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against anybody who said anything negative about the aliens. Once he said to me, “If you think the aliens are bad, Mr. Duclos, keep thinking about it until you realize they are good.’ “ But what of the surprising consistency of the stories Mack elicited? “Dr. Mack is ignoring the high level of suggestion and imagery that surrounds the way in which he deals with these people,” says Fred Frankel, 70, a Harvard Medical School professor and psychiatrist in chief at Boston’s Beth Israel hospital. ‘““Hypnosis helps you regain memories that you would not have otherwise recalled . . . But some will be true, and some will be false. The expectation of the hypnotist and the expectation of the person who is going to be hypnotized can influence the result.” To many experts, the abduction scenarios bear a striking resemblance to stories of satanic rituals and child abuse—stories that can be shaped by all sorts of outside influences, from movies and TV shows to the suggestive question- ing of a therapist. Says Ofshe, who is an expert in hypnosis: “If you convince someone they’ve been brutalized and raped, and you encourage them to fully experience the emotions appropriate for this event—and the event never hap- pened—you’ve led them through an experience of pain that is utterly gratu- itous.” Confronted by Time with the news that Bassett had faked her abduction experience, Mack declined to discuss her case, though he hinted that he had doubts about her reliability. (Hers is not among the 13 case histories recounted in his book, but tapes of her sessions leave little doubt that Mack took her seriously.) In general, he insists, there is no evidence that the core memories he elicited are distorted. ““When [the subjects] talk about this—and other people in the room with me have witnessed this, including several psychiatrists—the experience is that of a person who has been through something deeply disturbing.” While acknowledging 57 that he is not “an expert on hypnosis,” Mack scoffs at the debunkers. “The attacks on hypnosis didn’t begin until it began to reveal information that the culture didn’t want to hear.” Mack’s view of the UFO phenomenon reflects a larger philosophical stance that rejects “rational” scientific explanations and embraces a hazier New Age reality. “I don’t know why there’s such a zeal to find a conventional physical explanation,” he says. “I don’t know why people have such trouble simply accepting the fact that something unusual is going on here .. . We have lost the faculties to know other realities that other cultures still can know. The world no longer has spirit, has soul, is sacred. We've lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical... I ama bridge between those two worlds.”