Ralph Blumenthal details his biography of Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, whose career-defining work began in 1990 after meeting artist Bud Hopkins and interviewing hundreds of abductees. While Blumenthal highlights the physical reality of UAPs revealed by the Pentagon's ATIP program, he notes that abduction claims lack definitive proof like photographs or verified witnesses, such as the unidentified guards from the 1989 Brooklyn Bridge incident. Despite critics attributing stories to sleep paralysis or trauma, Mack's findings of unique details and family patterns challenged Harvard's materialist demands for scientific proof, ultimately exonerating him without sanctions. Ultimately, the episode distinguishes between verified aerial phenomena and unverified abduction narratives, suggesting that while the former is real, the latter remains a compelling but scientifically unproven phenomenon. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Best Assignments in Journalism00:05:36
Hello, world.
Ralph Blumenthal was a reporter for the New York Times for 45 years, where he worked as an investigative journalist and crime reporter.
He's also written seven books based on investigative crime and reporting on cultural history.
His latest book, The Believer Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack, is the first biography of the Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, who risked his esteemed career in psychology to investigate the stupefying accounts.
Of human abductions by aliens.
Nothing in Mac's four decades of psychiatry had prepared him for the otherworldly accounts of a cross section of humanity, including young children who reported being taken against their wills by alien beings.
Based on Ralph's exclusive access to John Mac's archives, journals, psychiatric notes, and interviews with his families and closest associates, he reveals the life and work of a man who explored the deepest of scientific conundrums and further leads us to the hidden dimensions and alternative realities that captivated Mac until the end of his life.
This is a good one, folks.
I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.
Please welcome Ralph Blumenthal.
Thank you for doing this, Ralph.
I really appreciate it.
I just finished watching the UFO documentary on Showtime, and you made a few appearances in there.
I did.
Really, really great documentary.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I wasn't responsible for it, but I liked the part where they used me, and I don't subscribe to all of it.
I think there were some sketchy things in there, but really, which is true of the whole UFO field.
I mean, it's.
You know, to pick and choose, but I try to keep it on a level comporting with reality, let's say.
Which part specifically about the documentary are you referring to?
Well, there were some references to, you know, the US government working with aliens and secret base, things like that, I think are kind of way off.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, there is quite a bit of varying theories about what's going on when you sort of dive into that world.
So, briefly, why don't you, for the people listening who aren't familiar with you, if you wouldn't mind, give me sort of a brief background on who you are and what your background is with your career and everything.
Well, I spent my whole career at the New York Times, and I was very well grounded in this reality, let's say.
I covered stories from the mafia, the World Trade Center bombings, including the first one, the truck bombing, which was a kind of a precursor.
Of 9 11, although investigators never realized that until too late.
And I covered political corruption and politics and investigative pieces.
So my background was not in UFO reporting at all.
And I got into the UFO story and John Mack through a series of circumstances I can go into.
But I really had very little interest in the field until very late in my career.
What originally made you want to become an investigative reporter?
Well, you know, every reporter who goes into the field feels that he or she can, you know, right wrongs, you know, as they say, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
I always felt I could, you know, make a difference by reporting.
I think you can change the world in different ways.
One is by, you know, political activism, another is by exposing the wrongs.
And I found early on in journalism that that was the best route for me, and I got a lot of satisfaction from it.
And you did a lot of overseas work as well, right?
Like in Vietnam and other places?
Yeah, I covered the Vietnam War from 69 to 71 and the Cambodian War, which was part of that.
And I was overseas before that in West Germany.
So I had some foreign experience.
Wow.
How old were you at the time when you were doing that?
20s.
Wow.
Very, very young.
What was that like?
Well, in journalism, you get your best assignments when you know the least.
Right.
When you're young and mobile, you don't have a family yet, you can move around quickly.
So that's when you get your best assignments.
Later on, the more you learn, you are encumbered by your family life and other commitments, and you have a home and things like that that you'd have to sell.
So little by little, the world closes around you.
But so I had wonderful assignments early on in my career.
I continued to have very good assignments, but my foreign work was really early on.
Now, are you still with the New York Times or are you?
No, I retired in 2009 after 45 years, but I still was able to contribute, including my most recent stories on UFOs, which we can talk about.
That I did those after I had left the staff, but continued to contribute.
Okay, okay.
UFOs and Pentagon Pilots00:15:03
Now, in 2000, correct me if I'm wrong, but the first legitimate article to ever be released by the New York Times on UFOs was 2017.
Is that right?
No, no.
No?
The Times did a lot of reporting on UFOs over the years.
So I definitely wouldn't call it the first legitimate article.
The Times has a long history, both covering this field and ignoring certain things in this field, both.
But if you go back into the archives, the Times was reporting on UFO incidents way back to Kenneth Arnold and Roswell, of course, and all the things that happened in the 40s and the 50s.
You know, the 60s throughout history.
And so I would definitely not call my article or our article because I collaborated with two fellow reporters the first.
But it did open up some new avenues, let's say.
It was a groundbreaking article in the sense that it, well, it exposed this unknown.
A unit of the Pentagon, ATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which no one knew existed.
And with the release of the three Navy videos that came along, two and then three that came along with that, I guess it kind of changed the tone or the paradigm to suggest that mainstream media was taking this field seriously.
Right.
So the 2017 article, for people who aren't familiar, is the one where you Talk or the videos or the radar videos were released from the pilots who were operating the Super Hornet, the Super Hornet fighter jets, and they captured the Tic Tac craft that was going at thousands of miles per hour, which was estimated almost colliding with one of the Super Hornets at one point.
What was it about that article that made it so groundbreaking?
Well, first of all, we exposed the fact that the Pentagon had been tracking UFOs, even though the government said.
It was out of the UFO business with Project Blue Book in 1970.
So the government obviously has not been straightforward with us throughout.
It said that it closed the book, Blue Book, on UFOs 50 years ago, whereas this secret unit, ATIP, was operating in the Pentagon tracking UFOs and collecting information.
It started in 2007 under another name and continued.
Well, today it continued to the present under another name.
But so we revealed the fact that the government was continued to be interested in UFOs.
That was interesting.
We revealed that Lou Elizondo, the head of the program, was resigning in protest against the lack of support he was getting within the Pentagon.
And that was groundbreaking.
And then to suggest that, or to prove, to show in the videos that the Navy had actual physical evidence.
That these things existed was groundbreaking.
I mean, you know, for a long time, people were dismissing UFOs as mental aberrations, fly specks on the windshield, marsh gas, the planet Venus, you name it.
But, you know, all the thousands of accounts by people, you know, throughout the years certainly gave the lie to that, but the government never admitted it.
So now the government was saying, yes, we have a unit investigating UFOs, and here are Navy videos.
They weren't the whole videos.
We only got parts of them, but what we got was very interesting.
So, how did the article start?
Like, when you guys first began working on it, what were those conversations like?
Okay, this is how it came about.
In October 2017, my colleague, Leslie Kane, who was not at the New York Times, but was a preeminent, probably the preeminent UFO.
Reporter, investigative reporter who had written an excellent book in 2010 called UFOs The Generals and Pilots Go on the Record, which was a very, very meticulous and well grounded account of how other governments, particularly in Europe and South America, were researching the UFO phenomenon.
Anyway, she and I were in touch because.
Um, she had been the companion of Bud Hopkins, who had gotten John Mack interested in UFOs.
And we'll go into that story down the line, but anyway.
So, Leslie and I had been in touch for some years, and in October 2017, she told me she had just attended a meeting in Washington with Lou Elizondo, who was quitting as head of this ATIP, that this organization existed, ATIP, that we didn't know about, and that.
We could probably get these, she saw, and we could probably get these Navy videos of some of the encounters.
So I realized this was big news.
You know, we didn't know that this organization existed.
It had been, you know, Harry Reid, the then Senate Majority Leader, had gotten the funding for this.
We told that story.
And so we took the story to the New York Times.
I still knew a lot of editors there.
I had left, as I said, in 2009.
I still knew people there, and it was an easy sell.
The story about a secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs and the director quits because he's not getting enough support.
I mean, that's a no brainer.
And I should say, Danny, that we had all this on the record.
We had no anonymous sources, we had the names of everybody we talked to, all the officials were speaking on the record.
We had the documentation.
We had Lou Elizondo's resignation letter.
We had an official comment from the Pentagon, which another colleague we worked with, Helene Cooper, Pentagon correspondent, had gotten from the Pentagon saying, Yeah, this organization did exist.
So we had this nailed down.
So it was not a hard sell to the New York Times, and they put it on the front page on Sunday, December 17th.
So the rest is history.
Wow.
Were these pilots at all discouraged from talking about this kind of stuff for the first time?
What was your feel from them?
I think they were wary.
Now they're not, by the way, because of the reporting that has since come out.
But at the time, there was a little reluctance to speak because traditionally, pilots who reported these encounters, both commercial pilots and military pilots, were referred to the psychiatrist.
They knew that it was a career killer to report these incidents, which, by the way, were common.
Sanctioned, let's say, and certainly not encouraged to report these encounters.
But as time went on and we followed up with some other stories, the Navy and the Air Force a little bit later did encourage pilots to come forward.
And now they say pilots, they want the pilots to come forward to report these encounters because they need them for the database.
Now, like for example, In the UFO docuseries on Showtime, Commander David Fravor talks about how, after they told them about these things, they want them to go check out and they come back after their flight.
They go back downstairs in the ship, and there were some people there taking all the footage away.
So, obviously, there's a lot more footage than.
Yeah.
There was an incident which we were made aware of that.
Personnel on the ship told us that unidentified military people came on board afterwards and confiscated the data records.
Okay.
And as far as I know, that still remains unexplained who those people were, why they took the database away, did they know what was on it, did they not want it to go further?
It's just not known.
I mean, you know, I want to say, Danny, that in our reporting, At the New York Times and in my book on John Mack, I've been very meticulous in not going beyond the information that I can verify.
As you know, there's a lot of crazy stories out there about UFOs and aliens and encounters, and they're very interesting stories.
But unless I can confirm them to the extent that at least I know who's telling them, what the circumstances are, etc., I'm very wary of committing that to print.
So I'm very cautious.
And I don't know what happened in that incident when they confiscated the data.
Obviously, the data still came out.
So we have the video, we have the radar tracks.
So they didn't conceal the actual encounters.
It was just some record that somebody wanted to have.
But more than that, we don't know.
Right.
I mean, most of these conversations are just speculation, right?
Other than what you can get from somebody as a matter of fact.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say most are speculation.
I'd say that there's a lot of speculation, but there's also a lot of factual information there, and people are coming forward.
People on the ships, radar operators, and people.
We've been in touch with a number of them, other pilots who have spoken to us on the record.
And so there's a lot of information.
Do you give any merit to the idea that these crafts could be some?
Part of some sort of secret defense program or secret military weapon program?
Well, that was an immediate thought and a possible explanation.
But that has been increasingly ruled out for the following reasons.
First of all, it was pretty much debunked in the latest UAP report.
The Pentagon changed its terminology from UFO to UAP, UFO being unidentified flying object, which was a term that was popularized in the late 40s, along with flying saucers.
Which is totally out of use now, to what the Pentagon now calls unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP.
So, in the UAP report that came out in June, just this past June, they examined all the possibilities, what these objects could be.
And one of the thoughts was well, maybe it's our own secret technology that, you know, one hand of the Pentagon is trying to keep secret from the other hand, you know, or it could be foreign.
China, Russia, another earthly adversary.
First of all, the US explanation has really been ruled out, conclusively, I would say, because everyone we have talked to on the record, off the record, says we do not, we, the US, do not possess this kind of technology.
Hypersonic speeds, ability to operate underwater.
In some cases, these things have been seen entering and emerging from the water.
Cloaking, turning invisible, all the things that go along with the reporting of this phenomena, these phenomena, rules out the fact that it could be American technology,
aside from the fact that it's very, very, very unlikely we would be operating our own secret technology in military airspace where it could collide with one of our jets and cause a terrific scandal, among other things.
Same goes with foreign explanations.
Nothing suggests, and everything to the contrary, that Russia or China or any other country on earth has this kind of technology.
So, the answer to your question, long roundabout, is no.
Nobody seriously suggests that this is our own technology that they're seeing.
I mean, obviously, everyone who has any sort of familiarity with this space is familiar with the Bob Lazar story and his whole story about being invited to work at S4 and back engineer all these crafts, which he describes almost to the T to be what these tic tac objects are doing.
Do you, what is your feeling or do you have any sort of opinions on his story and idea on what he talks about?
Do you give any credibility to that?
You know, I have not looked into the Bob Lazar story.
I'm very familiar with it.
It's a sensational story, to be sure.
There are a lot of very provocative stories out there told by people who have good credentials.
But I have to say, I have not checked that out myself.
There have been a lot of stories that we looked into at the Times about.
Sensational Stories and Credibility00:04:38
Retrieved, you know, craft that may have crashed and were retrieved that the government has possession of.
We made a little headway into that story with our last story in the Times, suggesting that or stating that congressional committees were briefed on some or shown briefing slides of some instances of retrieved crash materials.
Okay.
We didn't go beyond that.
We didn't say, you know, what had been determined from that, just that Senate committee staff were briefed.
On crash retrievals.
That in itself is rather sensational, I would say.
But to go to the next step and say that we have from these materials, if they exist, engineers and scientists have reconstructed spacecraft, reverse engineered them, is a big leap.
And to say that, you'd really need the evidence.
And I'm not aware of that evidence.
So it may yet come out.
But so to answer your question again, I just don't have an opinion on Bob Lazar.
It's certainly provocative and worth looking into for sure.
It just seems the media has been buzzing around this topic ever since the 2017 article.
Do you think that article did anything to change the stigma revolving the subject?
I think it did.
We keep hearing that the article showed that.
The stigma is not permanent.
That the Times faced up to the potential ridicule.
There still is a giggle factor in this whole subject, which people in Congress are afraid to subject themselves to.
But it showed that a serious newspaper can deal with the subject in a mature and well sourced way and suffer no consequences.
On the contrary, We were lionized for this groundbreaking story.
So I can't say we didn't suffer any consequences.
It can be done if it's properly sourced.
And as I said, we always just stick to what we know.
We don't speculate on what we.
By the way, we've never said that these UFOs are alien spaceships.
That is a conclusion that some people have drawn, and you might say it's the logical conclusion once you rule out all the other possibilities.
Okay, as Sherlock Holmes said, once you rule out all the impossibilities, what remains is the possible and the reality.
But we never said that.
All we said was that, and I think this is a big breakthrough, that these things do physically exist.
Okay, they have been caught on radar, and there's images of them and FLIR, this thermal imaging technology from the gunship cameras.
So, as I said, this dispenses with the idea that these things are figments of the imagination, they're archetypes, you know, they're, you know, natural phenomena mischaracterized.
No, they are physically real objects with astounding, you know, aerodynamics that we cannot explain.
But they physically exist.
So I think that's the biggest breakthrough since 2017.
Did you have any sort of colleagues reach out to you after that were had their feathers ruffled, or did you get any sort of negative blowback about this from other colleagues or people in your field?
No, I would say no.
I mean, we have a very serious science section at the New York Times that you know looks over the shoulders of anybody reporting on science and you know sort of makes sure that the time standards are adhered to, but.
I got to tell you, I got absolutely no feedback, negative, particularly negative.
Nightmares and Child Psychology00:15:32
I got a lot of positive feedback, but no complaints from any member of the staff that we maligned the New York Times.
On the contrary, people were very interested.
Okay, so when and how did you first become aware of John Mack?
Okay, so.
In 2004, I was still on the New York Times, and I was the Southwest correspondent based in Texas, in Houston.
And somehow I picked up a copy of a book called Passport to the Cosmos, which is John Mack's second book.
And I'll tell you about John Mack in a minute, because just keeping the chronology, I didn't know who John Mack really was when I picked up this book.
And I saw he was a Harvard psychiatrist.
Who had been gotten interested in the subject of alien abductions or the stories that people who consulted him told him about encounters they felt certain they had had with alien beings?
So he got interested in that field and he wrote two books.
And as I said, this was the second book that I picked up.
And I was immediately, as a journalist, captivated by the idea of a Harvard psychiatrist, and he was a very eminent psychiatrist indeed.
I mean, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Lawrence of Arabia.
He had founded clinics for impoverished people, mental health clinics.
He had worked on, he had protested against nuclear weapons because as a physician, he was concerned about the fate of the planet, all these things.
So he was an interesting guy, and now he had written this book.
On alien abduction and the stories people told him.
So I thought, as a journalist, he would make a good interview.
And I thought I would give him a call at Harvard and see if I could interview him.
Now, I didn't realize, I was naive probably, that he, I certainly didn't know he was as well known as he was.
As I said, he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Or 77 Pulitzer Prize for book written earlier.
And he'd been all over TV with his first book called Abduction.
He'd been on Oprah.
He'd been everywhere, been in the New York Times, but I had missed it.
So anyway, I thought, gee, I'll write a story about this guy.
And then I pick up the paper a few days later and I see he's dead.
I mean, he was run down in London by a drunk driver.
He was there for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia.
At T.E. Lawrence, 30 years after his book had come out.
And he was looking the wrong way down the street, which Americans tend to do in London.
And he was dead.
So I couldn't interview him, obviously.
But I did reach out to his family.
And it was not a great time for them.
Obviously, my timing was poor.
They were grieving.
But I let them know that I was very interested in his overall story.
And I kept in touch with the family, particularly his three sons.
And eventually, they granted me access to all his archives, his therapy sessions, which are taped.
I mean, his own therapy sessions, because he, as a psychiatrist, needed to be analyzed.
And he kept up with his own analysis over the years, and his private journals, and his unpublished manuscripts, and his tapes of every lecture he ever gave.
So I had access to a tremendous volume of material.
Plus interviews with the people close to him.
I mean, his wife Sally was still alive.
She died shortly afterwards of cancer.
Colleagues, family members.
Anyway, so I had access to a tremendous amount of material.
And that's what got me going on the book.
From everything that you drew from talking to his family and reading his work and watching his interviews, what kind of guy was he?
From what you could deduce?
He was very charismatic.
He was mesmerizing.
He was tall, very good looking, with a ruddy complexion, very tightly stretched skin.
He had a wonderful manner with people, which I guess is the mark of a good psychiatrist.
He just got people to trust him and to talk to him.
He was brilliant.
I mean, his writing is quite apart from the subject matter.
And what he was trying to convey, just his literary abilities, his gifts as a communicator were extraordinary.
He spoke beautifully in his lectures.
He was very intelligent.
So he was a very commanding figure.
Was he perfect?
Absolutely not.
Died his birth mother when he was eight and a half months old.
She died of appendicitis, and that affected him all his life.
I mean, he was always searching for the missing woman in his life, the missing mother, and he so he had some affairs.
He was searching for something he couldn't quite put his finger on.
It found some outlet in his search for the missing intelligence in the cosmos, perhaps.
He said that himself.
So he had some girlfriends, and I interviewed them too, by the way.
And he was a little naive.
He didn't understand how revolutionary his claims were in the rather cloistered precincts of Harvard and got him into trouble at Harvard.
He wasn't cautious enough in some of his assessments, et cetera, et cetera.
But all in all, a very compelling.
Figure and very well liked with really many, many friends, and yet some enemies and people who thought he was a little too smug, a little too smart, and a little too sure of himself.
But all in all, I found him a terrific subject and really worthy of the first full length biography.
Nobody had ever written about him like this before.
Now, was his first book the book on child psychology and nightmares?
That was his first book, yes.
He wrote a number of books, one about nightmares, which, by the way, really registered him as an expert on nightmares.
Because later on, people said, once he took up the alien abduction phenomenon, people said, Well, you don't understand, John.
These people are just having nightmares.
And he said, You know, in effect, he said, Look, I wrote the book on nightmares.
First of all, not all these encounters were at night, some of them were in broad daylight.
People were driving, or one case on a snowmobile.
People were encountering, having these experiences at all times of the day or night, not just at night.
So, his interests were, he ranged widely intellectually.
It was only later in his life that he came across the abduction thing.
And, like all of us who come across this subject, he was blown away.
I mean, how is this even possible that people are encountering alien beings?
And the difference is we'll encounter this subject and say, that's interesting, wow.
But he decided he was going to.
Make it his career to investigate it.
So he was very courageous.
I think that's one of his chief attributes.
He didn't care what people were going to think, and he didn't care if he was risking his professional reputation.
He just thought it was a damn good story and he was going to try to get to the bottom of it.
Right.
Now he spent all that time studying nightmares and child psychology.
Did he ever find any overlap in his studies of abduction or his?
Interactions with abductees, did he find any overlaps with those people and with his current knowledge of child psychology or, you know, like night terrors with children?
Okay, that's a very good question.
Well, first of all, I should say that he basically concluded that the people who came to him with these stories.
Many of them were troubled.
Indeed, they were troubled, but they were troubled as the effect of the experiences that they believed they had.
They weren't making up the experiences because they were troubled.
And that's a big distinction.
So he said that the experiences that they had, in effect, caused their distress, not that they were distressed and therefore.
They made up these experiences.
So, for example, some people, some critics said later that, well, these people, some of them were sexual abuse sufferers, women, let's say, who had trauma in their background.
And they therefore concocted a story of being examined by alien beings in sort of sexually intrusive ways because some of these women.
Recalled or seen to recall their pregnancies removed by the aliens for reproductive purposes.
There were a lot of these stories.
And he debunked that.
He found absolutely no connection.
Certainly, no reason to think that any woman who had a sexual trauma was covering it up or explaining it through these abduction stories.
No connection whatsoever.
Again, these people that came to him with these stories were normal people, normal in the sense that they had every You know, troubling incident in their background that everybody has, you know, neglectful parents, alcoholism, drug abuse.
You know, these people lived in the world and they, you know, they were like everybody else.
But nothing that they had experienced explained these stories.
That's what Mac was trying to establish that they didn't explain these experiences at all.
And to add on to that, there was.
Additionally, there were lots of young children, right?
Well, that was a big factor in the conclusion that he later adopted that these experiences were somehow real, that there was no other way to explain them.
Now, in what reality they occurred or dimension, Mac never could establish, and it remains mysterious.
But the reason he believed that these things actually occurred somehow, as impossible as it is to imagine, Rested on various observations that he made.
But one of the more important ones was that little children, in some cases as young as two or three, were reporting these abduction experiences, saying things like, Little man, take me up in the sky, I fly in the sky.
And so these kids could not be accused of picking this up from books they had read or movies they had seen.
They were barely able to speak.
So that Mac found that very compelling that these children would not really have a motive or an ability to make up really these astounding experiences.
But he had many reasons for coming to his conclusions.
Another is that UFOs were cited by some of these people, many of these people, around the time of their abduction.
Abduction experiences.
It was often identified with or close to a UFO sighting.
So they would remember later that they saw a UFO landing in their backyard or nearby, and then they had this experience, this abduction experiences.
Sometimes there was evidence that the foliage had actually been disturbed outside the house.
The tree branches were broken off, grass was disturbed.
And again, as I said, these people came from all walks of life.
There was no pattern.
That explained this.
Not a pattern at all that would say that, oh, yeah, these stories are coming from people like this.
There was no pattern at all to profile to these people.
They came from all walks of life.
They were professionals, they were blue collar people, men, women, old, young.
One of the distinguishing characteristics, by the way, was that abduction experiences seemed to run in the family.
Often their parents and grandparents had reported experiences like these.
And then the parents would say, Oh, my children are now coming to me telling me that they've had these experiences.
So there seems to be, or Mac found that there was some correlation, some family line running through these stories.
Another thing that made a very powerful impression on him was that on occasion, there were third parties who were witnesses to some of these encounters.
For example, he told the story of two girls.
Family Lines of Abduction00:02:21
Who had had a sleepover.
And during the night, the mother of one of the girls at the house came down to check on them and found them missing from their bed.
So obviously, she was terribly alarmed.
She called the police.
They searched all over and couldn't find them.
And the next morning or hours later, the girls turned up back in their beds.
And later, they remembered seeing a spaceship land outside their window and having had some kind of an abduction experience.
Now, here's a case where.
Uh, you know, they reported this experience later.
Um, uh, but the mother said, confirmed a part of it by saying she found the girls missing.
Now, that's really intriguing.
Now, not in every in some cases, um, people weren't physically missing.
Uh, there was another story that came up, um, at a conference that Mac attended of a woman.
Who fainted in her husband's arms, and while he was holding her, she had the experience of being transported up into the sky by some kind of an alien intelligence and flying around and seeing certain things, and then coming back to her body.
Her husband was holding her the whole time, so she wasn't absent for that experience.
So it's complicated, but anyway, for all the reasons I said, Mac believed that.
There was every reason to credit the stories of these people as real to them, certainly.
And no other way to explain these stories.
In all the accounts by skeptics and debunkers that have emerged since then, nobody has come up with a good explanation.
It remains mysterious.
So at least Max said, look, I can't explain it, but I can't credit any other explanation either.
So that's where we are.
And if this is a spoiler alert to my book, I'm happy to admit it that I don't solve the mystery, but it is a mystery.
Right.
Catalyst for Deeper Inquiry00:15:49
Now, during this time, wasn't he around the point where he started to become interested in this?
What was the catalyst or what was the point when he first became like, aha, I need to look into this more?
Was it one person that came to him?
I know this was around the same time that he started to experiment with like.
Certain holotropic breathing exercises and meditation and psychedelic drugs, right?
Yeah.
Well, I trace the process in my book.
It's interesting because, as I said, early in his career, he was very well grounded on the earth.
I mean, he protested nuclear weapons, he got active in Middle Eastern peace efforts because of his knowledge of the Middle East and Lawrence of Arabia.
He actually met with Yasser Arafat to try to.
Help advance peace efforts.
And then a series of things occurred and happened that pushed him in a new direction.
So, one of them was he went off to Esalen, which is this think tank on the Pacific, you know, where they were experimenting in the 60s with drugs and with alternate forms of consciousness.
And it was very cutting edge and, you know, very, very 60s.
And And while there, he met a psychiatrist from Czechoslovakia named Stanislav Graf, who had pioneered a form of breathing that was able to move people into a new level of consciousness, like drugs, but without drugs.
And it was called holotropic breathing, it was rhythmic breathing to music.
And it had the effect of inducing kind of a almost like a trance that enabled people to transcend their normal consciousness.
Okay.
So John Mack tried this and he found himself actually carried back to a childhood memory of being in the womb.
This is his mother, who was the woman who died in six, eight and a half months after he was born of appendicitis.
But he recalled or thought he recalled her struggles to give him life.
And it all came back to him, he said later.
And he also had a memory, or he thought it was a memory, of being a Russian peasant in the 16th or 17th century and watching his son being decapitated by a Mongol warrior, wherever that came from.
So, anyway, he came back from this holotropic breathing exercise and he was amazed that.
I mean, he was a psychiatrist, so he knew the processes of the mind, or thought he did.
And here was some new frontier that he was learning about where he could alter his consciousness and sort of catapult himself into other levels of consciousness and memories or realities, whatever.
So that kind of set the stage.
So then, at one of these conferences with Stanislav Graf, he met a fellow psychiatrist, and her name was Blanche Chavusti.
And she told him she had a patient who thought she had been abducted by alien beings, or she had these experiences that the psychiatrist thought were a signpost of abduction.
The woman didn't quite understand what.
These experiences were.
Anyway, she told John Mack about this, and he was pretty skeptical.
He wasn't there yet.
And he said, You know, it sounded kind of crazy to him.
And she said, By the way, I have a friend in New York who's studying all this.
His name is Bud Hopkins.
He's an artist, and he has a lot of people he's hypnotizing who have these experiences of abduction.
Would you like to meet him?
And John Mack said, No.
Sounds crazy.
But anyway, one of the strange things in life, you know, the story is full of synchronicities, and with me included.
So he's in New York in 1990, visiting a friend of his, Bob Lifton, the famous psychiatrist who wrote about Nazi doctors and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, very eminent colleague.
And John Mack is visiting Bob Lifton in New York, and he suddenly remembers Bud Hopkins is living nearby, and I had an introduction to him.
Should I call him?
So, this is very strange.
He says to Lifton and his wife, you know, I might just call Bud Hopkins because he's interested in this alien abduction stuff.
I might call him.
And by the way, Max said, I know, Bob Lifton, that you know Bud Hopkins from Cape Cod because you guys both have houses there.
Bob Lifton, I mean, like many psychiatrists, had to get away in.
On Cape Cod, Wellfleet, where psychiatrists go in the summer, which is why you can't get analyzed in August.
And Bud Hopkins had a studio near Wellfleet.
So he said, I know you know this Bud Hopkins.
Would you like to come with me?
And this is the good part.
Lifton's wife, then, BJ, speaks up and says, No, because Bob has a choice about getting involved in this and you don't.
Whoa.
Now I heard this.
I think I heard this from Lifton.
Anyway, this was an amazing story because here's the wife who sees this whole thing already happening.
She sees John Mack getting involved in abduction.
Before John Mack even saw it, she had this flash of insight and she was going to save her husband from getting involved in this.
Turns out that Bob.
Knew a lot about abduction, it turns out.
But anyway, Lifton had done some of his own research, but that came out later.
Anyway, John Mack goes alone to Bud Hopkins' house.
Hopkins is an artist.
He's got this great studio townhouse in Chelsea on the west side and hung with his sculptures.
Hopkins was a very good artist, by the way.
He'd been some of his work is in museums, a well recognized artist.
And he did these flat sculptures, non objective sculptures of very sort of brightly colored but ominous forms.
He called his guardians, wherever that came from.
So, Mac visits Hopkins, and Hopkins already got tipped off from his friend, Blanche, that John Mac, eminent psychiatrist, is interested in talking to you.
So, Hopkins hands Mack a sheaf of letters that he got from the people he had talked to about abduction.
And I should say that Bud Hopkins had already written two books, at least two books, on abduction.
The first one, Missing Time, long before John Mack got interested in the field, was about this very strange aspect of the abduction stories, which was that people who remembered afterwards being abducted lost track of time.
And they arrived at their destination much later than they expected, and they didn't know what happened in the intervening time.
And later, under hypnosis, let's say, they were able to recall things they forgot or where their memories have been wiped clean, which seems to be another hallmark of this phenomenon that the alien beings, if you believe their stories of the people, wipe out the memory of what happened to the people.
So Hopkins had written this book and he'd heard from a lot of people afterwards.
So he had these letters and he said to John Maher, You look at these letters, you're the psychiatrist, you tell me.
So, Mac went away, read the letters.
He actually was off on a trip to Czechoslovakia right after that.
So, he didn't get to it immediately.
And I tell the story in my book.
But he got to the letters not long afterwards, and he was amazed because these people were talking about these incredible experiences that couldn't be true.
And yet they were so detailed.
So, that's what started him off.
He then collected his own circle of people.
It wasn't hard to find through Bud Hopkins and others, men, women, cross section of people who reported these experiences, seeing a spacecraft, having encounters with these beings, being abducted on the spacecraft, having medical experiments performed on them, all kinds of things.
So that's where Gunnar started.
And the stories he heard were just astounding.
And so that was 1990.
And in less than two years, he was lecturing to Harvard.
On the phenomenon, which was probably too soon.
But he hit the ground running.
How many people throughout his career did he interview that claimed to be abductees?
In your mind, which ones are the most incredible?
Well, he interviewed several hundred.
I'll tell you this that John Mack's first book, Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, which came out in 1994, which got him into trouble at Harvard.
And I can tell you that story.
But that book, Is really a compendium of 13 case studies.
Okay, 13 people who had these stories of encounters with aliens.
And they are fantastic.
I mean, they are so amazing, more complicated, and with more twists and turns than you could ever imagine.
Very well recounted by John Mack, just like a psychiatrist would.
Who's business is recounting case histories?
He talks about their childhood background, all the events in their lives that led up to this.
So, in other words, he dissects their stories and then he tells their stories, the stories that they told him with his insights.
And it's really a totally remarkable book because.
Each of these stories is different.
This is what actually was so convincing to him.
The stories are all different in myriad details, but they're basically consistent.
That they see a spacecraft somewhere, that they next remember seeing alien creatures of different kinds.
They are then on the ship, subject to various procedures, and that they are then released.
Sometimes they have a scar afterwards of some procedure that healed quickly.
They don't remember having, you know, where the scar came from.
Some people felt that they had implants put into their body so they could be tracked later.
So, in other words, the stories were basically consistent because they had a lot of common elements, but they were different in thousands of little details.
So, it's not like they all agreed on we're going to all tell this one story.
This is the story.
It wasn't like that.
Some people had minimal or no contact with spaceships.
They just encountered beings.
As I said, a lot of variation and details you would think to yourself, and John Max certainly thought, you couldn't make this stuff up.
Besides which, the people who told him these stories, and this was another factor that influenced him into believing that on some level they were telling the truth, in recounting the stories, they went through all the trauma of the experience.
They wept, they cried, they screamed, they cursed, they thrashed about.
And he said they couldn't be making this up.
I mean, people fabricating a story are not that good actors that they can convey this level of fear and disgust and all the emotions they had.
Anyway, so these 13 cases in the book, each one is different, each one is amazing.
I mean, if I had to think of some of the stories, see, I interviewed quite a number of John Mack's people afterwards.
The people in the book are given pseudonyms to protect their identity.
All the 13, I believe, none of them identified by their real names at their request.
But some of them came out afterwards, some pretty quickly afterwards, because they appeared with John Mack under their real names.
So quite a number of them.
Identified themselves afterwards as the person in this story.
And others I was able to identify and talk to them, and they confirmed their identities.
I'm trying to think of, you know, there was one guy, he's called Scott in the book, his real name is Randy.
He ended up later.
Making a film documentary of an encounter of an incident at a school in Zimbabwe, southern Africa, where a ship, the children reported a ship landing and aliens emerging from the ship and the children interacting with these two beings.
Brooklyn Bridge Ant Incident00:15:18
I'll tell you that story later.
But anyway, so Randy Nickerson, who later made that documentary, was one of the first people, Mac.
Interviewed his stories told in the book, and he, you know, remembered being playing in the backyard and seeing these big ants, he called them.
And then they put something in his head, in his brain, and he passed out.
They had a kind of a wand, which you hear in other stories.
And, you know, and many details, but.
This was in Zimbabwe?
No.
Okay, okay, okay, okay.
He made a documentary later about an incident in Zimbabwe.
We'll talk about that.
But this is when he was a child and he was talking to John Mack.
He was one of John Mack's first subjects of patients.
Nobody could ever figure out whether John Mack was talking to them as.
As patients, because they weren't suffering from anything except their experiences, they weren't like they didn't have a real reason to be a patient except for these stories.
So, they didn't want to call them patients.
So, subjects suggest that they were research subjects for John Mack.
Anyway, we could just call them people who came to John Mack, but Randy was one of them.
Okay, and Randy found a specific interest in the Zimbabwe.
Well, the reason.
I ask is because some of these experiences, or some of these abduction experiences that people talk to him about, have more concrete evidence than others.
If it comes to physical scars or if it comes to actual eyewitnesses, in your mind, which ones, which accounts are the most credible?
Okay.
So here's a case that became very famous in its own right.
And that Bud Hopkins investigated and told John Mack about.
And it was actually a book by Bud Hopkins called Witnessed.
And this is a story.
Two security guards, they call themselves police officers, but let's say security guards were escorting a VIP in downtown Manhattan in November '89, I believe.
And this car suddenly came to a stop, and the security guards got out and they saw a spacecraft approaching an 11 story building near the Brooklyn Bridge.
They saw a woman, a figure of a woman, fly out of the window, surrounded by three alien creatures, all flying in the sky.
They escorted her into the And it flew off and plunged into the East River.
Okay.
So, you know, telling this story, it's very difficult to tell the story without all the background or nuances.
But this is a case that, as I say, became known as the Brooklyn Bridge abduction.
And John Mack spent a lot of time on it.
And because he was so intrigued by it, it wasn't his case, it was Bud Hopkins' case.
Anyway, the woman later came forward herself and contacted Bud Hopkins, which is really how the story started.
And Bud Hopkins found some witnesses who said they were stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge when all traffic came to a stop, the power went out.
They saw this woman flying out of the window into the spacecraft.
And anyway, and I tell the story in my book, really.
I go over the story.
And the thing is, the story was told to Bud Hopkins by the woman who said she was the target of the abduction.
And it was also told by these two security guards who said they witnessed it, who were driving down in lower Manhattan and whose car was stopped.
And they sent Bud Hopkins a bunch of messages, letters, and tapes.
The bottom line is that Bud Hopkins was never able to identify the two of them.
He got their names, but he never could find them.
And because he never could find them, and this is the problem so often in these stories, and this is why we've been so meticulous at the New York Times in sticking to things that we can confirm with named sources.
This is a case, a perfect example.
Um, that without the name, the without knowing who these two uh witnesses were or having them face to face telling their stories, um, the story became impossible to verify.
The woman said, Yeah, I was the one I was abducted, um, and people said, or some people said, Yeah, they saw this woman come out of the window, but uh, the two security guards who were the best witness who came for and the uh.
The closest witnesses, shall we say, to this could never be identified, and in fact, took some effort to remain unidentified.
So the story basically collapsed.
It's intriguing, but like so many of the abduction stories, there's something missing.
That is the hallmark of this phenomenon, Danny, is that none of them can produce the smoking gun.
That would convert skeptics, scientists, et cetera.
That's not an accident.
That is part of the phenomenon.
Somehow, whatever this is doesn't want to be found out or can't be found out.
There's a lot of intriguing signs pointing to these cases.
And as I said, there's fragmentary evidence, all of which convinced John Mack that there was something to this.
You know, the affinity with UFOs outside the window, the broken tree branches, the third party witnesses, the young children, the emotion that the people had when they recounted all these things, the scars afterwards, all these little bits of evidence pointed to something, to the reality of these events.
And yet there was something, of course, missing, which is the absolute confirmation that they occurred in reality.
There's no photographs, there's no video, there's no.
And you say, well, why isn't there?
Well, that's a good question.
Why isn't there?
There is video, by the way, of UFOs because they came out.
We saw the Navy videos.
There's definitely photographic and video evidence confirming the physical existence of these objects.
But that's all you can say.
There's no connection to aliens.
Or abduction, or anything else.
We don't know.
It doesn't exist.
We don't have that.
So all we can say is that, yeah, UFOs physically exist.
We don't know where they come from.
We don't know what intelligence is behind the wheel.
As far as alien abduction, we know people have told stories.
We have some fragmentary confirmation in different pieces, but nothing like the Navy videos of UFOs.
So that's the leap.
And that's why at the New York Times, we haven't reported on alien abduction.
We've reported on UFOs.
Right.
Out of all of the people that criticized John Mack, including.
You know, I don't know if you would call it criticism, but you know, whatever he had to go through with Harvard, you know, tight turning the screws on him for his research and what he was doing.
What were his biggest critics' theories, or like his biggest critics?
What did they say to sort of dismiss what he was doing or what the people he was talking to were saying?
Good question.
I've heard about things like implanted memories in hypnosis.
You know, it's possible to implant false memories.
I know that's part of it, but.
Yeah, that's a very good question.
Well, first of all, what critics said, including Susan Clancy, who wrote a book about it, put a lot of stock in sleep paralysis.
That it's a very common ailment or phenomenon that people during the night feel paralyzed and can have hallucinations of.
Various malign creatures.
And it's physiologically, you know, there's something interrupting sleep patterns, and the brain operates differently and thinks that these events are real.
So that was one theory.
Another theory is that.
The hypnotist was implanting these suggestions in the people, basically.
And there was actually one interesting experiment that a skeptic did where he collected a bunch of people and asked them to imagine an abduction experience.
Just imagine it in all its detail.
And they did.
And the imagined experiences seemed, in some cases, rather like the actual experiences.
In other words, they just made it up and it turned out to be sounded like some of the other experiences.
And I'll talk about why these all fall short of a good explanation in a minute.
But let's see what are some of the other explanations that people had suffered a trauma?
Like a rape or attempted rape.
And afterwards, they transferred this memory to an alien abduction memory.
But it was based on some real trauma that they had.
And it was just put in a different context, maybe to shield the accuser that the truth was too awful to believe.
Let's say a parent was abusing a child and the child couldn't deal with that.
So it made it into an alien.
So that was another attempt to explain these experiences.
The problem is, I have looked into these in great detail, and there were whole conferences that were held with experts.
I can tell you about one of those in a minute where people actually look for other explanations.
So, first of all, the sleep paralysis explanation, which is very common.
And by the way, the so called skeptics, the debunkers, a lot of them have not done their homework.
If you're going to get into this field and you want to expose the Charlatanism, or whatever you think is going on here, at least you've got to know the field well enough to know the claims so that you can expose them.
A lot of the skeptics have not done the homework, they have not read the cases, they don't know enough about the actual phenomenon and the scope of it and the details of it in order to debunk it properly, because I would guess they can't.
So they'll choose one thing and they'll ride that.
So, for example, sleep paralysis.
So, as I said, yes, it is an actual phenomenon where people experience helplessness.
They can't move.
They feel they're paralyzed.
They are often in the course of a terrible nightmare, et cetera.
But some of these experiences, a good number of them that John Mack investigated and others, were not at night.
There are people driving their cars.
So, they weren't sleeping in their cars, driving and having a nightmare.
Yeah, like the Travis Walton one, for example, is a great example of that.
Well, that now somebody has come forward now and that's been challenged, but he is sticking to his story.
And that's an interesting case.
Is he being challenged now?
Is this new?
I saw, yeah, yeah.
Somebody said that they faked it.
And one of the people, I guess, who was in one of his, the guys who was with him at the time he disappeared, said that.
We staged it.
I don't know.
It didn't make a lot of sense.
Because, again, if somebody comes up with that claim, you have to then go back and see all the other things that supported the story in the first place.
But let me just continue with the idea of the implanted memories.
So, that was one common theory yeah, the hypnotists implant these memories in the people by leading them.
Well, first of all, not all these stories emerge during hypnosis.
John Mack used hypnosis and modified relaxation techniques to draw out memories that were hidden or concealed.
Stinking Evil Presence00:06:33
Because, as I said, one hallmark of this phenomenon is that people's memories have been either wiped or clouded by whatever happened to them.
So, one way to get at that, and that's really the key to the Betty and Bonnie Hill.
Abduction case.
It's the first big abduction case in New Hampshire in 1961.
It only became public four years later.
Anyway, so psychiatrists have concluded, researchers have concluded the only way to get at these memories is through hypnosis.
So, and by extension, critics were saying, yeah, the hypnotist then implants these memories that are then taken as the account of something real that happened.
Well, first of all, A lot of these experiences were described without regard to hypnosis.
People had enough memory of what happened to recall or think they could recall at least the outlines of it.
So they weren't implanted by the hit.
There were no hypnotists at various stages of this.
And the idea, once you read through the case studies, as in the 13 cases that John Mack wrote about in Abduction, you would have a great difficulty in imagining.
That a hypnotist could provide this level of detail to these 13 very different stories.
I mean, what kind of an imagination would you need to have to implant these stories in somebody?
I ask you, read these 13 case studies and say, oh, yeah, the psychiatrist knew all these details and implanted it in the person.
And then the person sort of regurgitated it back.
Not possible remotely.
Wherever these stories came from, You cannot imagine that they came from somebody who was implanting them in these people because they are so bizarre and so one of a kind and so unimaginable, unimaginable that you could not, in fairness, conclude that they were given to the person to then feedback.
Okay.
Well, real quick, I want to interrupt you for a second.
Yeah.
The interesting thing to me about the sleep paralysis part of it is that.
By and large, most of the sleep paralysis stories are people being feeling paralyzed and dealing with some sort of terrifying being that has mal intent.
Right.
Like something that's choking them to death or trying to kill them.
But in the, I don't know if it's all of them, but at least all of the abduction stories I've heard, the beings that they're having this interaction with do not have this mal intent.
They're simply just doing, you know, taking samples or trying to communicate something to them.
Like, that's a very good point.
That's a very good point that there is a difference.
One of the books I talk about early on in my book, The Believer, is a book called The Terror That Comes in the Night by a psychiatrist who, a psychologist, who investigated what they call the old hag syndrome.
Particularly in Newfoundland, there were a lot of people who had stories of being paralyzed during the night, feeling a malign presence, a stinking, horrible, you know, evil, evil presence climb up on their bed and strangle them.
And it was so vivid and so clear.
And many, many people had this and told the author David Hoffman, I believe.
And And he investigated that, and he, the author, had it happen to him.
He himself had experienced this as a student.
He remembered the exact same thing.
He was in his room, he was drifted off to sleep, his college room.
He felt the door open.
He thought it was one of his roommates calling him to dinner.
Next thing he knew, this stinking, horrible thing climbed on his bed and was choking him.
And he was paralyzed.
He couldn't turn on the light.
And then somehow it left.
And he turned on the light and he ran outside to the dorm counselor or somebody who was the landlord.
He said, Did you just see somebody run in here?
No.
So, anyway, he himself had experienced this.
But as you say, that's a rather different experience.
These beings, whatever they are, in the abduction stories, were not strangling people.
They were imparting information.
They were seeking DNA, perhaps.
They were one of the things we didn't talk about yet, but that it's very much a part of the John Mack story is that a lot of people told John Mack that the beings communicated with them.
Telepathically, because that was another thing.
You mean they spoke English?
No, they didn't speak English.
I got the messages in my brain.
I just heard the words or saw the words, and they were telling me that the planet is in danger and humans have to get their act together and stop polluting the planet.
And in some cases, the message is this is what happened to us, the aliens on our planet.
And that's why we are able to warn you.
Anyway, but it's a very different experience from the strangulation stories of the terror that comes in the night, the old hag syndrome.
So, what are we to draw from this?
Well, first of all, there's a whole kind of anomalous experiences that seem to operate in a world that we don't recognize, another reality.
Unconventional Harvard Research00:10:15
That penetrates our world, as John Max said, somehow in ways we can't explain.
We have a clear idea of reality.
We think we do.
Reality is what you can see, smell, taste, and touch, knock on the table, feel it.
But what about all these other things that may be out there, other dimensions that, you know, we're a young species as human beings?
We don't understand.
Our science is young, a few thousand years old.
We don't understand everything.
So maybe there's other.
You know, dimensions, aspects to the universe that we don't understand.
So, and this is, this really came up in the Harvard investigation when Harvard cracked down on John Mack and said, you know, you're very bad, you know, you're making us look bad in effect.
And they said, we have to investigate your methodology.
Are you really proceeding scientifically?
And John Mack said, well, What is that?
I mean, what is scientists?
You know, there's no rules for science.
You know, you follow the scientific method more, you know, but all the great breakthroughs in science came in unconventional ways, you know, unexpectedly.
Yeah, why is that?
That so many of the academic types in places like Harvard are so quick to dismiss these types of topics.
Like, I've had this conversation with.
Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who discovered the Muamua, that he thinks was from another intelligent civilization.
And some of his astrophysicist colleagues at Harvard would say to him, they hope to God they never witness anything like this or never come across any sort of extraterrestrial thing in their entire career.
And it's just like, it seems like such an interesting thing why these people are so easy to describe.
Well, listen, first of all, as I say in my book, Harvard is no stranger to unconventional science.
William James, the father of psychology, who taught at Harvard 100 years before Mac, investigated seances and levitation and all that.
And there was a lot of unconventional research going on at Harvard.
There was, and there is.
What turned Harvard off, I think, was Mac was, well, first of all, he'd written a bestseller.
And that didn't endear him to his colleagues.
He'd written the best, he won the Pulitzer Prize on Lawrence of Arabia.
Yeah, there was jealousy there.
He was very sure of himself.
I think he turned some people off in the way he was so sure of himself.
I think he talked to, he announced his research at Harvard before it was really well advanced.
He had heard about the phenomenon from Bud Hopkins.
He had collected his circle of experiencers, which is what he called them rather than abductees because it's less a judgmental term.
And he had begun his research.
He'd learned about it from Bud Hopkins in January 1990.
In December 1991, he held a Grand Rounds lecture at Harvard, so less than two years later, where he introduced some of the experiencers on stage.
He had a tape of a session where a woman was screaming that her pregnancy was removed.
He outlined everything he had found out.
So, again, he hadn't given it enough time.
He didn't realize the opposition that was going to build at Harvard because it was very unconventional research.
He didn't lay the groundwork for that.
He didn't peer publish, it wasn't entirely his fault.
He tried, but his articles were rejected because they were too complicated.
And one publisher in the Journal of Psychology wanted more information and shorter.
He wrote a 100 page paper on what he had found.
This is before his first book.
And he brought up his findings, 100 pages.
He sent it to the journal and said, We can't run this.
It's much too long.
But by the way, could you add some more detail?
So they had him.
And he said, I can't add more detail.
And I need all this space.
Forget it.
So he took it away.
And the New England Journal of Medicine wasn't interested.
They wouldn't even open up his envelope.
So, look, it was a difficult subject to address, period.
And it probably needed a book.
An article wouldn't do it, it needed a book.
So, anyway, you know, we're talking about Harvard.
And so, you know, you ask Abby Loeb why Harvard has been so antagonistic.
I'm going to be on with him in the next couple of days on another program, and I'm going to ask him what his experience at Harvard has been like.
Because in Mac's case, they gave him time to, I guess you could say, gave him enough rope, and then they tried to hang him with it.
But they cracked down on him in 1994, about the time his book was published.
He had given that big lecture to Harvard in December 91.
So, in December 91, so two, three, four, so, you know, three years, two years later, they were on his case.
But, you know, it's an interesting story about the Harvard investigation because it was, as Mack himself wrote in an unpublished manuscript, a clash of worldviews.
He was trying to explain look, I came across this mystery, I don't know what the answer is to it.
But it doesn't respond to the usual scientific ability to get to the bottom of it.
I mean, we can't, we don't have any scientific proof of it, but we can't contradict it either.
We can't figure out what's going on here.
And Harvard's answer basically was well, if you can't prove it scientifically, it's not there.
And he was saying, well, there's something there, but I can't explain it.
Exactly, you can't explain it, so it's not there.
So that basically was the clash at Harvard.
There were two different worldviews.
One is the scientific materialism of the Harvard committee, led by a critic of John Mack, who he had clashed with once before, Arnold Relman, very eminent physician.
And Mack, who was saying, Well, I can't explain it, but this is what the people are telling me.
And it's good evidence, it's good, compelling evidence, but it's anecdotal in most cases, almost every case.
There's fragmentary bits of evidence that seem to back it up, but not conclusively.
So I don't know, you know, on and on.
And the committee kept saying, well, if you can't prove it, it's not there.
So anyway, that was the clash at Harvard.
But in the end, Mack was exonerated.
He had two wonderful lawyers that exposed Harvard's weak arguments, I would say.
And he would basically be reinstated.
He was never, he was never.
Uninstated, he was allowed to continue his research.
No sanctions.
They just said, please be a little more, be less enthusiastic, they said to him.
And he said, okay, you're right.
I was a little too enthusiastic.
I'll be less enthusiastic.
Because he acknowledged it.
That was one of the hallmarks of his nature, he didn't hold back.
What he thought you could see in his writings.
He was not devious.
Even in his love affairs, a few of it, you know, outside his marriage, he didn't, you know, sneak around his wife.
She knew what was going on.
He was just attracted to other women, searching for this missing thing in his life.
And he remained devoted to her.
They had a good relationship, you know, difficult, but good at, you know, At the end of his life when he died.
But he was not a sneaky guy.
What he was thinking, you could see in his writings, in his speeches, et cetera.
So, and that had a downside too.
He wasn't very careful in how he structured his approach.
And he might have gotten further at Harvard if he'd been, I don't know, a little less enthusiastic.
A little more cautious, but in a way, that was his nature, right?
Well, it's fascinating, Ralph.
I really appreciate your time.
I know we're out of time now, but I thank you so much for doing this and sharing your story with me.
Bouncing Headlines Together00:05:36
And let the people listening or watching where they can find more of your work if they're interested and buy your book.
Okay.
So, my book is called The Believer Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.
It's available everywhere Amazon, independent bookstores, Barnes and Noble.
It's available as an e book, it's available as an audio book.
And as I said, independent bookstores, if they don't have it in stock, will get it for you.
I'd love to support independent bookstores because they've been very good to me and they're great.
All the information is on my website, ralphblumenthal.com, ralphblumenthal.com, and has a bio, my work at the New York Times, et cetera.
So that's how they can find out.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Ralph.
One more sort of personal greedy question.
I've always wanted to ask someone like you who's had the amount of experience you have being in publishing and investigative journalism, especially working with a company like the New York Times for decades.
What is the best strategy for coming up with headlines?
Because I do so many of these talks and they're all published on the internet and I can never figure out the right formula for a headline.
Wow.
That's a good question.
Well, you know what?
When I teach journalism, I tell my students that poetry is a wonderful exercise, among other things.
It's enjoyable, of course, in its own right, in compressing language.
With a headline, you've got to compress the story and make every word count.
And poetry, more than prose, obviously, every word has to count multiple times in terms of impact and power.
And in prose, you have a lot of leeway.
You can throw in extra words.
You can't do that in a headline.
You can't do that in poetry.
So you have to get at the essence of it.
And it's almost like a Zen thing.
You've got to think what is the core point that I'm trying to convey here.
And don't try to tell the whole story in the headline because that's the formula for disaster.
You get much too complicated.
You have to zero in on the one point.
That is the essence of it.
So it's almost like you have to wipe away, wipe out everything you know about a subject and think about the one thing that comes to mind when you first hear about it.
You know, what is the question in everybody's mind?
Or what's the one word or one phrase that will make that come alive?
But what you're asking really is the hardest thing.
You know, how do you come up with a good idea?
Or where, you know, how do you, how do you, How do you sell it, right?
How do you sell it?
Elevate it.
You could just make something and fall flat without the right headline.
That's absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
And again, you still have to remain faithful to the truth.
You can't take liberties and say, you know, sex.
And then my real story is about UFOs.
No, it's about UFOs.
Right.
You can't play games with a reader or a viewer because they notice it right away that, you know, you're not.
You know, you are playing games.
So it's tricky.
And sometimes it helps to do it in a group.
So, you bounce headlines off each other and say, What about this?
And someone else will have an idea.
But it's difficult.
I find that, I mean, I do that all the time when I work with journalism students.
I come up with headlines for their newspapers.
And as I say, it's almost like you have to not think about what you know and try to think about it fresh.
Like, how would somebody come to this who doesn't know anything about the subject?
What is the one thing that they want to know?
Or what's the one thing that will come to mind?
When you bring up this subject, I'm doing a talk at my college, at Baruch College, next week on UFOs.
And I'm calling it Can You Believe It?
You know, UFO reporting, you know, the recent UFO stories.
That just seemed to encapsulate.
And you can read that two different ways Can you believe it?
Or like, Can you believe it?
Right.
So, you know, and that just sort of came to me.
As I said, experience helps.
And also be a reader of the tabloids because the tabloids have the greatest headlines.
They really do.
Yeah.
I mean, Headless Body and Topless Bar.
Wow, I haven't seen that one yet.
That was the New York Post headline, very famous Headless Body and Topless Bar.
Really?
Wow.
So that was a brilliant one.
So, anyway, but that comes with experience and it's trial and error.
And sometimes you think you have it.
And sometimes you think you have it and then you say, oh, that was in bad taste or that didn't do it.
Remaining Within Good Taste00:00:56
The important thing is not to err on the side of making a terrible mistake because if you have an unintended double entendre where you malign somebody or introduce a taboo subject or something, then you really hurt yourself.
So you always have to remain within the bounds of good taste.
You know, and that kind of thing.
But, and don't, in other words, don't take a shortcut just to be clever if it's going to subject you to criticism.
So, try to err on the side, you know, even if it's a little duller, try to err on the side of caution.
Right.
And don't piss off anyone that was involved.
Yeah.
Don't, don't, you know, cross the line, put it that way.
Right.
All right.
Well, that's very helpful, very helpful information, Ralph.
I very much appreciate your time.
You're very kind.
And hopefully we'll be in touch, be able to do this again in the future.