Even therapists who are intrigued by and half-convinced of the reality of UFOs concede this fact. "Expectations of the observer have a tremendous amount to do with what's produced," explains Jim Gordon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School who published an article on UFOs in The Atlantic. "Patients in Jungian analysis have Jungian dreams, and in Freudian analysis they have Freudian dreams. That's why therapists with different approaches to UFOs produce different reactions in their patients."
Mack responds to all these protests with the helpless shrug of a man who is simply convinced of what he is seeing. "I know this sounds like hedging, but we don't know in what reality this occurs. False and true memory don't apply. This is powerfully real, but in what reality?" I asked him where he felt he belonged in the raging controversy over memory and abuse. Does he think memories of satanic abuse might be happening in an alternate reality? He postulated that indeed they might: "Perhaps those memories are experientially true but they didn't factually happen in this reality." What does this mean? In the fourth dimension--or perhaps the sixth dimension?
Mack is the most frustrating type of true believer: congenial, intelligent, and absolutely impenetrable. "People say you must be influencing them, there must be childhood trauma, memory is not reliable. I could say all those things but it's not like that. It's authentic."
But what does he mean by authentic? I interviewed one of Mack's prime abductees, Peter Faust, a Boston acupuncturist and spiritual healer, a man Mack says the aliens simply won't let rest. Faust is as handsome as a soap-opera star, with dark hair and dimples. He and his wife were in the Caribbean when he had a strange dream, in which he remembers saying, "You little f**ers get out of here!" The next morning he had some odd bites behind his ears. It was years and several dreams later that he "realized" what might have happened to him and went to Mack for hypnotic regression.
Peter told me with absolute sincerity how he recalled under trance that during his abductions, sperm had been suctioned from him with a funnel device and that he was being bred with a particular alien female. I turned to his wife at that point and asked her how she felt about it.
"Well," she admitted, "it's hard. Sometimes I wonder if I should pack up and leave. It's like the affair that never ends. And I can't do anything about it."
I turned to Peter. His eyes were burning with a believer's intensity. "They're coming in our lifetime, I guarantee it."
WAITING FOR A VERDICT
The jury on UFOs may forever remain out--floating somewhere in the cosmos among spaceships and alien breeders. Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of John Mack and his work is not whether it is valid, but the intense furor surrounding it. Carl Sagan, the foremost astronomer of our time, wrote an impassioned cover story for Parade magazine about our national obsession with aliens. (Mack wrote him a nine-page letter in rebuttal, but it went unpublished.) Sagan contends that there is no hard evidence of ETs on this planet, and that so-called abductions are most likely hallucinations. Nonetheless "we have before us a matter of supreme importance--touching on our limitations...the fashioning of our beliefs and perhaps even the origins of our religions."
So, when Mack says this phenomenon gets at the very core of "who we are" and "makes us question all realities," he is right. We will always wonder about our place in the universe, and the form that wonder takes will always reflect the age. Ours is an age of rockets and radio waves, an era mesmerized by the pleasures of purging and confession, caught by the belief in widespread abuse, and both troubled and inspired by questions of consciousness itself. If anyone is an emblem of our age, John Mack is. The real disappointment is that he brings us no closer to the truth--even though he could.
PHOTO: Abduction by John E. Mack, M.D.
PHOTO: Road with a UFO hovering over it.
PHOTO: John Mack
PHOTOS: Abductee art: Visions of aliens sometimes look like E.T.
PHOTO: John Mack holding his Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Prince of Our Disorder.
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