Tinkering with Madness

• Share

On the morning of April 15, 1987, as he studied for his college entrance exams, Gregory Aller had his first visit from the aliens. "This brilliant white light appeared," Aller, now 29, recalls. "Space aliens were directing this. They told me I was going to become Speaker of the House. Then President Bush and Vice President Quayle would die. As President, I would unite our world with a dying alien planet whose sun was going out."

Soon Aller was visiting cemeteries. "I'd put my hands on the tombstones and make mind contact," he says. He would see his deceased grandmother walking through his parents' home. He was convinced that objects in his apartment were pipe bombs. He was worried that a sniper was outside, somewhere, waiting for him. "He was so convincing that I was frightened," says his father Bob Aller.

Suspecting that Greg was suffering from schizophrenia, Bob and Gloria Aller sought help from an expert at their alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles. Their fears were confirmed. But they also received some good news: Greg was eligible for a sophisticated UCLA research project that would provide him with the enormously expensive treatment and medication required by schizophrenia. The Allers felt they had found a way out for their troubled son. Instead they found a descent into hell.

The road to science is paved with good intentions. Gregory Aller had volunteered for an experiment designed to study the early years of schizophrenia, the onset of schizophrenic relapse, how to predict relapse, and how to determine who would and who would not be affected by withdrawal of medication. In the short term, that meant Aller would get medicine to make him well. But the long-range realities were harrowing. If he got well, the experiment would follow Greg as medication was withdrawn. If he then became ill, he could fall into the worst stages of psychotic relapse. Last March, Keith Nuechterlein, the project's director, sent a letter to his patients stating that among the findings of the experiment, three-quarters of the people who have been off medication "will experience a return of significant symptoms within a year." In 1990 Greg was among those who relapsed -- and, as his condition worsened, his parents claim they could elicit no cooperation or medication from the doctors in charge. Today Greg's parents believe the . doctors deliberately triggered his relapse.

The Allers had long known their son was troubled. After graduating from Santa Monica High School with good grades, Greg simply stopped attending classes at the University of California at Santa Barbara only one week into his freshman year. Flunking out after two quarters with straight Fs, he made an improbable run for local office, attempted to go into business, and was arrested for false advertising. After serving a 40-day jail term, he returned to live with his parents and make another stab at college. It was then that he saw the aliens.