THEY SAY THEY are being visited. Their stories vary, but many details match up: They find themselves falling into a trance, feel themselves floating--sometimes even passing through walls--into a waiting ship, where short, grey-skinned beings perform a series of frightening examinations.
Resistance, as the saying goes, is futile--the aliens are in complete control, even capable of reading thoughts. Often eggs or sperm are taken before the minds of the victims are wiped clean and they are returned to their homes or cars.
Just a bad dream, right? For most of us, yes. But, if some authors
are to be believed, there is a growing number of people who think
it's really happening to them--that they are indeed having a close
encounter of the fourth kind.
And as that realization sinks in, the CE-Fours sink into a tormented lives: terrifying half-remembered images of the aliens' dark eyes, a fear they may be going mad, the agonizing loneliness of knowing no one will believe their stories. It's enough to drive a person into therapy--where more and more abductees are ending up.
Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack has been working with traumatized CE-Fours since 1989, when he met New York artist Budd Hopkins, author of Missing Time and Intruders, books that explore the abduction phenomenon.
Mack, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 biography of Lawrence of Arabia, says he was a skeptic himself until Hopkins introduced him to a traumatized abductee. Fascinated by the phenomenon, Mack began to see patients in the Boston area and became convinced his patients were neither dreaming nor hallucinating.
That work comprises the bulk of Mack's groundbreaking 1994 book
Abduction, which documents his sessions with 13 CE-Fours.
In the book, he reports to have been struck by the fact that his
patients absolutely believed they were being abducted by alien
beings and exhibited no clear signs of mental illness other than
the trauma of the experience. Mack soon came to a startling conclusion:
I was dealing with a phenomemon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not plausible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview. My choices then were either to stretch and twist psychiatry beyond reasonable limits, overlooking aspects of the phenomenon that could not be explained psychologically, such as the physical findings, the occurrence in small children and even infants, and the association with UFOs--i.e., to keep insisting upon a psychosocial explanation consistent with the prevailing Western scientific ideology. Or, I might open to the possibility that our consensus framework of reality is too limited and that a phenomenon such as this cannot be explained within its ontological parameters. In other words, a new scientific paradigm might be necessary in order to understand what was going on.
Mack decided to open up the playing board, to abandon a worldview he says "had come to assume the rigidity of a theology...held in place by the structures, categories, and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen."
Leaning on Eastern metaphysics to bolster his understanding of the abductions, Mack goes so far as to suggest that these encounters are perhaps manifestations of a transdimensional intelligence that appears in different forms to different cultures.
Mack's willingness to accept that something is really happening has made him a best-selling author and a heavy hitter on the UFO lecture circuit, but it's also put him at odds with his employer. The Harvard administration, which puts a lot of stock in the rigidity of the structures of happened/did not happen, is not overjoyed by Mack's recent fame. A panel recently completed a review of his research methods, perhaps in anticipation of a legal battle to bounce a tenured professor.
While skeptics generally dismiss Mack as a crackpot, he's gotten a mixed response within the UFO community. Some believers are thrilled that someone with scientific credentials is finally taking up their cause. Others, like Kevin Randle, who has spent years researching an alleged 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, complain that Mack's research and methods are shoddy. Some grumble he has brought too much of his own Eastern philosphical beliefs to the phenomenon.
Despite his critics, Mack has found some support in the scientific
community. In 1982, he teamed up with MIT physicist David Pritchard
to host a conference on the abduction experience, which forms
the basis of journalist C.D.B. Bryan's recent book Close Encounters
of the Fourth Kind (see Gregory McNamee's review, right).
Bryan, author of Friendly Fire and five other books, attended the conference as a skeptic, but soon became intrigued by the theories being spitballed. In the book, Bryan remembers a conversation with Mack, who said that a search for physical evidence "misses the power of the phenomenon." As Bryan writes:
"Now, I'm not saying it's extraterrestrial," Mack continues. "Because, again, I think that has a way of making you question your categories. 'Extraterrestrial' means it exists in the physical world the way we know it...And I don't know that way of structuring it in terms of the physical world as we know it is going to help us very much....
"Now, people say, 'Well, maybe it comes from some dimension beyond space- time,' " Mack continues. "Or, 'Somehow they've developed a physics that has mastered the problem of moving around in the galaxy'--if they do, in fact, reside on some other star in our physical galaxy as we know it. But that's not an area I feel I can talk about. The one and only thing that I've really stayed with...is that my material says that something is going on here that is affecting these people powerfully, which I cannot account for in the physical world that I've grown to believe is reality. So...this phenomenon is stretching my notions of what's real...
"The furthest you can go at this point is to say there's an authentic mystery here. And that is, I think, as far as anyone ought to go. But that's a powerful, powerful place to come to at this point."
Mack may have found some clues: If our subconscious is communicating with some kind of interdimensional intelligence lurking beyond the perceptions of our primitive five senses, then the final frontier may not be outer space, but the hidden recesses of the human mind.
NEXT: NETWORK
