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Harvard launches John Mack attack: abduction psychiatrist's scholarship questioned

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 1995 by C. Eugene Emery, Jr.

Harvard University has launched an investigation of John Mack, the tenured professor of psychiatry who has spent the past few years arguing that people who believe they have been abducted by space aliens may actually be victims of extraterrestrial kidnappings.

Mack's Harvard credentials, plus the fact that he won a Pulitzer prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), have helped make him the leading light in the UFO field and turned his book on alleged extraterrestrial kidnappings into a best-seller.

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At press time, the Harvard probe, led by former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Arnold Relman, had not been completed. Because Harvard is a private institution, it is possible that the report by the Relman committee, along with any sanctions made against Mack, will not be made public.

Relman, Harvard University, Mack, and Mack's Boston lawyer, Roderick MacLeish, Jr., have all refused to comment.

The probe became known after Mack's former lawyer, Daniel P. Sheehan, began soliciting letters of support for Mack from scientists interested in UFOs.

In his letter of request, Sheehan said Harvard's "special faculty committee" was acting in "secret," and had prejudged the tenured professor. Sheehan alleged that the committee wrote a draft report of its findings of fact "before Dr. Mack was ever informed of any specific accusations of misconduct made against him and before Dr. Mack had been accorded any opportunity whatsoever to present any defense."

Sheehan's letter said the Relman committee had concluded: "When carefully investigated, such sightings [of UFOs] have been proven to be erroneous, fraudulent, or due to a known natural or man-made phenomenon."

Sheehan's letter quoted the committee as saying that if Mack is going to assert that virtually every claim of UFO abduction is accompanied by concrete physical evidence of a kidnapping, "we believe that Dr. Mack has an obligation to document some of this claimed physical evidence."

Sheehan's letter also said that the Harvard committee had concluded in its draft report that it is irresponsible for any scholar or practicing psychiatrist to give credence to the alien abduction idea until all other possibilities, including seizures, vivid dreams, and all other conditions can be ruled out.

The Harvard committee, according to Sheehan's version of the draft report, accused Mack of encouraging patients to believe they have been abducted by extraterrestrials when he should be discouraging that belief.

Some of Mack's supporters have depicted the probe as an assault on academic freedom. Sheehan said the Harvard investigation was an attempt to "silence John in his effort to speak out to the world about this important phenomenon and his conclusions about it."

Sheehan offered a three-page sample letter for UFO researchers to use as a template for support letters to Relman and the Harvard committee.

News of the investigation broke just as Mack and Ballantine Books were beginning to promote the publication of the paperback edition of his UFO book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

During a press conference conducted via conference call, Mack again declined to comment on the investigation. He did, however, offer comments on several other subjects.

Mack acknowledged that there have been conflicting accounts of abduction-such as the way people say they are brought into rooms that look like they couldn't possibly fit inside the spacecraft; or the way some abductees report that their captors are cold and unfeeling, while others feel a powerful bond.

"It's one way one time and it's another way" another time, said Mack. "Everything you say about it you can contradict and it drives linear minds crazy because it isn't one way."

Mack declined to cite a specific case that would be compelling enough to convince skeptics, saying, "You get your best case and it always gets shot down because somebody finds a fault."

Other comments from Mack at his press conference:

* On whether anything will convince him that the phenomenon he's studying has nothing to do with UFOs and space aliens: "Of the hundreds of these cases, now thousands that have been reported, not one has ever-with all the attacks on the people who do this work-turned out to yield another explanation."

* On one case that has produced an alternative explanation-the Gulf Breeze UFO photographs, which were discredited after a neighborhood youth reported helping photographer Ed Walters make them and a UFO model was found hidden in the attic of Walters's house: "Somebody planted apparently some sort of a model which was very crude.... All of the concentration was on the model, and no way could [it] have produced the [Walters] photographs.... [As for the youth who said he helped with the photographs] it Burns out that he was put up by his father to do this as a scam. The field is full of that kind of thing."

Harvard launches John Mack attack: abduction psychiatrist's scholarship questioned

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 1995 by C. Eugene Emery, Jr.

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