507 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
507 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: THE HARVARD PROFESSOR & THE UFOs FILE: UFO2223
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The Harvard Professor & the UFOs
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Byline: Jill Neimark
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March/April 1994
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PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
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In a tiny, utilitarian office at Cambridge Hospital - a nondescript cubicle on
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the third floor, overlooking a parking lot - Harvard psychiatrist John Mack is
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seeking God. And the way this 64-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner is going about
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it is truly unprecedented: He has become a kind of paterfamilias and healer to
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a whole underground of Americans who claim they have been abducted by aliens in
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UFOs.
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They flock to him from around the country, these abductees, then lie down on
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his office couch and are coaxed into a hypnotic trance. Under hypnosis,
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sometimes weeping and shouting with agony and terror, they recover buried
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memories of alien encounters. Many of them come to believe that they have been
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kidnapped by extraterrestrials regularly since they were children, that they
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are guinea pigs in an intergalactic hybrid-breeding program, and that, in a
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close encounter of a truly original kind, they have had sperm and egg samples
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taken, alien fetuses implanted and removed, and probes inserted in their
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vaginas, anuses, and up their noses.
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And here's the clincher: Most of them recall that after suffering the
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indignities of lab animals in outer space, they are given a picture show that
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aliens project onto the walls of their spacecraft - or directly into their
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brains - images and movies of ecological disaster that terrify and ultimately
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transform them into spiritual seekers hoping to save the polluted Earth.
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"Some other intelligence is reaching out to us. It's the most exciting work
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I've ever done," claims Mack. A few minutes later he admits, "I'm shocked in a
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way to hear myself saying such things. But I've been as careful as possible to
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exhaust conventional explanations. None of them begins to explain this
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phenomenon."
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This alien invasion - subtle, shattering, mysterious - is really a form of
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cosmic correction by beings more advanced than we, believes Mack, whose about-
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to-be-published book, "ABDUCTION" (Scribners), details the kidnappings of 13
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individuals by aliens and fits them into a new cosmology. It's a view of the
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universe that's both high-tech and ancient, one that assumes intelligence can
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take many forms and melds Eastern spirituality and Western science. Above all,
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it's a cosmology eerily well adapted to our country's obsession with abuse,
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confession, and transcendence.
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Mack has long been one of the brightest minds at Harvard, a man whose prize-
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winning "A Prince of Our Disorder" (1977) - a psychological study of T.E.
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Lawrence - was hailed as one of the most remarkable biographies of its time.
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Mack was one of the men who forged Harvard's Cambridge Hospital Department of
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Psychiatry into a premier teaching hospital, a place where psychiatrists and
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residents now vie for positions, and for four years he was its head. He's been
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a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, certified as a child
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psychoanalyst, and chairman of the Executive Committee for all five hospital-
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based departments of psychiatry that make up the huge Department of Psychiatry
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at Harvard Medical School.
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He's also a high-profile idealist who has been at the forefront of efforts by
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his peers for global peace and conservation. He is founding director of the
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Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age and a member of Physicians
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for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of
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Nuclear War. He is an outspoken advocate of corporate and industrial policies
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that sustain the environment. The list of accomplishments doesn't stop there;
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Mack has published over 150 articles and books on subjects ranging from
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nightmares to teenagers who kill their mothers to Russian children's feelings
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about nuclear weapons. And so his excursion into the realm of ETs has elicited
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an outcry of contempt, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, confusion, interest, and
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even admiration from his fellow colleagues.
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Is Mack legitimizing ufology, a pursuit that has until now found its warmest
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reception on the pages of supermarket tabloids? Or has he, as one longtime
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colleague laments, ruined his career?
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More than the legitimacy of UFOs is at stake. The fact is that Mack - at least
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to those who view him from the outside - is actually in the white hot center of
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a controversy that has been raging around the country. It's a battle about the
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essential nature of the human mind, really; a war over the nature of memory,
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and access routes to it, particularly hypnosis. Can hypnosis recover repressed
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memories of sexual abuse, satanic ritual abuse, past life abuse, and abuse at
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the hands of aliens? In a tabloid culture, recovered memories have led to
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accusations and court cases so damaging and sordid they've been compared to the
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witch-hunts of another age.
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John Mack's UFO work rests in great part on the validity of hypnosis as a tool
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to recover memory. The cultural uproar over this modus operandi may not resolve
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itself for years to come.
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Strangely enough, he shrugs off the controversy. "I have such long
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relationships here at Harvard, they just tolerate me. Of course, I don't know
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what they say behind my back. But the abduction phenomenon, " insists Mack,
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"gets at the core of who we are. It's traumatic for me as well as others, but
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it expands us into a different universe."
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I'd been chasing John Mack for months before he agreed to an interview. One of
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his assistants, Karen Wesolowski, at a branch of The Center for Psychology and
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Social Change, his own private umbrella organization for UFO research, had been
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stonewalling me, supposedly because he was under crushing pressure to finish
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his book, for which Scribners had reportedly paid him a handsome $200,000. But
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it was easy to detect another reason: fear of a hatchet job in the press. Mack
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himself has confessed, "The experience of taking on a subject which has been
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fare for the tabloids and the seamier side of the mass media has been a story
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in itself."
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The first time I spoke with Karen on the phone, I heard the clacking of
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computer keys: she was taking down every word I said. She asked more
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preliminary "who are you and what do you want" questions than I'd encountered
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in a decade of reporting. She called PSYCHOLOGY TODAY and asked to see samples
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of my work. She instructed me not to speak to Dr. Mack's department head, Malka
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Notman, M.D., until he had had a meeting with her first. She told me that in
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part she and Dr. Mack were simply protecting the abductees. Karen likened
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individuals who did not believe these victims' stories to people who tell
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holocaust survivors that Nazi atrocities never happened.
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When I finally faced Mack A DEUX, I found a tall, lank man with eyes like
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cobalt glass. He was wearing a slightly wrinkled button-down shirt of the same
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startling blue, khaki pants, and loafers. He had a boyish, baffled sincerity
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about him, an almost bedazzled helplessness that would both endear him to me
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and irritate me throughout the interview.
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It was lunchtime and we shared Mack's typical fare: peanut butter from a
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gallon-size plastic container stored in his secretary's adjacent office,
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bagels, and Mars bars. As we ate, he told me how he'd arranged at his fixation
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on UFOs as agents of cosmic correction of our Earth-destroying ways. Although
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the press, when credulous, recounts his story as if he simply woke up one day
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and was confronted with irrefutable evidence that aliens are kidnapping and
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experimenting on humans, the truth is far more complex and intriguing.
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First, Mack has never been your garden-variety shrink. He openly admits that he
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has always felt a bit like Georg Simmel's "The Stranger," the marginal man who
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participates in the culture but is not part of it. He was raised in a
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rationalist, German-Jewish, New York household, where his father read him the
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Bible not because he believed in God but because the stories were fascinating.
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From Oberlin he went to Harvard Medical School and set out to become a
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psychoanalyst. He continued his internship and residency training at Harvard
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institutions, and was accepted at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, then at
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the pinnacle of its reputation, where he underwent both personal and and a
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training psychoanalysis. He went on to specialize in child psychoanalysis. He
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also trained at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Mental Health Center when
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it was leading psychiatry to alternatives to institutionalization for the
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mentally ill, and was chief resident there. Mack was on brilliant trajectory
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in Harvard's prestigious embrace.
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Coming to Cambridge Hospital was his first major departure from the beaten
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track: At the time "it was a derelict community hospital. It was not the place
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to fast-track." He was its head of psychiatry until 1977 and was instrumental
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in crafting a community mental health program that today is the centerpiece of
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a citywide network of clinics and hospitals.
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His biography of T.E. Lawrence was another departure: though psychobiography is
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an honored tradition among analysts, Lawrence was an unusual choice. Mack was
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fascinated by this man who himself was a stranger, a troubled hero caught in
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the fate of a culture not his own.
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Later he began to work on issues of nuclear disarmament, global peace, and
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conservation. He has traveled the world attending conferences on ecology and
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the Earth, mingling with everyone from scientists to philosophers,
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philanthropists, and economists.
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He also began to explore alternative approaches to consciousness. In the 1970s,
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Mack was taken with Werner Erhard's EST and assorted mind-altering techniques.
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The final break with tradition came when Mack met Stanislav Grof, a Russian who
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had developed "holotropic breathwork," a technique of rapid breathing that
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allegedly accesses nonordinary states of consciousness. The first time he tried
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it, Mack not only "reexperienced" his mother's death when he was eight months
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old, he also felt "my father's grief at the time. There was also a businessman
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in the room screaming his head off because he was reliving the time when HIS
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mother tried to choke him as an infant. I got more out of one session than I
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had in all my years of analysis." Later in the session, "I became a Russian
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father in the 16th century, a man whose four-year-old son was decapitated by
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Mongol hordes."
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Mack In Time
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Mack begs the question of past lives here. He says that at the time he was in
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Russia as part of an exchange program, sponsored by Easalen, to talk about the
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impact of the nuclear arms race on children. His consciousness, he told me,
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"traveled in time to identify this Russian man. After that experience I felt
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great empathy for the Russians I was working with. "
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He took a three-tear training program in Grof's breathing technique, which
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concluded in 1988. A year later, a psychologist who also practiced the
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technique urged him to meet Budd Hopkins, a New York artist who had published a
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best-selling book, INTRUDERS, about UFO abductees.
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Mack claims that "nothing on my 40 years as a psychiatrist prepared me for what
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he had to say. I was impressed with his sincerity, depth of knowledge, and deep
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concern for the abductees. But what affected me even more was the internal
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consistency of the highly detailed accounts [of abduction] by different
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individuals who would have had no other way to communicate with one another."
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He cites the specific, consistent information abductees give about the inside
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of spaceships, procedures, medical instruments, and more, as absolute evidence
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of the veracity of their reports. He notes the interesting but inconclusive
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physical "evidence" of abductions - strange "scoop" marks, nodules, and cuts
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(in one case, on a quadriplegic man who would have been unable to self-inflict
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them); and the fairly common experience of waking upside down in the bed or
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sometimes outside the house, with clothes removed or lost.
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Today he calls himself "co-investigator and co-creator" in the abduction
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phenomenon. Mack has scaled down his private psychiatric practice and his
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teachings to focus on exploring this field. He has now hypnotized and
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"regressed" nearly 80 abductees and, in his home, where he encourages them to
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talk about their experience, holds monthly support group meetings. Mack's
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abductees undergo a remarkably uniform transformative shift in consciousness
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and become committed to preserving the Earth; they report dreams of floods and
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other destruction that will otherwise occur. "I have no way to explain this
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except as some sort of robust emergence of an intelligence reaching out to us
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in some way. The hybrid[-breeding] program may have something to do with the
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state of the Earth at this time.
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Mack's history, he admits, has prepared him exactly for this work. One almost
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wonders if he could have ever resisted it, for it so perfectly occupies his
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clinical, mystical mind. Abductions allow him to be far more than a
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psychiatrist. He is now an explorer of consciousness, at play in the fields of
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the universe itself, a participant in an ecological and global transformation
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that he sees as part of a cosmic plan.
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But what's really going on? I decided to retrace Mack's steps.
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Take a visit with me to the New York City home of Budd Hopkins, the man John
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Mack dedicates his book to, the one who "led the way." Hopkins is an abstract
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expressionist who has brushed elbows with many of the great painters of our
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day, and has the look of a slightly disheveled but friendly Phil Donahue. He's
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an ingenuous guy, happily showing off his studio and his upstairs home, where
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original art by Degas, Franz Kline, and Frank Stella grace the walls. Hopkins'
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free time these days is spent conducting free hypnotic regressions and support
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groups for abductees, traveling constantly to lecture on the subject, and
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preparing a third book for publication.
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Hopkins sat with me in his studio, which was filled with a series of brightly
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painted, wooden wall hangings he calls "the guardians," and rattled on
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enthusiastically about UFOs. He brought out a notebook of pictures of people
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with indeterminate "marks" from space-alien probings, which seemed unremarkable
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to me, garden-variety abrasions and minor bruises. He then showed me drawings,
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made by victims, of what they had seen on the inner walls of spaceships. He
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requested that I not describe them in print; yet they are generic and primitive
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enough to also seem unremarkable.
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Lavender Underwear
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It was when he began to talk about other "proofs" that he began to lose me -
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and I wondered how he had been able to retain Mack's interest. For example, the
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problem with clothes. Hopkins mentioned one abductee who woke up wearing
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lavender underwear, and she OWNS no lavender underwear because she hates the
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color. Others wake up with pajama bottoms several sizes too small - clearly not
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their own; or with bottoms and tops reversed.
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Picture this: We've got aliens who are smart enough to travel light-years
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across the universe, whisk us up into spaceships that move at unthinkable
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speeds, communicate telepathically and transform our consciousness, and yet
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they're so disorganized that when they're ready to drop us down again they
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dress us in the wrong clothes. (Mack has made equally amazing statements; he
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told me, "They can't do anything they want. Apparently they can take you
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through a window or a door but not walls of a certain thickness. But I'm not
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one to talk about that kind of TECHNICAL stuff.")
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Hopkins' reliability began to crumble like an old cake when he told me about
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the case of the decade, if not the century, which is the subject of his next
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book. A woman, Linda N., was abducted from her high rise in November of 1989 in
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lower Manhattan; Hopkins claims the abduction was witnessed by a woman driving
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over the Brooklyn Bridge a quarter of a mile away, and by two security officers
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driving former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar (who refuses to
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admit this; nor are there records of his car stalling that night, as Hopkins
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claims).
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Hopkins told me about this case at length. However he managed to leave out a
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remarkable series of details, all of which are revealed in a 25-page study of
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the "incident" published by three independent UFO researchers, including a
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former special agent for the U.S. Army and a former security police specialist
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for the U.S. Air Force. According to the information they gathered from papers
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Hopkins wrote and talks with him personally, Linda said that the two security
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officers who supposedly witnessed her abduction later kidnapped her, asked her
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to remove her shoes to find out if she was an alien (they claimed aliens lacked
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toes); and that one of the officers drove her to a beach house, asked her to
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put on a nightgown, and requested she have sex with him. She says he also tried
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to drown her and that at one point he wrote her saying he was in a mental
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hospital. Yet Linda never made an official complaint or contacted the police.
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The investigators note that these bizarre details of Linda's story - none of
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which Hopkins told me - turn out to be uncannily similar to a science fiction
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novel, NIGHTEYES, published a few months before Linda claimed to be abducted.
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If Mack accepts Hopkins wholeheartedly as the pioneer in whose path he has
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followed, what are we to conclude? This question haunted me simply because the
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distinction between Mack and Hopkins is enormous. Hopkins is an artist, but
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Mack is a high priest at a most sanctified temple of science: Harvard Medical
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School. He also happens to be a man with a halo of perfection about him, an
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honorable man given to just causes, a man with a reputation for kindness. Mack
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more than anybody needs to be rigorous in his research. Otherwise he may become
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a kind of Pied Piper, seducing and perhaps terrifying us with visions of a
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world that may not exist. Can Mack corroborate his own findings?
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I asked him about the physical evidence: "Why aren't the ETs showing up on the
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White House lawn?"
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His answer sounded like better sleight of hand than Freud himself, who invented
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the term "resistance" to fend off naysayers. "Is it real? Did it happen? That
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looks like an irreducible question. But the answer is, in what reality? Ours,
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or another reality? My hunch is that this is some new kind of entity that
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exists in a marginal place between the physical and the nonphysical. I would
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almost say this phenomenon, by its very nature, is trying to get us off the
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pure reliance on physical artifacts.
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I asked him how he responds to the criticism that he is "leading" his clients
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to the stories he wants to hear - a criticism not leveled solely at Mack but at
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many of those who rely on hypnosis to provide proof of any sort. Mack admits
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that not every UFO researcher gets the same powerful information he does about
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ecology and Earth changes. In fact, the field is rent by disagreement and
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argument about the meaning of UFOs. Early researchers, who were interested in
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the flying saucers, have trouble believing there are creatures inside who are
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performing experiments on us. Many of those who do believe feel, like Hopkins,
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that "the aliens' agenda is not focused on us particularly, we're incidental."
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And other researchers find the aliens are more body snatchers than angelic
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guides to a purer Earth.
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Nonetheless, Mack insists, "I do not lead people. We look together at a shared
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mystery, but they are not alone in the strange, reality-shattering matter here.
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" When I asked him what percentage of abductees come up with a new "Earth
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consciousness," he said percentages were not valid. "If I said half did, the
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other half may still come up with it. We just may not have gotten that far with
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them yet."
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I asked about his contention that these people lack pathology. He has given
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only four of nearly 80 clients any kind of psychological testing. No
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independent clinician has verified his statements of his patients' mental
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health.
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However, in a recent study of 49 people reporting encounters with UFOs, four
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Canadian psychologists found them free of psychopathology. What did set them
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apart from others, the researchers, led by Nicholas P. Spanos, Ph.D., state in
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the JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY, was "a belief in UFOs and in the existence
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of alien life forms." Most of their experiences took place at night, and the
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team attributes them to temporary sleep paralysis, a condition associated with
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vivid hallucinations. Under these conditions, believers tend to confuse
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"internally produced images and sensations" with external reality.
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Memory In The Musculature
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Mack insists that his patients are able to provide detailed accounts of
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abduction because of his use of Grof breathwork. "I tell the person about the
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breath, that it gives them power and connects them to the life-giving forces of
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the cosmos." He believes that traumatic experiences are held in the body's
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tissues and that, using the Grof method, pressure in the "blocked area of the
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musculature will bring the stored emotions forth and discharge the tensions
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that have been out of reach until this time, stuck in the body. As strong
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emotions are coming to the surface, I can feel, for example in the client's
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neck or back, in a place where he feels the alien instrumentation once
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occurred, a powerful tightness or spasm in the muscle."
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The most unwieldy question is that of hypnosis. All roads to UFOs always seem
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to lead back to hypnosis. It is when patients are under hypnosis that Mack
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witnesses extremes of emotion. Patients thrash, cry, shout. Stories pour out of
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them. The drama is so great it's hard not to be convinced.
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Mack, who "taught myself to do hypnosis in this work," here stands on shaky
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ground. Though scores of therapists around the country are happily in this camp
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- fully believing in repressed memories, and regressing patients who then come
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up with never-before-remembered stories ranging from ritual torturing of babies
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to copulation with aliens - a furious backlash has begun. Many professionals
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are concerned that such work is a misuse of the power of the therapist. They
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are also alarmed that innocent individuals are being accused of unthinkable
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crimes, by patients who themselves have been utterly terrified by hypnotic
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"memories" they believe are real. Mack's use of hypnosis enrages some
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psychologists, because it opens a very dark Pandora's box.
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Perhaps the most outspoken is Berkely social psychologist Richard Ofshe, who
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share a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his work in exposing the Synanon cult in
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California. Ofshe, with his olive-dark eyes and majestic beard, looks a bit
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like a feudal king you wouldn't want to mess with. He's become a crusader
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against what he calls extreme forms of influence - from coerced police
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confessions to therapist-induced false memories retrieved in trance. He sees a
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direct and dangerous bridge between them, and doesn't exempt John Mack for a
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minute.
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"If there's a certain brilliance in backing the trendiest wrong horses
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available, then John Mack has it," he comments. "He has made a stellar,
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absolutely impressive, world-class series of mistakes. First he was in bed with
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Sigmund Freud, and we are already beginning to see the obituary of Freud. Then
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he was in bed with Werner Erhard, another big-time loser. Now he's in bed with
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ET's evil brother."
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Ofshe points out that nobody has proved the concept of "robust" repression of
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memory, which is far different from traumatic amnesia (forgetting a single,
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horrendous event) or normal memory's denial and whitewashing. Robust repression
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requires that one repeatedly forget a recurring event - whether it's that your
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father kept raping you or aliens abducted you from the time you were three.
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"That's like forgetting you went to high school."
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"John Mack's use of hypnosis runs counter to all we know about it," agrees Fred
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Frankel, M.D., psychiatrist-in-chief at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, a
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professor at Harvard Medical School, and editor of the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
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CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS. Frankel tells a story that seems to put
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Mack in questionable light: a woman was referred to Frankel for disturbing
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dreams. "I explained to her that hypnosis does not necessarily provide accurate
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recall. I told her that in hypnosis fantasy and suggestion play a major role.
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Her response to hypnotic induction was minimal." Not much happened.
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But the woman then found her way to Mack, and "he got a major response." She
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recalled her abduction experiences in great detail. Mack describes her reaction
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in his book: "Her fear seemed to reach a crescendo as her body writhed in awful
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contortions. 'They take control of you and you don't have the energy to fight .
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. . .'"
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Mack called Frankel and they talked for two hours about their different
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results. This past September, they presented the case at a Grand Rounds, a
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standard teaching event for residents and other doctors, whose comments are
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always openly invited. The subject was a fairly big draw as these things go.
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Seventy people came. "It was done in a cooperative spirit," says Frankel. A
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third doctor presided and monitored the discussion of explanations for why
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hypnosis could yield two such opposite responses.
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"But [Mack] incorporated none of what was said there into his book," reports
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Frankel. "In fact, Mack has devoted an entire chapter to this woman's case and
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entitled it, 'Personally, I Don't Believe In UFOs.'" The woman claims that
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Frankel himself said this, which he indignantly denies. "Look, I don't know
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enough to ever make that statement. I have enough problems with THIS planet!"
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Although Mack acknowledges Frankel's denial in the book, he makes his bias
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stunningly clear by using the disputed statement as the chapter title.
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Frankel's main point is that Mack continually claims to be neutral but is in
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fact totally supportive of abductees and thus must be skewing his results. For
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instance, Frankel observes, before beginning hypnosis, Mack often gives people
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a pilot interview during which he indicates that he believes in abduction. If
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Mack has so clearly cast his lot, that is a stance far removed from balanced
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scientific research. The issue is not whether Mack is right or wrong, but that
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he has abdicated scientific objectivity; his methods preclude us from ever
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getting an answer.
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Hypnosis expert Michael Yapko - whose textbook, TRANCEWORK (Brunner Mazel), is
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the leading book in the field - has equally strong words of caution. Yapko
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recently surveyed nearly 900 psychotherapists and found that "they are grossly
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misinformed about the nature of hypnosis." The great strength of hypnosis, says
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Yapko, is that under trance "you can accept and respond to a suggested reality.
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Therapists like Mack may be oblivious to the fact that they're creating the
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experiences they then have to treat. These phenomena are not arising
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independent of his influence."
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Even therapists who are intrigued by and half-convinced of the reality of UFOs
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concede this fact. "Expectations of the observer have a tremendous amount to do
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with what's produced," explains Jim Gordon, a clinical professor of psychiatry
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at Georgetown Medical School who published an article on UFOs in THE ATLANTIC.
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"Patients in Jungian analysis have Jungian dreams, and in Freudian analysis
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they have Freudian dreams. That's why therapists with different approaches to
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UFOs produce different reactions in their patients."
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Mack responds to all these protests with the helpless shrug of a man who is
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simply convinced of what he is seeing. "I know this sounds like hedging, but we
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don't know in what reality this occurs. False and true memory don't apply. This
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is powerfully real, but in what reality?" I asked him where he felt he belonged
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in the raging controversy over memory and abuse. Does he think memories of
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satanic abuse might be happening in an alternate reality? He postulated that
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indeed they might: "Perhaps those memories are experientially true but they
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didn't factually happen in this reality." What does this mean? In the fourth
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dimension - or perhaps the sixth dimension?
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Mack is the most frustrating type of true believer: congenial, intelligent, and
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absolutely impenetrable. "People say you may be influencing them, there must be
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childhood trauma, memory is not reliable. I could say all those things but it's
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not like that. It's authentic."
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But what does he mean by authentic? I interviewed one of Mack's prime
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abductees, Peter Faust, a Boston acupuncturist and spiritual healer, a man
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Mack says the aliens simply won't let rest. Faust is as handsome as a soap-
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opera star, with dark hair and dimples. He and his wife were in the Caribbean
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when he remembers saying, "You little fuckers get out of here!" The next
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morning he had some odd bites behind his ears. It was years and several
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dreams later that he "realized" what might have happened to him and went
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to Mack for hypnotic regression.
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Peter told me with absolute sincerity how he recalled under trance that during
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his abductions, sperm had been suctioned from him with a funnel device and that
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he had been bred with a particular alien female. I turned to his wife at that
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|
point and asked her how she felt about this.
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"Well," she admitted, "it's hard. Sometimes I wonder if I should pack up and
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leave. It's like the affair that never ends. And I can't do anything about it."
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I turned to Peter. His eyes were burning with a believer's intensity. "They're
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coming in our lifetime, I guarantee it."
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#
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Waiting For A Verdict
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The jury on UFOs may forever remain out - floating somewhere in the cosmos
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|
among spaceships and alien breeders. Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of
|
|
John Mack and his work is not whether it is valid, but the intense furor
|
|
surrounding it. Carl Sagan, the foremost astronomer of our time, wrote an
|
|
impassioned cover story for PARADE magazine about our national obsession with
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aliens. (Mack wrote him a nine-page letter in rebuttal, but it went
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unpublished.) Sagan contends that there is no hard evidence of ETs on this
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planet, and that so-called abductions are most likely hallucinations.
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|
Nonetheless "we have before us a matter of supreme importance - touching on
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our limitations...the fashioning of our beliefs and perhaps even the origins
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|
of our religions."
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|
So, when Mack says this phenomenon gets at the very core of "who we are" and
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|
"makes us question all realities," he is right. We will always wonder about our
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|
place in the universe, and the form that wonder takes will always reflect the
|
|
age. Ours is an age of rockets and radio waves, an era mesmerized by the
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pleasures of purging and confession, caught by the belief in widespread abuse,
|
|
and both troubled and inspired by questions of consciousness itself. If anyone
|
|
is an emblem of our age, John Mack is. The real disappointment is that he
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brings us no closer to the truth - even though he could.
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**********************************************
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* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
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********************************************** |