Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction and UFOs- Witnesses and Scientists Report - Softcover

C. D. B. Bryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752801694 ISBN 13: 9780752801698

Publisher: Orion Mass Market Paperback, 1996

Synopsis

s/ Witnesses and Scientists Report
C.D.B. Bryan is the journalist author of the '76 bestseller Friendly Fire, a gritty, brutally honest look at the impact the Vietnam War had on this country. He's also been published in The NY Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker & other leading magazines. He's earned the kind of reputation as a journalist that demands he be taken seriously.
Bryan recently came out with a new book called Close Encounters of the Fourth Alien Abductions, UFOs & the Conference at MIT in which he reports on the '92 scientific conference held at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to examine "the findings of various investigators studying people who report experiences of abductions by aliens & the related issues of the phenomenon." The 5-day conference was chaired by MIT Physics Prof. David Pritchard & Harvard Psychiatry Prof. John Mack. As one of the few members of the media invited to attend, he was intrigued enough by what he saw & heard to investigate the subject in book-length form in an attempt to answer the If what these abductees are saying is happening to them isn't happening, what is?
I spoke to Bryan by phone from his Connecticut home & asked how he felt his book had been received.
"Well, I haven't had any responses from the reading public," Bryan said, "but I've heard from people in the field who said my book was the kind of book that John Mack should've written. You know, that it was an objective look at the phenomenon from somebody outside. I think John Mack is disappointed that I didn't come out & say that I believed that these people are being abducted by aliens in UFOs. I'm not sure they are. But what I do think is that something is going on here & that just to disregard it out of hand because the subject is unpopular or associated with flakey people is a mistake."
Bryan admitted that tackling the subject of UFO abduction entailed a certain amount of risk, especially for a professional "You write about this subject & you can get tarred with the same brush that tars the contactees. But I don't give a damn about that, you know? I'm going to be 60 next year. I've been writing & supporting myself as a writer for 35 years. Critics come & go, but I'm still here."
"What I care about," Bryan continued, "is that here's a subject that's really interesting. One of the luxuries of being a free-lance writer is that you can follow your curiosity. Were some of these abductees off the wall? Sure, some of them were. But not enough of them to disregard the phenomenon. If it's real, if it's true, then it's a hell of a lot bigger story than Bosnia & O.J. Simpson." He said that some articles written about his Close Encounters have asked the question "Why is a journalist with his reasonably good credentials risking all of that to do this book?"
"Well, I'm risking it," Bryan explained, "because I think the subject is compelling & I think something's going on. I don't have any idea what it is, but I'm certainly not going to laugh at people like Mack & Pritchard who take such risks. Nor am I going to laugh at the abductees who are in such obvious pain."
Bryan said he'd learned that often an abductee wants very much to be told he's crazy. "John Mack had a wonderful story," Bryan said, "about a University administrator telling him the story of his abduction. Mack is listening to this guy & sees the guy is getting increasingly upset & finally Mack asks 'What's the matter?' & the guy says, 'You're not telling me I'm crazy.' You see, if you're crazy you can take Prozac or go see a shrink. But if this stuff is going on--& here's where MUFON & John Mack & Budd Hopkins & all of us who've looked into this have trouble--it's fascinating, but if it's real, then what the hell is going on? I mean, that's truly terrifying."
Bryan said while he's grown more skeptical about the truth of alien abductions since putting some time & distance between himself & the book, he still cannot explain away everything he learned while working on it.
"The 5 key dimensions that John Mack talks The repeated, consistent details, the absence of any diagnosed mental illness, the physical changes, the association with UFOs, reports by children. Nothing I can come up with, & believe me I've looked, fits all the basic dimensions of the abduction phenomenon better than exactly what the abductees are saying."
At the conference, Bryan spoke to Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas entrepreneur who was one of the backers of the conference & the Roper Poll on "Unusual Personal Experiences" designed by Mack, Hopkins & David Jacobs.
"When I asked Bigelow what he thought was going on," Bryan recalled, "he said, 'Either it's a new psychiatric phenomenon or it's real.' & what's interesting is that nobody has come up with the psychiatric illness that corresponds with what these people are seeing. I think by now several thousand, or certainly several hundred con...

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion Mass Market Paperback
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0752801694
• ISBN 13: 9780752801698
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 642