I have always been uncomfortable with the alien abduction phenomena.
This is mostly because of the possibility of applying the Luminous
Dream conjecture which is a way of eliminating the sheer lack of
physical evidence of almost any kind but merely begs understanding
human auto imagination. The continuing stream of abductee reports
and a couple of specific independent eyewitness reports makes this
increasingly difficult.
Without question the experience all wraps around the collection of
physical data from the victims, while occasionally becoming a short
conversation, much as a doctor would do to make one comfortable.
Little meaningful information is actually shared except warnings to
be careful.
This reports brings us up to date and tightens things up by focusing
on the efforts of John Edward Mack. That he was forced to conclude
that these reports are clearly truthful is telling. The point is
that he also paid the price of introducing this phenomena to a wider
audience and made is possible for others to step up as much as
possible.
The problem with UFO's and abduction phenomena is the evidence. We
have an amazing amount of eye witness reports from completely
creditable people. What we lack is a testable interpretation. At
least Bigfoot produces tracks.
The closest that I have seen is night cameras catching a transition.
Perhaps we need to go the mile on this as we need to do with Bigfoot.
We are fighting a clear avoidance scenario here.
Alien Nation: Have
Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?
A prestigious Harvard psychiatrist, John Edward Mack, thought so.
His sudden death leaves behind many mysteries.
By Ralph Blumenthal
If you’re abducted
by alien beings, are you physically absent?
This happens to be an
important issue for the media-shy people gathered one afternoon last
July on the porch of Anne Ramsey Cuvelier’s blue Victorian inn on
Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, once called “the most elegantly
finished house ever built in Newport.” Co-designed in 1869 by a
cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, it has been in Cuvelier’s family
since 1895, when her great-grandfather bought it as a summer getaway
from his winter home blocks away, just as the Gilded Age cottages of
the Vanderbilts and Astors began springing up across the island,
redefining palatial extravagance. Still imposing with its butternut
woodwork, ebony trimmings, and four-story paneled atrium frescoed in
the Pompeian style, the harborside mansion turned B&B seemed a
fittingly baroque setting for the group of reluctant guests Cuvelier
describes as “not a club anyone wants to belong to.”
She had gathered them
to compare experiences as, well, “experiencers,” a term they
prefer to “abductees,” and to socialize free of stigma among
peers. Cuvelier, an elegant and garrulous woman in her 70s, isn’t
one of them. But she remembers as a teen in the 1940s hearing her
father, Rear Admiral Donald James Ramsey, a World War II hero,
muttering about strange flying craft that hovered and streaked off at
unimaginable speed, and she’s been an avid ufologist ever since. “I
want to get information out so these people don’t have to suffer,”
she says. “Nobody believes you. You go through these frightening
experiences, and then you go through the ridicule.”
So, for a week each
summer for almost two decades, she’s been turning away paying
guests at her family’s Sanford-Covell Villa Marina, on the
cobblestoned waterfront in Newport, to host these intimate gatherings
of seemingly ordinary folk with extraordinary stories, along with the
occasional sympathetic medical professional and scientist and other
brave or foolhardy souls not afraid to be labeled nuts for indulging
a fascination with the mystery. I had been invited as a journalist
with a special interest who has been talking to some of them for
several years.
Top, Betty and Barney
Hill pose with John G. Fuller’s book The Interrupted
Journey, which chronicles the 1961 abduction that the two say
they experienced.Above, a plaque in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
commemorating the Hills’ experience as “the first widely-reported
UFO abduction report in the United States.”
Perched on a wicker
settee was Linda Cortile, a mythic figure in the canons of abduction
literature, whom I’d come to know by her real name, Linda
Napolitano. A stylish young grandmother in a green T-shirt, black
shorts, and a charcoal baseball cap, she had agreed to meet me months
before at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport to point at her
12th-floor window overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, where, she says,
one night in 1989 three small beings levitated her “like an angel”
into a hovering craft in view of horrified witnesses, including, it
was said, a mysterious world figure who might have been abducted with
her. “If I was hallucinating,” she told me, “then the witnesses
saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the whole abduction
phenomenon.”
The short-haired
Florida woman in white capris and a fuchsia flowered blouse was, like
Cuvelier, not herself an abductee but the niece of two and the
co-author of a book on the first widely publicized and most famous
abduction case of all. Kathleen Marden, the director of abduction
research for the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, one of the oldest and
largest U.F.O.-investigating groups, was 13 in 1961, when her aunt
and uncle Betty and Barney Hill returned from a trip through the
White Mountains of New Hampshire with the stupefying tale of having
been chased by a giant flying disc that hovered over the treetops.
They said they had stopped for a look with binoculars, spotted
humanoid figures in the craft and, overcome with terror, sped away
with their car suddenly enveloped in buzzing vibrations. They reached
home inexplicably hours late and afterward recovered memories of
having been taken into the ship and subjected to frightening medical
probes. Their car showed some peculiar markings, and Betty’s dress
had been ripped, the zipper torn. She remembered that the aliens had
fumbled with her zipper before disrobing her for a pregnancy test
with a needle in her navel. I was surprised to hear from Marden (but
confirmed it) that the garment is preserved at the University of New
Hampshire, in Durham.
Also present was
Barbara Lamb, a tanned and gold-coiffed psychotherapist and family
counselor from Claremont, California, who studies crop circles, the
enigmatic patterns left in fields, often in England, and practices
regression therapy, treating personality disorders by taking people
back to previous lives. She told me what she remembered happened to
her about seven years earlier: “I was walking through my home and
there was standing this reptilian being. It was three in the
afternoon. I was alert and awake. I was startled somebody was there.”
Ordinarily, Lamb said, she is repulsed by snakes and lizards, “but
he was radiating such a nice feeling. I went right over and had my
hand out. He was taller than I, this close to me”—she held her
hands a foot apart—“with yellow reptile eyes. Then he was
suddenly gone.” She said she had recalled more of the encounter
when a colleague put her through hypnotic regression. “He said
telepathically, ‘Ha, Barbara, good, good. Now you know that we are
actually real. We do exist and have contacts with certain people.’”
Chatting with this
group were two astrophysicists from a leading institution and the
director of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital Southeast. I was
intrigued by these eminent outsiders, who may have been risking their
careers.
But I was interested
most of all in the dead man who remained an icon to many on the
porch. John Edward Mack, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, spent years trying to fathom
their stories and reached an astonishing conclusion: they
were telling the truth. That is, they were not insane or
deluded; in some unknown space/time dimension, something real had
actually happened to them—not that Mack could explain just what or
how. But weeks after attending the 2004 Newport gathering, days
before his 75th birthday, he looked the wrong way down a London
street and stepped in front of a drunk driver.
Aside from those of
his circle and university colleagues, Mack is scarcely known today.
But 20 years ago, when he burst onto the scene as the Harvard
professor who believed in alien abduction, he was probably the most
famous, or infamous, academic in America, “the most important
scientist ever to dare to admit the truth about the abduction
phenomenon,” in the words of Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling
memoir,Communion, introduced millions of Americans to alien
encounters.
Tall, impulsive, and
magnetic to women and men, Mack was everywhere, or so it seemed—on
Oprah and Nova; on the best-seller lists; in The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time; at his Laurance
S. Rockefeller–supported Program for Extraordinary Experience
Research; in scholarly journals, documentaries, poems, theater
pieces, and Roz Chast cartoons. And then suddenly he was under
investigation at Harvard, the target of a grueling inquisition. “I
didn’t think people would believe me,” Mack had confided to his
longtime assistant, Leslie Hansen, who was in Newport last July. “But
I didn’t think they’d get so mad.” In the end he achieved a
measure of vindication, but his freakish demise denied him a final
reckoning in an unpublished manuscript he saw as his cri de coeur
against scientific materialism and “ontological fascism.”
He left behind another
unpublished manuscript, with another mystery he was seeking to
unravel, a secret as dark as death itself. And now his interrupted
journey may be heading to the big screen. After a four-year
negotiation, the film and television rights to Mack’s story were
granted by the Mack family to MakeMagic Productions, which has
partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, and a major
feature film is currently in development. But two decades after Mack
took alien abduction from the pages of the National Enquirer to the
hallowed halls of Harvard, the question remains: why would a pillar
of the psychiatric establishment at America’s oldest university
court professional suicide to champion the most ridiculed and
tormented outcasts of society?
On Cuvelier’s porch,
a Vermont shopkeeper who wanted to be known as “Nona”—the way
Mack identified her in Passport to the Cosmos, his 1999 follow-up to
Abduction—remembered filling 300 pages with “abduction
recollections,” which Mack struggled to accept as real. Had she
actually traveled on shafts of crystalline light? “John, I know
when I’m physically gone,” she remembered replying. “I know
when I’m going through a wall.” Mack had had one nagging
disappointment, Nona recalled. He had never undergone an abduction,
or even spied a U.F.O.Why can’t I see one?, he wondered. Nona would
twit him. “Probably because you’re not patient enough, John.”
‘I was raised as the
strictest of materialists,” Mack told the writer C. D. B. Bryan. “I
believed we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe, on this
sometimes verdant rock with these animals and plants around, and we
were here to make the best of it, and when we’re dead, we’re
dead.” A great-grandfather of his had pioneered the use of
anesthetics in eye surgery, and a great-uncle had been one of the
first Jewish professors at Harvard Medical School. His father,
Edward, was a noted literary biographer and scholar at the City
College of New York who had remarried a widow with a young daughter
after his wife died of peritonitis eight months after John was born.
John’s socially prominent stepmother, Ruth Prince, was an eminent
feminist economist and New Dealer whose first husband, a
great-grandson of the founder of Gimbels department store, had jumped
or fallen from the 16th floor of the Yale Club as the Great
Depression deepened.
Mack graduated cum
laude from Harvard Medical School and, while only a resident, founded
one of the nation’s first outpatient hospitals. He took his
social-worker bride, Sally, to an Air Force posting in Japan and,
once home, introduced psychiatric services to incarcerated youths and
impoverished nursery schoolers. He started the first psychiatric
department at Cambridge hospital, winning a prize for a study of
childhood nightmares, a field he would explore further in his first
book, Nightmares and Human Conflict. His second book, a
groundbreaking psychological study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of
Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, won the Pulitzer Prize
for biography in 1977. He traveled in the Middle East, lecturing on
the Arab-Israeli conflict and going on “bomb runs,” traveling
from city to city warning what would happen if a one-mega-ton bomb
exploded overhead, and getting arrested with his family at
nuclear-test sites. He cornered Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the
H-bomb then pressing President Reagan for a Star Wars nuclear-weapons
shield in space. Teller denounced peacenik physicians and told Mack:
“If you are not in the pay of the Kremlin, you’re even more of a
fool.” After the cold war ended, Mack studied consciousness
expansion with Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychoanalyst who had
experimented with L.S.D. Grof and his wife, Christina, had developed
a breathing discipline called Holotropic Breathwork to induce an
expanded state of consciousness. In one breathwork session with
Russians at California’s Esalen Institute, Mack recounted that he
became, “a Russian-father in the 16th century whose four-year-old
son was being decapitated by Mongol hordes.’’ He owed a lot to
the Grofs, Mack later said. “They put a hole in my psyche, and the
U.F.O.’s flew in.”
Mack, at left,
performs an autopsy as a student at Harvard Medical School, 1951.
They flew in with a
man named Budd Hopkins.
It was January 10,
1990, Mack recalled, “one of those dates you remember that mark a
time when everything in your life changes.” A woman he had met at
the Grofs’ introduced him to Hopkins, a nationally known New York
Abstract Expressionist and intimate of Willem DeKooning, Jackson
Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, whose works
hung with his in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern
Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. According to Hopkins, he had
spotted a U.F.O. on Cape Cod in 1964, and he went on to investigate
the case of a badly shaken neighbor who had reported seeing a
spaceship with nine or ten small beings land in a park near Fort Lee,
New Jersey. Hopkins wrote a story about it for The Village Voice that
was picked up by Cosmopolitan. He was soon being thronged by
abductees, whom he examined under hypnosis, and he would win renown
as the father of the alien-abduction movement, starting with his
book Missing Time, in 1981, and its 1987 sequel, Intruders:
The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.
Hopkins was then
beginning his investigation of the so-called Brooklyn Bridge U.F.O.
abduction of the woman he called Linda Cortile, which would become
his third book, Witnessed, in 1996. It would involve two
security guards for an international figure Hopkins never named but
believed to be U.N. secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who,
Hopkins would conclude, appeared to have been abducted with her. (I
had a local reporter in Lima ask the 92-year-old retired Peruvian
diplomat directly about the matter in April 2012. He responded
enigmatically, saying, “I’m not interested in those types of
curiosities.” Asked if he recalled being questioned by Hopkins,
Pérez de Cuéllar, who was in the process of updating his 1997
memoirs, said, “I don’t remember, but it is possible. I can’t
assure it nor deny it. My memory at this age fails me.”)
Hopkins gave Mack a
box of letters from people reacting to aliens. “I think most of
these people are perfectly sane, with real experiences,” Hopkins
recalled telling Mack when I visited him in his art-filled Chelsea
town house shortly before his death of cancer at 80, in August 2011.
But, he added, Mack could decide for himself. He was the doctor.
“Nothing in my
nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack
later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters
with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have
been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them
seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries,
writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians,
psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a
gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not
begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality
“simply could not be.”
As he later said,
“These individuals reported being taken against their wills
sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to
elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive
purpose. In a few cases they were actually observed by independent
witnesses to be physically absent during the time of the abduction.
These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder, except
the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with powerful
emotion what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore these
experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends,
family members, or others in the community, including media reporters
and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the
individuals’ bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend
to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically
identifiable pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. In
short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be
explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the
framework of the Western scientific worldview.”
With the new
millennium, Mack began showing up at Newport, Leslie Hansen
remembered. She had been hired to help Mack transcribe recordings of
his sessions, and she came to believe in the process that she had
buried her own troubling childhood memories of aliens at her bedside.
Mack’s household was in turmoil. Sally was unhappy with Mack’s
treatment sessions in the house, especially the screams. Mack was
also deeply in love with his research associate, Dominique
Callimanopulos, the glamorous daughter of the Greek shipping tycoon
who owned Hellenic Lines. “John had a lot going on, but he was kind
of like a child,” Hansen recalled. “He kind of regarded every
person as a fresh slate.” And, she added, “he was very
attractive.” Hansen had heard about Cuvelier’s gatherings, and
she invited him to attend. Mack was dubious. “What’s this going
to cost me?,” he asked. Hansen laughed. “John,” she said,
“you’re a guest.”
Two years after
meeting Hopkins, Mack was working with dozens of experiencers, and
one day he told incredulous fellow psychiatrists at Cambridge
Hospital about alien abduction. In 1992 he and David E. Pritchard, a
pioneering physicist in atom optics at M.I.T., got that institution
to open its doors to a revolutionary alien-abduction conference. Mack
presented his findings, as did Hopkins and David M. Jacobs, an
associate professor of history at Temple University who was teaching
the nation’s only fully accredited college course on U.F.O.’s,
and who had just published a provocative book detailing alien
encounters, called Secret Life. C. D. B. Bryan, the author
of the best-seller Friendly Fire, was among a few select
writers invited, for another book, Close Encounters of the
Fourth Kind,which Knopf would publish in 1995.
“If what these
abductees are saying is happening to them isn’t happening,” Mack
demanded, “what is?”
Conferees argued over
the validity of a poll done by the Roper Organization for the hotel
and aerospace mogul and U.F.O. advocate Robert T. Bigelow that sought
for the first time to quantify alien abduction in America. Because
few were likely to admit to being an abductee, the pollsters asked
the 5,947 respondents if they had ever experienced five key
abduction-type symptoms: waking up paralyzed with the sense of a
strange presence or person in the room, missing time, feeling a
sensation of flying, seeing balls of light in the room, and finding
puzzling scars. (A trick question asked if “Trondant” held any
secret meaning for them. Anyone who answered yes to the nonsense word
was eliminated as unreliable.) Two percent of the respondents, or 119
people, acknowledged at least four of the five experiences, which
Roper said translated to 3.7 million adult Americans. At a minimum,
Hopkins reported, the results suggested that 560,000 adult Americans
might be abductees.
Mack, a year before
his death, with Budd Hopkins, the American artist and abduction
researcher, at the International U.F.O. Congress Awards in 2003.
The beings didn’t
have to come from outer space, Mack theorized, maybe just a parallel
universe. But by the time he wrote Abduction, he said his
cases had “amply corroborated” the work of Hopkins and Jacobs,
“namely that the abduction phenomenon is in some central way
involved in a breeding program that results in the creation of
alien/human hybrid offspring.” He concluded furthermore that the
aliens were carrying warnings about dangers to the planet; almost all
of his abductees emerged with “a commitment to changing their
relationship to the earth.”
Some respected
colleagues, asked to comment on his manuscript, were dismayed. Anyone
could espouse alien abduction, but Mack was a renowned Harvard
professor. “Can I believe any of this?,” wrote the editor of a
psychiatry journal who turned down publication even though all of the
peer reviewers urged it. An eminent Harvard ethicist and philosopher
responded: “Clearly you cannot easily go ahead with publication so
long as you do not have more incontrovertible evidence.” Even
Hopkins called Mack “gullible.”
Indeed, Mack soon
stepped into a minefield, adding to his circle of abductees a
37-year-old Boston writer who intrigued him with a bizarre tale of
being taken into a spaceship with Nikita Khrushchev and President
John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Then, saying she was
a double agent out to expose Mack’s U.F.O. cult, the woman, Donna
Bassett, supplied tapes of her sessions to Time, which
ambushed Mack with the hoax, calling him “The Man from Outer
Space.” Mack countered that Bassett had a troubled history at his
office, but the betrayal stung. The Boston Globe followed
up with a gleeful headline: ALIENS LAND AT HARVARD!
Undaunted, Mack
appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with five of his lucid,
articulate, and normal-acting abductees. “He believes them when
they say they have been on the aliens’ spaceships,” declared
Oprah. “And Dr. Mack believes them, he says, when they say that
they have had children with aliens.” Mack put it differently.
“Every other culture in history except this one, in the history of
the human race, has believed there were other entities, other
intelligences in the universe,” he said. “Why are we so goofy
about this? Why do we treat people like they’re crazy, humiliate
them, if they’re experiencing some other intelligence?”
Harvard had had
enough. In June 1994 it convened a confidential inquest under a
former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Professor
Emeritus Arnold Relman. “If these stories are believed as literal
factual accounts,” Relman wrote Mack, “they would contradict
virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on
which modern science depends.” Some went further, accusing Mack of
ushering in a new dark age of superstition and magic.
Mack recruited a
potent legal team: Daniel P. Sheehan, of the Christic Institute, who
had helped to uncover the Iran-Contra drugs-for-arms deals of the
Reagan administration and had represented Karen Silkwood’s family
in their successful lawsuit against the Kerr-McGee nuclear power
plant, and Roderick “Eric” MacLeish, former general counsel of
the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who was to achieve fame
for exposing sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Boston.
Experiencers who had
appeared on Oprah with Mack testified for him. Peter Faust,
an acupuncturist in his 30s, told of having been recognized on a
spaceship by another abductee and of possibly having been an alien
himself in a previous lifetime.
And then, as if
scripted for dramatic timing, BBC journalist Tim Leach in Zimbabwe
called Mack’s office about a flurry of U.F.O. sightings. Mack and
his research partner Callimanopulos flew off to investigate a report
that on September 14, 1994, a large, saucer-shaped spacecraft and
several smaller craft had landed or hovered near a schoolyard in
Ruwa, 40 miles northeast of Harare.
The children told Mack
and Callimanopulos on tape that the beings had large heads, two holes
for nostrils, a slit for a mouth or no mouth at all, and long black
hair, and were dressed in dark, single-piece suits. “I think it’s
about something that’s going to happen,” said one little girl.
“What I thought was maybe the world’s going to end. They were
telling us the world’s going to end.”“How did that get
communicated to you?,” Mack asked.
“I don’t even
know. It just popped up in my head. He never said anything. He talked
just with his eyes. It was just the face and the eyes. They looked
horrible.”
By mid-December 1994,
with Mack back in Cambridge, the Harvard committee accused him of
failing to do systematic evaluations to rule out psychiatric
disorders, putting “persistent pressure” on his experiencers to
convince them they had actually been abducted by aliens, and
preventing them from obtaining the help they really needed. Mack
countered with a fervent rebuttal.
As the inquiry hit the
press, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz wrote an op-ed
picked up by The Washington Post and The Harvard
Crimson: “Will the next professor who is thinking about an
unconventional research project be deterred by the prospect of having
to hire a lawyer to defend his ideas?”
When the final report
came out, Mack was dumbfounded. In a short statement, Harvard Medical
School cautioned him “not, in any way, to violate the high
standards for the conduct of clinical practice and clinical
investigation that have been the hallmarks of this Faculty.” But
Harvard “reaffirmed Dr. Mack’s academic freedom to study what he
wishes and to state his opinions without impediment. Dr. Mack remains
a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine.”
Mack had prevailed,
but he realized in retrospect that he had made a fateful error. As he
wrote nearly a decade later in a manuscript he was seeking to publish
as his masterwork, “When Worldviews Collide”: “I can see now
that I had to a large extent created my problem with the literalness
that I had treated the encounter phenomenon in the 1994 book. It is
possible that in some cases people are taken bodily into spacecraft.
However, the question is more subtle and complex.”
Whether space aliens
were visiting, what planet they came from, and whether they were
friendly to humans seemed increasingly less important than what such
spiritual encounters revealed about the cosmos, Mack wrote. The
Western materialist worldview was closed to such mysteries. But even
without physical proof of the encounters, scientific investigation
could proceed through study of the abductees themselves. What was
needed, Mack argued, was a new “Science of Human Experience”
stressing “the value of the authentic Witness.”
In any case, the
aliens’ abduction phase may have ended, Mack and his associates
theorized. Had whatever hybrid-breeding program existed been
accomplished? What was the next step? The emergence of aliens among
us? How would humanity react?
On Cuvelier’s porch
in Newport, a staff astronomer at a renowned astrophysics center, in
a short-sleeved sport shirt and cargo shorts, explained what he was
doing at a gathering of abductees. “I don’t mix the two,” he
said. “As a scientist, I would say we don’t have enough data.”
So far, he said, “it’s hearsay: somebody says they saw a light,
somebody is telling a story what they saw.” But that didn’t mean,
the astronomer added, that the stories weren’t interesting. He was
joined soon by a towering, bullet-headed friend of Mack’s who had
arrived straight from McLean Hospital Southeast, a psychiatric
facility affiliated with Harvard Medical School, where he is the
medical director. Jeffrey D. Rediger, who also holds a
master-of-divinity degree, is no stranger to anomalous experiences. A
decade ago in Brazil, where he had gone to study the claims of a
mystical healer called John of God, Rediger said, he had witnessed
surgeries without instruments and experienced, on his own chest, a
sudden episode of spontaneous bleeding from an unexplained incision
that quickly healed.
Rudolph Schild, a
noted astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics who had spoken up for Mack at the Harvard inquest,
joined the group. I had talked to him several times about one of
Mack’s friends and veteran experiencers, a woman named Karin
Austin, who, some two decades ago, recalled somehow arriving at a
clearing in a forest, where she and other humans had been presented
with their “hybrid” children. Schild had interviewed Austin and
was struck by her uncanny familiarity with the double suns orbiting
one another in the Orion belt. How, he marveled, was she able to give
such accurate descriptions of seasonal changes particular to a binary
system?
With the new
millennium, Mack’s interest had shifted to a new mystery, the
survival of consciousness, particularly the story of his friends
Elisabeth Targ, a psychiatrist with an interest in the paranormal,
and her husband, Mark Comings, a theoretical physicist specializing
in alternative energy. Targ’s grandfather William, as editor in
chief of G. P. Putnam’s, had published The Godfather, and
her father, Russell, an inventor of the laser, conducted top-secret
extrasensory experiments for the C.I.A. in “remote viewing,” the
ability to visualize objects thousands of miles away. Elisabeth’s
mother, Joan, was the sister of chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and
had taught her little brother the game of chess. Elisabeth was also a
prodigy, with unusual mental powers. As a psychiatrist, she practiced
distant healing on AIDS patients, and, later, on patients with rare
brain tumors, glioblastomas. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, she
contracted the same type of cancer and, despite her practice of the
non-traditional prayer therapies she championed, died. She was only
40. But now her husband was telling Mack that she was sending him
messages of love from beyond the grave. Mack was writing a book about
it, Elisabeth and Mark Before and After Death: The Power of a
Field of Love. He sent the proposal off to his literary agent
with a note: “There is a bit of urgency about this.” In a few
days he would be leaving for London to deliver a lecture on his idol,
T. E. Lawrence, killed at 46 in a motorcycle accident in England in
1935.In Newport with the other experiencers, a Tom Hanks look-alike
who wanted to be known as “Scott,” the way Mack referred to him
in Abduction, remembered their last meeting at Cuvelier’s
villa, in the summer of 2004. Mack was excited about his new book, on
the survival of consciousness. Scott confessed his own fear of death.
Mack reassured him. “You never know when it will be your time,”
he said. “We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the
street and get hit by a car.”
Raymond Czechowski, a
50-year-old computer technician, had spent three-and-a-half hours at
the Royal British Legion, a military charity in north London,
planning the latest poppy drive to aid the troops, in the course of
which he downed five or six pints of shandy—beer mixed with
lemonade and ice. Then, on that mild, clear Monday night of September
27, 2004, he pointed his silver Peugeot north and started driving
home.
Just ahead, shortly
after 11 P.M., in the north London suburb of Barnet, John Mack
climbed wearily out of the Underground station at Totteridge and
Whetstone. His talk had gone well, and many in the audience had
brought copies of his Lawrence biography, which they asked him to
sign. He had also spoken about the death of his father, Edward Mack,
who, 31 years before, almost to the day, had been driving home with
the groceries to their summer home in Thetford, Vermont, when his car
collided with a truck. In London, Mack was staying with a family
friend, Veronica Keen, a widow who told him she had been receiving
messages from her deceased husband—more evidence, Mack thought, of
survival of consciousness. She had said to call her from the station
and she would pick him up, but Mack decided to walk. He crossed a
divider and stepped into the busy street. His American instinct was
to look to the left.
Czechowski hit the
brakes, but too late. Mack’s body flew into the air, shattering the
Peugeot’s windshield before traveling over the roof and landing
heavily on the ground. “He just stepped there, bang,” Czechowski
told the police, who registered his alcohol level at well over the
limit.
Mack never regained
consciousness. From a crumpled paper with an address on it found in
his pocket, the police learned his destination and his identity.
Keen, who sat with
Mack’s body at the morgue, said he materialized and told her, “It
was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was
given a choice: should I go or should I stay? I looked down at my
broken body and decided to go.”
At Mack’s funeral,
many recalled one of his favorite quotes, from Rilke’s Letter
to a Young Poet (as translated by Stephen Mitchell): “That is
at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage
for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable
that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly
has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called
‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all
those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying
been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have
grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”
Barbara Lamb and other
friends also reported visitations.
Roberta Colasanti, one
of Mack’s research associates, said he communicated to her a
cryptic message on the abductions they had been studying: “It’s
not what we thought.” Colasanti waited breathlessly for the
solution to the mystery, but it didn’t come. Mack promised to
return with more information. So far he hasn’t.
Ralph Blumenthal
worked for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009 as an
investigative reporter; foreign correspondent in Germany, Vietnam,
and Cambodia; Texas bureau chief; and arts writer. In 1993, he led
the team covering the truck bombing of the World Trade Center, which
won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for spot reporting. In 2009, he broke
the story of the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center two
blocks from Ground Zero. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of
four nonfiction books on organized crime and cultural history and is
currently a distinguished lecturer in journalism at Baruch College of
the City University of New York. He lives in Manhattan with his wife,
Deborah, a writer of children’s books and novels. They have two
daughters. No one in the family, so far as is known, has ever been
abducted by aliens.
3 comments:
Mack was nutz just like the abductees. There never has been and never will be a shortage of crazy delusional people in the world nor will there ever be a shortage of fools who believe them. The fact that Mack was a Professor doesn't mean he wasn't nutz.
You also need to include the people who have had Alien contact and have called on the name of Jesus...and the "aliens" vanish. Leading many to believe they are Demons. For further information please look up the free movie on youtube: Age of Deceit-fallen angels and the NWO(full). or the website: CE4 God help us. beholdapalehorse.tv
Two idiotic comments from two assholes who obviously never had paranormal experiences.
FYI: Abductees include non-Christians and non-Americans.
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