Quotes from John E. Mack

This has not meant a blind surrender to the aliens' purposes, but is, rather, the recognition of the need to let go of control in the face of mysterious forces that she cannot usefully oppose.

through natural catastrophe, especially a more communicable form of AIDS. This kind of apocalyptic vision is common among abductees, but we have no way of knowing whether it is authentically predictive in the physical world – it certainly is not inconsistent with what we know to be occurring on the planet – or represents some sort of metaphoric prophecy or wake-up call.

The abduction phenomenon also raises interesting questions about the nature of memory and the control of consciousness. As discussed in chapter 1, prevalence or incidence

Sometimes this not remembering appears to protect the abductees from a distress that they could not handle, especially in the case of children. But we have little understanding of how this repressing force works, or, for that matter, why an altered state of consciousness, facilitated in a caring, protective setting, is so effective in recovering abduction memories.

Something, everyone who goes through these sessions agrees, has happened to these people, whether or not it is possible to identify the source of what has occurred.

For me and others who have attended the sessions, as well as for the abductees themselves, it is this intensity of recovered emotion that lends inescapable authenticity to the phenomenon.

Indeed, the alien abduction phenomenon seems to open abductees and those who work with them to deeper realms of human emotion, whether or not that is a specific "purpose" of the phenomenon.

The abduction phenomenon also seems to offer new perspectives on human destructiveness.

We can continue to try to make the phenomenon fit the world as we have known it, jamming it into a kind of procrustean bed of consensus reality. Or we can acknowledge that the world might be other than we have known it. Then we are free to see where our thinking leads us.

The first reports of UFOs raised questions for contemporary science, which has dealt with the issue largely by ignoring or denying the whole matter.

How, for example, do the aliens pass people through walls? Questions such as this might seem absurd, or suggestive only of observational error or psychosis, to those whose parameters of reality have been limited to

would only point out that as a clinician, I have spent countless hours trying to find alternate explanations that would not require the major shift in my worldview that I have had to face.

Carlos describes the sensation of having his cells vibrate and dissolve as he is transported by a light beam, leaving behind a kind of ghostly shape.

It has been suggested that the aliens are many thousands of years ahead of human beings in their mastery of various technologies. Perhaps so. In any event, we cannot begin to answer any of these questions within the framework of modern science.

But there are more fundamental questions raised by the abduction phenomenon which seem to lie outside the ontological framework of modern science and appear to be unapproachable by its methods. Foremost among these is the problem of defining in what reality the abductions occur.

They experience the aliens, indeed their abductions themselves, as happening in another reality, although one that is as powerfully actual to them as – or more so than – the familiar physical world.

UFO abductions have been reported and collected most frequently in Western countries or countries dominated by Western culture and values, but our investigations are revealing that the phenomenon, in its familiar form, occurs among native peoples in North and South America and in Africa.

Writing as if she were receiving information from another troubled and perplexed source or voice that was speaking to her, Jerry described the beauty of the Brazilian

Science: manifested travel into space and time Spirituality: unmanifested travel into space and time Science: limited travel Spirituality: unlimited travel Both valid

Which ticket will you buy?

And I did not foresee how fundamentally challenged the view of the world in which I had been raised would be.

These qualities were captured in a poem she called "Decision," written in the winter of 1992-93. She wrote of her battle to overcome her fears and the secrecy and silence that had always oppressed her. She had chosen, she said, to "no longer" let her abduction experiences "take all of me . . . At least I will have the dignity," she concluded, "of knowing and owning my own memory.

Eva wrote, "that our focus should be on mutual communication of some form and on some level with our alien friends, learning, accepting, and integrating alien wisdom within our world and culture. Time, money, and energy spent solely on providing proof of alien existence is fruitless.

hope, however, that the data contained here is of sufficient power and solidity to enable those who are open to expanding their view of possible realities to consider that the world might contain forces and intelligences of which we have hardly allowed ourselves to dream.