Budd Hopkins & John Mack — “A Dialogue on the Alien Abduction Experience”

Speakers: Budd Hopkins and John E. Mack, moderated (Christopher Lydon). A public dialogue between the two foundational abduction-research figures. ~1h53m.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/4YAJW2px6gI (posted on the official “John E. Mack” channel)
Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py).
Primary for hopkins-abduction-research (and corroborating for mack-harvard-abduction-research). Hopkins articulates his method in his own words — including the unfalsifiable “screen memory” doctrine (aliens implant false images, e.g. an “owl,” to hide themselves) and his reliance on experiencer reports “plus attendant physical evidence.” The moderator presses the framework’s exact questions (is it real-in-time-and-space? how is it different from dream/hallucination? what is the extraordinary evidence?).
NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; “Bud”=Budd Hopkins. Verify quotes against audio before load-bearing citation.

We are delighted to present to you our host this evening, Christopher Lydon. Good evening. I think of this as sort of our own little Berkeley Street X-Files. Let’s call it the alien connection. It may be about good aliens or bad aliens, or real aliens or imagined aliens, or dreaming or waking aliens, or rumored or experienced aliens. As Karen said, I’m the host of the connection, and I want to be the first to say that probably everybody in this room knows more about the subject than I do, and it may be that everybody in the room cares more about the subject than I do. I just want to be clear. I’m not a partisan. I think my job tonight is simply to catalyze the conversation, to keep it on track. It’s most certainly not to be the arbiter in any way or the judge of whatever truth develops on the stage this evening. I just want to prod it along from time to time with some friendly questions. Friendly skepticism, let’s say. The good thing tonight is that our principal guests are both famous researchers and best-selling writers on the subject. Karen pictured them as polar opposites in a certain way. I also think of them as kind of friendly, should we say, friendly rival pastors of different churches in the same general faith. But we’ll see. We’ll see about that. My friend John Mack, as everybody here knows, is a clinical psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. He was also a celebrated writer before the whole alien abduction subject came into his ken. He won a Pulitzer Prize for biography, no small prize, for his life of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. The book was called A Prince of Our Disorder. And John Mack had also been a very thoughtful activist, which is how I knew him, mostly behind the scenes in Middle East politics and in the politics of nuclear confrontation in the Cold War. Bud Hopkins is the man who, among other things, brought John Mack into this field. Bud Hopkins is a painter and a sculptor. He was drawn into the abduction research field 20 years ago. By now he has tracked down 600 reports of these experiences with aliens. It was his seriousness and his good faith as well as his evidence that persuaded John Mack to take a harder look. And then it was the abductees, the experiencers, and their stories who convinced both of them, in somewhat different ways as we’ll hear tonight, that something was going on here and that serious attention had to be paid. Let me just say for myself as a completely kind of neutral, ignorant, curious skeptic, that for me the persistent underlying question tonight has to do with the reality question. The question of what people mean, including Bud Hopkins or John Mack, when they say that these abduction experiences could be real. My first citizen question is, are we talking real, real happenings in time and space that can be verified as other such things can be? And if not that, how is this reality different, say, from dream reality? Especially the reality of sexual dreams that we’ve all experienced. Or say, from religious reality. To me this is an important question. Is this the same dimension of reality as alien abduction? How different are these from Elvis sightings? Or Hitler sightings? Or the real belief that John F. Kennedy is alive in the world somewhere? How different are they from hallucinations or certifiable mental disturbances? In other words, I just want to lay it on the table now and maybe I won’t have to do it again, but my question for John Mack and Bud Hopkins is beginning to end, what is your definition of the reality in which you think these things are happening? And also I have to say the sort of the basic skeptics question, for your extraordinary claims about this phenomenon, what are your extraordinarily powerful evidences or what is your extraordinarily persuasive rationale? So much for me. I think we’re all ready to meet the principles. And I just ask them onto the stage, Bud Hopkins and John Mack. Bud Hopkins, as you probably all know, is the author maybe most famously of Intruders. It’s a book. It’s also a general theory of what’s going on here. He’s the first reason we’re here and I’m going to ask him to sort of take the first at bat. Bud Hopkins. I’m very, very pleased to be here and flattered to be here and I would like to express my appreciation to John and to his associates and to Karen and those who planned this and to Christopher Lydon. I really mean the thanks very profoundly. I would just like to say something about my respect for John Mack, for his courage, for the difficulties that he’s undergone in bringing a very unconventional subject to the attention of a university that perhaps is overly frightened by something as new and dramatic as this. But I think any human being in this room would have to admit that if the UFO phenomenon is occurring, as the report suggests, it’s the most important event in human history. And if that’s the case, I don’t think any institution or organization is being very wise to oppose the investigation, the serious investigation of such a phenomenon. Now what I’d like to say just to start with is Karen’s introduction referred to a certain polarity. I’m not certain that polarity is the thing we should be talking about here tonight. Just to answer some of the questions that she raised very quickly. First of all, she raised the questions of good aliens and bad aliens. I have never seen any reports that suggested in a believable way that there were bad aliens. In other words, I have to remind people sometimes that Independence Day was just a movie. They’re not here to blow up the White House and so forth, even though that’s a very common science fiction myth. I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re good aliens either. I haven’t seen any sense of any suggestion, any evidence that they’re here to help and heal us. The most difficult thing in the world is to hold in the mind the idea that this is a third force, a third realm that is not here in the traditional gods and demons framework. So let’s dispose of the good alien, bad alien issue right to begin with. Now the most important thing to me about this evening’s discussion is that we must, in order to discuss this intelligently, we must know that the data we’re relying on is reliable, is solid. The data, of course, comes mainly from the reports of the people who have had these experiences, plus a whole range of attendant physical evidence, which I don’t want to go into at this point, even though Christopher has brought up the issue. I’ve written three books and John has written one to take care of the issue. So I just suggest people read the books if you want information about the physical evidence. But when we get to the heart of this, what this really means, what these experiences are, this is where the data is crucial. Now what do we know about the UFO experience in terms of the reliability of what the aliens say? And I use the word aliens for one of a better term. The first thing is that the aliens are extraordinarily deceptive and operate in a covert manner. There was no doubt about that. There is no possible way that anyone who’s looked into this phenomenon can say anything to the contrary of that, simply because we have a whole history of what we have to call screen memories, when the UFO occupants make us see things that are not there in order to hide the way they actually appear, the way the memory of the experience very, very often has been stolen from us, which is not only an act of theft, it’s an act of deception, and it can’t possibly really be defended so far as I’m concerned. Just a couple of screen memories. A woman recently described herself driving along, and she said a giant owl landed in front of her car and stopped, and it walked up to the front of the car and stared at her over the hood of the car, meaning it was a four-foot-tall owl or something like that. She said they have very big owls in this part of the country. And when it took off, it didn’t have any wings. It just went straight up, but it stared at her. Well, we have hundreds and hundreds of stories like this. We know when these things are explored that she didn’t see an owl. Incidentally, if you had a carload of people, they all would have seen the same owl, which means that the UFO occupants are able to input these images into our brains, into our minds, into our memories. That’s deception to start with. Now, there are all kinds of wonderful stories to illustrate this sort of control that they can have over our perceptions. I was working with a woman once who was recalling an experience. She’s on the table inside a ship. There’s a physical examination taking place. It’s extremely painful, demeaning, and so forth. And she is not only enraged and furious, but she’s scared to death and she’s undergoing pain. And the head alien, as we know from these accounts, often happens, walks over, puts his hand across her forehead, and she said the pain disappeared. She felt waves of the most profound love she has ever felt in her life. She said she would sacrifice her own children for the love that she felt for this being. It was just beyond anything she had ever known. No pain, no anger, and total love. He walked away from her, took his hand away, of course. The pain came back. She began to get angry again. She was hurting again. She was furious again. And he came back and he put his hand on her head, and she would have again sacrificed her children for that love. Now, that kind of manipulation is, of course, something that’s part and parcel with the alien means of operating. Another thing, of course, is that they begin very early, as for those of you who are familiar with this material, beginning in childhood when people are abducted, they are very, very often told, we are your real parents. Carla Turner suggested to me once that her first conscious memory of an abduction was being five years old, standing out in the field outside the house, freezing to death in her nightgown, scared to death, facing a tall, strange-looking creature that suggested a praying mantis to her, and she said, and it was trying to tell me it was my mother. A recent case, a man was abducted. He was taken into a craft and was shown a military man standing there with an MP uniform on. And, of course, he began to think, uh-oh, is the military cooperating with the aliens? It’s one of the paranoid rumors in the world. And, of course, it may be true to it, but I doubt it. But at any rate, he said, am I looking at a military man? And then he began to think, I can’t believe it, an MP uniform. And as he looked at this man, he suddenly changed this figure that he’s looking at, and he became a Nazi in a Nazi uniform. At any rate, this kind of deception goes on and on. People have been made to feel that they were themselves aliens in an early life, made to see themselves as if they had alien hands and so forth. All kinds of imagery seems to be played into people’s heads. I know this totally sounds crazy. You have to read the background information supporting this. But I’m trying to start with what I assume many of you already know about the phenomenon. So the basic first point here is that we can’t trust the data, that we can’t trust what the aliens are saying to us under any conditions. Poor Charlie Hickson, who was abducted in 1973 in a very famous case, a wonderful man, spent year after year after year preaching the idea that in 1992, the aliens were going to land massively all over the world. He had been told that, and of course, this is now 1997, and here we are. So the first thing is we cannot believe what we get from the aliens. I always say there are two sources never to believe automatically, and one is the United States government on this, and the other is the aliens themselves. They both lie. They both have agendas. Now, we know, as a second major fact, we know what happens to individuals who are reporting abduction experiences psychologically. We know that they are psychologically scarred. The only set of psychological tests which, so far as I know, were ever done on this matter were done, I was partly involved in this in 1981, Dr. Elizabeth Slater, a psychologist, tested a group of abductees or people reporting these experiences. She was not told the nature of the sample she was testing, anything about their UFO experiences, but she found that all of them shared three deficits psychologically. All had low self-esteem. All had a certain dissociation in their attitude towards their bodies, their physicality, their sexuality, and all had a lot of trouble trusting people. Well, at any rate, she pointed out when we later told her after she wrote a report the nature of the sample that she had tested and what they had experienced, and she said, though this doesn’t prove anything, if these people had had the experiences they reported, then these are precisely the kinds of deficits one would imagine would accrue. She said it’s very much like what happens when you get a rape victim. Now, the next thing is, are these experiences, and I’ll try to be very brief, are these experiences transformational in any way? And, of course, they can be transformational in a wonderful way, provided they meet therapists and a support group and other people who are associates in this field who can lead them through their experiences in such a way that they understand that they’re not crazy, that there’s no blame to be ascribed to them, and so forth. These experiences then can be faced in a very, very direct way. It’s my feeling that the therapist, the support group, and friends and family provide the safety net that create that transformational experience. I remember John Mack and I had a conversation not too long ago when he said several people that he had worked with who had had work-a-day jobs had ended up in several months after he’d been working with them, and they had quit their jobs and become involved in work with the environment, ecological issues. And John felt that that was due to the aliens, and I said, but, you know, if the aliens had these people for, say, 30 or 35 years and they ended up in sales, and you had them for three months and they ended up changing jobs, who gets the credit? So I think that he’s in a certain sense denigrating his own role in their lives because what we all want is these lives which have been scarred and damaged. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. We want these people to become much more whole. We want them to feel a sense of healing. It’s an extremely delicate and difficult new kind of procedure of therapy that has to be developed, really, at this point. I’m not a therapist myself, unlike John, but I feel that what we do if we work with these people is a kind of de facto therapy. Now, just one last thing on the issue of transformation. When you go out there, when people are taken wherever out there is, things can happen, and I want to read you just a couple statements. One man said, it made me a deeper, more religious person and more keenly aware of the fragile nature of our planet. Another person says that if we see that we are one on this planet, we can live on this planet in a unified way, it can have a very powerful effect. We are all locked together in this context and we are co-evolving. There are wonderful statements about feeling the fragility of the world and so forth. All of the statements I’ve been reading are statements made by the astronauts. These are people who went out there voluntarily, unlike the involuntary trips that the abductees have taken. And I think that what this shows is a certain kind of control group that when human beings leave this earth, this home that we cherish, and go elsewhere, that we do feel a new kind of opening up, a new kind of attitude towards the fragility of our planet, a new kind of caring, a transformation has taken place. But it is not due, in any sense that I can see, to the interventions of the UFO occupants. I think that it’s only when human beings begin to sense their own innate humanity and in a strange way their difference from the UFO occupants that they can begin to feel this transformation. It comes from us, it comes from within, it comes from the human spirit, the resources that we have within ourselves. It’s not a gift from up there, it’s something we have ourselves, and it’s something that we have to strengthen in the face of what are very, very disturbing and traumatic events. Right there, first of all to say your 15 minutes is winding down, but just, will you sum it up by describing the nature of the reality plane that you think that this is real in? Very good. The nature of the plane is this. The UFO phenomenon runs a tremendous 180 degree gamut from being totally physical, nuts and bolts, when the thing comes down it could break the tree branches down from the top, leave marks on the ground, people are floated out of buildings, are scarred, their bodies are marked, the craft can show up on radar, they can be photographed, etc. Totally physical. And on the other end, totally paranormal. All the communication is telepathic. The craft can be apparently unseeable at some points. We know that people can be floated through walls and they’re actually missing. This is not an out-of-body experience, it’s an out-of-the-house experience. The hardest thing for scientists to accept is the idea that it is both physical and so totally paranormal. The whole paradigm of what’s possible, of course, has to be expanded. The last thing I’d like to do, Chris, if I may, I’d like to read a short statement that a woman wrote, an abductee, about her attitude, she’s a psychotherapist, how she has dealt with this kind of transformation. She said, we of the earth are in possession, due perhaps to our biology, of an innate humanness which is often translated into a deeply spiritual humanism. It’s the basis of our moral sense, of the feelings of caring, empathy, love and responsibility we have for one another, for our children and for the planet. From my experiences with the aliens, I’ve come to believe that their entire paradigm is radically different from ours and that our sense of right and wrong, good and bad, does not apply for them. They are very different from us, not only physically, but in their understandings, motives, goals and purposes. They are separate and work from a set of beliefs or needs that we do not understand. If indeed this is the case, we’re fairly on our own down here on earth. The aliens are not going to teach us how to love our fellow humans, how to help our planet. I do not believe that they are the great redeeming power some may wish for, but only beings with a different set of principles. Therefore, we must assume responsibility for ourselves and each other. It places the burden of care for one another and for the planet squarely with each one of us. For what can we gain from them if not the understanding of our own nature as a species, using them for comparison? My curiosity about them is unbounded, as is my grief, confusion and fear. But what I have found, what I return to each day, be it coping mechanism or epiphany, is that I want to immerse myself in my humanity, in my humanism, in my caring for other humans, for life on our planet and for the earth itself. And this statement of hers is a statement which I absolutely 100% endorse. Thank you very much. Thank you. John Mack, the author of Abduction. Dr. John Mack. All right. First, I want to thank Chris for taking this on and being willing to show up here in Boston and with a couple of disreputable characters like Bud and me, and shows his courage. I also want to express my appreciation to Bud for… I don’t know if I really feel this way, actually. I’m not so sure I am appreciative that he introduced me to this field. I mean, it’s been a lot of trouble, actually. But I have deep fondness and admiration for his pioneering role and spirit in this, and I find when I hear him that I agree with a great deal of what he says. I don’t like getting set up in polarity with him. It’s not quite like that. We have some differences which will emerge as we go on here. What I’d like to see happen here tonight is that we really deepen some questions. I happen to be very interested in the reality question or the ontological question as it’s formally called in philosophy, and I hope to arouse and deepen your curiosity about all of this. Now, what happened to me with Bud is that somebody asked if I wanted to meet him. This was the fall of 1989, and I’d never heard of him. And they said, well, he’s this guy that works with people who think they’ve been taken by aliens into spacecraft. And I said, he must be crazy if he believes that, and this must be some new form of psychosis. Well, I had a couple of free hours, and I went to see him, and I liked him. He seemed sincere. He didn’t seem crazy at all. And he was telling me about people who were telling stories that they didn’t believe themselves, that they were questioning. They sounded like pretty healthy people, and that has been proven in the various psychological studies that have been done. We’re doing one at Peer now, where we’re comparing 40 experiences with 40 matched controls. We don’t have the results yet, but all of the other more preliminary studies that have been done have not revealed any consistent pattern of any disturbance. There’s a post-traumatic kind of set of symptoms, such as Bud just described, but nothing that can account for the experiences, nothing in their mental status that would explain it. I’ve worked intensively with about 130 of these people. The stories are consistent. They are described with intense feeling, appropriate self-doubt. They are shocked when they hear other people have had the same experiences because that tends to affirm that it’s real. They have nothing to gain by this, and they don’t seem to fall into any category whatsoever. And as I’ve gone more deeply into this, this has held up. In other words, I have not encountered, nor do I know anyone that has encountered a single case where some sort of psychological other explanation other than what the person said was happening or what they are describing had occurred. Now, the fact that what they are describing isn’t possible in our reality is not my fault. You then have a choice of trying to stretch what you might consider to be possible at that point. Now, I want to run through, just because someone ought to do it at some point this evening, what my view of the basic phenomenology is of this phenomenon. First, you have what Bud calls the event-level element. Now, I say, I believe overall this is a phenomenon of enormous complexity, meaning, and value for understanding of ourselves, who we are in the universe, and we’re just beginning to grasp what this is about. So there aren’t going to be answers here tonight, just deepening questions. First is the event-level aspect. This is the sort of traumatic part that Bud is talking about, this mixture of subjective and objective elements that have to do with the intrusive, rape-like aspect for some people, the creation of these hybrids. And again, every time you speak, you need to put this in quotes, because it’s, in what reality is this? The hybrids have not been photographed, yet they are described as altogether real by the people. The physical evidence is there, it’s part of the picture, and it works together with the subjective evidence to create this picture. The trauma is not just what has happened, it’s also what I call ontological shock. In other words, to the person having that experience, this is no more possible for them than it is for us. So we struggle together with that question. The second important element, in my perspective, is the information that occurs, and a great deal of this does have to do with the ecological aspect. In other words, the showing of the images, panorama of the planet destroyed, vast pollution, the earth destroyed on television-like monitors, through the eyes, in mind-to-mind communication by the beings. And this has an enormous impact on the consciousness of the individuals, so much so that it affects deeply their choices in their lives. And I do believe this is not just deception, but I believe it’s an important part of the phenomenon itself. And I see this in case after case, and in cases that I haven’t worked with myself. People say, well, isn’t it interesting that these aliens have max-green politics or something. Well, I was never that involved with the environmental aspect, and many of these people have written about that aspect, have talked of what they’ve experienced in terms of the distress about what’s occurring to the earth before I’ve even seen them. Now, you could say, well, they select or choose to see someone like me, and I can’t deny that. Often, there is a selection process, so that this is not a phenomenon. The people have a great variety of experiences, and they will select who they go to, often according to what they expect at some unconscious level, perhaps, will be the way that particular facilitator will work with them. Next, you have what I call the spiritual aspect of this phenomenon. This is the sense that people have that they’re somehow being open to source, returning to what they call home, with a capital H, the spiritual origin of all that is, and they feel that they are brought closer to that, and many experiences feel that that’s a fundamental part of this experience, that they’re brought closer to the depth of being, the godhead, whatever you want to call it, there’s different language for this. Here’s one young woman’s way of describing this. She said, I think source is purpose for letting that happen, that is, allowing the aliens to come, is to bring back memory of us, of source, to empower ourselves. The power has always been there. It’s not like source is giving you this power now. It has always been there. It’s self-realization. It’s to open up your consciousness more. I think it’s almost like a baby going from crawling to walking and realizing that I am. That’s what I think source is reason for this, I am. Then a fourth element, which is, again, something where I think Bud and I differ, is the relationship between the, and there is not one type of alien perceived. The most common of these greys with the big black eyes, which I never heard of when I started this work, but there are also various other kinds of beings. Bud sees the relationship as cold and different. In his autobiography, which he’s sharing with me, he wrote at the very first page, he said, who have come here from God knows where, subverting our truths and violating our planet. Well, there is that element in the beginning, but in my experience, if you work with the terror with the person, you work with the mystery, you have them sort of put the nose of the prow of the self into the phenomenon, that it does transform, that it does become more spiritual, that growth does occur. And sometimes there can be this, not just this sort of transient sense of loving connection that is manipulated, but some deepening bond that lasts throughout this relationship across these dimensions, and that this is a very deep, powerful phenomenon. Now, different investigators find a different kind of element here, but that’s what I find. Now, the last point I want to make in these opening remarks has to do with the resistance to the reality, and I think it relates to what Chris Leiden was saying. Why is there so much resistance to accepting, or at least realizing what’s going on? And I think at the heart of this, even more fundamental than the terror of the helplessness, the lack of control, we know that it represents that, and people are afraid that they can’t protect their children, and that this is a kind of intrusive, overwhelming kind of phenomenon. But I think even deeper than that is this ontological problem, in that this absolutely defies our categories. In other words, if our worldview is one that can master knowledge through experiment, through the methods of basic science, this doesn’t fall into a category that allows us to do that. It crosses over. You can’t locate it. It is both physical, and it is as if in another dimension at the same time. It doesn’t lend its secrets to the methods that we know about. We can’t prove it. We can’t get our hands on it. We can’t master it. It seems to hint of deeper realities beyond our ken. We can’t get at it. The clients, although they’ll make it clear, this is not a dream. It’s real. It’s altogether real. I know a dream. I wake up from a dream. This is different. I have knowledge of this. But they’ll say, but it’s not this reality. It comes through as if through the scrim of a theater front and enters into our reality, and it is in that reality altogether real, and it introduces them to a deeper fabric of reality that lies beyond this one. The English writer Patrick Harper has written a book called Daimonic Reality. And Harper, by daimonic, he means realities that have to do with unseen agency. It’s not daemonic, daimonic. And this would be near-death experiences. It would be apparitions where people see some very powerful images, and he includes the UFO abduction phenomenon. He says that this elusiveness, he says, is characteristic of daimonic reality. He says, no matter how many links are posited between the material and spirit worlds, there will always be a point of discontinuity at which the spiritual ceases to be spiritual and becomes material and vice versa. So it seems to me at the heart of what is called for now is that we allow this phenomenon to, through the questions we ask, to expand our notions of reality, to include unseen realities as perhaps even a deeper reality, but an other reality, not simply the objective physical world, and that we learn to value knowledge that comes from those realms. A psychologist in Mexico recently said to me, and he was only half-joking, he says, if I can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. And he was quite serious about that. But what this phenomenon, I think, along with many others, like the near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences does, it invites us to value knowledge that comes from the subtle realms. In other words, it asks us to credit our experiences, to develop criteria for how do we judge whether an experience, as Bud was saying, can be taken seriously. Is it because thousands of people are having the same experience? Well, you could say we’re all having the same delusion. Well, how do we decide? These people haven’t known each other. They’re doubtful about these experiences. I have certain criteria by which I decide these experiences are to be taken seriously. It goes along with the physical evidence. It’s that combination. But we don’t have a methodology yet. And I think I’d like to close with the point that I don’t think that this phenomenon is going to be proven. In other words, I think that the deepening of our understanding and knowledge, the expansion of ourselves in relation to it and other similar phenomena is going to occur by crediting and allowing other ways of knowing about reality. In other words, expanding the way we know and what we credit as important. I don’t think it’s going to yield its secrets to the frameworks of proof that we have developed to apply to phenomena that are purely in the material world. Thanks. John, thank you. Could I just say I’d like to back out of the conversation and let you sort of interview each other. Not just to congratulate each other on being right, but are there differences to probe here? Are there things you want to ask about each other’s presentations? Well, I had a question, John, when you talked about when you work with people and it takes on a deeper, more spiritual level of Sifuet. The model that presents itself to me is that we know these experiences happen from childhood on. Let’s assume a giant pyramid of individuals. At the bottom are the people who have had these experiences and have ended up really suffering from them. And you and I know people who have ended up in mental hospitals. I know several cases where people have taken their lives out of terror and fear. I’ve had many, many abductees talk to me about suicide attempts they made when they were 10 years old or 9 years old or whatever. Absolute, abject terror. So let’s assume at the bottom of this pyramid are all the people who either die along the way or have terrible psychological problems, become substance abusers or whatever it is. Up a little further are people who have had more understanding. Counselors, parents, whatever, have been listening to them. Perhaps they were stronger. And perhaps they’re handling these things a little better with fewer psychological problems. You go higher in the pyramid and you find a few people, fewer, who are lucky and they have run into a John Mack or David Jacobs or many of the people doing this kind of work and have been helped by them and met a support group and they’re doing much better. And finally, at that top, we find the group, a small group, that has managed to somehow transform themselves with all of that support. And in a certain sense, at that top of that apex of the triangle are those lucky few who have survived intact, more or less. And down at the bottom are the vast majority who are having a lot of trouble with this. I can’t look at that myself and grant it any kind of moral approval. I find that it’s market economics brought to the highest level. Survival of the fittest, whatever you want to call it. I find that extraordinarily upsetting. And if this is what the alien phenomenon is putting human beings through, I don’t want any part of it. My feeling has always been that they may be here ultimately for good purposes or be ecologically concerned or whatnot. They’re doctors to heal the planet, but I don’t like the bedside manner in the meantime. So that’s why I find it very difficult to look at that in any kind of way. I’ve seen over the 22 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen far too much pain, far too much damage, far too much psychological, even physical damage done to people. And I don’t think that this is deliberate. I don’t think the UFO occupants are intending it, but I’ve just seen too much pain to indulge it with the idea that somehow it’s going to all turn out okay. That’s my basic issue. I guess I’d like to try to take the discussion out of the question of whether this is benign or malevolent. I don’t really see it that way. And I don’t, for a moment, deny that people have had deeply troubling, traumatic, disturbing experiences, and in rare occasions have contemplated suicide. There’s an irony here in a way, because I’m supposed to be the psychiatrist here, right? I’m supposed to see the really troubled, disturbed people. And it almost seems as if you’re seeing the worst cases from the mental health standpoint, and I’m seeing the more seeking ones, which may have to do with who we are, and how we work, and what goes on. So I don’t want to give the impression that I think this is, as sometimes I’m quoted as saying, this is all sort of good, and it’s enlightened, and it’s all going to turn out for the better, and it’s simply godlike. No, this is highly traumatic for many people. It is deeply disturbing. It is terrifying. It is traumatic in ways that are rather unique. First of all, it’s traumatic in simply the helplessness, being taken against their will. because this is still not acceptable in this culture, so people are isolated, they can’t talk about it, they don’t get sympathy like they would for more generally considered forms of abuse. Alien abuse is not something that you can go talking about even with your parents and colleagues, although this may be changing some. Then it is ontologically traumatic. This just can’t be. It shocks everything people believe about the world. And then finally, it isn’t over when it’s over. It can recur at any time, or parents are troubled that they can’t protect their children. All that is true, but at the same time, I don’t find that the people that have these experiences, they tend to be way over on the healthy end of the spectrum of people that I’ve seen. And I don’t just mean that in terms of the nature of the trauma, I mean it in terms of their ability to handle it, the fact that a little goes a long way, that they seem to be able to integrate it with a minimum of help, that they often will feel themselves part of some life-giving process, it’s not simply traumatic, and that if they stay with it, the whole quality of the experience changes. So it isn’t repeatedly traumatic and disturbing, but becomes something different. The quality of the relationship with the beings, again in quotes, changes. So again, I don’t want to leave the impression that I don’t know the suffering that goes on, but something else occurs as you work with it. Can I ask you both a question, starting with Bud? But you started by saying that if the UFOs are real, this is the most important event in the history of the species. Big if, but it’s a plausible conclusion. If it’s the most important event in human history, if we’re getting a message from someplace else about the fundamental nature of reality, I mean to be blunt about it, who cares that it hurt a few people on the way? We’ve been given news about the nature of the universe that is overwhelmingly important. That’s the news. It’s not that a few people got hurt, it’s that we’ve got some big news. Why? It seems to me sort of a childish focus on healing the people who got the message. No, if the message is real, what about the message? What is the message? How do we know it’s true? What’s the story here? If they’re real, and this is the most important news of human history, what the hell is the news? Well, of course, the reason we do investigations is to find the answer to those questions. We’re in the middle of an investigation. I’ll be the last person to sit here and say, we know the answers to those questions. What is going to happen? I could use a terrible little analogy. I don’t want to bring in something as black as this, but the most important event in the history of the Aztecs was the arrival of Cortes. The Aztecs were a little in error in trying to figure out exactly who Cortes was and what was going to happen, but it was important to them to look into that issue. I think at this point, always considering that that’s one kind of dire possibility here. We don’t know what the end term is, so I’m urging an investigation into it. One thing I want to say back to what John was saying about getting different people and so forth, it’s kind of amusing, as John probably knows, that there’ve been several different people who we’ve both been seeing. One young man said to me that, he said, it’s funny, but I come to New York to see you when I need to feel stable and grounded, and I go to see John when I need to feel excited and uplifted. We could just end the evening right there. I think that’s funny considering that I’m the artist and he’s the psychiatrist here. I think there’s a mix-up here, but the point is, obviously, I work with people in terms of a certain attitude of triage. Whoever’s bleeding the worst gets seen first by me, and so I suppose there’s a skewing of things there, but I think that what John was saying too, again, he said, as you work with them and as they come to see this and so forth, then the spiritual interpretation comes in, then they feel better about it, but that again is due to John’s intervention. One of the remarkable things about your book, John, I thought, was how everybody who came to you at the beginning, before they met you, were pretty devastated, and therefore, what you have to ask yourself is, if these people have been dealing with the aliens on their own for 25 or 35 years or whatever, and they’re devastated, and there’s a final, ultimately very good outcome, then I think John should get the credit, not the aliens. Well, there’s something a little weird going on here, because I come from a very secular, rationalist background. People go, well, this is John’s sort of religious, spiritual viewpoint, or seeking, or whatever. That’s not how I, at least not how I saw myself growing up. I saw myself, my father was an English professor, very academic. The whole notion of God was rather treated as, we know better than that. We read the Bible in the household as, purely as literature, not as a spiritual document. Now, you could say, well, I had this sort of hidden hunger for spirituality, so that it emerges, but I was very slow to see this phenomenon in those terms. My sense is, I learned this from the people, not that I brought that to them. Could I ask you a fundamental question? I’ve asked you this before, but I want to see if I can state it very simply. Your whole sense, as you said, was that this is a kind of information that defies our basic categories that we think in, certainly you in the medical scientific world. I’ve got to say, I’m struck that this is extremely familiar in terms of the categories that most of us live in. Most of us, even with a secular education and a scientific respect, at two levels, or maybe at three levels. First of all, I mean, everybody who goes through a shopping market, supermarket thing, is confronted with this kind of bizarre stuff on the Star Weeklys every day. So, we know the world is turning upside down a million times, and people are coming and going and whatnot. Second, at the level of serious religious tradition, this is right smack out of the Bible. Everything, whether it’s, as I said, fires and floods, and dreams, and visitations, and Saul on the road to Damascus, and the resurrection, miracles, healings. The whole thing is part and parcel of the literature of a loving and often righteous and angry God dealing with his people, sending them messages. So, at that level, this is right smack out of the fundamental texts of the culture. And then, at another level, you say it’s counterintuitive, but the images of aliens that people report to you are very familiar stuff on television, in popular movies. I mean, we all know what these little sort of gummy bears look like, and we can imagine what they sound like. It’s not really devastatingly remarkable that two people who never met each other will come up with the same general description of the wee creature in the night. What if these things aren’t really counterintuitive or countercultural at all, but they’re basically the oldest myths of humanity, just reappearing in fresh form? Well, there are a thousand reasons why that’s not the case. And it has to do with the fact that UFOs were studied first by the Air Force as a Nazi secret weapon during World War II. Nobody thought they were godly. Well, that doesn’t make them out of space. That makes them out of Germany. No, no. That made them physical. Okay. Physical. Okay. So, we start with the idea that there are physical things flying around that accompany planes, and then we find that they can be photographed, they turn up on radar, and no one knows what they are. There’s no religious belief attached to them. There’s nothing of myth attached to them. These things leave marks on the ground when they land. They have a total physicality. I didn’t want to really get into these arguments, but we might as well face it at one point. It’s a very interesting thing that when I was growing up, every child could draw, at a certain age, if you were 10 or 11, you could draw a spaceship. And the spaceship looked like a big, long rocket, like a bomb, with fins on the back and flames shooting out. And that was everyone’s archetypal image. And, of course, when UFOs turned up, because they were actually seen and photographed, everybody had to go back and create a new image. Now, you talked about the image of the aliens being familiar. Why? And that’s because those images were presented very strongly and clearly in the film Close Encounters, the Steven Spielberg movie, because his special effects people went to Alan Hynek and the Center for UFO Studies to get an account of what these things actually look like. And we get the same drawings from people in countries that people are totally illiterate and so forth. One of the things that happens is when children get scars on them and cuts and their two-year-old child, when they’re abducted, missing, the police are searching for them. They return, they have physical cuts. And people said, well, people got in the Middle Ages and later people have gotten the stigmata. But the thing is, you never got, say, Jewish children getting the stigmata or Arabs or whatnot. You only got Christians who got the stigmata. It was a belief-connected phenomenon, perhaps self-inflicted, who knows. But in this case, the aliens are equal opportunity employers. They will pick people from all religions and all areas and they will cut them and do the things they do to them and frighten them and so forth. And no one knows what to make of it. It takes a long time and it’s taken a long time and partly due to John’s work and my work and others, David Jacobs, to present the material so that the public does begin to have some kind of a grasp on it. John, would you take a crack at the whole question of whether this indeed is counterintuitive or in fact deeply sort of culture affirmative? The thing that makes what you’re saying a bit doubtful is that the abduction phenomenon doesn’t fall nicely into any kind of Judeo-Christian mythic structure with which I’m familiar from my reading of the Bible. It actually goes against it. It’s rather, at the most obvious manifest level, in fact, it’s often called, must come from the devil because it’s so unimaginatively sort of real and crude. You know, little guys with big black eyes or luminous beings or reptilian ones or insect-like ones coming in, taking people against their will, leaving marks on their bodies. At the first blush, it’s rather anything but the glorious mythic narratives of a formal religion. It doesn’t resemble it at all. Now, you say it’s a familiar category. I presented recently this work at a college, a local college here, and there were about, it was a seminar, and there were ten people from different disciplines, from religion, anthropology, from physics, and each one said, oh, I know what that is. That’s, and then they would describe it in terms of their discipline, leaving out all the elements that didn’t fit into their discipline. In other words, it was, the physicists said, oh, yeah, we can understand that. It goes by this principle and that, and the religious person, the person in theology said, oh, yeah, we know that, like you were saying, from Christian religion. And the anthropologists, oh, yes, from cross-cultural studies, there are beings that come from the sky and the stars. We know about that. But nobody saw all the pieces that didn’t fit their particular discipline in this situation. So, I think it does defy and it does call for a discipline that, as Bud is saying, that is rather new. Now, I want, this media thing comes up all the time while people are getting it from the media. Let me ask you, if you see somebody who is deeply depressed, for instance, and they watch a program on, say, Nightline, or they, on one of the self-help programs, and they talk about depression, would you argue, and that person comes in deeply depressed, that they invented the depression because they happened to see something on the television? No. What they might do is they’d bring in a few terms that would help them give language to what they had seen. But I don’t have the experience, as a clinician, of people inventing a powerful, deeply held experience from which you cannot shake them because they happen to see a few images on the television set. It doesn’t work like that. As Bud says, in this phenomenon, the media follow the research. They learn something. Like, even Independence Day, which was kind of a travesty and, you know, wonderful that we could solve this whole problem by just sort of, you know, shooting a virus into the mother ship’s computer system. But anyway, even there, there is an abductor, a guy had gotten abducted, and then he gets even by, you know, avenging himself against one of those ships. But again, what is shown in the media, even when the media are now so familiar, has very little to do, actually, with the detailed fabric of the narratives of the abduction stories themselves. They have their own powerful, qualitative, highly nuanced accounts, and the media just don’t have that. So it doesn’t work that way. Go ahead. One quick question is somebody once said to me, oh, this whole abduction phenomenon, it’s like a cult. And I said, it’s very interesting to bring that up, because this is the precise opposite of a cult. A cult, like, let’s say, the Reverend Moon or something like that, is all beliefs and no miracles. And we’re all miracles and no beliefs. Because we literally do not know what this entails, what is going to happen next. We don’t know, really, the physical nature of this. We know it has totally physical properties, at least some of the time. The basic thing is, all of humanity, I think, wants to put this phenomenon into the gods or devils category. The old paradigm is that there are demons out there, and there are godlike beings out there. And this, my god, we’re going to make it fit. And it doesn’t fit. We’re going to end up at Greenland fighting with him. It doesn’t fit. Let me just say, this is the point, on the connection, we’d go to phone calls. But we’re going to ask people to, if there are questions, and I hope there are, we’d like you to feel free to join the conversation. There are two mics here. I should tell you that this is being videotaped for use god knows where. But if you would like to be seen on the television record of it all, this is the mic for you. If you’d rather stay behind the camera, there is a mic further back in this aisle. And if you’re an alien, go to the very, very back of the room. But please, try to be brief, if you will. I was wondering if either Mr. Hopkins or Mr. Mack have read the works of Jacques Vallée. Some of his books, yes. What strikes me, of course, is that you’re talking about Judeo-Christian heritage. And of course, there are a lot of other heritages that fit into the Western world paradigm. I’ve done quite a bit of study myself, and the fairy abductions that Celtic people talk about, they’re exact parallels to the abduction stories that I’ve read in both of your works. So I’d like to deal with that in a very direct way. I’d like this discussion not to be about Mr. Carl Sagan’s demonizing of this study of UFOs. I’d like for it to be about really what might be a true mythic and psychological phenomenon that’s happening. Good question. Thank you. Do you want to relate that to the sort of other mythic traditions? Well, first of all, what always has to be reminded is that this has a vast amount of physical evidence connected to it, which separates it from mythical or psychological issues. Wait a second now. I mean, the flood was a physical event. The Bible is full of stories of real things that happened. Well, unfortunately, I didn’t live back then, and I can’t look into it myself. Right, and I haven’t seen the evidence that you talk about. Well, that’s one of the problems. The interesting thing about the evidence, and John’s remark about it won’t be proved. Well, I think, as far as I’m concerned, proof is how much evidence it takes to persuade somebody that something’s true. And evidently, 10% of the population still don’t believe he walked on the moon, for instance. So we know that you can’t prove things to a really closed mind. But I think the evidence is so extraordinary here that the skeptics have basically backed into a corner saying, the one thing we want now is a piece of a spacecraft or an object that all science would agree could not originate on this planet. That’s the only evidence that they will accept. Now, you say, well, we have photographs of UFOs. We have 580 radar visual reports. Well, I don’t care about that. I just don’t want to think about that. We have these disappearances of people, physical marks on them, absolutely extraordinarily similar accounts. They even come up with drawings of the same kinds of symbols that they see inside the craft. Well, I don’t want to listen to that. I skip that. How about the physical marks on the ground? And on and on. We can go on with this forever. And they will simply say, I don’t want to look at that. I want a piece of a spacecraft. Well, we present gigantic amounts of evidence, and the problem that people can say it’s not proved to them is their problem, not ours. Just a word on the question of Vallée’s work on this being familiar historically. Yes, you have Ezekiel’s wheel, and you have the fairies doing abductions in Ireland, and you have chariots of fire in the sky, and you have Renaissance pictures that show an object in the sky. But these are usually handed down stories that have not been carefully researched. They are reasoning by analogy. It may be like this, but when you come to the UFO phenomenon of the past 50 years and the abduction phenomenon of the past 30 years, you have a whole new kind of empirical tradition that is trying to grope with something which appears to be highly detailed and rather new. In other words, it may not be new, but we have methods, clinical and empirical, for studying this now, and I don’t think we should jump from, well, it sort of looks like Ezekiel’s wheel, or it sort of looks like the star people stories from this or that culture, to assume that we’re dealing with exactly the same phenomenon. It may have a modern turn for whatever reason. Bud is saying that there’s a vast load of physical evidence out there, and John’s saying it’s a different kind of mythological story. On this mic, please. I want to move forward from your wise caution not to just pigeonhole our expectations into demons or angels here, and ask for you to kind of summarize and synthesize from the reports that the abductees tell you of the behavior of the aliens, what the motivation and the modus operandi of the alien seems to be. From what I know of it, it seems as though these are scientific expeditions that treat the abductees like we treat laboratory animals, and partly breeding expeditions, which again treat the people they gather as sources of biology rather than feeling creatures. Can you add to that casual impression of mine some more specific conclusions or partial conclusions to help us understand? After all, you said there were 600 cases. What does it sum up to be? What you’ve been saying, of course, I 100% concur with. People do feel like they’re a laboratory specimen, involuntary specimen, in someone’s ongoing experiment. And the breeding issues and so forth, their interest in human DNA and so forth, all of this is part and parcel of the reports that we’ve gotten from around the world. But I think there’s another issue that’s also interesting. They are extraordinarily curious about human emotions, our interior life, an emotional life that they don’t seem to have themselves. And very, very often they will present imagery or little scenes or something, who knows how this is done, as if they are creating kind of projective tests to see how human beings respond. Many abductees think that when they’re shown things, it’s predictive, it shows the future. But it seems more logical, although who knows, that rather than predicting anything, they want to see our reaction. For instance, as John said, they’ll show us images of devastation of the earth. They might be extremely curious to see how we respond to the idea of a damaged planet. They seem to be very, very curious about how human beings relate to one another in the sense that, and this is something I’ve gone into in my book, Witness, I have something like 12 or 13 cases now where two different young people were abducted as little children, brought together, and just allowed to interact. Brought together again and again, every six, eight, ten months, every year, or something like that. And they finally got older, matured, and they developed a romantic and sexual relationship, and then remet each other in the real world. It’s totally stunned. How do we know one another? There’s a couple here tonight, as a matter of fact, who actually met that way of all crazy things in this kind of abduction experience. But not just because material was being taken, but because apparently the aliens were interested in observing how people interact. They seem to be extraordinarily curious about our maternal and paternal feelings and how we treat our children. Actually, when you think of that issue, the paternal feelings, the feelings of relationship and love and interaction, human relationships, and even friendships, and then you think of the idea that they’re backing that up with a whole physical realm that they’re curious about. They seem to be at the most basic human level. They’re most interested, it would seem, in all the things that make us particularly human. They’re not interested in our water supply or our atomic weapons or anything like that. They seem to be, thank God, interested in the things that most make us human. John, do you want to take a crack at that? The question really asks, what’s it all about? It’s kind of the whole thing, and I can’t really do that. Again, I’d like to stress that much of this really has to do with different experiences with the experiencers. I know that many of this kind of cold indifference that Bud described, where we’re just kind of laboratory animals, that’s there. There’s no question. And yet, at the same time, I’ve had very discriminating people who describe not just that they’re sort of seduced in childhood to be playful so they can later be used as breeding animals, but actual evolving, deep, profound, loving bonds between the humans and these beings that last over time, that some experiences describe as many times more powerful than anything they can feel on earth. Someone will describe a mate that is occurring in this other reality. And in my experience, this showing, for example, of apocalyptic scenes of devastation of the environment, of the earth, of the pollution, is not simply to test our reactions, but is a kind of desperate effort to communicate something about us to ourselves. It is not apparently the way the universe works that we’re going to be saved as people. Why don’t they save us if they can see all that? Well, it doesn’t work like that. It works to open up our consciousness in some way to what’s going on. Now, I have a funny feeling just here with you and that we’re going to have to go further with this ontological question, because we’re slipping into a kind of literalism about this thing and losing the kind of, and maybe it’s because for you, it is altogether literally real in this reality, and it does manifest in this reality. But I kind of sense that if we don’t hit the kind of sort of contradictions and ambiguity… Yeah, I make a suggestion. Don’t do it for me. Let’s listen to some more questions from the floor and come back if you want. I’d like to deepen the skepticism about where this is located ontologically. I’d like to just make one quick response. We have huge, huge numbers of abductees in this country, a vast number. I would guess in the millions, and that sounds totally crazy, I know, but so does most of the rest of us. But the point is, if they were coming here to teach us to clean up this planet, we would have millions of devoted environmentalists out there. The only environmentalist I know in the, I know just a few who are abductees, and they were probably that interested in that before they were abductees. I don’t see any sign that people have been taught to do anything about the environment. As a matter of fact, I found I have more heavy smokers amongst the abductees than I do in the real world, and that isn’t good for their own personal ecology. But the point is that I think John is idealizing this in a way to think that that’s really what this is about. If it is, they have failed unbelievably miserably. If they had been taking millions of people over the years and look what the state of our planet is. Oh, I don’t argue that they failed. I mean, they don’t have a… If we don’t listen to environmental scientists, why should we listen to aliens who we don’t believe in in the first place? I completely agree with that. We don’t need the aliens to… I do have, however, the experience of many of the people I work with do become deeply involved in earth consciousness kinds of initiative. That does happen. But why didn’t the aliens do that? Why did you do it? I mean, you get the credit for that, I think. Well, the consciousness did it, but then we get into is it them or us? And then you can also get into the question, does that distinction between inside, outside, them or us even apply? In other words, one of our most fundamental categories is, is this inside? Is it outside? Is it us? Is it them? And even that category is up for questioning, it seems to me, in this phenomenon. Back to the callers, please. Okay. I have two questions, real quick ones. I was wondering if with the abductees you have studied, have you found any cyclic pattern of how often these things have occurred? Is there like a two-year, four-year, six-year? Is there a pattern to these that could indicate possibly a connection to our biology, to our growth phases? We’ll repeat the question, okay? Do you want to do that? Well, just a question that whether or not there’s any recognizable pattern or cycles to abduction experiences. In my experience, there isn’t any that’s discernible at all. Never mind. I mean, they may call it maybe a very intense period of activity and then nothing for 10, 15 years, then it may come again. Doesn’t seem to be related to geography or anything specific. Give another question. Okay. The second question involves both dreams and communication. Do you find with any of the abductees that they have active dream involvement and or communication with the people they believe are abducting them? What do you mean by dream involvement with the people abducting them? Could you say more what you mean by that? Well, do you dream about them? And like, do these people dream about them? Do they have encounters while they’re dreaming where they’re taught things and they wake up with the memory of the things they’ve been taught? All right. And then the question has to do with the dream aspect. It’s a good question. And I think it relates to what Chris was asking. How do we know these aren’t dreams? And I was asking someone about that today, trying to really try to pin that down. And it’s very difficult. If something happens at night and it isn’t supposed to happen, people tend to call it a dream. And then you say, well, why isn’t this an ordinary dream? Well, I just know the difference. This is absolutely real. I just know. I don’t have, when I wake up from a dream, I know I’ve been dreaming. This is like a memory of something that happened during the night. That’s one kind of relationship. Another is they will often have dreams like we do dream about things that are disturbing to us. We relive them in dreams. So the dream enters there. You have something else in mind though. What I was referring to specifically is I’ve found in a couple of the cases that I’ve researched myself, that people are having dream encounters where they’re given information to write down or to know themselves that is helping them to learn different things. Things about the mechanics of time, how time portals work, all sorts of interesting data that is coming to them in the dream state. And they’re remembering it from their abductees. Okay. In other words, the dream information coming through the phenomenon into the dream life that they learned. Yes. Almost as if they come into the dream and somehow can communicate that. Yeah, but you don’t know where it’s really coming from. Then you’ve got a double problem there because we don’t know where dreams come from in the first place. And so, do you think maybe, would we maybe learn more about that if we looked into it? Aliens teaching them in the dream. How would you know that that was anything you could rely on? I was wondering if it was common in the phenomena though, where people do have dream experiences where information of some sort is relayed, not just a rehashing of the abductions. It happens. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Mack, a few months ago, I almost came over to consult with you. Under severe stress or attention, and not very often, two cases did this appear. It had to do with her eyes changing in a way that I have never seen before. It was very clear. It wasn’t because the sun was reflecting on her face. She was in the shade when this happened. A pattern formed. It’s like her eyes lit up. A pattern, a spiral pattern, went around the pupil of the eye like this, right around both eyes. And I just tried to put it out of my mind. But is there any name for this? And have you ever heard of a case like that before? That’s a new experience. You’ve never heard? This is new, and I don’t know if it’s related to what we’re dealing with. It could be, but it’s not familiar to me. No, no. I will say this on the positive side anyway, that she had extra sensory ability, very intuitive, and certainly pretty high IQ. Well, that you do see a good deal of this sort of special sense of psychic ability. Oh, yes. Now that I am familiar with. Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Please. I remind myself here of the medical student who was told that the exam would be in the heart or on the stomach. He only had time to study for the heart. Sure enough, the question was on the stomach. And he said, the heart is close to the stomach. Now the stomach, and he was off and running. I’m going to do that in one minute, but before I do it, I’d like to say that I happen to believe, I don’t even like to say I believe. I just feel if the flying saucers exist, we stand to lose a lot more by not taking them seriously than we lose by taking them seriously should they prove not to exist. And it’s really a shame on all of us that we don’t take them seriously. I agree. Very good. But my other point, you see, I don’t think it’s so surprising that the anthropologist refers to anthropology in your student seminar, the sociologists. So that in learning a new language, we often go from learning French. I go from au revoir, bonjour, to more complicated words. And I am reminded of this discussion of the aliens, really for the first time tonight, of studying psychiatric residents in the 1950s. Many of them told me about entering this new world, which nobody understood anything about, and that their friends were ridiculed and their families ridiculed and the medical colleagues ridiculed. But this was exciting stuff. It was about the secret lives and loves and sexuality of people. And boy, was it exciting. Well, they offered themselves to abduction by training analysts, who in a few cases, unfortunately, did do some direct sexual examination. But by and large, mainly talked about sex and other deeper emotions, which everybody else said shouldn’t be studied because they can’t be measured. But some intrepid souls continued to study and came to conquer, for good or ill, the world. So I would be interested in what John had to say to this analogy. Well, obviously, I like it a lot. It’s very, it’s totally self-serving, and I shouldn’t reveal that you’re a personal friend, but you are. Actually, I don’t know whether my medical school colleagues will be happy to hear this or not, but increasingly, medical students and residents are slipping into my office. They look around up and down the hall, whether anybody’s watching before they do it, and then they come in. And there is a curiosity growing about this. I think the important thing, though, that we have to keep in mind, I look upon this as really a new area, and I get very nervous with questions that say, well, what’s it really all about? I think we’re right on the edge of something that is vast, which is rich, which we don’t understand, which is coming from some realms that we don’t even admit exist in this culture. And your question implies that there’s some kind of exciting curiosity that might be analogous to what occurred in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement. And obviously, I like that idea. Thanks, Myron. Incidentally, it’s an interesting thing that I’ve had so far, eight psychiatrists come to me secretly because of their own personal abduction experiences. John was not one of them, however. Thank you. Some people connected to the phenomena believe that crossbreeding between humans and aliens occurred many years ago, and that some abductees are descendants of these mixed varieties. These beliefs led this group to conclude that the primary four reasons behind most abductions are as follows, to track, trace, and monitor the activities of these particular abductees, to perform necessary genetic retrieval from the same group, to diagnose and treat maladies occurring in the same group, and to program via telesuggestion this group with necessary information and guidance in order to enhance their chances and those of intervening extraterrestrials of survival in the event of catastrophic occurrences on Earth. That if you found these beliefs to be credible… Let’s cut to a chase here with a question, please. Thank you. Well, everything you’ve said is really subject to… I mean, it’s based on speculation. No one knows. So there’s really no way to answer your question. We have to look at each case on its own merits, and there’s no way to say that what you’ve said, speculatively, is correct or incorrect. We don’t really know. John, do you want to… I can’t tackle it. There’s a kind of overriding reason I can’t, and I’m not being fair to the questions, but there’s a kind of implication of literalness about this that I don’t necessarily experience, like crossbreeding, for instance. Yeah, it’s like that. People experience that, but we don’t have a proven hybrid. We haven’t found one. It’s experientially real. Apparently, it’s in some reality, but I think we’ve got to get a lot more sophisticated about different dimensions of reality before I could begin to tackle something like that. I can’t handle it head on. That may be ducking it, and it is, but I just can’t. Okay. I have a thought, but maybe we’ll come back to it. Please. Okay. My question is that the traumatic experiences that you’ve described and resulting transformations are similar to initiation rituals that are done by various cultures, such as being buried alive or other events that cause extreme terror, and then that opens the person up to a spiritual awakening. I’m wondering if that’s actually the kind of experience that abductees have that Dr. Mack is describing, the transformation, if it isn’t not because of the aliens, but because of the experiences and the terror that the abductees have had that have opened them up to some other spiritual level or to a higher psychological understanding. Is the question clear, John? I like it. It’s a good question. The question has to do with, is this like initiation ritual? Yes and no. It’s like it in the sense that it is an endured trauma and that leads to an opening which can be transformational. Where it differs is that initiation rituals are, we know, are explicitly imposed in a culture for a particular purpose. In the case of the abduction phenomenon, the awakening can occur, the waking up, but one of the deep questions, and the questions you’ve already heard Bud and I differ on, is whether this is simply a side effect. In other words, human beings are traumatized, they’re stretching, they’re going through an effort to expand their awareness as a result of this confrontation, and that that would happen with any sort of trauma, but it isn’t purposeful by whatever this intelligence is. Or is the transformational element, the spiritual growth, the opening to other realities, is that intrinsic to the phenomenon? I don’t know. I do have cases where it does appear. not to be an initiation ritual, but where the growth, the spiritual opening seems to be part of the very fundamental fabric of the phenomenon, not simply a side effect of our human resilience and growth capability. So, you know, again, it’s a good question and the answer is not a clear-cut one. Thank you. Please. First, I’d speak for myself and I believe most other people here. We thank you for your courage in bringing this topic to the mainstream. Primarily, this is going to make it easier for the people that do have much of the information, primarily our government and various governmental agencies, to disclose much of what they know. For anyone that has done any amount of research finds that there is extraordinary evidence out there that supports much of what you have said and much more. So thank you for that. And my question is this. You folks seem to be examining this issue on a psychological level. Have you given any thoughts to why these individuals are targeted for abduction on a physical level, DNA or chemical? I have seen nothing that I could pinpoint that would suggest a particular person has been abducted, other than we do recognize that children of abductees are likely to, at least some of them, be abducted as if a particular bloodline is being studied. But we don’t know why that particular group. I have people from all races, people from the Orient, from the West, from South America, North America, from Europe. One of the most recent people I’ve been working with had all of his experiences in Israel. It is an international global phenomenon and there’s no way that anybody has been able to figure out anything that would suggest why particular people are targeted. But we do know that the psychological results, the psychological damage, psychological scarring, is pretty similar no matter where the people are abducted. Fair question. Please. Hi. It seems to me that there’s two issues here. One is the detail of how these abductees are abducted and what the motivation or goal is of the aliens, but I don’t really know if we can ever know that answer and can actually distract from the bigger question, which is this changes our whole world view and it changes our way of interpreting reality. And I’m wondering from John, you keep bringing up the ontology of it and what is it that you want us to take away from this evening of how, since we’re agents of interpreting life, we can’t, there is no objective reality. It’s us as interpreters. So what do we take away from this evening that is part of your understanding of this experience? Well, I mean I agree with the first part of your question that the, we can’t know what the motivation is. There are patterns, however, that seem to emerge that have to do with ourselves. Again, the question, for example, the question may come up and sometimes this very question is not clear to the experiencer. Experiencer will have, will report that they are shown a decimated planet and that planet has, the water is polluted, nothing grows, it’s on the brink of lifelessness, and they are deeply troubled about this. Now, sometimes they will report that’s the aliens telling about what happened to their planet and warning us that this is going to happen to ours and we need to take this threat seriously. The same experience can occur and the person will report that this is a communication about ourselves, it’s an image of what is occurring, it’s a metaphoric expression of the devastation that is here and now on our planet, it is the ecological crisis that is now occurring. How would you decide between them? So I don’t. Then I say to myself, well, maybe it isn’t different. Maybe whether it’s them or us, it is. It’s both. It’s both and. May I presume to say, I think the question was really, John, what do you want us to carry away from this evening about your worldview? That’s really hard. I mean, that’s such a set up wonderful question. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. I suppose it’s curiosity to ask, to deepen the question, perhaps to be open to the idea that there may be other realities, that this Grand Canyon we’ve created between the so-called other realms, the fourth dimension, the subtle realm, the implicate order, the holotropic world, there are so many terms, dynamic reality, whatever, that that world is not forever separate from our world. I’m not saying that it’s separate for all of us, but for what we’ve been using as mainstream. In the mainstream reality, that world is the world of the subjective. It’s the world of myth. It’s the world of religion. But it doesn’t show up. It isn’t supposed to cross over and manifest physically in our world. And when it does do so, then the person who says it’s physical will say, well, the evidence isn’t good enough, or it isn’t real. That barrier, those domains are supposed to be separate. And I guess one of the things I’d like to have this evening create for us is that those are not separate domains, that there is interchange, that it can show up physically, that those barriers from the daemonic realm, that there can be physical evidence, even though that physical evidence I don’t think is ever going to satisfy, Bud says, how much it takes to convince somebody. I don’t think that physical evidence by itself is going to give us, it’s not going to give us a smoking gun. It’s inviting us to stretch to reach it. I sometimes call this an outreach program from the cosmos to the spiritually impaired. In other words, it is cracking our consciousness to open to the fact that there is a vast range of realities out there that we can experience if we can crack this shell that we’ve created through the constrictions of our mindset. I’d like to add something to this in terms of what we would like people. When I work with people and we’re doing, say, a hypnotic session, and they’re in the middle of the experience, perhaps they’re on an examining table and they’re reliving it, I will say to them very often, just as a kind of therapeutic device, if you could speak to the aliens right now, what would you ask them? What would you say to them? You have now total freedom. What would you say to them? This is, of course, very important. What they generally want to say is, leave me alone. Leave us alone. And then they will say, explain what you want from us. What do you need? I would help you if you tell me. Why are you doing this? Why me? And one of the reasons I do this is I’m essentially wanting people to feel empowered in their own humanity. As I read in that statement, one of the most wonderful things is people really rediscover the richness of the human spirit and their own spirit and their own resources by contrast to the UFO occupants who, it seems to me, are the spiritually impaired that are here to, let’s say, absorb what they can of the things that are the most wonderful things about human beings. The fact that we love one another, we have emotions, we have jokes, we make love, we have sex, we care for our babies, we care for our planet. They seem to be in awe of those human resources. And if there’s anything I would like people to come away with tonight, it’s the fact that they have a new sense of the specialness of being human beings and the fact that whatever this is from the outside or whatever its ultimate goals are, it’s a poor, thin spiritual being in relation to human beings and the richness of the human spirit. I’m a humanist. I’m not saying that aliens are these spiritual beings. I’m saying that for complex reasons that we’re struggling with tonight, the effect of this is often some kind of spiritual growth or expansion. I’m not saying that aliens are these wonderful spiritual beings. No way. You know, it’s interesting. I hear what you just said. I sort of have a yes, a no, and then yes. I sort of half agree with you. Like, leave us alone. Some people, yes, leave us alone. Others feel deeply aggrieved when their experiences stop, if the experiences are of the more deeply bonding, connected way. Where I totally agree with you is that they are absolutely fascinated with our physicality, our spirituality, our love, our sexuality, our sensuality. I have several cases where people were abducted, intercourse was staged, and it was embarrassing to the people because these little aliens were standing around the table with their big black eyes staring at this couple having intercourse. And the very touching thing about the maternal qualities that we have and these so-called hybrids that don’t seem to thrive because they haven’t somehow found a way to bring in that nurturing element is a very touching aspect. In whatever reality this is occurring, it’s deeply felt and deeply powerful. With that, I agree with you. But I also see us learning a lot from opening our consciousness to this other realm. I just wanted to say one more thing. I think that we’re equally fascinated with them. I don’t see there’s an imbalance here. I mean, we’re all here because we’re also curious and maybe we would do the same thing. I’m not really interested in the aliens at all. I’m interested in us, but I really don’t care about the aliens. I don’t like what they do. You know, there’s a term for this. There’s actually a philosopher, Michael Zimmer. You know him, right? He calls this anthropocentric humanism. From the Shy Line. Good evening, Bud, and good evening, John. My name is Karin, and I feel like I’m standing at this microphone with the weight of someone who goes to a meeting and says, My name is Karin. I’m an alcoholic. Only I’m not. I’m an experiencer. And I, just for the record, am working currently with John. And so, for those who know John, will maybe perhaps be familiar with the bent that I have. But, Bud, my question is mostly, or my statement is mostly for you. And it may or may not be rhetorical in nature. And the thought goes something like this. Well, I have all due respect for John and his talents as a therapist and a psychotherapist. He’s a very wonderful man and a wonderful listener in the professional relationship that I’ve come to know him. He has not by any standard been the one responsible for my spiritual growth in this experience at all. Not even close. What he and his colleagues provide for me is an opportunity to stand or sit down in a room for a couple of hours and get rid of a lot of stuff that I can’t tell to anybody else. And for every statement or question that gets presented here this evening, about 20 more arise. And so, I guess my one thought is, I don’t think that we’re ever going to know, or at least for a long time, what this experience is about and to address an ecological concern. I was a Rush Limbaugh watching. Right wing. Very square box. Very three-dimensional. Very much, I don’t think, you know, maybe somewhere out in Arizona somewhere 30 years ago, some guy maybe got abducted. I don’t know. It didn’t have anything to do with my reality. It didn’t have anything to do with my consciousness. I didn’t watch television shows with almond-eyed alien things. It didn’t have to do with any of my network of reality at all. And I guess what I would like to say is that I think that each experiencer who’s going through this knows that this is very much an individual experience. And each person, depending on where they are in their life, where they were with their parents, where they were with their relationships, with everything, is going to come out with something different. And if I was going to say anything to you or any of the skeptics or anybody who’s asking questions, it’s for as difficult as it is for us as human beings to not have boxes, it’s very important in this experience to not have a box because we don’t have any answers. We have nothing but questions. I experience terror and I experience joy. And I experience them simultaneously. One minute I’m this and the next I’m that. And I know you’re familiar with that. But I think it’s very important that something is obviously definitely happening. And if we close ourselves to it, we will be missing perhaps one of the most incredible experiences that mankind is to develop. And I think it’s important that we stay open. Period. Thank you. Good evening to you both. Thank you for this forum. I don’t mean to go back to the religious aspects. I know abductees come from all walks of life. But I don’t really recall reading any cases of people in the religious life, such as priests or rabbis, nuns, being abducted. I wonder if either of you gentlemen have had any experience with that. I’ve had numerous experiences with very religious people, born-again Christians, Mormons, Roman Catholics, two priests, one nun. I don’t know that the rabbis come to me, but I think I must say it. It is very, very confusing to them. Because they understand there is the human realm, there is the traditional spirit religious realm, which John has alluded to, which includes all the Hindu gods, the Christian gods, every other thing, including spirit beings, spirit gods, whatever anybody wants to say. And then there’s this third realm, which comes in absolutely sharp-focused, clear-cut, leaving evidence physically, with its own agenda, confusing everyone who has already accepted that previous traditional religious spiritual realm, which it doesn’t belong to. And it’s much harder to juggle three realms than two. But that’s what religious people in particular have had to struggle with. Thank you. I know that you, Bud, and I think, John, also realize that there was a long research tradition in ufology before Bud opened up this field of abduction studies in the early 80s. And there’s been a lot of criticism and controversy within the field of ufology about the research paradigm that you both follow. And they arise from the fact that part of that earlier ufology research tradition was a big body of research, 3,000-plus cases in what were called close encounters. The people who sort of still vibrate to that paradigm have typically raised three criticisms of the new paradigm, the new abduction study paradigm. The first one is that you rely too much on hypnosis, and especially in view of the fact that there’s a large body of academic research that shows that hypnotically elicited memories are not as reliable. You have to summarize the question. This is much too long. Okay. And the second one is the fact that that earlier research tradition showed a much wider range of variation in the forms of the aliens and the contact. And the last criticism is you’ve never published catalogs of all your cases. And this was a standard thing in the earlier research tradition. Thank you. Well, first of all, every kind of research has to have its own particular methods and rules. When you work with somebody over a long period of time, looking into their particular recollections, interviewing the families and so forth, it’s not as simple as a sighting case, which happened at a particular night or a particular daytime in a particular event. There’s lots more work to be done. So to try to publish catalogs of all of this, and these are, of course, ongoing experiences, and there’s a tremendous issue of people wanting their confidentiality respected and so forth, it’s just an enormous undertaking. I’m kind of a one-man operation. I have people, of course, the IF network, we have people around the world, actually, and around the United States helping us, but there is really no system that we have to be able to really collate the material properly. The issue of hypnosis, of course, is the old canard that’s brought up all the time, and it’s such a complex issue I don’t want to bring it up here, but I can assure you the material that comes out under hypnosis, if it’s done properly and carefully with all kinds of interior testing, is just as reliable to me as normal recollection, and I’m the first one to say that normal recollection is very, very uncertain in many issues, and I believe that hypnotic recollection also can be unreliable in many respects. These are complicated questions, and I really don’t think that this is what this evening is supposed to be about. These are technical issues of procedure. We’re trying to deal with the body of material as we have it and what it might mean rather than techniques of research. John, do you want to comment? Well, I’ve tried to sort of demystify the hypnosis question. There are traditions in hypnosis that go back to Mesmer, which has the sort of theatricality related to it, the deep trance, the person lying down, a certain kind of power the hypnotist has over the person, the idea that they’re being suggested to, and these traditions die hard, and maybe even the practice of them dies hard. What I try to do is, I don’t even use the term anymore. First of all, the great bulk of the information I get is from ordinary, what is called ordinary conversation, not from hypnosis. I will sometimes do what is called regressions or hypnosis, but really it’s nothing more than a simple relaxation exercise. You simply try to stop the flood of social stimuli to let the person just relax and stay open to the recall of some event in their lives, and it’s not particularly hokey, and what comes up in that context, as Bud says, is no more or less consistently reliable or consistently distorted than the efforts to make themselves look good and to speak to what makes sense to them in ordinary conversation. On the whole, the barriers or the distortions that we bring in to make something seem normal under ordinary conversation seem greater than the distortions that occur when the person is being less defensive, more open to their experiences, simply reporting the raw data of what they recall. But I wouldn’t want to be held to this as an absolute. Also, one thing that can be said is that in every hypnotic regression session that I do, I build into it dozens of test questions that can help me try to lead the person, to see if they’re leadable, away from what happens to be truth that I know about the patterns or about other witnesses in the same case or whatnot. So you can test it internally, and I do this consistently. I’m really grateful that the three of you are here and Pierre has gotten us all together, because I think this is just certainly stretching my mind a lot and really interesting. And one of the things that just keeps coming to me as a theme is I notice the way I keep going back to wanting to find the answer and figure out the thing, and it seems like that’s a theme that we keep coming back to in different forms, like who are these people, why are they here, what’s their goal, how are we supposed to learn from them? And I get thinking about how diverse we are as humans here on this planet. We’ve got all these different cultures and races and traditions and developmental stages and levels that people are at. So then I start thinking, well, if there were a being of some sort coming from somewhere other than the Earth that wanted to do a reconnaissance and get to know these two-legged creatures on this planet, if they came with this idea that they were going to find out the answer about these two-legged creatures and what they’re about and they sent a little committee, they’d probably have a debate much like this one where they’d be going, well, what they’re really about is they’re really about something they’re calling science and some sort of study. And somebody else would say, no, they’re really about using everything up there as fast as they can. And somebody else would probably say, no, they’re really about getting together in little groups and they have this thing they call sex and they make these babies and it’s really interesting and exciting. And somebody else would say it’s all about emotions. And maybe those people out there are at least as diverse as we are, only more so because they’ve got these interdimensional awarenesses that they’re kind of knocking on us and saying, hey, but there’s more, you can do this too. That’s not exactly a question, but I wonder if… It’s more a comment. It’s a state of sort of uncertainty, confusion, stretching, because it’s kind of like what I would have liked to answer to the person that asked what I wanted people to get out of the evening. Is to have them sort of end up where you are right now. How diverse we are. I had another thought, but it’s escaping me right now. You’ve given us the world view. Thank you. Please. Yes. Okay, I’m Mr. Charles Boone. I want to identify the alien. Who are they? They are the rebel angels. I have in my hand a verse of the Bible that identifies the alien. Okay, just a moment. What’s the question? Okay. It’s not necessary to read that, but the text that I have here identifies the alien as the rebel angel. That the enemies of God and the enemies of humanity. John and Bud, are they ready to fight the aliens on behalf of God? I’d put it this way. I think both John and I are trying to do the best we can. I appreciate the struggle, trying to struggle with this thing within a religious framework that’s familiar. I appreciate that. Your turn. About this idea of nobody knowing what the message or what the alien’s agenda is, I was wondering how you feel about Ray Fowler’s idea of the watchers as given forth in the Andreas Sinnefer books, or of Courtney Brown’s idea of a galactic federation. I haven’t heard of it. Kind of the idea that there’s caretakers who have been around since Adam and Eve or creation or evolution or something who had had some part in our development and are looking at it forward. All of these things are theories that may be true and they may not be true. But when I said, and I truly mean it, that we’re all miracles and no beliefs here, at least as far as I’m speaking, we don’t really know purposes, ultimate goals. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We know what’s going on with people. We know what’s happening to them physically. Their own reactions to their experiences are always suspect to me simply because we know there’s alien manipulation of how they react to what they see, what they’re shown. The aliens can play with their responses. And, of course, there’s also a tremendous capacity for self-deception with human beings. There’s the Stockholm syndrome, as we all know about. But I pointed out that in terms of people feeling a great deal of love for their captors or for the UFO occupants, that may be something that’s been, in a sense, established in their minds. Also, I think we have to realize that in the real world, there are thousands and thousands more battered wives who try to claim that despite the broken nose and the black eye, their husband truly loves them than there are people, wives out there who are truly loved who are trying to invent artificial marks and scars and damage that their husbands did to them. In other words, we tend to indulge and hope we are a hopeful species. And, therefore, I find that some of Fowler’s hopefulness about this, and he’s a wonderful man and a religious man, I think that some of his hopefulness is perhaps just a subjective hope. I guess one idea that’s really kind of struck me is the idea is that supposedly mankind has dug a hole for himself and is destroying the earth, and these people have come along saying, well, we like what you have here, and if you can’t do something about it, we’re going to help you do something for it, either for ourselves or you or maybe both. Well, that’s another theory. That’s another theory. Thanks. I think we’ve got to move on. In the real world, we’ve been at it more than two hours, and I think we’re coming inside of a landing. Let’s do two more questions from each microphone. Be as brief as you can, please. Given the evidence that these aliens are much superior than we are in terms of technology, do you think it’s possible, and if you do, to what extent that these aliens are among us, improvising as humans? The idea that they may be here among us is certainly, it’s another plausible theory. Do any of you have any evidence to conclude that this might be a possibility, that it happens? You see, it’s such a broad notion. They’re among us. In what way? That a person feels sort of like an alien, but they look like a human, and a lot of people feel, I’m not really from here, I feel like I’m an alien, I have this double identity, I come from someplace else, but that’s a feeling. I haven’t seen any bald little guys with pear-shaped heads and big black eyes running around Boston. Now, there are a couple of reports of aliens driving cars with hats on covering up their bald heads and black eyes. I’m not being funny, there are a couple of reports like that, but I don’t rely, I don’t count on them. So, the idea that they’re among us, yeah, maybe, but how would we know, if that were true? What would be evidence that would mean anything around that question? You’ve come across a vast array of different telepathic type experiences that people have reported. How, if at all, does some of the channeling, has that played any part in your inspiration or your direction? Well, what often comes across from the experience is that experiences often have the sense that this telepathic communication, which you’re right, is the way that communication occurs, mind to mind. We all have this capacity, and, for example, Aboriginals in Australia have this sort of desert telegraph by which they seem to be able to communicate, and it seems to be a capacity that humans have which we’ve lost. So, and I am curious about it myself, how one can achieve that, how it can come about, but I don’t know any way to do it except to be in those kind of contexts over time. But have you looked into any of the so-called channeled writings or telepathically received information? My issue of sometimes I’ve had people begin to channel a couple of times, and typically once a woman began to channel and she started speaking in a very strange voice and she was sort of an alien from wherever, and I, of course, did what I usually do in a case like that, and I said this is very important, I need to know this, what can you tell me about the UFO base in the waters of Lake Owenoko, which I had just made up as a name, that wasn’t a name, whatever it was, and she gave me a full account of the base down there. I thought you couldn’t suggest anything. This was not during hypnosis. Anyway, the point is that every channeler will tell you don’t listen to the other channelers. I’ve got the truth. I don’t think that’s fair to channeling, but I really don’t. I don’t use channeling because I have enough trouble already, but I think we need ways of trying to decide how to use that information and be critical about it because we don’t have any way to access whatever that other, if it isn’t other, intelligence is. How do you evaluate? For example, if the person is channeling something, you can show that there’s just no way they could have known that from their Earth reality. That’s interesting, but people don’t usually take the trouble to establish that. Thank you. Let’s take one more question from each mic. Please. Hi. I heard that musicians and artists get more attention than normal people. As an artist, I think I resent that. I, too, so I can say that. And if any variation on what happens to them than to other people. In my experience, I haven’t seen any greater numbers. However, there might be a situation where artists, musicians, who maybe are leading a more independent freelance life may feel less nervous about coming forward and talking about their experiences. And I think in general, for instance, more women have come forward and talked about their experiences than men, partly because men have the problem of their macho self-image, and it’s very hard to admit that they were paralyzed and things were done to them. Sad to say, women have had more of a life experience of that sort of thing, and so, therefore, they’re closer to it. And so, therefore, I think our percentages are somewhat skewed. But I don’t think there’s any necessary connection between being artistically gifted and being a target of abductions, on top of which you have a chicken-and-the-egg question. If abductions are starting in childhood, maybe choice of profession is in some way affected by the abduction experiences themselves. Thank you. Last question here, please. Yes. Most of the people that you seem to have interviewed don’t expect to be abducted, and it seems that there’s a lot of trauma, etc. What about people like me who sometimes feel like, Hey, I might want to meet an alien. Have you ever interviewed people like that? Are there any people that you’ve interviewed that have actually wanted to meet them? Yes, but I’ve never been able to arrange it for anybody. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Should we be bold and take one more? Last question. Dr. Mack, could you reveal some information on the meetings at Jackson, Wyoming? He’s asking about meetings in Jackson, Wyoming. I’m not quite sure that I understand the question. I was shown the guest list. It was a small guest list. Your name was on it. I don’t know if it’s national security. What’s particular to you about that meeting as opposed to any other meeting? Well, the president was on the guest list. President of what? And Hillary. President Clinton. Was on a guest list in Jackson, Wyoming that I was on? His wife Hillary was on. Oh, I’m glad I kept asking him. I have never met President Clinton. Well, I guess that would answer the question. LAUGHTER Right. I would actually love to have a conversation with him about this matter. APPLAUSE Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you all. Listen, the evening is late. I wish you’d both sort of give us a minute wrap and we can all go home. I mean, seriously, take two, three, four minutes apiece, but sum up what we’ve learned and what we ought to be thinking about as we depart. I’ve taken a complete pledge for myself against any judgment on my own part. I’d love to hear judgments from you, though, about what kind of ground we’ve covered and where we are at the end of the evening on the 7th of March in Boston, 1997. Well, I was just thinking that, in terms of what we’ve accomplished tonight, I think one thing is that we’ve shown that in terms of the raw data, John and I really have exactly the same kinds of material presented by the populations that we’ve worked with over these many years. I think that the basic difference comes in terms of the interpretation, the spin put on the experiences. And I think that, in general, I suppose John is urging a greater curiosity on the part of the people he works with about the aliens themselves and about what their intentions may be and the whole issue that he’s mentioned about ecological concerns and so on. I tend to, by contrast, I think, try to accent living well as the best revenge, so to speak. Trying to get people to face the richness of their own lives, their own resources, their own inner strengths, and to put the aliens as much out of their minds as they possibly can to try to live a normal life. There’s no way, of course, when you tell somebody who’s been through this to put the aliens out of their mind. No one ever possibly can because it’s too enormous a fact. But I think that I want this to be a world in which the human spirit is central and it’s our deepest and most important value and we’re not looking in a needy way to some external force that is as mysterious and elusive and misleading as the UFO occupants. I simply don’t trust them. And I feel that what we have to learn is what we have within us to begin with and what other humans can give us. And that’s as simple as I can state it as my position on this whole crazy business. Yeah. I think I feel less kind of protective and anthropocentric than Bud does. I think that I don’t see the… I don’t feel that this is unwelcome in general. I know that it’s traumatic for many people and I think that, as we’ve said, that we need to work with people’s distresses. But I think that the phenomenon has such vast implications for us in terms of who we are in our universe. And it seems to me that, in a certain sense, anything that can kind of shatter this arrogance around the notion that we’re the superior intelligence alone in the cosmos is, in general, a rather good thing. In other words, that it can open us to vast other realms of reality that are far beyond this immediate, however pleasant, Earth environment. I think an example of that arrogance is the tremendous play that the very possibility that there just might be bacteria on Mars got in the press and the headlines and all over and the fact that, however faulty our way of knowing about this may be, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the US alone are having these profound experiences with another intelligence gets a sort of marginalized attitude. It seems to me that that discrepancy is a reflection of the very arrogance that we have about who we are in the cosmos. And I think that this phenomenon, insofar as it undercuts and does some damage to that anthropocentrism, is a good thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t think human beings can be wonderful and have a wonderful, resilient spirit, but I think we also have a tremendous kind of cosmic egoism, which this phenomenon has a way of rather challenging, to say the least. So that’s kind of where I am with it. Excellent. I think those are two eloquent summations. It’s been an interesting evening. A friend of mine on occasions like this, concerts, ball games, or whatever, will always say, and the best thing is nobody got hurt that we know of. Thank you very much. Thank you. I don’t think anybody got hurt. You didn’t. I didn’t get hurt. The three of us didn’t. Thank you.

UFOpedia

Explorer

hopkins-mack-dialogue-whisper

Budd Hopkins & John Mack — “A Dialogue on the Alien Abduction Experience”

Graph View

Backlinks