Russian
One of the difficulties of the alien encounter experience is trying to convey to others the kind of “place” or “landscape” of these anomalous visitations. Because in the West we are so used to restricting our experience within an empirical scientific worldview, things either happen in a world outside, or we have thoughts or feelings in an interior world.
People describing the alien encounter experience often say that they receive information of some sort, as if they were being educated about complex topics that may seem crystal clear during the experience, but that may become cloudy or may even seem trivial afterward. The topics are frequently momentous, such as impending environmental calamity, whether brought about by human behavior or by some other cause, perhaps unknown.
At a mutidisciplinary meeting of academicians convened by the Center’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) in April 1999 at the Harvard Divinity School, PEER’s former clinical director Roberta Colasanti, LICSW, spoke about the people who seek clinical assistance in dealing with life-long alien encounter experiences. This transcript is excerpted from her presentation.
The Reverend Jeffrey Brown is pastor of the Union Baptist Church, Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Janis A. Pryor is an author who lives in Cambridge.
Perhaps the most significant consequence of John Mack’s work with abductees (those who believe they have had an encounter or encounters with alien beings) is forcing the scientific community to grudgingly accept that there may be a reality that cannot be measured in the material world; a reality that transcends the scientific process. Mack says that “the [west believes] that the only intelligence that exists in the universe comes out of the human brain, not God.” [But] this phenomenon, according to Mack, “opens us to a different sense of ourselves,” and “gets the western mind right where it lives.”
Given the incredible diversity of reported human experiences with alleged [alien] visitors, is it possible to say who or what we are dealing with? Perhaps the closest we can get to the truth is an idea that confounds and infuriates literalists everywhere: the nature of the visitors is in the eye of the beholder. They are real, but their perceived character is dependent upon the quality of individual perception.
By definition, folklore is that which cannot be destroyed by mere facts. So it is unlikely that the Air Force’s latest effort to convince UFO enthusiasts that aliens did not crash at Roswell, NM, in 1947 will have any effect beyond feeding the voracious paranoia that now surrounds the story. As the public is leaning from The X-Files, the truth may be “out there,” but the main purpose of the United States government is to cover it up.
I began regarding the UFO fascination as something between a hoax and a fad the first time I was told the “truth” about Roswell by members of my own family in the late 1940s. I continued to view the matter with perfect skepticism until about four years ago, when I developed a rather different perspective.
Developed from a talk given at the International Association for New Science Conference, Fort Collins, Colorado, September 16, 1995
I want to talk with you about what I have been finding over the past now nearly six years in studying the alien abduction phenomenon. In the context of this meeting I wish to talk particularly about the ways that we know, how we actually know anything. What is the appropriate epistemology for a particular subject? It seems to me that all science, all knowledge really, is about the discovery of patterns, and that includes patterns of meaning. But how we know, the approach that we use, depends on what the matter at hand happens to be. For the sake of clarity, I would divide the realms that we are considering here between what has been called the gross material world on the one hand and the subtle realms on the other, or, in [psychiatrist] Stanislav Grof’s language, the hylotropic versus the holotropic world, or in [physicist] David Bohm’s terms, the explicate or manifest order or the implicate, or hidden, order, by which he means the structures, deeper reality and meaning in the universe.
A committee at Harvard Medical School is investigating a prominent professor because of his research about people who say they have been abducted now and again by little gray folks from outer space.
The medical school is part of Harvard University, which was founded in 1636 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In those days they had their witch hunts farther north, up at Salem.
A half dozen years ago, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack thought anyone who worked with people who claimed they’d been abducted by aliens from outer space must be crazy. A year later his whole frame of reference changed when he met Budd Hopkins, a pioneer in alien research who had worked with some 200 “abductees.”
John Mack and I were at the Ariel School, a small elementary school outside Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, listening to Elsa (not her real name) describe her encounter last September 16 [1994] with an “alien” being. In all, sixty children, ages six through twelve, reported seeing one large and several smaller “spaceships” land – hover, really – over the scrubby bushland adjoining their playground.
“DO ALIENS EXIST?” This is a standard question for abduction books, but it is not the question addressed by John Mack in his book Abduction. He considers a question with more far-reaching consequences: “WHAT IF ALIENS EXIST?” The answers he gets from speaking with a number of experiencers is a positive, energetic portrayal of hope, spiritually fulfilling goals, and an indication that the individual and his or her choices may matter in the grand scheme.
The other night I was reading along in Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, the much-discussed new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack. I was right at the part where Mack explains that right before people are abducted by aliens mysterious electrical malfunctions often occur. It being nightfall, I reached up to turn on a lamp. Sparks flew and the lamp suddenly burst into flames.
Increasing numbers of UFO abductees, as well as the experts who treat them, say their experiences have as much to do with inner as outer space.