Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis

On the heels of publication in Parade magazine of an article by Carl Sagan summarizing his views about UFOs and alien abductions, the magazine was deluged with mail. Most of it was impassioned and from obviously distraught people. Sagan presents in this chapter a selection of those letters.

For example, one reader asks what animals experience when humans approach by helicopter, subdue them, examine their sexual organs, clamp a monitoring device to their ear, and let them go. Isn't this an analogue to the reported human abduction cases? the reader asks.

Another identified himself as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and said he'd often drawn space aliens as a child and felt that he was overpowered and left his own body. The reader said alien abduction is nothing compared to being sexually abused by a parent—"the ultimate powerlessness...