One of the best and the brightest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
psychiatrist,has made himself into a high priest of what is politely
called the "abduction phenomenon." He insists it's a form of cosmic
correction of our Earth-polluting ways.
In a tiny, utilitarian office at Cambridge Hospital--a nondescript
cubicle on the the third floor, overlooking the parking lot--Harvard
psychiatrist John Mack is seeking God. And the way this 64-year-old
Pulitzer Prize winner is going about it is truly unprecedented: He has
become a kind of paterfamilias and healer to a whole underground of
Americans who claim they have been abducted by aliens in UFOs.
They flock to him from all around the country, these abductees,
then lie down on his office couch and are coaxed into a hypnotic trance.
Under hypnosis, sometimes weeping and shouting with agony and terror,
they recover buried memories of alien encounters. Many of them come to
believe that they have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials regularly
since they were children, that they are guinea pigs in an intergalactic
hybrid-breeding program, and that in a close encounter of a truly
original kind, they have had sperm and egg samples taken, alien fetused
implanted and removed, and probes inserted in their vagina, anuses, and
up their noses.
And here's the clincher: Most of them recall that after suffering
the indignities of lab animals in outer space, they are given a picture
show that aliens project onto the walls of their spacecraft--or directly
into their brains--images amd movies of ecological disaster that terrify
and ultimately transform them into spiritual seekers hoping to save the
polluted Earth.
"Some other intelligence is reaching out to us. It's the most
exciting work I've ever done," claims Mack. A few minutes later he
admits, "I'm shocked in a way to hear myself saying such things. But I've
been as careful as possible to exhaust conventional explanantion. None of
them begin to explain this phenomenon."
This alien invasion--subtle, shattering, mysterious--is really a
form of cosmic correction by beings more advanced than we, believes Mack,
whose about-to-be-published book, Abduction (Scribners), details the
kidnappings of 13 individuals by aliens and fits them into a new
cosmology. It's a vew of the universe that's both high-tech and ancient,
one that assumes intelligence can take many forms and melds Eastern
sprirituality and Western science. Above all, it's a cosmology eerily
well adapted to our country's obsession with abuse, confession, and
transcendence.
Mack has long been one of the brightest minds at Harvard, a man
whose prize-winning A Prince of Our Disorder (1977)--a psychological
study of T.E. Lawrence--was hailed as one of the most remarkable
biographies of its time. Mack was one of the men who forged Harvard's
Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry into a premier teaching
hospital, a place where psychiatrists and residents now vie for
positions, and for four years he was its head. He's been a member of the
Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, certified as a child psychoanalyst, and
chairman of the Executive Committee for all five hospital-based
departments of psychiatry that make up the huge Department of Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School.
He's also a high-profile idealist who has been at the forefront of
efforts by his peers for global peace and conservation. He is founding
director of the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age and a
member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He is an outspoken advocate
of corporate and industrial policies that sustain the environment.The
list of accomplishments doesn't stop there; Mack has published over 150
articles and books on subjects ranging from nightmares to teenagers who
kill their mothers to Russian children's feelings about nuclear weapons.
And so his excursion into the realm of ETs has elicited an outcry of
contempt, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, confusion, interest, and even
admiration from his colleagues.
Is Mack legitimizing ufology, a pursuit that has until now found
its warmest reception on the pages of supermarket tabloids? Or has he, as
one longtime colleague laments, ruined his career?
More than the legitimacy of UFOs is at stake. The fact is that
Mack--at least to those who view him from the outside--is actually in the
white hot center of a controversy that has been raging around the
country. It's a battle about the essential nature of the human mind,
really; a war over the nature of memory, and access routes to it,
particularly hypnosis. Can hypnosis recover repressed memories of sexual
abuse, satanic ritual abuse, past life abuse, and abuse at the hands of
aliens? In a tabloid culture, recovered memories have led to accusations
and court cases so damaging and sordid they've been compared to the
witch-hunts of another age.
John Mack's UFO work rests in great part on the validity of
hypnosis as a tool to recover memory. The cultural uproar over this modus
operandi may not resolve itself for years to come.
Strangely enough, he shrugs off the controversy. "I have such long
relationships here at Harvard, they just tolerate me. Of course, I don't
know what they say behind my back. But the abduction phenomenon," insists
Mack, "gets at the core of who we are. It's traumatic for me as well as
others, but it expands us into a different universe."
