Date: Sat Jun 11 1994 14:14:00 Subj: Review of Abduction, 1/5 Big (Space) Brothers by Jero

Date:   Sat Jun 11 1994  14:14:00
From:   John Powell
Subj:   Review of Abduction, 1/5

==================================

Big (Space) Brothers by Jerome Clark

(March/April 1994, Volume 19, Number 2, IUR, International UFO Reporter,
Copyright 1994 by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 2457 West
Peterson Ave., Chicago, IL 60659, published bimonthly with a
subscription rate of $25/yr.)


John E. Mack, _Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens_.
        New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, April 1994. 432p.


        You have a sensitivity.... You pick up on things. You can talk
to the earth. The earth talks to you.... Listen to the earth.... You can
hear the anguish of the spirits. You can hear the wailing cries of the
imbalances. It will save you."

        Who is speaking here? No, not the well-tanned host of a New Age
infomercial. No, not some wacky tree-hugger. No, not one of Orfeo
Angelucci's space pals, though you're getting warmer, no doubt because
at some point in your life you read either Chapter Two of Angelucci's
The Secret of the Saucers (1955) or Carl Jung's discussion of same in
the epilogue to Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(1959).

        No, the communicator of the above-articulated twaddle is an
alien named "Ohgeeka" or "Ageeka," planet or dimension of origin
unspecified, in the newly published _Abduction_. The author,
psychiatrist and IUR contributor ("Helping Abductees," July/August
1992) John E. Mack, is - as most of you know by now - a Pulitzer
Prize-winning psycho-biographer (of T. E. Lawrence) and a professor at
the Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is friends with many
of America's brightest intellectual lights. He is also a friend of Carl
Sagan. He is, from all indications including my own limited experience
with him, a genuinely nice man. He is also a brave one. UFO research,
not for the faint of heart under the best of circumstances, is in Mack's
circles an all-but-unimaginable act of intellectual defiance.

        For these reasons and others, not the least of them its
publisher's fat promotional budget, _Abduction_ may be destined to
become the most widely read UFO book since 1987's _Communion_, with
which it has much in common, even down to rectal probes. Mack subscribes
to at least one of Whitley Strieber's views of the abduction phenomenon
(about which Strieber has entertained, at one time or another, virtually
every view it is possible for a single representative of Homo sapiens to
entertain): that abduction-generated terror and trauma are initiatory
ordeals at the other side of which one learns that the aliens are
sensitive New Age dudes. Ohgeeka/Ageeka would feel comfortable in the
company of Angelucci's ETs, who were given to saying things like, "Weep,
Orfeo. Let tears unblind your eyes. For at this moment we weep with you
for Earth and her Children. For all its apparent beauty Earth is a
purgatorial world among the planets evolving intelligent life. Hate,
selfishness and cruelty rise from many parts of it like a dark: mist."

ACTING WITH GOD

        To one of my tastes a little of this goes a long way. Yet such
misanthropy - which is what it amounts to - has had a enduring appeal
both to contactee-oriented saucerians and to ufologists (Donald Keyhoe
and Stanton Friedman, for two prominent examples) who have rejected
contactees but embraced their message: human race bad, alien visitors
good. If they do nothing else (and in my opinion they do do nothing
else), these notions supply aid and comfort to critics who contend that
scientific pretensions notwithstanding, UFO research is at its core a
religious quest. Stated this baldly, the claim misrepresents what UFO
research is about; worse, it is often employed as a rhetorical strategy
which enables critics to dodge the real scientific questions UFO
research raises. Still, the charge is true enough in some specific cases.

        Such as John Mack's. Here no extrapolation whatever is
necessary. You can find it in black and white, in one form or another,
on just about every page. Take page 200: "If, in fact, the alien beings
are closer to the divine source or anima mundi than human beings
generally seem to be, then it is possible that their presence among us,
however cruel and traumatic in some instances, may be part of a larger
process that is bringing us back to God." On page 329 Mack quotes
approvingly an abductee's assertion that the aliens are "acting with
God." The 13 abductees whose stories comprise the bulk of this long book
tell how that is supposed to be happening.

        Much of what we read here is the familiar abduction phenomenon
documented by Thomas E. Bullard, Budd Hopkins, David M. Jacobs, and, in
recent months, MUFON's abduction-transcription project (MUFON UFO
Journal, February and March issues). Much of the rest of it is unique,
or so it seems at first reflection, only in its prominence. In his
massive 1987 survey of more than 300 abduction narratives through 1985,
Bullard took note of an aspect he called "theophany," characterizing it
as the "strangest and rarest episode in abduction reports"; in such
encounters experients confront "seemingly divine powers." He found only
six insltances, and - as was not the case in other aspects of abduction
experience - few common elements among them.

        It is Kenneth Ring's _The Omega Project_ (1992) that _Abduction_
most resembles, at least in the overall conclusions it draws. Both books
are broadly speculative, but Ring's at least begins with empirical data
compiled from psychological testing of those he calls "UFO experiencers"
(UFOErs), including abductees, and it convincingly eliminates mundane
explanations (such as fantasy-proneness) before launching into a less
convincing attempt to link UFO andl other anomalous experiences
(primarily of the near-death variety) with planetary consciousness
expansion. Mack gives alternative explanations hardly more than a
sidelong glance. Nonetheless both his abductees and Ring's
anomaly-experiencers report an enhanced spiritual and ecological
awareness.

        Yet in Ring's book case histories appear only spottily, and
nearly always in fragments, so it is not clear how many of these are
really "abductions" as ordinarily understood or other kinds of
experiences, such as those associated with contactees. Most ufologists
have tended to treat abductions as a separate category of experience
from that claimed by contactees, for the same reason preabduction-era
ufologists saw CE3s as fundamentally different from contact stories.
Whereas CE3 witnesses reported little communication, seemed genuinely
troubled by the encounter, did not seek publicity, and generally had the
social profile of other kinds of UFO witnesses, contactees actively
sought meetings with angelic extraterrestrials, often had personal
histories in occultism (and sometimes confidence crime), and all too
keenly lusted after publicity and profit. There was nothing to link
contactees with UFOs as such. For them UFOs only provided a pop-culture
cover for a mystical vision or a money-making scheme. To most modern
ufologists abductions have seemed more a variety of CE3 than a
latter-day contact claim. Betty Hill, after all, is no George Adamski.


EVIDENCE ABSENCE

        But consider these words from Isabel Davis's classic essay "Meet
the Extraterrestrial" (Fantastic Universe, November 1957), in which she
outlined the difference between occupant reports (as CE3s were then
called) and contact claims: In the former, Davis observed, the aliens
"never communicate at all. They utter no lofty messages, no explanations
of ancient riddles, no admonitions, warnings, reassurances, prophecies,
or esoteric doctrine."

        Mack's abduction humanoids do virtually all of the above. His
cases fuse themes from CE3s (not-human entities doing not-human things)
and contact claims (benevolent New Age aliens working to save earth and
earthlings) . From simply a narrative point of view, Mack's accounts
aren't nearly so boring as the latter, but they are less credible than
the former. The best-documented CE3s (Valensole, Socorro,
Kelly-Hopkinsville, Boianai) cause us to think anomalous events of some
kind occurred, whereas Mack's informants, the sincerity of all of whom I
am prepared to grant, are telling wild and fantastic stories of the sort
I think of as experience anomalies - tales of extraordinary encounters
which, if literally interpreted, would require us to reinvent the world;
yet even as they resist conventional accounting, they exist only as
memory and testimony. They may be authentic in some sense, but that does
not necessarily make them valid.

    In other words, to say that ordinary explanations fail - and so far
all proposed counterexplanations have indeed failed - ought not
therefore to give us free rein to reach for the most extreme possible
conclusions. Nonetheless Mack here demands as our response to these
tales nothing less than the wholesale rejection of the "Western
scientific/materialist world," an entity Mack, who possesses some
remarkable political opinions (about which more shortly), does not like
very much. He asks us to overturn the world as we know it because some
people tell bizarre yet curiously consistent stories, mostly under
hypnosis, and exhibit a marked degree of stress as they do so. They may
suffer, too, from permanent trauma for which there appears no other
cause than the one alleged: terrifying, intrusive encounters with
otherworldly beings.

        These considerations surely are sufficient to justify further
investigation but at this juncture not much more. And when some of these
same individuals erupt into past-life memories (or, in one instance,
"recall" being at the site of a Roswell-like UFO crash), the question is
not whether confabulation is going on but how much.

        There is some evidence here that something is going on beyond
hypnotically induced fantasy: a body of consciously recallled testimony,
a handful of independently observed UFO sightings which apparently
correlate with claimed abductions, a few abduction episodes in which
more than one eyewitness figures. But Mack makes little of these and
shows only modest interest in investigative efforts that require more
than interaction with abductees in his home or office, and so these
crucial issues, which touch on the basic question of whether anything
really happened, pass in and out of the text so quickly that the
inattentive reader risks missing them.

        As to other kinds of more direct evidence, Mack writes
complacently (p. 41), "The physical phenomena that accompany abductions
are important, but gain their significance primarily in that they
corroborate the experiences themselves; for the effects tend to be
subtle and would not by themselves convince a Western-trained clinician
of their meaning. For example, even though the abductees are certain
that the cuts, scars, scoop marks, and small fresh ulcers... are related
to the physical procedures performed on the ships, these lesions are too
trivial by themselves to be medically significant. Similarly, abductees
will often experience that they have been pregnant and have had the
pregnancy removed during an abduction, but there is not yet a case where
a physician has documented that a fetus has disappeared in relation to
an abduction." Analyses of alleged implants recovered from a small
number of abductees reveal nothing out of the ordinary.

        Right or wrong, one immediately obvious explanation for the
absence of significant physical evidence is that abductions are not
physical events but imagined ones. Mack, however, holds forth for a far
more extraordinary answer: To hope for conclusive physical evidence, he
says (p. 43), "may even be a sort of 'error of logical types.' In other
words it may be wrong to expect that a phenomenon whose very nature is
subtle, and one of whose purposes may be to stretch and expand our ways
of knowing beyond the purely materialist approaches of Western science,
will yield its secrets to an epistemology or methodology that operates
at a lower level of consciousness."

        I suppose this could be true, but I wouldn't count on it. To
start with, it starts on a slippery slope. From it one could plead for
just about anything, including - a cynic might have it - the existence
of the celebrated immaterial being named Santa Claus. All one has to do
is what Mack does here: assume that absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence. The assumption undercuts just about any hope for rational
inquiry and understanding. Moreover, where the larger UFO phenomenon is
concerned, it is demonstrably false. The open literature - not to
mention whatever classified technical reports there may be on the
Roswell debris - provides us with a body of impressive evidence
bolstering the hypothesis that UFOs are physical and extraordinarily
anomalous. Physical-trace and radar/visual cases are eminently
investigable and documentable via the methodology of Western science.

        In fact, as I have remarked elsewhere, ufologists pay heed to
the abduction phenomenon precisely because of its ostensible
relationship to the UFO phenomenon of CE2s, instrumented observations,
photographs, multiple witnesses, and trained observers. On its own the
abduction evidence is thin stuff, intriguing but inconclusive, resistant
so far to conventional psychiatric diagnosis but compromised by its
association with hypnosis - and now by the murky controversies over
false memories, Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), and the like. Mack does not
touch on these latter at all, not even long enough to deny, even
perfunctorily, their relevance to the abduction question. Yet as both
abductees and SRA "victims" come in droves out of the woodwork, both
claiming repressed memories in support of whose veridicality we have
only ambiguous supporting evidence (if that), a lot of sober reflection
seems in order.

        What _Abduction_ gives us instead is a good dose of Mack's
peculiar political beliefs, which one in due course suspects affect not
only his interpretation of the abduction question but his abductees' as
well. Worse, one fears that they influence the abpductees' sense of what
they experienced. The aliens Mack finds, in other words, turn out to be
the aliens Mack was looking for.

        These are not the alien abductors of whom Jacobs wrote in
_Secret Life_ (1992, p. 233): "They express no interest in [the
abductee's] personal, social, or family relationships, except as they
bear on the breeding program [the creation of alien/human hybrids]. They
express no interest in politics, culture, economics, or the rich and
extraordinarily complex tapestry that makes up human relationships and
societies. They do not ask even idle questions about this. They do,
howver, express interest in birth control, smoking, and health problems
that might directly relate to childbearing for women." From his own
group of abductees, Jacobs would conclude that the abductors have the
same relationship to abductees that laboratory technicians have to white
rats. Whatever courtesy or kindness they exhibit is simply to alleviate
abductees' fears and thus render them easier to manipulate.

        Jacobs's humanoids are recognizable cousins of the humanoids of
traditional CE3 lore. Mack's come out of the contactee universe. They
may be rougher in their methods than Adamski's Space Brothers, but they
are Space Brothers noneltheless, albeit with updated and more
fashionable concerns: pollution this time, not atomic bombs. Abductees
suffer terror, intense physical pain sometimes bordering on torture,
disrupted lives, anxiety, depression, anger, sexual violaltion and
attendant dysfunction, unsought pregnancies, and other miseries - but
all that's okay, according to Mack, because in the end these indignities
are for the ultimate benefit of individual abductees and the whole
darned human race, which direly needs to be saved from... well, you'll
never guess.


CULT OR DISEASE?

        I have met Mack once in my life, at a conference in Santa
Barbara, California, in November 1990. Though we talked about UFOs and
abductions, I remember practically nothing of what either of us had to
say on those subjects. I do, however, recall a conversation on another
matter of mutual interest, politics and world affairs. In the course of
that conversation, I understood Mack to say that anti-Communism is a
form of racism.

        I eventually decided I could not have heard him right. Otherwise
I would have been forced to conclude he subscribed to an opinion so
preposterous that only a Harvard professor could hold it. The rise of
totalitarianism in our century is one of the great tragedies of all
human history. Under Communism (in particular during the murderous
regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot) tens of millions of human beings
were killed, and those who managed to survive under it lived - and live,
in those places Communism survives, merely temporarily one hopes - in
controlled, oppressive circumstances. Not to oppose such evil seems to
me, as a democrat, a liberal, and a child of the Enlightenment, at the
very least an act of shocking moral obtuseness.

        My three-plus-year-old conversation with Mack came back to me as
I was reading _Abduction_, which is loaded with hand-wringing
pronouncements on humanity's failings versus the aliens' superior moral
wisdom. There is no question about what Mack regards as the supreme evil
of our era, and it is not totalitarianism, which is not once mentioned.
On page 10, introducing a theme to which he continually returns, Mack
remarks, "UFO abductions have been reported and collected most
frequently in Western countries or countries dominated by Western
culture and values. Insofar as the abduction phenomenon may be seen as
occurring in the context of the global ecological crisis, which is an
outcome of the Western materialist/dualistic worldview, it may be that
its 'medicine' is being administered primarily where it is most needed -
in the United States and the other Western industrial countries."

        All non-Western cultures are treated with appropriate piety.
Unlike the planet-plunderers of the Western-European tradition, American
Indians are "close to the earth," according to an alien (p. 287; these
words are supposed to have been uttered in the course of a UFO encounter
which occurred in a past life). Tibetan lamas and their Buddhist beliefs
show up here and there in the text, always in a context that depicts
them as victims of Western arrogance and ignorance, never - as in the
unblinkered truth - victims of a brutal Chinese Communist occupation
which threatens their culture far more gravely than any amount of
Western apathy ever could. Mack's selective telling of this sorry tale
has led my fiend and MUFON UFO Journal editor Dennis Stacy to speculate
that maybe Mack thinks the "rape of Tibet by the Chinese was actually
led by a secret cabal of corporate capitalists."

        If the aliens indeed are here to save the earth from
environmental apocalypse, they ought to direct their attention
elsewhere. It is not much needed in the West, where environmentalism
flourishes and plays a large role in public and private decision-making
about air, water, and land use, species preservation, and technological
development. protection of nature has become as much a Western value as
capitalism and democracy. The world's most egregious ecololgical horrors
are to be found in the nations and republics of the former Soviet empire
and in the Third World (for a disturbing account of what is happening to
thc ecology - and thus to the people - of Africa, read Robert D.
Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994).
In Third World states environmentalists are often themselves an
endangered species, harassed and on occasion even murdered by
governments or powerful private interests more concerned with
unrestrained exploitation than protection of natural resources.

        In any event, whatever else Mack would have you believe,
pollution is a consequence of industrialization, not of capitalism. In
the modern world, nations with free markets have, on the whole, the
cleanest environmental records. Maybe Mack's aliens just aren't doing
their homework.

        Throughout the book one reads accounts of appalling abuse of
human beings, including children, by alleged aliens. These accounts are
followed by the abductees' expression of love for, and even
identification with, their tormentors. Some even fantasize they
themselves are aliens; those who cannot make that imaginative leap
content themselves with the conviction that they are conduits through
whom the aliens' message will spread to those of us who have been
blinded by the Enlightenment. Mack approves wholly, even hinting that he
may be a part of the big cosmic game plan.

        Mack believes that you can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs. If one rejects the values of the Western tradition, one can excuse
the conduct of an all-powerful state, or an all-powerful alien
intelligence, which cannot be troubled to treat human beings with decent
regard. Cruelty counts as mere detail when the end is noble - as, of
course, tyrants and terrorists always say it is and sometimes even
believe it is. Those victims who embrace their tormentors bring to mind
the protagonist of Orwell's 1984; after prolonged torture and
overwhelming psychological assault, he decided he "loved Big Brother."
Is it any wonder that Mack's abductees love their Space Brothers?

        One may agree or disagree with Jacobs and Hopkins on whether
abduction experiences represent real-life interactions with
extraterrestrials. But one never doubts where their sympathies lie:
firmly on the side that favors the dignity of individlual human beings.
Their outrage is focused where it belongs. Mack's focus, on the other
hand, is severely blurred.

        The ontological status of abduction experiences is yet
undetermined, of course. Whatever else it may accomplish, Mack's book
should serve to remind us that it is dangerous to entertain "too much
ambition in our search for answers," as Bullard once remarked of
abduction research generally. "We are often better off settling for
small, obtainable answers along the way toward that big but distant
one."

        Serious abduction study is in its infancy. Let us let it grow
up. In the meantime, let it be said that the aliens Mack would have us
follow look not just unbelievable but undeserving of belief. One wishes
profoundly for their nonexistence or, barring that, their absence.