People who run with Aliens

The long table on the dais is swathed in tropical fruit salad prints. The lighting from the grid of the remodeled balloon hangar is pink and fuschia, giving the skin of the people sitting behind the table a hyperhealthy glow. More or less from left to right, these people are:

* an ex-astronaut who wants the government to stop covering up what it knows about alien visitors to our planet;

* a weight lifter/emergency room doctor who moonlights as the director of an institute studying extraterrestrial intelligence;

* a Silicon Valley venture capitalist assembling backing for a project to harness the force of gravity for commercial purposes;

* a business executive convinced that planet Earth will enter another dimension as soon as genetic mutation brings about a species-wide transformation in our consciousness;

* an academic psychiatrist who has helped more than 60 people come to terms with being abducted, assaulted, and sometimes surgically modified by alien visitors;

* and the man who called this curious gathering, a former concert promoter who discovered some years ago that Carlos Castaneda, though perhaps not in the league of Carlos Santana, could draw a pretty good crowd.

The group assembled at Fort Worden to address the topic "The UFO: Anomaly, Reality, Implications" late last month at the Prophets Conference Port Townsend seems in appearance and demeanor a thoroughly conventional bunch. Good-humored but basically serious, conservatively dressed and quiet-spoken, they could easily be a candidates' panel brought together by the League of Women Voters—with one exception: the foxy grandpa with the mariachi shirt, the benevolent smile, and a slightly dangerous gleam in his eye.

When his turn comes to speak, Robert Anton Wilson proves as wild a card as his appearance promises. Up till now, the talk, despite its off-the-map subject matter, has been gravely serious, and the audience of two or three hundred has taken what's been said seriously, pencils racing over their notepads like students before the big exam, the most overt demonstration of emotional engagement an occasional, almost sub-vocal murmur of agreement.

Wilson breaks the elevated mood as decisively as a raspberry during a Sunday sermon. His voice is raspy and short-winded, as befits one after a lifetime of assiduous devotion to cigarettes and other smokables. With a delivery telegraphic as the late Henny Youngman, you hardly notice that he's riffing on material borrowed from Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein. Wilson is best known as the coauthor of the ultimate novel of conspiracy Illuminatus!, but for the last 20 years he has been mostly writing the kind of unclassifiable m鬡nge of social criticism, satire, and rant that Nietzsche, had he overcome his shyness and listened to a lot of Coltrane, might have come up with.

After more than two hours of constant reinforcement of the notion that something, whether from out there or the fifth dimension or secret compartments in our own psyches, is messing with us, Wilson barrages us with a fusillade of genial scorn: not for our belief in alien abductors or extrasensory communication with dolphins or faster-than-light travel via wormholes in space but for belief in general, belief in anything. Wilson's skepticism is more radical than any conviction expressed so far today. And the audience loves it.

Sitting among a band of true believers hooting with laughter as their most deeply held convictions are pilloried has a curious effect on an outside observer, someone with no prior intellectual or emotional affinity for the whole UFO scene. Somehow, their willingness to respond with laughter to Wilson's only half-playful abuse is the most convincing evidence so far that the "phenomena" under discussion deserve respectful attention. Try to imagine the Christian Coalition paying Howard Stern to warm up a crowd.

After Wilson's fireworks display, it's hard to pay attention to the last discussant on the panel before lunch. There's too much to think about already. Except for Wilson, all the panelists who have spoken so far "believe" one way or another in UFOs and in the varied phenomena linked to that acronym in the public mind. But getting anyone else to believe seems to be the last thing on their minds. All these people— venture capitalist, psychiatrist, astronaut, emergency room physician—are far more interested in discussing, discovering even, what these phenomena mean, for themselves and for humankind.

The man who wound up the morning colloquium returns after lunch to make that perception explicit. He's Dr. John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital of Harvard Medical School, and, thanks to that highly visible position, a first-rank pain in the ass for mainstream scientists for whom the mere mention of the paranormal is anathema.

Author of two books dealing with what he today cautiously calls "extraordinary experiences"—Abduction (1994) and the forthcoming Passport to the Cosmos—Mack is an impressive figure, if only for his courage in continuing to insist on the importance of the phenomena he studies in the face of intense mainstream scientific resistance, knowing that a single intellectual misstep on his part could cost him his job. There's something reassuring, too, about his manner and appearance. After Wilson's flamboyance, a little academic tweed and avuncular prosiness is just what the doctor ordered.