John Mack

John Mack (1929–2004) was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for A Prince of Our Disorder, a biography of T. E. Lawrence. In 1990 he began interviewing people who reported being taken by non-human beings, and his book Abduction (1994) concluded that they were neither lying nor mentally ill and that the experiences deserved study on their own terms. He was struck and killed by a drunk driver in London in 2004.

In 1994 Harvard Medical School convened a committee to review his work, an unusual step for a tenured professor; after fourteen months the dean reaffirmed his academic freedom while restating that the school did not endorse his conclusions. The same year the writer Donna Bassett, posing as an experiencer, joined his study group and told Time he had accepted her invented story. Psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy later found that self-described abductees showed physiological arousal recalling their experiences comparable to trauma patients, which they read as sincere memory of something other than abduction.

The corpus discusses Mack in a dozen episodes, usually as the establishment figure who took experiencers seriously and paid for it. The knowledge base records his career, the Harvard inquiry and the press episodes as documented, and treats his interpretation of the experiences as contested.