John E. Mack and the Unbelievable UFO Truth

Michael J. Socolow looks back at the controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

By Michael J. SocolowSeptember 21, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Biography & Autobiography

• Cultural Studies

ON SEPTEMBER 27, 2004—20 years ago this month—an American man in London was walking alone back to his hotel after dinner with friends. As he stepped off the curb on Totteridge Lane, he looked the wrong way. A car bore down upon him, and struck him.

Dr. John E. Mack, one of the world’s foremost psychiatric experts, was killed by a drunk driver. He was 74 years old.

Mack had been serving as the head of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School since 1977. A remarkable polymath with a long and distinguished career, Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1977 for his brilliant A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. Mack’s presence in London that evening had been occasioned by his participation in a conference on the legacy of his biography’s subject, Lawrence of Arabia.

Yet by 2004, Mack’s reputation among his colleagues at Harvard, and in the wider psychoanalytic community of the United States, had suffered significant damage. Over the previous several years, Mack had dedicated much effort to investigating an idiosyncratic and seemingly unserious scholarly pursuit: the reality of alien abduction.

Mack’s studies of UFOs and encounters with extraterrestrial life, and his public statements, popular books, TV appearances, and conference speeches, had incited scandal—and even scorn—among his learned colleagues. Asserting the sanity of those claiming alien encounters, and, by extension, his belief in the probability that such improbable experiences had actually occurred, sparked suspicion and incredulity in the academic community.

Had he lived, Mack might have been gratified to witness, in 2023, the public testimony of three military veterans before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in Washington, DC, about UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), now called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). The controversial and widely covered testimony evidences continued public fascination with the possibility that other beings out there might have visited us on earth. Mack was convinced that his patients were telling the truth, and millions believed him—although many serious scholars did not.

The tragic car accident in London 20 years ago erased popular memory of the public and institutional controversies spawned by Mack’s quirky research. Yet Mack’s story lends relevant context to several of today’s challenges in describing and communicating reality. In 2024, with discussion flourishing everywhere about misinformation, disinformation, and whether shared communicative realities can even exist, revisiting Mack’s work offers timely lessons concerning the boundaries of inquiry. His quest to explore, and tentatively confirm, the veracity of stories so outlandish as to be almost laughable seemed almost humorous decades ago. That he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss alien abduction only served to further distance his research from serious academic inquiry.

Judging by the attention lavished on Mack, the media and American public loved the incongruity of a Harvard Medical School professor seriously investigating the same stories they laughed at on late-night comedy shows. Judging by the institutional investigation launched against Mack, Harvard felt its reputation was harmed by Mack’s quixotic efforts. When asked in a 1994 TV interview how his colleagues viewed his work, Mack admitted that “the acting chair of [his] department […] says ‘I wish John weren’t doing this.’”

Mack’s academic reputation unquestionably suffered. It was not simply his commitment to an esoteric topic—analysis of eccentric subjects has never been foreign to academia—but also the ways in which his work spoke to a sensitive contemporaneous public controversy. The early 1990s was the era of “the memory wars” in psychiatry and psychology, marked by the questioning of Freud’s methods, and Mack’s analyses were based on abductees’ memories. His alien abduction research occurred as the therapeutic community grappled with “recovered memory” and other novel interpretations of clients’ narratives. That Mack employed hypnosis and other alternative modalities to help abductees access their memories made his assertions even more controversial.

Despite not relishing the controversies or investigations, Mack loved his new subject. It seemed to reinvigorate his curiosity and reenergize his career. “Some other intelligence is reaching out to us. It’s the most exciting work I’ve ever done,” he told Psychology Today in 1994. His book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, was published that year by Scribner, which reportedly paid him a $200,000 advance ($429,642 in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars). Abduction arrived at the perfect cultural moment, as public interest in recovered memory, lurid tabloid sensationalism, and extraterrestrial mystery was soaring. The book’s promotional tour turned Mack into a minor celebrity.

In vintage videos, Mack comes across as a curious, patient, and inquisitive scholar. In a coat and tie and argyle socks, he looks professorial, especially when seated next to a patient relaying their often traumatic abduction story. He speaks authoritatively, but in a measured and calm tone.

Throughout his career, Mack valued public engagement. He felt that his education and scholarship conferred social responsibilities. He had been a founding director of the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age, and a member of both Physicians for Social Responsibility, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Yet his work on alien abduction eventually made him suspicious of the media and its ability to relay accurate summaries of his findings. He instructed his assistants to very carefully vet all interview requests, and he was particularly sensitive to any communication with his colleagues at Harvard.

Mack’s interest in alien abduction was first sparked by a meeting, in January 1990, with a New York City author-artist who shared his interest in alternative psychotherapeutic modalities. That author, Budd Hopkins, had written a best-selling book about alien abduction. When reviewing interviews and testimonies of abductees, Mack was particularly struck by one specific aspect he identified, as reported in the Psychology Today profile: “[T]he internal consistency of the highly detailed accounts [of abduction] by different individuals who would have had no way to communicate with one another.” Starting in 1990, Mack began seeing and evaluating abductees, employing controversial applied analytical modalities, such as hypnotic regression, to obtain their stories. In all, he treated approximately 90 clients, of which 13 served as case studies for Abducted.

Mack eventually settled on several “factors” that skeptics of alien abduction needed to refute to disprove his theory:

[T]he extreme consistency of the stories from person after person. […]

[T]he fact that there is no ordinary experiential basis for this. In other words, there’s nothing in [abductees’] life experience that could have given rise to this, other than what they say. In other words, there’s no mental condition that could explain it. […]

[T]he physical aspects: the cuts and the other lesions on [abductees’] bodies, which do not follow any psychodynamic distribution […]

[T]he tight association with UFOs, which are often observed in the community, by the media, independent of the person having the abduction experience, who may not have seen the UFO at all, but reads or sees on the television the next day that a UFO passed near where they were when they had an abduction experience.

And […] the phenomenon occur[ring] in children as young as two, two and a half, three years old.

Mack’s opponents and detractors chose either to ignore his challenge or simply dismiss his methods as unscientific. For example, two Harvard psychologists pointed out that American popular culture was so filled with UFO stories that any community of abductees describing similar experiences could result from regular exposure to movies, books, and TV; The X-Files debuted in 1993 with an alien abduction story and cover-up.

As if scripted by Chris Carter, the 2023 UFO congressional testimony featured a whistleblower, David Grusch, who claimed that there are secret government programs researching alien bodies and ships. Others testified to having seen things that could only be alien vessels. The US government denied and dismissed all of the claims. Officially and publicly, when it comes to UFOs, certainty is preferred to curiosity. Despite the government’s seeming aversion to seriously engaging the subject, it remains an enormously popular object of curiosity. Historian Greg Eghigian’s After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. In August, HarperCollins imprint William Morrow published Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs by Luis Elizondo, which is climbing bestseller lists.

In 1996, PBS devoted an episode of Nova to extraterrestrial life, balancing Mack against skeptics. One of those skeptics was the beloved Carl Sagan. “Many of the principal advocates of UFO abduction seem to want the validation of science without submitting to its rigorous standards of evidence,” Sagan explained. He dismissed the evidentiary basis for Mack’s works as simple narratives: “Someone says something happened to them … And, people can say anything. The fact that someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true. Doesn’t mean they’re lying, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.” Mack later publicly complained about his treatment in the Nova episode, arguing that it misrepresented his work.

By that point, Mack had survived a challenge more career-threatening than inaccuracies in popular media. In June 1994, Harvard Medical School administrators informed Mack they were opening an investigation, to be led by Professor Emeritus Arnold Relman (a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine), into whether his research aligned with accepted modes of ethical scientific inquiry. Though the investigation was meant to be kept strictly confidential, one of Mack’s attorneys alerted people in the UFO and abductee community about it, and news spread. Rumors abounded that Mack’s tenure might be revoked and he might even be fired. Over the next 14 months, as Mack (and his team of attorneys) jousted with the investigators, the controversy broke beyond academia to the mainstream press. “They tried to criticize me, silence me—by saying that by supporting the truth of what these people were experiencing, possibly I was confirming them in a distortion, or a delusion,” Mack told the BBC. “So instead of being a good psychiatrist and curing them, I was, by taking them seriously, confirming them in a delusion and harming them.”

In the end, the committee’s investigation, in August 1995, “reaffirmed Dr. Mack’s academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment,” but a separate letter from the dean of Harvard Medical School put concerns about Mack’s methods and research conduct officially on the record.

Rather than surrender, Mack fought back. He published a sequel to Abducted in 1999 (titled Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters). “He’s not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore,” Arnold Relman told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. Further damaging his scholarly reputation was the revelation that a journalist named Donna Bassett had faked an abduction story that fooled Mack. Shortly before he was killed in London, Mack’s friends and colleagues had been lamenting the current state of his reputation due to his commitment to such a disreputable subject. But it was not simply the topics of extraterrestrial life and alien encounters that damaged Mack’s considerable reputation. By 2004, his technique of “hypnotic regression” had been largely dismissed; in an article in The Lancet about Mack, Harvard clinical psychiatry professor Edward Khantzian summed it up as a “faulty instrument.” Mack’s side had lost the memory wars.

After the fatal accident, the legacy of Mack’s work faded quickly. Periodically, it would be recalled—mostly as a strange curiosity in the history of psychiatric research. But no scholar of Mack’s reputation or station seriously engaged or extended his research. Twenty years after John E. Mack’s death, we might benefit from reflection on his quest for truth. Mack pursued seemingly absurd questions about human experience with an open mind and well-informed curiosity.

By investigating a contemporary phenomenon existing at the nexus of popular culture, scientific knowledge, and myth, Mack encouraged us all to open our minds to the possibility of realities we might instinctively disbelieve. His work continues on at the John Mack Institute. Although legitimate scientific method might originate in skepticism, such critical disbelief must always remain intertwined with trust in discovery. He pushed us to question our certitudes and to always remain curious and creative in our thinking. To learn, Mack taught us, the element of wonder must always be present.

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Featured image from The Oprah Winfrey Show, 1994.