Customer Reviews

Chosen: Recollections Of UFO Abductions Through Hypnotherapy

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Yvonne Smith is a qualified hypnotherapist (C.Ht) practicing in California. In the 1980s, whilst working to uncover original causes of post-traumatic stress disorder in many patients, buried/blocked narratives of alien abduction experiences started to emerge under hypnosis. These not only explained the PTSD symptoms, but exploration of the issue usually resolved said symptoms. From a position of initial skepticism, Smith gradually moved to specialising in the abduction issue and founded the Close Encounter Resource Organization (CERO) in 1991. She subsequently learned a great deal about the phenomenon from Budd Hopkins and acknowledges the legacy of seminal work from that great New York City-based investigator.

This 2008 book details eight separate cases organised by chapter, and includes verbatim transcripts of many hypnotic regression sessions and the insertion of illustrations (usually abductees' drawings) into the page-text. Two of the cases involve the simultaneous abduction of two people, and some of the abductees consent to their own names and true IDs being used in the book. The complex serial abduction of two brothers from Tennessee is one of the strongest cases in the literature anywhere, and the author explains her involvement in helping unravel it in detail. The same breeding-focussed activities by the abductors are uncovered in common with the findings of virtually all other researchers - no surprise. For me, two small highlights of the book stand out: the short essay pp63-65 written by "Mary", one of the abductees, on what she feels about the nature, history and motives of the abductors is seriously thought-provoking and insightful; and the account in Chapter 8 of Rita Gaines' encounter with a strange human-looking individual (Hybrid? Alien?) on 15 November 1967 is an absolutely classic story of its type containing the usual elements of the physical, the mundane, the paranormal and the strange: it matches very closely accounts of similar encounters I have heard face-to-face from others.

"Chosen" is a good addition to the abduction literature from a qualified hypnotherapist, but at the end of the day breaks no new ground and adds little in the way of new understanding about the phenomenon which has not already been explored better elsewhere (by for example Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack or Raymond Fowler). It's shorter and less detailed than Dr. Edith Fiore's essentially similar but much earlier book "Encounters". Also it must be said the writing style could be better: more than a few typos and many instances of poor syntax could have been avoided by employing a good editor.

Yvonne Smith does have a reasonably strong profile in the field of abduction research and you can find many broadcast/podcast interviews with her online. A few criticise her as a persistent self-promoter, but even if true that's no bad thing with an issue as important as this one if you're essentially on the right track - which she definitely is.

You can get a new copy of "Chosen" directly from the author herself via her website, so don't pay more from a dealer.

The book includes several abduction stories that almost all describe the same kind of scenarios that have been outlined by David Jacobs and other followers of the so called negative school of thought. But this book is not about implications, just descriptions, raw material.
The downside of this book is that many illustrations are below any acceptable quality, and also often do not depict anything to add value to the text.