Conference hydra::dejavu

1750.0. "Dr. John Mack Interview on Alien Abductions" by SONATA::RAMSAY () Thu Oct 15 1992 18:53

 *** The following is reposted from the UFO's file with permission. ***

From the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, October 11, 1992, (reprinted without
permission)

                               "ALIEN TERRITORY"

   John mack, a Harvard psychiatrist at the front lines of UFO abduction
   research, is convinced that abductees are not making up their stories:
   "I encountered something here that did not fit anything I had ever
   come across in 40 years of psychiatry."

John Mack still remembers the conversation he had with Carl Sagan, back in the
1960s.  Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was intrigued by talk
of UFOs and wanted to hear Sagan's thoughts on the subject, which had been the
focus of a recent, well-publicized government inquiry.

"Sagan had had something to do with the Condon Committee, which had reviewed
the whole question of UFOs," recalls Mack, "and he said, with great authority,
'There's nothing to it.  There's no substance to it.'  Well, Carl was an
authority figure to me, a prominent scientist and a friend, so I let it go."

And that was that, as far as Mack was concerned, until some 20 years later,
when a friend invited him to meet Bud Hopkins.  Hopkins, a New York artist and
sculptor, is one of the leading investigators of reports by individuals who
claim to have been abducted by UFOs.  "I said, 'Who's he?' - which shows you
how familiar I was with the phenomenon," says Mack.  When the friend explained
Hopkin's work, Mack responded, "What?  There must be something wrong with him
and the people he meets with."  But on January 10, 1990 -- Mack remembers the
date as if it were a birthday or anniversary -- the two men met and spent a few
hours discussing the cases Hopkins had researched.  The studies were compelling
and unlike anything Mack had come across in nearly 40 years of clinical
psychiatric work; he knew immediately that the final word on UFOs no longer
rested with Sagan and the Condon Committee.  "I came away somewhat shaken
and fascinated," he says of the meeting with Hopkins.  "It was a mystery.  I'd
never taken abductions seriously at all.  I realized at this point that this
was something I had no way to explain."

In the nearly three years since his meeting with Hopkins, Mack has joined the
front lines of abductee research.  He has investigated almost 70 cases of
abductions and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment.  He
has been the subject of a network docudrama.  He has been criticized by the
press and lashed out at by scientists.  He has organized support groups and
professional conferences.  He has also become convinced that abductees are 
not making up their stories - and that their experiences may present a shock
as great and transforming to the foundations of science as did Copernicus'
proof that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

"I encountered something here, very early on, which I saw did not fit anything
I had ever come across in 40 years of psychiatry," says the 63-year-old Mack,
founder of the psychiatric department at Cambridge Hospital (which is
affiliated with Harvard Medical School) and winner of a 1977 Pulitzer Prize
for his psychoanalytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia.  "The deeper I went
into it," he continues, "the more and more information I got that doesn't fit
anything else.  This has all kinds of implications for our scientific world
view, for our identity as a species on this planet."

Typically, Mack says, abductions are highly traumatic experiences, often
repressed and usually called forward only with great psychic pain and stress.
Almost always, individuals report seeing small, gray beings with huge, dark
eyes who transport their immobilized subjects to some sort of spacecraft,
where the captives are probed in a battery of tests that appear to relate to



                                    (2)


sexual and reproductive experiments.  Many abductees, or "experiencers,"
report a long history of abductions.  Mack has found that parents who have had
many experiences often find that their children become abductees as well.  In
almost every case he has investigated, he says, people are reluctant to face
what has happened.

"One of the most powerfully consistent aspects  of this for me has been the 
tremulousness with which these people come to see me," says Mack, who has a
contract with Scribner to write a book on his findings.  "They come to me very
fearful that either they will be found crazy, because what they've experienced
doesn't fit ordinary reality, or that they'll be found not to be crazy, and
then they're faced with the fact that these are real experiences, and what
does that mean for their world view, for their future, for their lives?"

Of the several dozen cases he has investigated, Mack says, only two or three
individuals suffer from some form of mental illness.  There is no particular
type of person who experiences abductions and no apparent reason why some
people are selected as abductees.  Among the people Mack has interviewed are
a musician, a prison guard, housewives, secretaries, a psychiatrist, college
students, a retired firefighter, and a restaurant owner.

Fundamental to Mack's convictions about these experiences is the fact that,
over and over, abductees -- who come from all over the country and do not know
one another -- tell remarkably consistent stories.  Details may vary, but the
narrative thread is so similar from case to case that Mack is convinced that
the experiences are not imagined.  If they were simply made up or were the
psychic byproduct of some other traumatic even, he says, the accounts would
vary more widely, because of the individuality of each human psyche.

"What struck me almost immediately," he says, "was my inability, as a
psychiatrist, to explain how people who seemed otherwise quite normal, quite
unremarkable, could be telling the same, disturbing story, in great detail:
of being taken from their rooms, their cars, in fields, into these craft and
subjected to highly intrusive procedures that have a unique quality.

"There's a whole medical-like scenario, which is not known to us on Earth,"
he says, "and yet it's told by people all over the country, in great detail,
details which were not available in the media at the time and are still not
in the media in the kind of detail these people reported.  And these stories
were consistent, one to the other.

"The thing I've spent most of my professional life in," says Mack, "is learning
to make clinical psychological discriminations, like, 'Is this projection?  Is
this hallucination?  Is this real experience?  Is this a dream?'  And this
[abduction phenomenon] behaves like real experience.

"I have _never_ had a sense, and I trust myself in this, clinically," he says,
"that this phenomenon represents some kind of psychological contagion, that
people are influencing each other, or that these experiences are derivative
of something they've read or heard from someone else, or that they're
reflecting off the consciousness of another person's experience.  I've never
had a suggestion of that."




                                    (3)


Although Mack's earliest cases were referred to him by Hopkins, increasingly
he is contacted by people who have read his comments in stories about UFOs or
have seen him interviewed on television.  (Mack tends to turn down interview
requests, because he believes too many reporters trivialize or sensationalize
abductee cases.)  After a recent conference at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology on the abduction phenomenon, cosponsored by Mack and MIT
physicist David Pritchard, Mack was contacted by a woman who had read a story
about the meeting and wanted to see him.

Unlike many experiencers, the woman could recall -- without hypnosis -- a
variety of alien contacts, going back to early childhood.  She could also
recount more current experiences of being visited in her home by aliens, who
came into her bedroom, floated her into the living room, and performed a series
of intensely painful explorations into her spine with sharp instruments.

More commonly, abductees report what Mack calls a "margin of consciousness,"
where memory recalls an experience to a certain point and then blanks out,
leaving individuals with chunks of unaccounted-for time.  Under hypnosis, a
practice criticized by disbelievers but defended my Mack as an important tool
for uncovering repressed information, experiencers are taken back to the last
moment they consciously remember, such as the appearance of a small being in
their bedroom or the presence of a blue light.

As details surface, an anguished mental struggle often occurs.  Mack cites the
case of a 38-year-old Pennsylvania man with a long history of abduction-
related experiences.   All the man could recall of one recent experience, which
began as he was trying to fall asleep, was the presence of a female alien in
the room.  (Abductees, says Mack, can almost always identify the sex of aliens,
despite the lack of obvious sexual characteristics.)

Like many who undergo hypnosis, the man resisted recalling the experience,
asserting that the aliens had told him not to remember what had happened.  The
man's story, says Mack, unfolded with "tremendous distress, sweating, and pain
and anguish."  There was also, he says, a great sense of shame and fear of
being vulnerable, which Mack worked to dispel, trying to reassure the man that
his experience was not a reflection of weakness but something over which he
had no control.

"And, at a certain point, there was a breakthrough," says Mack.  "He began to
sob.  It was so touching, because he'd been fighting with himself and with his
unconsciousness, and at that point, he crossed a line and just let go.  It was
just this tremendous release."

What unfolded during the narrative was a story common among abductees, one Mack
had suspected in this particular case because of the shame and vulnerability
the man had expressed.  Like many male abductees, the man recalled that he had
been taken onto a craft, where he was sexually probed and a sperm sample was
forcibly taken from him.

Mack says that another emotion surfaced, common among experiencers.  "I've
seen it so many times now," he says.  "It's a sobbing  that goes along with a
sense of awe.  Have you ever been moved by something in nature or something in
art or music?  It's like you're humbled before God, you're just so moved by
the spectacle, by the awesomeness of what's before you.  It was that quality
[in the man's sobbing], a combination of relief and awe.  And the awe had to
do with, Oh, my god, what an extraordinary thing it is that has happened to me.



                                    (4)



"Again, it's a question of clinical judgment," he says.  "When memories come
back like that, I never have any question that these people are describing
something that has authentically happened to them.  If I do get a case, as I
occasionally do, where I feel somebody is looking to convince themselves or me
that they were abducted, I don't count those cases.  I don't include them
among the authentic ones."

Since beginning his research nearly three years ago, Mack has established a
support group that meets at his Brookline home once a month.  In the quiet of
his wood-paneled, book-lined living room, 20 to 30 people share their stories,
often expressing great relief at being able to talk to others who have been
through the same thing.  Their stories coincide on many levels: They talk
about the presence of light and the ability of the aliens to transmute into
sheer light force.  Often the light is connected with healing; abductees say
that fevers and other illnesses disappear as a result of an abduction.  Many
say that a vibrating energy courses through their bodies when aliens take them
from their homes.  Physical marks are often left on experiencers' bodies: small
incisions or scoop marks, which appear to be the remnants of surgical
procedures.

Overwhelmingly, woman and men recall sexual encounters and experiments.  A
wide variety of reproductive stories abound, with many women claiming to have
been impregnated by aliens, who then remove the embryo immediately or on a
subsequent abduction.  Some women say their captors have taken them to
nurseries where hybrid babies are being raised.

Mack is well aware that the stories stretch the bounds of credibility.  And
he knows that, like Hydra, every theory about abduction leads to a dozen new
questions.  Yet he is undeterred in his conviction that the abduction
phenomenon cannot be dismissed.

"No one has been able to come up with a counter-formulation that explains
what's going on," he says.  "But if people can't be convinced [that this is
real], that's okay.  All I want is for people to be convinced that there's
something going on here that is not explainable.  That something is entering
these people's lives that we don't understand.

"If we can be in that place of not knowing," he adds, "we're likely to learn
more than if we try to stick this here, or stick it there, or if we close our
minds and try to keep this under control."

The outrageous headlines are familiar to anyone who has ever stood in line at
a supermarket checkout lane.  Claims such as "Aliens Endorse Clinton" --
recently trumpeted on the front page of one popular tabloid -- crop us as
regularly as Elvis sightings and appearances of the Abominable Snowman.

Mack is somewhat resigned to it all.  He knows, thanks to the highly dramatic
nature of aliens and abductions, that there will always be an insatiable
appetite for alien stories in the tabloid press and on tabloid-type television
shows.  Lately, though, he's begun to see signs that the media and a growing
number of academics and scientists are starting to pay slightly more serious
attention to the abduction phenomenon.




                                    (5)


In the past few months, he says, he has been interviewed for a lengthy
upcoming _New Yorker_ story and has participated in a Canadian Broadcasting
Corp. program -- a Canadian equivalent of _Nova_ -- that will air this fall.
Mack has also been contacted by philosophers, theologians, young psychologists
who want to work with him, a molecular chemist, and a graduate student in
educational psychology who wants to do her thesis on the abduction phenomenon.
("That's a very good indicator, when people in academic degree programs want
to do their thesis on something," notes Mack.  "Then you know it's reached
a level of legitimacy.")  He has also met with a "quite prominent" Harvard
physics professor, who was "very interested and very open" but said he
couldn't talk about the abductions "around here" - meaning the building on
campus where the professor teaches.

"Little by little, people are coming into this thing," says Mack, whose work
with abductees is partially supported by small grants from private foundations.
"It's still not the way a young person can make a career in mainstream academic
institutions, but it's a very exciting field.  I  have a kind of faith that
if you really are truthful about what you see, and you do your work with
integrity, that people will eventually come around.  If they don't come to the
point of agreeing with it, at least they'll begin to notice it."

Mack, however, is well aware of the fact that physical scientists dismiss his
work out of hand.  Those critics, he contends, simply haven't explored the
evidence or are too bound by the conventions of science to consider information
that is not strictly measurable by machines or the physical senses.  When
doubting colleagues listen to the tapes of sessions with abductees and spend
time with him, discussing his research, Mack says, "they tend to be staggered
by the phenomenon."  And while those colleagues may not become believers, he
continues, "Some of them say, 'I've gone from atheist to agnostic on this.'"

Dr. Edward J. Khantzian is one of those colleagues who have heard Mack present
his data and calls it "very, very compelling stuff."  Khantzian, an associate
clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School at the Cambridge
Hospital, says that Mack "has taken a lot of disbelievers and had us scratching
our heads, wondering what is this that he's studying.  He's at least made a
lot of us stop and think again, which is what he's always done.

"I don't know what to make of it ultimately, and I'm basically somewhere
between being a disbeliever and an agnostic," says Khantzian, who has worked
with Mack for nearly 30 years.  "But, as far as I can tell, he's operating as
a careful clinician in these studies, and that's what I respect.  I don't
understand it, I'm still dubious, but I respect his right to search it out to
the fullest."

Mack takes most comments from doubters and skeptics in stride.  But the
generally soft-spoken psychiatrist does become incensed by the flat dismissal
of abductees's stories by disbelievers, a rejection that Mack says only helps
add to a sense of isolation already felt by traumatized abductees.  "It's
demeaning to those people to think that they are somehow subject to some kind
of perceptual distortion or make-believe," says Mack.

"People know what they see, they know what their perceptions are," he insists.
"That what they saw or what they experienced requires some explanation which
we don't now have, that's another story."



                                    (6)



As far as Mack in concerned, the search for answers has to include the
possibility of a reality not yet perceived by science.  At its most radical,
notes Mack, the practice of modern science has led to such things as the SETI
project, a $100 million National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission
formally known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  Scheduled
to begin tomorrow, the project relies on radio telescopes to search the
universe for signs of intelligent life beyond planet Earth.

Mack argues that abductees' reports point to an intelligence that can obviously
elude man-made machines, no matter how sophisticated - and to a world that
exists not somewhere out there in the physical universe, but in an entirely
different dimension.

"In the experience of the abductees," he says, "the aliens seem to come from
another dimension.  They seem to break through our sense of the reality of
this space-time physicalist world, to come from some other place.  Abductees
will describe the senses of space and time collapsing, or of coexistent
multiple time dimensions.

"They have the feeling that they have been introduced to another universe
which is just as real as this one, but which is other-dimensional," he says.
"It's as if it's a dimension that seems to enter our physical world but is not
necessarily _of_ our physical world."

Although he admits that such possibilities have yet to be proven by the
physical sciences, Mack laments what he calls "the unwillingness of the
official intellectual community to be open-minded about a reality that doesn't
fit their world view."  As he sees it, the abduction phenomenon could
ultimately present mankind with a "fourth blow" to its collective ego.  The
first, he says, was the Copernican blow, which proved that man and Earth were
not the center of the universe; the second blow was administered by Darwin,
whose findings on evolution proved that man did not spring from "some higher
level of spiritual biology"; and the third blow was delivered by Freud, whose
explorations of the unconscious revealed that man's conscious mind was not
all that was in control of his life.

Mack says he still has no answers about what the abductions mean or why they
happened.  Although some researchers in the field believe that the primary
purpose of the kidnappings is to carry out some form of breeding program,
Mack sees a more transformational element to the abductions: an attempt to
alert humans to the need for change in their lives.

Abductees frequently report that during their time on alien spacecraft, they
are shown powerful visual images of environmental destruction on Earth.  Many
return with a passionate commitment to protect the planet.  Mack interprets
the warnings, and the increased awareness among individual abductees, as an
attempt to reconnect humans with a heightened sense of spirituality.  It's
a quest, he says, best summed up by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote:

     That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have
     courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most
     inexplicable that we may encounter.  That mankind has in this sense
     been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are



                                    (7)


     called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death and all
     those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying
     been so crowded out of life that the senses by which we could have
     grasped them are atrophied.  To say nothing of God.

Other civilizations, including Eastern and native cultures, have been far
more fluent that the West in communing with experiences that defy understanding
in terms of physical reality, says Mack.  He argues that the Western world of
the past few hundred years may have reached a dead end of sorts - and that the
abductee experience may be part of a move away from the strict confines of
materialism.

"It may be that we're on the brink of some kind of major opening to our proper
place in the universe," muses Mack.  "I think, in this society, we're involved
in a major epochal shift.  I don't know what the purpose of all this is, but
it certainly is some kind of profound connecting of us beyond ourselves.

                <<< WIDGET::DKA200:[NOTES$LIBRARY]UFOS.NOTE;1 >>>
                                   -< UFOS  >-
================================================================================
Note 158.12                  Dr. John Mack Interview                    12 of 13
SONATA::RAMSAY                                        8 lines  15-OCT-1992 15:19
                          -< I've met an abductee... >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The movie "Communion" deals with abductions.  When recently describing
    that movie to an acquaintance, she told me that she herself has been
    abducted.  I asked her to describe a few things, such as what the
    aliens look like and the circumstances of the abduction; she described
    what had been depicted in the movie.  I feel she was telling me her own
    personal experience (she said she had not seen the movie, and I believe
    her). She had only told one other person about the abduction (her
    husband) until I brought up the subject.

Permit me to wax sleptical for a moment:

Dr Mack has enjoyed a reasonably successful career on the staff of
Harvard University -- certainly nothing to be ashamed of. At 63, he now
faces the prospect of retirement. Surely a little income to augment his
university professor's pension would be welcome. And what better source
of additional retirement income than a juicy book? The professor's
sudden interest in the UFO abduction phenomenon could have been
motivated by - shall we say - some extracurricular factors.

On the other hand, I've seen a UFO myself (from a great distance, anyway) ...

    This certainly does seem to imply that *something* very interesting is 
    going on.
    
    Yet there must be some other factor than just 'gathering data to
    study the phenomenon,' to motivate Dr. Mack to make such firm conclusions
    based on his clinical judgement of subject testimony.   Certainly,
    if it is demonstrated that beyond a shadow of a doubt 'we are not
    alone,' and 'transdimensional travel is a reality,' the two big
    discoveries he is implying he is contributing to, it would have 
    a great psychological impact on many people.  But he just seems to lay
    on the psychological impact part so thick that he is reminiscent to me of
    other, less credible sources of similar information.  And the
    credibility of his judgement of other people's perceptions
    is what the entire story hinges around.
    
    I would think that someone in a position under such scrutiny would be more 
    careful about how they express such dramatic and controversial 
    conclusions, especially being based as they are on clinical psychiatric
    judgement alone, unless they were specifically seeking publicity or had
    gotten caught up in the issue way beyond the likelihood of being able
    to maintain objectivity.
    
    Certainly, the possibility of alien abductions isn't unknown to the 
    public at large and Dr. Mack's data alone isn't all that convincing, so 
    why is he waving it so boldly and confidently unless, as Mike implies,
    he is looking for more than just to contribute to our knowledge of
    the universe.
    
    Of course, I'm resting my judgements on the same kind of psychological
    assessment that Dr. Mack's story rests on, and he's obviously better
    qualified.  :-)
    
>Permit me to wax sleptical for a moment:
    
    Careful, Mike, those slepticals get slippery when waxed !
    
    								todd

>>Permit me to wax sleptical for a moment:
    
>    Careful, Mike, those slepticals get slippery when waxed !

Hmm, clearly a froidian skip! Thanks, Todd :-)

And now, back to your regularly scheduled notesfile discussion ...

Both my wife and I have participated in Dr. Mack's group sessions and have
both undergone regression therapy for suspected abudction-like experiences.

I can't comment on Dr. Mack's motivations, certainly writing a "juciy" book 
might afford future revenue, however from what I've seen he doesn't appear
to need income. My feeling is that he's genuinely interested in the subject
due to the things that have been revealed by the work. He stresses that in
his field of competance there are only a handful of people who are willing to
consider anything other than a stock response which typically is to look for
any evidence of child sexual abuse, when that isn't apparent it's still the 
stock explanation used by the majority of mental health professionals.

Over in UFO I shared some of my family's experiences with this. I'm not
certain which note it is however.

There is something going on, I do not claim that aliens are to blame but there
is a consistant experience amoung "experiencers" that indicates a common 
experience. Believe me if you had experienced this type of thing as we have
you might feel like I do, I'd rather not believe.

dave

 >There is something going on, I do not claim that aliens are to blame but there
>is a consistant experience amoung "experiencers" that indicates a common 
>experience. 
    
    My opinion, okay ?  Recall that many of the abductees' stories have to
    do with the aliens and sexuality and reproduction.  I submit that 
    there is indeed a common experience among 'abductees'.. it's called 
    childhood sexual abuse.
    
    It's commonly known to counselors that abused children internalize the
    abuse, since otherwise Dad and/or Mom is a monster, and that's too
    threatening to the child's psyche.  The implicit and explicit sexual
    content of hypnotized abductee's stories (recall that this stuff is
    buried so deep that hypnotic regression is required) leads me to 
    believe strongly they're relating not an alien abduction, but childhood 
    sexual abuse.  
    
    Since the rule that 'Dad and Mom are good' never gets rescinded, the 
    psyche still attempts to shield itself by projecting the sexual abuse 
    on alien monster figures in a spaceship.. an image that we all have 
    from sci-fi movies.. as children.
    
    karl moeller
    

    re: .6,
    I was thinking yesterday along similar lines as Karl (and I'm glad he
    said it first, thanks).  The remarkable commonality of experience, 
    sometimes down to tiny details, among such a diverse group of people
    seems to me to have been a big part of what led to Jung's major postulate 
    of the collective unconscious (although I think he attributed that loosely 
    to the now largely discredited theory of Lamarckian evolution, rather than 
    to common patterns in actual experience).
      
    Whether the alien abductions are real, or this is a psychological
    phenomena, it is fascinating and I think well worth looking further
    into.  If the psychological theory is true, and this is a common way
    of expressing the experience of childhood sexual abuse, or similar
    kind of pattern, maybe it could shed some new light on other kinds of
    information sometimes dug up during therapy, like past lives and
    such.
    
    One counter idea though, I'd think that someone with Dr. Mack's
    experience would have thought of this possibility himself, and
    tried to verify it somehow with personal histories ??
    
    							todd

    At the MUFON conference, Dr. Mack stated that in many of his cases, 
    there was no history of child abuse.  
    
    	From Dr. Mack's article for the Noetic Sciences Review..page. 9
        Article is titled - "Other Realities, The Alien Abduction
    	Phenomenon."
    
    	(excerpt)
    	What's Going On ? 
    	Current Theories
    	
    	Current theories include psychiatric, psychosocial/cultural,
    	extraterrestial explanations, and what might be called the 
    	hypothesis of "other dimensions of consciousness".
    
    
    	.Psychiatric:
    	No clear pattern of mental illness has emerged, though psychiatric
    	disturbances may exist among abductees, related or unrelated to the
    	abduction history.  I have been struck by how *little* mental 
    	illness manifests among abductees, considering the often life-long
    	nature of the abduction phenomenon and its disturbing intensity. 
    	Many of the abductees suffer from the symptoms of post-traumatic
    	stress syndrome, but it is not clear, other than what abductees 
    	report, what the traumatizing event might be.  It is difficult to 
    	conceive of a post-traumatic clinical picture which arises entirely
    	from within the psyche.  Child abuse, including sexual abuse, has 
    	been considered as a possible source, but does not appear to
    	account for the syndrome in any of my own or other researcher's cases. 
     	(end)
    
	btw:
    	If anyone wants a copy of the paper, I'll be glad to make copies
    	and send them off, but its too long to type in.... 
    

   >John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist 
    
    a) as a longtime consumer of mental health services, I wouldn't go to a
    Ph.D psychiatrist if he/she paid ME.  
    
    b) it takes special training, empathy and years of experience to help a
    sexual abuse/ritual abuse survivor out of the pit of their Post
    Traumatic Stress Disorder.. 
    
   >.. at the front lines of UFO abduction research, 
    
    Motivation affects perception and he seems to be finding what
    he's looking for; abduction stories.
    
    >.. is convinced that abductees are not making up their stories
    
    That's right.. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is caused by actual, life
    threatening events.  It's just that the tabloid mentality would rather
    buy the story that our WOMEN are ABDUCTED BY ALIENS (in upper case)
    than the much more reasonable concept that the conscious and
    unconscious mind is very good at protecting itself.. and its image of
    Dad and/or Mom as good.
    
    karl

    re: .8,
    	I just started Dr. Kenneth Ring's _Omega_Project_, where he
    	compares measured and survey data from a number of 
    	Alien Abduction reporters, and also Near Death Experience
    	reporters.  I haven't finished it yet, but so far what
    	I've read from his work seems to also support the information
    	in .8, that childhood trauma is strongly implicated as 
    	a causal factor, but probably neither neccessary nor sufficient of 
    	itself.  Dr. Ring proposes the theory that the childhood trauma
    	is a factor in sensitizing people to whatever the actual
    	external stimulus is that prompts the abduction experience and
    	also to whatever prompts the near death experience in some people
    	and not others in similar situations.  
    
    	Ring doesn't theorize on what is actually happening to the people 
    	during the abduction, but focuses on the predisposing factors
    	and the aftermath of the experience.
    
    	He concludes that these two classes of experience, very different
    	in some ways, are also strikingly similar in at least two areas :
    
    	1.  The predisposing tendencies of people to have the experience
    		(compared to a control group that is 'interested' in the
    		phenomena but never had the experience).  This is 
    		broken down into distinct personality and psychological
    		profiles.
    
    	2.  The effects of the aftermath of the experiences, in terms
    		of observed psychological effects, physiological effects, 
    		reported subjective changes, and behavioral changes.
    
    	I should also mention that Dr. Ring's interpretations (and the very
    	name of his project, from Teilhard de Chardin) run a bit to the 
    	esoteric.  But his results are fascinating, even without
    	the 'spiritual evolution' hypothesis he seems to favor.
    
    							kind regards,
    
    							todd