JOHN MACK, UFO ABDUCTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

By Budd Hopkins

(NOTE: the following special report includes an excerpt from the manuscript of an ongoing memoir, which, upon completion, I hope to publish in book form. A previous section, dealing with the late Carl Sagan, appeared in IF bulletin, Vol. 5, No.1)

In a recent posting, Will Bueche of PEER raised some questions about my views on the transformative nature of UFO abduction experiences. I present this report as a fuller explanation of my position, as well as an opportunity to add a few more personal thoughts about my friend and colleague, the late John Mack. It is well known in the UFO research community that Dr. Mack, the founder of PEER, held a somewhat different view of the abduction phenomenon then I. Put simply, I've always believed that the UFO occupants- the abductors- were intent upon a self-serving agenda which I have reported upon in various published works, and that their behavior seemed neither deliberately malevolent nor benevolent. In our many conversations over the years, it was clear that John Mack preferred to believe that there was a benevolent side to the aliens' program. But in a less speculative difference between us, I saw the positive transformations in the lives of the abductees we both knew and worked with as due solely to human factors rather than spiritual infusions of some sort from the aliens. It seems obvious to me that, taken together, the individuals' personal spiritual resources, the love and support of their families and friends, and the sensitivity and skills of the
therapist/investigators they worked with are the agencies which bring about their positive transformations.

In John Mack's view, however, the aliens had specifically imbued many abductees with a sense of profound, transpersonal love, as well as a powerful desire to work for the betterment of our endangered environment. If true, this would be a happy outcome, balancing the inevitable trauma of abductions,
but unfortunately the evidence is strongly against it. First, and most damaging,the long established patterns of UFO abductions clearly show that these encounters begin in childhood and continue at irregular intervals across the decades, yet there is virtually no evidence that abductees, throughout their
lives, have been more environmentally conscious than non-abductees. (In fact, at the early support groups I facilitated, I was always disappointed by how many attendees were heavy smokers or showed signs of other unhealthy substance-abuse issues.) The factors that seemed, later on, to trigger
ecological sensitivity were the full exploration of the individual's abduction experiences, often using hypnosis, and, unfortunately, in some cases, the ideological input of therapist/investigators.

For example, years ago, John Mack informed me that he had been working with three abductees who had come to him unhappy, depressed and employed in uninspiring jobs. But, he said, after three months of helping them explore their abduction experiences, all three had come to see that the aliens wanted them to be concerned with environmental issues. With great enthusiasm he told me that all three had quit their jobs and were now working in positions which had noticeable environmental impact. "But John," I said, "if the aliens had them for twenty or thirty years and the three of them were depressed and holding dead-end jobs, and you had them for three months and their lives changed for the better, who gets the credit?"

My view of the basic difference between John's view of these transformations and mine can be simply stated: his was a rather mystical view - some might even say "religious," in the general sense of that word - while mine was the more traditionally humanistic. I believe that the abductee transformations we wish to achieve are brought about by purely human mechanisms, without
benevolent outside intervention by the abductors. To make the point, I offer a homely analogy. Let us suppose that there are two competitive hardware stores in a small town, the more successful owned by a devout, fundamentalist Christian and the less successful by a hard-working Buddhist. The Christian fervently believes his store is doing better because the Christian God is answering his prayers and helping him, while the Buddhist is fully aware that his competitor's store is doing better for three mundane reasons: it has a more central location, a larger parking lot, and a more extensive stock.

It's a truism that we often choose to credit both bad and good fortune to "invisible" outside factors when it should be obvious that we are merely invoking our belief systems, religious or otherwise.
Thus, in my example, John Mack preferred to ascribe the success of his own labors, and the spiritual growth of his clients, largely to outside alien intervention, to a "gift from above," rather than to a combination of his own undeniable therapeutic skills and the personalities, the spiritual resources and
the opportunities of the abductees he worked with.
There is yet another issue that further damages the idea that the aliens deserve credit for these transformations. That extraordinarily important factor is the omnipresence of alien deceit: the methodical blocking of abductees' recollections, the creation of screen memories - false images somehow forced upon innocent subjects in order to conceal disturbing aspects of the abductions - and perhaps worst of all, repeated alien claims that "we are your real parents, you came from the stars, you belong to us," and so on. All of this should warn anyone never to automatically believe alien promises, proclamations of "profound spiritual love," or even the simplest reassurance, "Don't worry, this won't hurt." And yet there are abductees who nevertheless choose to trust these blandishments, a tendency probably due to our human need always to believe the best, and to the effectiveness of the aliens' demonstrated ability to manipulate human emotion.

Having said all of this, I feel that such a dramatic series of personal encounters, such as intermittent, life-long alien abductions, consciously recalled or not, will inevitably cause genuine transformations in the developmental trajectory of any life, and I have written extensively on such transformations.
Anyone working with abductees - John Mack included - has also become aware of these experiences' negative side-effects: post traumatic stress disorder, depression, low self-esteem, elevated scales of distrust, and so on. In over thirty years of experience of working with many hundreds of abductees, I am aware of several suicide attempts - some successful - and a number of emotional breakdowns and hospitalizations, all of which is not surprising. But, as I stated earlier, once abductees have begun to explore their experiences with objective therapist/investigators and have begun to interact with other abductees through friendships and participation in support groups, a positive side to their encounters often comes to light. Many feel that, despite the traumas they have suffered, their lives have in some ways been expanded, their sense of connection with all living things has deepened, and their respect
for our planet's splendor and fragility has been stirred. But again, the central question is whether these positive results are a deliberate gift from the aliens or merely an aspect of the innate generosity and resilience of the human spirit when faced with extraordinary experiences.

It seems obvious to me that should anyone be temporarily transported from the familiarity and safety of our home planet into an unearthly environment, the experience will necessarily be emotionally transformative. Fortunately, we have on record a number of reactions to such experiences, in which the percipients, upon their return to their home planet, remarked upon their enhanced feelings for the earth's beauty and its endangered state, and pledged their renewed devotion to ecological issues. Some eloquently described the wide-ranging spiritual and intellectual changes that their unearthly experiences had brought about. I am not talking, here, about UFO abductees; I am
referring to NASA astronauts, to men and women who have voluntarily left the vicinity of earth, temporarily ceding their usual autonomy, and subsequently looking back with sadness and worry upon our troubled planet.

These "NASA abductees" provide what an experimental scientist might describe as a control, a way of measuring the innate reactions of people voyaging away from the familiarity of their earthly home.
They can be compared in some ways with the reactions of those who were involuntarily seized and temporarily taken away by UFO occupants. So, if one were to ask, "What might the average human being think after such an unearthly adventure," the NASA astronauts provide at least a partial answer:
to some extent, such a space traveler is likely to return more concerned about ecological issues and the imperiled state of our planet - not because of alien emotional infusions, but because of the inborn hopes and concerns of human beings.

In the light of all these reasons, it seems to me that John Mack's vision of the aliens as benevolent presenters of spiritual riches and ecological concern to abductees is essentially a matter of mystical faith, with no convincing evidence to support it. Worse, it provides a kind of reassuring alibi for the aliens' seizure of innocent men, women and children and their subjection to a series of coldly traumatizing procedures which apparently benefit the aliens but inevitably cause deep emotional scars in humans.

Finally, and perhaps most disheartening, this "benign" vision of the manipulative aliens ascribes to them spiritual resources which by all rights belong to the traumatized, even heroic abductees themselves. I recall a discussion I had a few years ago with the wife of an abductee with whom John had worked extensively. Her husband, she explained, was thoroughly entranced by his "alien family," to an extent that left her feeling both discouraged and subtly marginalized. I asked if she thought the profoundly loving relationship her husband claimed to have with his captors, and the spiritual growth and environmental sensitivity he said they had nurtured in him, were "gifts" from the aliens, or whether her husband, alone, was the source of these feelings. With a shrug she said that she believed all of it originated in her husband's own spiritual, hopeful nature, and that the aliens had actually given him nothing. In effect, she seemed to feel that they were coolly using him for their own purposes.

From another perspective, debunkers like to claim that some or even all abductees are "happy" they have had their experiences, because this idea buttresses the skeptical notion that the abduction phenomenon is merely one more New Age religion. Since they theorize that many people fear "God
is dead," the debunkers describe abductees as just another group that has had to invent new gods - UFO occupants - to give their lives meaning. This preposterous idea ignores not only the physical evidence for the phenomenon but also the huge number of abductees who, having suffered emotional and physical trauma, feel profound anger toward their captors. Yet surprisingly, many of those same traumatized abductees claim that, in some of the ways I've been discussing, their spiritual awareness has been expanded beyond the range of awareness of non-abductees and that they cannot imagine their lives without their history of alien encounters.

A bit of reflection shows why this is so. Let us, for a moment, substitute the experience of war for that of a lifetime of UFO abductions. Let us further imagine two young men, friends who have grown up together, one of whom serves in combat in the Iraq occupation while the other works in a fast food
store in New York. At the end of a year, the Iraq veteran returns home and resumes his relationship with his friend. During his time overseas he has survived unspeakable horrors, witnessed heroism and bravery, death and destruction. He has known intense, soldierly comradeship as well as cowardice, fear and self-sacrifice, while his friend labored on at McDonald's. Is there any doubt which of the two has become the more emotionally and spiritually deepened? Which man has been more truly broadened? Can the war veteran ever feel closer to his old friend than he does to the men in his
company, some of whom may have risked their lives to save one another?

The UFO abductee has known a world unavailable to the rest of us in its horrors and magic, its expansive grandeur and its helpless pain. Like the NASA astronauts, abductees have ventured (involuntarily) out of our familiar world and into the vast strangeness of the universe. They have met and interacted with an entirely alien, non-human intelligence, one which controls an extraordinary new technology. Like the Iraq veteran, UFO abductees have had to deal with a hugely expanded range of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual issues, so soul-altering and so unforgettable that neither the infantryman nor the abductees can imagine their lives without them.

And yet, at bottom, it comes to this: If one were to ask the survivors of the brutal combat in Iraq if they want their children to have the same kind of war experience they had, few, if any, would say yes. And in my decades of work with abductees, I have never met anyone who told me they wished UFO
abduction experiences upon their children. In fact, they dread the idea that their offspring might some day become abductees and suffer as they had.
To me, this seems to represent a final judgment, not only upon the "glory" of war, but also upon the so-called benign nature of UFO abductions.

* * *

A Few Personal Thoughts about John Mack...

Our friendship began in 1990, and within a few weeks it had become both warmly intimate and immensely rewarding for both of us. Though John lived in the Boston area and I lived in New York, we stayed in close touch, by letters, phone calls and visits. He was one of the most charismatic men I
have ever known, and his upbeat, optimistic temperament was impossible to resist. Though he was tall, slender and classically handsome, he walked with short, quick, shuffling steps and a gentle stoop, as if the varied concerns of his abductee clients unconsciously weighed heavily upon him. But if he did find these issues upsetting, he seemed unwilling to let them disturb his optimistic demeanor, and in fact, the infectious warmth of his smile remained one of his most appealing traits.

Nevertheless, all of us who work with UFO abductees - John included - have had to invent ways of keeping our spirits up, because we see, in our work with abductees, so much psychic pain. To get through the day, my dear friend David Jacobs relies on the creative teaching of American history, and upon his marvelous sense of humor and wry self-denigration. I find solace in making my art and visiting the Metropolitan Museum, almost weekly, to bask among the Cezannes and Van Goghs. But unlike David and me, who are sometimes unable to avoid brooding in front of company, John always
remained the determined optimist, smiling as he shuffled along, even though his shoulders were hunched and his back was curved uncomfortably. And never, in my presence, did he seem emotionally down, or anything but hopeful about the intentions of the aliens.

John possessed a marvelously deep, resonant voice, which he used with great effectiveness in his frequent lectures. It was a calming, intelligent voice, and helped to make his complex presentations both eloquent and seductive. Like unavoidable nervous tics, all of us have our favorite words and expressions, and "ontological" was his. One could count on hearing it a number of times in each of his talks, an indication of the somewhat abstract level of his usual discourse.

Over coffee or drinks, John and I often discussed the fact that though we were both graduates of Oberlin College (two years apart), we had had radically different lives prior to our college years and our later involvement with the UFO phenomenon. Unlike me, John, a native New Yorker, had been born into a privileged intellectual environment in which, he explained, atheism and cold, scientific rationalism prevailed. He had gone on to medical school, had become a psychiatrist and eventually a strict follower of the teachings of Freud.

In medical school, John had, of course, been trained in science, though to a purist like Carl Sagan, psychiatry didn't qualify as one of its branches. Once, in a conversation with the late astronomer, I mentioned that several psychiatrists I knew had become interested in the abduction phenomenon and
had admitted to me that they had no adequate explanation for the abductees' detailed and extraordinarily similar accounts. Sagan replied, in his high, somewhat pinched and nasal voice, "Well, a scientist would say..." followed by a rote denigration of the methods and standards of those in the field of psychology. Thus, with one condescending verbal flourish, the famous astronomer seemed to feel he had not only excommunicated John Mack and all of his colleagues from the halls of science, but had also rendered their abduction opinions worthless.

In my discussions with John about our early years, I explained that my life trajectory was almost exactly the opposite of his. Unlike the hyper-rationalism of his early environment, I was reared in a very conventional, Republican, middle-class home, where at least some vague attention was paid to protestant religious beliefs. Though I would never have described my family as devout, intermittent church attendance was a factor in my childhood. Unexamined conservative tenets, political and otherwise, dominated my life until I attended college, read hungrily, and thus began achieve a degree of intellectual and ethical maturity.

Science had never been my thing, but art was. I became an artist, moved to New York in 1953, and began to work and exhibit. I explained to John that as all abstract painter, I was living my life in a magic territory where fabric and pigment and personal marks and strokes were turned into pure emotion, in a creative process that has about it more than a whiff of the mystical. And as John's life unfolded, he gradually moved away from his conventionally scientific roots and began to explore what one might describe as more arcane, even mystical realities. He became a follower of EST and a devotee of Werner Erhard, and was soon experimenting with various methods of consciousness expansion, via hallucinogenic drugs and the deep-breathing methods of Stanislof Grof. Eventually, in 1990, when John and I met and I introduced him to the complexities and confusions of the UFO abduction phenomenon, his life took still another radical new direction.

For my part, after I had my UFO sighting in 1964 and began to read about the subject, I realized that I needed to add a more scientific kind of curiosity to my normal art-making life. Then, in 1975, when I found myself looking into a UFO landing and occupant case, I saw that I was now, ipso facto, a part time investigator, working a bit like a hard-headed police detective, though my day job was still in the headier atmosphere of art-making. A bit later, when I discovered a number of abduction reports and began to explore them, I had to invent for myself, virtually from the ground up, a new series of
investigative and interview techniques.

A few years after his introduction to the subject, John Mack began to view the abduction phenomenon less in the cold light of day - as he had at first - and more comfortably through the lens of an expansive new spiritual framework. While I, the artist, was amassing photographs of abductee
scars and scoop marks, and collecting soil samples for analysis, John, the scientist, was becoming ever more preoccupied with the philosophical implications of alien reality and a nearly mystical regard for witness testimony. Thus, in some ways it seemed he and I were gradually exchanging one-another's earlier dominant mindsets.

So far as I know, John never took a single photograph of abductees' abrasions or submitted an object for scientific analysis, and in fact stated that he regarded physical evidence as virtually worthless. For my part, I never addressed a college faculty on the philosophical implications of alien existence or speculated extensively on what this might mean for us earthlings. It is my guess that John made no photographs because he did not like to be reminded of the physical injuries abductees often suffer, while at the same time I was aware that I was too ill-educated to knowledgeably address the complex
ontological issues John was used to speaking about at major universities.

Without any doubt, however, one of John's most endearing qualities was a special kind of innocence, an attribute one doesn't usually find among university professors and experienced psychiatrists.
Around John I felt like a bit of a cynic, in that my view of the innate trustworthiness of my fellow man was always a few notches below his. And it was his innocence that one woman in his support group so famously preyed upon, in an unconscionable deception which caused him enormous difficulties with the Harvard authorities. It is also a measure of John's unruffled sense of trust that, soon after the Harvard crisis, he accepted an invitation to speak at a SCICOP meeting of professional skeptics. Apparently he attended with the naive idea that he could change a few ironclad minds, only to find that
the troglodyte SCICOPers had imported this same treacherous woman to launch a sneak attack upon him in person.

As long as I knew him - some fifteen years - John never seemed to lose either his natural, trusting innocence, or his upbeat, chronically hopeful state of mind. These qualities, in tandem, made him personally irresistible, and he was adored by many, many people. An abductee who had worked with both John and me once remarked that he went to John to feel uplifted and inspired, and to me to find out what really happened during his abduction experiences. Sadly, I realized that though I could deliver truth and accuracy, I could never deliver enough uplift or optimism to completely satisfy this man's needs.

I offer one final example to help clarify our differing views of the UFO abduction phenomenon. In the early nineties, I happened to be in Boston, and was able to sit in on one of John's support group meetings. Though he was unable to attend himself, the gathering was facilitated by several people
from the PEER staff. At the very outset, an unhappy, middle-aged woman began to speak. This was the second PEER support group she'd come to, she explained, and she hoped it would be better than the first one. She'd attended that meeting with a sense of desperation,"like a drowning person
swimming towards a life raft," as she described it. She'd come with many problems that she needed help with, but instead of getting help, she told us, "all anyone wanted to talk about at that meeting was the good things the aliens had done for them" during the previous weeks. "The aliens had done
nothing good for me," she said with some vehemence. "All my life they'd caused me nothing but a lot of problems." Worse, she felt looked down upon by the other people at that first meeting, and had left discouraged, with all of her problems still rankling. What she wanted this time, she said, was some
real help. For example, she told us that she found it almost impossible to go to the doctor for routine checkups because she had a terrible phobia about the examination table and the sterile medical environment. She was sure that these fears were connected with her abduction experiences.

Because of her almost palpable sense of desperation, I suggested we start by going around the room so that each person in turn could talk about his or her experience with doctors, dentists, gynecologists and so on. In this way, perhaps, someone might have something helpful and concrete to offer her
about how to handle her fears. Amazingly, all but one of the other attendees reported similar medical-phobia problems, but none had ever connected these crippling real-life issues with their abduction experiences. The sole exception was a woman who said, without a trace of irony, that she had had
absolutely no problems with doctors at all- because she hadn't seen a doctor in over twenty years! She didn't trust them, and had long ago put herself into the hands of alternative healers, where she felt safe.

The entire evening was edifying to me, and it turned out to be enormously helpful to virtually all of those attending - particularly the anguished woman who started it all. (Interestingly, I once led a support group in Rio De Janeiro on the same subject, and obtained the same results.) But the point I would like to make here is that devoting a support group session to such a "mundane" issue as medical phobias is neither uplifting or inspiring - nor even philosophically important - but it is, beyond argument, valuable therapeutically. At my abductee support groups, I've always tried to avoid
endless philosophical discussions - verbal wheel-spinning in such a context - and instead have focused on more immediate psychological issues such as this.

And so John Mack and I, friends and colleagues for the last fifteen years of his life, nevertheless, traveled on separate, somewhat divergent tracks. His path was the more elevated and hopeful, while mine is, I believe, the more grounded and realistic. In any case, despite our opposing views of the UFO abduction phenomenon, I miss him terribly, and find it almost impossible to believe that I will never see him again... that someone so real, so vivid, is gone. Our discordant opinions, once so critical, now seem beside the point, because life, human life, is so much more important than the interpretation of alien intrusions that we are, in any case, helpless to prevent.

Budd Hopkins, New York, February, 2006