Matt is missing. Bonnie's brother left his classroom to use thebathroom —and disappeared. A police dog traces his scent to the curb, where he apparently got into a vehicle. But why would Matt go anywhere with a stranger? Overwhelmed with fear, Bonnie discovers that her dog is gone, too. Was Pookie used as a lure for Matt? Bonnie makes one big mistake in her attempt to find her brother. In a chilling climax on a Washington State ferry, Bonnie and Matt must outsmart their abductor or pay with their lives.

From the #1 bestselling “master of the medical thriller” (The New York Times) comes a harrowing novel about deep-sea exploration that leads to a terrifying discovery. . . . “Leave it to doctor-turned-novelist Robin Cook to scare us all to death.”—Los Angeles Times In his renowned novels, Cook skillfully combines human drama and high-tech thrills with the latest breakthroughs and controversies of modern medicine. Now, in Abduction, a mysterious transmission from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean leads a crew of oceanographers and divers to a phenomenon beyond scientific understanding—and a discovery that will change everything we know about life on Earth. . . .

A Harvard psychiatrist, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder, presents accounts of alien abduction taken from the more than sixty cases he has investigated and examines the implications for our identity as a species. These mesmerizing and thought-provoking stories of alien encounters from a Harvard professor take you through actual case studies of people from all walks of life and ages who have had challenging, sometimes disturbing, and in every case, life changing experiences of alien abduction. “John Mack explores evidence of nonhuman intelligence like an attorney preparing for the ‘trial of the century’—interviewing witnesses, examining physical evidence, consulting with experts in related fields, constantly questioning his own assumptions…As a story of one man’s determination to bear witness to cosmic mysteries with extraordinary implications for the human future, Abduction is bound to become a modern classic” (Keith Thompson, author of Angels and Aliens)

When Luke and Mandy start experiencing strange hallucinations and blackouts, they know something is seriously, out-of-this-world wrong Luke Ingram is on his way home one evening when the sky goes black and seems to swallow him whole—but four hours later he wakes up in his own room with no idea how he got there. And Luke isn’t the only one experiencing these strange occurrences. The last thing Mandy Durgin remembers before waking up on her front porch is falling asleep in her bed hours before. When their creepy classmate Quentin starts following them around and harassing them, Luke and Mandy realize Quentin may know more about their lost time than he’s letting on. They know something isn’t right, but what could possibly have caused them to black out at the same time? And why are they having the same terrifying hallucinations about cold operating tables and large, bug-like eyes? Mandy knows there has to be a rational explanation, but Luke isn’t so sure. Those faces in his visions were so . . . alien. Still, the thought of alien abductions is absurd. But when Luke and Mandy black out again the next night, Luke is ready to consider the possibility that their troubles might have an extraterrestrial cause.

A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning. With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do. Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.

According to the US Department of Justice, more than 250,000 children are abducted each year. This book explains the types of kidnappings, details government and law enforcement efforts to prevent and solve them, and explores the many practices and programs, such as the AMBER Alert, to help protect children.

A look at the history of child kidnappings and abductions in the United States, the motives of the perpetrators, the activities of the media, and the results in the law and in public opinions.