Seattle, Washington -- Presented with claims by many people that they had been beamed into spacecraft by aliens possessed of technologies unimaginable to humans, a scientist might choose between several explanations:
* The “abductees” are delusional.
* The abductees have been immersed in a climate of irrational belief. This allows for encounters with angels, or Elvis, and for other notions that can be soaked up from tabloids by anyone standing in line at a supermarket.
* The reports are accurate, and space aliens really are abducting umpteen thousand earthlings and subjecting them to genital and anal intrusion, sperm sampling, and breeding of alien-human hybrids.
John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University School of Medicine, opts for explanation number three.
In his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Charles Scribner’s Sons) and on each stop of his extensive book tour, Dr. Mack explains why. As a prominent Harvard psychiatrist, he has attracted more press coverage than the average UFO advocate. More disparagement, too, including skepticism and dismay from almost all reviewers and from many of his colleagues and associates.
Last month, Dr. Mack came here to present his findings and theories to a tough audience -- in fact, an audience that would make the apostle Thomas seem credulous: the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP.
CSICOP (pronounced “sigh-cop”) is a national organization of academic and other skeptics formed in 1976. Its members are dedicated to disproving claims, such as Dr. Mack’s, that fly in the face of known physical laws of the universe.
Dr. Mack’s presentation opened CSICOP’s annual convention, which was held at an airport hotel with a clear view of Mount Rainier, site of the flying-saucer sightings in 1947 that began “UFOlogy.”
Virtually every press report and review characterizes Dr. Mack’s book as a horribly muddle-headed product of a researcher who was up to now top-notch, even though unconventional. Among Dr. Mack’s undisputed achievements is that he founded the psychiatry department at Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts and played a major role in winning eminence for the institution. In 1977 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Prince of Our Disorder, a probing biography of T.E. Lawrence.
For defending the abduction hypothesis, and for coming here, Dr. Mack was “a very courageous man,” said Paul Kurtz, chairman and co-founder of CSICOP. Dr. Mack’s explanation: “I have this kind of perhaps naive place in me that says perhaps dialogue can occur.”
For most of the evening, the audience politely heard Dr. Mack out. Here, as in his book, Dr. Mack argued that the UFO sightings and alien abductions were being reported by people of sound mind, primarily Americans. Their reports were largely consistent, he said, and did not feature details derived from media sources.
Abductees -- known as “experiencers” in the thriving world of UFOlogy -- are shocked to learn they are not alone, Dr. Mack said. “I’ve seen that moment, that moment of truth, that terrifying moment where they break into tears when they realize that what they’ve held as a dream does not hold up as a dream, does not hold up as a fantasy.”
Dr. Mack cited, also, the unexplained cuts, puncture marks, and lesions that purportedly appear on the arms of people abducted by aliens. Such pieces of physical evidence, he allowed, “do not satisfy the scientific criteria of proof, but they still have to be dealt with.”
In the course of the evening, many objections were raised to the techniques Dr. Mack used to elicit information from abductees. And many alternative explanations of alien abductions were proposed.
“There has been an absence of credible evidence to support claims -- no implants, no missing fetuses, no hybrid children, no souvenirs, no unimpeachable photograph,” said Robert A. Baker, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Kentucky.
Mr. Baker’s reference to implants stems from many abductees’ claims, to which Dr. Mack lends credence in his book, that they have found minute tracking devices in their bodies after abductions.
Other criticisms aired at the meeting included the following:
* Therapists such as Dr. Mack grossly misuse hypnosis to draw out recollections, according to most experts on hypnosis as a therapeutic tool. The practices, they say, convert patients’ fantasies into firm beliefs, to the patients’ detriment.
* Many abductees are in it for the money, or are self-dramatizing seekers of attention and notoriety, as evidenced by their eagerness for television talk-show appearances and the UFO convention circuit.
* The findings of UFO researchers sometimes suspiciously serve other causes that they champion. Dr. Mack has argued that aliens are bearing a message about impending destruction of the earth by warfare and pollution. In 1982, Dr. Mack co-founded the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age, now called the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which is affiliated with the Harvard Medical School.
* The look of aliens has clear links to cultural factors. In Great Britain, one presenter noted, aliens typically were tall, blond Nordic beings -- until the appearance in 1987 of Whitley Strieber’s best-selling novel Communion. After that, the British began to see aliens that closely resembled the novel’s jacket illustration. It was of the now-archetypal alien: a short humanoid with large head, hairless skin, and bulging eyes.
Several rationalist explanations of abduction experiences also were aired at the meeting. One was that they stem from “hypnagogic” and “hypnopompic” states. These are half-sleep, half-waking states, experienced by an estimated 4 to 8 per cent of Americans. They produce such symptoms as hyperventilation, paralysis, and fearfulness, and other kinds of sensory exaggeration including auditory hallucinations, coldness, and tingling. They may also cause auto-erotic asphyxiation, which skeptics here hypothesized may give rise to the sexual elements in abductees’ fantasies.
To try to gain some small purchase on the skeptics’ credence, Dr. Mack often employed a conciliatory tone, perhaps that of a therapist adept at guiding a patient to new insights.
He too, he said, initially was “intensely skeptical.” Yet, he said, the reports were unlike anything he had seen in 40 years of practice and research: “It is an authentic mystery for me.”
He phrased many of his statements as questions, particularly on the subject of why abductees are disparaged and have very few champions in academe.
“Why so much vehemence in all this, in these attacks? Why so much certainty in something that is so difficult, ambiguous, full of data that is hard to evaluate, not very well studied? Are we dealing here with some kind of epistemological totalitarianism?”
He outlined his own hypothesis: “I think we’re dealing with something which may not be of this world but enters into this world.”
He said he had consulted his childhood friend, Thomas S. Kuhn, the historian of science whose highly influential 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press), described the way scientific culture abruptly shifts to permit new frameworks for understanding.
“His advice to me was, suspend your categories -- inside/outside, real/unreal, exists/doesn’t exist, happened/didn’t happen -- and just collect information.”
His response to that advice, he said, was “to try to stretch my ontological boundaries into realms that are unknown and unfamiliar.”
Every culture except this one, he observed, has known there is an unseen world, “a world of other dimensions, other realities, that can cross over into our own world. Perhaps what’s unusual here is that when something crosses over and shows up in the physical world in another dimension, we don’t have anything in our scientific upbringing to deal with that.”
He quipped: “Sometimes I think of this alien-abduction phenomenon as a kind of outreach phenomenon for the consciously impaired.”
That drew appreciative chuckles. Dr. Mack had not yet exhausted the patience of the skeptics. But it was not an audience that would be won easily. At one point, one UFO-advocating panelist, trying to gauge the audience’s propensity for coming around, asked for a show of hands: Who believed in God? Only three hands went up, in an audience of perhaps 350. All three quickly and sheepishly were lowered.
Perhaps as a function of his conciliatory approach, Dr. Mack was less assertive about his arguments here than he is in his book.
Only when pressed by Mr. Kurtz, for example, did Dr. Mack acknowledge, as he states explicitly in his book, that he believed in reincarnation and in certain therapists’ ability to interpret individuals’ past lives.
At such moments, the prevailing civility of the gathering did break down. Dr. Mack did not appear to flinch at all. He sat quietly, a striking figure with features sharply defined on a somewhat leopard-like face. At one point, he mentioned Carl Sagan’s joke, that he won’t accept the idea of alien visitations until he sees a captain’s log from a UFO.
Among the skeptics, not all were amused. Mr. Kurtz, who is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, obviously exasperated, said: “In asking for evidence, we’re really consistent with the whole body of scientific methodology. Now if we were to abandon scientific methodology today, that would be another matter.”
Later Donna Bassett, a woman from North Carolina, addressed the group. Ms. Bassett had been a patient of Dr. Mack’s. In an unexpected presentation as dramatic as the testimony of a last-minute witness called by Perry Mason, Ms. Bassett described boning up on the literature of UFO abductions so she could fake abduction experiences, then infiltrate the UFO community to debunk them.
The many abductees she met were commonly needy, paranoid individuals, most of them leading unhappy lives, often after childhoods of great brutality. They spoke among themselves of telling Dr. Mack just what he wanted to hear, she said.
In response, Dr. Mack questioned Ms. Bassett’s claims. He speculated that she was “deeply troubled” and said he was not convinced by her claim that she was not an abductee.
