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John Mack Nothing in my nearly forty years in the field of psychiatry prepared me for what I have encountered in working with individuals reporting abduction ex- periences. I have always felt that my strong suit during many years of training in adult and child psychiatry and psycho- analysis, and in the clinical work as a teacher and practitioner that followed, has been the discrimination of mental states, the assessment of the nature and meaning of patients’ communications. Yet here were individuals, reporting with appro- priate feeling and self-doubt, experiences which—according to generally accepted notions of reality—simply could not be. . . tics tics of real events: highly detailed narratives that seemed to have no obvious symbolic pattern; intense emotional and physical traumatic impact, sometimes leaving small lesions on the experiencers’ bodies; and consistency of stories down to the most minute details. But if these experiences were in some sense “real,” then all sorts of new questions opened up. How often was this occurring? If there were large numbers of these cases, who was helping these individuals deal with their experiences and what sort of support or treatment was called for? What was the response of the mental health profession? And, most basic of all, what was the source of these encounters? ... events: no ex- What struck me initially about the cases I saw . . . was the consistency of the stories told by individuals who had not been in communication with each other, had come forth reluctantly, and feared the discrediting of their accounts or outright ridicule that they had encountered in the past. Furthermore, most of the specific information that the abductees provided about the means of transport to and from spaceships, the descriptions of the insides of the ships themselves, and the proce- dures carried out by the aliens during the reported abductions had not been written about or shown in the media. Finally, none of the experiencers seemed psychiatrically disturbed except in a [THE ABDUCTEES SHARE NO COMMON CHARACTERISTICS] of the efforts characterize None to abductees as a group have been success- ful. They seem to come, as if at random, from all parts of society. My own sample includes students, homemakers, secre- taries, writers, business people, computer industry professionals, musicians, psychologists, a nightclub receptionist, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, and a gas station attendant. ... Efforts to establish a pattern of psychopathology other than disturbances associated with a traumatic event have been unsuccessful. Psychological testing of abductees has not revealed evidence of mental or emotional disturbance that could account for their reported experi- ences. My own sample demonstrates a broad range of mental health and emotional adaptation. Some experiencers are highly functioning individuals who seem mainly to need support in integrat- ing their abduction experiences with the none of the experiencers seemed psychiatrically disturbed except in a secondary sense, that is they were troubled as a consequence of something that had apparently happened to them. There was little to suggest that their stories were delusional, a misinterpreta- tion of dreams, or the product of fantasy. None of those I saw initially and in the coming months seemed like people who would concoct a strange story for some personal gain or purpose. In short, the experiences reported had the characteris- of Introduction [from Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, 1994, 1997]