From: Doug Roberts (doug@nolimits.demon.co.uk)

A report from `2' the tabloid supplement to `The Guardian' newspaper. July 25th 1995.


Ian Katz sees close encounters of the third kind move out of the US oddball subculture.

Hollywood's latest sci-fi offering is Species, in which a repulsive alien passes itself off as a stunning and libidinous blonde to achieve its sole aim of reproducing with an earthiling. The critics have panned it, but it's unlikely American cinema audiences will be as harsh. Aliens have arrived. Relegated for years to celluloid fantasy and the wilder chat-show shores, tales of human encounters with extra-terrestrials are suddenly mainstream.

A Harvard psychiatry professor is in controversy over a book in which he appears to accept as fact the accounts of people who claim to have been abducted and sexually interfered with by aliens. A highly respected journalist has produced a tome based on a conference, held at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, on alien abductions. A leading philosopher has devoted his latest inquiry to the "philosophical implications of extra-terrestrial life".

Even the sombre Washington Post observed in a recent front page article that close encounters of the third kind have moved "from oddball subculture to a unique place in American culture -nither quite believed nor dismissed out of hand, but treaseured as a mystery". Abductee support groups are springing up across the country. According to a recent poll, 2 per cent of the population -more than 500,000 people - describe having "alien abduction" experiences.

"Slowly but surely we're winning the war", says Budd Hopkins, the New York artist regarded as the father of the "abduction" movement, between calls from TV producers desperate to make programmes on the "phenomenon". Hopkins has been the focus of an abduction underground since he wrote his first book on the subject in 1987 but increasingly, he says, credible figures have been willing to risk ridicule by openly admitting to an interest in the subject.

His argument is that a large numver of reasonable people - Hopkins alone has interviewed 500 - recall (often under hypnosis) abduction experiences which are remarkably similar and cannot be explained conventionally. Though aliens come in different shapes and sizes ("tall greys", Nordic-types and "reptillians" all figure) most abductees offer a strikingly uniform description of their ET kidnappers.

Described as small greys, these common-or-garden aliens are slightly translucent creatures between three and four feet high. They have large pear- shaped heads, and huge almond-shaped black eyes without whites or pupils. Their long arms end in three-or-four fingered hands, and their legs are spindly. They have no hair, ears, or nostrils and only a slit for a mouth. In his new book, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, journalist C D B Bryan reports that the greys' bodies are "flat, paunchless", apparently lacking buttocks or visible genitalia. In his contoversia book, Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack adds that besides "boots, the aliens usually wear a form-fitting, single-piece, tunic-like garment, sparsely adorned."

Typically "abductees" or "experiencers" describe being floated from their homes or cars into alien ships where they undergo quasi- medical procedures under the supervision of slightly taller "doctor- beings". Abductees, usually naked, are ephysically examined in detail, often sexual detail. Men describe having semen samples taken. Women recall having eggs removed with cold metal instruments. This leads Mack to conclude that: "The purely physical or biological aspect of the abduction phenomenon seems to have to do with some sort of genetic engineering to create human/alien hybrid offspring."

Oh, yes, the creatures communicate by telepathy and show their captives powerful images on television monitors before releasing them. "Scenes of the earth devestated by a nuclear holocust, panoramas of lifeless polluted landscapes and waters, apocalyptic images of giant earthquakes, firestorms, floods and fractures of the planet itself," are among the favoured videos, according to Mack. He thinks they are trying to drum home a green message.

While most scientists have ignored the increased credulance given to the stories, a growing number see it as an aspect of a dangerous trend, the powerful new anti-rationalism that has gripped America. These sceptics place abduction reports alongside "out of body" experiences, reincarnation, para- psychology, psychic healing and the other staples of the best-seller lists.

At a conference last month entitled The Flight From Science and Reason, more than 200 academics lamented the "hobbling of science", wanting a new offensive against psuedo-scientists like the proponents of abduction. Today aliens, they warned, tomorrow Aryan race theories.

The battle between the scientific traditionalists and the anti-ationalists has crystallised around Dr Mack. The 65 year old psychiatrist is a long-standing faculty member who won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1977 biography of T E Lawerence and is respected for his work on teenage suicide, and the psychological effect of the cold war. But now he is struggling to save his professional life amid allegatins of unprofessional conduct and a university inquiry into his academic methods.

He first encountered the phenomenon when he met Hopkins in 1990. He began interviewing "abductees", hoping to provide a psychological explanation for thier experiences, but found himself believing his subjects' accounts. His argument for accepting their stories boils down to this syllogism: the 90 or so people he interviewed sincerely believed they had been abducted; they were not crazy, by any conventional psychiatric definition; therefore they had been abducted.

His Harvard colleagues have not been entirely convinced by this reasoning or the testimonies of interviewees. Already embarrassed by the massive publicity for the launch of Mack's book, Harvard launced a full=scale internal inquiry after a woman alleged that she had duped him, and that he had unethically billed abduction therapy sessions to a health insurer. After more than 30 closed hearings, the investigating committee is said to have produced a report highly critical of Mack's research methods.

Mack has been particularly criticised for failing to publish his research in a proper journal in accordance with academic convention before releasing a masscirculation book. In the next few weeks, Harvard's dean, Daniel Tosteson. will decide whether he should be disciplined - or even dismissed from the faculty.

To many academics, including some who have little time for Mack's theories, Harvard's somewhat heavy-handed reaction is seen as a direct onslaught on the cherished notion of academic freedom. Mack himself says he was not surprised that the academic establishment turned on him: "When you do soemthing that breaks with the reality of your culture, you are going to draw some flak. The subject is difficult for the Western world view, because it says several things. Not only that are we not the top of the intelligence pyramid in the cosmos, but that we don't have control of our fates.

At the end of his book, Abduction:Human Encounters with Aliens, Mack concludes that the abduction phenomenon is "a profound mystery that has potentially vast implications for our contemporary world. For I have no basis for concluding, as yet, that anything other than what experiencers say happened to them actually did."

In arriving at this drammatic conclusion, however, he glosses over fairly obvious grounds for doubt. Many of the abduction accounts obtained by Mack and a handful of other researchers in the nascent field, were given while under hypnosis, precisely the kind of "recovered memories" which have been widely discredited in a number of sex-abuse cases. Similarly, the profusion of support groups and media coverage of the abduction phenomenon have made it easier for individuals to give, consciuosly or unconsciously, uniform accounts of their alien encounters.

There are apparently glaring inconsistencies, too, in the description of the aliens and their capabilities. They are smart enought to waft their abdustees through walls and suppress their memories of encounters for years, and yet they frequently return humans to their beds with their pyjamas on inside out, or wearing the wrong nightclothes. "Sometines the aliens seem to be making a point," Mack suggests, "or a certain humour is involved."