Cold War and anti-nuclear activism

In the 1980s, Mack interviewed many international political figures as part of his research into the root causes of the Cold War, including former President Jimmy Carter and the "father of the hydrogen bomb", Edward Teller. Together with luminaries such as Carl Sagan, Mack and other Physicians for Social Responsibility (the US affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War)

promoted the elimination of nuclear weapons and an end to the simmering conflict between the United States and the USSR. Emboldened by the organization's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, Mack, Sagan, and 700 other academics walked upon the grounds of the Nevada Test Site in the summer of 1986, setting a civil disobedience record for that nuclear weapons testing facility.

Alien abduction phenomenon

Mack had a world view inspired by elements of spiritual and philosophical traditions which hold that people are all connected to one another; this theme of "connection" was taken to a controversial extreme in the early 1990s when Mack commenced his decade-plus study of 200 men and women who reported recurrent alien encounter experiences. Such encounters had seen some limited attention from academic figures (R. Leo Sprinkle perhaps being the earliest, in the 1960s). Mack, however, remains probably the most esteemed academic to have studied the subject.

He initially suspected that such persons were suffering from mental illness, but when no obvious pathologies were present in the persons he interviewed, his interest was piqued. Following encouragement from longtime friend Thomas Kuhn, who predicted that the subject might be controversial, but urged Mack to collect data and ignore prevailing materialist, dualist and "either/or" analysis, Mack began concerted study and interviews. Many of those he interviewed reported that their encounters had affected the way they regarded the world, including producing a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern.

Mack was somewhat more guarded in his investigations and interpretations of the abduction phenomenon than were earlier researchers. Literature professor Terry Matheson writes that "On balance, Mack does present as fair-minded an account as has been encountered to date, at least as these abduction narratives go."[3] In a 1994 interview, Jeffrey Mishlove stated that Mack seemed "inclined to take these [abduction] reports at face value". Mack replied by saying "Face value I wouldn't say. I take them seriously. I don't have a way to account for them."[4] Similarly, the BBC quoted Mack as saying, "I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry."[5]

Mack noted that there was a worldwide history of visionary experiences, especially in pre-industrial societies. One example is the vision quest common to some Native American cultures. Only fairly recently in Western culture, notes Mack, have such visionary events been interpreted as aberrations or as mental illness. Mack suggested that abduction accounts might best be considered as part of this larger tradition of visionary encounters.

His interest in the spiritual or transformational aspects of people's alien encounters, and his suggestion that the experience of alien contact itself may be more transcendent than physical in nature—yet nonetheless real—set him apart from many of his contemporaries, such as Budd Hopkins, who advocated the physical reality of aliens.

His later research broadened into the general consideration of the merits of an expanded notion of reality, one which allows for experiences that may not fit the Western materialist paradigm, yet deeply affect people's lives. His second (and final) book on the alien encounter experience, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters

(1999), was as much a philosophical treatise connecting the themes of spirituality and modern worldviews as it was the culmination of his work with the "experiencers" of alien encounters, to whom the book is dedicated.

Investigation

In May 1994, the Dean of Harvard Medical School, Daniel C. Tosteson, appointed a committee of peers to confidentially review Mack's clinical care and clinical investigation of the people who had shared their alien encounters with him (some of their cases were written of in Mack's 1994 book Abduction). In the same BBC article cited above, Angela Hind wrote, "It was the first time in Harvard's history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation." Mack described the

investigation as "Kafkaesque": he never quite knew the status of the ongoing investigation, and the nature of his critics' complaints were not revealed to Mack until the committee had prepared a draft report eight months into the process.

Because the committee was not a disciplinary committee, it was not governed by any established rules of procedure; the presentation of a defense was therefore difficult and costly for Mack.

The lead inquisitor was Arnold "Budd" Relman, M.D., a Professor of Medicine and of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School who had amassed several honorary degrees during his tenure as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In that Journal, he had earlier editorialized against the doctor-led anti-nuclear activism that Dr. Mack was then best-known for, and he was a frequent critic of complementary therapies.

Upon the public revelation of the existence of the committee (inadvertently revealed during the solicitation of witnesses for Mack's defense, ten months into the process), questions arose from the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) regarding the validity of an investigation of a tenured professor who was not suspected of ethics violations or professional misconduct.

Concluding the fourteen-month investigation, Harvard then issued a statement stating that the Dean had "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment," concluding "Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine." (Mack was censured in the committee's report for what they believed were methodological errors, but Dean Tosteson took no action based on the committee's assessment.) He had received legal help from Roderick MacLeish and Daniel P. Sheehan,[6] (of the Pentagon Papers case)[7] and the support of Laurance Rockefeller, who also funded Mack's non-profit organization for four consecutive years at $250,000 per year.[8]

Works

He wrote the following books:

• • Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999)

  • Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994)

  • A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976)

  • Nightmares and Human Conflict (1970)

Collaborations:

• • The Alchemy of Survival: One Woman's Journey (1988)

  • Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent School Girl (1977)

He was editor or co-editor of:

• • Mind Before Matter: Vision of a New Science of Consciousness (2007; replaced by Paul Devereux)

  • Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference Held at M.I.T. Cambridge, MA (1995)

  • Human Feelings: Explorations in Affect Development and Meaning (1993)

  • Development and Sustenance of Self-Esteem in Childhood (1984)

  • Borderline States in Psychiatry - Seminars in Psychiatry (1975)

Unpublished:

• • When Worldviews Collide: A Paradigmatic Passion Play, a manuscript about the Harvard inquiry, was largely complete at the time of his death and is in-development as a motion picture.[9]

He also wrote the foreword to Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision (1993), the introductions to The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter (2000) by Jeffrey Mishlove and Secret Life (1992) by David Jacobs, and he contributed chapters to several books including The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter (1986), The Psychology of Terrorism Vol. 1: A Public Understanding (2002), and The Psychospiritual Clinician's Handbook (2005).

Death

On Monday, September 27, 2004 while in London to lecture at a T. E. Lawrence Society-sponsored conference, Mack was killed by a drunken driver heading west on Totteridge Lane. He was walking home alone, after a dinner with friends, when he was struck at 11:25 p.m. near the junction of Totteridge Lane and Longland Drive. He lost consciousness at the scene of the accident and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. The driver was arrested at the scene, and later entered a plea of guilty by careless driving whilst under the influence of alcohol. Mack's family requested leniency for the suspect in a letter to the Wood Green Crown Court. "Although this was a tragic event for our family," the letter reads, "we feel [the accused's] behavior was neither malicious nor intentional, and we have no ill will toward him since we learned of the circumstances of the collision."[10]