Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility, and Transgenic Beings
Rather than discrediting UFO abduction stories, recent scientific developments make them increasingly plausible, argues this intriguing volume. Hopkins (Intruders) and documentary filmmaker Rainey touch on everything from mind control to teleportation, but focus on two areas of progress that they say give clues as to how and why UFOs abduct their victims. The first is invisibility, now almost feasible on earth via NASA's "adaptive camouflage" technologies and presumably old hat for space-traveling extraterrestrials, which, they say, explains why abductions so often go unnoticed. The second is the burgeoning field of genetic and reproductive engineering, whose methods resemble the medical procedures that those who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials report they experienced. The resulting "transgenic" offspring can pass for human while serving the aliens, the authors argue, and nonhuman beings live among us, often distinguishable by their social unease and unfashionable clothes. The authors invoke everything from quantum mechanics to parallel universes to lend a scientific aura to their theories, but the operative paradigm behind UFO phenomena seems not so much physics as psychoanalysis, with alien abductions playing roughly the same all-purpose explanatory role as the Oedipal conflict. This becomes clear in the many riveting first-hand accounts of abductions, in which abductees evoke an inchoate, Kafkaesque sense of anxiety and misplaced reality that resolves itself, under hypnosis, into the harrowing specifics of psycho-sexual trauma at the hands of little gray men. Full of subtle, naturalistic detail and dense, complex, novelistic portraits of transgenic characters, these stories demonstrate that the folklore of UFO abductions-ostensibly about aliens but perhaps really about alienation-has developed into one of the richest psychological literatures of our time. Photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.