To the New York Times Magazine. This is an abridged version of an unpublished letter about John Mack, prompted by Stephen Rae's clear and well-balanced account of Mack's recent work (New York Times Magazine, April 20).
At the time of that article's appearance, I was struck by the muted response of most analysts to our respected colleague's startling reports of abductions by extraterrestrial aliens. This relative silence continued even after publication of Mack's Abduction (Scribner's, 1994).
Inhibitions against criticizing a fellow analyst have many sources. In this case they include admiration for Mack's past work—a scholarly biography of T. E. Lawrence and books on nightmares and adolescent suicide. I myself felt inhibited by friendship and my sympathy with his antiwar activities, but all the more obliged to speak out, as an analyst, in defense of reason and scientific skepticism.
One of Mack's chief claims for the reality of these space travels is the fact that he found his subjects perfectly sane, rather ordinary people. So let us acknowledge at once that neither Mack nor his “experiencers” are crazy, certainly not in the clinical sense of being psychotic. But in the colloquial sense of holding eccentric or bizarre beliefs, they may be called crazy, in the same way we refer to votaries of faith-healing cults, creationism, or millenarian beliefs about the end of the world. That a susceptibility to such irrational beliefs is not incompatible with sanity or scientific respectability is attested by Freud's weakness for telepathy and Lamarckian biology.
Popular epidemics of irrationality have occurred from time immemorial, intermingled with elements
from traditional religions, mythology, folklore, and superstition. There has always been a need to believe in ghosts, apparitions, and mystical visions, but waves of popular fallacies have often occurred during periods of social crisis: Aesculapian health cults in late antiquity, millenarian sects around the year 1000 A.D., and the mass hysteria about witchcraft and Satanism in the seventeenth century. The nineteenth and early twentieth century Spiritualist movement, from Swedenborg to William James, with its apparitions and messages from beyond the grave, perhaps comes closest to Mack's iconography of UFO sightings and sexual congress with extraterrestrial beings. Mack's special contribution is his hypothesis that these phenomena are warnings from a divine intelligence, or anima mundi, against the ecological violation of Mother Nature.
Another basis for Mack's conviction that his subjects were reporting real events, rather than dreams of fantasies, is the fact that so many scattered informants, quite unknown to one another, described monotonously similar experiences. More plausible and mundane explanations, however, may be found to account for these productions, including (1) the superficial imagery of science fiction, which supplies us all with the ubiquitous features of space travel, whether or not we have ever seen a sci-fi movie, and (2) a deeper irrational need to believe in supernatural intervention in human affairs, for good or ill, whether Satanic sex or uplifting messages about preserving the environment. Benign or not, this return to irrationality must be protested by analysts, as children of the Enlightenment and defenders of reason and science.
Sanford Gifford, M.D.
Cambridge, MA