Reports of abduction by aliens was not a topic taken seriously until John E. Mack, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, could no longer discount the recurring experiences of several individuals who consulted him in his office at the Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. The similarity and frequency of these experiences by clients with no history of mental illness provoked Dr. Mack to conduct four years of intensive research and investigation into the serious, ever-growing phenomenon of alien abduction. Dr. Mack's findings resulted in his best-selling book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, a work that will forever change our perception of reality by asking why, not if, such a phenomenon is happening.

Out of nearly one hundred case studies, Dr. Mack focuses on thirteen ordinary Americans from all walks of life who tell dramatic, inspiring, and remarkably similar stories of alien abductions. These stories tend to feature repeated visits from large-eyed beings, mysterious machines, telepathy, invasive medical procedures, hours missing from their lives, and startling messages about the future. As suggested in a 1991 Roper survey, the number of potential experiencers may be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, yet many people try to dismiss their encounters as nightmares or are misdiagnosed and treated for a range of physical and psychiatric disorders.

"This book describes a clinical map of the abduction territory, which I believe shows that we are dealing with a phenomenon that may not originate in our physical reality but penetrates variably into it or manifests within it in a variety of ways. This very concept is somewhat revolutionary and difficult to understand within our current modem secular world view," explains Dr. Mack. "It was in the hope of serving a misunderstood population by making sense of their experiences, and, above all, of provoking my readers to reconsider their views of the universe in which we live, that I undertook to write this book."

The revised edition of Abduction includes a new preface in which Dr. Mack addresses the various criticism his work has generated by some strict "rationalists" in the science and medical professions since the hardcover publication a year ago. As Dr. Mack says: "The interpretations and conclusions in this book are but hypotheses, designed to invite others to join me in the exploration of this important mystery. It is my hope that, if nothing else, this book will encourage at least some of the skeptics who have criticized my methods and hypotheses to immerse themselves in the primary data of this field, namely the experiences of those who have undergone the abduction encounters, and draw their own conclusions about what is talking place here and what it might mean for the human future."