Ralph Blumenthal’s “The Believer” – The UFO Odyssey of John Mack (Part 2)

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

(For the first part of this post, click here.)

“It is also possible that some of the affective energy which is displaced onto the UFO controversy derives from the unconscious concern with death and immortality … that for some of those who vehemently defend the extraterrestrial hypothesis it symbolically represents a denial of the finite nature of life.  On the other hand, those who have a need to deny that there is any anxiety at all around the issues of death and immortality may be led to attack the hypothesis with considerable passion.”
—Lester Grinspoon and Alan D. Persky, at the UFO symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 27, 1969

“It’s the fear of aloneness in this life, the fear of aloneness when I’m dying.  It’s like my mother.  It’s like, where did she go when she died? … I see why I’m so interested in this abduction story–because it’s the opposite of my belief system … it’s the welcome opposite to my conscious belief system, ’cause I was raised to believe in a universe with nothing in it, no God, no intelligence, no life, no nothing …”
—John Mack, in trance, February 24, 1994

So there we have it.

Death and survival … the lost mother … the perhaps present, perhaps absent God–and the nexus holding it all together: the UFO.

These were the themes that guided John Mack’s UFO odyssey; and in its final stages it followed a course akin to that later taken by his fellow-UFOlogist Leslie Kean.  Kean, author of the 2010 best-seller UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, returned seven years later with Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife.  Mack moved in the same direction.  He planned to collaborate with a bereaved husband to write a book about the post-mortem survival of the man’s new bride, tragically dead at age 40 of a brain tumor.  The book was to be called Elisabeth and Mark Before and After Death: The Power of a Field of Love.  It was to “provide evidence,” he wrote to his literary agent, “that Elisabeth Targ has in some important ways survived her death.” 

Before the book could be finished, Mack was himself dead–struck down on September 27, 2004, by a drunken driver in London.  He’d gone to England to participate in a symposium on T. E. Lawrence, whose biography he’d written nearly thirty years before.  Like Elisabeth Targ, he signaled his survival with post-mortem manifestations.  “I never knew it would be so easy” to die, he told a British psychic as she sat by his corpse; and in a seance two days later, assured the same psychic that “it was as if I was touched with a feather.  I did not feel a thing.”  He was given his choice as to whether to depart this life, and of his own free will he decided to go.

(Yet witnesses to Mack’s accident remembered him saying he was in pain, clutching at a bystander’s foot, begging “Please help me.”)

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A human life is not a crossword puzzle, where all the entries fit into a consistent and plainly intelligible pattern.  That there are loose ends in Blumenthal’s portrait of John Mack is no fault of his book.  On the contrary, it marks the book’s authenticity as reflecting a man of more than usual complexity and subtlety.  T. S. Eliot wrote of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin … / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”  Blumenthal has too much respect for his subject to pin him like an insect specimen.

Yet the loose ends probably should be examined, to see if there’s a natural way to bind them together with the rest.  I’m thinking of Mack’s fascination with T. E. Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia.”  This was no transient curiosity, but a passion that went back to the early 1960s, and stayed with Mack to the last day of his life.  Do Lawrence of Arabia and the UFO have anything in common?

A possible answer lies in one aspect of Mack’s psychic life that Blumenthal mentions, but devotes no sustained attention to.  This is his relationship to religion, and particularly to his ancestral Judaism.

Yes, I know: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.  And when you’re a religious-studies professor with a specialty in Judaica …  But still: I suspect my particular hammer may turn out to be a useful tool.  Let’s apply it to the Mack-Lawrence connection, and see what happens.

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The connection began in 1963, when Mack and Sally went together to see the recently released film “Lawrence of Arabia.”  “He thought he might study up on Lawrence, and he soon embarked on a full psychological workup.”  He was fascinated, says Blumenthal, with Lawrence as an examplar of heroism, and of what Lawrence’s life might teach (in Mack’s words) about “the relationship between the inner life–between dreams, hopes and visions, and actions or activity in the ‘real’ world.” 

Lawrence’s taste for introspection, for probing his own psychology, seemed to mark him in Mack’s eyes as a kindred spirit.  All of these might be reasonable motives for Mack’s interest.

But there’s more.  “Mack remained careful,” says Blumenthal, “to place Lawrence’s private torment in the context of a nobler legacy, an idealistic determination to give the Arabs the land and liberty they had won on the battlefield and transform the geography of the Middle East.  Back home on leave in England, Lawrence had arranged a meeting between his ally Faisal and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, aimed at fostering Arab-Jewish cooperation in Palestine, a goal of Lawrence’s that at the time seemed feasible” (pp. 48-49).

We’re so used to thinking of Zionism and Arab nationalism as implacable enemies that it’s easy to forget that after World War I there was a school of thought among British policy-makers that was at once pro-Jewish and pro-Arab, that saw the two national movements as complementary rather than opposed.  (David Fromkin wrote about this in his wonderful 1989 book A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.)  Lawrence, godfather of Arab national liberation and committed pro-Zionist, shared this perspective and worked tirelessly for it.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Mack also showed a passionate commitment to Jewish-Arab cooperation, reconciliation, even unification.

In Beirut in 1980, he was one of the first of a string of American Jewish intellectuals to make peace overtures to Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, contacts that helped pave the way for the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians.  He was perhaps naive, even foolish: the Oslo peace process, which aroused so much hope in the 1990s, soon collapsed in blood and terror, leaving despair in its wake.  But the impulse, to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, was plain to see.

That impulse was enacted in symbolic form in his family.  The month before Mack’s death, his son married a Kazakh Muslim woman.  The wedding, says Blumenthal, was “conducted by a rabbi who mixed Jewish and Kazakh traditions”; Mack gleefully took part in the ceremony, wearing a Kazakh robe which “ma[de] him look like an ancient wizard” (p. 261).  It spilled over, in a different symbolic form, into his abduction research.  Of the abductees discussed in his 1994 Abduction, his hands-down favorite, the one he described most fondly, was an Israeli woman who remembered under hypnosis a former life as a thirteenth-century Arab merchant renowned for his justice and benevolence (pp. 241-262).

If I’m not mistaken, Sally–who was with him when he saw the film that triggered his fascination with Lawrence–was a potent influence on this quest for reconciliation.  “In 1955, after graduating from the University of Michigan, Sally went to the newly created state of Israel as part of a Quaker work camp, working alongside Arabs and Jews and developing a lifelong commitment to bridging their divide.”  (This detail from her 2016 obituary in the New York Times.)

Was it perhaps due to Sally’s influence that, although Mack was never an observant Jew, the religion for him was more than an archaic fossil his parents had already disavowed, which he too might happily outgrow and forget?  In the holiday season of 1988, it was Sally and her family who insisted their Christmas celebration be combined with Hanukkah (Blumenthal, p. 88); sixteen years later, she and her sons sat shiva over the deceased man (p. 271).

This was a Judaism that never shut out the Other, but tried through a range of symbolic vehicles–a Christmas-Hanukkah celebration, a Jewish-Kazakh wedding, an absorption in the life of a Gentile who’d dreamed of a Jewish-Arab confederation in a new Middle East and had tried to lay the foundations for it–to welcome it, to fuse with it, to incorporate it.

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Why does this remind me of UFOs?

“If the round shining objects that appear in the sky be regarded as visions,” C. G. Jung wrote in his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, “we can hardly avoid interpreting them as archetypal images. … There is an old saying that ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.’  God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence is a totality symbol par excellence, something round, complete, and perfect. … On the antique level, therefore, the Ufos could easily be conceived as ‘gods.’  They are impressive manifestations of totality whose simple, round form portrays the archetype of the self, which as we know from experience plays the chief role in uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites and is therefore best suited to compensate the split-mindedness of our age.”

So the quest for the UFO–if we adopt the Jungian perspective, even provisionally–is the quest for God, for wholeness.  A quest, in Mack’s case, for the unifying not only of the external split between Jews and Arabs but, closer to home, the internal one between the material science in which he’d been trained and the spiritual reality that every instinct told him was the greater truth.

Which may have itself been an aspect of his quest for the lost mother and for the immortality after which in his last years he so hankered.  Or vice versa.

A hopeless quest, a quest after illusions?  Probably.  But also a tragic and noble one, and quintessentially human.

“We spend our years as a tale that is told,” says the King James Bible, guessing at the uncertain Hebrew of Psalm 90:9.  Blumenthal has told the amazing tale that was John Mack; it’s left for us, with speculative empathy, to tease out its meaning.  And to gaze on the extraordinary creature that is a human being, and wonder.