The author of this article, Dr. John E. Mac, was a Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
When first hearing evidence of aliens taking men, women and children aboard UFOs and subjecting them to various kinds of intrusive procedures, most people assume that in this case we are dealing with some form of modern psychiatric syndrome.
This was my first reaction. When a colleague invited me in the fall of 1989 to meet with Budd Hopkins (whom I hadn’t heard of before), explaining to me that he was serious about the testimonies of the abducted aliens with whom he worked, I thought that both he and his clients suffer from mental disorders, since this phenomenon is beyond the reality that is possible according to the Western worldview. But what is mental illness if not thinking and behavior that do not fit into what we are used to including within the limits of the affirmed reality?
It is a natural human tendency to adjust any new phenomenon to familiar patterns and structures, even if this Procrustean bed should be stretched beyond recognition, for we are very bad at tolerating uncertainty and mystery.
Those of us in the mental health industry are particularly well equipped with all kinds of diagnoses that we’re ready to apply to the alien abduction phenomenon when we first hear about it. All of these reports undeniably resemble delusions or hallucinations. They even refute all the laws of physics we are familiar with, which suggests psychosis.
The abductees are often nervous and anxious or suffer from various types of bodily pains and ailments, which may be a manifestation of neurosis.
Their memories of what happened to them are often abrupt, suggesting the possibility of a brain failure such as temporal lobe epilepsy. Their experiences are highly traumatic and often involve reproductive or sexual interference, suggesting the possibility that they were once raped or were victims of sexual harassment and abuse as children.
The experience of abduction by aliens either causes an altered state of consciousness, or occurs in this state, therefore there is the possibility of illness associated with a dissociative reaction, such as multiple personality disorder or even violence from the cult of Satanists.
Promotional video:
Since we have entered the space age and the phenomenon of alien abduction is receiving a lot of attention in the media, is it not possible that a collective process - mass hysteria or an illusion - is involved here? The fact that abductions occur at night may be explained as a dream or hypnological phenomenon. Also, the possibility of a desire to attract attention is not excluded.
Photo: johnemackinstitute.org
Various aspects of the abduction phenomenon suggest one or the other possible diagnosis, especially if there is a lack of awareness in this area. The difficulty lies in the fact that each of these diagnoses overlooks and even precludes possible several basic elements of the abduction experience. There are five dimensions that we must include in any conceivable theory.
The testimonies of abductees from all over the United States (I am writing only about the United States, since cultural differences can change this statement) are extremely consistent and consistent with one another, despite the fact that all these people never had any contact with each other. This testimony includes details that are not even now mentioned in the media among people who are extremely reluctant to provide such information due to fear of ridicule.
There are important physical signs of the abduction phenomenon. These include, unrelated to one another, witness statements that the abductees are indeed absent from the scene for some time; nosebleeds and various cuts, marks, bruises and other complex patterns of skin damage, sometimes appearing on the bodies of several abductees at the same time; implants can also be felt under the skin after abductions, although their non-biological or “alien” origin has not been proven.
Abductions occur in children who are too young to develop the psychiatric conditions mentioned above. A two-year-old boy said he was taken to heaven by a man who bit him on the nose. Another boy, who was not yet three years old, said that owls with big eyes (very often children remember alien creatures disguised in animal form) take him into the sky on a ship, and he is afraid that he will not be able to return to his mother.
Although not all abductees see the UFOs to which they are taken, this phenomenon is invariably accompanied by observations of unusual flying objects both by the abductees themselves and by other witnesses. One woman I worked with was amazed when, the morning after the abduction (during which she did not see any UFO), she learned from newspapers and other sources that at that time and near the place where her abduction took place, UFO.
Psychiatric evaluations and psychological studies of abductees, including several of my patients, have failed to detect consistent psychopathology. Of course, abductees can suffer mental and emotional discomfort as a result of this often traumatic experience, and several of them have been found to have accompanying psychiatric disorders. Many of them grew up in troubled families. But in none of the cases could the abduction experience be explained by emotional distress.
Given these basic aspects of the abduction phenomenon, let us consider the above possible diagnoses again. Any form of psychosis is ruled out for the simple reason that the abductees, with rare exceptions, are quite normal clinically and, despite the stress caused by their experience of abduction, generally function normally in society.
Three of my patients, whom I subjected to massive bombardment with psychological tests, were diagnosed as mentally healthy. Psychoneurosis can be ruled out by the fact that the abductees do not suffer from various kinds of intense personal conflicts that accompany neuroses. Likewise, abductions cannot be explained by fantasies, since nothing indicates that they are related to other aspects of the patient's personality or his emotional life.
The physical symptoms that the abductees suffer from appear to be the result of the intrusive procedures inherent in the abduction phenomenon. Likewise, cuts and other skin lesions following abduction do not follow any psychodynamic pattern, as in the case of religious stigmata.
The inability of the abductees to remember the details of their experience is most likely explained not by organic brain dysfunction, but by the suppression of memory, often following trauma, and possibly also by the forces behind the phenomenon of collisions with aliens.
Trauma is definitely an important characteristic of most cases of alien abduction, but there is not a single documented case proving that this injury was not caused by the abduction itself, but by another event in the life of the abducted. Finally, invoking dissociation as a possible diagnostic explanation completely avoids the issue of causality, since dissociation is a response, a defense mechanism by which memories of painful or disturbing experiences are disconnected from a person's consciousness so that he can retain the psychological energy necessary for daily functioning.
The abductees are “dissociated” from their traumatic experience, ie. transfer to the subconscious the memories of their exciting experiences. But that tells us nothing about the source of these experiences.
Even if abduction incidents are a manifestation of one or another aspect of these diagnostic categories, we still have the task of finding explanations for abduction among young children, various physical manifestations, their connection with UFOs and, above all, the striking similarity of the stories of various unrelated to each other. people. In this respect, abduction stories share many of the characteristics of real-life events that happen to people in the real world. Their veracity is not diminished by the fact that we do not understand the cause or source of these phenomena.
The question of psychosocial causation is more complex. It is safe to say that kidnapping syndrome is a collective phenomenon in the sense that it happens to many people in the United States and other parts of the world. When insufficiently considered, this phenomenon appears to be mass hysteria, delusion or delusional belief supported by a huge amount of material in the media (see article by Richard Hall).
However, abduction syndrome does not manifest itself as a collective disorder. All these experiences are extremely individual and personal among people isolated from each other and having only a very vague knowledge of UFOs and the subject of abductions. They manifest in a different way from the culturally prevalent or accepted beliefs familiar to us from historical examples of mass hysteria. Rather, the abductees are going against the prevailing social notions of reality, at the risk of being ostracized and ridiculed when they share their experiences with someone.
It is true that the electronic and print media have given a lot of attention to abductions, especially recently. But my opinion is that these publications are the result of evidence obtained from the abductees themselves and from the researchers, and not the cause of such evidence.
This argument is supported by the fact that the factual abduction stories circulating in our society are rich in details that are not available in the media. Finally, as I noted above, there is still no psychosocial explanation for the abductions of young children, as well as physical manifestations and, of course, the connection between abductions and UFOs.
We can - as Jung suggested in his article on flying saucers, written long before reports of abductions became so common - stretch our understanding of the collective unconscious and consider the phenomenon of UFOs and abductions as a kind of modern myth, a pattern for the manifestation of faith in a given culture in a given time. Jung called these kinds of phenomena "psychoids" because they are a kind of resonance between the soul or the inner world and the physical phenomena of the outside world (including the UFOs themselves and the physical manifestations that accompany abductions).
But it seems to me that if we stretched our understanding of the collective unconscious to this limit, then the differences between the inner and the outer, soul and reality, would simply disappear. The world and soul or consciousness would become one whole, existing in harmony or resonance in the world, the structure of which we have not yet figured out.
I would not rule out such a possibility, but if it can give us a real picture of the cosmos, then we will have to reject the dualistic paradigm of Western science, according to which internal and external realities exist separately, and the physical world obeys laws that have little to do with consciousness in any of it. form. With the help of the phenomenon of abductions, we will discover a new picture of the universe in which the soul and the world manifest and evolve together according to principles that we have not yet comprehended.
To summarize, I can say that psychiatry itself cannot explain much to us about the phenomenon of abduction. No psychiatric diagnosis can be applied in these cases. And psychosocial or cultural explanations, even if they include all the main aspects of the syndrome, will force us to stretch our concepts of the collective unconscious to such an extent that all differences between the soul and the world, internal and external reality will be destroyed.
Apart from the stories of the abducted themselves, there is no other evidence of what happened to them. The people I work with, as far as I can tell, are telling the truth, and this is the impression of other researchers. We found ourselves face to face with a deep and important secret, and we do not know what it hides in itself. It seems that some kind of intelligence entered our world from another dimension or another reality.
This mind has tremendous power (many abductees talk about the feeling of "awe" they have for this power), and we can in no way control its effect. We do not know what its ultimate goal might be. All we can do is try to learn more about the abduction phenomenon and find the courage to look at it honestly, resisting the natural urge to squeeze it into familiar categories.
As a result of my own work, evidence has emerged that when abductees overcome their feelings of terror and fully accept the reality of what is happening to them, this phenomenon becomes less traumatic. A relationship of mutual giving and love develops between them and the alien beings. The abductees receive information about fundamental environmental and other global threats; in doing so, they experience deep emotional and spiritual growth. These aspects of the phenomenon require additional research work carried out without bias.
This article appeared in Discussion on Aliens: Transcripts of the Alien Abduction Research Conference (North Cambridge Press, 1992)
The Alien Discussions is a transcript of the Alien Abduction Science Conference held June 13-17, 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They consist of 684 pages containing a glossary of terms, an alphabetical index, questions and answers, and critical comments after each article or group of articles. This volume can be used as an interdisciplinary introduction and scholarly guide to the phenomenon of alien abduction.
Among the experts who presented articles or reports were: 12 abductees, 1 anthropologist, 3 writers, 3 experts in related fields (near-death experience, sleep paralysis, ritual abuse), 2 experts in scientific analysis (dermopathology, neuroradiology), 1 folklorist, 1 historian, 12 researchers, 3 media representatives, 5 doctors of medical sciences, 1 neuropsychologist, 11 doctors of psychology, 1 philosopher, 3 physicists, 2 preachers / religious specialists, 4 social workers and 3 sociologists.