John Mack, Human Encounter with
Aliens and Transformation

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On becoming humane, on becoming human.

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John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University, highly credentialed academician, best-selling author and pioneer explorer in the realm of human endeavor and transformation of society.

Sadly and shockingly, at the very end of September, John Mack was killed while walking on a street in London. He had gone there to fulfill his mission to spread the word about the transformation of our society—possibly through the human encounter with aliens, and all that implied. This was a sad and heavy blow to society itself, because of the loss of this great pioneer and activist working to improve the human condition through improving the human person. It was a very personal blow to those of us at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine), for John Mack had consented to be our keynote speaker, the centerpiece of the annual conference in June, 2005. We had much looked forward to his presentation and teaching because of his bridging the most fundamental knowledge of human personality and personal development with exploration in the high ranges, most recently through his having interviewed and examined several thousand “experiencers.” Experiencer is the name he gave to those who have had, in one way or another, an encounter with aliens.

Mack was not only a professor of psychiatry at the country’s most prestigious medical educational institution, Harvard Medical School, but also a psychoanalyst and child analyst. Intensely trained and experienced in human behavior, he was very reluctant to entertain the possibility of UFOs and aliens. It was thrust upon him after having examined many experiencers as well as a considerable amount of literature (Whitley Streiber, Bud Hopkins, David Jacobs, among many others). Finally, in 1994 he published his experience and opinion in his best seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

In 1999 in a most significant book, Passport to the Cosmos, he expressed his conviction that encounters with aliens were designed to help us to save this planet. The experiencers (whether their experiences were in the material plane of having been taken aboard a UFO, or on the subtle planes of thought, dreams and significant imagination) were given visions over and over again of the beauty of Earth and at the same time, the wilting, the drying up, the dying of the Earth because of the assault upon it by humankind. There is a lot of evidence that the aliens were combining with humans, either through a sort of sexual intercourse or more especially through in-vitro fertilization, creating a hybrid civilization. The purpose of this endeavor is to save the planet, to save a dying civilization. But the most important thing about all of this, as Mack saw it, was that this is a thrust, not only toward saving this planet (a desperate reality need as things appear now), but also a way of helping humanity to transition, transform and transcend into a higher realm of personality and of civilization.

This is what was said in his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“In the 1990s, Dr. Mack studied dozens of people who said they had had such contact with aliens, culminating in his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens in 1994. In it, he focused less on whether aliens were real than on the spiritual effects of perceived encounters, arguing that the ‘abduction phenomenon has important philosophical, spiritual and social implications’ for everyone.’”

The very shock of meeting the aliens and of the encounter with something so extraordinarily unusual, the encounter not only with the aliens but with the abductee’s own helplessness, produced a kind of terror which then allowed them to transcend and move into a direction of higher aspiration: greater love of humanity and greater love of each other.

This is indeed the only answer to our current problems. By that I mean the elevation of the human personality world-wide, so that we turn from being aggression-dominated to a realization of the oneness and the unity of which we are a part.

In a parallel vein consider the following:

At a meeting of the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society, also at the end of September, Dan Gottlieb, PhD, a syndicated columnist who also has his own weekly program on National Public Radio, spoke of his own experience. Dr. Gottlieb is a quadriplegic. He spoke of “How to become Human.” His message was that we should accept our defects, our injuries, our helplessnesses, not by becoming inert but by accepting and absorbing them and moving on to a higher plane, finding joy and reward in doing good for other human beings.

Gottlieb has every right to say so, for as a quadriplegic who had developed helplessness overnight through a car accident, who had to be served day and night in order to stay alive, who had gone through the tortures of being bed-ridden for eighteen months, he discovered that all of this was transformative and transcendent. Not believing in God, ever, he nevertheless had a feeling that something was up there and had a dream in which God visited him. God said to him, “I am not going to give you hope or anything like that, but I will give you an assignment. Here is this little piece of the universe, about 1/6th of it. It is your job to take care of it.”

What Dr. Gottlieb said was that he was here, speaking to us, a group of psychiatrists, mental-health caregivers, in order to do his part in taking care of his 1/6th portion of the universe.

This is exactly what Mack was doing in his willingness to join us at our annual conference at ISSSEEM, in his lecturing widely, in accepting as many invitations as he could handle, in his traveling to London in order to spread the word. This was his taking care of a portion of the universe that he undertook as his endeavor. And with his extraordinary background of knowledge and credentials, his solid thinking, careful research and common sense were above question.

This is the message for all of us. It is for each of us to care for a portion of the universe, realizing the necessity to save this dying planet and the necessity to transform it and ourselves. It is time to abandon the model of we-they, of aggression born out of fear of “the other.” It is time to move toward a realization of the true unity that we are, a unity that we experience each time we allow ourselves to truly meet another, whether an alien or human. It is time to settle in; to know each other.

John Mack, we salute you; we miss you; we will continue your work and undertake it as a miracle assignment given to us by you.

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Contact Dr. Pressman by writing to: Maurie D. Pressman, M.D., 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106, or call 215/922-0204, email: mauriedavid@earthlink.net, or visit his website, www.mauriepressman.com.

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