At first glance, Dr. John E. Mack would seem to be on top of the world.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the individual who turned Cambridge Hospital's psychiatry department into one of the premier teaching institutions in the country, Mack has garnered high esteem for his work on topics ranging from nightmares and human conflict to teenage suicide.

Yet his interest in other worlds--namely alien abductions--has brought him both acclaim and extensive criticism.

Mack became something of a national celebrity after writing his best-selling book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens,which recounts the experiences of people claiming to have had encounters with extraterrestrial life.

Recently a secret Harvard "fact finding" committee was convened by Dean of the Medical School Daniel C. Tosteson '46 to evaluate Mack's research.

In 1983, Mack founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change at Cambridge Hospital, where he now works.

Originally founded to investigate the psychological dynamics of the Cold War, the Center now studies the psychological roots behind world problems in social, ecological and spiritual areas.

One project of the Center the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, deals almost exclusively with alien abduction experiences.

Why Aliens?

Dr. Mack's fairly recent interest in abductionphenomena has left his colleagues "puzzled" MalkahL. Notman, acting chair of psychiatry at theCambridge Hospital, says, "People who have knownhim for a long time feel both loyal to him andpuzzled by what this particular interestrepresents."

Mack says he has held long-standing interestsin unconsciousness, consciousness and "the depthsof the psyche." It was in the course of pursuingthese interests the Mack stumbled into the realmof alien abductions.

"I became interested in the work of StanislavGrof, who had extended our understanding of thehuman unconscious through the use of non-ordinarystates for consciousness for exploring thepsyche," Mack says.

Grof, who initially used the hallucinogen LSDin his research, developed a drug-free techniquefor exploring the psyche.

Through the use of rapid breathing, powerfulmusic and mandalas, Grof's holotropic breathingtechnique allows people to "explore the deeperrealm of the psyche," according to Mack, who nowuses this method with some of his patients.

According to Mack, Grof was also interested in"spiritual emergencies" involving various personalcrises surrounding life and death, addictionproblems, spirituality and UFO encounters. AfterGrof sent him and article on UFOs, Mack says, "Ikept asking myself: is this true? Are these UFOsreally coming?"

Soon thereafter someone who was also studyingGrof's work introduced Mack to Bud Hopkins, a NewYork artist who had been studying the abductionphenomenon for decades.