I think, also add that some things are more nearly
certain than others.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
A R E Y O U E X P E R I E N C E D ?
Once, a few years ago, I was lying on a beach north of Santa Cruz
when a strange dronelike machine zoomed overhead, heading south
down the coast. It looked like a pilotless airplane with the front sheered
off. I don’t think I was too wasted at the time, but this was California
so I just thought, “Whoa, dude, that’s too weird!” and assumed it was
some sort of experimental military aircraft. It didn’t hover over me
with an intense blue light or suddenly move away at incredible speed or
anything like that.
Years earlier, driving up the East Coast on I-95, I saw a glowing,
shifting, unnaturally bright purple patch in a clear sky. It moved
around coherently, as though it were being directed or piloted.
When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of being taken on an alien
spaceship. I still remember vividly the mixture of excitement and fear I
felt, the diffuse green light, the gridlike, patterned floor, and the gravity
that always seemed slightly off-kilter, making it awkward to stand up.
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Most amazing of all was the view of the rapidly receding Earth through
the porthole. I dreamed of this same ship enough times that I remember
thinking, “Here we go again.” The aliens were mysterious, their inten-
tions hard to discern. Though I never saw them, I knew they were
there.
My interpretation, if dreams need interpreting, is this: What do you
expect from a kid obsessed with science fiction and surrounded by
adults who talked about spaceflight all of the time?
If I were the type prone to believe in UFOs and alien abductions, all
these memories could form a pattern of evidence convincing me that I
had in fact been contacted. Over a lifetime, we all see and experience
plenty of weirdness. If you are a person who thinks, “A lot of strange
things are happening, and it all fits together to reveal a pattern of alien
presence,” then anything unusual you see and hear will help validate
your scenario.
Our beliefs and expectations mold our interpretations of experience.
This affects what we see and how we remember it. After a while you
have a pattern of memories that confirm your beliefs. This can work
both ways, of course. If you think, “We can find a rational explanation
for anything,” then you always will.
I N T E R R U P T E D J O U R N E Y
You know those “audience brush with greatness” segments they used
to have on Letterman where people stood up to tell about the time
Henry Kissinger stepped on their foot, or how their sister fixed Venus
Williams’s carburetor? Well, I once saw Gene Simmons from Kiss eat-
ing a hot dog at the Denver Airport.* And my dad roomed with John
Mack at medical school.
John Mack is the shining intellectual light of the UFO abductee move-
ment. They prefer to be called experiencers, rather than abductees.
Mack has published two books on his work with experiencers. In thera-
peutic sessions he helps them to remember and come to grips with their
(often traumatic) histories of alien contact.
He has also elaborated a philosophical framework to explain the
abductions, who the abductors might be, and what it all implies about
who we really are. Mack believes this phenomenon has crucial implica-
*No sign of the tongue.
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tions for human history, evolution, ecology, and the relationship of our
consciousness to a deeper reality.
John Mack is a distinguished, widely published, Pulitzer Prize–
winning, tenured physician and professor at Harvard. Among those
who are completely convinced of the reality and importance of the
abduction phenomenon, Mack is uniquely mainstream and respectable.
Or was.
I guess it’s slightly strange that my parents’ circle of friends included
both Sagan, the SETI pioneer, and Mack, who has become the leading
voice of the abductee movement. The beliefs and philosophies of these
two men were once quite similar, back in the day. But over time they
developed radically different conceptions of alien intelligence, which
required two entirely different worldviews. Sagan was a passionately
rationalist astronomer fascinated by the possibility of alien contact, and
Mack, a psychiatrist, came to believe that contact with extraterrestrials
required nothing more than a prepared mind. Somehow, they both
ended up in our swimming pool.
John and my father, Lester, met in 1951, the year they both started at
Harvard Medical School. They shared interests in literature and culture
that went far beyond the medical curriculum. They became roommates
and attended each other’s wedding. In some ways they have had paral-
lel careers. They graduated from Harvard together in 1955. Both went
into psychiatry and then psychoanalysis, and both eventually became
professors in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
John became a celebrity in some circles after his 1976 psychohistory of
T. E. Lawrence won the Pulitzer Prize (the year before Sagan won his
Pulitzer). Lester became famous in some circles and infamous in others
for his books advocating sanity in drug policy.
They continue to socialize, though not as much in recent years. This
friendship, as you might imagine, has been strained by the abductee
movement. Though John’s involvement began over a decade ago, it still
seems like a surprising new development to his old friends.
The topic of alien abductions was not entirely new to our household.
We had an early brush with the concept. The first abduction case to
gain wide attention, the archetypal case, was that of Betty and Barney
Hill, a couple who, under hypnosis, recalled being kidnapped by the
occupants of a UFO, taken on board, and subjected to strange experi-
ments, all while driving in rural New Hampshire one night in 1961.
The Interrupted Journey, a 1966 book about the Hills’ abduction expe-
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377
rience, became a best-seller. In the 1975 made-for-TV movie Barney
was played by James Earl Jones.
At first the Hills experienced only “missing time” and had no mem-
ory of what had happened to them. Their memories came out in hypno-
sis sessions with a Boston psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon. Betty and
Barney seemed to independently recall the same details of the abduc-
tion. Betty drew star maps that the aliens had shown her.
My father knew Simon and borrowed the tapes of the hypnosis ses-
sions. One evening, after the kids were in bed, Lester listened to the
tapes along with Sagan and James McDonald of the University of
Arizona, a meteorologist who was one of the few mainstream scientists
taking UFOs seriously.*
After this listening session, Lester proposed that the Hills were suf-
fering from a psychiatric condition known as a folie à deux—a joint
/> delusional syndrome first identified in mid-nineteenth-century France.†
It generally occurs between two people who live together and are
closely related. One is dominant and the other passive. The dominant
companion first develops the delusional system and the passive partner
is gradually drawn in.
Betty Hill was a strong-willed, outgoing, successful woman with high
standing in her community. Barney was by all accounts dominated by
his wife. Betty was effusive about her abduction experience. As my
father described it in a recent e-mail to me, “She talked about it as
though it were the defining event of her life. One might say that Barney
could scarcely afford to express any skepticism, or, ‘if you can’t beat
them, join them.’ ”
Lester’s folie à deux hypothesis became a widely accepted explana-
tion for the Hills’ “recovered memories,” at least among skeptics. So
the concept of alien abductions was not unknown to Lester and Carl
when John began publicly espousing his theories. Nevertheless, John’s
acceptance of these experiences at face value was somewhat shocking.
Not completely shocking. John always seemed to be searching. In the
seventies he got deeply involved in EST and became close to Werner
Erhard. In the eighties he became increasingly interested in altered
states of consciousness. He was especially enamored of psychedelic psy-
*I was upstairs having strange dreams. . . .
†In the original case from which the name stems, two women remembered time-traveling to eighteenth-century France.
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chiatrist Stanislav Grof’s “holotropic breathing” technique. It is a mea-
sure of the high esteem with which he was held by his old friends in the
Harvard academic community that he was able to convince the arch-
skeptics Carl and Lester to join him in a session where they were all
“breathed” by a woman trained in Grof’s technique. Mack had visions,
hallucinations, and transcendent insights, but Lester and Carl just got a
little dizzy. Eventually John’s interests soared far beyond interpersonal
or even transpersonal communication and he launched into interspecies
communication with other humanoid intelligences—no radio tele-
scopes required. To many of his old friends and colleagues he seemed to
be heading for Lilly-land.
E X P E R I E N C E R S
I’m not going to delve deeply into abductions. Many books and articles
have been written by believers and debunkers. The subject has been
debated on a NOVA documentary and discussed ad infinitum on day-
time TV, late-night radio, and nonstop coast-to-coast-to-coast Web
chatter. As my wife Tory said tonight at dinner, “You don’t need to go
on and on about that. People can watch that on Oprah. ”
In fact John did go on Oprah. She introduced him by saying that
although ordinarily she would not invite a guest who made such bizarre
claims, she was intrigued that a respected Harvard professor and emi-
nent psychiatrist takes abductions seriously. And that is one role that he
has played—helping to create a mainstream venue for stories of extra-
ordinary experiences.
It is troubling but fascinating to see people you know head down such
different roads of belief. All the time you hear about beliefs and ideas
that seem like complete tabloid nonsense: UFO cloning cults in France,
miracle cures from the dust of the Grand Wazoo, and authentic crystal
balls. Most of this cosmic debris is easy to write off either because you
don’t know these people and can just assume they are nuts, or because
you do know them and know they are nuts. But although the ideas espoused by the abductee movement definitely seem pretty loopy, I don’t
believe John Mack is crazy—which, for me, presents a puzzle.
The experiencers and their supporters are certain their recovered
memories of alien encounters are real. They believe that the messages
imparted to them are important, not just for themselves but for all of
us. Although the experiences are solitary, personal, and dreamlike,
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379
there are many recurring elements that give the abduction narrative a
certain solidity.
These common elements include being woken up by small humanoid
creatures in your bedroom, being transported to what seems like an
operating room on a “ship,” being confined to a table, and having
experiments done by alien “doctors” who seem particularly interested
in human reproductive organs and who sometimes take samples of
genetic material. The alien creatures also transmit various messages—
often warnings about ecological disasters to come if we do not stop
defiling the Earth.
Mack believes that the remarkable consistency of the stories estab-
lishes the reality of the experience. He and his experiencers are con-
vinced that these are not just dreams or hallucinations, that they have
actually been taken away to another place and encountered other
beings.
When I read the experiencers’ individual stories, I’m struck by how
frightening and emotionally powerful the memories are. However,
experiencers and their supporters lose me when they start interpreting
the aliens’ behavior. This is when they descend toward the grade-B
zone. The aliens are trying to alter us genetically. They want to create a
race of hybrid alien/humans. Some investigators feel this is to be feared
and resisted, because the aliens are creating an invasion force, and
when enough of them are among us, they’ll just take over. But Mack
and his followers think the aliens are benevolent. They are here to help
us survive by assisting in a necessary transformation of consciousness,
and human/alien hybrids will help us through the difficult decades
ahead.
Meanwhile back in reality, the debunkers sometimes get a little bit
grade B themselves. They argue that aliens wouldn’t behave in ways
that seem irrational to us, and that our encounters with real aliens
would not seem like dreams. Why would the aliens come all this way
from the gamma quadrant only to steal our sperm and eggs? How
could they possibly breed with us? It doesn’t compute. Real aliens
would have more respect for basic principles of physics and biology.
In a harsh critique of Mack in The New Republic, entitled “The
Doctor’s Plot,” James Gleick wrote “how infinitely unlikely it is that
our corner of the universe should be receiving alien visitors in such
strikingly near-human form at just the eyeblink of history when we
have discovered space travel.”
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In his book The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan asked why
aliens haven’t set off burglar alarms or been captured on security
videos. Debunkers are especially vexed by the aliens’ failure to leave
any footprints or garbage. Sagan noted, “There is certainly no retrieval
of cunning machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has
filched a page from the captain’s logbook, or an examinin
g instrument,
or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of the ship, or come
back with detailed and verifiable scientific information not hitherto
available on Earth. Why not? These failures must tell us something.”
Sagan stated that he would believe in the aliens if they left behind
unknown alloys, or materials with extraordinary properties.
Those were, of course, his own fantasy aliens. He’d have been con-
vinced if their technology was impressive in ways that he could imag-
ine, and if they left us samples. But they’d have to play fair, respect the
laws, and manifest themselves physically in a repeatable way that we
can verify. Mistrust and verify.
As I’ve pointed out, any aliens who came to Earth would probably be
thousands, if not millions, of years more technologically mature than
we. Who are we to tell them the rules? This provides a pretty good
loophole against any debunking based on the seeming illogic of alien
behavior and capabilities.
Other, more promising critical arguments invoke the similarities
between the abduction stories and pop-culture images of aliens. The
experiencer aliens have a definite physical resemblance to movie aliens
such as those portrayed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—the
skinny little guys with big heads and almond-shaped eyes. Abduction
critics also theorize about different kinds of hallucinations or sleep dis-
orders, the power of suggestion, and therapists who are often eager to
help experiencers remember their cosmic adventures. The skeptical
mind wonders if the wide propagation of science fiction imagery, popu-
lar books containing the basics of the abduction story, extensive media
coverage, and conscious or unconscious suggestions from the therapists
are not more than adequate to explain the consistent imagery reported
by experiencers.
Critics also love to make titillating hay out of the fact that many of
the memories involve lurid interspecies sex acts or violations of the
abductees’ private parts. You have to admit that these details do give it
a pulp fiction edge.
If numerous people who had never been exposed to the alien imagery
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381
pervading our culture or the abduction myth itself had independently
remembered the same experiences in detail, then it would point to some-
thing much more interesting, although not necessarily extraterrestrials.
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