According to Dr. John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist and author of the landmark book Abduction, one of the most common reactions a person has to becoming aware of their abduction experiences is something he labeled "ontological shock." The sudden jolt to the system of learning there is another reality never before dreamed of by the abductee causes a dramatic shift in consciousness, and an entirely new realm of experience must be assimilated.

That assimilation process is often slow and tortuous. And among the many subjects the abductee is forced to think differently about, religion stands out as one of the major problem areas. An abductee must often ask, "How did God let this happen to me?" or any of a number of theological and philosophical questions that bombard the mind as the person begins to try to navigate between the abduction experience and "normal" reality.

In an effort to learn how some abductees have had their religious beliefs changed by years of immersion in the "other" reality, we undertook to do a survey among some of the more high-profile experiencers. The answers the respondents gave to our question are varied and complex and run the gamut from reluctant agnosticism to heartfelt belief in the righteousness of the abducting aliens.

We'll begin with Whitley Strieber, perhaps the best known abductee of all. Strieber's first book, Communion, went to number one on The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks in 1987, and his three sequels, Transformation, Breakthrough, and The Secret School, were recently followed by a fourth this past spring, a book called Confirmation.

The abduction experience has almost nothing to do with his religious beliefs, Strieber said.

"There's never been much of a connection," he said. "No matter what my religious beliefs at any given time may or may not have been, the Close Encounter experience simply doesn't affect them. I have been many different things in my life. As a child, I was a Catholic. When I grew up, I joined the Gurjeef (spelling?) Foundation and became very interested in 'waking up' and not so interested in my Catholic background. I went through a period of being very interested in paganism. I returned to Catholicism again, and now I am sort of less interested in it. There are elements of Catholicism, such as belief in the Resurrection, that I'm having a lot of trouble with. But none of this has anything to do with my Close Encounter experiences."

Strieber said the religious changes he has gone through are "typical of anyone who has a religious life at all and is concerned with the welfare of their soul."

But still he has reservations.

"I don't even know if I have a soul," he said. "I've never been sure about that. I think so, and I think so because I have a lot of evidence that suggests that something exists that is more than just the physical body. But whether or not it persists after the death of the body, I haven't the faintest idea."

While he professes not to know, Strieber also resists the word "agnostic."

"The word 'agnostic' is such a cop-out," he said. "I hate it. I'm actively searching, let's put it that way. As I say, the Close Encounter experience doesn't seem to be too related to religion. The Visitors never seemed to indicate any religious beliefs. They don't fit into any religious cosmology."

Strieber said that when people attempt to match the experience to religious tradition, they do so for lack of a better way to describe the aliens.

"To me," he said, "they're not demons or angels. I think that the main problem that we have right now is that we can't describe them. And because we can't describe them, we keep trying to fit them into old descriptions that don't necessarily fit."

Linda Cortile (which has become by now a well-known pseudonym) is the abductee who is the focal point of the story Budd Hopkins tells in his book Witnessed. "I've always had faith," she said. "I was never an ultra-religious person, but I am a Roman Catholic. And I've always loved my religion."

Cortile said that God's real role in her abduction experiences was to help her endure them.

"I couldn't believe I pulled through it," she said, "and am presently mentally stable. I really didn't know where that strength came from. It had to come from God. And so my faith is stronger as far as religion is concerned."

Neither was it God's will that she was chosen to be an abductee.

"I don't believe God did this to me," she said. "It's just something that happened. And what had happened to me as far as the aliens are concerned is as natural as life, death, love. And God gave me the strength to go through it.

"However, I don't believe religion has anything to do with the aliens," she continued. "The only religious aspect of it that I can see is that God created them, too. But I don't believe He tells them to go around abducting people."

For Katharina Wilson, author of The Alien Jigsaw, church attendance began in childhood but lost its luster after she became aware she was an abductee.

"I went to church every Sunday until I was eighteen years old," Wilson said. "I don't remember ever leaving church feeling good about myself or life in general. I always felt worse rather than better. I was made to feel guilty rather than hopeful or uplifted. I never understood that, but I knew I didn't like it."

Wilson was 21 years-old when the pivotal experience of seeing an unearthly yellow light appear in her bedroom made her doubt her sanity. She had begun attending a fundamentalist church at around the same time.

"After some bizarre conversations about whether this light was from God or Satan," she said, "and after learning about some of the people I was involved with, I realized these people were dangerous. As I look back on that time, with their attempts at trying to get me to quit college in my senior year and to disown my family and friends, I realize it was more of a cult than anything."

Wilson said that ultimately there is not much difference between the aliens and organized religion.

"Both seem to use a level of manipulation," she said, "to obtain their desired results. Churches instill fear and guilt to obtain your money. Aliens instill fear and guilt to obtain your Will."

Like Cortile, Wilson credits God with helping her endure the trauma of abduction.

"I think living under such extreme pressures," she said, "has forced me to look to my inner strengths for survival. When my inner strength is exhausted, I am forced to reach out to that which created me: God. I am slowly gaining strength from God. I believe God is real and that God cares."

Wilson also feels there are ways to resist an abduction experience when it is happening and to fight off the abductors by using such techniques as "mental struggle," "righteous anger," and "protective rage." In other words, to visualize images and learn attitudes that drive the aliens away.

"It is important to me to add that I do not believe these techniques will work," she said, "if there is even one molecule in your body that still wants to participate-even if it's for the learning experience or for curiosity's sake. Unless every fiber in your body 'believes' you really want them out of your life, they will know it and they will come back."

Wilson also feels God offers help with the resistance process. "Today," she said, "when I feel I may be curious about them, I concentrate on God, or the Creative Force, and I say, 'If I need answers-or if I need the truth about this phenomenon-it will come from God, not aliens.' It's a way to remind myself and the aliens that I am aware of the enormous manipulative abilities they have."

Still there is an upside to Wilson's experiences which involves the notion of "Spirituality."

"Perhaps it is that which organized religion is so severely lacking," she said. "The teaching of Spirituality, which has helped me more than anything. In some cases, my involvement with certain aliens has taken me into the Spiritual Realm and what I believe to be other dimensions. Unlike most people on our planet, I know these realms exist. Spirituality is what is important, not religion."

From Wilson's experiences in the Spiritual Realm, we move on to Raymond Fowler, the veteran UFO researcher and author of numerous books on the subject of alien abduction (most notably, the four-part series on abductee Betty Andreasson Luca that began with The Andreasson Affair and was followed by the sequels The Andreasson Affair Phase Two, The Watchers, and The Watchers II. A fifth book in the series called The Andreasson Legacy was released last year). While researching The Watchers, Fowler learned of his own personal abduction history, and he has struggled to fit it into his religious understanding of reality ever since.

"On the objective side of my faith," Fowler said, "there has been an ever-growing tension between my theological beliefs and my theoretical hypotheses about the origin and meaning behind the UFO phenomenon and my own apparent abductions. My former Pastor, whose wife had a Close Encounter Experience of the First Kind, once asked me how I integrated my UFO research and experiences with my Christian faith. I replied that at the present time I had no choice but to 'compartmentalize' them.

"In short," he continued, "I find myself living a double life as a UFO researcher/experiencer on the one hand and a devoted Christian on the other while trying to erect a harmonious bridge between the two. Thus I find myself living with a continual tension between two worlds, both of which are very real to me."

Fowler told the story of how he had experienced an emotion he called "Unconditional Love" in both a Christian context and an alien one, and that they seemed to be related-at least coincidentally. The story began when Fowler was still in adolescence.

"It was on the evening of May 19, 1950," he began. "Several weeks earlier, I had befriended a boy from a broken home who was going to be placed in a state institution for the homeless. I had persuaded my parents to let him live with us. He shared my room. He and his friends were Christians and over those weeks had shared their faith with me.

"On the night in question," he continued, "unknown to my roommate at the time, while lying in bed I privately received Christ into my life. When doing so, I experienced an inner feeling of pure, unconditional love as an outside Presence entered and filled my being. As this was happening to me, my roommate exclaimed that there was a bright light hovering over the house. But I paid little attention to what he said because of what was happening to me experientially. It was only years later when he visited me and again told me about the bright light that we both wondered if it was UFO-related. A check of astronomical records reveal no such bright object in the sky on that date and time."

That sensation of unconditional love has happened to Fowler on more than one occasion.

"I have felt this identical feeling of unconditional love," he said, "envelop me on a number of occasions, including during what seem to have been UFO abductions. For example, I felt it as a child when awakened by a lady enveloped in light who floated me through my bedroom window up a beam of light to some lights in the sky. So from the very beginning and throughout my Christian walk of life, there seems to be at least a subjective, mystical-like, coincidental connection between my UFO and Christian-related experiences."

So have Fowler's UFO research and experiences affected his religious beliefs?

"Sure they have," he said, "and hopefully, in the long run, for the good-although I am prepared to accept the bad as well. On the one hand, I continue to attend church, sing in the choir, teach adult Sunday School and attempt with God's help to live a good Christian life. On the other hand, I continue to live in tension as I attempt to construct a bridge between two sometimes seemingly opposing but true experiences-the double life of a Christian believer and UFO experiencer."

Meanwhile, Betty Andreasson Luca, who began working with Fowler to uncover her abduction experiences more than twenty years ago, seems not to suffer from the same lingering doubt or to view her contact with aliens as in some way diametrically opposed to her Christian beliefs.

"My UFO encounters with extraterrestrials," Luca said, "which I still believe to be Angels or Messengers, have helped me to mature as a child of God. My Christian faith is of the utmost importance to me, and I believe it has occasionally given me access to a realm rarely seen by physical eyes. And yet this God-given rite of passage can exist for everyone, for the Creator is not a respecter of persons. His love for everyone is unconditional and encompasses all.

"I've chosen The Old and New Testament," she continued, "as my road map, and embraced with all my heart the humble human being who gave His all for me. He loved us more than life. When He died on a cross and rose to His Celestial Abode, His child began go grow inside each believer from the seeds of His Word. His child in us increases as we decrease. After complete surrender to Christ, the beginning of wisdom grew.

"It was not long before extraterrestrial visitation began," she went on. "While immersed in a benign celestial world filled with mystery, the angelic host began to reveal themselves little by little."

Such a cheerful outlook stands in marked contrast to the trauma and terror reported by most abductees. But Luca had an answer for those critical voices as well.

"I cannot express enough," she said, "the real need to be grounded in faith when exposed to the spiritual world of UFOs. For once there, you will experience what eyes have not seen and ears have not heard. For the unprepared, it can be a world of sheer terror, for when Man neglects to know himself and his Maker, it leaves him open to fear."

Luca acknowledged that her view is not shared by some.

"Unfortunately," she said, "many who worship today account the Angels or extraterrestrials to be evil spirits. But God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. As in the days of yesteryear, when He spoke to Moses, Jacob, Joseph and David, to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, He'll speak to us today through His Son, the Spirit, and The Watchers [a term Fowler and Luca sometimes use for the aliens that is taken from Old Testament scriptures], and tomorrow He will be the same God for generations to come."

For Luca, alien abduction is not something God helps her endure, it is the experience of union with God Himself.

"My faith is as strong as the Rock I stand on," she said. "And because I've experienced a deep walk and been privy to personal extraterrestrial encounters, I am blessed."

There are probably as many stories of the effect on the personal religious beliefs of abductees as there are individuals who undergo the experience-an experience that uproots a person from their familiar sense of reality and shocks them into a state of consciousness where God turns up in many different ways, but nearly always makes the abductee grateful that He showed up at all.