The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race by Len Kasten Read Free Book Online Page A

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