He said to me, “Do you know that concern about the environment is a recurring theme with those that tell me of their encounters? The beings tell them that they are concerned about the threats to our environment such as pollution and radiation. They are warning us that we are doing harm to Earth.” He then waited for me to respond to this, but I merely acknowledged what he said in a general way. Then he asked me if I felt that my work in the environmental field had anything potentially to do with my interest in the UFO phenomena. I replied that the two were entirely independent. I was not working in environmental advocacy or anything like that – rather I was a management consultant who happened to be working with client corporations who were major players in the environmental industry. And I told him that my interest in UFOs began very early on – and certainly well before my environmentally-related work.

 

He seemed very disappointed that my UFO and environmental interests were not in some way “connected.” This was the first sign or red flag to me that Mack may be “shaping” and “overly interpreting” others’ experiences. He brought it up yet again later – he simply could not seem to reconcile that I had no deeper connection to “the environment” and that my UFO experiences and interests were not related to it. I told him that though I am “eco-conscious”, my environment-friendly attitudes about this had no link to concern about aliens warning us that we are destroying our planet.

 

I had many “background” questions of Mack. I began by asking him about the UFO “Contactees” of the 1950s and about the New Age “Channelers” of aliens in the 1980s.

 

Though Mack had done an outstanding and detailed historical analysis of a military figure (and even was awarded a Pulitzer for it), it became quickly obvious to me that his historical analysis of the UFO phenomenon was sadly lacking. He did not possess a command of alleged human-alien encounters from the past. For instance, he knew of early contactee George Adamski, but names such as Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum, Howard Menger, Wayne Aho and others apparently did not ring a bell with him.

 

Following a vein similar to Contactees, I asked him about his thoughts on Channelers. I mentioned “Ramtha”, and I later mentioned “Ashtar.” Neither of these seemingly “rang a bell” with him either…

 

Mack was investigating alien abductions and was linking human consciousness with alien encounters. It concerned me that Dr. Mack had not completed deep analysis of these preceding cases before psychoanalyzing his patient “abductees”. Though we eventually got around to discussing the abduction phenomenon, his apparent lack of historical reference and perspective on such things was bothersome to me. How could an esteemed Harvard doctor be so lacking in knowledge of such essential elements of the UFO phenomenon’s past? How could he not see that the dynamics of those Contactees and Channelers provided precedent for his study of “Experiencers”?

 

Clearly this was a man who was just now gaining information about UFOs. Here was a man trained and working as a Professor of Psychiatry who was going to write books about UFOs. My immediate fear was that, here before me, stood a man of some renown who would hypnotize and regress patients to elicit memories about personal penetration by aliens! His need for more understanding about things UFO was obvious. He was a “career transition” MD who had yet to learn valuable lessons of UFO history that could have helped him in his assessment of this abduction “phenomenon.”

 

During another conversation I had with Dr. Mack, I brought up the ever-present prospect of “hoaxing.” After all, we were in the midst of Cambridge – the quintessential “college town” with young MIT science students always devising pranks. In fact, just some years prior, MIT students has somehow placed a life-size cow figure (stolen from a steak house) atop the famous MIT Dome building on Mass Ave without being seen (the street where Mack and I had met prior for dinner). He must have been aware of the propensity of people to hoax. Had he ever studied this or considered it relative to those claiming abduction? Was he aware of UFO hoaxes from the past that supposedly included human-alien encounters and communication? Though he had heard of UFO /alien hoaxer Billy Meier (and offered no opinion on the authenticity of his contacts and photos), Mack had apparently never heard of such people as Carlos Dias or Paul Villa. I wondered if Mack realized that some of his patients (called “Experiencers”) simply never actually had their claimed experiences because – consciously or unconsciously – they made it up!

 

Mack struck me as someone who was open of spirit and overly trusting. He seemed to want to find the positive in things. He believed that all things had a meaning. Because of this I could see how he could be easily deceived by others and indeed by himself.

 

Again, I was astounded at Mack’s credulity and his lack of completing essential “homework.” Dr. Mack could not see that hoaxing – making things up – was something that should always be heavily considered when considering things strange, including alien abductions. He seemed perplexed that this would happen. I was crestfallen that he had never examined the “hoaxer mentality” or that he had not done an intense study on the history of UFO hoaxing.

 

Incredibly, just a few years later in 1996, my fear that Mack did not understand the hoaxer dynamic came true! One of Mack’s former patients, Donna Bassett, admitted to a NOVA television documentary team in Boston that she had made up the alien and UFO encounters that she had once told to Dr. Mack. She based her story on her understanding of what others had said and written about the abduction phenomenon. Mack had never suspected it. He was entirely “taken in” by the woman’s fabrication.

 

In the end, I realized a lot about Dr. Mack:

 

• He was relatively new to the world of UFOs. He was not at all well-versed in its strange and long history, but he should have been, given his position and what he was seeking to accomplish.

 

• He was a ”researcher of the mind”, yet he never examined what made a Contactee’s or a Channeler’s mind tick, or even knew much about them at all. But like abductees, they too made claims of personal mental communication and interaction with UFO entities. Someone who is studying the human mind and alien interaction should have had some background knowledge of this.

 

• Though a perceptive man in some ways, he was not astute enough to be aware of hoaxers, even those who were within his own midst. He seemed oddly non-committal about hoaxes and abductions when I discussed the history of hoaxes and things alien and UFO.

 

• He suggested to me links that did not exist between my “interest in the alien” and my work in the environment. He was “overanalyzing” me. He tried to make "connections” that simply were not there. He dearly wanted me to agree with him.

 

• He seemed to be far too academic and cerebral to be engaged in this type of “work.” He was not someone I felt who had ever spent a lot of time in the “real world” – and especially to be cognizant of the motivations behind some in the UFO industry. He lived and worked in the bubble of Harvard Square for far too long to understand the larger world.

 

• He displayed a naiveté about the intrinsic reliability of humans, what they report and why. He did not seem to be an “investigator” who vetted what others told him. He seemed compelled to assign a "higher meaning" to anyone we talked about who made UFO or alien claims.

 

A CLOUDED QUEST FOR TRUTH

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