UFO Abductions

by D. Scott Rogo

1980 1st edition, paperback. Slight spine tilt but pages are in overall excellent condition. Softcover has some corner/edge/surface wear in spots but overall, good clean copy of this vintage title.

243 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 7, 1980

About the author

He wrote or co-wrote 20 books and more than 100 magazine and journal articles, 7 books were reprinted in 2005 by Anomalist Books, Leaving the body was reprinted in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. Rogo was active at the Psychical Research Foundation (formerly at Durham, North Carolina) and at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. The D. Scott Rogo Award was established in 1992 to benefit authors working on manuscripts pertaining to parapsychology.
Born in Los Angeles, California and educated at the University of Cincinnati and San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge; he graduated summa cum laude from the latter institution in 1972. (His B.A. was in music; Rogo played the oboe and the English horn, and for two years played professionally with the San Diego Symphony and other ensembles.) Rogo served as a consulting editor for Fate Magazine for which he wrote a regular column; he advocated greater involvement by both researchers and skeptics in parapsychological research.
Rogo was open minded on the question of survival of consciousness after death, he wrote that he was "favourable to the survival notion" he was however skeptical about some of the phenomena involved in psychical research as he believed they could be psychological experiences. He is most well known for his book written with Raymond Bayless titled Phone Calls From The Dead (1979) in which they describe an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which people report that they receive simple, brief, and usually single-occurrence telephone calls from spirits of deceased relatives, friends, or strangers.
In his book The Haunted Universe (1977) Rogo hypothesized that strange phenomena such as flying saucers and Bigfoot are really psychic projections that are produced by the minds of the observers themselves.

Reviews

[Indrid Cold · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Rogo’s Phone Calls from the Dead, I decided to pick this up. For the most part, I enjoyed his writing style in that book, and was hoping this title would be similar. I’m not exactly disappointed, but it turned out it was a sort of anthology from several different writers, with Rogo doing introductory notes for each part, as well as a conclusions type section at the end.

Most people who are familiar with abduction lore will be familiar with at least one or two of the cases presented here, but these do go into pretty good depth. For example, the last thing I wanted to read about again was the Villas Boas case, but the entry here did have way more detail than anything I had read before on it. Some of the cases have some parts to them that could be considered “creepy”, if that’s what you are looking for. For me, the Jerome Clark piece called The Ultimate Alien Encounter was pretty much that. It’s also probably the best piece in this collection.

All and all, I would say this is a very good resource for abduction material and analysis, and this is one of the rare instances where I mostly agree with the conclusions that are drawn by an author (unless it’s John Keel, who I pretty much agree with completely). I think even people who are well read in this subject can find something useful here.

[coffee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays regarding UFO abduction divided into three sections: Waking Encounters, Time-Lapse Cases, and Psychic Abductions. Rogo readily borrows heavily from Jerome Clark, and a bit from Jacques Vallee and John Keel in coming to the conclusion that most UFO abductions experiences are primarily psychic in nature, perhaps with an inciting agent such as a physical UFO encounter. An interesting note is Scott's observation that queer people or those who engage in "alternative lifestyles" are frequently targeted in abduction experiences, leaving Scott to speculate about the nature of the Phenomenon as not only being psychically and physically real, but also something in which there were potential ways to externalize and work through socially inflicted traumas.

"UFO abductions occur when the witness is in a state of psychological need, and when the unoncious mind needs to impart an important message to the concious mind. Once contacted by a human mind in such a state, the supermind (The Phenomenon) creates an abduction experience for the witness by drawing upon information and preoccupations buried deep within his mind. It structures this information as part of the abduction scenario and presents it to the witness in objectified form. The supermind does all of this by relying upon a prototypical experience, which it then individually molds to best communicate a vital message in symbolic form to the witness. This is the reason why so many abduction reports seem to share many common characteristics. The UFO and abduction experiences are somewhat independent of the witness's mind in that they are materialized in 3-dimensional form and into our dimension by the supermind. But they are meant to reflect preoccupations buried within the mind that has initially made contact with it."

Also noteworthy that Scott dedicates this book to his boyfriend, something he hasn't done in any book in his bibliography up until this one (his 17th book, released 1980) even though they had been dating since 1974.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good overview of the UFO abduction cases before Budd Hopkins got into the scene, some very valid points, but some are in fact a bit obsolete.