This book is a threat, alright

"The Threat" by David M. Jacobs is quite literally the most insane book I've ever read. Jacobs, who is a university professor (!), claims that Earth will soon be attacked by evil space aliens. The aliens want to turn humanity into slaves and there is *nothing* we can do to prevent it. Even worse, the aliens are already here. They abduct people, mostly women, on a regular basis, gang rape them, and force them to breed alien-human hybrids!

I'm not joking. Jacobs actually says all this. This is the United States, AD 1998. And remember: he's a university professor. In Philadelphia.

In one of his more candid moments, Jacobs writes that his fellow faculty members consider him to have seriously impaired thinking abilities. That, I think, is a very charitable comment.

How does David Jacobs know that aliens from another planet are kidnapping humans, mostly women? Well, dozens upon dozens of abductees have told him so, under hypnosis! You heard me. Jacobs' description of the process of hypnotic regression is highly revealing. Apparently, Jacobs believes that the aliens attempt to hide their tracks by implanting "screen memories" in their victims. Thus, if the persons under hypnosis don't tell scare-stories about alien abduction and torture, Jacobs assumes that they are lying, and induces them to drop their "screen memories", until the subjects finally tell him what he wants to hear: that they are indeed being abducted by space aliens. In other words, Jacobs *himself* brain-washes his subjects into believing that they've been attacked by aliens!

Is Jacobs, then, a brazen liar? No, I don't think so. "The Threat" seems to be written by an honest person, a person who actually believes that Earth is under attack by evil aliens. But is honesty really an excuse? The people hypnotized by Jacobs are obviously delusional, and inducing them to believe that they have been abducted and raped by space aliens isn't going to make them any better. It's amazing that the author can't see that his own methods of "investigation" are responsible for many of the "memories" of his clients. It's also amazing that Jacobs can't see the obviously sexual factor at work. Thus, several of his clients had benign imaginary friends as children, and only in puberty did these imaginary friends start to abuse them and rape them. You don't need to be a psychiatrist to realize that we are dealing with some kind of sex-related neurosis. Indeed, I wonder whether some of the clients might not actually be so-called survivors, i.e. victims of very human child abuse?

Amazon's customer review policy stops me from saying what I really think about this book.

I hope the "abductees" in the book will one day get professional treatment, and be well. That's all I can say.

:-(