In the late 1960’s, there was a wave of “skyjackings” — where lone gunmen would force airplanes to fly to Cuba. This book was a contemporary psychiatrist’s attempt to analyze the motivations of the Skyjackers, based on interviews with them in jail. In most cases, Cuba simply extradited them to Canada, which then extradited them to the United States. Even at the time, it was understood by everyone that the skyjackings were not initiated by, or encouraged by the Castro regime, which was actually rather embarrassed by the phenomenon. The author rejects the idea that there was any serious political motivation behind the skyjackings. In most cases, the political proclamations of the perpetrators were far too shallow and silly to be taken seriously as motives. He goes through the personal history of each skyjacker and finds that they are remarkably uniform. The typical skyjacker was the child of a violent, bullying father and a deeply religious mother, who subsequently failed miserably in carving out any kind of success. They were usually obsessively religious, and socially and psychologically extremely conservative. Their sexual lives, most of the time, were pathetic. After some particularly devasting failure or betrayal, they quite spontaneously concocted a scheme to create a dramatic event that would somehow, they felt, resolve their difficulties, at least in a symbolic sense. The idea of the skyjackings seems to have occured to them simply because others had done it, and it was a big thing in the news. The similarity to the psychological profiles of serial killers, discussed in Elliott Leyton’s work, is striking. Leyton would have had a more common-sense approach to the case histories. Hubbard used his data to concoct a rather lame theory from the pseudo-science of psychotherapy which was then still very influential. But the case histories speak for themselves, and it’s interesting for a reader in 2006 to be reminded that air travel was not particularly safe forty years ago.
14751. (David G. Hubbard) The Skyjacker, His Flights of Fancy
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
0 Comments.