With co-author Budd Hopkins (Atria/Simon & Schuster 2003)
The authors use paranormal experience as an entrée into complex and startling breakthroughs in such fields as transgenics, bioengineering, neurobiology, and quantum physics.
Review by Don Donderi, Ph.D., McGill University
“Sight Unseen” shows us the edge of what science can explain and pushes us to the edge of the unexplained. The book will provoke its readers, both scientists and non-scientists, in every sense of that word.
Review by Mac Tonnies, The Posthuman Blues Blogspot
Budd Hopkins is a central figure in the surreal landscape of alien abduction research. The title of his book "Missing Time" entered the ufological nomenclature and 1987's "Intruders"—an unnerving case study of multiple abductions—was pivotal in placing the phenomenon squarely on the cultural map. "Sight Unseen," co-written with former wife Carol Rainey, is Hopkins' best book yet. Subtitled "Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings," Hopkins and Rainey take a close look at abduction reports of high strangeness, daring to ask difficult questions.... Hopkins and Rainey tackle these enigmas with lucidity. Rainey provides a running scientific commentary to Hopkins' case-files, methodically searching for avenues of research that mirror the aliens' alleged abilities. Read as a whole, the effect is that of listening in on an extended dialogue between two well-informed friends. Rainey's insightful chapters on contemporary physics and biotechnology are well-researched and entertaining while Hopkins' selected abduction cases reveal a mind surprisingly open to exotic possibilities.....
"Sight Unseen" sheds light on other aspects of the archetypal abduction experience, with meditations on everything from string theory to levitation to gynecology…. The picture that emerges is amazingly rich and pregnant with unsettling implications: Hopkins and Rainey…don't claim to have solved the abduction enigma, but they offer witness testimony that suggests they might not be far off the mark.From Publishers Weekly
Rather than discrediting UFO abduction stories, recent scientific developments make them increasingly plausible, argues this intriguing volume. Hopkins (“Intruders”) and documentary filmmaker Rainey touch on everything from mind control to teleportation, but focus on two areas of progress that they say give clues as to how and why UFOs abduct their victims. The first is invisibility, now almost feasible on earth via NASA's "adaptive camouflage" technologies and presumably old hat for space-traveling extraterrestrials, which, they say, explains why abductions so often go unnoticed. The second is the burgeoning field of genetic and reproductive engineering, whose methods resemble the medical procedures that those who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials report they experienced. The resulting "transgenic" offspring can pass for human while serving the aliens, the authors argue, and nonhuman beings live among us, often distinguishable by their social unease and unfashionable clothes….
Full of subtle, naturalistic detail and dense, complex, novelistic portraits of transgenic characters, these stories demonstrate that the folklore of UFO abductions-ostensibly about aliens but perhaps really about alienation-has developed into one of the richest psychological literatures of our time.