WEBVTT - Unseen Realms of the Infinite 0:00:01.480 --> 0:00:05.080 Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:09.280 and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience, listen 0:00:09.360 --> 0:00:20.560 with headphones. In the West, we have very limited number 0:00:20.600 --> 0:00:24.560 of words for different states of consciousness. In Eastern thinking 0:00:24.600 --> 0:00:28.600 and religion, there maybe fifty eighty hundred words for different 0:00:28.600 --> 0:00:32.720 possible states. This phenomenon forces us to think about subtleties, 0:00:32.800 --> 0:00:34.640 and you know, we don't like to think about subtleties. 0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:38.560 High percentage of people will remember until they've had a 0:00:38.680 --> 0:00:43.239 chance to explore their abductions as dreams. Now, when they 0:00:43.280 --> 0:00:46.040 call a dream, is it a dream that recollects an abduction? 0:00:46.520 --> 0:00:48.760 Is it an abduction they're calling a dream? There's all 0:00:48.840 --> 0:00:51.000 kinds of ways that word dream is. There's just an 0:00:51.000 --> 0:00:53.000 experience that happens at night. You call it a dream 0:00:53.040 --> 0:00:55.120 because that's the way you were raised to think. If 0:00:55.120 --> 0:00:59.800 you take an abduction experiencer through the night of an experience, 0:01:00.320 --> 0:01:03.160 there is that moment of truth when they realize they 0:01:03.200 --> 0:01:06.520 weren't really asleep when this happened. As a sort of 0:01:06.560 --> 0:01:08.800 like you went to bed, and it's very important to go, 0:01:08.920 --> 0:01:11.000 you know, reconstruct the events of the night, like, Okay, 0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:13.160 what time do you go to bed. You're watching television, 0:01:13.200 --> 0:01:16.120 and you went to bed, and then what happened? And 0:01:16.360 --> 0:01:18.839 and then this light came in now, but you didn't 0:01:18.880 --> 0:01:21.440 say you fell asleep. And that's a moment of truth. 0:01:21.840 --> 0:01:25.360 And at that moment, a shift in consciousness occurs. It's 0:01:25.400 --> 0:01:28.440 not as if they're just like an ordinary waking consciousness. 0:01:28.440 --> 0:01:30.399 One of the people that Bud and I have worked 0:01:30.400 --> 0:01:34.080 with in New York describes it's as if the aliens 0:01:34.160 --> 0:01:37.520 come through a screen. They break through like a scrim 0:01:37.560 --> 0:01:39.640 which is a screen in the theater. It's as if 0:01:39.680 --> 0:01:43.040 they shatter one reality and come into this reality versus 0:01:43.080 --> 0:01:45.440 not asleep, but they're in another state of consciousness. But 0:01:45.520 --> 0:01:47.920 they're fully present in that state of consciousness. But it's 0:01:47.920 --> 0:01:50.720 a different state of consciousness. So it's a true experience, 0:01:50.760 --> 0:01:53.960 but in another state of consciousness, and we don't have 0:01:54.160 --> 0:02:04.240 language for that. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, 0:02:12.280 --> 0:02:23.080 Episode five, Unseen Realms of the Infinite. On June thirteenth, 0:02:23.200 --> 0:02:26.560 nineteen ninety two, a conference convened on the campus of 0:02:26.600 --> 0:02:32.080 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, titled the 0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:37.040 Abduction Study Conference. It brought together researchers, experiencers, and a 0:02:37.080 --> 0:02:39.800 loane skeptic in an attempt to make sense of the 0:02:39.840 --> 0:02:43.959 apparent alien abduction phenomenon. It's a little hard to picture 0:02:44.000 --> 0:02:48.120 this now because alien abductions have largely faded from public consciousness, 0:02:48.600 --> 0:02:52.000 but these were prominent people in their respective fields who 0:02:52.040 --> 0:02:54.400 were looking at what they felt was the very likely 0:02:54.520 --> 0:02:59.160 reality that people, perhaps millions of people, had been abducted 0:02:59.160 --> 0:03:03.840 by aliens. What were the consequences, what should be done? 0:03:04.480 --> 0:03:07.639 The conference was organized by John Mack, who was at Harvard, 0:03:07.880 --> 0:03:11.960 and David Pritchard, a prominent physicist at MIT who had 0:03:11.960 --> 0:03:15.280 become intrigued by the subject. Pritchard had looked at the 0:03:15.400 --> 0:03:19.240 ufology landscape in nineteen ninety two and realized that there 0:03:19.280 --> 0:03:21.280 was quite a bit of research that had been done, 0:03:21.680 --> 0:03:25.240 but almost none of it had been published. An academic conference, 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:28.400 he thought, was the proper way for these researchers to 0:03:28.440 --> 0:03:32.080 present their findings and then have discussions about them. It 0:03:32.160 --> 0:03:35.800 was an attempt at a serious academic look at the phenomenon, 0:03:37.280 --> 0:03:40.680 but while it was held on the MIT campus, MIT 0:03:40.880 --> 0:03:45.560 did not actually sponsor the conference. Not surprisingly, the subject 0:03:45.640 --> 0:03:52.640 was considered controversial. John mac, biographer Ralph Blumenthal. Now MT 0:03:52.840 --> 0:03:55.440 didn't sponsor this conference, but they gave it a venue 0:03:55.960 --> 0:03:59.280 because this professor Dave Pritchard was very eminent and he 0:03:59.360 --> 0:04:02.520 wanted a place to hold a conference. So it attracted 0:04:02.760 --> 0:04:08.400 atomic scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, religious scholars, a broad cross section 0:04:08.440 --> 0:04:12.360 of academia and people who were really interested in getting 0:04:12.360 --> 0:04:15.640 it at this mystery, which it was. So four five 0:04:15.720 --> 0:04:19.560 days in June of nineteen and ninety two they discussed 0:04:19.600 --> 0:04:25.120 all this. The one professed skeptic was Robert Schaeffer, who 0:04:25.120 --> 0:04:28.960 had worked with legendary UFO researcher Philip Klass and was 0:04:29.120 --> 0:04:33.160 himself a leading skeptical voice in ufology. Here he is 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:38.039 talking about the conference. They were very serious about this. 0:04:39.040 --> 0:04:42.839 Big conferences like this don't happen all that often. Especially 0:04:43.480 --> 0:04:45.560 this is not a conference that was open to the public. 0:04:45.600 --> 0:04:48.960 It's only people who were invited to attend, and actually 0:04:49.000 --> 0:04:52.520 they invited They wanted to make a show of having 0:04:52.560 --> 0:04:55.159 skeptics there, to show that they were, you know, open, 0:04:55.360 --> 0:04:58.279 that they were not afraid of septics, because some upologists, 0:04:58.279 --> 0:05:01.560 you know, they'll actually run in in the hole if 0:05:01.600 --> 0:05:07.920 somebody's going to critically examine their claims as Blumenthal mentions. 0:05:08.400 --> 0:05:11.760 The conference attracted experts in a number of subjects for 0:05:11.800 --> 0:05:15.279 an interdisciplinary effort at making sense of the reports that 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:19.440 were being obtained by UFO abduction researchers like John Mack, 0:05:19.760 --> 0:05:24.560 Bud Hopkins, and David Jacobs. The conference featured about one 0:05:24.600 --> 0:05:29.200 hundred presentations. Several people had more than one presentation as 0:05:29.200 --> 0:05:33.640 the conference organizers tried to create a coherent, comprehensive picture 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:37.880 of what they believed was happening. In many ways, the 0:05:37.960 --> 0:05:42.159 conference was at venue for mac and Hopkins and other uipologists. 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:45.360 They had been at the forefront of identifying what they 0:05:45.400 --> 0:05:49.200 saw as an abduction crisis, and this was their opportunity 0:05:49.279 --> 0:05:53.040 to present their findings to a scientific audience. For their response, 0:05:53.880 --> 0:05:57.960 this included giving presentations on their research methods and on 0:05:58.040 --> 0:06:03.160 specific cases they felt were especially compelling, say so that 0:06:03.279 --> 0:06:05.920 they had one big new case and a whole bunch 0:06:05.920 --> 0:06:08.720 of other ones. If they thought was so well documented 0:06:08.720 --> 0:06:11.719 and everything, this was going to be like their revelation 0:06:11.800 --> 0:06:14.200 to the world. Look at this great stuff, this great 0:06:14.240 --> 0:06:17.479 proof that we have. Okay, we could drop this upon 0:06:17.520 --> 0:06:20.280 the world, we could reveal this, and so that's what 0:06:20.320 --> 0:06:22.599 they were trying to do, and of course it didn't 0:06:22.680 --> 0:06:27.480 turn out the way that they were hoping. This big 0:06:27.560 --> 0:06:31.200 case was the so called brooklyn Bridge case that involved 0:06:31.200 --> 0:06:35.160 the alleged abduction of a woman identified as Linda Cortill. 0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:38.760 We looked at this incident in episode ten of the 0:06:38.800 --> 0:06:43.120 first season of Strange Arrivals. As time passed, the story 0:06:43.200 --> 0:06:47.280 grew until it became too convoluted and incredible for all 0:06:47.320 --> 0:06:51.880 but the most committed abduction adherents. In the end, it 0:06:51.960 --> 0:06:55.240 was a blow to the credibility of the field, but 0:06:55.360 --> 0:06:59.039 that came after this conference. The conference was also a 0:06:59.120 --> 0:07:02.400 chance for the u Phoe researchers to present their methods 0:07:02.480 --> 0:07:06.920 and results to a scientific audience. The expectation was that 0:07:06.960 --> 0:07:10.560 the scientists would affirm that their methods were valid, but 0:07:10.680 --> 0:07:14.960 again the reality was a little different. He had all 0:07:15.040 --> 0:07:18.080 kinds of psychology, were all kinds of psychologists and physinicists 0:07:18.120 --> 0:07:22.480 and everybody in this conference here, and as they were talking, 0:07:23.160 --> 0:07:26.520 like Bud Opkins and so I talking about these surveys 0:07:26.560 --> 0:07:29.080 that they were doing and such and a whole bunch 0:07:29.160 --> 0:07:32.080 of psychologists, and the audience back saw, right, could you 0:07:32.080 --> 0:07:36.600 didn't you quantify these the survey that Schaefer is talking 0:07:36.600 --> 0:07:40.160 about is known as the Roper pole. The Roper pole 0:07:40.320 --> 0:07:43.800 is famous in UFO circles. It sought to determine to 0:07:43.920 --> 0:07:47.080 some degree the number of people in the US who 0:07:47.080 --> 0:07:51.200 had been abducted by UFOs. The idea for it came 0:07:51.240 --> 0:07:54.320 from a man named Robert Bigelow, the owner of the 0:07:54.360 --> 0:07:59.680 discount motel chain, Budget Suites of America, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, 0:08:00.120 --> 0:08:04.360 and a leading figure in funding UFO studies. He provided 0:08:04.360 --> 0:08:08.120 the funds to conduct the survey. The survey was conducted 0:08:08.200 --> 0:08:11.760 face to face rather than by phone. It asked respondents 0:08:11.800 --> 0:08:16.400 a series of questions which the designers Hopkins Jacobs and 0:08:16.440 --> 0:08:20.600 a sociologist named Rob Westrom thought would identify people who 0:08:20.600 --> 0:08:24.320 had likely been abducted, even in cases where the respondent 0:08:24.440 --> 0:08:29.680 didn't remember the experience. And the results that two percent 0:08:29.760 --> 0:08:34.320 of the population, or three point seven million Americans, were, 0:08:34.520 --> 0:08:38.880 in Bud Hopkins words, highly likely to be UFO abductees. 0:08:39.760 --> 0:08:43.320 They felt that this number was a conservative estimate. Like 0:08:43.440 --> 0:08:47.080 so much of ufology, the Roper poll seems to mimic 0:08:47.160 --> 0:08:52.079 science without actually adhering to scientific rigor, and the scientists 0:08:52.080 --> 0:08:56.400 at the conference noticed often the most interesting parts of 0:08:56.440 --> 0:09:00.560 conference proceedings are the questions and comments that follow presents. 0:09:01.400 --> 0:09:05.440 This conference was no different. After a presentation on the 0:09:05.520 --> 0:09:12.199 Roper Pole, sociologist Robert Hall expressed his reservations about the pole. 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:17.280 I'm sorry, but all due respect to Bud Hopkins and 0:09:17.360 --> 0:09:19.880 Dave Jacobs, who have done a lot of things very 0:09:19.960 --> 0:09:22.840 valuable in this field, I have to say that I 0:09:22.840 --> 0:09:25.680 think this survey was the worst waste of research money 0:09:25.720 --> 0:09:30.280 I've ever seen, in a terrible, terrible lost opportunity. I 0:09:30.400 --> 0:09:33.080 think with proper advanced planning, it could have been a 0:09:33.160 --> 0:09:37.520 very valuable survey, but it does not provide any scientific 0:09:37.559 --> 0:09:42.839 evidence about the prevalence of these events. After another presentation, 0:09:43.200 --> 0:09:47.360 the poll was again the subject of stern questioning. David 0:09:47.480 --> 0:09:50.840 Jacobs protested that he didn't believe that he and others 0:09:50.840 --> 0:09:54.839 were making any outlandish claims as a result of the poll. 0:09:55.800 --> 0:10:01.320 Hypnotherapist Joe Nyman replied, reasonably, I think I don't agree 0:10:01.320 --> 0:10:05.360 with that, Dave, I think you are making an outlandish claim. 0:10:05.440 --> 0:10:09.439 Its specifically stated that these are the number of abductees 0:10:09.840 --> 0:10:13.160 and two and a half percent of the population are abductees. 0:10:14.800 --> 0:10:18.720 They screwed it up completely and Bud Hopkins said, from 0:10:18.800 --> 0:10:21.360 you know, the speaker's platform. He said, well, I'm glad 0:10:21.360 --> 0:10:23.280 you guys are here. I'm glad you guys are telling 0:10:23.320 --> 0:10:25.520 me this because you're the experts that we brought you here, 0:10:25.720 --> 0:10:28.679 so I ducally give us feedback. I don't understand these things. 0:10:28.720 --> 0:10:32.079 I'm just an artist. I don't understand about psychological tasting. 0:10:32.120 --> 0:10:35.080 It's there, ken, he says, it were. It was not 0:10:35.200 --> 0:10:37.559 nearly as solid as they thought it was, as it 0:10:37.720 --> 0:10:40.080 was immediately apparent from having you know, a number of 0:10:40.080 --> 0:10:43.320 these psychologists of the audience who were not themselves actually 0:10:43.800 --> 0:10:48.559 into ufology, but who are into psychological past daying down 0:10:49.520 --> 0:10:56.240 comparisons are various things. Despite these issues, not everyone saw 0:10:56.280 --> 0:11:00.200 the conference as a failure. In fact, people point the 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:03.839 conference is making a compelling case for the abduction phenomenon. 0:11:04.240 --> 0:11:10.480 Even today again Ralph Blumenthal talking about the conference proceedings. 0:11:11.880 --> 0:11:14.240 They made a record of their discussions. It came out 0:11:14.320 --> 0:11:17.239 in a thick book two years later. It was embargoed 0:11:17.320 --> 0:11:22.000 at the time, but it remains a very authoritative account 0:11:22.240 --> 0:11:25.720 of the best research of all these scholars. And you 0:11:25.720 --> 0:11:28.600 know what I like to say is that the so 0:11:28.679 --> 0:11:33.079 called skeptics and debunkers who pooh pooh this whole notion 0:11:33.160 --> 0:11:37.280 of alien encounters and dismiss it as ridiculous need to 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:40.480 do the research, because the research consists of looking at 0:11:40.600 --> 0:11:44.800 volumes like this Alien Discussions account of the MIT Conference 0:11:45.000 --> 0:11:49.040 to really understand that the strength of the evidence. It's 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:53.000 circumstantial evidence, to be sure, but these accounts that are 0:11:53.120 --> 0:11:57.480 very vivid and coherent and consistent, and you can really 0:11:57.880 --> 0:12:01.480 challenge these accounts till you know what they really are. 0:12:01.760 --> 0:12:04.640 So a lot of the skeptics are lazy, they haven't 0:12:04.640 --> 0:12:06.880 done the work, and they just say this is ridiculous. Well, 0:12:06.920 --> 0:12:09.760 of course it's ridiculous. It makes no sense in our world. 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:13.160 And yet these accounts are so vivid and so consistent 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:16.240 and so credible when you look at the people from 0:12:16.280 --> 0:12:19.320 all walks of life are coming out with its, including children, 0:12:19.720 --> 0:12:22.520 not only the aerial school children, but children as young 0:12:22.559 --> 0:12:25.400 as two years old or John mac interviewed who told 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:29.120 stories of being taken from their cribs and flown into 0:12:29.160 --> 0:12:32.199 the sky by alien beings. And these kids, you know, 0:12:32.320 --> 0:12:34.840 haven't read books, and they haven't seen movies. This is 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:37.880 just stories that they've told their parents and told John 0:12:37.960 --> 0:12:41.160 mack so That was the importance of the MIT conference 0:12:41.200 --> 0:12:44.000 and the research he did. It gave credibility to this 0:12:44.040 --> 0:12:47.360 phenomenon that once you really go into it, it stands up. 0:12:47.440 --> 0:12:52.560 It's very difficult to challenge. What I find really interesting 0:12:52.640 --> 0:12:56.400 about John Mack is here was an obviously very smart, 0:12:56.760 --> 0:13:02.640 very accomplished guy. He studied alien abducts, worked with experiencers, 0:13:02.679 --> 0:13:06.920 and came to believe unequivocally that people were being abducted 0:13:06.960 --> 0:13:11.040 in mass numbers. But this was based on the testimony 0:13:11.160 --> 0:13:16.080 of the experiencers. There was no real physical evidence, certainly 0:13:16.120 --> 0:13:18.840 not of the kind you'd expect with the sheer number 0:13:18.840 --> 0:13:24.680 of cases. So how do you resolve this contradiction? After 0:13:24.720 --> 0:13:45.160 the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. It 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:48.040 seems to me that the tension that lies at the 0:13:48.080 --> 0:13:51.920 heart of ufology and the alien abduction phenomenon is this. 0:13:53.000 --> 0:13:57.080 There are thousands and thousands of UFO encounters and far 0:13:57.200 --> 0:14:01.720 fewer but still numerous tales of an abduction, but to 0:14:01.760 --> 0:14:04.640 this day there is no single piece of the kind 0:14:04.679 --> 0:14:08.080 of evidence one would expect an abundance based on the 0:14:08.120 --> 0:14:12.559 sheer number of cases. Someone who thinks seriously about UFOs 0:14:12.679 --> 0:14:15.640 has to confront the question of why this evidence does 0:14:15.679 --> 0:14:20.640 not exist. John Mack wrestled with this question and arrived 0:14:20.680 --> 0:14:24.400 at an answer that is both strange and not surprising 0:14:24.800 --> 0:14:28.880 because it reaches back to his preexisting beliefs. We saw 0:14:28.920 --> 0:14:33.520 how his devotion to environmentalist and peace movements was reflected 0:14:33.560 --> 0:14:37.720 in the messages the aerial students said they received. In 0:14:37.760 --> 0:14:42.160 explaining how the phenomenon leaves no physical traces, he looked 0:14:42.160 --> 0:14:46.080 to his beliefs about spirituality and realities not accounted for 0:14:46.480 --> 0:14:51.520 in Western science. This is John Mack being interviewed informally 0:14:51.640 --> 0:14:56.000 on camera by philosopher Terrence McKenna at the nineteen ninety 0:14:56.000 --> 0:15:00.960 two International Transpersonal Conference in Prague. He mentions the term 0:15:01.280 --> 0:15:05.160 anima mundi, which refers to the concept that there is 0:15:05.200 --> 0:15:08.600 a connection between all living things in the world, much 0:15:08.640 --> 0:15:13.960 like a soul in an individual. The world of both 0:15:14.240 --> 0:15:19.200 spirit with form and spirit without form, or the anima mundi, 0:15:19.280 --> 0:15:23.240 whatever your language for it, the Great Spirit, the Holy Spirit, 0:15:23.440 --> 0:15:28.040 whatever it is, it we have lost contact with it. 0:15:28.040 --> 0:15:32.280 It signals us we don't listen. There are various ways 0:15:32.280 --> 0:15:38.000 that certain people have revelations and experiences. Occasionally, the more 0:15:38.040 --> 0:15:42.320 advanced spiritual people among us are reconnecting with the spirit. 0:15:42.640 --> 0:15:45.640 But for most of us, the only language that we 0:15:45.760 --> 0:15:48.720 know now is the language of the material world. So 0:15:48.760 --> 0:15:51.520 it's as if the Divinity say, Okay, if that's all 0:15:51.600 --> 0:15:54.640 you understand, I'll give it to you in the material world. 0:15:54.680 --> 0:15:59.720 I'll give you physical manipulations. I'll give you reproductive connection. 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:03.240 I'll give you cuts, scars, scoop marks. I'll give you 0:16:03.240 --> 0:16:07.400 a burned earth where the UFOs land. And I'll give 0:16:07.440 --> 0:16:12.400 you an experience which is consistent among various people, which 0:16:12.480 --> 0:16:17.120 empirically everybody agrees that photographs of UFOs. It's showing up 0:16:17.160 --> 0:16:19.480 in the physical world. It may not be of the 0:16:19.480 --> 0:16:22.640 physical world as we know it, but it communicates in 0:16:22.680 --> 0:16:28.240 the physical world. What is Max saying here, He believes 0:16:28.240 --> 0:16:32.360 that the phenomenon is essentially a non material or spiritual one. 0:16:33.000 --> 0:16:36.240 But we have for the most part lost our ability 0:16:36.360 --> 0:16:39.680 to access that world. So it appears to people in 0:16:39.800 --> 0:16:44.800 strange physical ways to let itself be known. So through 0:16:44.840 --> 0:16:48.640 this experience in the body. Because that's the importing point here. 0:16:48.960 --> 0:16:53.480 This experience is not just information and an intellectual sense. 0:16:53.760 --> 0:16:57.440 They experience these abductions in the body and as several 0:16:57.480 --> 0:17:01.200 abductees have said to me, we only know the body 0:17:01.320 --> 0:17:03.760 now as embodied creatures. If you want to reach us, 0:17:03.800 --> 0:17:05.960 you have to reach us through the body, because that's 0:17:06.000 --> 0:17:09.679 the only language we understand it. So that tells us 0:17:09.720 --> 0:17:12.960 that the creatures are real in this on a sense. 0:17:14.680 --> 0:17:17.960 As we have seen earlier, Mac had taken part in 0:17:18.040 --> 0:17:23.359 attempts to access a spiritual realm through meditation, taking LSD, 0:17:24.000 --> 0:17:29.560 and most importantly, through holotropic breathing, a controlled breathing technique 0:17:29.760 --> 0:17:34.520 intended to cause non normal states. In nineteen ninety four, 0:17:34.800 --> 0:17:38.600 science writer Jill Nemark interviewed Mac for an article in 0:17:38.680 --> 0:17:43.320 Psychology Today. In it, they discussed Mac's experience with this 0:17:43.400 --> 0:17:48.520 technique the first time he tried it. Macna only quote 0:17:48.560 --> 0:17:52.080 reexperienced his mother's death when he was eight months old. 0:17:52.600 --> 0:17:55.800 He also felt quote my father's grief at the time. 0:17:56.200 --> 0:17:58.640 I got more out of one session that I had 0:17:58.760 --> 0:18:02.600 in all my years of analysis. Later in the session, 0:18:02.960 --> 0:18:07.200 he said, I became a Russian father in the sixteenth century, 0:18:07.280 --> 0:18:10.560 a man whose four year old son was decapitated by 0:18:10.640 --> 0:18:16.199 Mongol hordes. Mac found analogs to his conception of the 0:18:16.240 --> 0:18:21.240 phenomenon existing in both the material and spiritual realms. He 0:18:21.320 --> 0:18:25.639 saw the stories of shamans as describing experiences similar to 0:18:25.720 --> 0:18:30.119 those of abductees. In his book Abduction, he quotes the 0:18:30.200 --> 0:18:37.560 great Romanian sociologist Murcia Aliada. During his initiation, the shaman 0:18:37.640 --> 0:18:41.159 learns how to penetrate into other dimensions of reality and 0:18:41.240 --> 0:18:45.280 maintain himself there. His trials, whatever the nature of them, 0:18:45.560 --> 0:18:48.960 endow him with the sensitivity that can perceive and integrate 0:18:49.000 --> 0:18:52.399 these new experiences. Through the strangely sharp and senses of 0:18:52.400 --> 0:18:57.040 the shaman, the sacred manifests itself. He would bring the 0:18:57.080 --> 0:19:02.120 shaman concept to his work with experiencers, making those connections concrete, 0:19:02.400 --> 0:19:05.280 even if the meaning wasn't always clear to the subject. 0:19:06.200 --> 0:19:10.639 This is abduction experiencer Elizabeth Anglin, who worked with Mac. 0:19:12.040 --> 0:19:14.199 He listened a lot, and he took a lot of notes, 0:19:14.840 --> 0:19:17.439 and then when he wanted to get his opinion, he 0:19:17.560 --> 0:19:19.879 would say some blah blah blah, Well, you know, I 0:19:19.920 --> 0:19:23.760 think it might be a shamonic thing. Mac would also 0:19:23.800 --> 0:19:26.879 talk about the phenomenon in terms of what he considered 0:19:26.920 --> 0:19:30.240 the false choice between the real and the not real. 0:19:30.800 --> 0:19:36.000 He wrote, we've got make belief phenomena and we've got reality. 0:19:36.080 --> 0:19:38.880 I think we need a category of phenomena for which 0:19:38.880 --> 0:19:45.000 we have no category. Ralph Blumenthal, Well, he said that 0:19:45.040 --> 0:19:48.880 this phenomenon has a way of penetrating our reality, and 0:19:48.960 --> 0:19:53.000 when it penetrates, it penetrates with a great deal of vividness. 0:19:53.119 --> 0:19:57.680 There's nothing subtle about it. These people who reported these 0:19:57.760 --> 0:20:01.080 encounters say this was more real to me than reality. 0:20:01.160 --> 0:20:04.320 This was not a dream. John Macrone a book on nightmares. 0:20:04.359 --> 0:20:08.160 He studied dreams and nightmares, and these people said, look, 0:20:08.160 --> 0:20:11.320 I know the difference between a nightmare and reality. This 0:20:11.440 --> 0:20:14.040 was not a nightmare. So the best he could come 0:20:14.119 --> 0:20:16.199 up with was that this was some kind of a 0:20:16.280 --> 0:20:20.320 reality that was penetrating our reality. It was absolutely real, 0:20:20.560 --> 0:20:24.000 but not our everyday reality. It was happening in some 0:20:24.080 --> 0:20:27.880 other dimension, on some other way that he could not explain. 0:20:28.480 --> 0:20:31.640 But it was absolutely real to the people who encountered it. 0:20:33.359 --> 0:20:37.600 The phenomenon is real, but not from our reality. What 0:20:37.680 --> 0:20:43.320 does this mean to me? It sounds a little like stubbornness. Sure, 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:46.720 I can't prove it's real, but that's because you're only 0:20:46.760 --> 0:20:51.119 willing to consider our reality. But what reason do we 0:20:51.240 --> 0:20:54.800 have to believe that there is another reality? We seem 0:20:54.800 --> 0:20:58.560 to be far adrift of science. Just how far adrift 0:20:59.000 --> 0:21:02.360 is clear when this reasoning is applied to topics outside 0:21:02.400 --> 0:21:07.919 the abduction phenomenon. This passage from Jill Nemark's Psychology Today 0:21:08.040 --> 0:21:12.800 article begins with a quote from Mac. He says, quote, 0:21:13.160 --> 0:21:15.600 I know this sounds like hedging, but we don't know 0:21:15.680 --> 0:21:19.440 in what reality this occurs. False and true memory don't apply. 0:21:20.000 --> 0:21:23.960 This is powerfully real, But in what reality? I asked 0:21:24.000 --> 0:21:26.879 him where he felt he belonged in the raging controversy 0:21:27.160 --> 0:21:30.960 over memory and abuse. Does he think memories of satanic 0:21:31.000 --> 0:21:35.240 abuse might be happening in an alternate reality? He postulated 0:21:35.359 --> 0:21:40.720 that indeed they might, saying, perhaps those memories are experientially true, 0:21:41.000 --> 0:21:44.880 but they didn't factually happen in this reality. What does 0:21:44.880 --> 0:21:50.159 this mean in the fourth dimension or perhaps the sixth dimension? 0:21:52.280 --> 0:21:56.200 So again, this article was written in nineteen ninety four, 0:21:56.640 --> 0:22:00.720 before the so called Satanic panic had been comprehensive debunked. 0:22:01.480 --> 0:22:05.879 He says about a controversy that is raging within psychology, 0:22:06.240 --> 0:22:09.800 his field of expertise, that is possible that memories of 0:22:09.840 --> 0:22:14.440 abuse are true but from a different reality. What does 0:22:14.440 --> 0:22:18.600 that mean? What do you do with this idea? People 0:22:18.640 --> 0:22:21.440 were on trial at the time on charges of abuse 0:22:21.520 --> 0:22:26.359 stemming from these quote unquote recovered memories. The more I 0:22:26.359 --> 0:22:29.000 read John Mack, the more I got the sense that 0:22:29.080 --> 0:22:32.879 he was approaching the topic backwards. He wasn't gathering this 0:22:33.000 --> 0:22:36.840 testimonial evidence and trying to determine whether it described a 0:22:36.880 --> 0:22:40.520 phenomenon that was actually physically happening and not just a 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:44.919 psychological perception. He assumed that the stories were things that 0:22:45.000 --> 0:22:48.040 had actually happened, and he was trying to figure out 0:22:48.080 --> 0:22:51.719 how to explain them. And it leads to reasoning like 0:22:51.840 --> 0:22:56.040 this example from Max nineteen ninety four book Passport to 0:22:56.080 --> 0:23:00.320 the Cosmos, where the following is suggested as necessary to 0:23:00.400 --> 0:23:05.240 understanding what is going on. An awareness of unseen realities 0:23:05.280 --> 0:23:07.960 of the Infidel in which the laws of space, time, 0:23:08.000 --> 0:23:11.320 reality as we know them seem not to apply. This 0:23:11.440 --> 0:23:13.840 can create a dilemma or a mind that would stay 0:23:13.840 --> 0:23:17.840 in the duality of internal external, for the phenomenon appears 0:23:17.880 --> 0:23:22.520 to be both or now one than the other. In fact, 0:23:23.000 --> 0:23:26.560 mac even puts forward the idea that whatever is behind 0:23:26.560 --> 0:23:31.720 the phenomenon is actually intentionally creating a situation where there 0:23:31.760 --> 0:23:35.359 is enough evidence to convince believers, but not enough to 0:23:35.400 --> 0:23:39.199 win over skeptics. It is as if the agent or 0:23:39.280 --> 0:23:43.800 intelligence at work here we're parodying, mocking, tricking, and deceiving 0:23:43.800 --> 0:23:47.840 the investigators, providing just enough physical evidence to win over 0:23:47.920 --> 0:23:50.600 those who are prepared to believe in the phenomenon, but 0:23:50.800 --> 0:23:55.480 not enough to convince the skeptic. In this apparently frustrating situation, 0:23:55.880 --> 0:24:01.120 there may lie a deeper truth and possibility. He goes 0:24:01.119 --> 0:24:04.560 on to say that the phenomenon might be inviting us 0:24:04.560 --> 0:24:08.000 to change our way of looking at things, to expand 0:24:08.040 --> 0:24:12.640 our consciousness, to do, in other words, what John Mack 0:24:12.760 --> 0:24:18.719 wants us to do. John Mack died tragically when he 0:24:18.760 --> 0:24:22.240 was hit by a car in London on September twenty seventh, 0:24:22.400 --> 0:24:25.840 two thousand and four. He was seventy four years old. 0:24:26.680 --> 0:24:29.919 His final years were marked by two controversies, which I 0:24:29.960 --> 0:24:33.080 won't go into depth about, but which should be mentioned. 0:24:34.119 --> 0:24:37.439 The first was a critical article in the April twenty fifth, 0:24:37.560 --> 0:24:41.679 nineteen ninety four edition of Time magazine. It featured the 0:24:41.720 --> 0:24:46.240 revelation that one of Mac's subjects, a woman named Donna Bassett, 0:24:46.680 --> 0:24:51.080 was a debunker. Earlier, she had reported to Mac in 0:24:51.119 --> 0:24:54.840 a session that, among other things, she had been on 0:24:54.840 --> 0:24:58.960 a spacecraft with both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Kruschoff, 0:24:59.440 --> 0:25:06.080 and that she comforted the crying Cruischoff again. Ralph Blumenthal, Yeah, 0:25:06.080 --> 0:25:08.760 this was a very sad episode, as she wanted to 0:25:08.800 --> 0:25:11.600 destroy him. She thought he was a cult leader and 0:25:11.880 --> 0:25:14.760 she'd made the whole thing up. Well, it turns out 0:25:14.840 --> 0:25:19.159 that she probably did have real alien encounter experiences because 0:25:19.160 --> 0:25:22.840 she told them to other people before encountering John Mack. 0:25:23.160 --> 0:25:28.000 She had a very strange background herself, and for whatever reason, 0:25:28.240 --> 0:25:31.359 she was determined to bring John Mack down. And Time 0:25:31.359 --> 0:25:34.280 magazine picked this up and made a big issue of it, 0:25:34.480 --> 0:25:37.840 and it hurt John mac tremendously. It was damaging to him, 0:25:37.880 --> 0:25:40.920 no doubt, but it did not undermine all the other 0:25:41.000 --> 0:25:43.720 cases he had dealt with, and it was just a 0:25:43.880 --> 0:25:48.280 very very sad episode. There was more to the article 0:25:48.359 --> 0:25:53.160 than Bassett's allegations at general skepticism about his work. One 0:25:53.200 --> 0:25:59.240 passage reads, psychologists and ethicists do not question max sanity 0:25:59.440 --> 0:26:03.159 so much as his motives and methodology. They charge that 0:26:03.240 --> 0:26:06.959 he is misusing the techniques of hypnosis, trying to shape 0:26:07.000 --> 0:26:09.679 the memories of his subjects to suit his vision of 0:26:09.680 --> 0:26:14.120 an intergalactic future. And very possibly endangering the emotional health 0:26:14.119 --> 0:26:17.560 of his patients in the process. Quote. If this were 0:26:17.640 --> 0:26:20.439 just an example of some zany new outer limit of 0:26:20.440 --> 0:26:24.320 how foolish psychology and psychiatry can be in that wrong hands, 0:26:24.760 --> 0:26:27.359 we'd look at it, roll our eyes and walk away, 0:26:28.840 --> 0:26:34.600 says University of California, Berkeley professor Richard O'she. Quote, but 0:26:34.720 --> 0:26:38.919 the use of his techniques in counseling is substantially harming 0:26:38.960 --> 0:26:44.399 lots of people. End quote. The second controversy was that 0:26:44.560 --> 0:26:49.120 Harvard launched an unprecedented secret committee to look into Max's research. 0:26:50.680 --> 0:26:54.920 Harvard was very uncomfortable with his research and eventually conveying 0:26:54.960 --> 0:26:58.600 a secret committee and inquisition. I call it because that's 0:26:58.600 --> 0:27:00.879 a word that they used at one to see if 0:27:00.920 --> 0:27:05.359 he was doing anything wrong inappropriate. And they kept asking 0:27:05.440 --> 0:27:08.520 him what is his proof, and he kept saying, well, 0:27:08.560 --> 0:27:11.719