Since the death of her mother in 1984, [Sheila] had regularly found herself angry, sad and irritable. She was also experiencing terrifying nightmares. A friend ... suggested she contact John Mack. A Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, Mack had recently begun working with individuals who believed they might have been taken and experimented on by extraterrestrials. Mack used hypnotic regression – a technique designed to recover lost memories – to help Sheila find out more about her past. The method seemed to work, and it confirmed what had been suspected: she was having alien encounters. By the early 1990s, numerous individuals had been coming forward in alarming numbers to say they feared they had been taken against their will by aliens. One survey published in 1992 found that perhaps as many as one out of every 50 adults in the United States had had such encounters. And then, at the start of the 21st century, interest in the phenomenon suddenly all but disappeared. [In] the 1990s, alien abduction found a place alongside satanic ritual abuse, recovered memories and multiple personalities as something deemed scientifically spurious. Witnesses were not suspected of lying. Rather, the recollections of abductees, it was argued, were false memories encouraged by abduction consultants through leading questions in order to imaginatively relive ‘experiences’.