Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
Mack's credentials are impressive; he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School's Cambridge Hospital. He has investigated 76 UFO abduction cases over the past four years and here summarizes 13 of them, also offering his scholarly comments and controversial conclusions. These narratives involve scenarios that are sexually explicit, terrifyingly gruesome, and mind-numbingly chilling in their implications for the nature of reality. The individuals Mack portrays have experienced deeply traumatic events that have transformed their lives--for the worse at first, but ultimately for the better. According to Mack, the aliens are objectively real and seem to be abducting people for two purposes: (1) changing human consciousness to prevent the destruction of Earth's ecosystems and (2) creating offsping from aliens and humans. What sets Mack's book apart is his willingness to deal with some of his clients' assertions that they themselves are half-human and half-alien, at least psychologically or spiritually; his acceptance that the laws of physics can be broken (many abductees claim that the aliens can "float" them through solid objects such as doors and closed windows); his seemingly routine procedure to hypnotically regress abductees into previous incarnations; and his emphasis on spiritual transformation as the nexus of the abduction (even likening it to a shamanic expansion of consciousness). How much you agree with all this may depend on where you're coming from to begin with. Nonetheless, Mack has shown the psychiatric community that the UFO abduction syndrome is a real problem that deserves serious clinical attention.George Eberhart--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.