Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T.

Bryan (Friendly Fire) brings top-notch reporting skills to this open-minded account of a five-day conference on UFO abductions held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Many of the purported abductees, who spoke at the symposium and in subsequent interviews with Bryan, tell of being floated aboard spacecraft by gray, four-foot-tall creatures with big heads who subjected them to clinical examinations. Bryan believes in the abductees' sincerity but remains undecided whether such experiences are encounters with nuts-and-bolts craft and real aliens, disturbances of the collective unconscious or something else. Among the ufology heavyweights attending the conference were bestselling abduction researchers Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, who believe aliens are conducting an ongoing breeding experiment with humans; Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (Abduction), who emphasizes that close encounters often involve personal transformation and growth; folklorist Thomas Bullard; and Sacramento psychologist Richard Boylan, who divulges his own recent encounter with three ``interdimensional'' beings in the New Mexico desert. Bryan's thought-provoking report takes us to the frontiers of current UFO research and controversy. 50,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections. (June)