Quotes from John E. Mack

Temple University historian David Jacobs has further refined the basic reported pattern of an abduction experience (Jacobs 1992). Jacobs identifies primary phenomena such as manual or instrument examination, staring, and urological-gynecological procedures; secondary events, including machine examination, visualization, and child presentation; and ancillary events, among them miscellaneous additional physical, mental, and sexual activities and procedures.

still greater problem resides in the fact that memory in relation to abduction experiences behaves rather strangely. As in the cases, for example, of Ed (chapter 3) or Arthur (chapter 15) the memory of an abduction may be outside of consciousness until triggered many years later by another experience or situation that becomes associated with the original event.

He said he was learning to open his Chi and control it through his hands, which he can make become hot.

We can admit that psychiatry does not have all the answers to understanding mental disorders, so why should we believe that science is prepared to explain everything that happens in this world?

He said the beings are in the process of changing themselves physically "so they can breathe here. They don't breathe the same as we do." Scott revealed other problems for both of our species should the aliens' presence be manifest on a large scale too soon. "We're not up to their speed," he said. "They think much faster than we do," and "They're going to make it so they don't hurt us.

We need to learn that even though "we look different" and "we think different . . . we're all life.

they don't share." In the alien realm "nobody's in their own world and "everybody knows everything. There are no secrets." I asked him about himself. "I'm one of them," he said, but in his human identity he imposes limits on his ability to love and share because of "my own ignorance.

Their reactions are as perhaps Westerners would react to ghosts; not necessarily terrified (or not always so) but certainly wary of what they see" (Hind 1993, p. 17).

it is selfish," he says, "because you get more out of it than what you are putting into

Lastly, experiencers are not motivated to believe in the "truth of their experiences. Often they prefer to believe that they have had some sort of bad dream, and become intensely distressed when they realize in the interview that they were not asleep when the experience began.

Or they hope that I will find some sort of psychiatric explanation that can be treated so that the experiences can be stopped.

However, at the present time this is merely speculation. There is little hard data about the accuracy of material transformed from traumatic to semantic memory. More research is needed in this area.

As has so often been said, there is, as yet, no recorded abduction experience that proved, upon investigation, to be a reflection of some other trauma or experience, despite a great deal of effort on the part of investigators to find some other source for these experiences.

It seems clear to me at this time that we are not dealing with "false" or confabulated memories.

Each abductee discovers that he or she is but one intelligent being in a universe populated with various other entities that are not "supposed to" exist.

Human beings are not lords of the earth, they realize, but children of the cosmos who must find their way to live in harmony with all manner of creatures on the earth and elsewhere.

It is hard to imagine how the psyche could generate so intense a level of emotion without some kind of exposure to an extraordinary experience as the template for that emotion.

These interests are reflected in the attachment to the notion that the physical laws we know describe all that is, and that if other beings reside in the cosmos they will behave more or less like

and the session concluded with Paul speaking with Pam of human domestication of animals into pets as an expression of our need "to control everything around us because of fear," the narrow perspective of human identity, and the "twisted," competitive, and intolerant culture we have evolved.

Abductees tend to feel that the contents of their minds are thoroughly revealed to the aliens.

As philosopher Terence McKenna has suggested, "To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant" (McKenna 1991).

That's when the ship came down. It came right down. Bam! There it was. Small." The ship, he said, was "kind of round, but oblong. It's kind of like an egg," a "standing-up egg." The craft was "real symmetrical . . . more oblong on the top half" and "about four feet off the ground," with some sort of "feet" holding it up.

This might explain why it is the intellectual and political elite in our culture that seems most deeply wedded to perpetuating the materialist view of reality.

These individuals might believe in the existence of a personal God or a supreme being, yet not find possible the notion that cosmic entities such as these might enter our physical and mental world.