From: mvbth@cbnews.cb.att.com (bernard.t.hebert)
Subject: ALIEN_TERRITORY(repost)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 17:29:59 GMT
Followup-To: mvbth@cbnews.cb.att.com 
Summary: Boston Globe Magazine article from 10/11/92
Keywords: abductees, Harvard psychologist Dr. John Mack


	Due to editor differences in the computers I use, the last posting of
	this article was not readable by everyone.  I have re-written it using
	the vi editor. Sorry for any inconvenience. BTH.
_______________________________________________________________________________
 
	 The following article was taken from The Boston Globe Magazine of
        Sunday, October 11, 1992.

________________________________________________________________________________

		ALIEN TERRITORY  by  Sara Terry

	JOHN MACK, A HARVARD PSYCHIATRIST AT THE FRONT LINES OF UFO ABDUCTION
	RESEARCH, IS CONVINCED THAT ABDUCTEES ARE NOT MAKING UP THEIR STORIES:
	"I ENCOUNTERED SOMETHING HERE THAT DID NOT FIT ANYTHING I HAD EVER COME 
	ACROSS IN 40 YEARS OF PSYCHIATRY."

  John Mack still remembers the conversation he had with Carl Sagan, back in the
sixties. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was intrigued by talk
of UFOs and wanted to hear Sagan's thoughts on the subject, which had been the
focus of a recent, well-publicized government inquiry.
  "Sagan had had something to do with the Condon Committee, which had reviewed
the whole question of UFOs," recalls Mack, "and he said, with great authority,
'There's nothing to it. There's no substance to it.' Well, Carl was an author-
ity figure to me, a prominent scientist and a friend, so I let it go."
  And that was that, as far as Mack was concerned, until some twenty years later
 when a friend invited him to meet Bud Hopkins. Hopkins, a New York artist and
sculptor, is one of the leading investigators of reports by individuals who 
claim to have been abducted by UFOs.
  "I said 'Who's he?' - which shows you how familiar I was with the phenomenon,"
says Mack. When the friend explained Hopkins work, Mack responded, "What? There
must be something wrong with him and the people he meets with." But on January
10, 1990 - Mack remembers the date as if it were a birthday or an anniversary -
the two men met and spent a few hours discussing the cases Hopkins had research
ed. The studies were compelling and unlike anything Mack had come across in
nearly 40 years of clinical psychiatric work; he knew immediately that the final
word on UFOs no longer rested with Sagan and the Condon Committee. "I came away
somewhat shaken and fascinated," he says of the meeting with Hopkins. "It was a
mystery. I'd never taken abductions seriously at all. I realized at this point
that this was something I had no way to explain."

  In the nearly three years since his meeting with Hopkins, Mack has joined the
front line of abductee research. He has investigated almost 70 cases of abduc-
tions and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment. He has been
the subject of a network docudrama. He has been criticized by the press and 
lashed out at by scientists. He has organized support groups and professional
conferences. He has also become convinced that abductees are not making up their
stories - and that their experiences may present a shock as great and transform-
ing to the foundations of science as did Copernicus' proof that the Earth is not
the center of the universe.

 "I encountered something here, very early on, which I saw did not fit anything
I had ever come across in 40 years of psychiatry," says the 63 year old Mack, 
founder of the psychiatric department at Cambridge Hospital (which is affiliated
with Harvard Medical School) and winner of a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his psycho-
analytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia. "The deeper I went into it," he cont-
inues, "the more and more information I got that doesn't fit anything else. This
has all kinds of implications for our scientific world view, for our identity as
a species on this planet."

  Typically, Mack says, abductions are highly traumatic experiences, often 
repressed and usually called forward only with great pain and stress. Almost 
always, individuals report seeing small, gray beings with huge dark eyes who
transport their immobilized subjects to some sort of spacecraft, where the cap-
tives are probed in a battery of tests that appear to relate to sexual and 
reproductive experiments. Many abductees, or "experiencers," report a long 
history of abductions. Mack has found that parents who have had many experiences
often find that their children become abductees as well. In almost every case he
has investigated, he says, people are reluctant to face what has happened.
  "One of the most powerfully consistent aspects of this for me has been the
tremulousness with which these people come to see me," says Mack, who has a 
contract with Scribner to write a book on his findings. "They come to me very
fearful that either they will be found crazy, because what they've experienced
doesn't fit ordinary reality, or that they'll be found not to be crazy, and 
then they're faced with the fact that these are real experiences, and what does
that mean for their world view, for their future, for their lives?"

  Of the several dozen cases he has investigated, Mack says, only two or three
individuals suffer from some form of mental illness. There is no particular type
of person who experiences abductions and no apparent reason why some people are
selected as abductees. Among the people Mack has interviewed are a musician, a
prison guard, housewives, secretaries, a psychiatrist, college student, a retir-
ed firefighter, and a restaurant owner.

  Fundamental to Mack's convictions about these experiences is the fact that, 
over and over, abductees - who come from all over the country and who do not 
know one another - tell remarkably consistent stories. Details may vary, but the
 narrative thread is so similar from case to case that Mack is convinced that 
the experiences are not imagined. If they were simply made up or were the 
psychic byproduct of some other traumatic event, he says, the accounts would 
vary more widely, because of the individuality of the human psyche.

  "What struck me almost immediately," he says, "was my inability, as a psych-
iatrist, to explain how people who seemed otherwise quite normal, quite unre-
markable, could be telling the same disturbing story, in great detail: of
being taken from their rooms, their cars, in fields, into these craft and 
subjected to highly intrusive procedures that have a unique quality.
  "There's a whole medical-like scenario, which is not known to us on Earth,"
he says, "and yet it's told by people all over the country, in great detail,
details which were not available in the media at the time and are still not in
the media in the kind of detail these people reported. And these stories were
consistent, one to the other.
  "The thing I've spent most of my professional life in," says Mack,"is learn-
ing to make clinical psychological discriminations, like 'Is this projection?',
'Is this hallucination?', 'Is this real experience?', 'Is this a dream?'. And
this [ abduction phenomenom ] behaves like real experience.
  "I have never had a sense, and I trust myself in this clinically," he says,
"that this phenomenon represents some kind of psychological contagion, that
people are influencing each other, or that these experiences are derivative of
something they've read or heard from someone else, or that they're reflecting
off the consciousness of another person's experience. I've never had a sug-
gestion of that."

  Although Mack's earliest cases were referred to him by Hopkins, increasingly
he has been contacted by people who have read his comments in stories about
UFOs, or have seen him interviewed on television. (Mack tends to turn down
interview requests, because he believes too many reporters trivialize or
sensationalize abductee cases.) After a recent conference at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology on the abduction phenomenon, co-sponsored by Mack and
MIT physicist David Pritchard, Mack was contacted by a woman who had read a 
a story about the meeting and wanted to see him.
 
  Unlike many experiencers, the woman could recall - without hypnosis - a
variety of alien contacts, going back to early childhood. She could also
recount more current experiences of being visited in her home by aliens,
who came into her bedroom, floated her into the living room, and performed
a series of intensely painful explorations into her spine with sharp 
instruments.

  More commonly, abductees report what Mack calls a "margin of consciousness",
where memory recalls an experience to a certain point and then blanks out,
leaving individuals with chunks of unaccounted-for time. Under hypnosis, a
practice criticized by disbelievers but defended by Mack as an important tool
for uncovering repressed information, experiencers are taken back to the last
moment they consciously remember, such as the appearance of a small being in
their bedroom or the presence of a blue light. As the details surface, an
anguished mental struggle often occurs. Mack cites the case of a 38-year old
Pennsylvania man with a long history of abduction-related experiences. All the
man could recall of one recent experience, which began as he was trying to fall
asleep, was the presence of a female alien in the room. (Abductees, says Mack,
can almost always identify the sex of aliens, despite the lack of obvious 
sexual characteristics.)
  Like many who undergo hypnosis, the man resisted recalling the experience,
asserting that the aliens had told him not to remember what had happened. The
man's story, says Mack, unfolded with "tremendous distress, sweating, and pain,
and anguish." There was also, he says, a great sense of shame and a fear of
being vulnerable, which Mack worked to dispell, trying to reassure the man that
his experience was not a reflection of weakness but something over which he 
had no control.
  "And, at certain point, there was a breakthrough," says Mack. "He began to 
sob. It was so touching, because he'd been fighting with himself and with his
unconsciousness, and at that point, he crossed a line and just let go. It was
just this tremendous release."
  What unfolded during the narative was a story common among abductees, one
Mack had suspected in this particular case because of the shame and vulner-
ability the man had expressed. Like many male abductees, the man recalled that
he had been taken onto a craft, where he was sexually probed, and a sperm 
sample was forcibly taken from him.
  Mack says that another emotion surfaced, common among experiencers. "I've 
seen it so many times now," he says. "It's a sobbing that goes along with a
sense of awe. Have you ever been moved by something in nature or something
in art or music? It's like you're humbled before God, you're just so moved by
the spectacle, by the awesomeness of what's before you. It was that quality
[ in the man's sobbing ], a combination of relief and awe. And the awe had to
do with, Oh my God, what an extraordinary thing it is that has happened to me.
  "Again, it's a question of clinical judgement," he says. "When memories come
back like that, I never have any question that these people are describing 
something that has authentically happened to them. If I do get a case, as I
occasionally do, where I feel that somebody is looking to convince themselves
or me that they were abducted, I don't count those cases. I don't include them
among the authentic ones."

  Since beginning his research nearly three years ago, Mack has established
a support group that meets at his Brookline home once a month. In the quiet of
his wood-pannelled, book-lined living room, 20 to 30 people share their stories,
often expressing great relief at being able to talk to others who have been
through the same thing. Their stories coincide on many levels: They talk about
the presence of light and the ability of aliens to transmute into a sheer light
force. Often the light is connected with haeling; abductees say that fevers and
other illnesses disappear as a result of an abduction. Many say that a vibrating
eneergy courses through their bodies when the aliens take them from their homes.
Physical marks are often left on experiencers' bodies: small incisions or scoop
marks, which appear to be the remnants of surgical procedures.
  Overwhelmingly, women and men recall sexual encounters and experiments. A wide
variety of reproductive stories abound, with many women claiming to have been
impregnated by aliens, who then remove the embryo immediately or on a subsequent
abduction. Some women say their captors have taken them to nurseries where 
hybrid babies are being raised.

  Mack is well aware that the stories stretch the bounds of credibility. And he
knows that, like Hydra, every theory about abduction leads to a dozen new
questions. Yet he is undeterred in his conviction that the abduction phenomenon
cannot be dismissed.
  "No one has been able to come up with a counterformulation that explains 
what's been going on," he says. "But if people can't be convinced [ that this is
real ], that's okay. All I want is for people to be convinced that there's 
something going on here that is not explainable. That something is entering
these peoples lives that we don't understand.
  "If we can be in that place of not knowing," he adds,"we're likely to learn
more than if we try to stick this here, or stick it there, or if we close our
minds and try to keep this under control."

  The outrageous headlines are familiar to anyone who has ever stood in line
at a supermarket checkout lane. Claims such as "Aliens Endorse Clinton" -
recently trumpeted on the front page of one popular tabloid - crop up as
regularly as Elvis sightings and appearances by the Abominable Snowman.
Mack is somewhat resigned to it all. He knows, thanks to the highly dramatic
nature of aliens and abductions, that there will always be an insatiable
appetite for alien stories in the tabloid press and on tabloid-type television
shows. Lately, though, he's begun to see signs that the media and a growing
number of academics and scientists are starting to pay slightly more serious
attention to the abduction phenomenon. In the past few months, he says, he has
been interviewed for a lengthy upcoming "New Yorker" story, and has participated
 in a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. program - a Canadian equivalent of 'NOVA' -
that will air this fall. Mack has also been contacted by philosophers, theolo-
gians, young psychologists who want to work with him, a molecular chemist, and
a graduate student in educational psychology who wants to do her thesis on the 
abduction phenomenon. ("That's a very good indicator, when people in academic
degree programs want to do their thesis on something," notes Mack, "Then you
know it's reached a level of legitamacy.") He has also met with a "quite 
prominent" Harvard physics professor, who was "very interested and very open",
but said he couldn't talk about the abductions "around here" - meaning the 
building on campus where the professor teaches.
  "Little by little, people are coming into this thing," says Mack, whose work
with abductees is partially supported by small grants from private foundations.
"It's still not the way a young person can make a career in mainstream academic
institutions, but it's a very exiciting field. I have a kind of faith that if
you really are truthful about what you see, and you do your work with integrity,
that people will eventually come around. If they don't come to the point of
agreeing with it, at least they'll begin to notice it." 
  Mack, however, is well aware of the fact that many physical scientists dismiss
his work out of hand. Those critics, he contends, simply haven't explored the
evidence or are too bound by the conventions of science to consider information
that is not strictly measurable by machines or the physical senses. When doubt-
ing colleagues listen to the tapes of sessions with abductees and spend time 
with him, discussing his research, Mack says, "they tend to be staggered by the
phenomenon." And while those colleagues may not become believers, he continues,
"Some of them say 'I've gone from atheist to agnostic on this.'"

  Dr. Edward J. Khantzian is one of those colleagues who have heard Mack present
his data and calls it "very, very compelling stuff." Khantzian, an associate
clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School at the Cambridge
Hospital, says that Mack "has taken a lot of disbelievers and had us scratching
our heads, wondering what is this he is studying. He's at least made a lot of
us stop and think again, which is what he's always done."
  "I don't know what to make of it ultimately, and I'm basically somewhere 
between being a disbeliever and an agnostic," says Khantzian, who has worked
with Mack for nearly 30 years. "But as far as I can tell, he's operating as a
careful clinician in these studies, and that's what I respect. I don't under-
stand it, I'm still dubious, but I respect his right to search it out to the
fullest."

  Mack takes most comments from doubters and skeptics in stride. But the 
generally soft-spoken psychiatrist does become incensed by the flat dismissal
of abductees stories' by disbelievers, a rejection that Mack says only helps
add to a sense of isolation already felt by traumatized abductees. "It's
demeaning to those people to think that they are somehow subject to some kind
of perceptual distortion or make-believe," says Mack.
  "People know what they see, they know what their perceptions are," he insists.
"That what they saw or what they experienced requires some explanation which
we don't now have, that's another story."
  As far as Mack is concerned, the search for answers has to include the 
possibility of a reality not yet percieved by science. At its most radical, 
notes Mack, the practice of modern science has led to such things as the SETI
project, a $100 million National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission
known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Scheduled to begin
tomorrow, the project relies on radio telescopes to search the universe for 
signs of intelligent life beyond planet Earth. 
 Mack argues that abductees' reports point to an intelligence that can obviously
elude man-made machines, no matter how sophisticated - and to a world that 
exists not out there in the physical universe, but in an entirely different
dimension.
  "In the experience of the abductees," he says,"the aliens seem to come from 
another dimension. They seem to break through our sense of reality of this
space-time physicalist world, to come from some other place. Abductees will
describe the sense of space and time collapsing, or of coexistent multiple time
dimensions.
  "They have the feeling that they have been introduced to another universe 
which is just as real as this one, but which is other-dimensional," he says.
"It's as if it's a dimension that seems to enter our physical world, but is not
necessarily of our physical world."
  Although he admits that such possibilities have yet to be proven by the 
physical sciences, Mack laments what he calls "the unwillingness of the official
intellectual community to be open-minded about a reality that doesn't fit their
world view." As he sees it, the abduction phenomenom could ultimately present
mankind with a "fourth blow" to its collective ego. The first, he says, was the
Copernican blow, which proved that man and Earth were not the center of the 
universe; the second blow was administered by Darwin, whose findings on evolu-
tion proved that man did not spring from "some higher level of spiritual
biology"; and the third blow was delivered by Freud, whose explorations of the
unconscious revealed that man's conscious mind was not all that was in control
of his life.

  Mack says he still has no answers about what the abductions mean or why they
happen. Although some researchers in the field believe that the primary pur-
pose of the kidnappings is to carry out some sort of breeding program, Mack 
sees a more transformational element to the abductions: an attempt to alert
humans to the need for change in their lives.
  Abductees frequently report that during their time on alien spacecraft, they
are shown powerful visual images of environmental destruction on Earth. Many
return with a passionate commitment to protect the planet. Mack interprets the
warnings, and the increased awareness among individual abductees, as an attempt
to reconnect humans with a heightened sense of spirituality. It's a quest, he
says, best summed up by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote:

	That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us:
	To have courage for the most strange, the most singular and 
	the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has
	in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm;
	The experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called
	'spirit-world,' death and all those things that are so closely
	akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life
	that the senses by which we could have grasped them are atrophied.
	To say nothing of God.

  Other civilizations, including Eastern and native cultures, have been far more
fluent than the West in communing with experiences that defy understanding in
terms of physical reality, says Mack. He argues that the Western world of the
past few hundred years may have reached a dead end of sorts - and that the 
abductee experience may be part of a move away from the strict confines of 
materialism.

  "It may be that we're on the brink of some kind of major opening to our proper
place in the universe," muses Mack. "I think, in this society, we're involved in
a major epochal shift. I don't know what the purpose of all this is, but it
certainly is some kind of profound connecting of us beyond ourselves."



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EOF