Nuggets from Occult Invasion

The chief priest of UFO abductions is Dr. John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. He has interviewed more than a hundred people who claim to have been abducted by aliens aboard UFOs. Much of what he claims to have learned through these encounters is revealed in his book ABDUCTION: Human Encounters with Aliens. James S. Gordon reviewed the book in the New York Times:

“For year this noted psychiatrist…has been recording the strange and striking stories of ordinary men and women who believe they have been abducted from their homes and cars and transported, through walls and on beams of light, to spaceships…. These articulate, sensitive and well-educated men and women were not, it seemed to Dr. Mack, psychotic, delusional, or self-promoting…. Their experiences with U.F.O. abductions seemed to be the source, not the symptom, of their troubles.

“As Dr. Mack listened, he began to believe that their experiences were in some sense quite ‘real’ and…under hypnosis, their fragmentary memories became crystals around which complicated scenes of abduction, violation and instruction formed…. As his book reveals…Dr. Mack [began] to make other connections—between abductions, near-death experiences and ‘past-life regressions.’ All of these experiences are, Dr. Mack suggests, vehicles for recovering perennial [occult] wisdom…. Unfortunately…the abductees’ accounts…lack the weight of authority that Dr. Mack and a sympathetic reader would like to give it…. It is here, precisely on the clinical and scientific ground…that his book is most vulnerable to criticism…. Equally disturbing is the dearth of material about Dr. Mack’s methodology…how he induces a hypnotic trance or how he questions his subjects under hypnosis…[and] his statement that he and the abductees are ‘co-creating’ their reality.”