John E. Mack

The psychologist who sought to legitimize the experiences of claimed alien abductees

Name	John Edward Mack
Age	74
Born	October 4, 1929
Died	September 27, 2004
Famous for	Studying the psychology of alien abduction experiences

At a time when even whispers of alien abduction were dismissed as fantasies, one academic took the abductees’ accounts seriously. His name was John E. Mack, a respected psychiatrist, Harvard professor, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 

His academic accomplishments were why his later studies on the psychology of alien abductees would prove controversial among academic circles.¹

Let’s explore how this man, who was trained to examine the human psyche, ventured into the fringe of aliens and UFOs, along with the things he had done in his pursuit of this study.

Who Was John E. Mack? — Life and Career Before Becoming Tied With Alien Abductions

John E. Mack was born to a German-Jewish household in New York City. His father, Edward Clarence Mack, was a historian and professor at City University of New York. His birth mother, Eleanor Liebmann Mack, died when he was still a baby. His father later remarried Ruth Mack, an economist, who bore him a half-sister, Mary Lee Ingbar.

From his family’s careers alone, one can infer that he and his sister were raised in intellectuality. 

Down the line, Mack would complete his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College in 1951 and his medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1955. He then did his psychiatric training at Harvard-affiliated hospitals, including the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.²

Due to his interest in understanding the human identity, he became a clinical expert in child psychology, teenage suicide, and addiction.³

Sometime after his training, he toured with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) in Japan for two years, serving as the unit’s psychiatrist.⁴

While in Japan, he met and married Sally Stahl, and they had three sons together. The eldest was born in Japan, while the younger children were born after they had returned to the U.S.

After his military service ended, in 1961, he earned a child fellowship at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and completed a psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

In the late 1960s, he founded the department of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital. 

In 1964, he joined the Harvard faculty, and in 1972, he was offered a professorship in psychiatry, which he held until the end of his life.

In 1976, his psychobiography of T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Then, while in London for a T.E. Lawrence conference, he fell victim to a drunk driving accident, passing away on September 27, 2004, just a mere week from his 75th birthday.

What Led John E. Mack Toward Alien Abductions?

John Mack’s ride down this proverbial rabbit hole was due to the influence of two men: Stanislav Grof and Budd Hopkins.

With Stanislav Grof

Mack attended Grof’s training program on holotropic breathwork, “a method that uses deep, rapid breathing and evocative music to create a nonordinary state of consciousness that provides access to the holotropic or transpersonal world.”⁵

Sometime after their acquaintance, Grof shared with him a paper on UFOs by Keith Thompson, titled The UFO Encounter Experience as a Crisis of Transformation, which became one of the chapters in Grof’s 1989 book, Spiritual Emergency.

Thompson’s paper, which he considered a Jungian interpretation of the UFO phenomenon, intrigued him. He asked himself repeatedly, “What is really going on here?”⁶

With Budd Hopkins

In late 1989, a fellow holotropic breathwork trainee and friend asked Mack if he wanted to meet Budd Hopkins, a pioneer in the field of alien abduction.⁶ Then, on January 10 of the next year, the two met in New York.

Mack considered this meeting life-changing. He wrote⁷:

What struck me about the reports that he was telling of the cases he had seen (at that point, he had met with more than 200) was the consistency of the stories down to the minutest details among people from all over the United States and also other parts of the world, told with great reluctance by experiencers who had nothing to gain and much to lose by coming forward.

The fact that strangers experienced the same things couldn’t be simply dismissed as dreams. He argued that “dreams don’t work like that” and that “people don’t respond to another’s dreams that way.” He inferred that this “could only occur if something real, not imaginary, had happened to them.”

Since then, he got pulled into these abduction cases, and by June 1990, he had worked on 55 of them.

How Did John E. Mack Treat Alien Abductees?

To John Mack, the alien abductees, or “experiencers,” as he often referred to them, were ordinary people, young and old alike, who exhibited relatively little psychopathology⁷ (mental distress or illness). That is, they were not crazy and were, in fact, healthy, sane people to begin with.

These experiencers had unexplained encounters with aliens that led them to varying degrees of trauma.

In treating them, he combined Grof’s holotropic breathwork with hypnosis.⁶ His general process went like this:

• Interview the patient, looking for any indication of abduction.
• Use holotropic breathwork to set them into focus. 
• Use hypnosis to help them relax and enter a nonordinary state.

He could tell if the patient had genuinely experienced the abduction phenomenon, or fantasized or deluded themselves about it, through the intensity of the emotional distress they felt in recalling their alien encounters.

These are the individuals who literally shake with fear confronting the memories of how they were paralyzed or upon seeing again the little aliens with the big black eyes. Their bodies shake, and they scream literally with terror as they remember the intrusive procedures which occurred on the ships.

How Did the Academic Community Respond to John E. Mack’s Pursuit?

Colleagues thought him crazy when Mack dipped his hands into the serious study of people who claimed to be abducted by aliens.

They questioned his use of hypnosis, citing that he was giving the method “undeserved credibility”⁸ in recovering his patients’ memories of their unpleasant encounters. 

They also didn’t like his somewhat dismissive attitude toward physical evidence and scientific principles. 

Then, when he published his first book on the subject, Abductions, Harvard authorities placed him under academic inquiry, questioning his work. This almost cost him his tenure.

It was 14 months of gruesome battle. In the end, the Harvard review committee concluded that Mack had “the right to investigate any issue he wanted, no matter how weird.” However, they were of the opinion that he should “use rational and scholarly methods.”

Dr. Arnold Relman, the head of the review committee, said, “If we abandon scientific principles, then we can’t deal with the real problems we face.”

What Else Had John E. Mack Contributed to UFO Studies?

Aside from helping legitimize the experiences of alien abductees, John Mack had also published books and established an organization.

Books

Abductions

The book, Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), highlights the stories of 13 of Mack’s patients. He shared insights into their psychological and spiritual transformations and how their experience is relevant to our existence.

Further, he wanted to persuade people that what his patients had gone through was not dreams or hallucinations, but real experiences.

Passport to the Cosmos

The book, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), goes beyond alien abduction. It provides readers with insights into the following:

• Relationship between spiritual and physical energy
• The role of trauma in an experiencer’s transformation
• Information about the ecological crisis facing the planet and the urgency that we do something about it
• The possibility that human beings are participating in the creation of some sort of interdimensional hybrid race
• The expansion of human consciousness and our spiritual reawakening
• The apparent evolution of extraordinary relationships that some human beings may be developing beyond the earth place

Organizations

John Mack Institute

The John Mack Institute (formerly the Center for Psychology and Social Change) was co-founded by Mack and Dr. Robert J. Lifton, a psychiatrist and historian, in 1982. 

According to its website, the organization’s mission is⁹:

• Explore the frontiers of human experience
• Serve the transformation of individual consciousness
• Further the evolution of the paradigms by which we understand human identity

One of the projects it created was Mack’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER, 1993–2002), after receiving generous funding from philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller. It focused on studying how reported alien encounters affected experiencers’ lives and worldviews.

🛸 Fun fact: UFO lobbyist Stephen Bassett reportedly volunteered at PEER in 1996.

What Legacy Did John E. Mack Leave in Ufology?

At a time when alien abduction claims were often outright dismissed, John E. Mack became the ears and mouth of experiencers who wanted to be heard and understood. This, in turn, led him to bring academic credibility to the study.

His work shifted the conversation, enabling future researchers to explore the phenomena outside the existing frameworks.

Would you like to know more about the people whose studies went beyond the traditional methods? Feel free to check out our library today.

FAQ

What was John Mack’s initial impression of the alien abduction phenomenon?

Like most, Mack was a skeptic of their stories and thought the experiencers had or were suffering from mental illnesses. It wasn’t until he found the consistency and similarities in their stories that he concluded an authentic mystery was unfolding here and deserved to be studied.

Why did Mack trust hypnosis?

Hypnosis, for reasons that do not entirely understand, seems uniquely capable of undoing the amnesia that occurs in abductions.

Had Mack been involved in investigating a UFO incident?

Yes, and it was with the Ariel School UFO incident in November 1994. Mack went to Ruwa, Zimbabwe to interview the dozens of schoolchildren who witnessed the incident.

References