At first glance, Dr. John E. Mack would seem to be on top of the world.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the individual who turned Cambridge Hospital's psychiatry department into one of the premier teaching institutions in the country, Mack has garnered high esteem for his work on topics ranging from nightmares and human conflict to teenage suicide.

Yet his interest in other worlds--namely alien abductions--has brought him both acclaim and extensive criticism.

Mack became something of a national celebrity after writing his best-selling book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens,which recounts the experiences of people claiming to have had encounters with extraterrestrial life.

Recently a secret Harvard "fact finding" committee was convened by Dean of the Medical School Daniel C. Tosteson '46 to evaluate Mack's research.

In 1983, Mack founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change at Cambridge Hospital, where he now works.

Originally founded to investigate the psychological dynamics of the Cold War, the Center now studies the psychological roots behind world problems in social, ecological and spiritual areas.

One project of the Center the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, deals almost exclusively with alien abduction experiences.

Why Aliens?

Dr. Mack's fairly recent interest in abductionphenomena has left his colleagues "puzzled" MalkahL. Notman, acting chair of psychiatry at theCambridge Hospital, says, "People who have knownhim for a long time feel both loyal to him andpuzzled by what this particular interestrepresents."

Mack says he has held long-standing interestsin unconsciousness, consciousness and "the depthsof the psyche." It was in the course of pursuingthese interests the Mack stumbled into the realmof alien abductions.

"I became interested in the work of StanislavGrof, who had extended our understanding of thehuman unconscious through the use of non-ordinarystates for consciousness for exploring thepsyche," Mack says.

Grof, who initially used the hallucinogen LSDin his research, developed a drug-free techniquefor exploring the psyche.

Through the use of rapid breathing, powerfulmusic and mandalas, Grof's holotropic breathingtechnique allows people to "explore the deeperrealm of the psyche," according to Mack, who nowuses this method with some of his patients.

According to Mack, Grof was also interested in"spiritual emergencies" involving various personalcrises surrounding life and death, addictionproblems, spirituality and UFO encounters. AfterGrof sent him and article on UFOs, Mack says, "Ikept asking myself: is this true? Are these UFOsreally coming?"

Soon thereafter someone who was also studyingGrof's work introduced Mack to Bud Hopkins, a NewYork artist who had been studying the abductionphenomenon for decades.

"My first reaction was that if he took thisseriously there must be something wrong with himand that this is some kind of psychosis ofpsychiatric problem." Mack recalls.

Yet Mack's opinions about both Hopkins and theabduction phenomena changed after he began seeingabductees professionally in the winter of 1990.Mack, who dedicated Abduction to Hopkins,says, "It soon became apparent and remains clearto me that these are not experiences that can beexplained in a purely psychodynamic orpsychosocial way. They do involve some kind ofactual encounter with some sort of entity."

"Now whether those entities are literallyphysical beings in our material universe ofwhether they represent some kind of cross overfrom another dimension I really don't know," Macksays.

The Abductions

Most abduction reports follow a similarscenario. According to Dominique Callimanopoulos,the coordinator for Mack's International AbductionProject, people report being visited by a brightlight, floating through a closed window, wall orceiling, entering a ship, and undergoing certainprocedures [For an account from an actualabductee, please see adjacent story.]

Researches say abductees share no specificdefining characteristic David Jacobs associateprofessor of history at Temple University, saysanyone and everyone can be abducted, and thatexperiencers come from a wide spectrum of peoplein terms of intelligence education, ethnicity andreligious belief.

Mack, however, is now studying the personalityprofiles of experiencers to determine whether ornot abductees may share certain characteristics.

According to researchers, abductions can occuranywhere and at any time-- in bed, while driving,even while canoeing, Jacobs says memories of theabductions vary among experiencers, from somepeople remembering entire episodes to some havingno conscious recollection of the encounter at all.

The actual nature of the aliens is debatedamong abduction researchers. To Mack, the aliensare primarily benevolent entities while toresearchers like Hopkins, they have a moresinister motive.

Mack says such differences may reflect thedifferent ways in which people interpret and reactto experiences. Some may be frightened byencounters, while others might find themspiritual.

The different reactions to alien abductions mayalso reflect their varied appearances.Callimanopulos says Mack is most familiar with the"little grays," what one might typically think ofas aliens: they are about four feet tall, withgrey pear-shaped heads and large oval eyes.

Another "species" of alien are the "TallNordics": tall, blond humanoids who look very muchlike gods. According to Callimanopulos, othertypes of aliens include reptilian-looking entitiesand dwarves.

Controversy

Perhaps the only thing certain about Mack'sabduction research is its surrounding controversy.According to Beverley A. Rubick, director of theCenter for Frontier Sciences at Temple University,"anyone who is raising extraordinary questionsabout what we think about realty is going to belaughed at or ridiculed."

Since the publication of Abduction in1994, scientists have criticized Mack's researchmethods and his contention that UFOs and abductionmay be real.

Robert A. Baker professor emeritus ofpsychology at the University of Kentucky, saysthat abductions are just delusions. "There are noaliens, no UFOs," he says. "Nobody's beenabducted."

Yet ufologists--researchers who study UFOs--andsome academics disagree. "The evidence for theabduction phenomena is overwhelming," Jacobs says."The question is: why and for what reason?"

Mack and other abduction investigators say theconsistency of abduction reports in one of themost compelling aspects of the phenomena.

"When case after case after case, theseconsistent stories occur, it became clear to methat this, although mysterious was a robustphenomena," Mack says.

Yet skeptics are quick to dismiss theseconsistent reports by charging that therapists areinfluencing their patients, especially duringhypnotic sessions when the abduction memories areretrieved.

"They do not recognize that they've reproducedextravagant stories that are easy to get people toconfabulate," says Richard J. Ofshe, a socialpsychologist at the University of California atBerkeley. "Hypnosis is a wonderfully powerful andinteresting method of influence, and not torecognize that can be very foolish."

But Mack, who hypnotizes some of his patients,says the hypnosis does not impose anything on thepatient's memory. "It's basically a way ofextending the awareness that the person has oftheir experiences," Mack says.

And Mack points out that plenty of patientsrecall alien encounters consciously without theuse of any hypnosis. In the appendix toAbductions Mack concedes that hypnosis canlead to recollections of inaccurate memories, butwrites, "My personal experience is that abductionmaterial recovered under hypnosis parallels whathas been obtained by conscious reporting."

John Carpenter a psychiatric therapist at theCenter for Neuropsychratry in Springfield,Missouri says, "Twenty Five to 30 percent recallexactly the same kinds of details without any useof hypnosis at all."

But critics say hypnosis or no hypnosis,patients may still be influenced by theirtherapists and by popular culture. Ofshe sayshypnosis simply accelerates patients' tendenciesto fabricate stories.

Still, abduction researchers press critics toexplain why, if indeed culture of a therapist is asource of influence consistent stories have beenreported globally, even among three-year-oldchildren and in primitive cultures.

"How could you get such incredibly matchingmemories over thousands of people over manybackgrounds and countries?" asks Carpenter. "Whywould everybody have the same imagination?"

Redefining World Views

Mack says he sees himself as pioneering a newterritory in psychology. "This was not supposed tobe a formal research study," he says. "I felt likeI was in the tradition of Freud and Jung andErikson and others who were trying to map out anewdomain of human experience."

Mack says the abduction phenomenon has made himquestion society's most fundamental assumptionsabout existence consciousness and reality.

"This phenomenon in confounding because itseems to cross over from some realm, we know notwhere, and enter into our world," says Mack. "Ithink that this field may have some value inopening human consciousness to a larger sense ofwho we are."

At the same time Mack admits such aredefinition of reality and consciousness resultsin much public resistance.

Using a phrase coined by Michael Zimmermanprofessor of philosophy at Tulane, Mack says hiswork challenges the notion of anthropomorphichumanism ," the idea that human beings are thehighest intelligence in the universe.

Mack says. people are often reluctant to accepta notion that threatens their "world view," whichgives them a structured place in the universe.Experiences with other entities or energies causeus to reevaluate our Western, materialist outlook,says Mack.

Critics have found other ways of explainingabductions without having to radically shift theirworld views While few doubt the actual pain andtrauma abductions claim to experience, the causeand reality of these experiences are in question.

Some critics challenge the mental stability ofthe patients. But Mack says it is clear that theseindividuals are not expressing something that isthe product of some mental illness.

Mack says any psychiatric problems a patienthas could have resulted from the abduction oranother unrelated aspect of the person's life.

Mack says most of the arguments againstabduction fail to explain all five fundamentalaspects of the phenomenon: the consistency ofstories among widely separated people, the absenceof personal psychopathology that could account forthese experiences, associated physical findingssuch as scars and reports of missing people, theassociation between UFO sightings and abductionreports and the reports of the phenomena inchildren under three.

It seems as if there's little escaping thedebate and controversy surrounding Mack's currentline of work, but he's not in this alone .

"John Mack is certainly not the onlypsychiatrist investigating these type of things,"says Miller. "He's just the only one who'sup-front and out in the open."Judy Dater