BBC News
Alien thinking
By Angela Hind
Pier Productions
Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien
abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who
was killed in a road accident in north London last year,
did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job,
hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere
him.
Professor John E Mack was an eminent Harvard psychiatrist,
psychoanalyst and Pulitzer Prize winner whose clinical work
had focused on explorations of dreams, nightmares and
adolescent suicide.
Then, in 1990, he turned the academic community upside down
because he wanted to publish his research in which he said
that people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens,
were not crazy at all. Their experiences, he said, were genuine.
They were not mentally ill or delusional, he said, and it
was the responsibility of academicians and psychiatrists not
only to take what they said seriously, but to try to
understand exactly what that experience was. And if reality
as we know it was unable to take these experiences into
serious consideration then what was needed was a change in
our perception of reality.
"What are the other possibilities?" said Mack. "Dreams, for
instance, do not behave like that. They are highly
individual depending on what's going on in your
sub-conscious at the time.
"I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people.
[But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon
here that I can't account for in any other way, that's
mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is but it seems to me
that it invites a deeper, further inquiry."
Lifeline
For many people who claimed they had been abducted, John
Mack was a lifeline. He worked with more than 200 of them,
including professionals, psychologists, writers, students
and business people.
Many had never told anyone else of their experiences apart
from Mack for fear of ridicule from colleagues, friends and
family. Here at last was a highly respected psychiatrist who
was not only prepared to listen -- but also take what they
were saying seriously.
An abductee -- or "experiencer" as they prefer to be known
-- says that alien encounters begin most commonly in their
homes and at night. It can however happen anytime, anywhere.
They say they are unable to move; they become extremely hot
and then appear to float through solid objects, which their
logical mind tells them can't be happening.
Usually the experiencer says they are accompanied by one or
two or more humanoid beings who guide them to a ****p. They
are then subjected to procedures in which instruments are
used to penetrate virtually every part of their bodies,
including the nose, sinuses, eyes, arms -- abdomen and
genitalia. Sperm samples are taken and women have fertilised
eggs implanted or removed.
Hybrid offspring
"Have I questioned my own sanity"? says Peter Faust an
experiencer and close friend of John Mack's. "Absolutely,
every day to a certain degree because the majority of the
world says you're crazy for having these experiences. But if
it was just me who had contact with aliens, who had intimate
experience with female aliens and producing hybrid
offspring, I would say I'm certifiable, put me away, I'm crazy.
"And that's how I felt when I initially had these
experiences. My wife thought I'd lost it. But then I began
to look at the experience outside myself and realised that
hundreds if not thousands of people re****ted that exact same
experience. And that gave me sanity. That gave me hope. I
knew I couldn't be fantasising this."
The whole experience is often accompanied by a change in the
experiencer's understanding of humanity's place in the
universe. And it was this that forced Mack to question who
we are in the deepest and broadest sense.
"I have come to realise this abduction phenomenon forces us,
if we permit ourselves to take it seriously, to re-examine
our perception of human identity -- to look at who we are
from a cosmic perspective," he said.
Extraordinary work
In 1990 John Mack's book Abduction: Human Encounters with
Aliens was published. It shot to the top of the best sellers
list and John Mack appeared on radio and television
programmes. Harvard decided enough was enough.
Mack was sent a letter informing him that there was to be an
inquiry into his research on alien abductions. It was the
first time in Harvard's history that a tenured professor was
subjected to such an investigation. John Mack decided to
fight back and hired a lawyer, Eric MacLeish.
"It was appalling that John had to go through this," says
MacLeish now. "And we made it clear that if we were to have
a full blown trial here, then we were going to have a very
public trial and call on everyone who worked with John --
all of whom had nothing but praise for his extraordinary
work and dedication to his patients -- and I don't think
that's what Harvard had in mind at all."
There followed 14 months of stressful and bitter
negotiations. "They tried to criticise me, silence me -- by
saying that by sup****ting the truth of what these people
were experiencing, possibly I was confirming them in a
distortion, or a delusion. So instead of being a good
psychiatrist and curing them, I was by taking them
seriously, confirming them in a delusion and harming them,"
said Mack.
The inquiry made front page headlines all over the world and
eventually Harvard dropped the case and a statement was
issued reaffirming Mack's academic freedom to study what he
wished and concluding that he "remains a member in good
standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine".
He continued to work and write. But Mack was killed in a car
collision last year in north London after leaving a Tube
station. He was visiting the city to deliver a lecture on
the subject which had won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, T
E Lawrence.
But Mack's work lives on with an institute which now bears
his name; the hundreds of people who count themselves in
"the experiencer community" still hold him in particular
affection.
His search for an expanded notion of reality, which allows
for experiences that might not fit traditional perceptions
and worldviews, is one they, at least, will be hoping continues.
Abduction, Alienation and Reason, a programme about John
Mack, is broadcast on Wednesday night on BBC Radio 4 at 2100BST.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/4071124.stm
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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