posted on Oct, 26 2006 @ 04:17 AM
When I was a teenager, a close family member came under the influence of a charismatic born-again preacher who was sharking about our
neighbourhood.
At the time I was still fairly religious. I attended one of the preacher's meetings with the aforementioned relative. It didn't take long for me to
identify the preacher as a fraud and a liar who was making a good living (and getting his ego well massaged) by unhappy souls in the neighbourhood.
After the meeting was over, I told my relative what I thought. She refused to believe me and embarked on a passionate defence of this charlatan. One
of the stories she told me was about a young woman, a domestic employee, from whom the preacher had 'cast out devils'. It was an impressively
gruesome story.
Apparently, the demons who plagued this woman would cause pins and needles to appear in her flesh. Over the course of several 'exorcisms' the
preacher had removed a number of these. Of course I suspected sleight-of-hand on the preacher's part, but my relative said that the woman's
employers had first noticed the appearance of these objects, and it was they who had introduced the girl to the preacher. This seemed to eliminate the
conjecture that the preacher was performing conjuring tricks to impress his flock.
I did not get to the bottom of the story at the time. I still considered the preacher a fraud, but the pins-and-needles story deeply impressed me, so
much so that I maintained for some years a half-belief in demonic possession on the strength of it.
Then, while a student at university, I happened to read Colin Wilson's compendium of the paranormal, The Occult. And in it I found a
description of an identical manifestation that had occurred in nineteenth-century Vienna. It was exactly the same story: suspected demonic possession
(that era's equivalent of alien shenanigans), pins and needles emerging from small lesions in the woman's flesh, etc. There was one difference,
however -- in the Vienna case, the woman was referred to one of the great psychologists for which that city was then famed. I think the man in
question was Kraft-Ebbing, though I may be wrong about this.
Whoever he was, the psychologist put the girl under covert, round-the-clock observation. And what did he find? That the girl was sticking the needles
and pins into her own flesh, of course. She appeared to be in some kind of fugue state while doing this, and seemed to have no memory of the act
afterwards.
I suspect that something of the same sort is happening here. NeedHelp, Jessica or whatever her name is may genuinely believe that something
extraordinary is happening to her girlfriend. She may even be right -- but the something extraordinary has nothing to do with alien nanotechnology, it
has to do with the fact that her girlfriend suffers from some kind of psychological disorder that causes her to secretly palate bits of yellow metal
and hold them in her mouth for a while before coughing them up and presenting them to other people as proof of -- who knows what? -- her need for
attention, perhaps.
Yes, I know it isn't a very charitable hypothesis. But it is certainly makes sense, given the facts available.