The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Frederick Crews’s article, “The Mindsnatchers” [NYR, June 25], provides yet another excuse for scientists to avoid the one course of action compelled by their profession: the thorough, open-minded investigation of the UFO phenomenon.

Although one would never know it from Crews’s angry, tendentious article, the evidence supporting the reality of UFOs is extraordinarily extensive. For more than a half-century, researchers have amassed thousands of highly significant sighting reports, many by highly trained observers: astronomers, such as Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto; astronauts, such as James McDivitt, Deke Slayton, and Gordon Cooper; and a multitude of commercial and military pilots, police officers, and scientists from a variety of disciplines. In hundreds of UFO sightings the craft were observed both visually and on radar.

Supporting these eyewitness and radar observations are many motion-picture films, videotapes, and still photographs of UFOs which have been independently analyzed and validated by photo experts such as Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist employed by the Navy Department. Ground traces—signs of some kind of physical interaction between UFOs and the environment—have been examined in hundreds of cases, most notably perhaps by the scientists of Groupe d’Etude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-Identifiés, an official agency operating within the French version of NASA. The GEPAN report on the 1981 UFO sighting and accompanying changes in the environment at Trans-en-Provence presents an extraordinarily detailed study of the physical evidence. Logically, if this evidence suggests that extraterrestrial craft may be operating in our environment, then the thousands of UFO abduction accounts cannot be automatically discarded, as Crews implicitly suggests.

Frederick Crews and I do agree, however, that whatever may lie behind them, all of these reports of sightings and abductions constitute an extraordinary phenomenon. As a man experienced in the field of psychology and with enough interest to write about UFO abductions, he should be curious enough to join those of us who are actively looking into the matter. An extraordinary phenomenon such as this demands an extraordinary investigation.

Sadly, I have become used to critics with no firsthand knowledge of the UFO evidence attacking these reports rather than investigating them. Crews cites as broad and sensible the book UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game by journalist and debunker Philip Klass. Ostensibly a serious investigative study, UFO Abductions is essentially a work of reverse hagiography, a series of ad hominem assaults on an “enemies list” of UFO abductees and prominent researchers. Apparently Klass practices a new kind of journalism because, though he attended conferences where all were present, he never bothered to interview any of these abductees and researchers for his book.

But Philip Klass is not alone in his curious indifference to the firsthand investigation of UFO abduction reports. In 1987, when the late Dr. Carl Sagan appeared with me on a Boston TV program, he said that I should inform him of my “next good abduction case” and he would join me in its investigation. I waited until I received such a report in the Ithaca, New York, area, from a student at Cornell. The young man’s memories of his experience were extensive, he bore a scar from the abduction, and there was even a subsidiary witness to an aspect of his encounter. When I spoke to him on the telephone, he agreed to go to Sagan’s office if he were asked to, and he was quite willing to be examined by any members of the Cornell psychology department whom Sagan wished to bring into the investigation.

I wrote all of this to Dr. Sagan, reminding him of his promise to me and stating my willingness to keep our joint investigation confidential. I received a four-line reply; Carl Sagan did not find the case interesting and declined to interview the young man. So far as I know, Sagan never became involved in the firsthand investigation of a single UFO abduction case, despite his frequent authoritative statements that UFO abductions can be easily explained away as psychological phenomena. And on the now infamous Nova program—which so dishonestly distorted the evidence for UFO abductions—he implied that he had personally investigated such cases and found the evidence to be lacking.¹ Science is not always what scientists do.

Frederick Crews leans heavily upon such slender reeds when he ridicules those of us who have spent years investigating UFO abduction accounts with the goal of separating those with supporting evidence from those accounts which suggest a psychological etiology. The essential difference between Crews and myself is that he is an ideologue, a true believer in the a priori falsehood of all these reports, whereas I am a pragmatic investigator who, because of the evidence, finds himself unable to reject the possibility that UFOs—extraterrestrial spacecraft—do exist, and that among the thousands of traumatized men, women, and even little children who describe extraordinarily similar abduction experiences, many may actually be telling the truth.

Budd Hopkins

Executive Director
Intruders Foundation
New York City

To the Editors:

Frederick Crews’s review of my book The Threat [NYR, June 25] displays a tiresome but characteristic reaction to research on the UFO abduction phenomena; he assumes its illegitimacy, and cynically castigates those who would be foolish enough to study it, suggesting that they are motivated by avarice and self-promotion.

Mr. Crews implies that I insert frightening abduction scenarios into peoples’ minds while I pay lip service to the problems of hypnosis. This is not only wrong, but Mr. Crews displays an underlying ignorance of my methodology and, not surprisingly, of my book, which contains a sustained analysis of the problems of abduction hypnosis and a detailed critique of researchers who have used faulty techniques.

That Crews would resort to naming hypnosis and, of course, false memory syndrome as his solutions for abductions is expected. In fact, these common interpretations are accepted by most who have not studied the phenomenon. Indeed, Crews seems unaware of why “tenured apologists” and other academics and professionals would find sufficient evidence to impel them forward into this career-endangering field so immersed in ridicule and scorn.

Although Crews is seemingly aware of the wide range of psychological, psychiatric, and cultural stimuli that could generate these extraordinary narratives, he is unaware that abduction researchers have devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to them. Had these mental determinants, which Mr. Crews accepts so easily, been found to be sufficient in their explanatory power, the controversy would have died long ago. It is precisely because they have proven inadequate to explain the phenomenon that allows us to engage with the evidence on a serious level and to search for explanations that will satisfy the data.

For abduction researchers, all explanations suggesting internal generation must come to terms with the following: perhaps as many as 20 percent of all abduction narratives are with two or more individuals who can confirm the others’ experiences. Victims are physically missing from their normal environments during abductions. They present puzzling scars and other marks on their bodies not there before the abduction (which might have taken place the night before). Their narratives are precise and detailed. They match accurately with thousands of other details of narratives which have never been publicized.

Mr. Crews is also unaware that abduction narratives are global and have little concern for the individual’s culture or upbringing. The accounts are nonidiosyncratic and the narrator’s economic, intellectual, geographic, political, religious, ethnic, or racial background has little bearing on them. Psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, scientists, attorneys, writers, professors, and a wide range of people down to and including individuals who are uneducated and unable to hold a job have all described the same experiences—sometimes in such detail that researchers have learned the function of instruments and the purpose of typical abduction procedures. Of course, Mr. Crews fails to even mention the great number of abductees who remember their experiences immediately afterward and have not availed themselves of hypnosis.

It is these types of elements, and many more, that constitute the core of the abduction phenomenon. Not to study this phenomenon, or to automatically assume prosaic explanations in the face of disconfirming evidence is, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest. Crews would have us dismiss the evidence and ignore the data. Rather, it is important for the intellectual community to engage with the abduction data and begin to understand its tenets so that we can, free from ridicule, finally solve this persistent and puzzling mystery.

David M. Jacobs

Department of History
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To the Editors:

Frederick Crews [NYR, June 25] correctly states that whatever plausibility the alien-abduction hypothesis may have is due to the (allegedly) “otherwise unaccountable congruence of detail from one ‘abductee’ narrative to another,” referring to this as “the classic sophistry of all ufologists.” He does not address the question whether any argument based primarily on firsthand testimony can be plausible which implies, as this one does, that such phenomena as telepathy and interpenetration of matter (e.g., “wafting” through closed windows) are physically possible. As it happens, the best, most versatile skeptical strategy may well be to concede the theoretical possibility. Our current physical theories are indeed admirably well confirmed, but this fact falls far short of entailing that no such argument could ever seem plausible to rational people. To deny this would leave the abduction theorist with the not unattractive reply that the history of science is well-stocked with cases in which theoretically anomalous anecdotal reports were eventually accounted for by revolutionary new theories, and that claims that this can never again occur seem remarkably dogmatic coming from people billing themselves as “skeptics.” Skeptics may thus not assume, but must demonstrate, that the claimed congruence of detail can indeed be accounted for without such counterintuitive hypotheses. Of course, Crews takes himself to do that very thing; but he sometimes seems to base his rhetorical dismissal of abduction researchers as scientific ignoramuses simply on their willingness to entertain the abduction hypothesis itself. This can cause him to overplay his hand.

For example, far from displaying “insouciance” with respect to scientific questions, as Crews alleges, David Jacobs is quite right to dismiss as irrelevant skeptical worries about the presumed impracticality of interstellar travel. Let’s say the alleged aliens aren’t from around here. But if they don’t have the ability to travel here, skeptics remind us, then they aren’t here at all. True enough; but this statement is logically equivalent to the following: If they are here, then they have the ability to travel (somehow). What we are actually interested in, of course, is the aliens’ presence, which is the only reason the issue of interstellar travel came up in the first place. The evidence Jacobs has available to him—first-person reports from possible abductees—has to do with the former, and not the latter; so that is indeed the appropriate target of his investigation. The bizarreness of the hypotheses he provides concerning methods of interstellar travel, which Crews mocks as if they were Jacobs’s own, is meant to emphasize this point. Indeed, how could we conceivably investigate the possibility of travel via the “astral plane”?