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Sept. 10, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:34
Edition 661 - Ralph Blumenthal

Respected author and journalist Ralph Blumenthal in New York talks about his deep research into the life of John Mack - the Harvard Professor who put his reputation on the line to investigate alien abduction.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for being part of my show.
Thank you for the ongoing support and the messages that you sent.
Sorry these podcasts, this one and the one that follows it, are slightly delayed.
There have been a number of reasons for that.
Partly my tinnitus problem, where I've had to go very easy with all sound that comes to me in headphones.
I'm not going to bore you with the details of what happened.
We are where we are.
I had to see a specialist during this week about this, and, you know, I'm on the journey, as they say, and hopefully this will improve.
Hence, some delay.
Also had a run of technical problems and guest booking issues, and it all seemed to come at once.
So do forgive me for that, but we're back on track now.
Now, crucially and more importantly than anything else, we are in a period of extended national mourning in the United Kingdom for the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
It was expected, of course, we knew that Her Majesty was getting older.
96 is a tremendous age to reach.
But nevertheless, a shock for all of us when the news finally broke.
Even for those of us who haven't followed every detail over our lives of royal affairs, the Queen was different and special, I think, to all of us and symbolized what this nation meant and still does and always will.
You know, there was always Queen Elizabeth on the throne here.
As many years as I've been in the world, I have never known another monarch.
And it's a strange feeling, I think, for all of us just to come to terms with this.
It is sad news indeed.
And I've noticed that everything seems to be a little subdued at the moment.
I went out today to a shopping centre, and there were a lot of people for a start wearing black clothes.
But also, it seemed to me that people were quieter.
And I think people have been more reflective over this time because, you know, we know that this is the change almost of a generation, the change of an era, as we move towards the era of King Charles III.
So the national mood is different, and we know that we're at a crossroads here.
And it's a very interesting time.
Thank you very much for all of your communications.
I'm not going to do any shout-outs on this edition apart from actually two and both in Canada because I said I would.
Kirsten, who's in Saskatchewan.
I'm Kirsten, nice to hear from you.
Thanks for that email.
And also Suki, a Brit, who's in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
So thank you very much indeed for that.
If you want to get in touch with me, then of course you always can.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me an email from there by following the link.
The website, of course, designed and created by Adam.
And you can also go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And, you know, my apologies if I sound slightly subdued now.
It's just my response to the quietness of the moment.
And, you know, as we go through this period, I suspect we'll do a little bit of introspection, all of us.
I certainly have already, and I think we'll continue to.
All right, the guest on this edition is going to be a good one.
Ralph Blumenthal, award-winning reporter for the New York Times.
He was.
He co-authored the Times article in 2017.
You know, the one that broke the news about the secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs, the tic-tacs, and all of that.
He is the author of four non-fiction books, including Miracle at Sing Sing, How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners.
He is a distinguished lecturer at Baruch College and lives in New York City.
Today, we're going to talk with him about his new book.
It's been out actually a number of months, but it's a book we haven't talked about here.
About the life and times of that most interesting of ufological, but more importantly, alien abduction and contact researchers, John Mack.
We've referenced him so many times here on The Unexplained.
It's going to be good to talk about this man who was completely unique, an academic, a Harvard man, respected in his field, who decided to go the extra mile and investigate cases of people who say that they have been abducted or have had contact of one kind or another, including, of course, we talked about his role in the Ariel School case from the 1990s.
So I think this is going to be an interesting one.
And thank you very much for being part of this show.
Like I say, when you get in touch with me, as usual, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and send me an email from there.
And don't forget, of course, to check out the cruise that's coming up with well-known guests from The Unexplained participating in that and speaking at it.
Your chance to meet them and also experience some wonderful Mediterranean places.
If you want to know about that, go to theunexplainedlive.com.
Right.
Let's get to New York now.
Ralph Blumenthal is waiting for us there.
Ralph, thank you so much for doing this.
It's very kind of you.
A real pleasure.
Thank you.
How are you?
Oh, great.
Great.
So, Ralph, this is a difficult one to discuss, I think, because John Mack's life was so huge in every way.
You know, this man was a larger-than-life character.
Yes, he spanned a lot of things.
And later in his life, he's jumping ahead a little bit, but he realized that what he was studying and investigating for so long, alien abduction, was really part of a whole complex of mysteries.
And it was much broader than he thought at first.
It was not just limited to UFOs and alien beings, but it took in crop circles, which you specialize in over there, and survival of consciousness, life after death, and ghosts, and all kinds of other things that we don't understand.
And unusual and unique, well, kind of unique for an academic man at that time to be interested in these things.
Let me reference it to you then, because I could ask you, it seems to me, bearing in mind your background, New York Times and now the work that you're doing and the writing of books, researching of subjects.
I could ask of you the question that was asked of John Mack.
Why is somebody accomplished interested in UFOs?
Well, I'll turn it around the way he did.
He said, why wouldn't you be gripped by this phenomenon?
I mean, it's one of the greatest mysteries in creation, this.
And, you know, what happens after we die?
And where did we come from?
We, you know, the cosmos.
These are the big questions.
And nothing is bigger than the idea that ordinary people from all walks of life, including young children as young as two, have had these experiences that no one can explain.
It's not mental illness.
It's not fabrication.
It's not delusion.
But somehow, through some dimension or other, these people have encountered intelligence that is just beyond all understanding and in great colorful detail in the form of alien beings.
So, you know, how could you not be gripped and fascinated by this?
Well, there are still some people who aren't, but I'm completely in agreement with you.
And it seems that more of the world is, because as you will know, and especially given your background being involved in that 2017 article, the New York Times one that, you know, lit the blue touch paper on so many things.
But this year, the new NASA director, Bill Nelson, has continued to show a lot more interest than his predecessors in this subject.
And the U.S. Congress is debating it in a kind of serious way.
So there seems to be some kind of sea change here.
Yes, we really, I think, have come a long way.
You know, people often ask me, am I disappointed that the government has not come out with more?
Clearly, the government knows a lot more than it's saying.
So, you know, it's a question of the glass half full or half empty.
I like to think of it as half full in terms of how far we've come from the days when the government was out and out denying the obvious, when they were, you know, actually promoting disinformation and throwing people off the track and not only withholding information, but putting out false information as to what this strange mystery was.
So we've now come to a point where the government, as you said, NASA is chiming in finally.
And who's better to weigh in on what's up there and maybe down below in the water?
But certainly coming in from space, if these objects are what they seem to be, which is physical objects coming into our atmosphere, NASA is the perfect one to weigh in.
So NASA is joining the hunt for explanations.
Congress certainly is losing its squeamishness about dealing with a very disreputable subject.
And the Pentagon is now on board.
Pilots are being told to report these incidents, whereas in the past they were told don't report them because it'll impact your career.
And they're even changing the law to allow whistleblowers.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of things are coming together.
So I think that's all positive.
It is.
And it either indicates the march of enlightenment, which, you know, through the centuries, the generations continues, they tell us.
Or it indicates the interest of these people and these organizations and governments in this thing, the renewed interest, the taking it seriously, indicates that maybe we're on the brink of something, that maybe these people know that there is going to be a moment when so-called disclosure of a sort will have to happen.
Well, I'm a little skeptical about that.
I don't think that there's a plan to prepare the world for a big event of disclosure.
I think it's just a process that has become kind of inevitable given what has been learned and what's come out.
So it's one step after another.
I don't think, I mean, nobody knows, but I don't think there's anything imminent.
I don't think the government is planning a big disclosure moment.
But I think that we're on a spectrum, a continuum here, that augers well.
Yes, I think it does, but only time will tell, as they say.
And I'm sorry to fall back on that cliche, but it's the only one that kind of fits here.
And so to John Mack, a man who seems to be as enigmatic as he is charismatic.
Yeah, that's well put.
I mean, I spent 17 years sort of tracking his life and work.
And he is kind of mysterious because he was such an unlikely investigator of this phenomenon.
I mean, he began life very conventionally, grew up in a very ordinary, if well-to-do, German Jewish household, a secular household.
He didn't believe in a superstition, as his parents would say.
He was very well grounded in science.
He was a psychiatrist, medical doctor.
His parents were professors.
And there was nothing in his upbringing that would indicate that he would take an interest here in this direction.
He was very devoted to social causes, as I point out in my book.
I mean, he tried to make peace in the Middle East.
He wrote a book that won the Pulitzer Prize on Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, but nothing that would suggest he would become captive to strange theories of anomalous events.
So that's what made him actually a rather credible proponent of this strange area of research because he was so unlikely.
It wasn't like he didn't have any sightings of his own, by the way.
To his dismay, to his disappointment, he never saw a UFO.
He never had an alien encounter.
So that left him, you reflected later, it left him purer to pursue it just as an outsider.
I can see the benefits of that, that that would facilitate and fuel your research.
But also the frustration if you're talking about something that you haven't experienced.
And how can you?
Well, you know, you can, I guess.
And he did.
But as you say, most unlikely man to be doing these things.
Professor of psychiatry, a man of multiple talents, a maverick.
But he seems to be one of the things that comes out from the book.
And, you know, you tell the stories around him beautifully.
There's much detail that I was not aware of here.
Much detail that I was not aware of at all.
But he seems to be restless.
There seems to be a restlessness that comes out here.
Well, there was.
And, you know, interestingly enough for a psychiatrist, he had a backstory that might explain some of this.
He was eight and a half months old when his mother, his birth mother, died of appendicitis.
And it was very traumatic, as it would be for any child who suddenly loses his or her mother.
And he couldn't understand, you know, why she was suddenly gone from his life.
And that really found its way, as he himself said many times, into a kind of searching his whole life, which found expression in his search for the ineffable, something missing in the cosmos, which he took to be intelligent life elsewhere.
So I think it was grounded in that and came out in many complex ways, not always, you know, salutary.
I mean, he was not faithful to his wife.
Yes, I was going to say he was a bit of a womanizer.
He was a bit of a womanizer.
I mean, he was it was really a process of searching for that perfect relationship, for that perfect romance.
And even though he and his wife remained close throughout their lives and she was very devoted to him, despite everything.
He did, you know, search for love outside the marriage.
But he was restless, as you said.
He was always this search, this unsatisfied, you know, search for something missing.
And it came out in his dreams, which, by the way, I had access to his his private journals and his his analysis recordings, which he did with an analyst, a guru.
So he himself recognized it.
It permeated his whole life that he was searching, searching, searching.
And he was he was not satisfied.
And in the end, of course, he came up blank, as we all do with this mystery, because he never solved it.
And we haven't solved it.
No.
And indeed, that's a question that we'll address at the end because you address it at the end of the book.
Quite beautifully, I think, in the way that you do it.
He doesn't seem to me to have been in any way concerned about being a maverick in a world of people who are quite straight laced.
You quote a Spanish poet in the book whose name I forget, who says and I'm going to use this this quote because I love it.
You know, he followed his own path.
And the poet said there is no path.
You make the path.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The path is made by walking.
I love that.
You're right.
Do you think he paved the way for people like Professor Avi Loeb at the moment?
He did.
I'm glad you bring up Avi Loeb because he has basically succeeded John Mack as as a maverick in place at Harvard.
Now, Avi Loeb hasn't gone as far as John Mack did in pursuing alien life.
Avi Loeb is more focused on the, you know, the hardware, the objects that have come into the atmosphere that are mysterious.
And but in the same way that he has made his own path by walking, he's he's a worthy successor to John Mack.
He seems to be he's a regular guy.
guest on my tv show and on this podcast oh and he seems to be doing stuff that other people are not doing including at the moment you may be aware of the quest to be able to recover something from the ocean bed and he yeah he's sending out this probe i think it's costing him a million dollars he's looking for another 1.5 he's had uh quite quite a few generous donations but he's still looking for i think 1.5 million dollars well i'll send him a check in the morning yes me too i don't think it'll make a big difference on my part but there you are um um jomac he achieved
So much, didn't he?
So much that despite the controversy surrounding him, I mean, they even made him an honorary citizen of Cambridge, not not the Cambridge in the UK, the one the boss.
Yeah, he did achieve a lot.
He faced a lot.
I mean, including a what I call an inquisition at Harvard.
I mean, they it was very intrusive.
They they were not happy with his his research into this very disreputable and unconventional area.
So they convened a committee to investigate his finances, what he believed in, how he was teaching.
And in the end, he was he was basically exonerated.
I mean, he was he was exonerated.
But it went on, according to the book, the investigation.
And this is really for later in the discussion.
But the investigation into him went on for such a long time.
They tortured him.
Basically, they tortured him with the investigation because, well, first of all, he went into it without realizing what he was up against.
They he thought it would be just a sort of a collegial thing where he would be asked some questions about his his unconventional research.
And he would put the you know, the concern to rest.
But it turned out it was much more involved than that.
And he he ended up getting two excellent lawyers.
But it went on for a long time.
And he learned who his friends were, which were few.
and far between alas he had some allies but he also had many opponents who you know took the opportunity to attack him because of his unconventional research I mean this brings up the whole question of the so-called skeptics who aren't really skeptics at all because they don't have an open mind.
They're just, you know, they were just against him.
And they haven't done the research that he did and that I've done for my book, which really gets to the heart of the mystery of these encounters.
They're very, very difficult to explain.
They cannot be explained simply as these skeptics do by saying, oh, it's sleep paralysis.
Oh, it's a nightmare.
Oh, it's this or that.
These people are looking for publicity.
None of the explanations really work.
But he had to fight his way through that inquiry, and it cost him a lot psychically and financially for sure.
So it was a real drama for him and a debacle.
Indeed.
And today we may look at things differently.
And this is recent history.
It's not that long ago, but there was a different view of this.
And I suspect that there were one or two people in seats of power who probably held those seats of power for a long time who just wouldn't buy into any of this and couldn't believe, couldn't accept that anybody would.
Okay, you start the book.
And let's bear in mind that John Mack, for reasons that we will get into, I keep promising so many things, but he came to all of this a bit late.
But at the start of the book, we see John Mack addressing a conference at MIT, and he lays out to the conferees, there, whatever they call them, the delegates, why the abduction phenomenon is not all in the mind, in his view, because of the consistency of the reports, the accounts from children simply too young to make it all up, and the lack of psychopathology in the subjects.
In other words, they are clearly not, you know, there's nothing wrong with their minds in any significant way.
Right.
He said there was nothing wrong with them except the experience they'd gone through, which was, you know, really terribly traumatic.
It wasn't only traumatic, as he almost single-handedly pointed out or discovered, and contrary to other people who were doing similar research like Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs, but John Mack found a transformational aspect to these encounters that the others didn't see.
But anyway, he did arrive, when he first became interested in the subject, and we can talk about how that came about, he was looking for some simple explanation for why these people, ordinary people, were reporting encounters with aliens, which is, you know, on the face of it, preposterous.
I mean, we all agree on that.
It's just almost impossible to wrap your mind around.
But little by little, after talking to these people on his own and studying them as a psychiatrist would in great, great detail, he concluded for some of the reasons you laid out that these were not fabrications or these were not the delusions of mentally ill people, but there was really an authentic mystery at the heart of this.
Something had happened to these people that we cannot explain.
And that's what drove him.
He was courageous enough not to abandon the search when it became uncomfortable, but he kept at it to the end of his life.
He didn't have to wait long, though, to find out that some of his Harvard colleagues were not happy, to say the very least about this.
Right.
I mean, he was denounced by people at Harvard.
The administration was very unhappy with the they were hearing from alumni, let's say, and prominent contributors to Harvard, you know, who is this guy going around talking about aliens?
It's giving us a bad name.
But, you know, he stood up to that.
That didn't stop him to his credit.
He was very confident, by the way, almost too confident.
Because he was brought up in a wealthy home, he didn't worry really about what the consequences would be.
He was really one of those rare people who, like T.E. Lawrence, who he biographied, who have a vision and stick to it.
And you say that he didn't seem to be over, as we say here in the UK, he didn't seem to be overly bothered about contributing to his own legend.
He seemed to enjoy it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he liked fame.
He went on so many TV shows, including Oprah.
And he brought some of his experiencers, his abductees.
He like to call them experiencers because it's more of a neutral term, but he brought them onto Oprah.
And on a number of those shows, he was humiliated because the shows like to create controversy.
This won't surprise you or shock you.
They look for ways to ridicule things.
So that didn't seem to bother him.
He went on with his people and he looked foolish at some sometimes.
They made him look silly because again, this is a phenomenon that does not lend itself much to show business.
It is so complicated and so controversial and so bizarre that even to utter it on a TV show invites ridicule.
But he pressed ahead.
He didn't care.
And he suffered the consequences of that, but he also brought his message to millions of people.
You know, I was trying to think of a neat way, and I don't think I found it, but I found a way of describing that process that you're talking about.
And it seems to me that here was a man who was more swayed by the scale of the case stories, the case histories that were brought to him, than the size of the brickbats, as we call them in the UK, the criticism that came his way.
You know, he one outweighed the other.
Yeah, it's interesting that he was confident enough.
I mean, Bud Hopkins thought he was too confident.
Bud Hopkins said he was a lucky man in life.
Quotes, He had looks, personality, and brains.
So, you know, he had it all almost to the point of conceit, I think.
Yeah, that's true.
And he was conceited.
I mean, he knew he was charismatic.
He was indubitably charismatic.
He was tall.
He was good looking, crystalline blue eyes.
He wowed the women, particularly men too, but he was particularly attractive to women.
And he really felt he was onto something.
He didn't know what he had gotten a hold of, really, because he couldn't explain it himself.
But he knew enough to know that he had gotten a hold of some authentic mystery that he was determined to run to ground.
He never quite did because no one perhaps ever will.
But at least he was not intimidated into giving up that struggle.
Bud Hopkins, as you say, was a big part of this story, fired his imagination.
And in the book, you say that he was swayed by the tales of unearthly encounters that he got from Bud Hopkins.
And it seemed that John Mack was impressed by the experiences in the stories that were relayed to him because they seemed to be in genuine distress.
And a psychologist, you know, psychiatrist can tell the difference between genuine distress and something that perhaps comes from somewhere else.
Well, one of the things that impressed John Mack so much, you know, we talked about the things that convinced him that this phenomenon was real.
I mean, for example, people who reported UFOs before they encountered these beings, they saw a UFO.
And later, you know, there was some evidence of broken branches and foliage outside their windows or evidence of some kind of a landing outside.
So, but one of the things that really convinced him that these people were authentic was their so-called affect, their, you know, the way they reacted when they were telling or reliving their stories.
Now, some of the, or many of the encounters were not always accessible in their conscious state, in people whose full consciousness, so they had to be relaxed.
John Mack didn't use hypnosis much because he was wary of it, but he used relaxation techniques for the people.
And once they relaxed, they started reimagining or remembering their encounters with these alien beings, these often traumatic encounters.
And they would shake and they would scream and they would curse.
And it was as if they were happening all over again.
And John Mack was enough of a good psychiatrist to say people can't make that stuff up.
I mean, they were genuinely recreating or remembering a real trauma.
So that's, you know, those are among the things that convinced him.
And some of this material came out, I think, with the use of something which I've never heard of until I read the book today, holotropic breath work.
Yeah, this was John Mack.
One of those that really influenced John Mack was that just before he got into the whole subject of UFOs and alien encounters, he studied with a man called Stan Groff, a Czech-born psychiatrist who had actually done a lot of experiments with LST.
And Groff and his wife developed this technique called holotropic breath work, where you'd relax to sort of rhythmic music.
And after a while, if you're in the right frame of mind, you might enter an altered state of consciousness, a more relaxed state.
And while he was doing, you know, trying this out, John Mack found himself born back to what seemed to be a previous life.
He was born back to his birth, his own birth.
He felt his mother giving birth to him.
And then he felt himself in medieval Russia, watching his son being beheaded by a Mongol warrior.
And he couldn't figure out what that was all about.
But what it convinced him was that the mind has a way of traveling.
And this was his big breakthrough, really.
His training in psychiatry was that everything was very firmly grounded in our notion of reality, but perhaps not.
Perhaps there's other things going on that call that into question.
So that was the beginning of the opening in his armor against the conventional understandings of reality.
And again comes in this restlessness, because there are times in his life where he tries psychedelics.
He wants to experience these things himself.
Yeah, I mean, as I said, John Mack is not a perfect role model.
He did experiment with drugs.
He tried LSD.
He tried ayahuasca.
And he liked to push himself to the limits.
And I would never recommend that to anybody because you don't know where they're coming from and what kind of fragile state they might be in when they embark on these trips.
But he was sort of fearless as an investigator, including with his own body.
And he took these trips and he had some very intense experiences, especially with the ayahuasca, which is that drug that induces visions they take in Brazil and it's used in religious ceremonies.
It induces vomiting.
I mean, it's very upsetting to the stomach, but it's like mushrooms and other natural psychedelics.
So he had to try that himself and he found himself catapulted into other realities.
Yeah.
And we just have to say, as we've both said, neither of us endorses the use of drugs.
He felt it was profound for him, but it didn't seem to get him anywhere with his core study of people's experiences, those who say that they've had contact.
But he did say that it opened a door for him.
He said, all creation is there, he said.
Exactly.
And again, it's not a quick answer to the nature of these very mysterious encounters with alien beings.
It's not like, oh, yeah, people were taking LSD and that's why they had these visions.
Almost all the visions occurred without the use of drugs.
I mean, all these experiences that people had, they were just in their bedrooms or they were outside walking around or driving a car, in one case, a snowmobile.
And suddenly they found themselves, so they saw a UFO, they met these beings, they got taken onto a spacecraft, they had medical procedures done, women felt they had their eggs taken or men their sperm, and then they were, you know, shown hybrid babies that they had engendered.
I mean, all kinds of strange things happened, but this was not the result of taking drugs.
He was fascinated by Bud Hopkins' work, hypnotic work, with an experiencer who I am aware of, and I have talked about on shows that I've done, called Kathy Davis, aka Debbie Jordan.
Yes.
Bud Hopkins was a very interesting guy because he was, unlike John Mack, Bud Hopkins was not a professional psychiatrist, a psychologist.
He was an artist and quite a good one, a sculptor and a painter.
But he got interested in UFOs because he'd seen one once in Cape Cod where he was an artist.
And that got him interested.
And then he started, he actually did more hypnosis than John Mack did.
He taught himself hypnosis and he started hypnotizing people.
And they were coming out with these incredible stories of encountering aliens and being taken onto their spacecraft and having babies with, you know, impregnated by alien beings like this, you know, Kathy, Debbie Jordan or whatever name she used in the, you know, stories to Bud Hopkins.
So Bud Hopkins was a pioneer in this, and he actually came up first with the idea of missing time, how people would, you know, arrive at their destinations hours later after they've been expected, and then later in relaxation techniques or hypnosis would remember that they encountered a UFO and they were taken aboard, but all that had been wiped out of their memories, which is a common experience with these people.
They all say that, that their memory had been wiped clean till they were able to recapture it.
But Bud Hopkins was the one who did interest John Mack in the phenomenon, but they sort of had a parting of the ways at one point, and then they became friends again, but they took rather different approaches.
But Mack was fascinated by the idea that humans were, and many people have said this down the years, being harvested by some intelligence, somebody, somewhere.
He wrote, and you quote him in the book, there is growing evidence human reproductive functioning and sexuality are at the heart of the abduction phenomenon.
So he believed that.
Well, at one point he did.
Later in his life, he began to question a lot of the things.
He realized that what he took as certainties in the earlier or middle part of his research, he later began to question because he realized it was more complicated than that.
See, Bud Hopkins always felt that these things were happening in everyday reality, that these were real experiences happening to people.
They were really being abducted.
They were really being subjected to reproductive procedures.
They were really having hybrid children.
And David Jacobs, the same way, felt the same way.
Mack increasingly felt that there was something else going on, that it was not that literal, that it might be more what he called liminal.
In other words, some kind of a shadow world where these things are not happening in our reality.
They're happening in maybe some other reality because we're not seeing these things happen in front of us every day.
So he realized it was more complicated than he first thought.
But he believed that he was onto something.
Just quickly, let's deal with this.
He was very interested in sleep and sleep and things that happen within various states of sleep are very much a part of the whole abduction and contact phenomenon.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, because frequently, although not always, frequently these experiences happened as people were in their bedrooms, either asleep or approaching sleep.
Somehow it became accepted that these things could be nightmares or that they were all happening at night.
But John Mack, actually, he studied nightmares.
He wrote a book on nightmares.
So he knew what nightmares were.
And very often, these experiences happen to people not at night in their bedrooms.
So you couldn't explain them away as always happening at night when people were sleeping.
So maybe there were nightmares, maybe it was sleep paralysis.
It didn't explain the cases where people were walking around or driving, like Betty and Barney Hill, the first couple who went through an abduction experience in 1961, although the story didn't come out until a few years later.
They were driving in a car.
And other people, including people I interviewed afterwards, along with the book and after the book, told of having these experiences at different times of day when they were in broad daylight.
So again, it was more complicated than he thought.
You've got some great photographs that you've clearly done a lot of diligent work to obtain in the book, Ralph.
One of them, I think maybe a couple of them actually, are of his military service time.
John Mack was in the U.S. Air Force.
Did that have any influence on him?
No.
I mean, he went into the Air Force early on in his career as a psychiatrist.
He did government service.
And at the time he went in, I guess he was afraid he might have gotten drafted into the Vietnam War or even before that.
or maybe he wasn't even worried personally about being drafted, but he wanted to get his service out of the way.
So, he took advantage of an opportunity to sign up as a physician, and he was posted to Japan.
But this was around 1960, as I recall, or really maybe even before that, but early on.
And it was not in the furthest reaches of his mind that he would be interested in UFOs or alien abduction or any of that stuff.
That all came much, much later, which is why I think it gives strength to his story that he was not a believer from the beginning that he was just trying to validate something he'd always been interested in as a child.
He had very opposite leanings early on, a very conventional background in science and medicine.
So his time in the Air Force really played no role in what happened later.
You know, sometimes I've observed, and maybe it's just reading people's life stories makes it look that way.
But as people come to the pinnacle of their life or maybe the end of their life, things seem to speed up for them.
They seem to be doing an awful lot of stuff if they're accomplished people like John Mack.
And he seemed to do an awful lot of stuff in his last decade, 15 years or so.
He wrote an abduction syndrome manuscript that was going to be very important for him, and indeed was, but it was scoffed at by a lot of academics, but welcomed.
He was beginning to make headway with the UFO community because it was scoffed at by a lot of academics, but it was welcomed by the man who headed up MUFON.
Right.
Well, he, you know, he tried, like any good scholar, to get recognition for his work.
And he didn't feel he was certainly didn't feel he was doing anything wrong at Harvard when he started investigating this.
He didn't make a big secret of it.
He actually gave seminars at Harvard in altered states of reality.
He had experiences into his classes.
So it was not a big secret at Harvard.
He actually gave a talk at Harvard about his research and he tried to get published like all good academics, but nobody would have it.
They thought it was nuts.
And it was even too complicated to put out in a paper, a normal professional journal or so.
They didn't have the space to do that.
So he tried to get published.
He couldn't.
He finally wrote a book which laid out 13 case studies in great detail, a book called Abduction.
And that's what got him basically into trouble with Harvard because they saw his name on this book about humans abducted by aliens.
And even though I don't think they read the book, they didn't read it very carefully because he was very careful in his accounts to explain or try to explain the background of what was going on, that it was a genuine mystery and these people had had some kind of authentic experience.
But he couldn't get published so he published it himself.
And the media, as we said, wasn't exactly helping him by the way that in those days they treated these things.
He appeared on Oprah.
Oprah asked him the question that I don't think he could answer.
How could you answer it?
What do they want with us?
I mean, it's the question that you would ask on a show like that, but it's not the right question for him.
No, this phenomenon did not lend itself to sort of armchair, you know, discussion on these pop shows because it's much too complicated.
And these people are held up for ridicule.
I mean, one guy who went on, one experiencer who went on with John Mack talked about, you know, the reproductive aspects of this.
And boy, they jumped all over that, the audience.
They wanted to know what it was like to have sex with an alien and, you know, stuff like that.
And it's not really helpful to discuss this in those terms.
It's just sensationalist and it doesn't really get at the mystery of what was involved.
It makes it much too literal and what can I say, ridiculous.
And it is, the whole thing is ridiculous.
And it turns it into a bit of a circus show and gives fuel.
If you've got people who are deriding you, both in your own field and outside, it gives them fuel.
But, you know, he was starting to get, he was starting to get attention, yes, but he was getting some bad reviews.
There was a review in Time magazine that you quote in the book.
It questioned his motives and his methodology.
There was a review by a former New York Times science editor, I think.
Is it James Gleek?
James Gleek?
Who said abduction, quotes, was a tawdry belief mania.
Yeah.
Well, you know, whenever scientists, so-called scientists and science writers jumped into this, they took particular glee at picking it apart because in the end, John Mack could not put forth any proof that would be acceptable to the scientific community.
There is no proof, you know, in that sense, anything that science can grab onto.
There's only a series of circumstantial accounts that give credence.
In other words, you start eliminating things and what you're left with, as Sherlock Holmes said, is the truth.
But that falls short of actually having a piece of landing gear from a UFO or producing an alien so that the alien can be studied.
That was not possible.
This phenomenon is much more difficult to document than that.
Now, of course, we have military photos of UFOs, which have been accepted as almost certainly genuine, Probative of physical objects, real physical objects that have been documented by the military.
So we've come a long way in that respect, but we're still far short of proof of alien encounters.
So that was a big stumbling block that we have to this day.
True enough.
So, you know, he was facing the flak, but he loved to be where the action is or where the action was.
And he was going everywhere.
He went to India, as you said, and that apparently was profound for him.
He went to Brazil, where the famous Villas Boas case happened, a farmer who said that he was abducted back in the 1950s.
And it doesn't get as much publicity as the famous cases in North America and in Europe because it happened in South America and it didn't quite have the media attention.
Mac went there.
He needed to be where things were happening.
And the one that I know most about is his connection, and it's been in a recent documentary too, the aerial school encounter in Zimbabwe.
The school kids who saw some kind of craft, and I think it was a silver being, maybe two of them they encountered.
I think the kids' accounts were slightly different, but had common threads within them.
There was a swashbuckling BBC reporter out there, a guy who'd done, he covered wars and all sorts of stuff.
So, you know, he was used to unusual stuff, but not this.
Tim Leach, who I don't think is with us anymore, but he called in John Mack.
Yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned that case because that really is one of the best documented cases we have of UFO encounters.
And the witnesses, again, were children, school-aged children, elementary school, who were unlikely to meet together and agree on a said story.
They all later drew pictures of what they had seen.
They gave their accounts.
Interestingly enough, no adults were apparently witness to this, but 60 kids were in a schoolyard outside the capital of Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1994.
And it remains, there was a documentary, there is a documentary now by Randy Nickerson.
And it's an extraordinary story because it is so hard to debunk.
The kids know what they saw.
They're now grown up.
They repeat the same stories.
And John Mack dropped everything, was in the middle of the Inquisition at Harvard, but he packed up and flew to Zimbabwe to interview the kids himself.
And he was very good with kids, by the way.
Well, that video is actually in the Randall Nickerson documentary about this, which I think, I mean, he spent years putting that documentary together.
It is excellent.
But what made such a deep and moving impact on me was the empathy, the way that John Mack went about those interviews with the kids.
Yeah, he literally would get down with them on the floor and talk to them, you know, eye to eye.
And he didn't patronize them.
And he was genuinely, you know, because his work studying childhood trauma made him particularly suitable to talk to kids.
And he knew how to approach them.
And he did not, you know, put his foot on the scale.
He didn't lead them, as so many critics, you know, later would say.
He really let them speak.
And their testimony is very, very powerful because they're kids.
And again, they didn't have the ability or the tendency to make stories up.
I'm going to be famous.
I'm going to tell this story.
They were kids.
And it came through in the way they spoke, the basic honesty.
And that's what makes this story so powerful.
So that is really a very, very important episode.
And John Mack was a very big part of it, but he walked into controversy there.
As you say, he was already in the middle of that.
We'd call it a kangaroo court here in the UK, but I don't know what they call it in America.
He was in the middle of this kangaroo court at Harvard.
He goes to Zimbabwe, gets involved in this, and they start claiming he's breached Harvard's research standards.
So the bullets are flying at him.
Yeah.
Again, he was, you know, first of all, he took the opportunity to fly out to Zimbabwe as a welcome break to what he was going through at Harvard.
So here at least he was seeing something real.
He was talking to kids.
He was doing his own research.
He was getting away from that circus at Harvard.
So I think it was therapeutic for him.
But what did he come out with after he came back from the aerial school and all of that effort and doubtless expense?
What conclusions did he come to?
This was a real phenomenon.
He could not explain it.
He didn't know how these intelligences came to impact our world, how they suddenly showed up and why they would show up to some people and not others.
That's an interesting question, why he was never picked to be a witness to an encounter, but other people were, and it seemed to run in families, they found that if a child was an abductee or an experiencer, likelihood is his or her parents were, and maybe grandparents.
For some reason, this seemed to run in families.
But if you were not in a family that had that kind of history, you were not likely to be abducted or have an abduction experience.
So, you know, it was one of the things he noticed and picked up on.
But, you know, he just persisted.
I mean, he wanted to get to the answer.
He never did.
To this day, we don't know what it's all about.
But at least we know, as I say in my book, at least we know what it's not.
It's not mental illness.
It's not hallucination.
It's not publicity seeking.
It's something else.
And there's a great quote that you include earlier in the book, and I think maybe it sums him up.
He said, some form of intelligence seems to have entered our world as if from another dimension of reality.
That kind of sums it all up, doesn't it?
Yeah.
You know, there's another quote I use in the book that I think about often.
There was a scientist in the 1870s, England, named Joseph Crookes, later knighted Sir Joseph.
And he was assigned by fellow scientists to check out the story about some seances and levitation and all kinds of weird things that were going on because they thought he would go off and debunk them.
And he witnessed these things and he was astounded.
He saw musical instruments playing themselves behind a locked cabinet.
He saw people levitating.
And he came back and he said, and I love this quote, he said, I never said it was possible.
I only said it was real.
I only said it was true.
I forgot.
But anyway, it's not possible and yet it's true.
And that's what impressed John Mack.
He agreed that none of these things seem possible.
And we agree on that to this day.
It's wild, crazy stuff, and yet there's no other explanation for what this could be, except some other intelligence penetrating our reality somehow.
And that's the dichotomy at the heart of all of this.
We don't have an awful lot of time left.
But one thing that occurred to me, and I don't think you talk about it in the book, you know, working roughly the same time as John Mack was Stanton T. Friedman, who I did know pretty well over many years.
I met him and interviewed him many times.
And sadly, we lost him in recent years.
But, you know, Stanton Friedman was a nuclear physicist.
And he started with the investigation into Roswell, the first person to systematically do that.
He didn't care what people thought about him or what he was saying.
Seems to me that there were similarities of sorts there and also differences.
Did they ever meet?
Did they have any contact?
I don't think so.
I didn't come across, I found out, you know, I learned about Stan Friedman later.
He did a lot with, you know, Kathleen Marsden, who's the niece of Betty Hill.
But he has separate credentials and certainly a brave, you know, scientist to plunge into this area, did some very, very good work.
But he didn't interact with John Mack, as far as I know.
Another scientist who stuck to his story.
And bringing us back to the beginning in full circle fashion, one of his passions, one of his many passions, was world peace.
He was the most unlikely peace envoy, but he went out to Beirut and met Yasser Arafat.
And the heart of all of that was that he was terrified that ultimately the world might get embroiled, rather, in a nuclear conflict and the horrible consequences of that.
But it's astonishing that that's one of the aspects of this man's life, this quest for peace and this disdain at the state of the nuclear proliferation of arms.
Right.
Well, this is his courage coming out early.
As I said, it grew out of his research into T.E. Lawrence, and he was very interested in the Middle East.
And he became very involved in social causes.
He tried to make peace between the Arabs and the Israelis.
And we know how that worked out, alas.
But so then he began protesting nuclear weapons because he felt very strongly as a doctor, as a person, a man of medicine, that the health of the human species was at risk from nuclear weapons.
So he protested and his courage came out then.
Interestingly enough, it came out years later that some of these UFO encounters seem to have been intended to block missile silos.
I'm glad you said that because that was the next thing I've got in my notes here.
People like Robert Hastings have written about it.
A year or so ago, a trio of ex-military people who say that they experienced this, Robert Salas being one of them, wasn't he?
Yeah.
You know, said that something had intervened and closed down the nukes.
Yeah, I mean, there are many accounts of that, that nuclear weapons were disarmed by UFO flybys.
And, you know, John Mack got this from his experiences.
They told him that when they were interacting with these alien beings, the beings were very concerned about the fate of the planet and mankind.
And they communicated that telepathically, by the way, they were not in conversation.
The beings didn't speak English in the conventional sense, but somehow their thoughts popped into, they were able to send their thoughts into the minds of the people, humans they were interacting with.
And one of the things that the humans, the people, the experiences kept saying to Mac and others was that they were getting messages that the planet is in peril.
And it's in peril from nuclear weapons and pollution and ecological disaster.
And this is where Mac, by the way, split or differentiated from Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs.
Mac heard from his experiences that they were getting messages that the world, that they had to transform the world away from ecological disaster.
And Hopkins and Jacobs said, no, we never got any of that.
All we know is that the aliens are evil.
They want to take over humanity.
And the trauma was the number one thing that they picked up on, these researchers, but not Mack.
So we talked about John Mack's life seemingly getting faster and faster.
He's doing more and more things.
And he comes to the UK to present on one of his favorite subjects, his passion, Lawrence of Arabia.
And is unfortunately, his life is cut short by a driver under the influence of alcohol who knocks him down and kills him.
And that's the end of the story.
And there are conspiracy theorists who over the years have suggested, well, maybe John Mack was silenced.
But no, this just looks like a tragedy that the guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So what a shame.
That's too light a word for it, That this man's work was cut short, just as it all seemed to be coming to some kind of critical mass for him.
Yeah, but you know, it's true that it was not a conspiracy.
I verified that from the police reports from the UK, and I looked all that over.
It was a drunk driver.
It was a complete accident, but Mac was ready in some ways.
He'd done what he wanted to do.
He was tired.
He was moving into new areas now, life after death.
And he thought he might be fun to experience that.
And sure enough, he's killed.
And I end the book, as you know, I'm sure, that with some accounts of people who think they felt they encountered his spirit after he died.
He appeared to a number of people with messages after he died.
And he was actually working on a book on life after death when he was killed.
So it's a strange ending.
It is.
And it seems that it's not over then, if that's the case.
You know, maybe somebody will come out one day and say that they're completing the book with him.
Who knows?
I mean, you know, those things, there are people who say those things happen.
Who am I till they say it?
There is a story I haven't told much, but it is interesting that John Mack, just before he was killed, was supposed to deliver a paper at a conference on reptilian beings, you know, reptile aliens.
And then he was killed and his collaborator at the talk didn't know what to do.
And she had a vision of him coming to her after he was killed and said, I want you to continue giving the talk.
And she said, I don't have the notes.
And he said, call my assistant and tell her the notes are in the bookshelf near the bathroom on the second level, and the spine sticking out.
And so this woman, Barbara Lamb, who was supposed to present with Mac, calls the assistant and said, I just had a message from John.
And he said, get out the notes.
And they were just where he said they would be.
And the woman got the notes and delivered the talk.
So go figure.
And that's a true story.
That's a true story.
Well, you know, there you go.
He's making an impact from beyond the grave.
But that is, I haven't heard that.
That's astonishing.
Utterly astonishing.
And finally, as they say in the movies, in a sentence or so, how do we remember John Mack?
What was his place in it all?
Well, I think he was a man of courage.
He was not a perfect human being.
None of us are.
But he latched onto a mystery.
He was courageous enough to pursue it against a lot of enemies and against a lot of other influences that sort of dissuade him.
He was strong enough to persist.
And, you know, I like to compare him to the, you know, the hero and the hero's journey of Joseph Campbell, who set off on a quest and, you know, faced down many personal dangers and emerged with a boon for mankind, which was this information that there's something out there that we don't understand.
And that's the way I like to remember him, somebody courageous enough to bring back that boon for mankind.
And if you can do that, and how many people can in this world, if you can accomplish things and pose questions that people are still asking, that's great because that leaves an impact.
And if you can do it, and I've had personal experience of this with a number of people who've referenced him, in a way that people remember you fondly.
And it seems to me that a lot of people remember John Mack fondly.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, even I've spoken to his wife, long-suffering wife.
I interviewed her before she died from cancer and his girlfriends and everyone who came in contact with him had a nice thing to say about him.
He was an inspirational figure, which is nice to be remembered that way.
With no bitterness that I found from anybody, they all felt he had brought them knowledge, information, sunshine, light, and an inspirational story of courage sticking up for his beliefs.
So it is a great legacy.
That's an achievement.
Why the title, The Believer?
Ah, glad you asked.
Some people take it as a disparagement that, you know, you put someone down and say, well, he's just a believer.
I chose it deliberately because John Mack always said that he was not a believer in the sense that he was just latching on to some myth that he chose to believe in.
I use it in the sense that he believed in social justice on Earth.
He believed in the possibility of intelligence beyond Earth.
He believed in possibilities yet unfathomed or unfathomable.
So in that sense, he believed in the best of possibilities, not that he was gullible.
And once I explain that as the genesis of my title, I think I get a lot of positive feedback.
And for all of those reasons that you've just stated, those are the reasons why I like John Mack, and I wish I could have met him.
Ralph, thank you very much for telling the story.
I wish you well with the book.
I think it's excellent.
There is so much detail that somebody who is brand new to all of this can appreciate that detail.
It's not put in a difficult or impenetrable way.
I think it's just excellent.
And thank you for talking with me about it.
Have you got a website that people could look at?
Yes, I do.
www.ralphblumenthal.
That's R-A-L-P-H, B-L-U-M-E-N-T-H-A-L dot com.
And it's got my bio, it's got my books, it's got photos, it's got all kinds of material that will, you know, should be of interest to anyone who's interested in the subject.
Ralph, thank you for your time.
Howard, thank you.
A Real pleasure.
A great guest, a totally interesting and absorbing topic, Ralph Blumenthal.
My thanks to him.
And the book is called The Believer.
It is out wherever you get your good books right now.
And I'm very grateful for that conversation about a remarkable man, John Mack.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the online home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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