The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack

by Ralph Blumenthal

Overview

The Believer is the weird and chilling true story of Dr. John Mack. This eminent Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer risked his career to investigate the phenomenon of human encounters with aliens and to give credibility to the stupefying tales shared by people who were utterly convinced they had happened.

Nothing in Mack’s four decades of psychiatry had prepared him for the otherworldly accounts of a cross section of humanity including young children who reported being taken against their wills by alien beings. Over the course of his career his interest in alien abduction grew from curiosity to wonder, ultimately developing into a limitless, unwavering passion.

Based on exclusive access to Mack’s archives, journals, and psychiatric notes and interviews with his family and closest associates, The Believer reveals the life and work of a man who explored the deepest of scientific conundrums and further leads us to the hidden dimensions and alternate realities that captivated Mack until the end of his life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826362322
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	03/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	1,017,574
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Ralph Blumenthal was an award-winning reporter for the New York Times. He coauthored the Times article in 2017 that broke the news of a secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs, and he is the author of four nonfiction books including Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America’s Most Dangerous Prisoners. A distinguished lecturer at Baruch College, he lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

1. "They Are Telling the Truth"
2. Terror in the Night
3. This Budd's For You
4. The Mystery of Anomalous Experience
5. "Have We Visitors from Space?"
6. The Sources of Suffering
7. Mack the Knife
8. A Prince of Our Disorder
9. "UFO Chiller"
10. "The Interrupted Journey"
11. The Peacemaker
12. Danny's Gift
13. "More Activist than the Movement"
14. "They Put a Hole in My Psyche"
15. The Turquoise Maiden
16. "Sane Citizen Sees UFO in New Jersey"
17. Mack's Secret
18. "He's Got This Glass Jar . . ."
19. "The Abduction Syndrome"
20. Aliens at Harvard
21. "You Cannot Go Ahead!"
22. Iron John
23. Hello, Dali
24. Aliens at MIT
25. "Good Evening, Doctor"
26. Stuck
27. "The Whole Bloody Snowsuit"
28. PEER Pressure
29. Aliens in Brazil
30. The Time Bomb
31. Oprah
32. "The Man from Outer Space"
33. "A Review of Your Work"
34. Not an Inquisition
35. "What if You're Wrong?"
36. Aliens in Africa
37. "Have Good Manners!"
38. "Oh God!"
39. "We Watch The X-Files"
40. The Lighthouse
41. Abduction and Divinity
42. "Passport to the Cosmos"
43. A Cosmic Marriage
44. The Holy Grail
45. The Rune of Doom
46. "I Never Knew It Would Be So Easy"
47. "John Mack Now Knows Everything"
Epilogue

Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This extraordinary biography reads like a fast-paced thriller. It deftly weaves the detailed richness of John Mack's genius and complex life through the historical backdrop of the alien-abduction phenomena. Ralph Blumenthal has so beautifully captured the essence of Mack's soul and his relentless curiosity that by the end of the book I mourned that Mack is no longer with us."—Trish MacGregor, coauthor of Aliens in the Backyard: UFO Encounters, Abductions, and Synchronicity

"As a person sane enough to hold a driver's license, I say, what are we to make of Mack's findings? Read this gripping, factual account of a mental-health pioneer and truth-seeker by a soundly accredited successful author, veteran New York Times foreign correspondent, and reporter. Decide for yourselves and then tell me!"—Dan Aykroyd

"Anyone who is intrigued by the involvement of John Mack, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard, or by the interest of psychiatrists in the anomalous in general and UFOs in particular, should not miss reading this book! It is filled with details on the topic, both pro and con, that are not publicly available in any other place that I know."—David J. Hufford, author of The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions

"John Mack was one of the few prominent American intellectuals who saw and said what was, and still is, really at stake in the UFO phenomenon—reality itself. And Ralph Blumenthal is the perfect biographer to take up Mack and bring him to life, in all his humanity and complexity, on the page. A major achievement."—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge

"Ralph Blumenthal's definitive biography is beautifully written and impeccably researched, providing fascinating new insights into the professional and personal life of John Mack. What drove the Harvard psychiatrist to take alien abductions seriously? This question has never been addressed as brilliantly or as deeply as it is in The Believer—a must read!"—Leslie Kean, author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record

From the Publisher

03/01/2021

Blumenthal (Miracle at Sing Sing), a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, has written a compelling biography of Dr. John E. Mack (1929–2004), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist who provided mental health care in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Mack's interests in alien abductions and alternate realities set him apart from his colleagues, but his defiance of scientific expectation in giving credibility to alien abductees' accounts was risky for an academic and a scientist. The story begins in June 1992 at a secretive Alien Discussions conference held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and proceeds to follow Dr. Mack on his mission to discover whether we have been misunderstanding the basic concept of reality all along. This well-researched account uses Mack's personal journals, archives, and notes, along with interviews of close friends and family members, to capture the full picture of Mack's life and genius. VERDICT Likely to appeal to those with an interest in mental health or the anomalous, this book tells the story of a man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge who "believed in taking risks and breaking boundaries to boldly explore the deepest secrets of existence, which no one yet has come close to fathoming."—Marissa Mace, Cumberland County P.L. & Information Ctr., Fayetteville, NC

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