by Len Kasten
Forty-foot tunnel-boring machine
3
The Hall of Mirrors
To Budd Hopkins who led the way.
DEDICATION IN ABDUCTION BY DR. JOHN E. MACK
It has been awhile since we have heard from Dr. John E. Mack,*8 and many have wondered what he has been doing since his extraordinary book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens first burst on the scene in 1994. That book was greeted with gushing plaudits from such literary bastions as the New York Times. Among the adjectives used in the Times’ review were “absorbing,” “powerful,” and “touching.” It said further, “the abduction experience . . . is . . . as Dr. Mack understands, an aspect of something bigger . . . and a sign of an urgently needed individual and collective transformation.” Coming, as it did, from a respected Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner,†9 the book arrived with the patina of establishment respectability and was, in retrospect, the breakthrough event that transformed incidents perceived by the media and the masses as wild and somewhat wacky into phenomena deserving serious sociological and scientific scrutiny.
Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story had almost achieved that breakthrough. That book was near the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for six months in 1987. But then, two years later, came the movie based on the book, which somehow managed to throw the whole package into the pile labeled “Imaginative Horror Stories.” And no matter how many times Strieber assured us that it was a true story, that’s where it stayed, testifying once again to the awesome power of film to “make or break.” The Hollywood treatment of abduction incidents makes them subject to popular ridicule and usually destroys whatever fragile, tenuous grip they previously had on credibility.
Fortunately, the two books written by Budd Hopkins, Missing Time and Intruders, were never made into movies, although material from Intruders was used in a TV documentary in 1992. Hopkins was clearly the pioneer in bringing the abduction scenario before the public. However, because he is an artist, Hopkins just doesn’t have the credentials for this work, so he has been a very large target for all of the doubters and skeptics who seem to have made UFO debunking their profession. Slowly, his credibility has been chipped away despite his careful and thorough reporting. But because of Mack’s impeccable credentials and prestigious affiliations, Abduction has stayed in the spotlight. Consequently, until now, it has been perhaps the only credible foundation on which to base ultimate public acceptance.
In the late 1990s, Mack added a new dimension to his original work. His book Passport to the Cosmos takes us down the very hazardous, mine-strewn path of trying to make some sense of the abduction phenomenon. While Abduction is primarily a record of his hypnotic sessions with selected abductees with some added commentary, Passport to the Cosmos tries to put it all together. It builds on the work done in the previous book but takes on fully the challenge of interpretation. This is a challenge that several other great minds have taken up, and the opinions are very diverse. Unlike a jury trial where a verdict can usually be rendered from the available evidence, in this case the same evidence can lead to any of dozens of equally plausible conclusions. Or, as investigator Linda Moulton Howe has so succinctly summed it up, it is like being in “a hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor.”
Dr. John E. Mack
A NEW RESEARCH PARADIGM
Because of the importance of this long-awaited follow-up to Abduction, I interviewed Mack for Atlantis Rising. I hoped to get a sense of his motivation in writing the book and to get an update on his status with his academic colleagues. It may be recalled that although Abduction was reviewed enthusiastically in the popular press, it was greeted by a storm of criticism within the scientific community, ultimately compromising Dr. Mack’s status at the Harvard Medical School as an academic psychiatrist. A review by James Gleick in The New Republic magazine referred to the abduction phenomenon as a “mythology” and called it an example of the “anti-rational, anti-scientific cults that are flourishing . . . in the United States.” Psychoanalyst Sanford Gifford called it a “subversive assault on psychoanalysis as a science” and said that abductees are “‘crazy’ in the same way as believers in Creationism, faith-healing, and thought transference.”
Mack sums up all of these criticisms as coming under the umbrella of what he calls the “materialist paradigm.” It was Mack’s position in writing Abduction that this paradigm apparently no longer works, since it cannot be stretched to accommodate these phenomena. He says in his preface to the paperback edition, which he wrote in 1995, “The fact that what the experiencers are describing simply cannot be possible according to our traditional scientific view would, it seems to me . . . 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.” The plight of the enlightened researcher is probably best represented by a quote in Passport to the Cosmos by eminent Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor Victor Weiskoff, who reportedly said to theologian Houston Smith, “We know there’s more. We just don’t know how to get at it.” It was this dilemma that prompted Mack to found a new research organization called the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) in 1993 that would accommodate these types of experiences and that would be based on the premise that when dealing with phenomena that do not fit our definition of reality, we need a new way to study them. Ultimately, Mack concludes that his psychiatric training was the most useful preparation possible for interviewing abductees because psychiatrists are taught to use “not just our intellects, but our hearts and souls, our whole selves.” This method he refers to as “consciousness as an instrument of knowing.”
THE LIMITATIONS OF THREE DIMENSIONS
In both books, Mack says that no matter how incredible these abduction stories may seem, they are undeniably real experiences, and the abductees are perfectly sane. In answer to those who suggest that they may be dreams, he says, “The person realizes he or she was not asleep . . . they feel they have remembered something that actually occurred; the narrative has a logical sequence, however strange its content; and the episode, when recalled, or relived, may be accompanied by intense emotions and bodily reactions more usually associated with remembered events than with dreams.”
Coming from a psychiatrist, this is convincing enough. But scientific believability gets stretched when the abductees talk of “other dimensions.” They frequently report “being taken into another dimension or plane of reality with different properties.” In this other dimension, they usually experience time, space, and dimensionality in a different way. One abductee, Karin, who was interviewed by Mack, refers to this as “the fourth dimension.” Another says, “It was not a place like we have here, not in our space/time.” In this state, the experiencers frequently notice a change in perception, which several have attributed to an altered state of consciousness. They may see or hear things that others cannot see or hear. Apparently, the aliens somehow have the capability of increasing the vibratory rate of the molecular structure of the abducted person, which is probably experienced as being in another dimension. This explains how they are able to move people through solid windows and walls. Karin says, “It’s racking just to go through the window because they have to alter your vibration in order to get a solid object to pass through another solid object, literally. And that happens.”
None of this is very surprising to anyone familiar with UFO lore. For decades there have been reports of UFOs winking in and out of physicality. There is very little doubt now that the aliens have the ability to freely shuttle in and out of the etheric realm, where space/ time is collapsed, and this probably explains how they are able to travel such vast distances in short periods of time. While this concept may seem strange to scientists, it’s a cardinal precept to anyone into metaphysics and explains many otherwise inexplicable phenomena such as telepathy, remote viewing, astral travel, and astrology. It is this interdimensiona
l component of the abduction phenomena that keeps scientists at arm’s length. Yet the most recent trends in theoretical science, especially in quantum physics, are coming to that very place. Mack quotes theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who summed it up exquisitely in 1998, “There’s not enough room in the three dimensions that we’re familiar with to accommodate all of the forces of nature.”
Alien abductors as described
AN ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE
For just about everyone who believes in the UFO and abduction phenomena, the most important question is, why are they here? There is endless speculation about their intentions and the so-called alien agenda. In Passport to the Cosmos, Mack, after ten years of intensive research, has come to some categorical conclusions. He believes that the primary goal of the extraterrestrials is to save the planet from toxic doom. As a means to this end, they have undertaken the rapid transformation of humanity through an accelerated global expansion of consciousness, person by person. This, they evidently expect, will engender new attitudes toward cleaning up the environment and will ultimately bring about the necessary legislation.
Precisely how Mack arrived at such visionary conclusions from countless recitals of painful probings on spaceship operating tables is not entirely obvious at first glance but comes more into focus as we consider the personal testimonies and transformations of the abductees whom he has worked with, along with interviews with shamans from more primitive cultures. What is somewhat mystifying about this conclusion is the fact that, as Mack says himself, “generally speaking, experiencers do not appear, on the basis of their backgrounds, to be particularly likely candidates for becoming environmentalists.” However, the ETs may be counting on getting the message across through sheer numbers. According to a 1992 Roper poll, approximately four million adult Americans had been abducted. Extrapolating worldwide, the global number would have been around ninety-six million in 1992! Also, it is very likely that the aliens anticipated that these stories would get wide distribution in print, as they have indeed through Mack’s books.
The narratives of the cases Mack reports on in Passport to the Cosmos are filled with dire warnings and prophecies about the fate of the planet. Jim Sparks, one of Mack’s subjects, who claims he has been educated extensively on board the spaceships, says he has been shown “scene after scene showing mankind’s destructive ways and its impact on the environment.” Along with the visuals he also gets an accompanying telepathic message: “YOU ARE KILLING YOUR PLANET. YOUR PLANET IS DYING.” Sparks says he has attended “meetings” on the spaceships where he was told, “Your air, your water is contaminated. Your forests, jungles, trees and plant life are dying . . . You have an overwhelming amount of nuclear and biological . . . contamination. Your planet is overpopulated.” The aliens then told him that they had made agreements with world leaders to correct these conditions, but they had all been broken because “those in power” view such measures as “a military and security threat,” which is why they were now turning to “average” people.
Abductees are frequently shown visions of apocalyptic destruction where the aliens narrate “the sky will become dirty, the animals will vanish, the seas will turn into poisonous mud, water will be even more precious than gold.” They speak of tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, weather changes, worldwide sickness, clouds of static electricity, a pole shift, meteor showers, cities gone, rubble everywhere, and “God’s wrath exploding.” The abductees are given to understand that this will be a “cleansing.” Although it is unclear to them whether they are seeing actual future scenes or possible scenarios, the emotional impact is usually severe.
According to at least two of Mack’s abductees, the aliens confessed that they had destroyed the environment on their own planet through similar disregard and had to move underground, where they deteriorated physically, having previously resembled earthlings. According to Sparks, the aliens’ motives are less than altruistic and noble. He claims that they are harvesting Earth products for profits in other parts of the galaxy and are simply trying to protect their investment! Credo Mutwa, a South African shaman, agrees. He says, “They don’t love us. They need us . . . how will they get things from us if our bodies are dirtied with drugs and toxins from the air?” This brings us to the most incredible part of the story, and the most damaging to the alien claims of selfless service to mankind.
Mack devotes an entire chapter in Passport to the Cosmos to the alien program of hybrid development. It is now well established that for decades aliens have been impregnating Earth women with alien seminal seed, and in many cases collecting human sperm from men and using it to impregnate female aliens. In a typical case, they remove the human egg, add the alien component, and then reimplant the fertilized egg in the woman’s womb. They then let the pregnancy advance for three months, at which time they return to remove the fetus and transport it to their laboratories, where it is immersed in a fluid-filled incubator. For a full discussion of the hybrid project, see chapter 19.
NO PAIN, NO GAIN
In the chapter titled “Trauma and Transformation,” Mack takes the position that although the abductees may be terror stricken and traumatized initially, as they usually are, if they refuse to be victimized, confront the fear squarely, and take advantage of the opportunity for growth, ultimately their consciousness expands, and they become transformed. Does this mean that such transformation is the intended result of the experiences and that the aliens are using some sort of shock treatment to force us to grow up and save the planet? Isabel asks, “How do we know that [they] . . . aren’t using extreme emotions to help us grow?”
However, the evidence in Passport to the Cosmos strongly suggests that such transformation is a by-product of the experience—the result of a courageous reaction and the triumph of the human spirit over life-shattering and psyche-shattering events. The abductees testify that exposure to the fourth dimension, where the aliens basically reside, is, by itself, life transforming and that it demolishes previous illusions of our cocoonlike material existence. They also say that the comprehension of the immensity of a creation that includes such strange creatures with such marvelous powers is a powerful, mind-opening, and religion-confounding realization. Ultimately, the abductee becomes acutely aware of his or her own inner power. Karin sums it up nicely when she observes that the collapse of the barriers between dimensions allows one to become “very aware of your soul. You’re very aware of your higher consciousness, that thing inside of you that’s you.”
This means that individual growth is simply an unavoidable, unintended result of what the aliens are doing. It is beginning to appear that perhaps all the alien concern about an environmental apocalypse is really an elaborate, deceptive cover story to justify the hybrid program, and that perhaps Sparks is right—they are just trying to save the planet for themselves and the hybrids. Mack suggests, however, that, whatever their intent, this gives us the opportunity to seize on these events to our own advantage. He says, “The alien abduction phenomenon is largely an opportunity or gift, a kind of catalyst for the evolution of consciousness in the direction of an emerging sense of responsibility for our own and the planet’s future.” For those who believe that such jump-starting of consciousness expansion is a violation of natural progression and would therefore resist this invitation, I might point out that military reprisal does not appear to be an option at this point. However, worldwide acceptance of this reality might be the first step toward a solution, and both of Mack’s books will definitely help us reach that goal.
4
The Legacy of Jesse Marcel
Since it is virtually certain that these craft do not originate in any country on earth, considerable speculation has centered around what their point of origin might be and how they get here. Mars was and remains a possibility, although some scientists, most notably Dr. Menzel, consider it more likely that we are dealing with beings from another solar system entirely. Numerous examples of what appear to be a form of writing were fo
und in the wreckage. Efforts to decipher these have remained largely unsuccessful.
EISENHOWER BRIEFING DOCUMENT,
NOVEMBER 18, 1952 (SEE APPENDIX)
THE ROSWELL BUNNY
It’s a controversy that refuses to go away. Now, sixty years later, the mystery of Roswell continues to intrigue and fascinate and provoke strong reactions, perhaps even more so lately than in the beginning. As with the Kennedy assassination and the Energizer Bunny, the Roswell dispute just “keeps going and going and going.” Mark Larsen, communications category manager for Energizer, says, “The Bunny has become the ultimate symbol of longevity, perseverance and determination.” But I would say that Roswell now trumps the Bunny. It wins hands-down in longevity, and dogged determination and perseverance are abundant on both sides of the debate.
Just when it seems that public interest has waned and the incident has been relegated to the obituaries, something comes along to jolt it right back to the front page. First there was the Showtime television movie Roswell, starring Martin Sheen. Then there was New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff ’s investigation and the outrage and renewed suspicion it provoked when it was found that the Air Force had destroyed all the relevant documents. Then came the blockbuster—the book The Day After Roswell by Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes. In 1995 the television documentary The Roswell Incident breathed new life into the believer cause. Also keeping it in the news were the several clumsy efforts by the Air Force to explain it away, starting with the famous “Mogul balloon” gambit and culminating in the notorious “crash dummy” proposition, which, in terms of sheer absurdity, have now far surpassed the classic “swamp gas” and “planet Venus” explanations of UFO phenomena. Most recently, we have been treated to a theory that attempts to breathe new life into the crash dummies. In the book Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story by British UFO writer Nick Redfern, we are seriously expected to entertain the possibility that the bodies found at the crash site were not dummies at all but “deformed, handicapped, disfigured, and diseased” Japanese POWs, still in U.S. custody despite Japan’s official surrender two years earlier, who were being used in experiments in high-altitude survivability by the Air Force, thus supposedly explaining their oriental features and diminutive size. And so the Roswell Bunny continues to bang his drum.
