2 items from the archives in honor of John Mack’s birthday – an essay and a video

October 4, 2024 — In recognition of what would have been John Mack’s 95th birthday, we’ve republished two items from the archives – an essay and a video.

The video is “Entering the Heart of the Alien Mystery”, John Mack’s presentation of November 16, 1999. In this half-hour lecture, Dr Mack suggests that the alien abduction phenomenon calls for a new way of examining the nature of reality, and argues that by broadening our definition of “what is real” we can begin to explore a phenomenon that has deep and lasting implications for humanity. (Subscribers to our YouTube channel may already be aware of this video, since we uploaded it last month without fanfare and it has already received more than 6,000 views.)

The essay is “Trying to Make a Difference”, a lengthy autobiographical chapter with an emphasis on his medical career, written in 1994. It was originally contributed to Ellen L. Bassuk’s 1996 book, The Doctor-Patient Activist: Physicians Fighting for Social Change. Several quotes from this essay appeared in Ralph Blumenthal’s 2022 biography of John Mack, The Believer. (The photo accompanying this news item is from that essay; the image is of the Mack family and Koto Fujimoto, photographed when Mack was stationed west of Tokyo in 1960).



Audiobooks by John Mack


We would like to take this opportunity to welcome people who are new to John Mack. This website contains many essays by Dr Mack and his friends and colleagues. And in the footer you will find links to his pair of books about alien encounters, including the newly-recorded audiobook editions. Mack felt that Passport to the Cosmos was the better of the two books, but Abduction may be an essential introduction.