IS THE STRATEGIC Defense Initiative meant to protect the country from incoming Kazakhstani ICBMs, or to shield the Earth from incoming alien starships?
However you answered, if you dog it through the 500 pages of C.D.B. Bryan's Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Knopf, $25), you may find yourself entertaining dark thoughts about the strange corridors military research wanders down. You may also find yourself less ready to scoff at supermarket-tabloid headlines that scream, "Woman gives birth to two-head ed ET baby."
Most people run when the subject of extraterrestrial calls on the blue planet comes up. And rightly so: UFOs, ETs, SETI, and that whole other hodgepodge of outer-space acronyms has always been the domain of crackpots and charlatans.
C.D.B. Bryan, best known for the Vietnam-era exposé Friendly Fire, takes us into more respectable company with Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. He begins at a June 1992 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chaired by physicist David Pritchard and psychiatrist John Mack, on the subject of "fourth encounters"--meetings of earthlings and otherlings instigated by the visiting team.
Those encounters, Bryan reports, are said to bring humans into
contact with "grays," "Scandinavian types,"
and sinister reptilians, 3 to 4 feet tall, thin, macroencephalic
critters with a fondness for probing people in their most sensitive
areas and for scientific experimentation of the sort that fueled
so many episodes of The Outer Limits.
It is Mack who announces, early on in Bryan's book, that "for thirty years and possibly longer, thousands of individuals who appear to be sincere and of sound mind and who are seeking no personal benefit from their stories have been providing to those who will listen consistent reports" of alien abductions. And it is Mack who contests the usual objections to UFO reports: that only kooks claim to have seen aliens, that profit motive alone fuels the will to believe that we are regularly visited by beings from other venues (See Jim Nintzel's "CE-Four," left).
Bryan presents a score of case studies of otherwise unremarkable Americans who have reported encounters of the fourth kind. One of them, famously, is that of Travis Walton, who disappeared for a few days from the Mogollon Rim near Heber on November 5, 1975, and wound up at a roadside café claiming to have been taken away for a spin in the cosmos by sinister creatures. Others are reported by women who have similarly disappeared for hours or days and returned bearing all the signs of pregnancy.
Bryan does not deal with the commonly advanced theory that ET abduction is a cover for repressed memories of childhood sexual trauma. Neither does he exhaustively pursue the military angle--the notion that UFOs and ETs are alternately secret government programs or matters kept from the citizenry on pain of death. Bryan touches too briefly on weirdly named programs like Majic-12 and weirdly demarcated places like Area 51--perhaps, as more paranoiac UFOlogists would say, to prevent mass hysteria at the thought that we are not the dominant intelligence in the cosmos, or even on our home turf.
It is a longstanding scientific principle, Bryan reminds us, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In his book is plenty of fuel for a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmares, replete with animal mutilations, crop circles, glowing football-field-sized discs, and aerial maneuvers that would make Steven Spielberg's heart stop.
Even skeptics have to wonder, after going through Bryan's careful reportage, whether there may be something after all to this long-buzzing rumor of inquisitive and invasive brothers from other planets.
