I'D BEEN CHASING JOHN MACK FOR months before he agreed to an interview. One of his assistants, Karen Wesolowski, at a branch of The Center for Psychology and Social Change, his own private umbrella organization for UFO research, had been stonewalling me, supposedly because he was under crushing pressure to finish his book, for which Scribners had reportedly paid him a handsome $200,000. But it was easy to detect another reason: fear of a hatchet job in the press. Mack himself has confessed, "The experience of taking on a subject which has been fare for the tabloids and the seamier side of the mass media has been a story in itself."
The first time I spoke with Karen on the phone, I heard the clacking of computer keys: she was taking down every word I said. She asked more preliminary "who are you and what do you want" questions than I'd encountered in a decade of reporting. She called Psychology Today and asked to see samples of my work. She instructed me not to speak to Dr. Mack's department head, Malka Notman, M.D., until he had had a meeting with her first. She told me that in part she and Dr. Mack were simply protecting the abductees. Karen likened individuals who did not believe these victims' stories to people who tell holocaust survivors that Nazi atrocities never happened.
When I finally faced Mack a deux, I found a tall, lanky man with eyes like cobalt glass. He was wearing a slightly wrinkled button-down shirt of the same startling blue, khaki pants, and loafers. He had a boyish, baffled sincerity about him, an almost bedazzled helplessness that would both endear him to me and irritate me throughout the interview.
It was lunchtime and we shared Mack's typical fare: peanut butter from a gallon-size plastic container stored in his secretary's adjacent office, bagels, and Mars bars. As we ate, he told me how he'd arrived at his fixation on UFOs as agents of cosmic correction of our Earth-destroying ways. Although the press, when credulous, recounts his story as if he simply woke up one day and was confronted with irrefutable evidence that aliens are kidnapping and experimenting on humans, the truth is far more complex and intriguing.
First, Mack has never been your garden-variety shrink. He openly admits that he has always felt a bit like Georg Simmel's "The Stranger," the marginal man who participates in the culture but is not part of it. He was raised in a rationalist, German-Jewish, New York household, where his father read him the Bible not because he believed in God but because the stories were fascinating.
From Oberlin he went to Harvard Medical School and set out to become a psychoanalyst. He continued his internship and residency training at Harvard institutions, and was accepted at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, then at the pinnacle of its reputation, where he underwent both personal and a training psychoanalysis. He went on to specialize in child psychoanalysis. He also trained at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Mental Health Center when it was leading psychiatry to alternatives to institutionalization for the mentally ill, and was chief resident there. Mack was on a brilliant trajectory in Harvard's prestigious embrace.
Coming to Cambridge Hospital was his first major departure from the beaten track: At the time "it was a derelict community hospital. It was not the place to fast-track." He was its head of psychiatry until 1977 and was instrumental in crafting a community mental health program that today is the centerpiece of a citywide network of clinics and hospitals.
His biography of T. E. Lawrence was another departure: though psychobiography is an honored tradition among analysts, Lawrence was an unusual choice. Mack was fascinated by this man who himself was a stranger, a troubled hero caught in the fate of a culture not his own.
Later he began to work on issues of nuclear disarmament, global peace, and conservation. He has traveled the world attending conferences on ecology and the Earth, mingling with everyone from scientists to philosophers, philanthropists, and economists.
He also began to explore alternative approaches to consciousness. In the 1970s, Mack was taken with Werner Erhard's est and assorted mind-altering techniques. The final break with tradition came when Mack met Stanislav Grof, a Russian who had developed "holotropic breathwork," a technique of rapid breathing that allegedly accesses nonordinary states of consciousness. The first time he tried it, Mack not only "reexperienced" his mother's death when he was eight months old, he also felt "my father's grief at the time. There was a businessman in the room who was screaming his head off because he was reliving the time when his mother tried to choke him as an infant. I got more out of one session than I had in all my years of analysis." Later in the session, "I became a Russian father in the 16th century, a man whose four-year-old son was decapitated by Mongol hordes."
MACK IN TIME
Mack begs the question of past lives here. He says that at the time he was in Russia as part of an exchange project, sponsored by Esalen, to talk about the impact of the nuclear arms race on children. His consciousness, he told me, "traveled in time to identify this Russian man. After that experience I felt great empathy for the Russians I was working with."
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