Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

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.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“If what these abductees are saying is happening to them isn’t happening,” Mack demanded, “what is?”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 1994 BBC journalist Tim Leach called Mack’s office about a flurry of U.F.O. sightings in Zimbabwe.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack and his research partner Callimanopulos flew off to investigate a report that on September 14, 1994, a large, saucer-shaped spacecraft and several smaller craft had landed or hovered near a schoolyard in Ruwa, 40 miles northeast of Harare.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The children told Mack and Callimanopulos on tape that the beings had large heads, two holes for nostrils, a slit for a mouth or no mouth at all, and long black hair, and were dressed in dark, single-piece suits. “I think it’s about something that’s going to happen,” said one little girl. “What I thought was maybe the world’s going to end. They were telling us the world’s going to end.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“How did that get communicated to you?,” Mack asked.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“I don’t even know. It just popped up in my head. He never said anything. He talked just with his eyes. It was just the face and the eyes. They looked horrible.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

By mid-December 1994, with Mack back in Cambridge, the Harvard committee accused him of failing to do systematic evaluations to rule out psychiatric disorders, putting “persistent pressure” on his experiencers to convince them they had actually been abducted by aliens, and preventing them from obtaining the help they really needed. As he wrote nearly a decade later in a manuscript he was seeking to publish as his masterwork, “When Worldviews Collide”: “I can see now that I had to a large extent created my problem with the literalness that I had treated the encounter phenomenon in the 1994 book. It is possible that in some cases people are taken bodily into spacecraft. However, the question is more subtle and complex.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Mack concluded, "The furthest you can go at this point is to say there's an authentic mystery here. And that is, I think, as far as anyone ought to go."

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

While visiting London in 2004, he stepped off a curb, instinctively checking for traffic over his left shoulder. A speeding driver struck him from the right, killing Mack more or less instantly.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Rediger knew Mack at the end of his life. “By the time I knew him, he believed that he had been misunderstood by the public and by Harvard,” Rediger says. “The culture focused on the exterior manifestations — the flying saucers, and so on. His private beliefs were much more sophisticated. It was like he was exploring a new terrain but lacked a map. It was confusing for him and confusing for many who knew him.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Producer Denise David Williams, is developing a motion picture based on Mack’s life, which was set at one point to star Robert Redford before Williams parted company with Wildwood citing artistic differences.

 

http://www.makemagicproductions.com/johnmack/index.html

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Alienation Nation

"The claim to truth and its challenges to our practices for establishing it are what enable the alien to function as an icon of postmodern anxieties."

Aliens in America

Jodi Dean

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The UFO events of the 50s have gone a long way towards creating and boosting the literary/film/television genre of science fiction, as well as creating a huge marketing empire.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

UFOs and aliens have moved into the mainstream of popular culture.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Dean sees aliens as repositories for our fears and phobias. These fears center around the inability to distinguish truth from fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Dean notes that our neighbors are aliens.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"Assimilation has been discredited as an ideal, and multiculturalism hasn't become much more than a marketing strategy...Better to forget the neighbors, go inside, and enjoy cyber-citizenship on the World Wide Web." And alien abduction, notes Dean, "narrates the predominant experience of the familiarity of strangeness in the techno-global information age."

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But in the end, aliens are really modern Americans and our feelings of alienation.