Someone recommended that I read this book, and when I learned that John Edward Mack, M.D. was a psychiatrist who had once won a Pulitzer prize (for another publication) and a professor at Harvard, I decided to follow through. This is not a new book. It came out in 1994. It may be more interesting when you consider where we earthlings were at in 1994. The book profiles 13 cases among many of patients who may have had actual close encounters of the 3rd kind. These people do have some things in common.
The first is that they believe they are part of a breeding program, that aliens are trying to create a new type of human and a new type of alien, clearly an alteration of genetics, and the word DNA does not come up once. The reasons for this are their survival and ours. Specifically, and remember this came out in 1994 so these experiencers are pre-1994, that earth is headed for man-made disaster and humans may die out, or almost die out, without modifications. Think the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of entire cities and thousands of innocent civilians murdered, and genocide, our fear of World War III, the madness of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Putin, and it's believable.
The modifications being done by the aliens seem to be more about making humans more peaceable and kind, less violent, ironically, because violence is being done to them. Some understanding by the unwilling participants, who try as they might to accept that there is something special and even spiritual happening, is expected. Yet at the same time these humans are having medical exams and the use of their biological reproductive aspects against their will. Being told they will forget what has happened to them, so it is OK if they are experiencing a total lack of control, terror, and therefor violence to their bodies, their psyches, and perhaps their souls, is to me, no excuse. (If you were told that your sperm was responsible for not just one but hundreds of hybrid beings would you feel good about it?) It's the old rapist excuse for having sex with a woman who is passed out drunk.
This is where I cannot accept that pacifism is the point. Going against someone's will when it comes to reproduction, be it sex with an alien, or what is Invitro Fertilization (another term never used) and the harvesting of fetus's still alive, in order to grow them outside a mother, perhaps so she will not have to give birth on earth, perhaps so the aliens can further tweak them, is still evil.
And if the aliens are so superior to us when it comes to space travel, medical science, and science in general, as well as spirituality, they would have come up with more sophisticated means to make the experience less painful and frightening. So while I would not go as far as to say all alien encounters are Satanic or Demonic, I'm going to error on that side.
Here is why, basically, and this is my own opinion: If the soul is eternal then death - be it by any form of war or Nuclear War - by Climate Change say by heat-fueled starvation, or simply the usual maladies or just plain dumb luck - does not kill off the soul. There is some function in place already that we have a conscious earthly existence. And if we have ruined the earth - its atmosphere (all those rocket and space launches as well as planes, trains, and automobiles) - its waters, its soil, and are expecting an extinction event, which some people think Covid-19 is, well, I suspect that we can also heal the earth or that the earth can heal itself - maybe by shucking us off it. Just look at all the new science and strategies that have come up in the last near 30 years since the publication of the book.
What I liked about this book was that the stories seem to be arranged in a kind of progression in which the various human's profiled, have different ideas or ways of interpreting the experience and explaining it, with the last being most spiritual. Mack did a great job of considering which patients/stories he wanted to write about and overall this work of his is a tremendously interesting read. The man was outstanding and personally involved in preventing nuclear war. (He died in 2004.)
C 2022 Christine Trzyna
