He took a three-year training program in Grof's breathing technique, which concluded in 1988. A year later, a psychologist who also practiced the technique urged him to meet Budd Hopkins, a New York artist who had published a best-selling book, Intruders, about UFO abductees.
Mack claims that "nothing in my 40 years as a psychiatrist prepared me for what he had to say. I was impressed with his sincerity, depth of knowledge, and deep concern for the abductees. But what affected me even more was the internal consistency of the highly detailed accounts [of abduction] by different individuals who would have had no way to communicate with one another."
He cites the specific, consistent information abductees give about the inside of spaceships, procedures, medical instruments, and more, as absolute evidence of the veracity of their reports. He notes the interesting but inconclusive physical "evidence" of abduction--strange "scoop" marks, nodules, and cuts (in one case, on a quadriplegic man who would have been unable to self-inflict them); and the fairly common experience of waking upside down in the bed or sometimes outside the house, with clothes removed or lost.
Today he calls himself a "co-investigator and co-creator" in the abduction phenomenon. Mack has scaled down his private psychiatric practice and his teaching to focus on exploring this field. He has now hypnotized and "regressed" nearly 80 abductees and, in his home, where he encourages them to talk about their experience, holds monthly support group meetings. Mack's abductees undergo a remarkably uniform transformative shift in consciousness and become committed to preserving the Earth; they report dreams of floods and other destruction that will otherwise occur. "I have no way to explain this except as some sort of robust emergence of an intelligence reaching out to us in some way. The hybrid[-breeding] program may have something to do with the state of the Earth at this time."
Mack's history, he admits, has prepared him for exactly this work. One almost wonders if he could have ever resisted it, for it so perfectly occupies his clinical, mystical mind. Abductions allow him to be far more than a psychiatrist. He is now an explorer of consciousness, at play in the fields of the universe itself, a participant in an ecological and global transformation that he sees as part of a cosmic plan.
But what's really going on? I decided to retrace Mack's steps.
Take a visit with me to the New York City home of Budd Hopkins, the man John Mack dedicates his book to, the one who "led the way." Hopkins is an abstract expressionist who has brushed elbows with many of the great painters of our day, and has the look of a slightly disheveled but friendly Phil Donahue. He's an ingenuous guy, happily showing off his studio and his upstairs home, where original art by Degas, Franz Kline, and Frank Stella grace the walls. Hopkins' time these days is spent conducting free hypnotic regressions and support groups for abductees, traveling constantly to lecture on the subject, and preparing a third book for publication.
Hopkins sat with me in his studio, which was filled with a series of brightly painted, wooden wall hangings he calls " the guardians," and rattled on enthusiastically about UFOs. He brought out a notebook of pictures of people with indeterminate "marks" from space-alien probings, which seemed unremarkable to me, garden-variety abrasions and minor bruises. He then showed me drawings, made by victims, of what they had seen on the inner walls of spaceships. He requested that I not describe them in print; yet they are generic and primitive enough to also seem unremarkable.
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It was when he began to talk about other "proofs" that he began to lose me--and I wondered how he had been able to retain Mack's interest. For example, the problem with clothes. Hopkins mentioned one abductee who woke up wearing lavender underwear, and she owns no lavender underwear because she hates the color. Others wake up with pajama bottoms several sizes too small--clearly not their own; or with bottoms and tops reversed.
Picture this: We've got aliens who are smart enough to travel light-years across the universe, whisk us up into spaceships that move at unthinkable speeds, communicate telepathically and transform our consciousness, and yet they're so disorganized that when they're ready to drop us down again they dress us in the wrong clothes. (Mack himself has made equally amazing statements; he told me, "They can't do anything they want. Apparently they can take you through a window or a door but not walls of a certain thickness. But I'm not one to talk about that kind of technical stuff.")
Hopkins' reliability began to crumble like old cake when he told me about the case of the decade, if not the century, which is the subject of his next book. A woman, Linda N., was abducted from her high rise in November of 1989 in lower Manhattan; Hopkins claims the abduction was witnessed by a woman driving over the Brooklyn Bridge a quarter of a mile away, and by two security officers driving former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar (who refuses to admit this; nor are there records of his car stalling that night, as Hopkins claims).
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