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

and been physically abused by his stepfather. He had always felt a misfit. So the fantasy of being ‘one of them’, an alien in disguise, charged with some mission on Earth, would obviously provide him with a satisfying sense of identity.
    Yet, plausible as these explanations seem, both leave behind an element of doubt—particularly when viewed in the light of other similar cases. I had written extensively about multiple personality, and had at first accepted the standard notion that the ‘other selves’ are dissociated fragments of the total personality. But some cases described by psychiatrists like Adam Crabtree, Ralph Ellison, and (more recently) David Cohen had refused to fit the pattern, and reluctantly led me to conclude that ‘spirit possession’ must be considered a possibility. And, where Paul is concerned, Mack himself notes how many abductees feel that they themselves are part alien, and belong elsewhere than on Earth.
    I had bought the book mainly to find out what John Mack had to say about UFOs; by the time I had finished, I was convinced that, whether abductions are a delusion or not, they demand to be taken very seriously.
    Now I have to admit that, before encountering Mack’s book, I had always found it difficult to work up any deep interest in Unidentified Flying Objects. The first widely publicised sighting had occurred two days before my sixteenth birthday. On 24 June 1947, a businessman named Kenneth Arnold had been piloting his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State, when a brilliant flash had drawn his attention to nine ‘bright objects’ flying at a tremendous speed—he estimated it at 1,700 miles an hour—and bobbing up and down as they flew, like boats on a rough sea. Arnold concluded that they were some secret weapon of the US Air Force. When he later told a journalist that the craft had bobbed up and down ‘like a saucer being skipped over water’, the term flying saucer was born.
    The news unleashed a flood of sightings—no fewer than eighty-eight on Independence Day, 4 July 1947, alone—four hundred people spread across twenty-four states. And four days later, the commander at the Roswell army base announced that a flying saucer had been found and recovered from a ranch seventy-five miles away—only to take back the statement almost immediately. By that time, there were reports from England, Chile, Italy, Japan, and Holland—the Chile sighting was made at the De Salto Observatory, where astronomers estimated that the saucer was travelling at 3,000 miles an hour.
    All this failed to arouse my interest. In a few days’ time I was due to leave school, and my family expected me to find a job and contribute to the household budget. Since I had failed to achieve a credit in mathematics, I would be unable to apply for a job with Imperial Chemicals, where I had hoped to begin a career as a scientist. That meant I had to take some kind of a labouring job in a factory.
    But that was not all that dragged on my spirits at the age of sixteen. For the past three years, I had been burdened by a feeling that life is meaningless and futile. It had started one day in the clay-modelling class, when we had started a discussion on where the universe ended. If you could travel in some spaceship to the end of the galaxies, how far would empty space extend? For ever and ever? I had read Einstein, and the assertion that space is spherical, and curves back on itself, but the notion that space—which is merely another name for emptiness—is curved struck me as absurd. Yet the idea of infinity seems equally absurd. We talk about infinity, but we never actually think about what it means—something that goes on forever, totally contradicting our idea of a world where everything has an ending.
    As we talked, I began to feel a horrible sense of insecurity. I had always lived in a good, solid world, a world of my parents and my grandparents and my home and school. There were unanswered