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JOHN MACK is respectfully trying to describe and explain a wildly sensational and much derided experience, one that he suggests hundreds of thousands of Americans believe they have had. For four years this noted psychiatrist, a professor at the Harvard Medical School's Cambridge Hospital and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of T. E. Lawrence, 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.
Nothing in Dr. Mack's conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic training had prepared him to hear such stories from the people introduced to him by an experienced U.F.O. researcher, Budd Hopkins. These articulate, sensitive and well-educated men and women were not, it seemed to Dr. Mack, psychotic, delusional or self-promoting. They were troubled, but 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 that "the abduction phenomenon has important philosophical, spiritual and social implications" for all of us.
In Dr. Mack's consulting room the abductees recalled repeated visits, often from large-eyed, short, gray beings who commanded mysterious and powerful technologies and displayed a telepathic omniscience. In isolated spots on the ground and in the curved confines of their unearthly vehicles, these visitors, sometimes under the direction of an authoritative figure -- who appeared male to some, female to others -- sampled the humans' semen and ova and pressed them into interspecies breeding projects.
Dr. Mack's informants said that at first they were paralyzed, terrified and recalcitrant. In time, however, they came to feel they were willing participants in the intruders' experiments. The aliens seemed to have a wider and wiser perspective than ours. They wanted to wake us all up to the ecological and political disasters that threaten our planet. They were instructing their abductees to sound a warning to the rest of us, and they were also using them to create a race of hybrid survivors.
Some of the 13 abductees whose case histories Dr. Mack presents in "Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens" (he has interviewed more than 100 people who claim to have been abducted) came to him, he says, because they consciously recalled fragments of encounters with aliens. Others were plagued by dreams of U.F.O.'s or had sensed that there were "entities" in their rooms while they slept. Several had had frequent and inexplicable nosebleeds or had found surprising scars on their bodies, while others, like Sheila, a 44-year-old social worker, had experienced fears, black moods and bodily sensations that traditional psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy had not alleviated. Some were referred to Dr. Mack by mental health professionals, but most came because they had heard through the grapevine about his work or had seen a fictionalized composite...
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