We live in an open society whose rapid flow of information on many levels is quite unprecedented in all history. However, we are still strangely prudish and reticent when we are faced with fundamental anomalies within our experience. When faced with the hair-line cracks that open up within the bedrock of our most precious assumptions.

we look back often as if in some fearful nostalgia panic to our immediate ancestors, those very straight Victorian Station Masters as it were, for whom both the world and experience were solid determined structures.

Generally speaking, with very few notable exceptions, books on UFOs by “experts” and “researchers” exhibit such cultural paranoia. Such solid folk bear before them the flaming cross all the credentials of bourgeois “solidity.” Using such as a talisman to ward off demons, they hardly ever use the word “writer.” as if to assurance readers that their mental welfare has been borne in mind, and all such “imaginative” devils have been cast aside.

As such, most books on UFOs do not have a good reputation as reading material. They tend to be the equivalent to garage-manuals containing little more than lists of spare-parts, and most are terrifyingly over-rational.  Such books express a case-history medieval scholasticism that would do credit to Aquinas, and such tomes are instrumental in turning away wider and more general interest in Ufology.

Frequently “experts” pile case history upon case history in a maniacal frenzy as if to crush the subject to death and try and make it yield up its secrets with hacksaws and hammers. One imagines such “data-bank books” being unearthed from our nuclear dust by some future alien species who will wonder at what they were for, just as we ourselves gaze upon the steps of  incomplete Mayan temples and wonder why they were never completed and what they for.

What a pleasure it is then to receive Bruce Maccabee’s novel Abduction in My Life. A UFO researcher of renown, he has written a book about the UFO experience with which one can curl up with and read like a Dickens novel. The fictional treatment can often tell us more about the UFO experience than the plain nut-and-bolt approach by those who have a serious mechanical intent upon our creative imaginations. Nick Pope did this successfully with his “factual and “fictional” follow-ups, such as Open Skies Closed Minds and Operation Lightening Strike. Jacques Vallee also followed up in a similar way with his novel, Fast Walker.

If we take and combine the mid-way threads between the fact and fiction dualities of these three authors, we have a pretty good picture of what the contemporary UFO experience is all about.

For one of the world’s top UFO researchers, Maccabee’s literary command and technique is brilliantly conceived.

His main character is a writer and researcher, who initially knows nothing about UFOs. After he has met someone who tells him of a UFO experience they have had, our researcher decides to read a book about UFOS by one Mac Sargent. Sections of this “objective” book (a book wholly created by Maccabee himself) are used to counterpoint the fictional life of his created characters. He thus very cleverly gives himself two degrees of freedom. He can be as clinically as he likes with Mac Sargent’s book, yet put warm living flesh on these bones by the lives and actions of his created fictional characters.

Maccabee knows perhaps better than anyone else all the fears, doubts and uncertainties created by someone who is approaching this weirdest of subjects for the first time.

There is the comedy of self-denial as Maccabee looks at his subject from the outside. After long experience, he knows what interested outsiders say about Ufology. He know the jokes, the clichés about little green men, and the way the media half-and-three-quarter and five-eighths deny and do not deny, ect. The psychological drama of all this often comic mental management and navigation is well conceived. The book tells us about human beings and how they construct (in a Fortean sense) theories and structures of different levels of explanations. Many such explanations, no matter how absurd, are useful a “stoppers” (like a blanket over a drafty door) rather than being of any use in themselves.

Therefore on just one level this novel is a psychological study of how the mind deals with contradictions. We see our investigator lift the curtains of perception a little, then draw them again, then open then a little again, rather like some character from Kafka or Beckett. He is ready for acceptance, then goes into many ranges of self-engineered denial, only to deny in turn such denials. All this is well seasoned by Maccabee’s many years of experience in observing attitudes toward the UFO experience. He has a very good feel for the absurdities involved in the different kinds of UFO experience. Many first-class investigators avoid such daunting complexities, and deal with the UFO experience as it were an exercise in engineering middle-management, for all the world as if they were building bridges and space ships. Maccabee realises that in this particular area, the Agatha Christie Cartesian “solution” belongs to a passing world where indeed the trains did run on time, and inputs equalled outputs. He is not quite a Postmodern yet, but he is getting there.

I don’t want to tell readers too much about the plot of this book, because after all it is a thriller, and to reveal what happens would be to spoil the expectancy. Suffice it to say that our main character finds himself, his wife, and family entering and experiencing events as described by Mac Sargent in his book. One world begins to enter and take over another.

another.

What more thrilling Christmas read could you have than that?

Colin Bennett

November, 2005