John E. Mack

© Photo: Harvard University Press Office
John E. Mack

John Edward Mack (1929–2004) was an American author. He won the Pulitzer prize in 1977 for A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence.

He was born October 4, 1929, in New York to Edward C. Mack and Ruth Prince Mack, and died September 27, 2004, while attending a conference about T.E. Lawrence in England.

Alien abduction research

In his later years he became known for his research about the alien abduction phenomena that was not always met with acceptance by Harvard Medical School officials. In 1990, the same year Mack began his investigation into the alien abduction phenomena, a faculty committee was formed to review Mack’s “clinical care and clinical investigation of his subjects.” No action was taken by the committee after their 15 month investigation was completed, according to journalist Mark Feeney of theBoston Globe. Note: Some sources state the investigation was conducted for 14 months.

Mack interviewed approximately 200 people who reported encounters with extraterrestrials, according to Feeney. Feeney also wrote that Mack believed alien encounters were more of a spiritual nature rather than a physical one.

"No one has been able to come up with a counter-formulation that explains what's going on," Dr. Mack said in a 1992 Globe interview in which he discussed his view of alien encounters. "But if people can't be convinced that this is real, that's OK. All I want is for people to be convinced that there's something going on here that is not explainable,” wrote Feeney concerning Mack's research.

During an interview with the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) NOVA television series Mack discussed his research into the alien abduction phenomena. He said during the interview he found the alien abduction phenomena at first hard to take seriously.

“I had very little place in my mind to take this seriously. I, like most of us, were raised to believe that if we were going to discover other intelligence, we'd do it through radio waves or through signals or something of that kind,” he said during the NOVA interview.

He later became impressed with the consistency of the experiences related by his interviewees.

“.... I've now worked with over a hundred experiencers intensively. Which involves an initial two-hour or so screening interview before I do anything else. And in case after case after case, I've been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of feelings connected with this, the self-doubt—all the appropriate responses that these people have to their experiences,” said Mack during his NOVA interview.

Mack published two books concerning the alien abduction experience. “Abduction” was published in 1994 followed by "Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters," in 1999.

Career

Mack graduated from Oberlin College in 1951, received his medical degree from Harvard in 1955, and also graduated from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Mack joined the Harvard Medical Facility in 1964 and later became a medical professor in 1972.

He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1959 to 1961.

Mack lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he started the psychiatry unit at Cambridge Hospital where he served as chief of the department from 1969 to 1977.

He founded the John E. Mack Institute in 1989 as the Center for Psychology and Social Change,. He later started the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research with a grant from Laurance Rockefeller. The institute was founded in 1993.

Mack was also an assistant editor ofThe Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and was on the editorial board of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

During his career, Mack was "...was drawn to psychoanalytic analysis of the misunderstood or vulnerable, including children contemplating suicide, teenagers troubled by the threat of nuclear war and finally, people plagued by what they believed to be recurrent alien encounters," according to Jennifer Bayot of TheNew York Times.

Marriage

He was married to Sally Stahl Mack. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1995.