So you’ve got your characters, probably astronauts, and they claim hallucinatory experiences on a planet or in space. Now these aren’t random nutjobs you yanked of the street, these are hardened professionals who have been through batteries of tests and stress without cracking. Its likely if they were prone to psychotic breaks it would have happened already.
So why are they always doubted by everyone? :smack:
From Solaris to countless episodes of Trek and all other sci fi shows(in Trek its even stranger since it happens about once a season!) no they are clearly just cookoo.
I’d take it seriously, I mean for fucks sake thats an alien planet out there who knows what is possible!
Sometimes they look kind of wild-eyed when they tell their story. Those are the guys you should actually believe though. The calm ones are actually under alien mind control and just trying to lull you into a false sense of security.
Also, you can get tired of all the stories that crew members tell when returning from EVA. They always say it’s the weirdest alien planet anyone has ever seen. Or it was the biggest, meanest looking ten armed, four headed monster anyone has ever seen. You just tune it out after a while.
I’m sure there have been plenty of stories where that influence is noted. I can recall a story by L. Sprague de Camp (I think) where the aliens were known to have the power of superhypnosis, and humans had to take measure to keep from being influenced.
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum has an alien predator that attracts its prey by telepathically appearing to be what the person desires the most. No one doubts Jarvis when he tells them about it.
Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters has people catching on pretty soon to alien influences.
Heck, the Star Trek convention seems to be that telepathy operates on a limited set of (presumably FCC-regulated) frequencies, hence all telepathic races share the same bandwidth and use universal protocols.
But I too am irritated by characters who can’t describe their experiences calmly (and thus get dismissed) or can but only report to characters who are idiots (and wouldn’t believe water was wet if caught on a raft during an ocean storm).
I’ve long had a half-assed idea for a science fiction story with the following premise: following first contact with an alien species, humans discover that we have psychic abilities pertaining to them. Say, their brainwaves are such that we can read their thoughts effortlessly, or we can control them like puppets. We just never knew, and couldn’t have known, that we had this ability until we encountered this alien species.
They did this on Stargate. Sam sees Ascended Being, is essentially confined to her house with cameras put all around. When they take the cameras away, they secretly leave some. Way to trust your second in command, O’Neill.
Then Jonas sees extradimensional beings and is thought to be crazy, until everyone else starts seeing them too.
Sort of reminds me of Alan Dean Foster’s The Damned trilogy, where it turns out when the mind controlling Amplitur try their power on humans, something nasty in the human’s heads reaches out and fries their brains.
When they modify human genetics so that Amplitur won’t die when trying to influence humans, it makes it possible for those humans to influence them (and all the other aliens)
Larry Niven had a telepathic race that could control minds in his Known Space writings. http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Grogs
Although claiming to be peaceful they were feared enough that mankind took the precaution of placing a weapon in orbit, and hopefully out of their telepathic reach, capable of sterilizing their home world.
I think it’s because in real life we would think such a person is nuts. Even given the existence of alien beings, there’s no reason to think they’d be capable of telepathically influencing humans, and the scientific likelihood of such a thing is virtually nil.
Star Trek especially was bad about not thinking through the implications of their premises or of the events of an episode. Once it’s been established that aliens can influence humans telepathically, and all the characters know about it, reacting to it the way we would makes as much sense as people in Middle-Earth thinking Bilbo must have been hallucinating when he claimed to have seen a DRAGON!
Of course we would think that astronauts would encounter alien life that could telepathically influence them. It’s a standard theme of science fiction. The only surpising thing would be sending astronauts to another planet who don’t find alien life that can telepathically influence them.
After saving a giant space-based jellyfish for its mate, travelling back and forth in time every other star date, discussing a Shakespearean invasion of France with a mechanical man, foiling the various nefarious plots of a race of gods dressed in U.S. Civil War uniforms, speeding through the cosmos at 10 times the speed of light and having a chief engineer who wears a Fram air filter on his head, when something telepathic occurs Riker tells Picard, “That’s impossible.”