February 24, 2004
By Tom Sharpe, The New Mexican
A Boston filmmaker whose recent documentary focuses on people who claim they were abducted by space aliens says she looks forward to returning to New Mexico where people are open to unconventional thinking.
When Laura Chilten's film Touched was screened at Santa Fe Film Festival in December, about one-fourth of the people in the standing-room-only audience indicated they had experience with beings from other planets, according to a festival news release.
"It was a very, very welcoming, curious audience," Chilten said in a telephone interview last week from her Boston home. "I'm used to very skeptical people in the audience."
Chilten, who describes herself as agnostic on the subject of space aliens, said she is at a loss for words to explain abductions, so she is pleased this week's screenings will be attended by John E. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist known for his work with "abductees."
"I'm just a lowly filmmaker," she said. "This time, I'm going to sit back and let him do the Q&A."
Chilten said Mack approached her after seeing her previous documentaries, The Jew in the Lotus, about rabbis who visit the Dalai Lama in India, and Twist and Shout, about Tourette's syndrome.
She said she wasn't even interested in abductions at first, but agreed to meet with Mack and his patients because they were at an event with free food.
"I'll go anywhere with free food," she said. "But I was really reluctant. I thought, 'Why doesn't he just let me alone?' and then I heard them speak and their stories sort of blew me away."
Chilten recalled a woman who broke into tears when she tried to explain what it was like to touch an alien.
"For me, it wasn't whether the aliens exist or not or whether the story was real or not," she said. "What was real was that longing for connection, and that's what drew me in."
Touched focuses on two people who have had what Chilten calls "the classic abduction experience."
"You're lying in bed. You're awakened," she said. "There's a bright light. You become paralyzed and are lifted, floated, brought into a spaceship. Experiments are done on them, and then they are brought back into the bed. Most of the time, they don't remember. They become amnesiac in the morning. ... Generally, something happens at some point where it permeates their consciousness and they start to remember pieces, more and more. Then it sort of opens the door."
The most extensive interviews are with Karin, a single woman; Peter, a married man, and his wife, Jamy, who claims no contact but struggles with her husband's belief he is being bred to a female space alien.
"It feels like she's my real wife," Peter tells Mack in an audiotape of a "regression" session, which is included in the film.
"In so many ways, she's me," Chilten said of Jamy. "She's the one I identify with. ...
"In some ways, it might be her that would surprise you most ... because a lot of times, these films are focused on the abduction experience and we don't look behind that ... and say, 'Who are these people? What's happened to them? How has it impacted their lives? Who were they before? Who are they now?' "
Even more intriguing than the abductees' stories are Mack's accounts of the troubles he encountered after beginning to study abductions.
Touched interviews a faculty investigator who says Mack is a biased researcher because he has become a UFO cult leader and an opportunist.
"If it was an opportunity," responds Mack, "it was an opportunity to commit professional suicide."
His defenders include a Vatican "demonologist" who remains open to the possibility of space aliens and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who says Harvard's "serious minds" welcome theology but not UFO-logy by harrumphing, "Angels, yes; extraterrestrials, no."
Mack, 74, started out his career conventionally by graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1955 and joining the psychology department at The Cambridge Hospital.
In 1977, he won a Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder, a biography of T.E. Lawrence, the psychologically complex British military officer who fomented Arab nationalism on the eve of the First World War.
By Mack's own admission, his life began to change in 1989 when he met Budd Hopkins, a New York City artist working with abductees.
In Mack's 1994 book, Abductions, he says the abductees' descriptions of space aliens -- with gray reptilian skin, large heads and almond-shaped eyes -- are so similar that he is convinced they are not the products of imagination.
"Clinically, sometimes the most honest thing you can say is, 'There's something I don't know here,' " he said.
In his 1999 book, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, Mack goes even further out on a limb to suggest alien abductions might be a modern manifestation of an ancient phenomenon that has resulted in tales of gods, angels, demons and other supernatural beings -- things that tear at the fabric of what we call reality.
As Mack says in the film, "It's like somebody out there is trying to reach us."
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