Dr. John Mack

Touched

John Mack was a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, happily married with three sons and considered a genius by many.

In 1990, he became intrigued by the reports of people who claimed they'd had contact with aliens. Mack naively went public with a best selling book, Abduction, appearing in the media on talk shows such as The Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He then suffered ostracism from colleagues and friends, and became subject of an unprecedented investigation by Harvard to discover where he must have gone wrong. After Harvard took no action against him, Mack returned to his controversial work undeterred. He still has a dramatically mixed reputation.

In his second book about alien encounters, Passport to the Cosmos, Mack suggests that extraordinary experiences such as alien encounters can affect “personal, societal and global transformation.” He now believes these “aliens” are beings from another dimension, appearing here as a “wake up call” for a new way of examining the nature of reality, and our place in the cosmos. 

John E. Mack, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital.

Dr. Mack earned his medical degree at the Harvard Medical School (Cum Laude) after undergraduate study at Oberlin (Phi Beta Kappa). He is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and is Board certified in child and adult psychoanalysis with over 40 years of clinical psychiatric education and experience.

His exploration of the “human dimension” of alien encounters led him to consider the merits of an expanded notion of reality, one which allows for experiences that may seem impossible, yet deeply affect people.

“What has become clear to me in the ten years that I have been wrestling with the mystery of the alien abduction phenomenon,” he writes, “is the deeper power and meaning of the encounters cannot be understood without consideration of their transformative power and spiritual significance.”

“The people who have the experiences change. They grow. They transform. They become Earth-conscious,” he explains. “That is why I seek to give them voice, because they become passionate on behalf of the stewardship of the Earth.”

Dr. Mack is the author or co-author of eleven books, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of British officer T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, the controversial Abduction, and Nightmares and Human Conflict. The culmination of his 12 years of research into how alien encounters affect people's lives and worldview, Passport to the Cosmos, was published in 1999. The theme which runs through all of his seemingly diverse work is the exploration of how our perceptions shape our relationship with each other and with the world.

He is the founder of a Cambridge-based non-profit organization, the Center for Psychology & Social Change: www.centerchange.org

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© 2006 by St.Clair