Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

Abduction (Scribner, 1994) is the book that made the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, the most prominent academic to take alien abduction reports seriously. It presents thirteen of the more than one hundred people he worked with, many under hypnosis, and argues that their experiences cannot be explained by any known psychiatric condition and may be real encounters with intelligences that challenge our view of reality.

It became a bestseller and met scepticism from nearly all reviewers and many colleagues. Critics pointed to the use of hypnosis, which can create or shape memories, at the height of the recovered-memory controversy; Kirkus concluded that it leaves the reader "with very little solid ground to stand on". Harvard opened a faculty review of his research in 1994, which ended without action against him.

Sources: Kirkus Reviews · Los Angeles Review of Books · Psychology Today (1994)