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

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