Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read Online Free PDF Page A

thousands of Americans believed that they have undergone abduction experiences. If all these are false memories, then we have merely shifted the problem; it now becomes: why do such a vast number of people experience hallucinations about abduction?
    The case that most fascinated me—and I finished the book between leaving Boston and arriving home in Cornwall twelve hours later—was that of a young man whom Mack calls Paul. Sessions with a female psychiatrist had been unsuccessful in resolving ‘weird’ problems, for she found herself unable to cope with the ‘alien’ material that was beginning to emerge. Once, during a session, he asked for some sign of the reality of his experiences, and a loud bang occurred, which frightened the psychiatrist. Later, at home, she experienced something like poltergeist phenomena; her bed had bounced up and down, as a result of which she had made some kind of attempt to exorcise the house of ‘evil spirits’. Presumably she was not sorry when Paul terminated the treatment.
    At his last session with the psychiatrist, Paul had recalled an abduction when he was about three. The alien had come into his room and taken him by the hand into a ‘ship’. There he felt that something had been injected into his leg, causing numbness.
    Paul also recalled how, at the age of six and a half, he had one night experienced ‘a familiar voice in his head’ telling him to go outside. On the porch, he saw the ‘ship’ overhead, huge and round, and brightly lit. Then he was joined by a group of aliens, all about the size of a six year-old child (although one was taller), with whom he felt at home. He was placed naked on a bench in the UFO, and examined. Later, one of the beings showed him the controls, and explained that ‘you’re from here’. He was taken to a ‘floating’ bed, which he was told was his own. In fact, the quarters felt oddly familiar, as if he had been there many times.
    At this point in the hypnotic session, Paul seemed to break through an ‘information barrier’, and to recognise that he had a dual identity, as an alien and a human being. He came from another planet, and ‘there are a lot of us here’. Their purpose was to integrate with humans, but it was slow work. ‘Everyone here is so wrapped up in power’. The aliens, Paul said, had access to a higher form of consciousness. Yet, with all their intelligence, they could not understand why human beings are so destructive, and so resistant to change.
    At one point, Paul remarked plaintively, ‘I want to go home’.
    He went on to comment that the aliens had been to Earth thousands of years ago, and had made an earlier attempt to influence its life forms, in the days when the highest life forms were reptilian.
    Like Catherine, Paul ended by becoming an active and valuable member of the abductee support group. Another member of this group told Mack that she believed she had met Paul on ‘the ships’, and Mack comments that such ‘recognition’ is common among abductees.
    The case of Paul interested me more than any other I had read so far because it reminded me of Stan Grof’s experience with Flora. Both were apparently dual identities, although Paul’s ‘secondary personality’ was less menacing than Flora’s. It seemed to me that the most important thing they shared was that they could both be regarded, from a purely psychiatric point of view, as fascinating examples of dual personality and self-delusion, yet that there was something about both of them that resisted such an interpretation.
    Flora’s childhood had been traumatic: she became a criminal and a drug addict, and suffered feelings of guilt about her lesbianism. So a violently antisocial alter ego might well have developed on an unconscious level, which expressed itself as her ‘demonic’ personality. As to Paul, he admitted that he had his first glimpse of an alien—on the stairs—after smoking marijuana. Paul had also had a difficult childhood