SUBJECT: JOHN MACK ON ABDUCTION FILE: UFO2726
The Harvard University Gazette is a publication largely internal to
Harvard. It prints information about seminars, research and whatnot,
along with spotlights on interesting professors and areas of study.
In the most recent issue (July 24, 1992) a full page is devoted to
John Mack, an MD affiliated with Harvard who believes that aliens
routinely abduct midwestern housewives and perform strange experiments
on them.
The article is extremely generous to Mack; in fact, it could scarcely
be more so.
I would like to write a full response to the Gazette, and was
wondering if anybody reading this post could point me to relevant
sources of information about the 'abductions' and 'visitors' and so on.
The article follows, in its entirety.
---
Accounting for Stories of Alien Abduction Psychiatrist John Mack shares
his convictons [sic] that these reports are 'authentic and disturbing
mysteries'
By Deane W. Lord
Gazette Staff
From Ancient Greece to the present, humankind has asked, Is there
life beyond planet Earth? And, if so, what form does it take?
Last month some 100 researchers and mental health professionals
gathered in Cambridge to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial
life and to examine and compare the experiences of abductees--men and
women who claim to have been kidnapped by alien beings, taken aboard
spacecraft, and eventually released.
The four-day closed meeting drew some of the most ardent and long-
term researchers who presented short papers on their work. Chief among
them was conference co-organizer Medical School Psychiatry Professor
John Mack, who became involved with the UFO question two and a half
years ago. Though he began as a total skeptic, he admitted, he now
believes that the experiences of abductees "are an extremely important
phenomenon"-and that "we can't begin to understand them without a shift
in our world view."
He believes that mental dualism in the West--"we're here, you're
there"--will prevent many from being open minded about the possibility
of alien abductions. These experiences are shattering our world view
[by suggesting] that we may be connected with other beings beyond
ourselves.... The proposition attacks the arrogance of our ideas and
makes a mockery of our technology.
Estimates vary as to how many individuals have had abduction
experiences. According to a Roper Organization poll, one out of every
50 American adults-- some 3.7 million people indicate that they have
had an encounter with an unidentified flying object or an alien being.
"It is possible that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of
people in this country alone have undergone abduction experiences,"
said Mack.
Because of the stigma attached to revealing such experiences, he
believes many people remain underground, too ashamed or alarmed to
admit the experience.
"The more prominent the person, the more likely he or she will be
reluctant to come forward as they have more to lose," he said. "Often,
once they seek help, abductees prefer to be diagnosed as crazy."
A well-known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Mack reports that of the
60 cases he has worked on he has found, -to his surprise, that after a
battery of psychological tests, "no psychiatric or psychosocial
explanation for these reports is evident. These people are not mentally
ill." He has spent countless therapeutic hours with these individuals
only to find that what struck him was the "ordinariness" of the
population, including a restaurant owner, several secretaries, a prison
guard, college students, a university administrator, and several
homemakers.
"The majority of abductees do not appear to be deluded,
confabulating, lying, self-dramatizing, or suffering from a clear
mental illness," he maintained. He has encountered only one person who
showed psychotic features.
The central finding of most researchers, including Mack, is that
there is one archetypal abduction experience and that most abduction
memories contain very limited variations on a standard scenario. A
typical encounter would begin with uneasy feelings of foreboding, a
fear-inducing appearance of small alien beings, transport to a
spacecraft, examination and other procedures performed on a special
table, various tests and tasks given, the introduction of more
favorable feelings toward the aliens, and finally a return to pre-
abduction activities and states of consciousness.
For most of the abductees, the experience is fearful and many repress
the details. Often, hypnosis brings back the traumatic episode and
helps the abductee recover memories of the entire event, Mack and
others have found.
"Particularly impressive to me has been the intense resistance and
disturbing affect, especially fear, as memories of traumatic abduction
experiences begin to emerge under hypnosis or through conscious
recall," said Mack. He and others find it hard to explain the marks
left on some bodies from red triangles on the chest to incisions on
arms and legs. Several have had implants in their ears and noses but,
upon study, physicists and biochemists find no unearthly material.
"Any adequate theory of alien abductions, even a useful hypothesis,
must account for a broad range of puzzling phenomena," said Mack.
In his inventory of occurrences, he includes narrative consistency.
"The stories that abductees tell vary in their details, but they have a
hard edge of narrative consistency," he found. He dismisses the
argument that abductees influence one another and believes that "what
more often happens is that when abductees communicate with each other
about their abductions or watch television or film versions of
abductions, they fill in details of what they have already experienced
and are trying to clarify."
Even though many abductions occur independent of UFO sightings, a
close association between UFO encounters and abduction experiences has
been consistently observed, noted Mack.
Mack believes a convincing theory must be found for the bizarre
physical effects, such as termination of pregnancy, sexual liaisons,
incisions, and implants that abductees report.
A way also must be found to account for the abduction reports of
children as young as 2. These are, Mack said, "emotionally intense and
seemingly authentic, detailed experiences [from young people] whose
exposure to outside sources of information has been limited."
The abduction phenomenon, said Mack, "confronts us with an authentic
and disturbing mystery. There is no way, I believe, that we can even
make sense, let alone provide a convincing explanation, of this matter
within the framework of our existing views of what is real or possible.
Our psychological theories do not include a way of accounting for the
simultaneous occurrence among thousands of people, unacquainted with
each other, including small children, of complex, elaborate, and
sometimes overwhelmingly powerful experiences that resemble one another
in minute detail, accompanied by equally peculiar physical phenomena."
Mack also thinks that the current understanding of physical reality
"whereby a population of beings from some other space/time realm can
enter our world with such limited detection and affect so many people"
defies our accepted notions of scientific reality.
Like others, Mack believes the phenomenon is worthy of more inquiry.
"The phenomenon may deliver to us a kind of fourth blow to our
collective egoism, following those of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. We
may be led to realize that we are not physically at the center of the
universe, . . . we are not even the preeminent or dominant intelligence
in the cosmos in control of our psychological and physical existences.
"It appears that we can be 'invaded' or taken over, if not literally
by other creatures, then by some other form of being or consciousness
that seems able to do with us what it will for a purpose we cannot yet
fathom."
Sidebar:
Research on human lives, with purpose and idealism
About three years ago, a colleague asked John Mack to meet writer
Budd Hopkins, the author of Intruders, a book recently made into a
television movie on the experiences of abductees.
Mack was highly skeptical; "there was no way I could understand the
phenomena," he recalled.
But Mack did meet with Hopkins, and became fascinated by the stories
he heard. The conversation ultimately led Mack into abductee research;
from 1990 to January of this year, he interviewed 34 adults and
children who claim to have encountered aliens, and will write a book
about the phenomenon.
His work with abductees impressed him "with the powerful dimension of
personal growth that accompanies the traumatic experiences. An intense
concern for the planet's survival and a powerful ecological
consciousness seem to develop for many abductees. For me and other
investigators, abduction research has had a shattering impact on our
views of the nature of the cosmos."
He is most proud of his work at Cambridge Hospital's psychiatry
department, which he founded in 1962. He won a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for
his biography of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life
of T.E. Lawrence (Little, Brown and Co.). He has also published
extensively in the areas of psychobiography and the psychosocial
effects of the nuclear arms race.
As an investigator of the psychology of the nuclear arms race, Mack,
62, founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, a Cambridge-
based research organization devoted to the psychosocial study of human
violence, conflict, and images of the enemy. The center has recently
enlarged its focus to include the preservation of the environment.
Mack received his M.D. from Harvard in 1955, and graduated from the
Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in 1967 and was certified as a child
analyst in 1969. He graduated from Oberlin College, phi beta kappa.
He has been a professor of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, an
affiliate of the the Medical School [sic], since 1972 and was head of
the Department of Psychiatry there from 1973 to 1977. A faculty member
of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, he is also currently president of
the International Society for Political Psychology.
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