Bonus Sample: Alien Abduction Mack Daddy

Listen to the full episode In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor John E. Mack became one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, alien abductions, and the alien-hybrid breeding scheme. He was introduced to celebrated painter, amateur hypnotherapist, and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins by transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof. Hopkins had helped author Whitley Strieber recover the abduction “memories” that became the book (and then movie) Communion. Mack and Hopkins quickly produced their own movie, Intruders. Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, going on the TV talk-show circuit with star patients that believed they were being experimented on while on alien spacecraft. Oprah slotted alien abductions right into her schedule, alongside Satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorder, and past-lives regressions. In reasoning not unfamiliar to Conspirituality listeners, Hopkins claimed a government conspiracy was covering up the ET hybrid breeding scheme, while Mack explained the lack of physical evidence by claiming the abduction experience “challenged the Western paradigm of materialist science.” The X-Files TV show was inspired by their work, which also spawned today’s generation of UFO grifters, alien channelers, and pastel-Q lightworkers. For today’s installment of his The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the characters, stories, psychology, and cultural significance of fantastical repressed memories retrieved under hypnosis—be they of horny demons, ritual Satanic abuse, or alien scientists who steal abductee’s DNA in the night.