Exploring Cross-Cultural Abduction Experiences
Author: John Mack (Audio Tape)

Reviewer: Sheryl Gottschall

UFORQ tried with all their might to get Professor John Mack to come to Brisbane earlier this year whilst partaking of a conference in Sydney on the 4th February, 1996, but due to the short duration of his stay in Australia this was not possible. Fortunately I was lent a copy of the audio tape of the UFO evening and now present a brief review.

John Mack is a renowned Harvard psychiatrist, researcher and director of P.E.E.R., an institute for the study of people who claim extraordinary experiences. His work has taken him into the UFO abduction arena and most recently, research involving analysis of apparent extraterrestrial interactions with people from indigenous cultures around the world.

John Mack has now worked with approximately 100 to 120 UFO abductees having used a modified hypnosis approach with approximately 70 of these , and has found that case after case has remained consistent. He states the phenomenon appears to have three fundamental dimensions to it the first one being of a basic biological relationship with the aliens. For example, someone may be in their home, car or outdoors when they see a strong beam of light which comes down to them and they see one or more alien beings. The individual is frightened, paralysed and transported to some sort of enclosure where within that enclosure they are subjected to a whole host of intrusive behaviour such as staring, probing, sperm taken from men and eggs taken from women. In subsequent ordeals they will see hybrid children looking like a mix of human and alien beings. There are cuts, marks, lesions and nose-bleeds as evidence of some physical intervention having occurred.

The second dimension he calls informational where people are in some sort of communication with the aliens who convey to the humans that there are problems in the way we are living. The information is conveyed in several ways either through mind to mind communication, on TV-like monitors or through the eyes of the beings themselves. People may be shown scenes of nuclear destruction or an extension of the environmental devastation. Often people feel so strongly about certain issues they start campaigning for them.

The third dimension he calls transformational. This encompasses human growth, consciousness development and spiritual opening. For example, abductees participating in hypnotic regression may recall a past life experience and be struck by the fact that they are not a finite being. They can come in contact with infinite cosmic consciousness where all time collapses and the people are present in all aspects of time at the same moment. There is also a sense that humans are one with these alien beings, from a common stock and that somehow we have split off from the source, this being God or the creator. These people experience themselves as having a human and an alien identity and have to integrate the two. They often discover they have made some kind of agreement with the source to come to Earth, to be embodied and pursue life here.

The cross cultural aspect is important as it shows that the abduction experience is not just a US phenomenon that is a hi-tech, media driven, Speilberg-type phenomenon. Mack has now spoken to the indigenous peoples of South Africa, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Australia, Europe and the USA and has found again and again that the basic dimensions of the phenomenon show up which means these experiences are powerfully real in any sense.

One particular case he recounts is that of Credo Mutwa, a South African medicine man who was training to become a shaman. Whilst in his late thirties he was doing a mining job in the bush when suddenly he found himself in an enclosure, terribly bad smelling, on a table with several beings with big eyes looking at him. He had a sexual encounter where he was mounted by a female alien being. The encounter was not sexually appealing yet he managed to have an orgasm which was very disturbing for him. Credo says that these experiences are double-edged in that they are informative yet dangerous to us.

He has also spoken to a Lakota Indian medicine man in South Dakota who is a leader of a group of medicine men who decided to come forward and share what they knew about the Star people and the role of them in the culture’s history. The medicine man told Mack that westerners have no way of knowing (understanding) the star people because they have only three dimensions in their reality and the Lakota’s have two hundred and twenty.

So where does all this leave us besides a few dimensions short? Obviously looking at much more than the nuts and bolts of the phenomenon and braving the esoteric nature of it all. As Mack states in his opening, “We are in a time when the field of alien abductions is rapidly shifting from the question - ‘is this real?’ to ‘aliens are here, so what.’ And if we are to answer this we have to look past any hard-nosed training toward a human connection and deep exploration of the experiences. This phenomenon will not yield any of it’s basics let alone it’s secrets to this sort of approach.”

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