From: stern6@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Stern)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Harvard University Gazette endorces alien abductee research
Date: 31 Jul 92 02:11:46 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc10.stern6.712548706

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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         Michael Stern        *  "I love children, especially when they cry,
                              *   for then someone takes them away."  
   stern6@husc.harvard.edu    *                         -Nancy Mitford
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