DR.JOHN E. MACK: ABDUCTEE INVESTIGATOR ABDUCTED BY HISTORY?

A procative, thoughtful essay on the late John Mack appeared recently on aeon, and is a fine reminder of this curious and in some ways troubled man, and the curious and in many ways troubled nature of his most famous -- and infamous -- work.

Dr. Mack (he was an M.D.) does not seem to be widely remembered today, but there was time in the early 1990s when he attracted quite  a bit of attention for what he insisted was a serious scientific investigation of the alien abduction phenomenon.

Dr. Mack's  bona fides were about as good as they get: He won a  Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, was a psychiatrist and member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, the author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers, a recognized expert on childhood identity formation..

And he was fascinated by matters that people possessing such respected credentials and academic positions aren't supposed to be fascinated by.

As Alexa Clay points out in her essay, Mack paid a heavy price for approaching abductees -- experiencers -- with absolute seriousness and a fairly high level of scientific rigor. At least in public; Clay relates that in private Dr. Mack was far more credulous when discussing the possibility that the experiencers he interviewed had actually been abducted by actual aliens.

But public circumspection only goes so far, particularly when one's investigations include hypnotic regressions of abductees, just the sort of thing that attracts a lot of often lurid  media attention. Dr. Mack was investigated by a committee convened by the dean of the medical school.

I'll let Clay tell you the whole story via the aeon essay which I link to again here  -- her piece is quite good and also quite touching. But the points she makes about Dr. Mack's insistence that we investigate phenomena, that we open our minds to possibilities of perception, are good ones, whether one agrees with Mack or not.

It's no news to anyone who knows me that I don't believe in the presence of extraterrestrials among us. When OMNI launched its intensive investigation of the UFO phenomenon, and did so with an overtly skeptical, but willing to be be proved wrong, perspective, we caught it from both sides. The UFO believers thought we were stacking the deck against them, and the scientific community thought that it was sign that I'd gone over to the "dark side."

In fact, it was neither. What we were trying to do over the course of several issues, was to bring journalistic and investigative tools to bear on a phenomenon that deserved to treated seriously, if only because so many people do believe it.

I still don't believe that we have been visited, that the greys have walked among us and, in some cases, probed within us. But I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon, and by all of the unexplained phenomena, unusual occurrences, and, outré and, well, outright weird belief systems and explanations of the universe that continue to thrive and even proliferate in a world more than well-equipped with the tools of science and rationalism.

Those tools, I believe, not only can be brought to bear on unexplained or paranormal or supernatural experiences and incidents, they should be, and more often than they are.

I am confident enough in the ability of those tools of rational, evidence and verification and reproducibility-based --  inquiry,which are the most effective tools our species has ever developed, and which get better all the time, o find the reality at the heart of the so-called mysteries that I would like to see more investigations, not fewer.

That's why I'm so glad that Alexandra Clay shared her memories of Dr. John E. Mack, investigator.