Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Teller denounced peacenik physicians and told Mack: “If you are not in the pay of the Kremlin, you’re even more of a fool.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Many credit Edward Teller for being the inspiration behind Peter Sellers’ classic character in Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

 

"The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientists job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used."

Edward Teller

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

‘I was raised as the strictest of materialists,” Mack told the writer C. D. B. Bryan. “I believed we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe, on this sometimes verdant rock with these animals and plants around, and we were here to make the best of it, and when we’re dead, we’re dead.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack’s entire world view changed after meeting Budd Hopkins in 1990. Hopkins gave Mack a box of letters from people reacting to aliens. “I think most of these people are perfectly sane, with real experiences,” Hopkins told.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

As he later said, “These individuals reported being taken against their wills sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive purpose. In a few cases they were actually observed by independent witnesses to be physically absent during the time of the abduction. These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder, except the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with powerful emotion what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore these experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, family members, or others in the community, including media reporters and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individuals’ bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically identifiable pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. In short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview."

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack spent five years interviewing more than 100 "experiencers" to produce his book Abduction - Human Encounters with Aliens and reached an astonishing conclusion: they were telling the truth. That is, they were not insane or deluded; in some unknown space/time dimension, something real had actually happened to them—not that Mack could explain just what or how.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

It made him internationally famous and a regular guest on television talk shows. However, his emergence as a guru for UFO believers caused Harvard University acute embarrassment.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

”Now everyone knows torture exists. That is accepted. But it is not accepted in our society that these UFO encounters exist. Therefore you need to have evidence of a pattern of such similarities that is showing up in hundreds, if not, thousands of cases. It is ironic that experiences like alien abduction encounters, UFOs, crop circles, and near-death experiences are called anomalies. In another words, in our culture, what lies outside the realm of the cultural agreement, about what is real, is called anomalous. Therefore a huge amount of human experience is called anomalous… scientific materialism does not give human beings any real satisfaction. It leaves us without spirit and it leaves us with an empty feeling because all it has to offer are more and more material things.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Two years after meeting Hopkins, Mack was working with dozens of experiencers, and one day he told incredulous fellow psychiatrists at Cambridge Hospital about alien abduction. He found that people from all over the world - who had never met each other – were telling the exact same abduction stories.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“These people are not lying and are not crazy. I know mental illness and this is not mental illness,” he said.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

A 37-year-old Boston writer intrigued him with a bizarre tale of being taken into a spaceship with Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Then, saying she was a double agent out to expose Mack’s U.F.O. cult, the woman, Donna Bassett, supplied tapes of her sessions to Time, which ambushed Mack with the hoax, calling him “The Man from Outer Space.” The Boston Globe followed up with a gleeful headline: ALIENS LAND AT HARVARD!

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Undaunted, Mack appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with five of his lucid, articulate, and normal-acting abductees. “He believes them when they say they have been on the aliens’ spaceships,” declared Oprah. “And Dr. Mack believes them, he says, when they say that they have had children with aliens.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack put it differently. “Every other culture in history except this one, in the history of the human race, has believed there were other entities, other intelligences in the universe,” he said. “Why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they’re crazy, humiliate them, if they’re experiencing some other intelligence?”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In June 1994 Harvard convened a confidential inquest under a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Professor Emeritus Arnold Relman. “If these stories are believed as literal factual accounts,” Relman wrote Mack, “they would contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.” Some went further, accusing Mack of ushering in a new dark age of superstition and magic.

 

 

Edited June 7, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

His main contention for taking on what many consider to be “tabloid fare” was that the standard psychiatric “treatment” for people claiming alien abduction was to get them to deny that it ever happened. He argued that just because the experience falls outside a “mainstream” point of view, doesn’t mean that clinical professionals shouldn’t treat their patients with respect. He said that the closest comparable case a psychiatrist is likely to encounter would be a rape victim, and there is no shortage of agreement on how detrimental it would be to “treat” a rape victim by assuring the person they were never raped.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack concluded that the only phenomenon in psychiatry that adequately explained the patients' symptoms in several of the most compelling cases was post traumatic stress disorder. As he noted at the time, this would imply that the patient genuinely believed that the remembered frightening incident had really occurred.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

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." In a 1994 interview, Jeffrey Mishlove stated that Mack seemed "inclined to take these [abduction] reports at face value".

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack replied by saying "Face value I wouldn't say. I take them seriously. I don't have a way to account for them." 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."

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

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.