Abduction by John Mack, Scribners/Simon & Schuster, pp 356, $20/
£16.99 (May in Britain)

Alone at night, an individual wakes to find him or herself paralysed,
surrounded by diminutive grey-skinned beings. Aboard a beam of light, the
person floats through walls and windows into a domed, evenly lit room where
they are stripped and subjected to a series of invasive medical procedures.
Needles are inserted and scoops of skin taken, leaving visible scars. Male
abductees are milked of their sperm, females have their ova forcibly extracted.
A genetically altered egg is then reinserted, and the half-human, half-alien
fetus later removed well before term. Either parent may be reabducted, shown
the body, and asked to hold or nurse it.

Such is the ‘typical’ UFO abduction scenario, if anything about the
alleged experience can be said to be typical. And, according to believers
in the US, alien abductions are on the up and up. Proponents of the phenomenon,
such as Harvard University’s professor of psychiatry, John Mack, point to
a 1991 Roper Organization poll of 6000 American adults and claim that as
many as 3.9 million Americans – about one in fifty – may be alleging that
they have undergone an abduction.

Of course, there are differing views. Jim Schnabel, a journalist and
sociology student, believes there is much less to abduction mania than
first meets the eye or ear. Dark White, his second book, is a mordant, often
amusing romp through the American UFO community in general and abduction
research in particular.

At one point Schnabel finds himself sitting in on a regressive hypnosis
session (apparently the preferred method of investigation) while a female
abductee recounts being taken aboard a flying saucer and encountering former
Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Perez de Cuellar. A few
nights later, after a fruitless search for an underground cavern allegedly
used as a staging point by the abducting aliens, he is parked on a lonely
country road in West Virginia with the same abductee, waiting for something
celestial to happen. But Godot never shows, and neither do the cosmic gynaecologists.

At the apogee of the abduction spectrum is Mack himself, a recipient
of the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his psychoanalytical biography of T. E.
Lawrence. It seems safe to say, however, that the Pulitzer jury won’t be
out long on Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, which could rank as
one of the most credulous books ever written, primarily because there is
so little in the way of follow-up investigation and physical corroboration.
The author apparently only has to hear one of his abductees say or emote
something to accept it as gospel truth. And if testimony, typically recovered
under hypnosis, is sometimes absurd, then we’ll just have to overturn a
few Western scientific paradigms to accommodate same.

Remarkably, such revelations, not to mention those of ‘missing fetuses’
and alien ‘implants’, do not raise any warning flags in the author’s mind.
Instead, we are assured that while ‘abductees are, with rare exception,
highly hypnotizable’, they are also ‘peculiarly unsuggestible’. Try as he
might, Mack just cannot mislead his subjects with misleading questions.

But a few pages on, when one of his hypnotised subjects balks at walking
up a metal ramp leading into a spaceship, Mack suggests ‘a trick or game
we might play in which she would stand at the base of the ramp and send
an imaginary puppet-spy with his eyes closed up into the ship with instructions
to open his eyes upon our command and report back to her what he saw’. The
trick succeeds. The plodding style, alas, is typical.

Rack his brain as he may, Mack just cannot find any precedent for the
abduction phenomenon in his clinical experience. The emotions relived under
hypnosis, he argues, are just too raw and convincing. Something untoward
and profound has happened to these people he claims. Unlike his fellow abductionists,
who tend to equate alien body-snatching with the trauma of rape, Mack finds
the experience ultimately positive and transformative in nature, comparing
abductees to modern-day Dantes. Schnabel, however, surveys the available
psychological and medical literature and finds many related alternatives
that need full consideration before alien invaders are invoked, beginning
with temporal lobe lability, sleep and paralysis. In the former, according
to Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger, temporal lobe ‘microseizures’
could arguably engender many of the sensations reported by abductees, since
that part of the brain is so intimately connected with memory and a sense
of self and can be a source of hallucinations, audio and visual. In sleep
paralysis, victims often report awakening, paralysed, with the sense of
another presence in the room. And then there are your standard out-of-body
experiences and even simple dream sensations of flying.

The problem is complicated by the cultural milieu in the US, which is
famously top-heavy with therapies and therapists and awash with claims of
physical and psychological trauma suffered at the hands of others – from
sexually abusive parents to ritual satanic cults. Interestingly, as with
abductions, many of these recovered ‘memories’ are retrieved via hypnosis
and immersion in support groups. Indeed, some practitioners have identified
what they refer to as FMS, the false memory syndrome.

But patients may not be the only sheep led astray. Specifically, Schnabel
cites Munchhausen syndrome, often difficult to diagnose because it involves
convincing physical ‘symptoms’, including self-inflicted injuries, to elicit
medical and/or other therapeutic attention. Sufferers from Munchhausen’s-by-proxy
inflict the injuries on a child; usually the female parent is the one with
the condition.

Overall, Schnabel writes ‘it seems plausible that some or all cases
of alleged alien abduction, satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorder,
spirit-possession, and demonic oppression might be understood not merely
as ‘unusual experiences’ but as self-victimisation syndromes – that is,
syndromes in which the goal of the symptoms or behaviour is the fulfilment
of the role of victim’.

Mack pleads that if we are to understand the abduction experience we
may have to first jettison our current, self-destructive paradigms about
the nature of reality. But Dark White leaves the distinct impression that
when it comes to UFO abductions, and much else about modern Western society,
both Pogo and the old Baron would have been more than proud. It was Pogo,
a popular American cartoon figure, who first said: ‘We have met the enemy
and he is us.’

Dennis Stacy is based in San Antonio, Texas. He edits a monthly UFO
journal.

MORE THAN two decades ago, while searching for a quiet research corner
she could carve out and call her own, astronomer Vera Rubin turned her attention
to the rotation of spiral galaxies. She soon came into contact with Kent
Ford, a fellow scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC. He
had just developed an image tube which could convert photons into enhanced
electronic images. What Rubin, Ford and their colleagues discovered flew
in the face of common sense: the rotational velocity of visible matter in
galaxies did not drop off with distance from the galactic centre as expected.
In many galaxies, it remained constant; in a few it even increased.

How times and topics change. Nowadays, the influence of so-called dark
matter, the invisible mass that may make up as much as 95 per cent of the
Universe, is one of the burning issues in astronomy and cosmology, with
more than passing implications for particle physics. At stake are theories
of how galaxies form and evolve, the nature of the big bang, and the fate
of the Universe itself. The hidden matter may be enough to cause the Universe
to eventually collapse in a big crunch. On the other hand, it may fall short
of the critical mass density, which means that the Universe will expand
for ever and all things will fizzle into darkness with a whimper. There
is, as nearly always, a third possibility. The mass created in the big bang
may equal, or counteract, the explosive force imparted in the initial expansion.

Collectively, these are the questions tackled in Dark Matter by Wallace
Tucker and Karen Tucker. He is an X-ray astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she has been his collaborator
on several previous popular books. They, or their editor, should have exercised
a tighter rein on this book, however. The authors open too many chapters
with a naggingly similar refrain of the initial mystery, namely, that for
some reason there appears to be a good deal more to the Universe than we
presently observe. Most readers will be willing to concede this at the outset.

The authors, in fact, are at their best when recounting personal anecdotes
about the people involved in this particular quest, such as the twist of
fate that landed Rubin at the forefront of a newly emerging field. Another
personal favourite concerns the seemingly irreverent Fritz Zwicky, recipient
of the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal for lifetime achievement,
awarded two years before his death in 1974. Some astronomers believe faint
dwarf galaxies may account for a considerable portion of the missing mass.
It was Zwicky, in the late 1930s, who not only proposed their existence,
but then went out and built his own 18-inch telescope and found them.

Zwicky based his belief on two principles, both of which should earn
him a niche in the astronomical hall of fame, philosophical wing. The first
he called the inexhaustibility of nature; galaxies, he said, should come
in all shapes and sizes.

‘Zwicky’s second argument,’ say the Tuckers, ‘was that if Hubble said
dwarf galaxies did not exist, then they almost certainly must exist. This
was what he called ‘the method of negation and subsequent construction.’
The first step of this method is to look for statements, theories, or systems
of thought that pretend to absolute truth, and to deny them. You are almost
certain to be correct in doing this, Zwicky maintained, because it is extremely
unlikely that anyone knows the absolute truth about anything.’ I hereby
formally propose the term ‘zwickyism’ to denote any future contrary scientific
discoveries.

The drawback of Dark Matter is that the subject frequently outstrips
the prose. But while they do not provide the definitive work, the authors
do bring the current thinking on dark matter and the conundrums it raises
into clear enough, if not necessarily enthralling, focus. For the Tuckers’
next book, might I be so brazen as to suggest a biography of Zwicky, astronomer
extraordinaire?

*105 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, US.

Dennis Stacy is a freelance science writer based in Texas.