Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind; Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. First Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xii, 476, [6] pages. Occasional footnotes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan (April 22, 1936 - December 15, 2009), better known as C. D. B. Bryan, was an American author and journalist. He was born on April 22, 1936 in Manhattan, New York City. Bryan attended Berkshire School in the class of 1954 and earned a Bachelor of Arts at Yale University in 1958, where he wrote for campus humor magazine The Yale Record.[3] His parents were Joseph Bryan III and Katharine Barnes Bryan; after they divorced his mother married author John O'Hara. He served in the U.S. Army in South Korea (1958-1960), but not happily. He was mobilized again (1961-1962) for the Berlin Crisis of 1961. He was an intelligence officer. He was editor of the satirical Monocle (from 1961 until 1965), Colorado State University writer-in-residence (winter 1967), visiting lecturer University of Iowa writers workshop (1967-1969), special editorial consultant at Yale (1970), visiting professor University of Wyoming (1975), adjunct professor Columbia University (1976), fiction director at the New York City Writers Community from (1977), lecturer in English University of Virginia (spring 1983), and Bard Center fellow Bard College (spring 1984). His first novel, P. S. Wilkinson, won the Harper Prize in 1965. Bryan is best known for his non-fiction book Friendly Fire (1976). The most concrete book yet on the subject of UFOs. At the center of this serious, richly explicit, riveting work is a five-day UFO conference held at MIT, which the author attended, & from which he has recreated the accounts of close encounter experiences of many abductees, telling their stories in chilling detail.Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: cases in which personal contact between an individual or individuals is initiated by the "occupants" of the spacecraft. Such contact may involve the transportation of the individual from his or her terrestrial surroundings into the spacecraft, where the individual is communicated with and/or subjected to an examination before being returned.One might expect that a "scientific conference" devoted to people who have reported being kidnapped by "little green men" would be dismissed out of hand. But C.D.B. Bryan, the greatly admired journalist and author of Friendly Fire, did not dismiss it: the conference was to be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and would have as its chairmen a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor and a professor of physics from M.I.T.Bryan attended the conference throughout its five days. He approached the subject with no prior stand, no agenda, and an open (if slightly skeptical) mind. As the conference progressed, he was astonished by the quality of the stories told by the hundreds of men and women who came forward hesitantly and reluctantly with their utterly amazing-and utterly convincing-accounts of having been abducted and then examined aboard extraterrestrial spacecraft by spindly limbed, telepathic gray creatures with outsized foreheads dominated by huge, compelling, tear-shaped black eyes.What most astonished Bryan were the similarities found again and again in these accounts and the consistency of their details. It is here that the heart of the mystery lies: as the Harvard professor John E. Mack asked at the conference, "If what the abductees are saying isn't happening to them, then what is?" This question-and the possible answers-are at the center of this richly explicit, serious, and riveting book.Bryan recreates the conference. He interviews ufology's most prominent psychiatrists, psychologists, hypnotherapists, researchers, physicists, physicians, and folklorists. He interweaves throughout the testimony of the abductees themselves, who tell us their stories in chilling detail. He presents, in depth, the Close Encounter experiences of two women whose stories he tells on the basis of both their spontaneous recollections of the events and their memories that were retrieved through sessions of hypnosis of which Bryan himself was a witness.Finally, Bryan examines the current theories-psychological, psychiatric, medical, parapsychological-that have been put forward by the unconvinced to explain the abduction phenomenon. Are the abductees suffering from some sort of false memory syndrome? . . . a multiple or dissociative personality disorder? . . . Are they fantasy-prone? Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind is a detailed, objective exploration-the most concrete to date-of one of the enduring and amazing mysteries of our time. It is a book that will equally fascinate believers and nonbelievers.