We feel we must note with some dismay that on this BBC program Dr Richard McNally of Harvard Medical School again makes a claim, which in our view is inaccurate, that the alien encounter "experiencers" who McNally studied had "preexisting new age beliefs" which may help explain why they reported alien encounters.

Two of the ten subjects who participated in his study are heard in the BBC radio program, and neither one fulfills that criteria: Karin, who described herself as "a right wing Rush Limbaugh fan" at the time of her most memorable alien encounter, and Peter, who described himself as a "recovering Catholic" during his.

Beyond this factual contradiction, the suggestion is made by McNally that their stated belief in phenomenon such as esp/telepathy or being shown the future is evidence that these people were predisposed to report alien encounters. That suggestion fails to note that the alien encounter experience itself (which seems to begin in childhood) involves telepathic communication from the purported "aliens" as well as visions of future environmental destruction, etc. To fail to note that the experiencers' subsequent beliefs in these and other extraordinary experiences may have arisen from the alien encounter experiencers themselves is, in our view, misleading.

Similarly concerning to us, a true but somewhat disingenuous assertion of McNally's is that the ten experiencers whom he studied had recalled additional details of their alien encounters after consulting therapists. While this is true (and while we appreciate that McNally did not attempt to dodge the fact that these people had conscious recollections of their alien encounters before seeing therapists) we find it is somewhat odd for him to note that the subjects had been to therapists in light of the fact that the John Mack Institute provided McNally with about a third of his subjects. If McNally had wanted an honest random sampling of experiencers, without the certainty that they had been seen by a psychiatrist, he could have avoided skewing the sample by declining our referrals.

The more general question of why more elaborate theories of alien encounters are given short thrift by McNally is sufficiently addressed by participants in the BBC program — including McNally himself, who comments that "I had no idea what he was talking about," in reference to John Mack's suggestion that Western concepts of reality are too restrictive for an understanding of the alien encounter phenomenon.

So with the above noted, we leave the rest to the listeners; it is an exceptionally well done program and we hope you will enjoy it.