John Mack – The Believer - Reviewed by Neil Nixon

The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack

Ralph Blumenthal 

High Road Books

John Mack (1929 – 2004) parachuted himself into ufology once well into middle age and long-established in a significant, if sometimes wayward academic career. Many in ufology at the time were pleased that a Harvard professor (of Psychiatry) had joined the ranks. Few appreciated the true magnitude of the shift made by Mack. Crudely, his arrival might be equated to Coronation Street unveiling a new talent like Ralph Fiennes. Mack’s arrival into the community really has no precedent before or since. Others – notably J Allen Hynek (the only other significant ufologist who has been subject to a detailed biography – The Close Encounters Man) – found the community in a natural progression. For Hynek it was simply that his erstwhile role as a professional doubter eventually took him to a realisation that some UFO reports refused to reveal themselves in any standard scientific model he understood; at which point he directed his interest to understanding these mysteries. 

The Believer presents John Mack’s arrival into our midst in a totally different light. The book maps a life of seeking and restlessness, initiated in part by the sudden and tragic loss of his mother when Mack was only nine months old. Mack is the believer because – crudely – his life reveals itself as a series of searches for subjects in which he can lose himself in study and find himself as a person. Anyone reading the work from the perspective of UFO interest is likely to find no surprise in the way the narrative is set up. Chapters on Mack are occasionally interrupted by chapter length considerations of other developments – notably the developing reports and beliefs around flying saucer reports. The implication is that Mack and the aliens were on a collision course. An inevitability started on one side by Mack’s loss of his mother and on the other by Kenneth Arnold’s sighting. 

Anyone reading the book from the perspective of general interest is dropped into a classic and gripping narrative structure in which the irresistible force of Mack hurtles towards its date with destiny by way of colliding with ufology’s immovable object. Co-incidentally I re-watched The Damned United (UK movie chronicling Brian Clough’s ill-starred 44 days in charge of Leeds United) just before reading The Believer. The parallels – I hope – are obvious. When driven and highly individual talents encounter an established culture and belief system there will be drama. Scientifically when the object and force collide the force forces, the object resists. In the very human stories of Clough or Mack that means consequences and casualties. 

The signs are clear in the opening chapters, one of which sees Mack – head in hands – dealing with the fallout of having won a Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976). Mack’s psychological study of Lawrence earned praise for levels of insight most historical biographies couldn’t hope to match, expertly layered and frequently revealing in a way Lawrence himself was never able to articulate. Mack’s reaction to the recognition he received was to worry how his remaining career could hope to meet the expectations that fell on him. He was in his mid-forties, just coming into his academic prime. As Ralph Blumenthal teases out the strands of Mack’s life it appears obvious that the insight he brought to the Lawrence biography was partly drawn from Mack’s own life, in particular the extent to which key moments and events are informed by subconscious actions drawn from early trauma. Lawrence’s fatal motorcycle crash was unquestionably an accident, but Mack’s understandings helped readers to grasp the extent to which Lawrence lived his life with a level of reckless endangering that made such an end more likely. Ralph Blumenthal has access to intimate material (including Mack’s diaries and personal correspondence) and all the key figures in Mack’s life who remain alive. 

He builds a picture of someone in search of a subject, a cause and a life with some sense of belonging. But someone also overwhelmed with contradictions. Ufology and Mack were – to some extent – made for each other. It’s another question entirely how good each was for the other one. Sometimes the tragi-comic elements emerge easily. Mack repeatedly launches himself into learning of the most extreme and esoteric kind. His excursions into ufology were preceded by a lengthy period of exploring new age philosophies and psychedelic drugs (a habit he never lost). Mack is a good student in such studies, using his professorship at Harvard as an opportunity to direct resources fearlessly where others might be constrained in the hope of climbing the career ladder. Ironically, the deep learning of subjects is presented as going side-by-side with repeated instances where his lack of consideration for others leaves his life occasionally derailed and in a mess. 

The fateful meetings with Budd Hopkins and Mack’s massive turn towards accepting the accounts of abductees and employing interviews and hypnosis to collect their stories, treat the apparent victims and compile his best-selling Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) is the centrepiece of the story. Mack’s public profile was never higher, his sense of engaging with a subject that fulfilled him academically, and personally was probably never stronger. One moment appears definitive, something no other individual in ufological history has replicated. Having worked to bring about the high profile gathering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 in which abductees, academics and a few other favoured individuals gathered to investigate the experience of alien abduction Mack was loudly cheered and applauded as he stated openly that he accepted the stories of the abductees as true. Academically it was an act of extreme courage, not that far removed from the way T E Lawrence chose to ride a motorcycle. Not everyone in the room was cheering and some of those most conspicuously silent represented a body of thought who saw Mack’s conduct as academically unacceptable. 

The predictable collision whereby Harvard’s management investigated the conduct and credibility in Mack’s work is covered in detail. So too the abductee who soon outed herself as a debunker, fabricating her abduction narrative simply to prove the alien-obsessed Harvard professor was as credulous as anyone else when it came to such stories. As Blumenthal writes it, there is something of a tragi-comic inevitability about much of the subsequent tale. Crudely, Harvard unleashed a blistering critique of Mack’s methodology and conclusions. Ufology regarded it and reported it as a witch-hunt, the furore, if anything, aided book sales and Mack’s friends rallied as he prepared to strike back. This was the mid-nineties, so when Mack’s legal team went in search of allies, they faxed their requests. Consequently, finding the individual who leaked the details of the intense academic battle to the media is always likely to prove impossible. What is beyond dispute is that the subsequent circus took the story to its greatest level of exposure, from which point on the main casualty was the truth and Mack’s side of the battle could spin Harvard’s approach as undermining of the university’s role in exploring the truth, however unfamiliar and strange it may be. The compromise they agreed (something akin to an academic slap on the wrist) was always likely to have occurred. However, The Believer makes clear that both sides, at times, fell far short of the standards they were obliged to uphold. Harvard’s detailed investigation into Mack cites only one significant UFO book as context. This work – Curtis Peebles’ Watch the Skies – may be an estimable investigation by the standards of what they had available, but it is also unquestionably a detailed work of debunking. From Mack’s side it is somewhat damning that Harvard’s report sees the abductees with whom he worked in such detail as “S/Ps”. Quite simply as a researcher Mack worked with subjects “S,” as a clinician he had patients “P.” In the work he did with abductees Harvard couldn’t disentangle to the two different areas of responsibility, hence the unique identifier “S/P” and the implication that at times Mack exploited his patients and/or simply became too subjective in investigating the subjects of his research. 

As the battle was put to bed Mack had – in any case – moved on to more esoteric ground and The Believer makes clear that Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999) is more representative of the opinions he came to hold. Regardless of the massive differential in sales of these two UFO related works Mack regarded “Transformation” as the more significant work of scholarship. 

Many with a strong interest in UFOs will know the main details of Mack’s story but The Believer is still an intense read, developing like a biopic where each marginal drama and detail is infused with some power. Mack emerges as a complex and frequently contradictory individual. Admired by many, loved intensely by a few. His most loving and lasting relationships tending to find their deepest stage after the other person has been forced to forgive Mack in some way. No lover, lifestyle or single academic subject was ever going to be enough; the tensions and traumas were always likely to happen. There is a photograph in The Believer of a family outing for the Macks, mother, father and three sons are snapped on an anti-nuclear demo. There are no casual family snaps – for example – on a beach. 

In terms of major ufological figures Mack remains an outlier. Hynek’s route to ufological revelation was straightforward by comparison; reliant on scientific method and being led by the evidence Hynek simply found his subject and stayed true. Stanton Friedman – like Mack – found ufology and found himself within ufology, but Friedman was effectively a full-time ufologist for most of the time and didn’t follow Mack’s route of career academic orchestrating his studies around the esoteric. Arguably Friedman needed ufology as much as the subject needed him. By contrast Mack’s personal journey after his abduction research took him further into fringe subjects and, predictably as he entered his seventies, into considering survival of death.

His death was accidental. However, like T E Lawrence’s accidental end there is something almost fitting about the circumstances. The American Mack simply looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic as he crossed a London road. Perhaps the academic who lived very much in his own thoughts was distracted to the point of failing to recall he was in a country with differently organized traffic. Mack was unfortunate enough to find himself in the path of a driver over the alcohol limit. He was dead on arrival at hospital. 

Mack would probably have loved to investigate reports like those that followed his death. Blumenthal in The Believer simply presents accounts of Mack appearing in the dreams of those closest to him and lets the enigmatic contact through a medium sit there on the page. The reader is the judge. 

Make no mistake, The Believer is a meticulously researched, expertly compiled, and clearly expressed journey through a complex character who made a series of typically individual life choices. It matters now less for the realities explored in Mack’s abduction research than it does as an insight into how and why some individuals dive deep into the UFO experience and all that goes with it. Any criticisms in this context are trivial though it is worth mentioning that those well-versed in UFO lore might, occasionally, feel a frustration when Blumenthal’s reporting misses a couple of key points. He maps the growth of UFO reports as Mack comes of age and rightly cites the Roswell case but appears unaware that the case lay almost completely dormant for over 30 years and that other high-profile and subsequently debunked cases were of much more consequence at the time. Similarly, the Betty and Barney Hill case is rightly explored as a seminal abduction encounter both in terms of the details presented and the use of hypnotic regression to get them. But Blumenthal misses (or maybe doesn’t realise) that Dr Benjamin Simon who gathered the stories through hypnosis was amongst those doubting the literal truth of the reports. 

Avi Loeb – Harvard astronomer and believer in the argument that the mysterious object that passed through the Solar System in 2017 is alien hardware – is our nearest equivalent of John Mack today. A major academic figure parachuting himself into the UFO world and clearly at odds with professional colleagues.  He may be taking professional risks. He’s very unlikely to be another John Mack. As The Believer makes clear, for almost 75 years Mack followed a very idiosyncratic path. We may never see his like again.

Reviewed by Neil Nixon April 2021