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Loading...Several people have asked me about my claim that “group hallucinations” are possible. That is, a “vision” can be seen by many people at once. It seems counter-intuitive: aren’t hallucinations by definition the inner workings of a person’s mind? How can more than one person have the same hallucination at the same time?
Well, I’m not sure how that works, psychologically. My guess is that there is a strong sociological component as well. For example, if something weird is seen by a number of people, one of the persons in the group interprets it, and the rest agree that yes, that is indeed what they saw. But that’s just my guess. Maybe some of the trained psychologists on the blog can tell us.
But in any event, it is a well-documented phenomenon. Here is the query from one of the people who asked the question, specifically with respect to the modern-day appearances of Jesus’ mother, Mary, followed by a brief discussion of the phenomenon taken from my book How Jesus Became God.
Group Hallucinations – The Case of Mary
QUESTION: Bart, when you refer above to “the hundreds of people who say they have, at one and the same time, seen the Blessed Virgin Mary” what apparition or apparitions are you referring to? Can you give some background details, please? Thank you!
RESPONSE: Here is a brief discussion taken from my book:
The Blessed Virgin Mary & Group Hallucination
René Laurentin is a modern-day Catholic theologian and expert on modern apparitions, who has written many books on the topic.[1] He has a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, and two PhDs, one in theology and one in literature. He is not your average intellect. He deeply and sincerely believes that Mary – the mother of Jesus who died 2000 years ago — has appeared to people in the modern world and that she continues to do so. Here I give just two examples from his writings.
In Cua, Betania, in Venezuela, a woman named Maria Esperanza Medrano de Bianchin received peculiar spiritual powers: she could tell the future, levitate, and heal the sick. The Virgin Mary appeared to her…
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Mentalist “The Amazing Kreskin” did not believe in hypnosis, but he often demonstrated what he called “the power of mass suggestion.” I remember him convincing a dozen or so volunteers from his TV audience that they had seen a UFO. Their excitement as they described their visions seemed genuine. Kreskin also cited mass suggestion as a possible reason several people became ill on two occasions within four days, at the courthouse in Monmouth County, New Jersey in June, 2012. The courthouse was closed for a week, but no physical cause for the illness was ever found.
Good morning, Bart. For a fascinating account of group hallucinations, read Stacy Schiff’s new book, “The Witches – Salem, 1692.” A massively researched work detailing the infamous Salem Witch Trials. The well chronicled inquiries and witch trials are full of eye witness accounts from the locals, many well educated, as to the witchcraft they experienced first hand and to their experience of the witches responsible.
I think it is important to distinguish between what people say they are experiencing ‘now’ and what they say they remember later. There may be two different processes at work.
And in the biblical accounts, we don’t know that anyone actually reported their experiences ‘at the time’. Just that so,some said they did.
Thank you, Bart. Maybe you can enlighten me on the following: is it the consensus view among the experts that all of the apparitions referred to above were nothing more than hallucinations? Or are there other equally qualified people who arrived at a different conclusion?
The scholar I cite in the post thinks they are real.
Here are some other interesting group hallucinations (or miracles if you’re a believer):
Three early leaders of the Mormon church claimed that they saw an angel come down from heaven and present a book of gold plates to them (the golden plates Joseph Smith claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from). The Mormon church relies heavily on this miracle as evidence that the Book of Mormon is true. It’s printed in the front of every Book of Mormon. (https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/three?lang=eng)
Another example is from a Mormon break off religion called the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days. Here’s an excerpt about a vision by two people:
“I had my head bowed, and my eyes were closed. And when I opened my eyes and was wondering why he was pausing. And then I closed my eyes again and I saw three men walk through the wall. It was Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball who came through the veil. And they placed their hands upon my head and revealed many things concerning my life and my [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to certain things upon this earth that I should do. And I could see the vision as he spoke. I could see it, and Jim described what he saw, what we both saw in vision.” (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/21/transcript)
Happens without any religious basis to it, of course.
The Great Fear of 1789, in revolutionary-era France. With the breakdown of the social order, paranoia reigned–rumors spread through the countryside that bands of brigands or foreign soldiers were burning, looting, raping–people would swear that they heard the brigands approaching, could even see them, and they reacted by running away, or sometimes attacking the local manor house to get weapons, food, etc.
Just before WWI began, there were rumors that the Germans were sending zeppelins to attack Britain, and people kept reporting them overhead, even though there clearly were no zeppelins.
UFO’s, reports of aliens, Bigfoot. And of course, Slender Man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man
And that began with the originator of the myth admitting upfront that he was just making it up as an experiment.
Human minds can be highly suggestible, and this seems to be equally true when no conventional religious idea is behind it.
All sorts of things are going on in such mass hallucination situations: people are often being primed by another person (like a leader), by each other and/or by their surroundings, witness contamination occurs during and after the event, people passionately want to be part of the group that sees something and don’t want to look less “chosen” than people who claim to see something, etc. A couple of years ago I had a look at the alleged “Marian apparition” at a Coptic church in Warraq, Egypt, because there is a fair amount of footage that exists of it.I did a video on it showing the most likely explanation (http://youtu.be/rFZfWWeAGiM): church lights being turned on in the middle of the night captured with (back then) low-resolution cell phone cameras. The low-res, overexposed footage was sent around to people because the church lights in the tower kind of looked like a figure (i.e. pareidolia), and that seems to have gotten the ball rolling.
I’m sure some of this is the “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon. “I saw it, didn’t you?!” “Well sure, I saw it too!” No true believer wants to admit they didn’t see the miracle, lest they lose face with their fellow believers.
Actually the more you examine these incidents the more ephemeral they become. Of the three children at Fatima only one claimed to have actually seen Mary. At the “cosmic miracle of the sun” incident witnesses reported seeing different things and many reported seeing nothing at all. And it’s interesting how in the retelling the size of the crowd kept getting bigger and bigger.
Allow me to recommend the late great Oliver Sack’s wonderful book HALLUCINATIONS from 2013. From the blurb:
“To many people, hallucinations imply madness, but in fact they are a common part of the human experience. These sensory distortions range from the shimmering zigzags of a visual migraine to powerful visions brought on by fever, injuries, drugs, sensory deprivation, exhaustion, or even grief. Hallucinations doubtless lie behind many mythological traditions, literary inventions, and religious epiphanies. Drawing on his own experiences, a wealth of clinical cases from among his patients, and famous historical examples ranging from Dostoevsky to Lewis Carroll, the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the mystery of these sensory deceptions: what they say about the working of our brains, how they have influenced our folklore and culture, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.”
Yup, great book!
Interesting. I may read it.
Does the Sacks book deal with the apparitions of Mary in Venezuela? My starting point for claims like that is skepticism. To be able to reasonably conclude that Mary did in fact appear, the standard of evidence to be met would have to be extremely high. But am I being being reasonable if I deny a priori that something like that is possible? Or, to put it more precisely, that there couldn’t be more evidence for the apparitions actually happening than for some other explanation. Why not rely on empiricism? A group vision/hallucination perceived by large numbers of people, including well-educated people, on multiple occasions seems to at least begin to approximate the kind of occurrence that can be investigated objectively by impartial observers. I don’t know if journalists and scientists and atheists descended upon the site to investigate it. If they had it seems plausible that, depending on the evidence, they could have reached the conclusion that Mary did appear. As I think someone else asked, did any atheists see Mary, or see substantially the same phenomenon/sense data that the believers in Mary saw? We know a lot of people at least thought they saw Mary. How many did not see Mary?
Of course even if there is evidence for some kind of weird and extremely unusual phenomenon, there is probably a very large amount of interpretation that goes into the process of concluding that it’s Mary. Someone else asked how the people knew it was Mary or knew what Mary looked like. And what if there should be an equally well-attested apparition by a god (Kali?) that Catholicism denies exists. My point here is that the conclusion has to somehow fit, even if only very roughly but without formal contradiction, with other (background) knowledge that is even more strongly attested. It’s not simply a question of evidence for the isolated case. But the isolated case nevertheless is some kind of evidence.
Dr Ehrman, do you know some examples of “group hallucinations” in non-christian religions ? For some reason I have never heard of this kind of things outside Christianity.
I”m afraid I’ve never looked into it!
Devotees of the late Hindu Guru Sathya Sai Baba claim to see mass manifestations of him regularly.
Sam Harris frequently mentions the contemporary India mystic, faith healer and miracle worker Sathya Sai Baba who performs “miracles” similar to the ones attributed to Jesus in the NT. See this video for more info
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqjB31xiE9k
If you search “our lady of zeitoun” on YouTube, you’ll see several videos showing pictures of the alleged Virgin Mary appearances. They are nothing but an oblong blob of light. If the same thing appeared at a UFO convention, people would see aliens.
“Hallucination” does not seem to be the right name for this phenomenon. Michael Shermer uses the term “patternicity” for our tendency to see patterns that are not really there.
What does Mary look like? How do they know it’s her?
It’s a miracle!
Before I retired, I practiced psychiatry for 4 decades. During that time, I worked primarily with psychotic patients and saw hundreds of patients who were having hallucinations, mostly auditory hallucinations. Visual hallucinations are usually associated with drug abuse. During that time, I never saw a group having the same hallucination. Hence, I was skeptical about such reports, but the examples I read in your book are fairly convincing that people actually report such group hallucinations, especially about Mary. I have no clue about how to understand these phenomena except people see what they want to see. I have certainly seen groups of people believe all sorts of weird stuff as part of their subculture. I guess I would call it “indoctrination.”
This reminds me of a past article in National Geographic about a group in Indonesia who used monkeys in their worship and refused to stop doing this even when the scientific evidence was clear that the monkeys were spreading a possibly fatal disease among the members of the congregation.
I also once saw a psychotic patient who plucked out his eye as the Bible directs. It was pretty gross and upsetting. .
Ugh. Sounds gruesome…
I teach in a residential facility where hallucinations are common. Most are auditory as you stated, and I’ve never seen a shared hallucination.
Speaking of taking the bible literally, my husband who is a paramedic was called to the scene of a similar situation. He cheated on his wife, so you can guess what he cut off. Unfortunately, he died.
I’d like to know if any atheists shared in these mass visions. I just haven’t found a satisfactory answer to these types of experiences. I don’t see how it’s possible that people could see the same thing at the same time if something wasn’t actually there.
Anthony Sukto was 8 years old when he was stabbed by his father. His mother was attacked as well but didn’t survive. After his father left the house, Anthony said he saw three angels that helped him survive the ordeal. They lifted him to the phone and helped him call 911. The angels told him to play dead when his father returned to the house. He was a guest on Oprah several years back. He’s 18 now and maintains that he did see angels but hasn’t seen any since that time.
You could say that his brain was helping him cope with the situation, but how do we know that for sure?
Yup — no way to know!
I think that there is a large difference between a multitude ‘experiencing ‘ a thing simultaneously and a multitude ‘recalling or reporting’ a given event.
We have lots of reports of evidence but very little actual evidence.
Coincidentally, the PBS “NOVA” program last night (10 Feb 2016) aired an episode entitled “Memory Hackers” (season 43, episode 6).
An hour of up-to-date info on memory research by neuroscientists in the U.S. and Europe.
I was really interested in the second half hour wherein research on memory reconsolidation and on implanting false memories is discussed. Appeared to me to be very relevant to the topics discussed in this thread.
I would imagine, if we were able to record such things, that we would have more than 50,000 people that could attest to not seeing anything (using the “cosmic miracle of the sun” as en example). In fact, I would guess that the number of those seeing nothing would far outweigh the number of those who do see these “miracles” in all of these instances.
Professor, rereading from How Jesus became God I again triggered a question that has nagged. In discussing apostle’s visions of Jesus you said ” Paul too explicitly states that he had a vision of Jesus, and I think we can take him at his word that he believes Jesus appeared to him.” And my question is why take him at his word? And I say that because I’ve often wondered if Paul was not seeking respect as a leader in a group and switched groups to advance quickly. Paul to himself:
“Here I am dragging my tired backside down this hot dirty road to Damascus to whip Christians for old Gamliel’s henchmen and for what – so I can wait 30 years for them to die off to take their place? You know this Christian thing…. might work a lot sooner – and all I have to do is say I saw him! Old Cephas he can’t say I didn’t or the others will say he didn’t either!
I suppose historians think he is not fabricating the story because it did not provide any real gain to him — other than beatings, floggings, being stoned, imprisoned, and eventually executed; so it’s not like an evangelist who propounds a view because he makes millions out of it. And in Paul’s case there doesn’t seem to be anything in his writings to make you doubt his deep sincerity. He may have been mistaken but he probalby wasn’t lying.
But he didn’t really have a vision of Jesus. He saw a light and heard a voice (sometimes attributed to epilepsy?). He concluded afterwards that it was a divine experience perhaps to get in good with the apostles, whose experiences appear to have been quite different (seeing a man, talking/eating with him).
I have sometimes thought that had Paul not had that vision, Christianity would not exist as we know it. There is a good chance, I think, that it would have continued to exist, mainly because ideas die hard, but I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t be very different, possibly considered an obscure sect of Judaism. There wouldn’t have been the Galatians argument with the Jerusalem apostles about circumcision, and perhaps gentile Christians would simply be circumcised converts to this Jewish sect. And finally, had Christianity not spread like it did thanks to Paul, what impact would that have had upon Islam? When you think about it from a historical perspective, the world as we know it would not exist were it not for that vision, hallucination or not.
In Tibetan Buddhism as well as Kundalini Yoga which are both my long time practices (over 35 years) a range of phenomena including visions is part of the territory for advanced practitioners. Having said that, I’ve recently started investigating what’s called “swarm mentality” which occurs in the natural world frankly prompted by watching a lot of Sir David Attenborough nature videos. I’m wondering without coming to any conclusion if a similar pattern if not phenomena … “swarm mentality” exists among groups of people (dare I use the word cults?). Definitely need to study more about this including mass hypnosis.
Playing Daniel’s Websters Advocate playfully 🙂 you wrote above “My point is not that Mary really is appearing in these times and places. But people deeply believe she is.” Why couldn’t the event have been fact?
I’m neither confirming nor denying it; I’m simply saying that conservative evangelical Christians who claim that group hallucinations are impossible do NOT think that Mary really appears — and so by definition they DO think that group hallucinations are possible.
Thank you for the clarification. I understand better the dual thinking.
There are also examples where an individual’s vision report has probably later become reported as a vision shared by a group of people. This has direct application, of course, to the New Testament’s literary accounts of appearances to various groups of people at a single time. The online article here http://tinyurl.com/jhhf6ya provides four examples:
1. Ashurbanipal’s vision of the Goddess Ishtar/Astartes, reported as seen by his whole army;
2. Constantine’s vision seen only by himself (Lactantius) or by his whole army (Eusebius);
3. Alexander’s dream-vision about the siege of Tyre, also had by many Tyrians (per Plutarch);
4. A ghostly vision probably originating with one townsperson, reported as shared by all the townspeople (Sefer Chasidim).
While it is possible in each case that the underlying ‘experience’ (if any) might have been ‘shared’, I agree that the claim of a mass vision in each case looks like a development in the reporting of what was originally an individual vision. In either case, the reporting of a mass vision is a quite understandable development on naturalistic grounds.
A similar event occurred in Lubbock, TX when I lived there in 1988. From the article:
“Then, in the middle of mass, and shortly before dusk, the sun broke dramatically through a gathering curtain of clouds. Shrieks went up from the lawn, and many of those assembled cried, prayed and pointed toward the sky. Some said they saw Jesus in the heavens, some saw the Virgin Mary, some saw the gates of heaven. Others, including a number of priests, stood by, craning their necks but seeing nothing unusual at all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/17/us/lubbock-journal-reports-of-miracles-draw-throngs.html
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-10/news/mn-1686_1_virgin-mary-crucifix-guide-dog
http://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/08/15/Between-10000-and-15000-pilgrims-cried-pointed-to-the/2066587620800/
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/081008/loc_316883103.shtml#.Vu8HD_lVikq
http://lubbockonline.com/life/2013-08-11/westbrook-st-john-neumann-chalked-record-attendance-25-years-ago#.Vu8Hi_lVikp
http://lubbockonline.com/slideshow/2013-08-08/1988-feast-assumption#slide-1
Well if they saw her there would be no way to prove it. I can say , however, that when i was having a very hard night that two people some how pickedup on it I went to their church for a few years , one I knew the other woman I did not know. The woman I did not know phoned me the next morning , but my number was unlisted and she did not dial my number. She dialed the Pastors number but got me . My number was no where near the same Karen asked who she was talking to and when i told her who I was , she was so surprised. She said she dialed Pastor Dodson to get my phone number, but git me instead. The one woman that I did know called me later that day and said she felt I had a bad night .She said she woke up ln the middle of the night singing to God, and believed it was for me. She then said it upset her husband and he kicked her off the bed to shut her up.
Bart,
Quick question on the group vision claim in 1 Cor 15:7: “he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” Since Paul traveled extensively with Barnabas (another apostle), wouldn’t Barnabas have told Paul that a collective appearance by Jesus to all of the apostles never happened?
Barnabas wasn’t one of the original apostles; it’s not clear if Paul would have thought of him as one or not (he doesn’t say). I’m afraid we don’t really know much about him. (He’s called an apostle in Acts, but normally Acts thinks of only the 12 as apostles)
Bart,
Two questions: 1) Who among “the twelve” and who among “all the apostles” do you think Paul definitely had some direct contact with, and 2) how do you explain that not one of these people told Paul that the collective group appearance legends in 1 Cor 15:5, 7 (assuming they are legends and not collective illusions) never happened?
The only three he mentions are Peter, James, and John. They didn’t speak the same language and didn’t see each other for periods. When they did meet, it appears to have been for Paul to convince them that his mission to Gentiles was acceptable. Why wouldn’t they tell him about the collectivbe group appearances? Any range of answers is possible, and we simply don’t know. Maybe he didn’t ask. Maybe they didn’t volunteer. Maybe they did tell him. Maybe they told him something he misunderstood. Maybe they exaggerated. Maybe …. It’s all maybes. He never says they didn’t tell him — so our deductions that they *must* have told him are really simply deductions, and what seems so extraordinarily implausible to us is … well, welcome to history, where crazily implausible things happen all the time that we can’t figure out later. In any event, I don’t think it can be counted as “evidence” that the groups really did see Jesus.
Bart,
You said that among “the twelve” and “all the apostles” (1 Cor 15:5, 7) Paul only had direct contact with Peter, James, and John. However, in your post today you said Paul met the apostles Andronicus and Junia (Rom 16:7). Did you accidently leave these folks out and, if so, is there anyone else you accidently left out?
Sorry — I was referring to what Paul meant in that particular verse. He is repeating an old tradition that says Jesus appeared to “all the apostles” and that almost certainly means the original ones. Paul does not include himself in that number, because he was not an apostle at the time. So too the others that he later considered apostles.
Bart,
Okay, I think I see your position now. You do not think Andronicus and Junia were part of the group “all the apostles” (1 Cor 15:7), but they were apostles, do I got that right? If so, do you think Andronicus and Junia had some kind of vision of Jesus in order to be apostles (c.f., 1 Cor 9:1)?
Yup, that’s it. And I don’t know if Paul thought they had a vision or not — whether, e.g., he thought some people could be apostles without a vision.
Bart,
You said, “I don’t know if Paul…thought some people could be apostles without a vision.” Doesn’t 1 Cor 9:1 strongly suggest that one *did* have to have a vision of Jesus to be an apostle according to Paul: “Am I am not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” Nearly every scholar I have read takes it that way. Are you an outlier? , Can you point to another scholar or two that thinks like you that Paul could have thought someone an apostle without ever seeing Jesus?
Yes, I think it probably it does. That doesn’t mean though that he thought *every* apostle had seen Jesus. He just doesn’t say. (And note: he does not say: I am an apostle *because* I have seen Jesus. Those *could* just as easily be two different qualifications, rather than one. Moreover, he probably doesn’t think seeing Jesus alone was enough to be an apostle, since then the 500 who saw him would all be apostles)
Bart,
You confused me with your answer. You agreed with my statement that “1 Cor 9:1 strongly suggests that one *did* have to have a vision of Jesus to be an apostle according to Paul”, but then you immediately wrote, “That doesn’t mean though that he [Paul] thought *every* apostle had seen Jesus.” How can the two quotes above both be true at the same time?
Sorry, I can see how it might confuse. What I was trying to say was that Paul thought he was an apostle because he had a vision of Christ, who commissioned him to take his message abroad. But he may well have thought that *other* apostles received a commission from Christ *without* having had a personal vision.
Got it, crystal clear this time!
Bart, I would like to make a suggestion to you that I think would help a *ton* of people and is not adequately addressed in HJBG. Can you please do a dedicated blog post outlining your view that Paul could have picked up the creedal formula of 1 Cor 15:3-7 in the mid to late 40s and then never asked any of the people in the group leadership appearance traditions if these appearance traditions were actually true or reflected on their past remarks about appearances to judge if they were true, i.e., give a good case that the leadership group appearance traditions in 1 Cor 15:5-7 are legends. I think there is a decent case for this given the limited contact Paul had with others leaders (only Peter, James, and John that we know of, and very sporadic), and the possibility that when they did meet other matters were more important than comparing appearance stories, but I think it would be very beneficial for a pro to lay out the lack of communication between Paul and other church leaders on this topic, recognizing of course that this is only one of several possibilities.
Do these hallucinations of Mary happen in people *without* a mental Illness, and are they common? Do they normally develop an illness/disorder after this experience?
I find it unlikely Peter, Mary and Paul would’ve been mentally I’ll since they were people of their day, and signed no signs of it…We cannot psycho analyze them but I see no signs of illness from them when placed cultural context.
Oh yes. These are regular ole folk, including professional people –doctors, lawyers, and such who have ben interviewed.
The are, though, deeply believing Catholics, which almost certainly matters (Mary doesn’t appear for the most part to Southern Baptists or Buddhists) disabledupes{1c349408361727dbcabfd5b2569aa086}disabledupes
Hello, Bart.
I’m aware that multiple reports have been given throughout history about visual collective apparitions, but what about auditory collective hallucinations? Do you know of any such case, besides the experience three mormon church founders had?
I’m afraid I haven’t looked into it; but I imagine there are lots documented.
Thanks for the reply! I found something related to it myself. If it’s of your interest, maybe you can take a look at it. Here’s the link to the article:
https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/1/1/sgaa025/5847631
I know this is an old post… I recently discovered the blog and have also been looking into the hallucination theory, so this post caught my attention. Regarding Sacks’ book, looking at some of the Amazon reviews, it appears he focuses on the type of hallucination where the people are not psychotic such that they’re aware that what they’re experiencing is in fact a hallucination and not the “real thing.” I would think the apostles, and others, would have had to experience the second type of hallucination. The one where the person is psychotic such that they believe the person is real. Supposedly Sacks doesn’t address that type of hallucination.
Yes, it’s just a popular book of course. For group hallucinations, the accounts of Mary’s appearances are the most amazing (written by people who believe in them!)
Dr. Ehrman,
I have a question.
1. From my understanding, the only time we get any kind of detailed information about any of the group appearances is in the Gospels. So, for a moment, let’s assume that the Gospels were written by the original apostles/eyewitnesses (I don’t believe they were, but just assuming for argument’s sake). The fact that these are Greco-Roman biographies would mean that all of these depictions could have been purposeful embellishments, correct?
In other words, one or more apostles believed they saw Jesus individually (Peter), then told it to others, then they all gathered together and had an experience of religious ecstasy, similar to a charismatic meeting today (or even what’s happening in Asbury right now). This experience then is interpreted as an appearance to them at once. Then, based on that experience, the authors could embellish details to enhance their storytelling, as was common in Greco-Roman biography.
So, my point is that even if the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, the genre of the Gospels makes it impossible to know exactly what they thought actually happened as opposed to what they embellished and compressed for literary purposes.
Is this a plausible hypothesis?
Paul mentions group appearances as well. And yup, that’s plausible.
Dr. Ehrman,
But Paul didn’t claim to have been involved in a group hallucination. So, we don’t have anybody involved in a group hallucination claiming they were in a group hallucination, right? Only people claiming they heard of/knew stories about them?
I wonder if any group hallucinations or experiences even *happened*?
We don’t have any author who claimed to be involved wiht a group hallucination.