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Mack says he expected the disbelief that has greeted the bizarre tales recounted in his book. "This isn't supposed to be," he explained to TIME. "You aren't supposed to have little guys with big black eyes taking men, women and children against their wills on beams of light through walls and windows into strange craft and have this going on all over the country." But after hearing dozens of such stories, Mack concluded that the abductions were real. Moreover, he discerned a motive behind them: the abductors, it seems, were implanting mind-to-mind messages urging better care of the planet. The aliens' apparent objective was an intergalactic breeding program combined with a brotherly warning of impending doom if the earth doesn't change its warlike and ecologically wasteful ways.
Mack's studies are largely funded by a tax-exempt, nonprofit research organization that he founded in 1983, now called the Center for Psychology and Social Change. With headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the center was started as an attempt to study the nuclear arms race in psychological terms. After the cold war ended, the organization started raising money for scholars who want to combine psychology with such topics as ecology and ethnic conflicts. Explains the center's executive director, Vivienne Simon: "One of our main goals is to challenge current scientific method, which is to deny all things you cannot reduce to statistics."
Donna Bassett's story seemed to fit right in with that goal. Bassett, 37, then a Boston-based writer and researcher, became interested in Mack's studies after hearing complaints that he was "strip mining" the stories of emotionally distraught people and failing to help them with follow-up therapy. After reading stacks of books and articles on UFO abductions, Bassett made up an elaborate story of otherworldly encounters involving her family, going back to the 11th century. Her great-grandmother, she said, saw "little people," whom she called angels from God. Bassett herself saw "balls of light" around her house at age five. She also said that as a child she had a space-alien friend named Jane, who healed her hands after a neighbor stuck them in boiling fudge to punish her for snooping.
Bassett participated in three hypnotic-regression sessions (she says she used method-acting techniques to fake her way through them) and eventually served as treasurer of an abductee support group that Mack organized and ran. "I've never seen a UFO in my life," Bassett says, "and I certainly haven't been inside one."
Bassett, who made extensive tapes and notes of her life in the UFO cult, says Mack provided her with UFO literature to read prior to her sessions -- a practice that medical hypnotists say will almost surely influence hypnotic revelations. During the sessions, which Mack held in a darkened bedroom in his house rather than in a neutral office, he asked leading questions that reflected his biases. "John made it obvious what he wanted to hear," says Bassett. "I provided the answers." Among other recollections, she told of an encounter with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev on board a spaceship during the Cuban missile crisis. Bassett said Khrushchev was crying and that "I sat in his lap, and I put my arms around his neck, and I told him it would be O.K." Hearing her tale, Mack became so excited that he leaned on the bed too heavily, and it collapsed.