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Imserba Webstore - Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens
![Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens]()
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List Price: $22.95
Our Price: $22.95
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Manufacturer: Wheeler Publishing
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.942
EAN: 9781568950822
Format: Large Print
ISBN: 1568950829
Label: Wheeler Publishing
Manufacturer: Wheeler Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 683
Publication Date: 1994-12
Publisher: Wheeler Publishing
Studio: Wheeler Publishing
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Editorial Reviews:
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THE PROVOCATIVE BESTSELLER--THE MOST RIVETING ACCOUNT EVER PUBLISHED ON ALIEN ABDUCTION
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNER
John E. Mack, M.D.
"Fascinating, suggestive, and even inspiring."
--The New York Times Book Review
"A TRANSCENDENT, LANDMARK WORK...An extraordinarily rich and strange mind-expanding book.--Boston Herald
When respected Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, M.D., first published these astonishing results of four years of intensive research and investigation into alien abduction, he unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Now, in this paperback edition, Mack answers his critics, both believers and skeptics. Mack focuses on thirteen ordinary Americans (from nearly one hundred case studies) who tell dramatic, inspiring, and remarkably similar stories: repeated visits from large-eyed beings, mysterious machines, telepathy, invasive medical procedures, hours missing from their lives, and startling messages about the future....
"Provocative...This book is a challenge to any reader. It raises questions about how we live on this planet and with each other that the Western mind and culture will not be able to ignore for too much longer. It also raises questions about the nature of reality; of time, space, energy and the true nature of humanness. It opens the door to a very serious redefinition of life as we know it."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Strange and disturbing...Something is powering this rash of abduction claims, making it worth the kind of serious investigation Mack presents here.--San Francisco Chronicle
"A groundbreaking study...Credible and thought-provoking."
--Publishers Weekly
A FEATURED SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The intellectual abduction of John Mack
Comment: The late John Mack was a regular professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, when he encountered people who claimed to have been abducted by space aliens and taken onboard UFOs. For reasons best known to himself, Mack decided to believe that these experiences were in some sense real. Harvard University was scandalized, and even carried out an investigation against him (in the end, nothing much happened).
"Abduction" was John Mack's first book about alien abductions. It's based on interviews and therapy sessions with a number of purported abductees. Mack suggests that the space aliens might actually be spirits, perhaps spirits from our planet worried about our destruction of nature. He even believes in the bizarre notion of alien-human hybrids, speculating that the spirits want to create a kind of new life form. And yes, he claims that the crop circles (!) were supernatural. Naturally, the author constantly attacks the "Western" scientific or materialist paradigm, since it refuses to accept the reality of the abduction phenomenon. Interestingly, Mack believes that the sharp dualism between "real" and "unreal" is part of the problem, which to a sceptic like myself suggests that he cannot really prove the alien abductions! If he had tangible physical evidence, he would (of course) produce it - then, the "Western paradigm" would presumably be just fine.
Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs are two other writers on alien abductions. They are much more pessimistic, however. To Hopkins and Jacobs, the aliens are essentially evil. To Mack, the question is less straightforward. He does describe many cases where the aliens have kidnapped, tortured and molested their human contacts. However, it seems that most of the abductees later bonded with the aliens, began to feel that they were aliens themselves, and had mystical and religious experiences. Often, the abductees experienced visions of coming ecological disaster. Mack interprets the abductions in a positive light, as a spiritual transformation and in this sense sounds pretty "New Age".
The New Age theme is taken further in a later book by the same author, "Passport to the Cosmos", where he connects alien abductions with shamanistic experiences and even interviews a couple of shamans (including the notorious Credo Mutwa, who also co-operated with David Icke).
How could this self-professed atheist and materialist suddenly turn around and embrace such extreme notions? Somehow, I found it hard to believe that it happened over night. Mack does mention working with Stanislav Grof, who seems to be pretty unconventional, although I never understood whether he believes in the supernatural or not (he is certainly referenced by people who does). Somehow, this interest in altered states of consciousness and heterodox therapy must have grown over into a belief in alien abductions, which indeed are similar to a certain kind of religious experiences.
I guess you could say that John E. Mack was intellectually abducted.
Customer Rating:
Summary: OK but still out there
Comment: Mack is a good writer and has noteworthy credentials. I've read a lot of alien related books and several of his case studies are definitely out there. Hybrid stories and other details corroborate with each other but each abductee seems to be the chosen one, even among other witnessed abductees on ships and everything. There's very little modesty, which is a tad hard to believe at times.
I had my own experience(s) and matched it with the insights in the book. However, I had to skim read several outrageous and ridiculous stories offered in the book. Also, I don't like the author's use of quotes. He talks as the narrator but includes first person quotes that, to me, are unorthodox. It's a small gripe though. Good book if you're into this subject. If you're looking for a first book on the subject, read Strieber or Hopkins first.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Abduction: excellent research by Harvard professor
Comment: Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. John Mack made history when this book came out in 1994. After interviewing dozens of people who said they were abducted by aliens, Mack dug deeper. He interviewed alleged abductees from across the globe, and he also queried them under hypnosis. People who couldn't possibly have known each other made some of the exact same claims: similar looking aliens used advanced technology to loft them up to alien craft where abductees were immobilized and medically examined. Sperm and egg samples were taken, and some women were implanted with hybrid embryos. A professor of psychiatry, Mack witnessed raw emotion and consistent details in abductees' stories. He determined that most abductees were sane, responsible people who were probably telling the truth. In Abduction, Mack reports abductees' statements directly then provides an analysis of what the aliens look like and what they appear to be doing.
Mack isn't the only competent researcher reporting on the subject. David Jacobs, PhD, interviewed hundreds of abductees and also concludes that aliens are real. Abduction researchers' work became more widely known after Eisenhower White House National Security Council member Col. Philip Corso wrote a book about how he helped distribute downed alien technology from the Roswell, NM crash in 1947 so that the US military could copy it.
Mack's book is superbly written. It's required reading for an understanding of an important new subject that is regarded most seriously at the highest levels of government.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Listen to the Aliens Inside Your Head
Comment: The late John E. Mack MD - Havard psychologist and Pulitzer prize winning author, investigates the alien abduction phenomenon by subjecting participants to hypnotic regression. Brilliant intellectual and excellent writer tackles a controversial and sexy topic, but it's oddly not as compelling a read as one might expect. This is largely due to the sheer number of abductions cases chronicled in this book, 13 in all with a full chapter and "discussion" devoted to each; failure to firmly answer the $64,000 question - do you believe these individuals were "really" abducted by aliens; and for those familiar with Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (who was a life-long close personal friend of John E. Mack MD), a fatal misuse of Kuhn's thesis. The biggest problem is that the sheer number of cases Mack describes in great detail - 13 in all, grows tedious after about the seventh or eighth abduction case. I found myself skimming the last several cases, and forcing myself to read them. While some may relish in their detail and length, and argue Mack is using a quantitative approach to make his case (and I'm not exactly sure what his "case" is), it's overkill and for me became tedious.
The alien abductees come from all walks of life - regular guys and gals to successful entrepreneurs to university professors. The narrative of these abductees is strikingly similar (but with equally confounding dissimilarities). They were abducted several times during their life starting from childhood, medical experiments were performed on them, men had sperm taken from them, females were artificially impregnated and in subsequent abductions an alien-human cross-bred fetus was removed from them. Sometimes "listless" hybrid alien children were given to their mothers to hold. In their last abduction, the aliens - who are "grays" in each of the abduction cases and communicate telepathically, reveal their motives. Their cross-breeding is necessary for intelligent life to exist on earth after a soon to occur cataclysmic event of our own doing destroys the earth's ecosystem. The aliens in each case show a graphic presentation of earth's future. This event - witnessing the devastated earth in the form of an extra-terrestrial PowerPoint presentation (of sorts) is always the most emotional and distressing portion of the abduction experience for the abductees under hypnotic regression. Some literally weep like babies over the fate of the earth and mankind that was shown to them by their alien captors.
Mack believes that SOMETHING happened to these people. He believes that they believe that their expreiences were real. He writes in a style and with word choice that never doubts these accounts but never comes out and declares, "Yes, these people were "really" abducted by aliens". Instead, Mack waxes "swami", suggesting that we Westerners need to expand our minds beyond Western science notions of Space/Time to understand the abduction phenomenon. He asserts that an ontological paradigm shift is required to account for the abductee's experience and the common narrative of our own holocaust they consistently describe. Here, he loses me, as Kuhn - who coined the phrase "paradigm shift" was emphatic that these shifts apply only to hard sciences, not social sciences, and certainly not religious beliefs. Mack floats the notion that there may be a universal intelligence that our species has drifted from and it manifests itself in differing forms and reveals itself to selected people to guide us. Why it choses to communicate so cryptically - via aliens and other religious revelations and paranormal experiences, is beyond our level of understanding.
This all said, as I was into what seemed like the 90th abduction case in this book, employees at O'Hare International Airport claimed a UFO appeared there before bursting through the clouds and disappearing. A few days after this hit the news, scientists moved the infamous "Doomsday Clock" to five minutes before the zero hour due to the increased threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and unstable states. Politicians and scientists debate humanity's course of action for global warming, now being taken very seriously, save for a few on the fringe.
Perhaps the debate around this book shouldn't be whether these people were "really" abducted by aliens. Instead, maybe, we should listen to the gray's consistent message about a forthcoming ecological calamity of our own doing - and not concern ourselves with the relatively unimportant details like whether these extra-terrestrial abductors actually exist.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting descriptions, fuzzy analysis
Comment: Harvard psychologist John Mack interviewed more than seventy people who believe that they were abducted by aliens. After using hypnosis and other techniques to draw out victims' memories, he concluded that they were not inventing their stories; they had suffered traumatic experiences, in many cases more than once. Mack also found that their stories were remarkably consistent. The cases he studied may be only the tip of an iceberg; a 1991 survey showed that at least several hundred thousand Americans have had abduction experiences. Mack argues that abductions force us to reconsider our perception of reality; "no familiar theory or explanation has come even close to accounting for the basic features of the abduction phenomenon." As abductions can not be understood within the framework of Western science, a new scientific paradigm may be necessary. Mack speculates that the aliens may be from other dimensions. At the end, he offers his personal opinion that "abductions have to do with the evolution of consciousness and the collapse of a worldview that has placed humankind at a kind of epicenter of intelligence in a cosmos perceived as largely lifeless and meaningless." Mack writes that "When we explore phenomena that exist at the margins of accepted reality, old words become imprecise or must be given new meanings." His own words suffer from that problem; many readers will find his analyses vague and fuzzy-minded, particularly when he writes about spirituality. Many of his speculations appear in both his introductory and concluding chapters, an annoying duplication. Readers may be struck by how closely the X-Files followed the abductees' descriptions of their experiences, including implants and the creation of alien-human hybrids. The warnings delivered to some abductees sound a bit like those in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, or in the more recent film The Abyss, suggesting that abductees may have been influenced by their own cultural experiences. Nonetheless, something peculiar happened to these people.
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