Ralph Blumenthal - The Believer

THE BELIEVER

ALSO BY RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Miracle at Sing Sing

Stork Club

Once Through the Heart

Last Days of the Sicilians

Outrage (with Robert McFadden, M. A. Farber,
Charles Strum, E. R. Shipp, and Craig Wolff)

The Gotti Tapes (with John Miller)

RALPH BLUMENTHAL

ALIEN ENCOUNTERS,
HARD SCIENCE,
AND THE PASSION
OF JOHN MACK

High Road Books is an imprint
of the University of New Mexico Press

2021 by Ralph Blumenthal

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blumenthal, Ralph, author.

Title: The believer: alien encounters, hard science,
and the passion of John Mack / Ralph Blumenthal.

Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020038248 (print) | LCCN 2020038249 (e-book) |
ISBN 9780826362315 (cloth) | ISBN 9780826362322 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Mack, John E., 1929-2004. | PsychiatristsUnited States
Biography. | Alien abductionUnited States.

Classification: LCC RC438.6.M33 B58 2021 (print) |
LCC RC438.6.M33 (e-book) | DDC 616.890092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038248

LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038249

COVER ILLUSTRATIONS

starry sky | Rastan | istockphoto.com
flying saucer in sky | George J. Stock | public domain

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

always and forever

TO DEB,

my faithful believer

I never said it was possible, I only said it was true.

SIR WILLIAM CROOKES 1874

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology sprawls along the southern coast of Cambridge, facing patrician Back Bay Boston across a wide spot of the Charles River. On its northwest shoulder, around a bend in the river, hunkers Harvard University. But MIT alone never really had an outdoors, not one that anyone uses, writes architecture critic Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe. Its 166 acres are pocketed with quadrangles of greenery and classical courts carved with the names of Newton, Aristotle, and Copernicus, but they seem superfluous. The nearest thing to a public space, a place of social and cultural gathering, is the so-called Infinite Corridor indoors. Here MITs scientists labor on their studies, which, to date, have been honored with ninety-five Nobel Prizes.

In this inquiring spirit, on an unseasonably hot Saturday in June 1992, an unlikely assembly convened for five days of secretive conferencing. Filling the steeply banked seats of lecture hall 6-120 in the Eastman Laboratorieswhere a lobby plaque pays homage to the storied MIT benefactor, Kodak photo pioneer George Eastmanwere dozens of doctors, psychologists, therapists, physicists, folklorists, historians, theologians, and other specialists; a handful of trusted journalists; and sixteen otherwise seemingly ordinary folk with extraordinary experiences. All had signed nondisclosure agreements for the event that would remain under wraps for two more yearsuntil the publication of a thick, oversize volume called Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference.

The conference was a professional forum about humans who believed they were, at a minimum, (1) taken against their will by nonhuman beings, (2) brought to an apparent spacecraft or other enclosed space, (3) examined or subjected to telepathic communication, and (4) could recall the experience consciously or under hypnosis. Some further recounted astral travels, ecstatic bonding with a deity or Source, apocalyptic warnings of planetary doom, and the forcible harvesting of their eggs or sperm for human-alien hybrid reproduction.

It was hardly MITs regular fare (although the schools fabled Science Fiction Society hosted the worlds largest open-shelf library of more than sixty thousand science-fiction and fantasy books and magazines), and, to be sure, MIT was not a sponsor. Rather, in the spirit of academic freedom, it only granted use of its facilities after a distinguished MIT atomic physicist, David E. Pritchard, pointed out how bad censorship would look. Renowned for his pioneering research in the wavelike properties of beams of atoms and forces of light on atoms, Pritchard, a prize-winning mentor of Nobelists, had long been intrigued by the abduction narratives, which he saw as more amenable to scientific investigation than sightings of what were long called flying saucers or, more accurately, unidentified flying objectsUFOs. He had been reading up on the subject and used his travels in physics to consult with leading investigators of the phenomenon.

At first, Pritchard thought of writing a book, but he later decided that a critical analysis of all the possibilities really demanded a conference. With a sabbatical at hand, Pritchard devoted the semester to planning it, ignoring the hostility of MIT administrators and enlisting as his partner a noted Harvard psychiatrist named John E. Mack, who had begun his own abduction investigations. Given the evident psychological dimensions of the phenomenon, Pritchard said, I would not have had the courage to run this without a prominent psychiatrist.

Mack was a Harvard star, a heralded founder of community mental-health services in once-downtrodden Cambridge, and the author of a groundbreaking psychological biography of Lawrence of Arabia that had won a Pulitzer Prize. Commandingly tall at sixty-two years of age and with crystalline-blue eyes and a face stretched tight over his skull like the leathery mask of some totemic figure, he packed lecture halls and seminars, attracted disciples (particularly women), published prolifically, mobilized colleagues against nuclear weapons, and traveled the world on missions of peace. He had met with Yasir Arafat and been arrested at a nuclear test site in Nevada. And he was just back from the Himalayas, where he had joined a select group of professionals discussing aliens with His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Now Mack told the conferees at MIT why he thought the abduction phenomenon was not a psychiatric phenomenon, although that was most peoples snap assumption, including, at first, his own. But any explanation, he said, had to account for five elements: (1) consistency of the reports, (2) physical signs like scars and witness-backed reports of actual absence for a time, (3) accounts from children too young for delusional psychiatric syndromes, (4) an association with witnessed UFOs, and (5) the lack of any consistent psychopathology among abductees.