Abduction

by Jenny Randles

'Scientific exploration of alleged kidnaps by alien beings'Janny Randles explores the phenomenon of alien abductions by looking into historical accounts and claims, investigating their links to science-fiction and imagination, and looking at other literature in the genre.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

British author and former director of investigations with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), serving in that role from 1982 through to 1994.

Randles specializes in writing books on UFOs and paranormal phenomena. To date 50 of these have been published, ranging from her first UFOs: A British Viewpoint (1979) to Breaking the Time Barrier: The race to build the first time machine (2005). Subjects covered include crop circles, ESP, life after death, time anomalies and spontaneous human combustion.

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The British ufologist Jenny Randles is always worth reading even in her lesser books like this one, because she is one of the most genuinely open-minded writers to have worked within the field and also among the most methodologically rigorous. Even though this book, where she turns her perspective on the abduction/contactee experience, has some of her few slip-ups, it is nonetheless worth reading because she digs up quite a bit of interesting information.

Among the worthwhile parts are many of the UFO contactee cases from Europe and South America she digs up. They fit into neither the George Adamski "hippie space brothers" or Betty & Barney Hill "little grey Josef Mengeles and Shirô Ishiis from outer space" schools of alien contact. A handful even sound for all I know more similar to particularly eccentric "Doctor Who" storylines than what most UFO investigators associate with extraterrestrial contact, but they are highly interesting to read.

The chapters on Africa and Asia are also interesting. Randles can dig up quite a few stories from there that sound similar to Western alien contact experiences but only the most Westernized people in the relevant countries interpret what happened to them that way. The majority of contactee types from Africa and Asia that Randles communicated with, however, experienced the entities as ghosts or demons or trolls rather than as extraterrestrials.

Even the chapters on first world countries provide information that do not fit into the stock narratives of ufology. There are plenty of cases from the UK, US and Australia + New Zealand where UFOs stop cars and the witnesses experience time lapses - but they don't go into hypnotherapy to recover the "missing time" afterwards, because they do not want to risk their professional reputations or attract as much unwanted UFO-related attention as the Hills or Striebers did.

Where I find Randles kind of fumbles in "Abduction" is in her analysis at the end, where she dismisses both psychosocial and "nuts-and-bolts" ETH. Instead opting for some kind of theory that abductees are meeting real non-human entities but the entities are *not* what they present themselves as. I don't think I quite follow her argumentation here, and I frankly think her explanations raise more questions than they answer. That is a similar theory as Whitley Strieber arrived at, and I don't really buy it from him either. It does not exactly help that Randles herself later abandoned her thoughts on the abduction/contactee phenomenon in her subsequent "Time Storms".

This book is still worth reading for people interested in UFO contactee phenomena, however, again because what I mentioned about how much information that does not fit into popular UFO narratives Randles presents here.

[Wyktor Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book by Jenny Randles, former director of investigations with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), which details a number of close encounters and abduction events around the globe, but primarily in the UK and the USA.
Well written and researched by someone who definitely know her subject matter.
I rather enjoyed this book but found the final chapter to be somewhat of a letdown, as it veered off into a number of different theories which fell way short of being credible, I felt.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is on the same level as the best work from Bud Hopkins or David Jacobs. It is funny how Jenny Randles a pioneer on the UFO phenomena research does not yet gets her well deserved credit for her work, perhaps because part of her work was to recycle some of her early work in a more palatable way not adding much thought to it, but her early work was cutting edge with very interesting hypothesis and unique cases. This book provides a great amount of incredible data, that have been researched with a lot of rigour, these data is not really well known but it is really worth to be investigated by the new gen of researchers, as there are so many interesting cases here. The only thing I would pity is that the best abductions have been covered elsewhere, so this book in fact should be much larger in my opinion. Anyway is a very good read.