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In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor John E. Mack became one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, alien abductions, and the alien-hybrid breeding scheme. He was introduced to celebrated painter, amateur hypnotherapist, and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins by transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof. Hopkins had helped author Whitley Strieber recover the abduction “memories” that became the book (and then movie) Communion.
Mack and Hopkins quickly produced their own movie, Intruders. Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, going on the TV talk-show circuit with star patients that believed they were being experimented on while on alien spacecraft. Oprah slotted alien abductions right into her schedule, alongside Satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorder, and past-lives regressions.
In reasoning not unfamiliar to Conspirituality listeners, Hopkins claimed a government conspiracy was covering up the ET hybrid breeding scheme, while Mack explained the lack of physical evidence by claiming the abduction experience “challenged the Western paradigm of materialist science.” The X-Files TV show was inspired by their work, which also spawned today’s generation of UFO grifters, alien channelers, and pastel-Q lightworkers.
For today’s installment of his The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the characters, stories, psychology, and cultural significance of fantastical repressed memories retrieved under hypnosis—be they of horny demons, ritual Satanic abuse, or alien scientists who steal abductee’s DNA in the night.
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I remember a light hitting me in the forehead, aliens in my room, being lifted up into a spaceship.
I remember being lying on a table, lying naked, having probes put around me, experiments done on me, looking in my eyes, my ears, around my body.
So this happened to you what, in the middle of the day or you...
They happen at night time.
Okay, so when you're sleeping.
In the middle of the night, I woke up, very conscious, walked over to my living room, saw something in the room, felt the white light, felt the paralysis, and then I fell asleep.
Several hours later, I woke up and had these intense emotions.
But Dr. Mack Tate recorded several of his therapy sessions with Peter, including one where Peter was under hypnosis.
And during these sessions, Peter recalled his meetings with the aliens.
I'm in my room in Hawaii.
And they lifted me up like this.
They got me.
That's Oprah Winfrey hosting alien abductee Peter Faust and his therapist, the Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack on her TV show in 1994, the same year Mack published his book, Abduction, Human Encounters with Aliens.
The book and its publicity tour was at the center of a wild narrative about extraterrestrial visitors performing terrifying experiments on humans who, usually under hypnosis, recalled anal probes, nasal implants, and forced extraction of ova and semen.
The purpose of all this?
An ominous alien human breeding project often enacted on spacecraft to which victims were repeatedly transported, sometimes even meeting their own half-alien hybrid babies.
This kind of subject matter made Oprah Winfrey very rich.
She joyfully shoveled pseudoscience and paranormal conspiracism into the black hole appetite of the American public and was repaid in kind.
By 1995, Forbes listed her net worth at $340 million, and in 2003, Oprah became a billionaire.
This was due in part to her coverage of a sensationalist cluster of topics, recovery of repressed trauma and the multiple personalities it had supposedly created, claims of ritual satanic abuse, and, as in this episode, alien abduction experiences.
The waves of cultural hysteria generated around that cluster of topics issued from one common therapeutic practice, hypnosis, as a means of extracting buried traumatic memories from the subconscious mind.
Hypnosis provided by helpful true believer and often then best-selling author therapists who would become expert hubs for networks of patients seeking confirmation of their worst fears.
In terms of alien abduction, John Mack was both an adventurous researcher and an understanding therapist to a roster of patient subjects.
Together, they helped establish a strange new cosmology in the collective American psyche.
Mack's work inspired the hugely popular X-Files TV show and spawned the plethora of science fiction tropes presented as paranormal truths being covered up by government conspiracy on the so-called History Channel, and then more recently the Travel Channel and Gaia TV.
Later, we'll get into how all of this may just be an updated fantastical remix of the centuries-old interpretation of sleep paralysis as visitation by horny demons.
But Mack did not do this alone.
Several other prominent figures of the time contributed to his hero's journey, most notably a celebrated painter and UFO researcher named Bud Hopkins.
Mack was introduced to Hopkins by legendary transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Groff, who he met at Big Sur's Esalen Institute, where else.
LSD, ayahuasca, and intense holotropic breathwork sessions all guided the Harvard professor, in the midst of a midlife crisis, I should add, down a path of coming to believe that the Western scientific model of reality was insufficient to the task of making sense of what was really happening with the aliens.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
How did a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatry professor become one of the most pedigreed proponents of UFOs, abductions, and the alien-human hybrid breeding scheme?
What can we learn from his story, the stories of his patients, and the cultural context that makes up such a significant branch of what I call the roots of conspiratuality?
That's what we'll unpack together today.
I'm Julian Walker.
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