Abduction Quotes

“Some have speculated that the alien beings have mastered time travel and come to us from the future. Sometimes they even communicate that this might be so. We do not know. But the guiding or regenerative myth of the abduction phenomenon offers a new story for a world that has survived many holocausts and may yet be deterred from a final cataclysm. The abduction phenomenon, it seems clear, is about what is yet to come. It presents, quite literally, visions of alternative futures, but it leaves the choice to us.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“this is not received merely cognitively, like a lecture. Abductees experience powerful images of vast destruction, with the collapse of governmental and economic infrastructures and the total pollution and desertification of the planet. This knowledge is felt profoundly in their bodies, and I have been greatly moved as they sob on the couch and experience heartache so intense that they can barely bring themselves to speak of it. It is the kind of knowledge that must be translated into action. Writer and futurist Jean Houston, at the Congress of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in September 1993, commented that all myths begin with a form of betrayal. Perhaps the human betrayal of the earth itself is giving rise to a new myth of interspecies relationship and creation.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Virtually every abductee receives information about the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem and feels compelled to do something about”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“break!”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“None of this work, in my view, has come to terms with the potential implications of the abduction phenomenon for the expansion of human consciousness or the meaning for our world of this apparent opening to a mysterious reality that may be beyond the manifest physical world.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“still greater problem resides in the fact that memory in relation to abduction experiences behaves rather strangely. As in the cases, for example, of Ed (chapter 3) or Arthur (chapter 15) the memory of an abduction may be outside of consciousness until triggered many years later by another experience or situation that becomes associated with the original event.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Temple University historian David Jacobs has further refined the basic reported pattern of an abduction experience (Jacobs 1992). Jacobs identifies primary phenomena such as manual or instrument examination, staring, and urological-gynecological procedures; secondary events, including machine examination, visualization, and child presentation; and ancillary events, among them miscellaneous additional physical, mental, and sexual activities and procedures.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The first publication of an abduction case took place in Brazil, involving the reported abduction of the son of a rancher, Antonio Villas-Boas, in 1957.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“UFO abductions have been reported and collected most frequently in Western countries or countries dominated by Western culture and values, but our investigations are revealing that the phenomenon, in its familiar form, occurs among native peoples in North and South America and in Africa.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“People in Ireland believed that fairies or the gentle folk were not earthly, having originated on other planets. Fairies often travel about the skies in cloudlike aerial boats called “fairy boats” or “spectre ships” (Rojcewicz 1991, p. 481).”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Likewise, Native American Hopi were traditionally taught by the Kachinas, spirit-like beings from other planets, who instructed them in agricultural techniques and gave them philosophical and moral guidelines that have shaped Hopi culture”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“In Truk, located in the Marshall Islands, people have traditionally believed in an outer world that corresponds in some ways to our modern conception of outer space.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The contemporary Western tenet that we are alone in the universe, conversant only with ourselves, is, in fact, a minority perspective, an anomaly.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The alien abduction field is a new one, and it deserves a broad and systematic multi-disciplinary inquiry. It is my hope that, if nothing else, this book will encourage at least some of the skeptics who have criticized my methods and hypotheses to immerse themselves in the primary data of this field, namely the experiences of those who have undergone the abduction encounters, and draw their own conclusions about what is taking place here and what it might mean for the human future.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“A recently interviewed geologist and abduction experiencer wrote me that his experiences have taught him that “We are a runaway species bent on self-destruction, because we (collectively) are unwilling to impose self controls to stop our growth and to plan for our future with forethought and higher purpose” (Bruce Cornet, letter to the author, December 1994).”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Mr. Mutwa and the children were both distressed by their experiences. But they also spoke spontaneously of receiving powerful communications from the alien beings, especially through their huge black eyes, about the failure of our species to take proper care of the earth.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“As part of our effort to explore whether the abduction phenomenon, as has been suggested, is primarily a Western occurrence, my colleague Dominique Callimanopulos and I have been exploring alien abductions in other countries and among American indigenous peoples.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“The experiential data, which, in the absence of more robust physical evidence, is the most important information that we have, suggests that abduction experiencers have been visited by some sort of “alien” intelligence which has impacted them physically and psychologically.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Careful research on the complex relationship between the electronic and print media and the evolution of the alien abduction phenomenon waits to be undertaken.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Although it cannot be proven that no elements of abduction experiences have been incorporated from these media, by and large abductees avoid media accounts of abductions and are uniquely distressed by them. My impression is that the traffic is stronger the other way – i.e. that abduction stories, based on actual clinical cases, find their way into the work of media producers hungry for this material.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Many of the details they report are not known in the culture or, at least until recently, reported in the mass media.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Some have suggested that in alien abductions we are dealing with some sort of mass psychosis, hysteria, or hallucination (Sagan 1993). But abductions do not resemble mass phenomena (Hall 1995). Abductees are generally individuals who have, at least before being brought in contact with other experiencers for purposes of support, been isolated from people having similar experiences.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Neurophysiological explanations include sleep paralysis and temporal lobe epilepsy (Spanos et al. 1993; Persinger 1992; Blackmore 1994), but researchers exploring these possibilities have either failed to find such pathology among abduction experiencers or have chosen to overlook important aspects of the phenomenon. For example, many abduction experiences occur under conditions that do not appear to be associated with sleep. Second, abduction experiences are often corroborated by independent UFO sightings or physical evidence. Third, neurophysiological explanations do not account for hyperarousal and anxiety triggered by certain events or images symbolically linked to abduction.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“It bears repeating that no case has yet been reported where the alien abduction story masked another kind of traumatic experience. The reverse, however, has frequently been noted, including in my case experience – i.e. that a client presenting with a complaint of possible sexual abuse or trauma has discovered a history of alien abduction experiences, even when being treated by a therapist unfamiliar with the phenomenon and certainly not expecting that an abduction story would emerge.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“I have never encountered anything similar to this in patients I have known to be traumatized by humans, or in psychotic patients suffering from delusions.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“There are, for example, consistent details of passage to and from the craft, the rich descriptions of the alien beings and the intricate relationships to them, the many non-traumatic activities and observations that occur within the craft, and the elaborate communications concerning the earth’s ecology and other psychospiritual matters which are, in my experience, a frequent, if not regular, dimension of the abduction phenomenon.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Furthermore, there is much more involved in the complex narratives of abduction experiences than human trauma per se.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“It is true that abduction experiences do show some of the symptoms associated with post-traumatic states, but these symptoms appear to be the result, not the cause, of what the experiencers have undergone.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“Psychiatric examinations and numerous psychological tests have failed to reveal forms of mental illness that could, conceivably, explain the abduction phenomenon (Mack 1995; Bloecher, Clamar, and Hopkins 1985; Parnell and Sprinkle 1990; Rodeghier, Goodpastor, and Blatterbauer 1991; Zimmer 1984; Spanos, Cross, Dickson, and DeBreuil 1993).”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

“What some of these critics may not realize is that frequently abduction experiencers have already been subjected to intense investigations of their abduction-related symptoms by physicians and various mental health professionals seeking a variety of neurophysiological and/or psychological and emotional explanations, sometimes with frustrating and even damaging effects (see, for example, the cases of Scott, Sheila, and Paul in this book).”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens