Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who was killed in a road accident in north London last year, did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job, hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere him. (An article based upon a BBC Radio 4 radio program, Abduction, Alienation and Reason, originally broadcast June 8, 2005).
Dr. Mack’s thoughts on family-friend David Grinspoon’s take on the paradigmatic gulf that separates mainstream astrobiology from the world of those who believe alien contact has already taken place.
A Harvard professor killed in London last week had been vilified for his belief in the ‘third realm’. His theories may not be as mad as some think says Bryan Appleyard.
When John Mack was in Australia I supported his research into indigenous aboriginal abduction & UFO experiences – an area we both had a strong interest in, particularly its shamanic dimensions. I recently went through the final editing of my forthcoming book, from which some discussions about John’s legacy had been deleted. This forum and this time seems like a good place to post that material….
A brief response to a discussion generated by an article in Psychology Today magazine, 2003. In this response, Mack declares “The idea…that we can learn about what matters to people simply by objectifying them is wrong.”
The scientific method has been highly successful in giving us reliable ways of knowing about the material world as we know it. But we have yet to develop methodologies that are as reliable with respect to matters that are not clearly in the objective or the subjective realms but seem to partake of both. In this paper I will consider the elements of an expanded epistemology which might help to legitimize experiences that are giving us vital information about the cosmos but which cannot be substantiated by the ways of knowing now considered reliable in Western culture.
A shortened version of the essay “Thinking Like A Cancer”.
Are we ready to admit this lesson of the Rio+5 and Kyoto environmental meetings: that we must finally give up hoping for environmental wisdom and political will from political leaders and their conferences? Perhaps we need to look elsewhere, to reconsider those visionary, religious traditions that would transform us. Certainly, by now there is a growing scientific consensus to help us along: if we value life on Earth, we must change our lives.
Highlights from a presentation at a favorite Cambridge book store, after the release of Passport to the Cosmos, in which Dr. Mack explains his reasons for writing a second book on the alien encounter experience.
Philosopher Ken Wilber’s dismissive column about experiencers, “Hick Alert,” in the Nov./Dec. 1999 UTNE Reader and Blend magazine provoked responses.
One of the difficulties of the alien encounter experience is trying to convey to others the kind of “place” or “landscape” of these anomalous visitations. Some encounters seem to be taking place in a realm that is not clearly recognizable as either outside of ordinary reality or within one’s interior world.
People over the centuries have reported being taken to strange places by non-human beings, some of whom reveal delightful or disturbing aspects of previously unknown dimensions of reality. How are we to understand the “educational” aspect of the alien encounter experience?
PEER’s former clinical director, Roberta Colasanti, LICSW, describes stages of integration that are often seen in people who seek clinical assistance in dealing with life-long alien encounter experiences. Excerpted from remarks made at a mutidisciplinary meeting of academicians convened by PEER at the Harvard Divinity School in April 1999.
Our mission is not to argue for or against the existence of aliens. We are saying, however, that we support John Mack’s contention that as a culture, our epistomology, our way of investigating the origin, methods and the limits of human knowledge must be expanded to include that human experience can be a legitimate way of knowing.
An excerpt, circa 1998, presenting Dr. Mack’s assessment of the possible nature of the human/alien “hybrid project”, including this statement: “This is not to say that the aliens or hybrids are not entirely real. Rather, I would argue that the process might be occurring largely in another realm, one with a different vibrational frequency, a kind of in-between domain — not pure formless spirit or dense matter — which, under certain circumstances, can penetrate our world, and be perceived with such vividness as to bring intense experiential conviction and even subtle physical manifestations for abductees… To some degree, then, the nature or quality of the hybrid project may reside in the eyes or co-creative consciousness of the beholders.”
As a historian, I have learned to take crazes like this as serious matters that can change society more dramatically than any official political policy. Skeptics find the urge to debunk such delusions overwhelming; that is understandable. But in spite of those who criticize with good sense and straight thinking, delusions change the world.
In the focus on the material realm to the exclusion of the subtle realms, we have virtually rid the cosmos of nature, rid nature of spirit and, in a sense, denied the existence of all life other than that which is physically observable here on Earth.
A committee at Harvard Medical School is investigating a prominent professor because of his research about people who say they have been abducted now and again by little gray folks from outer space.
The Ariel School sighting is one of the most significant in recent UFO history. Even in their state of fear, many of the children reported also being curious and fascinated by the strange beings they saw, whose eyes in particular commanded an intense attention.
John has been much faulted for not being more scientific in his book [Abduction] but the topic of abductions does not neatly fit into what is “scientific,” but strays into philosophy and realms of the spirit… John can hardly be faulted for following this subject wherever it leads, and where it is appropriate to speak as a philosopher rather than a psychiatrist.
I don’t know if those of us who have never had our deepest-held beliefs dismissed as sick and ridiculous can begin to understand the overwhelming therapeutic value of simple respect. It’s hard, indeed, to find a downside in Mack’s trust: with nobody being sued or impugned (as in “repressed memories” of childhood abuse), his patients reportedly function better after their purgative sessions with him. If this is bad science, it may nonetheless be good medicine. …Yet, is it bad science?
While UFOs remain mired in fifties-style science fiction imagery, increasing numbers of UFO abductees, as well as the experts who treat them, say their experiences have as much to do with inner as outer space.
Presented at the International Transpersonal Association Conference on “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis: Toward a World with a Future,” held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 25 June 1992.
From the proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT, June 1992
…Even psychosocial or cultural explanations, if they were to include all of the major dimensions of the syndrome, would force us to stretch our notions of the collective unconscious to such a degree that the distinctions between psyche and world, internal and external reality, would be obliterated.
We hear the expression “consensus reality” used to distinguish the conventional Western/Newtonian/Cartesian world view from other possible philosophies or frameworks of thought. The frequent bracketing of these words in writing and conversation implies that there is one accepted version of reality that includes a social agreement about what the mind may or may not legitimately countenance.
