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by Joe Eich-Bonni
Boston's Weekly Dig
February 7–14, 2001
Vol. 3, No. 6
from
JohnEMackInstitute Website
John E. Mack is a Doctor of
Psychiatry and a professor at Harvard University.
At 71 years old he might have retired by
now, but he’s a doer and always has been. After attending Harvard’s
Medical School he went on to found the Psychiatric Department at
Cambridge Hospital. And somehow, while exemplifying himself in his
chosen field of study, particularly within the realm of studying
repressed and screen memories associated with family trauma, he
found the time to win a Pulitzer Prize for a biography he penned on
T.E. Lawrence.
Yes, that would be Lawrence of Arabia.
However, it would not be his Pulitzer Prize, or his founding of a
respected psychiatric department, or his list of academic
credentials with one of the most storied universities in the world,
that would gain him his greatest degree of recognition.
No, it would be something far more
unexpected, strange, and what some might even consider bizarre.
In 1994, Dr. Mack authored a book called Abduction, which chronicled
the stories of dozens of people claiming to have been abducted by
aliens. Released around the same time as the premiere of the
X-Files, Abduction grabbed the attention of an American public,
whose interest in all things alien was at an all-time high.
But good timing wasn’t the only reason
Abduction made such an impact. Dr. Mack’s pedigree lent credibility
to the abduction phenomena.
Dr. Mack looked at the abductees he
worked with, not as suffering from some sort of hysteria, but as
having gone through a transforming, if unexplainable event. In
Abduction, Mack posited that the abductees hadn’t imagined or
fabricated the experiences they described; instead, the events they
suffered were real, only we, the observers, needed to change, or
more accurately expand, our definition of what is real in order to
begin to understand them.
Dr. John Mack, you see, thinks there may
be aliens among us, and he thinks there very well may have always
been.
In his new book,
Passport To The Cosmos - Human Transformation
And Alien Encounters (1999), Dr. Mack writes on his
discoveries, both personal and scientific, after studying over 200
cases of ‘anomalous experiences.’
In Passport… the doctor widens
the range of experiences he studied in Abduction, this time
including not only those claiming to have been abducted by aliens
but also other “daimonic realities” (unseen realities or forces that
manifest in the physical world) including Shamanistic beliefs.
In Passport To The Cosmos, Dr.
Mack likens the abduction phenomena to what mystics and
spiritualists from non-western traditions have described for untold
centuries in stories of ‘starpeople’ or makuras, beings that,
according to Brazilian Shamanisitic tradition, “came from high up in
the sky.”
Ultimately in Passport… Mack
observes that in cultures that do not so sharply divide the realm of
the spiritual and the realm of the scientific as westerners do, such
anomalous experiences like abduction, out of body experiences and a
variety of other states of alternative consciousness and states of
being, are not dismissed or even looked at as aberrant.
In Passport, Dr. Mack revisits
the need for observers of this phenomena to change their ontology
and develop new epistemologies, that is, change their definition of
reality and devise new ways and systems of learning – ways of
studying things – in order to simply understand the evidence
presented, not necessarily prove or disprove the events professed by
witnesses.
In a daring step, the good doctor, after
interviewing hundreds of experiencers, as he prefers to calls them,
asks his readers and more importantly his peers in various
scientific disciplines, to expand our worldview and accept concepts
often left to
shamans and
quantum physicists, the dark witch doctors
of the spiritual and scientific communities respectively, and accept
not only concepts of multiple and parallel universes, but to accept
that sometimes things happen, even if there is no evidence, as we
have come to understand evidence, to support the events or results
that lie before us.
In Abduction, Mack made note of his time examining family
traumas and work he had done in the past involving repressed
memories, events forgotten consciously for years but suddenly,
unexpectedly, and sometimes to initial detriment, dredged up to the
present, and screen memories, a fictional set of memories created to
replace real events, often too painful to deal with consciously in
one’s day-in and day-out life.
His work with patients suffering from
these problems due to personal trauma and his knowledge and use of
relaxation and meditative techniques to allow patients to achieve an
altered state of consciousness, states often more receptive to
discovering altered memories, made the doctor a perfect candidate to
work with individuals claiming to have been abducted.
Through researchers like UFOlogist Budd Hopkins, Dr. Mack was
introduced to many abductees, and over the last decade or so he has
come to discover a number of patterns in the experiences of these
people. Issues of veracity, corroboration and deception on the part
of those he studies have been some of the criticisms levied against
the doctor by critics, but over time Dr. Mack has quelled most of
his critics through methodical study and documentation of his work.
Even his cronies at Harvard have been
mostly quieted.
The patterns or common elements he has
discovered can be broken into four parts:
-
medical and surgical elements of
the abduction, including an introduction of the abductee to
alien/human hybrid projects
-
an ecological aspect of the
visitation, including aliens imparting information important
about the survival of the planet and the human species
-
a transformative, ‘consciousness
expanding’ phenomenon of abductees
-
development, over
time, of relationships with these beings by the abductees
rather than the perpetuation of the abductee’s belief that
they are just victims
Almost as important as the development
of consistent patterns among those he has studied was Mack’s ability
to parallel these elements to the mystic traditions of tribal and
native cultures throughout the world.
Essentially, what Dr. Mack has been
discovering may have been poo-pooed by modern western science, but
it isn’t anything new to history or dozens of other cultures older
than our own.
In Passport To The Cosmos, Dr. Mack explains his own
transformation by explaining he was,
“...faced with the choice of either
trying to fit these individuals’ reports in a framework that fit
my worldview – they were having fantasies, strange dreams,
delusions or some other distortion of reality – or of modifying
my worldview to include the possibility that entities, beings,
energies – something – could be reaching my clients from another
realm.
The first choice was compatible with
my worldview, but it did not fit the clinical data.
The second was inconsistent with my
philosophical grounding, and with conventional assumptions about
reality, but appeared to fit better what I was finding. It
seemed to be more logical, and intellectually more honest to
modify my cosmology than to continue trying to force my clients
into molds that did not suit them.”
It’s statements like this that would get
Dr. Mack some unexpected, and not necessarily appreciated, attention
from his peers at Harvard.
In his new book he even jokes about some
of the concerns his peers had about his new found foray into, and
his convictions regarding, the paranormal after the release of
Abduction.
“One of the deans at the Harvard
Medical School handed me a letter that called for the
establishment of a small committee to investigate my work. After
explaining vaguely that ‘concerns’ had been expressed to the
university about what I was doing, (although he told of no
specific complaint, nor was any offered in the letter), he added
pleasantly – for he had been a friend and colleague – that I
would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the
book that my findings might require a change in our view of
reality rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric
syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.”
Dr. Mack relays this story to me again a
few days ago.
I was lucky enough to get a few minutes
of the good doctor’s time to talk to him about the decade he has
spent studying the abduction phenomena and how it has affected him
both professionally and personally, and ultimately, to find out what
all this means to him, someone whose credentials are enviable to say
the least, and who answered such criticisms by colleagues by
ultimately founding a multidisciplinary study group of the phenomena
in 1999 - with the assistance of the very same university that had
just five years earlier called his work into question.
“I’ve been connected with Harvard
since I was a medical student – and I’ve been a faculty member
for many years. I had, by and large, nothing but support from
Harvard until 1994. I guess I had quite a high profile in the
media. Someone objected, I don’t really know who or what
happened but someone asked why was this professor going around
saying that little green men were taking our children into
spaceships.
So there was damage control – a
committee appointed to investigate my work – after 15 months
there was a more or less amicable agreement – they didn’t find
anything wrong with my work but they didn’t like my findings. We
simply agreed that I would continue to follow the standards of
the Harvard Medical School, which had never been all that clear
in the first place, but since then I have continued to do my
work without any problems.
“One of the recommendations [of the committee] was that I should
involve more colleagues, that I should create a
multidisciplinary study group to look at the phenomena from many
points of view. A historian at Harvard struggled with the
phenomena and called it a ‘wily reality’ – she couldn’t put this
phenomena into any category. It couldn’t be reduced to something
else – the phenomena held up and the meeting brought dignity to
the field.
Theologians, philosophers,
historians, all got together, all looking at this from different
points of view and asking how we could wrap our minds around
this thing which so radically veers from our reality. That
meeting helped to push the whole respectability of these types
of anomalies forward.”
Previous to the study group held in ’99,
Dr. Mack had years earlier, in 1993, founded the Program for
Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER).
PEER is a unique
organization combining research and education. Originally funded by
Laurence Rockefeller and having
roots in the Center for Psychology & Social Change, which was
originally and for many years an affiliate of the Harvard Medical
School, PEER, a non-profit organization, takes on the scientific,
yet inescapably social, challenge surrounding the study of reports
of extraordinary experiences.
PEER has been contacted by over 10,000
persons interested in learning more about anomalous experiences and
themselves.
The establishment of PEER, along with the multidisciplinary Study
Group held in ’99, the release of two books by a respected Harvard
Psychiatrist, and the increasing awareness of and compassion for
abductees by medical professionals, has meant increased respect for
experiencers.
Mack tells me,
“In the critical, scientific world I
think that slowly there are clinicians coming to see these
people – and there are many types of anomalous experiences –
near death, telekinesis, hauntings; a whole realm of spooky
paranormal and supernatural events that are increasingly being
seen as part of the natural world – as part of our basic
reality.
By avoiding [studying these
anomalous events] we do endless harm to our planet. In a sense
we have rid the planet of the entire spirit world and thereby
have turned the whole earth into a marketplace of resources to
be commandeered by the more aggressive among us.”
Mack explains that all along, one of his
biggest challenges has been convincing peers to move away from the
concept of proving or disproving whether these events have occurred,
and instead, just studying the anecdotal evidence the experiencers
provide.
To that end, Passport… reads a
little more like a Parapsychology 101 textbook than a history
of abductee stories. The good doctor lays out very succinctly the
challenges facing professionals attempting to study issues that
science has traditionally ignored.
Over the last ten years, Dr. Mack has
been building a framework of sorts for clinicians to study the
paranormal.
When I ask him if he perhaps pioneered
the concept that issues of spirituality and ‘super-science’ (as
opposed to science fiction – in other words, scientific ideas or
concepts that have not or even can not be proven by science’s
current understanding of the universe, but nevertheless exist
insofar as some can anecdotally describe the events) can be
documented and analyzed in a scientific manner, his reply is amusing
and humble.
“I don’t know what I’ve done because
it is hard to separate what you do yourself within a whole shift
in the field of consciousness – what I can say is that there is
increasing recognition. We have been operating form a limited
epistemology.
The scientific method, which is very
effective in learning about the material world, falls short when
it comes to studying things ‘beyond the veil’ – the
trans-personal realm, spirit world, holotropic world,
morphogenic field – all deeper realities that are not
immediately apparent to the senses but can be reached through
non-ordinary states of consciousness. The scientific method
provides an opportunity for experimentation and replication and
control but this new epistemology (of consciousness or holistic
knowing) is the one that is suitable for studying these unseen
realms.
The experiences themselves are the
primary incidences and they can only be known mind to mind. What
I may have had some effect on is increasing the respect of this
way of knowing – that these unseen realms are best observed
through direct knowing, not by traditional scientific methods of
experimentation replication and measurement by instruments.
Until recently, that could which not
be known by these methods was simply dismissed as not worth
studying so I hope that what I have done, along with others
studying near death experiences, past lives, out of body
experiences – all of which reveal these deeper realties beyond
then immediately apparent - is to make these domains respectable
ideas of scientific study and exploration.”
And finally, I ask the good doctor, are
the abductions real in his opinion?
“If by real you mean ‘in the
physical world entirely,’ I would not say that about these
experiences.
There are physical elements to them – marks on
bodies, UFOs and lights seen by several witnesses, even those
observed to be missing by others – but rarely – but the
experience as a whole cannot be said to be in this material
world.
But if real means something that is
powerfully significant whether or not it is material or existing
in another dimension of reality – if we open reality to all
sorts of realms beyond three dimensions, some of which are only
accessible to non-traditional states of consciousness – if we
mean by real that we live in a
multi-dimensional universe of
which our three-dimensional world is only part of the whole –
than yes they are real.”
Letter to the Editor
Editor's Reply
Boston's Weekly Dig
February 21–28, 2001
Vol. 3, No. 8
Joe,
Your article on John E. Mack is part of disturbing trend,
as of late, in some of Boston's local papers and magazines.
Along with psychic readings at the Tremont Tea Room, ear
candling and others, Dr. Mack's work on the subject of “alien
abduction” falls firmly into the realm of pseudo-science or
outright fallacy.
What is not revealed in your article is the method used to
determine "abduction". One of the key problems inherent in Dr.
Mack and his associate Budd Hopkin's approach to decide whether
they are dealing with a case of abduction is to question their
subjects with a battery of inquiries skewed towards the
abduction theory.
Dr. Mack also uses the example of Brazilian makuras as
evidence of the abduction phenomenon's pan-cultural existence.
Alien abduction has had parallels drawn to the old Faerie
legends; with their faerie rings, tales of being spirited away
and of infants being taken and replaced with changelings.
That these similarities exist should
not immediately be taken as validation of the phenomena
(certainly few today would say that faeries exist and are the
culprits for such ‘occurrences’). Instead, could we not consider
that yes, indeed, [there] might be a collective psychological
experience at work and that, based upon the prevailing culture,
these experiences are given a name, face and identity? “Makuras,”
“faeries,” “aliens?”
Although I cannot at this time provide you with the anecdotal
instances, there have been studies which suggest that certain
natural phenomena, such as ball-lightning, might “short-circuit”
the brain's electro-chemical signals and induce a state which
gives rise to hallucinations and emotional states which coincide
with those reportedly experienced during alien abduction
scenarios.
Dr. Mack's imploring his colleagues to accept a universe that
cannot be defined by scientific methods flies in the face of all
that is science. What he recommends is not fact, [and is] not a
rational, definable quantity. It is closer to the faith of
religion than to the inquiry of science. His theories and those
of other paranormal researchers are not, as he states, “part of
our basic reality.” They are the exact opposite.
That there are whole cultures that
accept these supposed phenomena as fact does not prove they are
fact. It is unfortunate that a person of such standing and
accomplishment as Dr. Mack did not feel that he was dealing with
"a new psychiatric syndrome [for which a] cause had not yet been
established".
If he had, perhaps we would have a
true and rational explanation for these phenomena and claims.
Instead, it seems, he has fallen into the trap of being seduced
by the fantastic. I am somewhat disheartened to see that the
Weekly Dig has as well.
Still your friend and admirer,
J.N.
Reply from the Editor:
Often, when criticizing the work of
paranormal investigators like Dr. Mack, debunkers themselves
resort to anecdotal evidence rather than hard evidence. Dr. Mack
has been peer reviewed by none other than the folks at Harvard
and none of them found him to be leading his patients or forcing
a panacea on them.
As he explained in both book and
interview, those reviewing his work didn’t like his findings but
could find no real problems with his methodologies. No doubt
that when artist turned hypnotist Budd Hopkins introduced
America to the concept of alien abduction and repressed memories
in the 70s, people were justifiably skeptical, but Mack’s
involvement over the last decade has brought new respect - and
controversy - to the field.
However, as long as debunkers use
vague accusations of ‘leading’ a patient without evidence that
Mack has done so, you all do nothing to help your argument.
Whether Faeries or Aliens, a long cross-cultural history of
star-people and mysterious abductions permeates mankind’s
mythos. Even if, as you say, there may be a “collective
psychological experience at work,” from where did it originate?
Such a suggestion is open to just as much if not more
questioning than Mack’s observations that these people genuinely
experienced something (something unexplainable) by today’s
limitations of scientific inquiry.
And I think that’s the key here: questioning.
Remember, we could
have picked up the phone and called
MUFON (The Mutual UFO
Network) and interviewed any number of persons investigating
the abduction phenomenon - instead, we profiled a respected and
dedicated, brilliant local doctor who has changed the minds of
many and challenged most of the rest who have come to know his
work on this topic.
In 1999 Harvard and the Doctor hosted an event where many
scientists in many fields debated the phenomenon. Interestingly
enough, those involved in some very high-sciences like
experimental physics had far less difficulty in accepting the
multi-universal terms in which Mack speaks. Recent scientific
discoveries challenging the Standard Model, accelerating and
decelerating light and quantum research have all begun to
unravel and yet improve our basic knowledge of physics and the
universe.
Those who have witnessed Einstein’s
and Newton’s discoveries miss the mark firsthand often don’t
find the concept of extra-dimensional existence all that
unscientific.
That is not the same as saying they believe in the
abduction phenomenon, but such new thinking does allow for more
time to be spent on asking,
“What happened to these people?” as
opposed to, “Did anything happen to these people?”
Reaching for the stars,
Joe Eich-Bonni
Boston's Weekly Dig
[1] Clarification: The
Multidisciplinary Study Group held in April 1999 at the Harvard
Divinity School included academics from Harvard and other
institutions from around the country, but the meeting was
sponsored by Dr. Mack, not by Harvard itself. For a complete
report see
PEER Perspectives 3.
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