John Mack
By The Guardian TOP 500 REVIEWER
As Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, John Mack had the highest possible academic credentials. He was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, ‘A Prince of our Disorder.'
‘Passport to the Cosmos' (PTTC) was Mack's second and final book on the alien abduction issue, before his death in September 2004. It's a thoughtful, coherent and readable essay; a more absorbing narrative than his earlier 1994 book “Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens”. Whereas the earlier book episodically recounted the experiences of 13 different abductees in their own words but seemed reluctant to draw conclusions – beyond the obvious fact that the phenomenon was not psychiatric but (in some way) external to the experiencer and physically real – “PTTC” explores what it all might mean in terms of human consciousness and why our accepted “ontological notions of consensus reality” need to be expanded to accommodate this subversive intrusion into our world.
The author writes in Chapter One:
“…marshalling evidence that might conceivably satisfy the physical sciences `on their own turf' has proved to be an elusive task. I will document experiencers' reports with physical evidence where applicable, but my principal interest is in their pattern, meaning and potential implications for our understanding of reality and knowledge of ourselves in the universe.”
