Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

BACK in the 1950s space aliens were a straightforward bunch. By and large, they wanted little more than world conquest. Comfortingly, they were also imaginary. To be sure, there were those who claimed to have seen UFOs, but the aliens themselves remained elusive, `space brothers' of interest only to `contactees' such as `Professor' George Adamski, a California hamburger vendor with an extensive Venusian social circle.

However, by 1992 the B-movie bogeyman had become real, moving from Hollywood to the even stranger surroundings of a five-day conference at MIT organized by David Pritchard, an MIT physicist, and John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. A curious Courtlandt Bryan attended, and Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind recounts what he found. The aliens, it would appear, have been busy. The old stories of global domination have been replaced by tales of abduction `recalled' by hundreds of people and, this time, believed to be true.

Most of these recollections are strikingly similar. The luckless victims are transported to the alien craft, where they are subjected to various unpleasant medical procedures associated with some sort of breeding program. Even worse, the aliens seem to have embraced a lunatic environmentalism worthy of our Vice President, raising once again the question of where Mr. Gore is really coming from. The aliens that have been seen come in a number of shapes and sizes, but, somewhat suspiciously, in the United States they mainly resemble those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In general they are spindly creatures, about four feet in height, grey-skinned with large, black, tear-shaped eyes. These `small greys' are often said to be supervised by a `doctor,' a larger grey-skinned humanoid.

The good news, if you are over thirty, is that if you have not been abducted by now, it's not likely to happen. The aliens are said to focus on younger people, with abductions often beginning in childhood. The bad news is that you may already have been abducted but just cannot remember. The aliens, it is believed, tend to `mask' memories of abductions. It is only recently that these memories have begun to surface in significant numbers. Often the stories emerge painfully in therapy sessions such as those conducted by John Mack, sometimes, but not always, using hypnotic regression techniques. The aliens, it is claimed, have abducted hundreds of thousands of people.

Mr. Bryan himself makes little attempt to judge the phenomenon. He simply, and at times vividly, describes the conference sessions and the people he met. The book also features fairly lengthy interviews with some of the participants, as well as all too brief synopses of some of the competing theories. The broader UFO debate is also well covered in passages that range from a discussion of the tantalizing early sightings to the increasingly ornate conspiracy theories that now infest the field. In a book that has room for not merely one but two supposed UFO crashes near Roswell, New Mexico, it would have been good to hear more from the skeptics, but Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind provides an excellent, if somewhat uncritical, introduction to the whole subject.

The reader also benefits from the fact that, throughout, Bryan managed to retain both his sense of humor and his open mind. Told of an organization of worlds run by `Zar,' he had to `fight the steadily growing conviction that [his] abductee dinner companion was crazy as a loon.' He steels himself to remain nonjudgmental, for `Zar would want that.'

Mr. Bryan, by his own account, wishes to believe that aliens are coming our way. As the abductees tell it, however, this may not be a pleasant experience. Their eerie stories dominate his book. In the end Bryan is not convinced that the abductees experienced extraterrestrial visitations, but he did `come away a believer in the sincerity and merit of their quest.'

This must be right. Whatever it is, this phenomenon warrants serious, dispassionate investigation. Sadly, this is something that, judging by this book, it did not get at a conference that seems to have been part revival meeting, part Geraldo, and part public therapy. When Dr. Mack declares that `we must rethink our whole place in the cosmos,' he is interrupted by a standing ovation.

Abduction, Dr. Mack's best-selling but drearily written book, published in 1994 and recently released in a revised paperback edition, is not much more enlightening. Here abductees tell their stories to the sympathetic Dr. Mack, who turns to metaphysics for a solution. `Western' science, we learn, `relies primarily on the physical senses and rational intellect.' As such, concludes the Harvard professor, it is a `restricted way of knowing' incapable of rising to the challenge posed by the abduction experience. Well, of course. Something about the way Dr. Mack uses the word `Western' signals that he is going to come to that conclusion.

John Mack moves quickly. He started meeting abductees in 1990. By April 1992 he was in India discussing these matters with `Tibetan leaders.' A month or two later he told the MIT conference that he had `kind of moved away from trying to persuade the mainstream culture of the validity of this phenomenon.' If his scientific forebears had shown such perseverance, we would still be living in caves.

Dr. Mack is careful to state that he is not `presuming that everything [the abductees] say is literally true.' Nevertheless he writes of his `growing conviction about the authenticity of these reports . . . No plausible alternative explanation . . . has been discovered.' He forgets, however, that these are early days in the exploration of this phenomenon. Alternative explanations, if not as yet entirely satisfactory ones, already abound. It seems, for example, that acute psychotic episodes and temporal-lobe dysfunction can produce impressions akin to those recalled by an abductee, albeit without the generally flimsy corroboration that sometimes exists in the abduction cases.

It is also necessary to look at the relationship between the abductee and his or her therapist. Dr. Mack is clearly sensitive to this point, which he discusses at increased length in the revised, and more cautious, version of his book. Interestingly, a good number of the `hypnosis' or `regression' sessions featured in the original edition are now described as `relaxation' sessions, while some patients' `trances' have become `altered states of consciousness.'

Dr. Mack would disagree, but these are, one suspects, distinctions without much of a difference, in which case the ``reality status' (to use his phrase) of the abductees' memories must be even more questionable. In 1985 the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs warned that ``recollections obtained during hypnosis not only fail to be more accurate but actually appear to be generally less reliable than recall.' Hypnosis does, however, appear to increase the subject's confidence that something real is being remembered, whether or not it be the case.

Many abductee stories are uncannily similar to one another, something that struck Dr. Mack from the beginning. Charles Mackay, the splendidly acerbic author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), would not have been so surprised. Writing of medieval witchcraft trials, he noted that `the great resemblance between the confessions of the unhappy victims was regarded as a new proof . . . but this is not astonishing . . . the same questions . . . were put to them all, and torture never failed to educe the answer required by the inquisitor.'

`Relaxation' with the undoubtedly kind-hearted Dr. Mack is far removed from a torture session in a European dungeon. Nevertheless the question remains. Do abduction therapists somehow `lead' their patients into giving, consciously or otherwise, the sort of answers the patients think their therapists want to hear? Dr. Mack appears to concede that this could occur, but not in his sessions, even if they sometimes are, as he puts it, `co-creative.'

If the impact of `co-creativity' on a `memory' is uncertain, what is the effect of that memory on the rememberer? This is a crucial difference between the UFO controversy and the abduction controversy. The existence of UFOs is generally no more than a fascinating mystery, even to those who may have seen them. However, for those who believe that they, and sometimes their children as well, are being repeatedly abducted for use in an alien breeding experiment, it is difficult to argue that life must simply go on. The therapist who encourages or sustains these beliefs is taking on a heavy responsibility, particularly given the somewhat fragile personalities of some of the abductees. Dr. Mack had two boys under age 3 in his own group of interviewees.

Ominously it was only on the last day of the MIT conference that these issues seem to have been discussed at any length. ``We must,' said one therapist, ``be able to demonstrate . . . that what we are doing is reasonable, safe, and effective.' This comment did not, apparently, merit a standing ovation. In fact, not only the abductees but the whole abduction mystery begs, in the words of David Pritchard, `for a careful and multidisciplinary investigation.' To John Mack, however, this would be just `fussing over whether we have got something real here.'

As Jung noted in his book on UFOs, `the Middle Ages . . . live on merrily.' In an increasingly irrational and anti-scientific America, `fussing' about what is real is just what is needed, although it will probably end up telling us more about ourselves than about any extraterrestrial visitors. The alternative will not take us to the stars, but it might take us to Salem.