Ralph Blumenthal’s “The Believer” – The UFO Odyssey of John Mack (Part 1)

Ralph Blumenthal.  The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.  High Road Books, 2021.

(First part of a two-part post.)

This is a remarkable book about an extraordinary man: John Mack (1929-2004)–Harvard professor of psychiatry, anti-nuclear activist, author of highly regarded books as diverse as Nightmares and Human Conflict (1970) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (1977).

And a UFO believer.  And a tireless investigator of alien abductions, whose two books about them brought him worldwide fame along with the cruelest of mockery.  And all his life, until that life was cut short by a drunken driver, a spiritual seeker.

The book is a biography of Mack, but it really has two subjects: Mack himself and the often despised phenomenon to which his name is indissolubly linked.  Ralph Blumenthal, veteran New York Times correspondent, is no stranger to either.  In 2013, he published a superb article on Mack in Vanity Fair.  At the end of 2017, his front-page articles on UFOs in the Sunday Times (co-authored with best-selling UFO author Leslie Kean) triggered the subject’s current skyrocketing into public respectability.

Blumenthal tells here the story of Mack and the UFO together.  At first, before Mack catches the UFO bug, they’re woven together only awkwardly, and the story proceeds by fits and starts.  But at the book’s midpoint–the year 1990, when Mack’s encounter with abduction researcher Budd Hopkins changes the trajectory of his life and the two story lines become one–it takes off.  It remains a riveting read all the way to its thundering, devastating climax.

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How well is it possible to know a human being?  (Even oneself, much less another.)  “Compared to the obstinate mystery he was chasing,” Blumenthal writes in his acknowledgments, “John Mack was an open book.”  A book, however, written in an unknown language and a script only intermittently decipherable.  Finishing The Believer, one is apt to come away with the same impression as one man who’d known Mack since childhood.  “There was no one he had known longer than Mack … but as he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he ever really knew Mack at all” (p. 270).

From one perspective, Mack lived the life of a fairy-tale prince.  The early pages of his biography, dripping with illustrious names from business and the learned professions, locate his family among the (mostly German) Jewish elite of the East Coast; his stepmother was the widow of a scion of the Gimbel’s Department Store family.  Budd Hopkins, who outlived him by nearly seven years, looked back on Mack’s life with what sounds like envy.  “He was cushioned financially.  He had looks, personality and brains.  I don’t think John ever had a tough course of action.  There was something blithe about the way he succeeded at everything” (p. 32).

But even fairy-tale princes have their griefs, their failures.  Mack lived his nearly 75 years in the shadow of the most devastating loss imaginable: the sudden death of his young mother, when he was only eight months old.  He grew up hungry for feminine comfort–and, the handsomest of men, he had little difficulty finding women eager to provide it.  Yet in all his relationships, satisfaction eluded him.

There were other hungers as well, intertwined with this archaic yearning in ways we can only fitfully grasp.  Brought up in an aggressively secular household, where material reality was all that counted and religious faith was antiquated mumbo-jumbo, he’d been starved for spirituality; he spent his life trying to make up for what he’d missed.  His quest took him through psychoanalytic psychology to such practices as Stanislav Grof’s breathwork, which evoked for him primal visions of himself as a blue baby, emerging from the womb of an equally blue mother.

“She was blue.  I was blue.  We were together blue.”  But she dies, and “I’m alone, this little blue baby,” weeping in “gratitude toward the women who’d loved me.”  He went on to have a vision of space invaders, somehow bound up with incubators and “abandoned fetus-infants separ[ated] from their mothers in these technology places”; and Blumenthal perceptively remarks that this seems to “foreshadow his later encounters with an alien world” (p. 87).

This was in 1987.  Three years later, Mack met Budd Hopkins.

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His story is filled with riddles great and small.  One of these, for me, is his relationships with women, and I’m disappointed that Blumenthal has done less than he might have to shed light on them.

For over thirty years he was married to the former Sally Stahl, a Jewish beauty queen from a small town in Pennsylvania.  During that time he betrayed her–as I would put it, in my old-fashioned way–with two major amours and (we’re given to understand) a host of minor ones.  Weirdly, he seems to have taken little or no responsibility for his antics’ contribution to the deadness of their marriage.  He “bridled,” says Blumenthal, at “Sally’s dim view of his extramarital adventures” (p. 128).  “Dim view”?  For many wives, “dim view” would be a pretty mild way to describe their reaction to any “extramarital adventures” of their husbands.  What fantastic complaisance did Mack expect from his Sally, that he should resent her disapproval?

Yet she did stick with him for more than thirty years, and although his other two women eventually broke off with him as well, they all seem to have retained a large measure of affection and loyalty for him even after leaving him.  There are stories here, left untold.

Yet we can hardly fault Blumenthal for neglecting them to concentrate on the really big story, the great mystery.  How was it possible that so brilliant, so exhaustively learned a man could have not only believed in but dedicated the last fourteen years of his life to things that, by all the canons of the academic world in which he’d achieved his success, were wholly bizarre?  (Even Blumenthal, who devotes an “afterword” of the book to the defense of his own UFO beliefs, says of Mack’s final years: “Mack seemed open to most anything strange now” [p. 257].)

Mack’s book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens was published in 1994.  It became a best-seller.  It brought down upon Mack a flood of abuse and ridicule, as from New Republic writer James Gleick, whose spiteful viciousness Blumenthal considerably understates.  It also set in motion a formal inquiry by Harvard into just what Mack was about, and whether such activities as his could be tolerated from one of their tenured professors.

This was not an “inquisition,” Mack was told when the inquiry was launched in July 1994; and, although Mack’s formal and informal defenders portrayed it as an assault on academic freedom, it’s hard to read the gripping story–almost a courtroom drama–without the sense that the University (like Sally?) showed itself remarkably flexible and tolerant.  In July 1995, after a full year of investigation, the dean of the medical school affirmed Mack’s “right to postulate a syndrome with a heterodox etiology”–real abductions by real aliens, in other words–for the people he’d been hypnotically regressing.  A press release from the University announced that “Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine” (pp. 226-27).

In the meantime, Mack and Dominique Callimanopulos–the second of his two great extramarital passions–had been in Zimbabwe, investigating the Ariel School UFO encounters (of which Blumenthal gives a workmanlike but not especially enlightening account).  He and Sally, separated since 1993, were at last divorced; he published a second book, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), pursuing the spiritual implications of his research.

As the new century began, his attention shifted to the issue that his quest had perhaps secretly been about all along.

Namely: do we survive bodily death?

(To be continued in part 2 of this post.)