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To most of us the notion of extraterrestrial entities abducting human beings against their will is unfathomable. Verification of such occurrences would be a shattering blow to our prevailing notions of reality. Yet, when we examine the record of history and the a nek ee ee TTI 8 A ed ee In his book Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallee examines the ancient folklore of mankind and finds that throughout history, in nearly every culture, mankind recorded stories of beings who flew in the sky, abducted, and even interbred with human beings! For most of us there is a tendency to dismiss such folk-lore, yet the stories of ancient times closely parallel the alleged encounters that have accelerated in the last half of the nan 20th century. ° In previous chapters we have examined evidence which points to an interdimensional solution to the UFO phenomenon. The alleged abduction of human beings by alien entities is but another piece of the puzzle of this phenomenon. In the 1950s the first modern accounts of alleged alien abductions were reported publicly and immediately dismissed as public-relations stunts or the ravings of lunatics. In the 1960s and 1970s the reports continued but were dismissed by the media, scientific, and academic communities. However, in the 1980s, bolstered by the success of movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and others, the abduction phenomenon took center stage. The public and the media began to take a closer look at the question of alien abductions. Books such as Communion by Whitley Strieber and Intruders by Budd Hopkins made The New York Times bestseller list with grizzly details of alien encounters. In June 1992, research into the alien abduction phenomenon gained a measure of respect when a scientific conference was held at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). The purpose of the conference was to examine the veracity and nature of the UFO and alien abduction phenomena. The prestige of the conference was boosted by the location and by the credentials of the cochairmen—Dr. John Mack, M.D., a cum laude graduate of Harvard Medical School and M.I.T physicist David E. Pritchard. Mack was the head of the department of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard University, and the author or coauthor of over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers which have appeared in academic journals and textbooks. Dr. Mack also won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his biography, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. Pritchard is a well-respected researcher in the field of atomic and molecular physics. In addition to Mack and Pritchard, the conference was attended by a number of well- known abduction researchers including Budd Hopkins, John Carpenter, and Temple University historian David Jacobs. According to C.D.B. Bryan, author of Close 61 contemporary UFO phenomenon, we find an abundance of such accounts. M.1.T. CONFERENCE