Abduction introduction

I'm not very interested in UFOs or alien abductions, and I'm inclined to treat the latter, in particular, with a high degree of skepticism. Nevertheless, at a used bookstore sometime ago, I picked up a copy of John E. Mack's controversial bestseller Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, and recently I started looking through it.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about alien abduction claims or the people who make them, Mack showed considerable courage in taking their reports seriously and risking his academic prestige in the process. (He was a psychiatrist at Harvard and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.) In his introductory remarks to the 1995 paperback edition, Mack addresses skeptical criticisms of his work, which are quite similar to skeptical critiques of other paranormal claims. What he has to say is worth reading -- and so, in abridged form, here it is:

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The most archetypal expression of the cry of anti-science came from science writer James Gleick in a review in the New Republic magazine (Gleick 1994). Gleick called the "alien-abduction mythology" a "leading case of the anti-rational, anti-science cults that are flourishing with dismaying vigor in the United States." He lumps the alien abduction phenomenon together with "paranormals who bend spoons, parapsychologists who sense spiritual auras, crystal healers, believers in reincarnation" and "psychic crime-solvers" as well as "tarot readers and crystal ball gazers."

In a similar vein psychoanalyst Sandford Gifford, in a review of my book for a psychoanalytic journal (Gifford, in press), called it a "subversive assault on psychoanalysis as a science" (he assumes that the phenomenon must be some sort of product of the unconscious mind), and wrote of the abduction experiencers as individuals "holding irrational beliefs that are not shared by the 'compact majority.'" In that sense, he continued, "they are 'crazy' in the same way as believers in Creationism, faith healing, thought transference, or the end of the world on a specific date."...

I believe these critiques reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of rationality and reason, and even of science itself. For what the worldview implicit in these statements requires is the a priori exclusion of vast amounts of data simply because that information is in conflict with that point of view. This, I believe, is a far more irrational, and even dangerous, approach to knowledge than to allow information from every possible legitimate source to come into our minds before applying rationality and reason in assessing this information once we have "let it in." To exclude data because it does not fit a particular view of reality can only, in the end, arrest the progress of science and keep us ignorant.

The worldview that Gleick, Gifford, and [others] espouse is what is usually called the "materialist paradigm." According to this view, which until recently has dominated mainstream science (although now it is increasingly being questioned, even in contemporary physics), there is only one hard reality, namely that which is observable through the sensory/empirical mode. This dualistic approach would separate cleanly the observer from the observed, subject from object. In so doing, all of the information about other or "unseen" realities that has become available to us through anthropology, comparative religion, parapsychology, consciousness research, and various uses of nonordinary states inside and outside the laboratory -- to name but a few sources of data -- would, of necessity, have to be excluded. This worldview and its accompanying restrictive epistemology would, in short, eliminate human consciousness and experience as legitimate ways of knowing about reality.

Of the many responses which were more open to my material, Kathryn Robinson's reaction to Gleick's review (Robinson 1994) was one of the most telling. Addressing the restrictiveness of the worldview that Gleick's assault reflected she wrote, "scientific discovery is not a matter of jamming data into existing categories; it's about supporting new ones. It's about admitting how much we don't know -- in marked contrast to the hubris of a rationalist such as Gleick, who argues that any phenomenon that's not available to his senses must therefore be a sham. Gleick's arrogance," she notes, "would perhaps approach respectability if there were no mysteries left to science." Psychologist William James made the same point a hundred years ago. "The ideal of every science," James wrote, "is that of a closed and completed system of truth... Phenomena unclassifiable within a system are therefore paradoxical absurdities and must be held untrue (James 1896)."...

This book provides the most detailed accounts we have today from people who report abduction experiences. These reports, I believe, raise profound questions about how we experience the world around us and the very nature of that world. The information that I obtained during the several years of this investigation has been communicated in case after case with such power and consistency that a body of data formed which seemed to point clearly to the experiential truth of the abduction phenomenon, whatever its ultimate source might prove to be. The fact that what the experiencers are describing simply cannot be possible according to our traditional scientific view would, it seems to me, more sensibly, yes rationally, call for a change in that perspective, an expansion of our notions of reality, rather than the "jamming" of "data into existing categories" that some critics would have us do.

John E. Mack, M.D., Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1995 paperback edition)

Comments

[Kevin]

There are interesting parallels between this phenomenon and the mysteries of consciousness, not least being the reaction of the scientific mainstream to the data. When looking into the abduction area some years ago, I was startled to come across some reports of cases which included non-abducted witnesses and multiple abductions in which people were returned wearing someone elses clothing (one report told of a woman awakening draped in the clothes of some oversized male much larger than her husband). Those in the scientific community who attempted a blanket explanation of abductions as "sleep paralysis" and "hypnogogic hallucinations" never offered an explanation for these other cases. Their attitude of cocksure dismissal reminded me of the Marshall McLuhan quote that the really BIG secrets remain kept due to public incredulity. Fallibility does not disappear with post-graduate degrees. It speaks to the over-entertained laziness of so much of the population that they cannot recognize the inconsistant and untenable explanations which come from whichever Ph.D. "expert" is asked to comment on reports of events which seem outside of our daily experience. Arthur C. Clarke once noted that any scientist who pronounces something to be impossible is most likely to be wrong, as the history of science so vividly shows. I would recommend Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as a starting point to illustrate the point.

[o9hw24gqvhg8]

Whenever "mainstream" thinkers have to resort to the use of ridicule, logical fallacies, and social isolation to attack those who think differently, it is a clear give-a-way that the mainstream view is wrong about the facts. The list of subjects include more than the afterlife, and ufo /alien abduction phenomena. It includes intelligent design, cold fusion, human evolution and probably more.

[Greg Taylor]

Hi Michael,

A worthwhile resource is the official website for the 'sequel' to 'Abduction', 'Passport to the Cosmos':

On that site readers can find many essays and audio interviews/lectures with the late Dr Mack, all freely available. It's a great resource, and there are some stimulating pieces there.

Mack often noted the inability of the materialist paradigm to deal with what Henry Corbin called 'the Imaginal Realm". Afterlife researcher Kenneth Ring devoted some space to these ideas in his book 'The Omega Project', and there are a number of other researchers who have pulled together various strands of 'the paranormal' (to generalise quite clumsily!) and seen commonalities and a possible origin in some such 'third realm'. Jacques Vallee and Rick Strassman would be others, off the top of my head.

I discussed this convergence briefly a while back in an interview I did with Michael Grosso.

Kind regards,
Greg

[Adam]

Hi Michael & Greg

I remember Gleick's review of Mack's first book and he made some good points. Mack seemed to acknowledge the lack of any physical reality when he locates abductions in the Imaginal Realm. That makes me wonder just how 'alien' the entities involved really are. They've been around humans a very long time in many guises, so we're hardly strangers to them. Are we like pets to them? Would a visit to the vet - or worse, a biology lab - seem like an abduction to a small animal?

[william]

Here in phoenix several hundred people got to see a UFO fly right over them only a few hundred feet above them and a couple of football fields long. Even the governor at the time saw this UFO and he related this sighting on Larry king recently.

Thousands saw the lights of this UFO over phoenix in the nineties, but the air force said it was dropping flares. Mainstream media bought the flare excuses. No surprise there.

To state we humans are naive would be an understatement.

A movie was even made about the story that a logger was abducted by a UFO in the mountains near Pinetop Arizona I think. He was held for several days. He friends got scared, drove off, and left him.

I suspect that most but not all abduction stories are due to dreams, imagination, or just fraud. But what did James say about a white crow. It makes sense they are keeping an eye on us. We may be just a masters or PhD project for a very advanced species on a very advanced planet.

It also makes sense to me that the gradual evolution of our consciousness means someday we will be moving around in those UFO’s and have our own projects to look after. Gosh I hope when I get to that level my “project” turns out better than this one on earth where we so called civilized humans seem to delight in killing one another over land, oil, and religious dogma.

Just kidding this evolution of consciousness may be right on schedule.

[TomC]

another example of how skeptics 'explained' everything by doing a study that doesnt really prove anything.

OBE

[red pill junkie]

Whatever the abduction phenomenon turns out to be, John Mack was a very brave man, willing to risk his comfortable position in Academia and his reputation in order to further our understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it.

God bless him.