pul9504.02b
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1995 04:33:57 GMT
From: John Powell
Subject: Review: Allagash Abductions

The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention
by Raymond E. Fowler
1993, 347 pp., cloth: $23.95,
paper: 16.95
Wild Flower Press, PO Box
230893, Tigard, OR 97281

Reviewed by Jerome Clark

If you're suffering from abduction fatigue - a common ailment in
ufology these days - you probably want to read another abduction book
about as much as you want to have your wisdom teeth removed or you tax
returns audited. Raymond E. Fowler's book The Allagash Abductions had
sat gathering dust on my shelves for some months, and only a request
from INFO to review it prompted me to take it down and put eye to print.

The prospect filled me with more than the usual dread. I had
just finished reading John E. Mack's newly published Abduction: Human
Encounters with Aliens, a book that rubbed me wrong in just about every
way a book can rub one wrong (for details, see my extended commentary in
International UFO Reporter, March/April), and on top of that, Mack's is
a long book. Fatigue hardly describes how I felt; comatose is more like
it.

In short, I came to the Allagash Abductions in a decidedly and
deservedly sour humor, exasperated by a controversy that has practically
consumed ufology in recent years, even as the rhetoric has escalated and
the claims for it have grown ever more extreme. The nadir may have been
reached with the Linda Cortile case, when a trio of debunkers managed to
turn a debate over a particular claim - which has indisputable problems
in the evidence department - into a witch hunt. Apparently they harbored
the strange impression that ufological discourse heretofore had been too
civil, a failing they hastened to correct by painting their adversaries
as not merely mistaken but positively craven. Presumably this made the
debunkers feel better, but it did nothing to advance serious discussion
of the Linda case in specific or abduction matters in general.

On the other hand, leading abduction proponents were asking us
to believe that the UFO abduction experience is one shared by millions,
perhaps tens of millions of people, and we are talking just Americans
here. In short, we are asked to credit the proposition that kidnapping
by extraterrestrial (or extradimensionals) is a sort of defining human
experience. This in the absence of a single medically documented
missing-fetus case, or a single unambiguously anomalous
abduction-related artifact.

Nonetheless, so confident have some proponents become that
"investigations" of abduction stories more and more consist in their
entirety of the simple elicitation of testimony under hypnosis. Mack
even maintains that we ought not to expect much more evidence than this,
inasmuch as "it may be wrong to expect that a phenomenon whose very
nature is subtle, and one of whose purposes may be to stretch and expand
our ways of knowing beyond the purely materialistic approaches of
Western science, will yield its secrets to an epistemology or
methodology that operates at a lower level of consciousness."

I was delighted to find that Fowler operates at a lower level of
consciousness. Fowler is of the opinion that abduction reports, like
other kinds of UFO reports, can be investigated, that if there is
anything to them that fact can be demonstrated through meticulous
fact-gathering and analysis. The Allagash Abductions, a little gem of a
book, reminds us, in case we have forgotte VA
22210-0367. Quarterly subscription $12/yr.]



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John Powell - via ParaNet node 1:104/422
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