An engrossing work on unearthly visitors, written for the nonbeliever. Bryan (Friendly Fire, 1976, etc.) embarks on this account as a skeptic, but his deeply affecting chronicle is remarkable for its balance of journalistic distance with compassion for individuals who, whatever actually happened to them, have clearly been traumatized. Bryan uses a five-day conference at MIT to introduce us to a cast of characters that includes psychiatrists, researchers, ``ufologists,'' and abductees—or, as many prefer to be called, ``experiencers.'' Significant among them are John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who treats abductees (and wrote last year's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens); Richard Boylan, an anthropologist and psychologist crusading to open government files on extraterrestrial life; Budd Hopkins, who researches and runs support groups for abductees; and science journalist Linda Moulton Howe, one of the book's most lucid voices. (She made a documentary about possible links between bloodless animal mutilations and UFO sightings.) Bryan allows the participants to speak more or less independently of his own narration, as he outlines the flux in how experts deal with the topic. Abduction stories have often been seen as screen memories for childhood sexual and satanic ritual abuse, to which they bear great resemblance. Bryan even suggests in passing that the reverse might be the case. While he concludes that the abductees believe what they are saying, he is not on a crusade for the truth but rather to engage readers in this strangely compelling subject. But sometimes it goes on for too long;. the author rambles towards the end, and the abduction accounts begin to read like other people's dreams—interesting only if we can get a handle on what they might mean. Despite these problems, a highly enjoyable and thoughtful introduction to the subject. (First printing of 50,000; Book-of- the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: June 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42975-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Newsworthy brief by ufologist Vallee (Confrontations, 1990, etc.) on how the Iron Curtain hid from Western eyes not only a people in chains but also perhaps a star-fleet's worth of UFOs and their bug-eyed occupants. It was on the heels of the notorious Voronezh sightings of 1989 and the first warm breezes of glasnost that Vallee was invited by the Soviet press agency Novosti to visit the USSR to meet with leading Soviet ufologists. In this chronological account of that trip, the author blends pungent travelogue with crisp science reporting, noting, for instance, that ``the depression that engulfs you as you get closer to the Soviet Union is not a delusion....It was as if light itself had been confiscated. There was a dreary blanket over the airport buildings, the dusty air, the people themselves.'' Yet upon his arrival Vallee found myriad scientists eager to exchange notes—an ironic result, he realized, of ``censorship itself,'' which had forced Soviet ufology into ``unofficial networks'' where it flourished. In sit-downs with Soviet researchers, he discussed in detail the Tunguska explosion of 1908 (perhaps caused by destruction of a nuclear-powered craft), the Voronezh incidents, and about 40 other close encounters, and marvelled at the widespread Soviet technique of ``biolocation''—a kind of dowsing of ``biological fields''—to investigate UFOs. He also visited the cosmonauts' training center, learning—and here reporting apparently for the first time in the West—that Yuri Gagarin was drunk when he fatally crashed his airplane. And, gratifyingly, Vallee found considerable Soviet interest in his core theory that UFOs are extradimensional, not extraterrestrial. A ``preliminary catalogue'' of Soviet UFO sightings appends the text. An intriguing example of glasnost in action and an important ufological document opening up rich new veins of exploration for researchers and buffs alike. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-345-37396-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
Next time you glance at your watch and find a few minutes missing, better rush to your local hypnotist—you, too, might have been unwittingly kidnapped by a UFO. So Jacobs seems to suggest, estimating that over a million Americans have been abducted in recent years. ``We have been invaded,'' he proclaims, warning that ``the aliens have powers and technology greatly in advance of ours.'' Odd words, coming from a professor of history at Temple Univ., and a sign of the extreme oddity of the phenomenon, which Jacobs explores through extensive structural analysis. Each stage of a typical abduction, including the most sensational—the sexual encounters and reproductive experiments found in nearly all cases—are scrutinized through firsthand transcripts of hypnotic-regression interviews with more than 60 victims. The conclusion? That aliens are impregnating earth women in order to create quasi-human ``hybrids'' for some unknown purpose. The mind reels, but the sober, obviously terrified abductees make a strong case for the veracity of their experience. Jacobs's own presentation is a mixed blessing: His scholarship is punctilious, but he reveals the zeal of the converted in his debunking, after slight analysis, of all earth-bound explanations for UFO abductions (hysterical contagion, psychogenic fugue states, temporal-lobe dysfunction, and the like). By bringing solid scholarship to the pioneering efforts of Bud Hopkins and the hot prose of Whitley Strieber, this marks the next stage in UFO abduction research—and is just as likely to fly off the supermarket bookracks.
Pub Date: March 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74857-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
