Hopkins told me about this case at length. However, he managed to leave out a remarkable series of details, all of which are revealed in a 25-page study of the "incident" published by three independent UFO researchers, including a former special agent for the U.S. Army and a former security police specialist for the U.S. Air Force. According to the information they gathered from papers Hopkins wrote and talks with him personally, Linda said that the two security officers who supposedly witnessed her abduction later kidnapped her, asked her to remove her shoes to find out if she was an alien (they claimed aliens lack toes); and that one of the officers drove her to a beach house, asked her to put on a nightgown, and requested she have sex with him. She says he also tried to drown her and that at one point he wrote her saying he was in a mental hospital. Yet Linda never made an official complaint or contacted the police. The investigators note that these bizarre details of Linda's story--none of which Hopkins told me--turn out to be uncannily similar to a science fiction novel, Nighteyes, published a few months before Linda claimed to be abducted.
If Mack accepts Hopkins wholeheartedly as the pioneer in whose path he has followed, what are we to conclude? This question haunted me simply because the distinction between Mack and Hopkins is enormous. Hopkins is an artist, but Mack is a high priest at a most sanctified temple of science: Harvard Medical School. He also happens to be a man with a halo of perfection about him, an honorable man given to just causes, a man with a reputation for kindness. Mack more than anybody needs to be rigorous in his research. Otherwise he may become a kind of Pied Piper, seducing and perhaps terrifying us with visions of a world that may not exist. Can Mack corroborate his own findings?
I asked him about the physical evidence: "Why aren't the ETs showing up on the White House lawn?"
His answer sounded like better sleight of hand than Freud himself, who invented the term "resistance" to fend off naysayers. "Is it real? Did it happen? That looks like an irreducible question. But the answer is, in what reality? Ours, or another reality? My hunch is that this is some new kind of entity that exists in a marginal place between the physical and the nonphysical. I would almost say this phenomenon, by its very nature, is trying to get us off the pure reliance on physical artifacts."
I asked him how he responds to the criticism that he is "leading" his clients to the stories he wants to hear--a criticism not leveled solely at Mack but at many of those who rely on hypnosis to provide proof of any sort. Mack admits that not every UFO researcher gets the same powerful information he does about ecology and Earth changes. In fact, the field is rent by disagreement and argument about the meaning of UFOs. Early researchers, who were interested in the flying saucers, have trouble believing there are creatures inside who are performing experiments on us. Many of those who do believe feel, like Hopkins, that "the aliens' agenda is not focused on us particularly, we're incidental." And other researchers find the aliens are more body snatchers than angelic guides to a purer Earth.
Nonetheless, Mack insists, "I do not lead people. We look together at a shared mystery, but they are not alone in the strange, reality-shattering matter here." When I asked him what percentage of abductees come up with a new "Earth consciousness," he said percentages were not valid. "If I said half did, the other half may still come up with it. We just may not have gotten that far with them yet."
I asked about his contention that these people lack pathology. He has given only four of nearly 80 clients any kind of psychological testing. No independent clinician has verified his statements of his patients' mental health.
However, in a recent study of 49 people reporting encounters with UFOs, four Canadian psychologists found them free of psychopathology. What did set them apart from others, the researchers, led by Nicholas P. Spanos, Ph.D., state in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, was "a belief in UFOs and in the existence of alien life forms." Most of their experiences took place at night, and the team attributes them to temporary sleep paralysis, a condition associated with vivid hallucinations. Under these conditions, believers tend to confuse "internally produced images and sensations" with external reality.
MEMORY IN THE MUSCULATURE
Mack insists that his patients are able to provide detailed accounts of abduction because of his use of Grof breathwork. "I tell the person about the breath, that it gives them power and connects them to the life-giving forces of the cosmos." He believes that traumatic experiences are held in the body's tissues and that, using the Grof method, pressure in the "blocked area of the musculature will bring the stored emotions forth and discharge the tensions that have been out of reach until this time, stuck in the body. As strong emotions are coming to the surface, I can feel, for example in the client's neck or back, in a place where he feels the alien instrumentation once occurred, a powerful tightness or spasm in the muscle."
The most unwieldy question is that of hypnosis. All roads to UFOs always seem to lead back to hypnosis. It is when patients are under hypnosis that Mack witnesses extremes of emotion. Patients thrash, cry, shout. Stories pour out of them. The drama is so great it's hard not to be convinced.
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