John Mack discusses past lives and dual identity in relation to alien encounters, in this excerpt from a June 27, 1993 interview on 21st Century Radio’s Hieronimus & Company. The full interview follows the excerpt. More interviews by Bob and Zoh Hieronimus are available from: 21stCenturyRadio.com
Bob Hieronimus: You note that there are three classes of information involved in abduction phenomenology.
Some we can study empirically, like photos, cuts, scars, beams of light, etcetera.
Some of it involves technology that we can conceive of but can’t enact, like people going through walls.
And then there’s a whole other class of phenomena that we have no way of understanding with our Western worldview. Would you please elaborate on this type of phenomenon and what they might mean?
John Mack: I’ll give you examples.
An abductee will under hypnosis often have the experience of their infancy, of encountering alien beings not only as a small child, but even as a baby under a year or even a few days old.
And sometimes they will say with a strong feeling/affect, “I am here again”, or “I have been brought back”.
Now, if I just let that go and just talk further about the experience of seeing the aliens and being abducted and so forth, I will still be more or less in the ballpark of the “conceivable technology” class you mentioned.
But if I ask them, “what do you mean by ‘back here again’?”, then they will describe that they have come from some spiritual source, some place which is not in our physical space/time universe, which they call “home” or “the Source” or the “place of light”, which is the nonphysical consciousness source of all creation. Something related to what some people would call God or the anima mundi or the divine principle, or the Great Spirit – it depends on the culture that you’re in. And that their embodiment as a baby or as a human figure, human being, a physical human being, has occurred through the linking of their consciousness which existed in this primal Source place, this divine consciousness from which they emerge. And then that consciousness joins a body, and then they become a person.
Now, none of that fits anything like our [Western] worldview. That is much more what can be read about in Eastern spiritual traditions, or in any kind of religious tradition where the soul or spirit is considered to be separate from the body.
But we have systematically expunged from our knowledge-base any such notions of a consciousness, or a soul or a spirit separate from the physical body. In our Western view, anything like consciousness or spirit is simply a kind of projected phenomenon of the human brain. That’s one area of data that doesn’t fit.
They will actually experience themselves as having been embodied before, in another century as another kind of being, or as a human from before. In other words they will have past-life experiences in which they go through strong feelings – birth, death, other experiences – which are just as powerfully recalled as anything in this life. We have no place in our Western worldview for past-life experiences.
Another area is many abductees, if one works with them over time, will discover that they have a kind of double identity. That they can identify with the aliens. That they have an alien self, a kind of a lost ancestral alien self, and they will alternate in the regressions (the hypnosis sessions) between their human self and their alien self. And often the work becomes the job of integrating these two dimensions of themselves.
We have no way to understand that in our physical Western world. What does it mean to be an alien self, to be identified as the alien, perceiving the world through those large dark eyes and large heads and brains and computer-like brilliance of the aliens… and then have to integrate that identity with their physical human identity on Earth?
I mean, all of that is a part of the consciousness of this experience, but it is not in any way explainable within the Western empirical physicalist tradition.
Robert R. Hieronimus, Ph.D., is an acknowledged pioneer of the “New Paradigm” movement. He founded 21st Century Radio in 1988, first in Baltimore, then on over 100 stations nationwide. He and his wife Zohara Hieronimus interview leading-edge authorities about their unusual findings or opinions, and add humor and inspiration to counter sometimes discouraging news of the future.
© 1993 Hieronimus & Co.
Reprinted by kind permission.
More interviews are available from: 21stCenturyRadio.com
An interview with John E. Mack by Robert Hieronimus
June 27, 1993
Announcer: For the ABC Information Network, I’m Chuck Stevenson.
Views and opinions that you hear on the talk station WCBM 680 are not necessarily those of the owners, management, or advertisers of contemporary talk radio WCBM 680.
[music and dialogue from The Day the Earth Stood Still: “We have come to visit you in peace and with good will”]
Bob Hieronimus: Greetings Earth people. This is 21st Century Radio’s Hieronimus & Company where knowledge comes first, reminding you that we’re not just the people from any city or state in the union. And we’re not just the folks from the East or West coast of America. We’re not only Americans, occidentals, or Orientals. We are people from the planet Earth. We are Earth people.
Welcome back to 21st Century Radio’s Hieronimus & Company. I’m Dr. Bob Hieronimus, one half of Hieronimus & Company on WCBM. You can hear the other half, Zoh Hieronimus, with her own show tomorrow and every day this week from nine to 11 on WCBM. We’ll tell you about her schedule coming up this week a little later in the program. Our executive producer and research assistant is Laura Cortner. Our engineer tonight is Robin and we, yes, it’s Robin London. Thank you very much. Talk-line number is 922-6680, that spells WCBM-680, toll free number is 1-800-296-9226. Our on air fax number is 363-9226. Our Cellular One car-phone users can make a free call, with star sign WCBM.
Our show tonight will be two hours on UFOs – an advance preview of the annual MUFON symposium this Sunday, excuse me, not this Sunday, this July 3rd and 4th, taking place in Richmond, Virginia. I’ll introduce this hour’s guests after these few announcements.
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Now, if you remember our interviews with Dr. David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins recently, they both made on-air challenges to the crown prince of science in this country, Carl Sagan, to review their findings on the UFO abduction phenomenon.
One of our guests this hour is the working partner of Hopkins and Jacobs, Dr. John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.
At 10:00 AM on Saturday, July 3rd, Dr. Mack will be presenting his paper, entitled “The UFO Abduction Phenomenon: What Might it Mean for the Human Future?”. He was kind enough to send me a review copy of his paper beforehand, and I’ve read it through several times with great interest.
You may remember Dr. Mack’s name mentioned during our recent interviews with Dr. David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins as they discussed the report, quote, On Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three National Surveys conducted by the Roper Organization end quote, published by the Bigelow Holding Corporation in Las Vegas, Nevada. By the way, a copy of this particular report will be included with every prize tonight. Now, this is the same report that Prince Carl Sagan has said he has reviewed carefully and concluded that these 3.5 million Americans were hallucinating. Of course, we all doubt – at least I do doubt – if Mr. Sagan ever actually reviewed this material.
Now without further delay, welcome to 21st Century Radio’s Hieronimus & Company, where knowledge comes first, Dr. Mack. Are you there, doctor?
John Mack: Yes I’m right here.
Bob Hieronimus: Okay. Could you get a little closer to your… use your telephone as a kind of like a microphone, John?
John Mack: Okay, how’s that. Is that better?
Bob Hieronimus: That’s better. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for joining us tonight. Our listeners have been looking forward to hearing about your important research for a very long time. The question [laughs], the question you are most frequently asked by others, and even by yourself, is how did you get into this crazy subject? Well, here’s it is again, John. How did you get involved in this crazy subject?
John Mack: I’m not someone who had a great interest in UFOs or certainly not in abductions. And a colleague of mine asked me if I wanted to meet Budd Hopkins. This was in the fall of 1989. And I said, who’s he? That indicated how unfamiliar I was. And she explained that he was a New York artist who worked with people that reported being taken by alien beings aboard UFOs. I said, well, he must be crazy, and he must be working with some new form of psychosis. She said, no, no, no, it’s very serious.
So I had some time in New York one day, and it was one of those memorable days in your life when everything seems to change, you know, and, it was January 10th, 1990.
And what impressed me was the warmth, sincerity of Budd Hopkins. But more importantly, what he was describing were highly similar experiences among people from all over the country who had come forth reluctantly, had nothing to gain by coming forward to speak with him and everything to lose, had been traumatized in the same way by what seemed to be very intrusive kinds of procedures aboard UFOs, the details of which dovetailed very carefully from one case to another. And the only thing that could do that, that in my experience in 40 years as a psychiatrist, was something that had really happened to these people. It did not in any way fit some form of mental illness or a psychiatric condition that could explain that, because of the similarities of the stories. Only something, a real event can behave like that. Now, if this were a real event, then what in heaven’s name was going on here? So I got extremely interested in that question.
Bob Hieronimus: He certainly is a fine person, has done some really important work, and he’s quite an excellent artist as well. I’ve noted there are a lot of artists that get involved in this particular area, such as Whitley Strieber as well.
John Mack: Sometimes it takes somebody who’s got a kind of creative imagination to take on something which defies the mainstream point of view of a culture.
Bob Hieronimus: Sure, yeah, that’s for sure. Could you give us a brief summary of what the abduction experience, that is the UFO abduction experience of course, usually entails?
John Mack: The typical situation – and it varies somewhat from among individuals – is that the person is in their bed at home or they’re in their car or in one case on a snowmobile, or children in their school yard. And they may see a UFO up close, or they may not see the UFO but only see a beam of light. Can be usually a bluish color. They experience themselves as being paralyzed by this beam of light. They may see small gray beings around them with large dark eyes. And then they find themselves being taken, as if miraculously, against their wills. They are incredulous about this at first, at least, and floated bodily down a hall or through a wall or through a window, up into the air. They sometimes see their houses recede below them.
They are taken then into a craft through some sort of opening. And then in the craft which they rather uniformly described as being cool inside with a kind of damp misty atmosphere, curved walls, a kind of whitish, bright color, a number of the being around, instrument panels everywhere. They are forced in this paralyzed state onto a table. They may see one, two, three, or many more of these beings with the large black eyes, usually three, three and a half, four feet tall, usually a taller one that is experienced as the leader who seems older than the others, who seems to be in charge. And they are stared at, skin scrapings are taken, samples are taken from their bodies, and various intrusive procedures are done to them as they are in a state of terror.
The terror is sometimes modified by a touch of the beings or some kind of vibratory, strange anesthetic effect that, that the, sort of electrical effect that the beings can bring about.
And they become relaxed, kind of, as this anesthesia effect takes effect. But then they may become frightened once again as more intrusive procedures are done. Some instrument placed through their abdomen or, often something is put in the vagina, or sperm samples are taken from the men. And there’s a whole complex reproductive experience that goes along with this. So it’s simpler for the men, but more complex for the women, because for women, it involves sometimes a something being inserted into the vagina, an egg removed or something that maybe is a, they experiences as an egg that has been tampered with put in there, or a small fetus removed.
And as they – bizarre is that this seems – as they relive this, either whether without hypnosis, there is extreme distress and sobbing and weeping and shaking. And the authentic power of the feelings that are expressed as they relive these experiences is what convinced me that something extraordinary is going on here. This is not just some kind of fantasy or a dream or…
Bob Hieronimus: Hallucination?
John Mack: …hallucination or something of that sort.
Bob Hieronimus: Yeah. All right. John, we’ll be back with you in a few minutes. We’re going to take a 21st Century kind of a break here, guys. And when we get back, we have some more important questions concerning the important research of Dr. John Mack and friends.
If you have a copy or get a copy of USA Weekend, they have a magazine there, take a look at it. Dr. John Mack is in there on pages, I believe page 4 to page 6, right? And the cover of USA Weekend is “Abducted by Aliens” question mark.[1]
We’ll be back in just a few minutes.
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Okay. John, many months ago, Christina and Dr. Stanislav Grof joined us in a first-time interview for both of them together to discuss their important work, The Stormy Search for the Self – boy, did I enjoy that book – where they detailed their system known as holotropic breathwork. Could you tell us, please, what is holotropic breathwork and how do both regular people and abductees gain from using this process?
John Mack: Holotropic breathwork is a method of creating an altered state of consciousness that allows people to go deep into their buried memories and their walled-off inner experiences. There are, in the map of the psyche that Stan Grof with working with his wife, Christina has worked out, there are, there is the level that has to do with our experiences, what would we call the biographical level – which means what’s happened during our lifetime going back to birth – but then he also, one can also recover what he calls perinatal or experiences related to the birth process itself. And then finally, the psyche can open to the experiences of transcending one’s immediate biographical and perinatal life into identification with animals, mythic figures, gods, goddesses, a whole realm of experiences that go beyond what is generally considered possible in the Western view of the psyche.
And it was actually through my work with Stan and Christina that I became open to the possibility that there was something serious going on in this UFO abduction matter, because they include – I think not in that book, but another one called Spiritual Emergencies – the encounter with a UFO or particularly abductions can be a spiritual emergency.
And Stan showed me a paper that was being included in that book.[2] And that was really what got me started thinking about this subject at all. That, that kind of primed me for the meeting that I later had with Budd Hopkins. I wouldn’t even have probably had had that much interest if I hadn’t been opened up to this, these, what Stan calls transpersonal experiences. Because UFO abduction is certainly a transpersonal experience, it extends the psychic experience beyond the boundaries of our ordinary reality.
Bob Hieronimus: How is this useful to the abductees?
John Mack: Well, you don’t, I don’t do a straight holotropic breathwork with abductees per se, but what I do is in the course of the hypnosis, I use a lot of breathing techniques to center the person, to open them to their own power and to their own connection in the universe and beyond themselves. And the breathwork technique with hypnosis seems to be a very effective way to not only recover memories, but recover memories in a way that is integrating not overwhelming. Because I’m much more interested in the person being centered in themselves than simply getting the story. And the constant return and focus on the breath is a way of keeping the person centered. It’s different than the holotropic breathwork because it’s important for me and the research that I’d be able to carry on a conversation with these individuals, whereas a straight holotropic breathwork session, the person for two hours is simply in their own inner space with evocative music. And then they report in a sharing session with say the group if they do it with a group, what, what occurred. But what I do is a kind of modified hypnosis using the breath as a way of strengthening the person’s sense of their groundedness and power. So it’s use of breathwork method, but with a fairly classical hypnotic regressive technique.
Bob Hieronimus: You’re, you’re persuaded that the experience of these abductees are real. How did you come about that conclusion?
John Mack: Well, see all these words are so much, much a product of our culture, you know, our Western way of dividing things in terms of polarities. You know, real/unreal, inner/outer, exists/doesn’t exist. Not all cultures define the world the way we do. What we mean by real is something that is empirically observable in the physical world. We have no room in our psyches, we have blotted out over the past 300 years, all experiences other than those of the physical world. So if we say real, we mean something that someone else could observe along with us. Now, this phenomenon doesn’t behave like that. You can’t… we have no photographs of aliens or no photographs of the abductees took of their experience. Or they don’t bring back artifacts from within the craft.
So it doesn’t fulfill the Western notion of real. It’s real in the sense of, the strongest evidence we have, I mean, there are physical corroborative kinds of evidence, like cuts, scoop marks, burned earth around where the UFOs landed, photographs, that kind of thing, but they are largely corroborative.
The most powerful evidence we have in my view is the evidence of consciousness. In other words, the experiences of otherwise normal, sane people reporting very powerful happenings, is what gives it the sense of reality. Now, what is our criteria for real, other than that you have a witness that, that you believe is speaking authentically and as truthfully as they know how? Now does that mean it exists, it’s real in the literal physical space-time sense that, you know, a chair seems real to us or another person’s standing there is real? I don’t know. It may be we may have to expand our notions of the real to include this phenomenon. But that’s one of the things that makes this work so interesting to me.
Bob Hieronimus: It does, doesn’t it? It really does. We’re going to touch on this again later on because it, because you note that perhaps the abduction phenomenon won’t reveal itself to the physicalist approaches of the Western scientific method, and that relying on material evidence for proof may be a dead end. That’s a it’s a very important statement I believe. And we’ll touch on that again later.
Now, there is a great deal of controversy going on. I was sitting down in Florida a little while ago, listening to Dr. Carl Sagan basically say that this evidence using the hypnosis was basically worthless. And there’s a great deal of controversy surrounding the use of hypnosis as an investigative tool. Is hypnosis accurate and do people report memories correctly?
John Mack: There’s a misunderstanding about hypnosis. The inaccurate reporting with hypnosis tends to occur when the matter at hand is not a vital significance for the personal. For example, somebody has been asked to recover a memory if they’re a witness of an accident which was not of central importance to them. But where you’re dealing with something which is absolutely critical vital importance for the well-being of the individual, something that they experienced is having happened to them, the recovery of the memory under hypnosis is likely to be much more accurate. Furthermore, in the case of the abduction situation, I have many cases where I have very detailed memories from individuals without hypnosis. And in fact, the hypnosis tends to… I trust the hypnosis more than the non-hypnotic memories, because often what is recovered under hypnosis is much more traumatic and less appealing to the self-esteem of the individual than what they remembered without hypnosis.
I have one man who reported an abduction that occurred when he was 16 years old.[3] And the conscious memory was that he was seduced by this sexy alien and taken on a ship and they had sex and it was wonderful. And then she filled his head full of terrifying information about the future of the Earth and the environment.
Under hypnosis, it was much more disturbing to his adolescent bravado, because there was no sex. The alien behaved as aliens do, which is in a kind of a detached way – stood by while a forced sperm sample was taken, which was humiliating to him. And then later this information that I mentioned was given to him.
So that the memory recovered under hypnosis was much less congenial to his view of himself and more trustworthy than the somewhat glossed-over memory that he had consciously recalled. And that’s been my experience in case after case in this in this work.
Bob Hieronimus: Of course Carl Sagan believes that these 3.5 million souls are hallucinating. What’s your reaction to that dogmatic statement?
John Mack: Well, I think he really should be ashamed of himself for coming out with strong statements of a psychiatric nature like that. I mean, I wouldn’t venture forth with any strong, sweeping technical statement having to do with astronomy or radio waves or anything like that. I mean he’s not equipped or trained to make that sort of statement. And furthermore he hasn’t studied these individuals. And in my own work, and I’ve worked now intensively with more than 70 of these people, the phenomenon doesn’t behave anything like hallucinations. I mean, it behaves like the experience of people who are as bewildered about what this means and what it’s all about as you and I are, who are speaking authentically of very powerful experiences that they’ve had, which are not dreams, are not delusions, are not hallucinations, but something that they’re recalling that has occurred. Now, what the source of this is, none of us really know. But to, to, because something doesn’t fit our Western worldview to sweep it aside in a way, using language which we have no professional competence to use is, you know, a person should be embarrassed to venture off in that kind of way.
Bob Hieronimus: Well, obviously Parade Magazine wasn’t too embarrassed to give him a full reign there.[4]
John Mack: But that’s the mainstream culture, this defines the mainstream culture. And, you know, a culture will defend it’s a worldview against all evidence. You know, like any ideology, you hang on to it even if the facts don’t support it. Like Freud said, you know, theory doesn’t prevent facts from showing up.
Bob Hieronimus: [laughter]
John Mack: And we presume this is not possible because it doesn’t fit our worldview. So we manufacture theories that are preposterous because we want to preserve the status quo of our scientific worldview, which acts like a kind of a religion now at all costs.
Bob Hieronimus: Well there are some questions here that I think are not as important as I had originally thought, because I think you’ve touched on some of them, but I do want to, I would like to ask you to define “psychopathology” for our listeners, and then explain why psychopathology does not account for abduction scenario phenomenon.
John Mack: Psychopathology, it simply means, is just another fancy word for mental illness, basically. Mental and emotional disturbance. And there is not in my knowledge and certainly not in my own cases or any cases that I’ve read about in the abduction literature an abduction experience that can be explained on the basis of some form of mental illness. Now that is not to say that these are not disturbing experiences. But the emotional disturbances that I’ve encountered are the effect of what is occurred, not the cause.
Bob Hieronimus: All right, now, now we’re moving into a section of questions that I am really fascinated with, and this is what I find so…. I would, yeah, I’ll just say it. I find it thrilling to read this kind of material, because it’s enormously important in trying to put this type of thing in perspective.
You note that there are three classes of information involved in abduction phenomenology.
Some we can study empirically, like photos, cuts, scars, beams of light, etcetera.
Some of it involves technology that we can conceive of but can’t enact, like people going through walls.
And then there’s a whole other class of phenomena that we have no way of understanding with our Western worldview. Would you please elaborate on this type of phenomenon and what they might mean?
John Mack: I’ll give you examples.
An abductee will under hypnosis often have the experience of their infancy, of encountering alien beings not only as a small child, but even as a baby under a year or even a few days old.
And sometimes they will say with a strong feeling/affect, “I am here again”, or “I have been brought back”.
Now, if I just let that go and just talk further about the experience of seeing the aliens and being abducted and so forth, I will still be more or less in the ballpark of the “conceivable technology” class you mentioned.
But if I ask them, “what do you mean by ‘back here again’?”, then they will describe that they have come from some spiritual source, some place which is not in our physical space/time universe, which they call “home” or “the Source” or the “place of light”, which is the nonphysical consciousness source of all creation. Something related to what some people would call God or the anima mundi or the divine principle, or the Great Spirit – it depends on the culture that you’re in. And that their embodiment as a baby or as a human figure, human being, a physical human being, has occurred through the linking of their consciousness which existed in this primal Source place, this divine consciousness from which they emerge. And then that consciousness joins a body, and then they become a person.
Now, none of that fits anything like our [Western] worldview. That is much more what can be read about in Eastern spiritual traditions, or in any kind of religious tradition where the soul or spirit is considered to be separate from the body.
But we have systematically expunged from our knowledge-base any such notions of a consciousness, or a soul or a spirit separate from the physical body. In our Western view, anything like consciousness or spirit is simply a kind of projected phenomenon of the human brain. That’s one area of data that doesn’t fit.
They will actually experience themselves as having been embodied before, in another century as another kind of being, or as a human from before. In other words they will have past-life experiences in which they go through strong feelings – birth, death, other experiences – which are just as powerfully recalled as anything in this life. We have no place in our Western worldview for past-life experiences.
Another area is many abductees, if one works with them over time, will discover that they have a kind of double identity. That they can identify with the aliens. That they have an alien self, a kind of a lost ancestral alien self, and they will alternate in the regressions (the hypnosis sessions) between their human self and their alien self. And often the work becomes the job of integrating these two dimensions of themselves.
We have no way to understand that in our physical Western world. What does it mean to be an alien self, to be identified as the alien, perceiving the world through those large dark eyes and large heads and brains and computer-like brilliance of the aliens… and then have to integrate that identity with their physical human identity on Earth?
I mean, all of that is a part of the consciousness of this experience, but it is not in any way explainable within the Western empirical physicalist tradition.
Bob Hieronimus: We do have something explainable here, friends. We have a 21st Century Radio break. When we returned with Dr. John Mack, we’re going to talk about the transformational aspect of the UFO abduction experience.
And then finally, the overall impression of the abduction phenomenon, dealing with what is going on? Some sort of possible evolutionary purpose? We’ll talk about that when we return.
…
[music and dialogue from Close Encounters: “I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint! How come I know so much? What the hell is going on around here?!”]
…
Bob Hieronimus: Welcome back to 21st Century Radio’s Hieronimus & Company. We’re talking with Dr. John E. Mack about UFO abductions. There is a transformational aspect of the UFO abduction experience that is seldom covered in UFO research literature. What kind of information, John, has been given to abductees that could confront us with what might be called our collective selves?
John Mack: It’s important that this aspect of phenomenon not being misunderstood. When I speak of a transformational dimension, I’m not in any way downplaying the fact that at least initially for most abductees, the experiences are very traumatic and disturbing.
And there are four parts to the trauma. There’s the experience itself, which is to be paralyzed and taken against your will and have these things done to you. It’s disturbing. And then people are isolated. They can’t talk about it because, you know, they’ll be laughed at or ridiculed, or fear that they will. And then it’s shocking to our worldview. And finally it can recur at any time. So it is traumatic.
But what seems to happen if one goes deeply enough into the traumatic aspect of the experience, something shifts. The experience shifts, if there’s an acceptance and opening to it, a willingness to acknowledge the existence of the beings, something like a more reciprocal relationship seems to emerge. Something like an exchange of information. Now, the information may be present even with the trauma. The abductees are shown vivid images of the destruction of the Earth, of apocalyptic pictures of cracks in the Earth’s surface, of pollution beyond anything we’ve known – basically the end of life. And they will sob in distress over the power of these images. But what seems to happen as the acknowledgement of the reality of the experiences occurs is a shift in the consciousness of the abductees, so that they become very ecologically sensitive. Sensitive to the environment, and sensitive to the destructive forces that are present in the human collective condition. Sensitive to how we are intolerant of one another. Sensitive to the desecration of the jewel of the planet that we have here. Much more spiritually attuned to the forces of nature and to the sacredness of our world. And, and there’s a kind of deep growth and development that occurs among a number abductees.
Now, I know that that is not the commonly held view of many of the really top-notch abduction researchers like Dave Jacobs and Budd Hopkins. And it may be that because this goes along with my own kind of spiritual evolution that I’m open to receiving that kind of information. I certainly don’t impose any view on people, but this is what I discover in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth hypnosis session, that there is this shift to a more reciprocal relationship between the beings and humans, some sense of deep connectedness that they feel with the beings.
Now it’s argued sometimes, maybe that’s something like the Stockholm syndrome, which is like when hijackers… it relates to a case that happened in Sweden; hijackers take people, you know, and people may people identify with their captors and feel connected with them. I don’t think [so], I think it’s more than that. I think that there is some way in which there becomes a kind of shared sense of horror at the destruction of the Earth that is going on, and some change in consciousness in relation to the, what would I say, the catastrophe that we’re bringing about, as a, this out of control run-amuck species that we are on the planet, there becomes a horror in relation to that.
People say, well, the aliens haven’t stopped anything, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about our changing our consciousness so that we stop the destruction that’s going on.
Bob Hieronimus: I think that’s a very important aspect of it. I’m certain you’re familiar with the writings of [Raymond] Fowler on Betty Luca. There’s a similar strain. It’s certainly not exactly the same, but there’s a similar strain in there with the emphasis upon the environment as being a serious problem. We had a wonderful question off the air from, from Joe. The implants. Now you mentioned something about the implants in your work that are reportedly being studied at – is it MIT?
John Mack: There’s one being studied there. Yeah, I’ve studied one myself. And there’s another one. There there’s several implants.
Bob Hieronimus: Have we learned anything about these implants yet?
John Mack: I was very excited about the whole implant area initially, and I’m less excited about it now. Because as one of my abductees said, the aliens insofar as we can speak of them literally, like this, are going to work within the physiological milieu of the body itself. They will not be operating with materials that would not be consistent with the body physiology. Also, this phenomenon operates at level of subtlety that is not going to yield its secrets, in my view, to the gross empirical methods of Western science. In fact, in one way that would be a paradox. Because the very, in my view, the very nature of the phenomenon is to challenge the limited consciousness of the Western empirical view. So it would be an error of logical types to think that something that’s operating at a much more advanced level of consciousness and intelligence would yield its secrets to a lower level of consciousness and intelligence. It’s a category error.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t important physical findings, and that we shouldn’t try to do the best we can in understanding them, but, but they will not have the kind of gross nature that would satisfy the scientific requirements of the Western view.
Bob Hieronimus: Yeah, it makes sense to me. I want to thank you for joining us on 21st Century Radio, Dr. Mack, and obviously we hope you’ll be able to return for an interview with myself, or my wife on her late morning show. She has a totally different audience, which I think would find your research – well, I know they would find your research very enlightening. As you know, we believe your work is enormously important, and especially the courage that you have in pursuing it at great personal cost. And that’s absolutely inspirational to the field. Obviously you’re not being paid oodles of money to do this. You obviously have to pay for some of these things yourself, is that, isn’t that correct?
John Mack: It’s not something that you would, I mean, it’s not something… People don’t get into this field for the money.
Bob Hieronimus: That’s for sure.
John Mack: …anybody that entered this area do it for that reason. It becomes… It become something that you do kind of like swimming upstream and hopefully you’ll spawn something eventually.
Bob Hieronimus: It also kind of reminds me of, I just found out that we have a mutual hero. His name is Babe Ruth. And when you study his life, he was swimming upstream to say the least, he went against all kinds of odds. And he came through. And he just told me to send you along a set of the Babe Ruth collection trading cards. It’s about 165 cards that tell the entire life of Babe Ruth. And there’s an another important writer by the name of Robert Creamer who wrote in my opinion, the definitive autobiography of Babe Ruth – not an auto bio, right, what am I saying now? Biography of Babe Ruth. We’ll send that along to you as well.
John Mack: Thank you very much.
Bob Hieronimus: Thank you all so much. And also I wish you would consider the possibility of coming on Zoh’s show in the morning. You think that’s a possibility?
John Mack: It’s a possibility, I have to see, you know, when the time is and so forth.
Bob Hieronimus: Yeah.
John Mack: Okay.
Bob Hieronimus: Well, thank you very much, John.
John Mack: Thank you, Bob.
Bob Hieronimus: You’re welcome.
John Mack: Take care.
Bob Hieronimus: Take care. Friends, the field of UFO research includes some fools and a few pioneers of great integrity. And Dr. John Mack has set some standards for research and made some important contributions in our understanding and developing some treatment for UFO abductees. When you get to the MUFON symposium at the Richmond Virginia Hyatt, make sure you attend Dr. Mack’s presentation at 10:00 AM on July the 3rd.
Friends we’re a bit behind time and it’s my fault. I just wanted to make sure that some of these questions were answered. And it’s my first time I’ve had a chance to talk with Dr. John Mack on the air. We hope he would be able to join us again.
[1] The newspaper article Bob refers to is: Huznik, Frank. 1993. “Carried Away”. USA Weekend, June 25-27, 1993, pp. 4-6.
[2] The paper given to John Mack by Stan Grof that piqued Mack’s interest in alien encounters was: Thompson, Keith. 1989. “The UFO Encounter Experience as a Crisis of Transformation”.
[3] The account of “Ed” that Dr. Mack describes is presented in chapter 3 of Abduction, titled “You will remember when you need to know”.
[4] Carl Sagan’s infamous take-down of alien encounters was published in Parade Magazine, March 7, 1993. A longer version was later published as chapter 6 of Sagan’s book, The Demon Haunted World.
Robert R. Hieronimus, Ph.D., is an acknowledged pioneer of the “New Paradigm” movement. He founded 21st Century Radio in 1988, first in Baltimore, then on over 100 stations nationwide. He and his wife Zohara Hieronimus interview leading-edge authorities about their unusual findings or opinions, and add humor and inspiration to counter sometimes discouraging news of the future.
© 1993 Hieronimus & Co.
Reprinted by kind permission.
More interviews are available from: 21stCenturyRadio.com
Related interviews available from
Hieronimus & Co. include:
1993-06-27 Bob Hieronimus with John Mack
1994-07-03 Bob Hieronimus with John Mack
1994-08-21 Bob Hieronimus with experiencers from John Mack’s book Abduction
1995-05-23 Zoh Hieronimus with John Mack
1999-12-19 Bob Hieronimus with John Mack
1999-12-22 Bob Hieronimus with John Mack
