- Mack, John E.
Abduction.
New York: Ballantine Books, [1994] 1995.
ISBN 0-345-39300-7.
-
I started this book, as I recall, sometime around 1998, having
picked it up to get a taste for the “original material” after
reading C.D.B. Bryan's excellent
Close
Encounters of the Fourth Kind, describing an MIT conference
on the alien abduction phenomenon. I made it most of the way through
Abduction on the first attempt, but ran out of
patience and steam about 100 pages from the finish line while reading
the material “recovered” from “experiencer” Carlos, which is
the literary equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld with a custard pudding.
A mercifully brief excerpt with Mack's interpolations in parentheses
goes as follows (p. 355).
Their bodies go from being the little white creatures they
are to light. But when they become light, they first become
like cores of light, like molten light. The appearance (of
the core of light) is one of solidity. They change colors
and a haze is projected around the (interior core which is
centralized; surrounding this core in an immediate
environment is a denser, tighter) haze (than its outer
peripheries). The eyes are the last to go (as one
perceives the process of the creatures disappearing into
the light), and then they just kind of disappear or are
absorbed into this. … We are or exist through
our flesh, and they are or exist through whatever it is
they are.
Got that? If not, there is much, much more along these lines
in the extended babblings of this and a dozen other abductees,
developed during the author's therapy sessions with them. Now,
de mortuis nihil nisi bonum
(Mack was killed in a traffic accident in 2004), and
having won a Pulitzer Prize for his
biography of T.E. Lawrence in
addition to his career as a professor of psychiatry at the
Harvard Medical School and founder of the psychiatry
department at Cambridge Hospital, his credentials incline one to
hear him out, however odd the message may seem to be.
One's mind, however, eventually summons up Thomas Jefferson's
(possibly apocryphal) remark upon hearing of two Yale
professors who investigated a meteor fall in Connecticut and
pronounced it genuine, “Gentlemen, I would rather believe that
two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall
from heaven.” Well, nobody's accusing Professor Mack of lying,
but the leap from the oh-wow, New Age accounts elicited by
hypnotic regression and presented here, to the conclusion that
they are the result of a genuine phenomenon of some kind,
possibly contact with “another plane of reality” is an awfully
big one, and simply wading through the source material proved
more than I could stomach on my first attempt. So, the book
went back on the unfinished shelf, where it continued to glare
at me balefully until a few days ago when, looking for
something to read, I exclaimed, “Hey, if I can make it through
The Ghosts of Evolution,
surely I can finish this one!” So I did, picking up from the
bookmark I left where my first assault on the summit petered
out.
In small enough doses, much of this material can be quite funny.
This paperback edition includes two appendices added to address
issues raised after the publication of the original hardcover. In
the first of these (p. 390), Mack argues that the presence of a
genuine phenomenon of some kind is strongly supported by
“…the reports of the experiencers themselves.
Although varied in some respects, these are so densely consistent
as to defy conventional psychiatric explanations.” Then, a mere three
pages later, we are informed:
The aliens themselves seem able to change or disguise their
form, and, as noted, may appear initially to the abductees
as various kinds of animals, or even as ordinary human beings,
as in Peter's case. But their shape-shifting abilities extend
to their vehicles and to the environments they present to
the abductees, which include, in this sample, a string of
motorcycles (Dave), a forest and conference room (Catherine),
images of Jesus in white robes (Jerry), and a soaring
cathedral-like structure with stained glass windows
(Sheila). One young woman, not written about in this
book, recalled at age seven seeing a fifteen-foot kangaroo
in a park, which turned out to be a small spacecraft.
Now that's “densely consistent”! One is also struck
by how insipidly banal are the messages the supposed aliens
deliver, which usually amount to New Age cerebral suds like
“All is one”, “Treat the Earth kindly”, and the rest of the
stuff which appeals to those who are into these kinds of things
in the first place. Occam's razor seems to glide much more
smoothly over the supposition that we are dealing with
seriously delusional people endowed with vivid imaginations
than that these are “transformational” messages sent by
superior beings to avert “planetary destruction” by “for-profit
business corporations” (p. 365, Mack's words, not those of
an abductee). Fifteen-foot kangaroo? Well, anyway,
now this book can hop onto the dubious shelf in the basement
and stop making me feel guilty! For a sceptical view of the
abduction phenomenon, see Philip J. Klass's
UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game.
June 2005 