Review of John E. Mack's Passport to the Cosmos
by Mac Tonnies

In Passport to the Cosmos, John Mack succeeds in creating one of the most astute, rational narratives ever written about the “alien abduction” phenomenon. Not since Whitley Strieber's seminal best-selling Communion have I read a book that addresses the issue of nonhuman intelligence with such humility and restraint (traits lacking in recent books on the subject, such as David Jacobs' insipidly literal The Threat). Mack argues that alien encounters, while subjectively real to experiencers, probably reflect a much more sophisticated model of reality than Western empiricism currently allows. In other words, abduction experiences are likely not “real” in the traditional sense of flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial visitors conducting unsolicited health check-ups (an interpretation exploited by skeptics eager to downplay the reality of alleged alien encounters).

Mack takes time to address the issue from an indigenous perspective, drawing on testimony from experiencers in Africa and South America. The parallels, he reveals, are as startling as they are productive. In them, Mack concludes that we are indeed coming into contact with a largely (though not entirely) unrecognized intelligence that appears to antedate space-time as we know it.

Mack is to be applauded for his skepticism and determination in helping our understanding of what is perhaps the most misunderstood phenomenon in the world today. Passport to the Cosmos is a landmark book in a field with too few reasoned perspectives and way too many unbounded imaginations.