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Extraterrestrials
Become More than Academic Concern Second, announce you're pretty darn sure extraterrestrial beings have visited and continue to visit Earth, abducting human beings for sexual-reproductive studies and experimentation. Whoa! Hose out the rubber room. The professor's fallen into the Twilight Zone and he can't get up. Or maybe the professor is quite sane. That would certainly rattle intellectual complacency. Recently, it did. Harvard's Medical School has just completed a closed-door review of the research and related activities of one of its tenured professors, John Mack. He's a psychiatrist and has been a member of Harvard's faculty for more than 30 years. The probe drew sharp criticism from some of Harvard's faculty who considered it a violation of the academic freedom which tenure is designed to protect. Others welcomed the investigation. These latter perhaps remembered some poorly designed and controlled experiments involving LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs that took place on Harvard's campus in the counter-culture 1960s and early 1970s. Many involved Dr. Timothy Leary, a professor who theorized that hallucinogenic drugs enhance human creativity and intellectual abilities. Leary's experiments, some involving students, proved little save the seductive power of these drugs and their ability to induce unpredictable hallucinations. While Leary became a hero to and apologist for the emerging anti-establishment drug culture, he was a gross embarrassment to the university and all its research programs. He was finally ousted, with difficulty. One presumes this ghost of academic freedom gone berserk still haunts Harvard Yard. Otherwise, it seems doubtful John Mack would have been obliged to undergo scrutiny for his theorizing concerning extraterrestrials. Mack won a Pulitzer Prize for an insightful biography of T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. Last year another of Mack's books was published. This one is titled, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. The book describes the remembered and half-remembered experiences of many living people who believe they have been taken aboard space ships, some more than once, and subjected to strange sexually focused biological experiments. Mack interviewed the alleged abductees individually and in groups many times in various settings. He subjected them to extensive psychological testing. In TV interviews, Mack has said his first impression was that all these people must be suffering from some delusional disorder. After much study, however, he said he became convinced these subjects were emotionally sound and stable. He came to believe some event took place very much as these subjects said it took place, and that the only reasonable explanation is (gasp) alien abduction. Of course, Mack's work was investigated. Last week, however, the dean of Harvard Medical School announced no action will be taken. All right. Now, can anyone tell me why the U.S. government isn't hip-deep in UFO research and the sharing of its findings with us? Apparently, not everyone who believes UFOs are spacecraft, not weather balloons, is mad. Increasingly, people of polished academic credentials are lending credence to the concept of visits to Earth from beings from Elsewhere. It's long past time we, the people, find out what's going on. We may have much more and worse than Bosnia to fret — and one Harvard professor is quite enough to tell us all we need to know.
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