The Alien Deception [Kindle Edition]

This is a substantial book, which appears to have been self-published. It covers a lot of territory and includes many references. Unfortunately, though, it has no index. Worse still, there are no page numbers, which makes referencing difficult. The first third of the book is largely taken up with somewhat peripheral matters, such as UFO 'contactees' (e.g. the late George Adamski) and sightings of mysterious airships in the late nineteenth century. These topics may be of some relevance, but perhaps they could have been discussed more succinctly.

So far as abduction reports are concerned, the author concentrates mainly on relatively well-known American cases, such as that of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire in September 1961. Surprisingly, given that Watson is a UK-based author, there's no mention of classic British cases, such as the apparent abduction of Garry Wood and Colin Wright on the A70 road in Scotland in 1992. And although Watson appears to be well-read about the alien abduction phenomenon, it's not clear whether he's had much personal contact with people who claim to have been abducted.

Without being dogmatic, Watson appears to lean towards a 'psycho-social' interpretation of the abduction phenomenon rather than one involving extraterrestrial beings or paranormal factors. In Chapter 9, he displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of the science fiction that's appeared in print, in films, and on television over the years, and which may, with some people, have helped engender believed-in fantasies with an alien abduction theme. In Chapter 10, he considers other factors that may be conducive to such experiences - dissociative tendencies, fantasy-proneness, sleep paralysis, etc.

However, the evidence, or its interpretation, may be open to debate. For instance, Watson refers to Joe Nickell, an investigator and writer in the USA, who is well-known for his sceptical stance on UFO and paranormal matters. Watson notes that Nickell found that 11 out of 13 abductees studied by the late John E. Mack (a Harvard psychiatrist) met seven out of seven criteria for 'fantasy-proneness'. But Watson doesn't mention the fact that Mack (along with Will Bueché) responded to Nickell's critique, claiming that it dismissed extraordinary experiences a priori. Mack and Bueché noted that, "Having codified experiences that transcend our material reality [...] as examples of fantasy, it is thereafter a simple matter of defining anyone who has such experiences as 'fantasy prone'" (quoted from p. 385 of 'The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters', edited by R. D. Story; London: Robinson, 2002).

Watson's book would have benefited greatly from competent proof-reading, since it's littered with grammatical and punctuation errors, as in the following sentence, which appears on the twenty-first page of Chapter 10: "Powers, indicates that abductees have a greater ability to temporary go outside the normal stream of consciousness." This sentence also exemplifies another problem with the book: the author sometimes refers to people (in this case, someone called Powers) without telling the reader who they are. Furthermore, in places, Watson uses personal pronouns without making it clear which named persons he's referring to. Of course, such errors make the book a harder read than it should be.