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 John E. Mack, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital. Dr. Mack is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and is Board certified in child and adult psychoanalysis with over 40 years of clinical psychiatric education and experience. |
Fascinating, suggestive,
and even inspiring.
–The New York Times
Book Review
Only once in
a great while does a scientist encounter evidence that challenges
our fundamental understanding of the cosmos and humankind's place
in it. Dr. Mack's extraordinary research with alien abductions
represents just such a phenomenon, and he has engaged that challenge
with singular courage and integrity. Abduction is a landmark
work.
–Richard Tarnas,
Ph.D., author of The Passion of the Western Mind
Controversy.
Clarity. Courage. These three qualities permeate every page of
Abduction by Dr. Mack. The current psychological and
spiritual paradigms that define the nature of being Human and
probe the potential of our capacity are under challenge and change.
This work is mind-provoking, awakening and a compass point in
the search for new directions to understand ourselves and our
place in the environment and the Cosmos.
–Gurucharan S.
Khalsa, Ph.D.
In the history
of science, radical progress has always required individuals of
extraordinary foresight and integrity who had the courage to ignore
the intellectual taboos of their times and to explore phenomena
that challenged current belief systems. John Mack's research into
the phenomenon of UFO abduction is a ground-breaking work that
belongs in this category. His book Abduction: Human Encounters
with Aliens is a major contribution to modern psychology and
psychiatry; however, its importance reaches far beyond that. His
study has profound implications for the philosophy of Western
science and the power to radically change the worldview of our
generation.
–Stanislav Grof,
M.D.
John Mack has
written a gripping and fascinating book. As with Frazier's The
Golden Bough and as with William James' Varieties of Religious
Experience, and perhaps as with the Brothers Grimm, Abduction
is a book that repeatedly leads the reader to psychologically
important sources of wonder about worlds beyond our ken.
–George E. Vaillant,
M.D.
A transcendent, landmark work...An
extraordinarily rich and strange mind-expanding book.
–Boston Herald
Click
here to read full review from The Boston Herald
Provocative...This book is a
challenge to any reader. It raises questions about how we live on this planet
and with each other that the Western mind and culture will not be able to ignore
for too much longer. It also raises questions about the nature of reality; of
time, space, energy and the true nature of humanness. It opens the door to a
very serious redefinition of life as we know it.
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
Baltimore City Paper 05.04.94:
I Was Raped by an Alien!
Or Did the Doctor Make Them Do It?
By Mark Gauvreau Judge
In the winter of 1993 I traveled to Cambridge to interview John Mack, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and the author of several books, including A Prince of Our Disorder — which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 — a biography of Lawrence of Arabia author T. E. Lawrence. Our discussion, however, would fall well outside the bounds of literature. Mack had become deeply involved in studying the alleged abductions of human beings by aliens, a phenomenon he defends as very real and widespread. Although as a lifelong UFO buff I suspected there was more to abductions than science fiction, I still was stunned by Mack and his research, which is collected in Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens.
I met Dr. Mack at his home in a picturesque Cambridge suburb. He is nearly as eloquent in person as in print, and in fact, what he said to me was virtually identical to his arguments and analysis in the book, which he inadvertently summarized with the astonishing remark "The only explanation for what is happening to these people is exactly what they say is happening." So with the cooperation of Mack and his assistant, I went straight to the source and interviewed four of his patients. More shocking than Mack's claim was the believability of his patients, 13 of whose stories make up the bulk of Abduction. That's not to say that the stories of E.T.'s floating people out of their beds and through walls were credible, simply that the manner in which they were told was convincing, and chilling. One woman, a student I call Catherine (who uses the same pseudonym in the book), told me that while under hypnosis administered by Mack, she recounted being snatched on countless occasions by short, gray beings with large oval eyes who took her aboard a spaceship, where they performed quasimedical procedures on her, including the removal of a fetus. (She claims that one abduction coincided with a UFO sighting in the area where it happened.) She also described her hysteria when these memories began to surface and the nights she spent without sleep and with every light on in the house. "If I was going to come up with a story," she told me, "why would I do that to myself? Why wouldn't I come up with something happy?" Another abductee questioned her own sanity before I had the chance to: "This is the kind of thing they lock you up for," she said, chuckling.
Such diffidence is one of the things that convinced Mark of the reality of the stories of the "experiencers" — his patients prefer that term to "abductees" — when he was introduced to the phenomenon in 1990 on January 10 of that year ?? one of those dates you remember that mark a time when everything in your life changes," Mack writes — he met Budd Hopkins, a UFO?and?abduction researcher and the author of two books on the subject. "Nothing in my then nearly forty years of familiarity with the field of psychiatry prepared me for what Hopkins had to say," Mack writes of the fateful encounter. What Hopkins had to say was that folks from all walks of life and all parts of the country had been contacting him with virtually identical accounts of abductions by strange creatures. Mack then met with a group of abductees, and his doubt withered: "None of them seemed psychiatrically disturbed except in a secondary sense, that is they were trouble as a consequence of something that had apparently happened to them. There was nothing to suggest that their stories were delusional, a misinterpretation of dreams, or the product of fantasy." Shortly after this encounter, Mack began seeing abductees at his house.
While varying in detail, most of the accounts collected in Abduction have a similar plot. The subjects, usually at night and usually while in bed, awaken to find themselves surrounded by small alien creatures who render them powerless. Victims then are "floated" through walls or out windows and up into an awaiting ship. Once aboard, their bodies are subjected to invasive procedures, including taking sperm samples from men and performing vaginal probes or fetus removal on women. Afterward the victim is shown tanks full of "hybrid" human/alien fetuses and shown apocalyptic visions of the end of the earth, brought about by human self-destructiveness. They them are returned to the place of the abduction, awakening the next morning with no recollection of the episode. Recurring anxiety drives abductees to seek help, and in therapy — usually while under hypnosis — they remember several abductions, many dating back to childhood.
After four years and performing almost 50 hypnotic regressions on abductees, Mack has come up with a thick file of hair?raising tales, as well as a unique perspective on the abductions. In Abduction he challenges the prosaic explanations fraud, delusion??of "the Western, Newtonian/Cartesian, or materialist/dualist scientific paradigm," which is "grounded in the material world or in what can be perceived by the physical senses." He claims that such thinking has led to "most of the destructive patterns that threaten the human future," including the potential nuclear holocaust aliens apparently are warning us about. While Mack himself often uses such thinking to bolster his case — for example, citing as evidence marks on abductees' bodies allegedly left by aliens — he believes abductions hold spiritual, metaphorical, and mythic levels of meaning. He refers to abductees as "pioneers on a hero's journey," and describes how many undergo profound personal transformations, becoming more ecologically conscious and convinced they are part of an evolutionary mission to save the planet and the human race.
Mack, a lucid and powerful writer, is at his best when turning over various interpretations, as in the passage in which he compares abductees' descriptions of being whisked away into the luminescent world of the spaceship to a shamanic or mystical journey:
The mystic or the shaman, like the abductee, makes a pilgrimage, usually with ardor, to receive a new dimension of experience or knowledge. This involves a rebirth which is sometimes very distressing, a retracing of ones steps to a preternatural, primordial arena to recondition the consciousness of the experiencer. The resulting psychic chaos is a metaphor for the precosmogentic chaos, amorphic yet penetrating, that the individual has been exposed to. The abductee is a modern Dante, whose ontological underpinnings are unraveled. Returned to his bed or his car after his time with aliens, he struggles to reassemble his world view.
Of course, not everyone sees abductions in such Joseph Campbellian terms. Some sympathetic researchers view abductions as the possible hobgoblins of "fantasyprone personalities." Ken Ring, author of The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large, told me after I interviewed Mack that people who have experienced trauma, usually in the form of child abuse, have a tendency to "dissociate" and create an "alternate reality" that helps them escape overwhelming terror and stress. Others condemn hypnosis, the tool for wrenching alleged "missing" memories from both childabuse victims and UFO abductees, as an unreliable source of information.
Then there are the genuine skeptics. Philip Mass, author of UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, has called the process of hypnosis a "master-slave relationship," in which the practitioner leads the patient while the latter tries to give the former what he or she wants. British UFOlogist Hilary Evans compellingly has argued that everything in UFO reports since 1947 — when the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting, which kicked off the modern saucer era, took place — had been anticipated by early-20th-Century science-fiction.
Another hypothesis blames abductions on "waking dreams," which are forms of hypnagogic (while falling asleep) or hypnopompic (while waking up) hallucinations during which the person feels paralyzed and thinks he or she is seeing ghosts or aliens. And a recent piece on Mack in The New York Times Magazine noted that Mack's patients seem to be the only abductees who view the experience as positive, indicating that his spiritual, social, and pro-UFO biases rub off on them.
Mack's attempts to refute such arguments are often convincing. He insists that any trauma his patients suffer from is secondary — the result of the abduction rather than the cause of it — and that abduction accounts are too detailed and identical to be mere hallucinations. (None of his patients whom I spoke to seemed to have "fantasy-prone personalities" either.) He argues that "not a single abduction case in my experience or that of any other investigator has turned out to have a masked history of sexual abuse," though such abuse may be "one of the forms of human woundedness, at least from the experiencers' standpoint, [that] has led the aliens to intervene in a protective or healing manner."
However, Mack runs into trouble defending hypnosis, when his honesty compels him to face his own influential role in the process. Abductees "are quite difficult to lead" during hypnosis, he writes; nonetheless, he "cannot avoid the fact that a co-creative intuitive process such as this may yield information that is in some sense the product of the intermingling or flowing together of the consciousness of the two (or more) people in the room." Elsewhere, he acknowledges that his own favoritism toward "the transformational and spiritual, aspects of the abduction phenomenon' may lead the like-minded to his door. "Possibly, abductees sense that I am open to experiences or information that might be considered too 'far out' for most investigators, and my own personal evolution may, in fact, have made me more open to the information they are seeking to convey."
Such honesty — and Mack's considerable gifts as a writer — sets Abduction apart from most UFO books, with their conspiratorial hyperbole. It also makes for fascinating reading even if Abduction is a bit long on case studies and short on the wider spectrum of UFO theories. Mack concludes that "abductions seem to be concerned primarily with two related projects: changing human consciousness to prevent the destruction of the earth's life and a joining of two species for the creation of a new evolutionary form." Yet he might be closer to the truth when he places abduction in the context of mystical and paranormal episodes throughout history. "Across many epochs, humans have reported making contact with a multitude of gods, spirits, angels, fairies, demons, ghouls, vampires, and sea monsters. All have been said to instruct, direct, harass, or befriend humans with varying dispositions, motives, and purposes."
Indeed, humankind's rich history of mysticism, myth, and folklore, which Mack passes over much too quickly, is as good a place as the night sky to search for meaning in the abduction experience. Without such a validating alternative, the abductees — none of whom, I was sure when I left Cambridge, were lying — have no recourse but the UFO community. As UFO skeptic Bill Ellis noted (in The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, no less), this restricted access tends to cement the alien abduction theory in victims' minds. This is the price, in Ellis' words, for "maintaining our own fiction that 'intelligent' people do not experience apparently paranormal events."
Click image on left to read the original press release announcing the publication of Abduction. |
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