May 20, 2025 — Jim Garrison reminisces about his friendship with John Mack in this newly-posted video. Jim co-founded the State of the World Forum with Mikhail Gorbachev (see full bio here); the 1999 forum was one of John’s favorite events. He will be doing another livestream video about John Mack soon (June 10, the second Tuesday of next month).
https://youtu.be/Y_PWZx8d-U8?si=l0kdZGZhBTvgk4FD
Some minor errata:
[1] As far as we are aware, Mack was never “approached by the Pentagon to examine various personnel who reported direct experience with UFOs”.
[2] At Harvard Medical School, Mack was not a “dean”; he is often referred to as having been the “head” of the department of psychiatry because he was (deep breath) “chairman of the executive committee of the consolidated departments of psychiatry” (1980-1986); he’d also founded and was for many years (in the 1970s) the head of the department of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals.
[3] His earliest report on alien encounters (1991) was submitted to two psychiatry journals but we do not believe he submitted it to the New England Journal of Medicine. Garrison likely heard a story recounted by attorney Daniel Sheehan in which it is asserted that editor Arnold Relman directed his staff to reject any submissions from Mack. (Relman was later made the head of the ad hoc committee that investigated Mack at Harvard from 1994-1995.) Although the anecdote that Mack’s report was “returned unread” may be apocryphal, Mack said something about this in a letter to his lead attorney, Eric MacLeish, during that investigation:
“My situation is typified, I think, by a conversation I had with Marcia Angell, now Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, when she was a senior associate editor under Relman. I consulted her soon after I started doing this work about what I should do, wondering if I might submit a paper to the New England Journal. She cautioned me that no matter how good a paper I might write, there was a very good chance that it would not be accepted because the findings would so violate the reviewers’ view of reality. I did not find this encouraging as far as the peer review route was concerned, but if I can emerge from this period of affliction I would still like to pursue that route.” (letter from Mack to MacLeish, Nov 3, 1994)
Mack had a better reception at the journal Psychiatry, of the Washington School of Psychiatry. Editor David Reiss wrote these kind words to Mack:
“Your [report] on abduction phenomena poses the same dilemma for me that your patients suffering from this syndrome pose to you. Can I believe any of this? You will note we gave the manuscript an extra dose of reviewers and all of them urge me to publish your piece, in some form or other. This does not make my task any easier since I am acutely aware that a publicly identified editor will catch a great deal of heat while anonymous reviewers can be boldly open to radical ideas while fully protected by the shadows of their anonymity. Despite the covey of reviewers, I am on my own on this – as you have been. What attracts me about your submission, frankly, is not its extraterrestiality but its empathy. The core of your piece is not so much that you find these stories credible but that you have recognized that these people are not exhibitionists or actors but, in many if not most cases, genuinely terrified. I also absorbed this material by trying to hear your dilemma: if these people are really terrified and we can’t find reasons to feel this is all self-generated and we have ruled out more common sources of terror, what is going on here?”
Reiss would have published the report, if Mack worked on it some more. But by the time of Reiss’ reply (March 26, 1993), Mack was already expanding it into a book – a decision which Arnold Relman later described as negligent, writing, “We do not fault him for writing a popular book about his work … but we do criticize him for neglecting to report his results fully to his professional peers in academic psychiatry.” (Relman, Brandt, Shore, 1994. Draft Report of the Ad Hoc Committee)