Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?

What leads people to believe they've been abducted by aliens?

By Kaja Perina, published on March 01, 2003 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

Psychologists have long surmised that abductees may be inclined to fantasy and "absorption," the propensity to daydream or be enthralled by novels. Both alien abductees and garden-variety fantasizers report false pregnancies, out-of-body experiences and apparition sightings. Some psychologists speculate that people like Will Bueche and Peter Faust are simply "encounter-prone" individuals with a heightened receptivity to anomalous experience. Whatever the case, Bueche and Faust found a willing listener in John Mack.

Mack has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 1955, and in 1982 he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, located in a yellow clapboard house just beyond the university's campus. The Center aims in part to study anomalous experiences, and has its post office box in Cambridge, but the building lies just within neighboring Somerville. The address is a fitting line of demarcation for a clinician who straddled conventional science and altered states of consciousness long before the publication of Abduction.

Mack founded the department of psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital in 1969; a program that has long attracted innovative, Eastern-oriented psychiatrists. In 1977, Mack was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder, a biography of Lawrence of Arabia. "Mack is in dynamic communication with the humanities," says Eugene Taylor.

Mack has embraced traditions from Freudian psychoanalysis to the guided meditation of Werner Erhard. In 1988, he began to practice Stanislav Grof's holotropic breathwork, a technique that induces an altered state by means of deep, rapid breathing and evocative music. Mack believes he retrieved memories of his mother's death, which occurred when he was 8 months old. "I was raised in a tradition of inquiry," says Mack. "If you encounter something that doesn't fit your worldview, it's more intellectually honest to say, 'maybe there's something wrong with this worldview,' than to try to shoehorn your findings into an existing belief."

At 73, Mack appears regal despite his slightly stooped gait. His handsome, deeply lined face and flinty blue eyes are quietly compelling; he quickly earned a reputation for emotional succor among the abductees he interviewed. Abductees including Faust and Bueche cling to him like acolytes, often parroting his theories.

Mack used hypnotic regression to retrieve detailed memories of 13 encounters with aliens, all chronicled in Abduction. He has now interviewed more than 200 abductees. He says that he ultimately endorsed abduction reports largely because he found his subjects to be mentally competent. Some were also highly traumatized and most were reluctant to come forward and appropriately skeptical about their experiences.

Mack defends the use of controversial techniques such as hypnotic regression because he prizes the experiential narrative over empirical data. To debrief an abductee is to be "in the presence of a truth teller, a witness to a compelling, often sacred, reality." Mack says he was jolted when his subjects reported receiving telepathic warnings about man's decimation of natural resources. "I thought this was about aliens taking eggs and sperm and traumatizing people," admits Mack. "I was surprised to find it was an informational thing."

The faculty of Harvard Medical School, for its part, was dumbfounded that Mack believed he'd stumbled on anything more than an underreported cluster of psychiatric symptoms. From 1994 to 1995, Arnold Relman, M.D., professor emeritus of medicine, chaired an ad-hoc committee that conducted a 15-month investigation into Mack's work with abductees. "John did good things in his career and gained a lot of respect. His behavior with regard to the alien-abduction story disappointed a lot of his colleagues," says Relman. The investigation ended with much tongue-wagging but no formal censure. Mack was, however, encouraged to bring a multidisciplinary approach to his study of the phenomenon. "No one is challenging John's right to look into the matter," sighs Relman. "All we're saying is, if you do it, do it in an objective, scholarly manner."

In the spring of 1999, Mack invited astrophysicists, anthropologists and a Jungian analyst who studies anomalous experience in the wake of organ transplants to the Harvard Divinity School, where they brainstormed with mental health professionals and abductees. One participant was Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally, an expert on cognitive processing in anxiety disorders.

McNally told the assembly that "sleep-related aspects of the experiences might be correlated with different parts of the REM cycle." He was referring to the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, but he hesitated to speak bluntly about it. Many abductees deem sleep paralysis too mundane an explanation for their experiences, so McNally didn't use the term, for fear of "alienating" the very subjects he wanted to recruit.