Alien Abduction and the search for the soul

I just got about halfway through a book by Dr. John Mack and felt compelled to bring myself here to post another blog, John Mack spent many years working with clientele who had felt they were abducted by some form of superior beings from some other place in the universe or some other dimension all together. Most of these "abductions" were traumatic at first, but once the trauma was dealt with, most of these people, if not all of them, felt a shift in their consciousness and their position and place in the universe, they felt more connected to everything around and felt that there was a hidden message contained within those traumatic abductions. Why are these people having these experiences and are these experiences not unlike religious and spiritual revelations that many of us seek most of our lives?  Are we not born alone in this chaotic world with no one that we can truly connect with, most of the time not even ourselves, we seek connections everywhere, usually finding nothing there. Isn't it inevitable that we need to join with something, to mesh or merge with something other than ourselves. One question I have is are these experiences real or psychologically imagined and needed?