may have embellished. Sagan takes it as an instructive lesson, even if we can't know for sure which parts have been embellished and all that. But I do think we can go to other examples of relationships between patients and therapists that have been two way in this kind of way, where in

some sense there's a cooperative lack of skepticism. And maybe we should follow Sagan toward another one of those examples, right because in the book, and in relation to this example, he mentions UFO sidings, the alien abduction experiences, and of course satanic ritualized abuse allegations. UFO abductions seem to be the main context of this coinac that's the wh he spends the most time with that. He does deal with the this satanic ritualized abuse a fair amount as well.

But in all these cases, you know, he says that the encouraging individuals are you know, they're often mere teachers, counselors, or other authority figures, and they may be deep within the altered reality of UFO theory or you know, satanic cult theory. For instance, u f U UFO therapist who

advertised in the back of publications about UFO sidings. Oh no, yeah, so obviously that's probably not the that's it's probably you know what you're going to get when you when you seek someone out like that, and especially if they give you material about UFO sidings for you to then read well. By recruiting from the pages of UFO citing publications, essentially you are almost guaranteeing that your patient already has things

to draw from. Right. So the same can be true if if you had an individual and there was some question of possible abuse, and then the person who weighed in on it was, say, a social worker given to religious fundamentalist ideas. Still Second points out to the idea that some psychiatrists and others with some degree of scientific training that they could find them so they could give

themselves over to This kind of nonsense is startling. You know that you have people who do have some training in skeptical thinking, perhaps a lot of training in skeptical thinking, and they can still slide down the slippery slope. Yeah, but it's a good reminder that people of scientific training are not superhumans. You know that they're not rationality machines. Scientific training is just it is an aid to proper

critical thinking, but it's not something that makes you invincible. Yeah, it's a reminder that there's a challenge in thinking critically and not simply chasing after the explanation that feels best, or is more emotionally transferred or appeals to something deep inside us. No, we have to ask which explanation stands the test of critical evaluation, in which one requires the fewest leaps of faith. Segan says. Quote A friend of mine claims that the only interesting question in the alien

abduction paradigm is who's conning. Who is the client deceiving the therapist, or vice versa. I disagree. For one thing, there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien abduction. For another, those two alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. And again, this comes back to that idea I mentioned earlier about the magic trick, the fact that you need the magician

and the audience for the trick to exist. Well, yeah, I mean, in a way, the audience is also, in a kind of limited sense, tricking the magician, because the audience is playing along. The audience doesn't really think magic is happening on the stage, but they're pretending to think that magic is happening on the stage in order to allow the magician to continue doing the magic without embarrassment. Like if the audience was all just scoffing the entire time,

the magician would not feel like continuing. Right, And in the context of a magic show, that type of audience member sucks. No, nobody wants to sit next to that person, right, because you've entered a social contract when you go to a magic show. You there's an unspoken agreement between everyone that says, we'll all just pretend we're seeing magic here. You know, you don't have to be like, that's not real,

he made that up. I know. When't suck if the person to your left at a magic show was just a total you know, just pointing out how every trick is done and just telling you how fake it is at every second, and then the person to you're right thinks that it is real and is blasphemous and is just screaming witchcraft at the stage. Well, both of those are the wrong way to experience a magic show. Right. You go to a magic show knowing it's all fake, but pretending it's real for fun, And a magic show

is a safe environment. I think that the problem in real life is you don't want to slide into another category, you know, and I actually encountered this a lot. We encountered this with some listeners writing in about conspiracy theories and and you know, wacky or more fringe idea that come up sometimes, and how they and how it's safe when they engage with them, and they can say, oh, I can read about this and it's it's interesting, it's wacky,

et cetera. But we all want to be able to stay in that place, right, to stay in the center of the middle of those three seats in the theater. And I don't know if it is always safe, because I think you know, the media we consume and the things we expose ourselves to work on us. They work on us in ways that we're not always aware of. It's the same way that people think advertising doesn't work on me, it works on other people. It doesn't work

on me. I'm immune to it. I can watch a million commercials and it will never change my purchasing behaviors. You are not immune to advertising. It works on you. And also, by that same token, I think people need to be careful what kinds of say, conspiracy media they expose themselves to, because I know exactly what you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are skeptics who do not they're not conspiracy theorists, they're not buying into

the flat earth. But they might say, watch conspiracy theory videos on YouTube because they think it's funny. But when you expose yourself to that kind of thing a lot, I think, I think sometimes it can start to make gears turn in your mind. It can start to kind of work on you. Even if you try to practice a certain level of detachment, there are there are ways in which we start just kind of succumbing to what

we're exposed to. Yeah, I've seen it argued that one of the problems with conspiracy theories, uh is that there

is an underlying, uh, teleological explanation for the world. Uh. And so even if you're if you're just not for a second one over by the idea that that there are lizard men living in the center of the hollow Worth or what have you, or that there's some sort of massive uh you know, conspiracy you know, doing something to or a watter and whatever the conspiracy theory happens to be, you might not be one over by the details. But but what if they underlying teleological explanation for reality

takes hold the idea that things are happening for a reason. Yeah, and then how might that make you more susceptible to other teleological concepts that are not actually healthy for an objective understanding of the world. Well, I think a huge part of the appeal of conspiracy theory, literature and videos and all that, not just conspiracy theories, but alien abduction

stuff and all that is the conspiracy part. It's not just it's not just that I believe the Earth is actually flat and people say it's a ball, but actually

it's flat. It's that the government is lying to us about the shape of the Earth and scientists are lying like That's the crucial part, because to believe in a conspiracy like that that's being perpetuated by all these people with power does give you a sense of Okay, there is a meaningful conflict, and I can understand who the villains are and that they're doing something like it gives you a sense of purpose, the same way that war

gives people a sense of purpose. Exactly. That's a very good point, though I've never quite figured out why exactly the scientists want people to believe that it's a ball instead of well, was this ever explored on the X Files. Did they ever get into I don't think they ever did Hollow Earth? But hey, speaking of the X Files, maybe we should come back to Carl Sagan and the idea of insufficiently critical therapists dealing with people who have

a delusion like that. So let's take a break and then when we come back, we can get into John E. Mac. All Right, we're back, all right. So part of the context for Sagan's discussion of the whole Linener and kirk Allen phenomenon is the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, and Sagan talks about Mac a lot, right, Yes, Yeah, he spends a fair amount of time with him, Like he initially brings him up in the book, because he is

he's talking about dreams. He brings up Max's nineteen seventy book Nightmares and Human Conflict, in which Mac writes that there's a period in childhood development in which there's a little distinction regarding the difference between dreams and reality, and the establishment of this distinction is quote hard one. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but it seems plausible. The main point that Sagan makes is like this passage.

This book even would would indicate that Mac is a professional capable of realizing that dream hallucinations, that these can have a huge influence on how we perceive reality. And Mac did start as a respectable mainstream psychiatrist. Yes, Sagan mentions that he'd known him for many years. They were both involved in the Nobel Peace Prize winning Physicians for Social Responsibility movement. I think they were both, didn't They both campaign against nuclear weapons. Yes, that was a part

of this. Yeah. It's also be mentioned that Mac won a Pulitzer for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, a Prince of our Disorder, Oh, of Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, yeah, So yeah, he didn't just climb out of the woodwork and start advertising ufology courses in the back of a magazine or anything like this. This guy had credentials. Now, earlier I mentioned the connection between John Mack and the X Files. Why Mac in the X Files? How do

those things go together? Well, because he was a big proponent of the reality of alien abduction experiences at some level, at some kind of mysterious level. But also because in the X Files, Robert, I'm sure you remember this from some point or have you not watched The X Files, Like, I've seen two episodes, Remember I've seen I've seen the creature that lives in the porta potty. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, and the one about the invisible elephant

the twoisdes Oh, that's the worst one ever. You've seen one of the best ones in one of the worst ones. Yeah, the complete experience. Well, you have missed out on one of my favorite running themes in the show, which is deep regression hypnosis. So whenever Moulder and Scully come across somebody who's experiencing missing time, they can't figure out what's going on, Where did all that? Where did that night go?

Mulder recommends deep regression hypnosis. And this, of course is a great you know, it leads to jokes in our house like I can't remember where I put the gardening gloves. Well, let's try deep regression hypnosis. And so Christian and I actually talked about John Mack back when we did our two parter on the Science of The X Files a few years ago, because we were talking about deep regression hypnosis in that episode. But so, what does that have

to do with John Mack. Well, apparently in the nineteen nineties when Chris Carter was developing the idea of the X files. Part of what got him going, part of what got him into the all of the intellectual fodder and territory that would become the X Files, was the work of John Mack. And as we were saying, Mack

was originally a respected psychiatrist. He was Harvard Medical faculty, but he became very interesting in alien abduction experience, not just in the subjective experiences of his patients, but increasingly in the underlying reality of alien abductions. And he worked with more than two hundred people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and so he appears to have believed them, But then again, sometimes it's hard to tell.

He would say things that sounded kind of waffly, like he would seem to say he believed, but then he would also hedge. Here's one quote when he was talking to the BBC quote, I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people, but I would say, there is a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way. That's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is. But it seems to me that it

invites a deeper further inquiry. And to me, this kind of statement, it comes back to Sagan's fire breathing dragon, the invisible dragon in the garage. What specifically is it that's so mysterious, Like you should always be cautious. I think when somebody in that there something is real and highly significant, But when you ask them for further clarifying questions, they sort of retreat to the defensive battlements of vagueness

and mystery and must be something and can't be explained. Like, let's not let's not be too quick to judge here about this, about this idea that there's a dragon in the garage, because clearly we're talking about it. Something's going on here, Yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe maybe it's not a dragon, maybe it is, maybe it's not. Who's to say,

But clearly something very significant is in the garage. But yeah, when people talk like that, you very often will hear them in a different context with a different audience talk more like so when I encountered the dragon in the garage and when he blessed me with his holy cold fire. But anyway, back to John Max, So, one of the things that Mac did in his sessions with people who claim to have had UFO abduction experiences. Is he would

sometimes use something like him hypnos. I think he referred to it more often as relaxation techniques, but he would he would put people in a hypnotized state and say, Okay, let's draw out details of your experience with alien abduction and flesh out all of the vague parts that way, which just I mean, we know lots of reasons now why that's not a good strategy for getting accurate information

about what happened to people. And you think you would have thought more people would have would have been inclued into that, just by the fact that to think about hypnosis something that is sort of stereotypically about putting someone in a heightened state of suggestibility, and that's the state you're going to, you know, use to to define the

truth of what happened. Well, yeah, I mean, so Mac defends he defends his practices by saying, hey, you know, I think there's some criteria that make the information I get through these types of sessions more reliable than normal face to face interviews. And so his criteria include the fact that he says this testimony was often against the self interest of the person giving it, So people in this relaxation state or this hypnosis state would admit things

that were more embarrassing or something like that. He also says that the memories recovered through this regression technique would be more consistent with the independent reports of other abductees. That's another red flag, because then again, you could be drawing from elements in the culture, right Yeah, I mean everybody is watching the same TV shows, They're potentially watching

the same films, they're reading the same accounts. And he also says that memories, the details of which are drawn through regression or hypnosis tend to cause stronger emotional reactions in the patient. That also sounds not surprising and not like a true advertisement for their validity as factual. There's actually a great piece in aon magazine by the writer

Alexa Clay, who grew up around John. She was John Mack was her mother's partner, and in this article Clay writes, quote, I remember one summer evening in a beach house on Martha's Vineyard, when I was about eleven. We all watched as John regressed my aunt back into a past life. She lay on the couch recalling an incident in which she was a forest ranger who witnessed the death of a few people during some kind of avalanche. My aunt later told me that she was fully conscious of the

experience but couldn't control what she was saying. It was like she was watching herself tell a story. John later tried to hypnotize my brother so that he wouldn't be afraid of spiders and listening to this kind of story that Clay tells. I don't know. This was the conclusion I came to back when Christian and I talked about this, and I feel the same way now you hear these overt signs that it sounds like John Mack was somebody

who was kind of chasing something, right. I mean, it's hard to diagnose from afar, but it really seems like this is somebody who's looking for ways to believe. Yeah, and again, it reminds me of this idea of that while Steven's presented in Demon Lovers, the idea that the the witchcraft theorist in the Witchcraft, essentially the persecutors we're asking these questions because they wanted they wanted proof, They

wanted proof of, ultimately of the divine. But if you can't have direct proof of the divine, at least you can have direct proof of the demonic. And maybe he wasn't, maybe Mac wasn't looking for something quite so specific, but I mean, we can all relate to the the you know, the desire for something wondrous in our lives. I mean, even Carl Sagan admits that, you know, he says many times, you know that he would really love for there to be aliens like that would be tremendous, even Carl Sagan

emotionally as a malder. Emotionally he also wants to believe. He puts unsatisfying Scully constraints on himself to prevent him from coming to false beliefs. So Sagan in The Demon Hunted World he writes that Mac had once asked him if there was anything to all the UFO stuff, and Sagan's answer was not much, except on the psychiatric side.

And Mac then, of course proceeds to interview all these self identifying abductees like we've been discussing here, and he finds them quote completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these experiences quote, and he proposes in his book Abductions that quote, the power or intensity with which something is felt should inform us if something is true. And this is something that Sagan rightfully calls a quote dangerous doctrine.

Oh yeah, that's a terrible way to judge what's true. Yeah, I mean, because for my own part, I can think of a number of ideas or concepts that I feel intensely about, and I can make them meaningful, you know, life changing parts of my existence. But it doesn't mean that they should inform one's objective understanding of reality. I cry more often about fiction than I do about the

real world. I suspect I'm not alone in this. Yeah, I mean, fiction is tweaked in a way to maximize these reactions, right, but Sagan he says that he finds it perplexing. Then an expert like Mac who recognized the power of dreams and hallucinations would jump to this conclusion. Alien should be an explanation of last refuge, and Sagan also writes that if the Kirk Allen story is one of a patient saving the therapist, then Maac was perhaps

not so lucky. Well, the question I have is the question I have about the comparison between the two is one that's earlier. Just based on these quotes you've read so far, do you think do you think mac already had a predisposition to believe in alien abduction before he got into interviewing these patients or do you think like Lindner, he got wrapped up in a relationship with the patient and that emotional relationship of trying to treat the patient

infected him with the alien abduction belief. Do you see what I'm saying is if you more like the Kirk Allen story or did he already believe going in? Well, I wonder if you have if the connecting thread here is that is perhaps one of empathy, like the just the ability to just really feel what someone is telling you.

And and certainly this is something that Christian and I talked about when we did a two parter an alien abduction Experiences, is that that even though we deny the the uh you know, the reality of alien abduction experiences, the objective reality of them, certainly there can be a

subjective reality. There can still be there is something there that that can be a trauma or an experience, no matter how warped it has become through manipulation of memory or some other factor like that that there there can still be this emotional thing that is raw and real. And then ultimately, if you have someone who is very receptive to those kind of, you know, emotional experiences, then yeah, I could see where that could have an impact on

what you believe. I think you're absolutely right. But then again, we also don't want to accidentally make it seem like, you know, oh, if you care about somebody, if you have an empathetic connection with them, then you just want to validate all the things they believe that clearly aren't true. Because you don't want to do that either. I mean that that's harmful to people. You don't want to validate

people's delusions. So I guess the trouble is finding ways to, you know, to to relate to people in a positive way, to show you care, but without telling them, hey, you're right about being abducted by an alien. That really did happen, right, I mean, it really underlies the immense responsibility that is that is undertaken by professional psychologists and therapists. Yeah, you have to be able to to in a sense, walk that line and not fall into some of the pitfalls

on either side. Now, of course, I have to be. I have to point out too that in both max case and Linener's case, they both were able to get some books out of this and probably get some you know, some book advances. So so what if you have a cynical approach to well, I mean, if there's I mean, we're all on this to make money. So I you know,

I understand the inclination, but I don't know. I mean, I admit, I you know, I'm not like his biographer or anything, but I've read a decent amount of mac and it it seems to me like he is genuinely mistaken about things. I don't get a very cynical vibe from him. Yeah, I get the feeling that he's somebody who was smart, who was even wise in a way, but who just got led down a really unfortunate path of credulity about you know, kind of vague beliefs that

he couldn't back up with evidence. Yeah, I mean it comes down to just all those interviews that he would did, hundreds of interviews, Like how often is he interacting with this worldview that is, uh, that doesn't actually represent reality? And I can see where that could take a toll After a while, all right, So there you have it. This is the first of two episodes that we're going

to do. So we're not done with kirk Allen just yet. No. One of the things we haven't even explored yet is the whole science of daydreaming and what it means when, because so at the resolution of the story, we hear that kirk Allen in fact does not necessarily believe he's traveling to the future and all that he was just keeping it going in order to satisfy Lendner's curiosity. But still supposedly he was. According to the Lindner's account, something

was bad enough that his employers called in a psychoanalyst. Right, he was clearly spending a lot of time daydreaming about these science fiction worlds. So what's going on there when people are not necessarily deluded about what's real and what's not, but they're spending lots of time in an internal fantasy to the detriment of their work life and their relationships.

Well we'll discuss it on the next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, And in the meantime, you can head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership, that's where you'll find everything that we're up to, so you'll find all the podcast episodes there. You also find some instructive tabs at the top of the page, such as our store tab, where you'll find our fabulous collection of you know of merchandise with our logo or show specific designs merch up, yeah, and then hey.

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