Voice of Reason

This BBC profile of the late Harvard physician John Mack is extraordinary. It begins:

Not many scientists are prepared to take tales of alien abduction seriously, but John Mack, a Harvard professor who was killed in a road accident in north London last year, did. Ten years on from a row which nearly lost him his job, hundreds of people who claim they were abducted still revere him.

This type of story is an interesting counter-example to the notion (which I have never argued and do not believe) that the BBC is politically biased. The inability to discriminate among the claims of self-interested lobbies is a common BBC failing across subjects, not confined to politics. In this case, an extraordinary claim is presented without even a modicum of scepticism, Dr Mack is depicted as an embattled fighter against hidebound orthodoxies and academic prejudice, and his cause is imbued with a romantic - almost messianic - quality. The piece concludes:

Mack's work lives on with an institute which now bears his name; the hundreds of people who count themselves in "the experiencer community" still hold him in particular affection. His search for an expanded notion of reality, which allows for experiences that might not fit traditional perceptions and worldviews, is one they, at least, will be hoping continues.

If there is one thing you can say with certainty about Mack's theories of widespread alien abduction it is that they do not offer "an expanded notion of reality". As the science writer James Gleick noted in a fine review of Mack's preposterous book in The New Republic over a decade ago:

Mack never manages to discuss the world's most widely shown piece of popular entertainment on his subject, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though surely many, if not all, of his patients saw Steven Spielberg's lovable little bug-eyed aliens long before they came up with their own memories of virtually identical aliens. In fact Mack's whole new mood about abductions isn't new at all--it's all there in Close Encounters: the Eastern mysticism, the spiritual save-the-planet denouement. (Remember the closing sound-track of the original version? "When you wish upon a star,/Makes no difference who you are,/Anything your heart desires will come . . . to . . . you.")

Gleick also alighted on the single most frightening aspect of Mack's theoretical edifice - not the alien probing human bodies with needles and so on, but this:

In a chilling aside, Mack writes that Ed and his wife, "Lynn," have had "a number of fertility problems, which may or may not be abduction-related, including three or four spontaneous terminations of Lynn's pregnancies." It's a reminder: This man is practicing medicine. He is telling patients that their miscarriages may be due to imaginary aliens. Why do the medical licensing boards permit this?

It's often forgotten, but before he became known for this theories on the reality of alien abductions, Mack was an active and very prominent anti-nuclear campaigner. With no training or expertise in international politics, Mack wrote with world-weariness of the need "in the sphere of international relations .... [for] what might be called political maturation". Maturity in this sense was defined as agreeing with Mack's political opinions:

There is no place for dominance, greed, and the power to control in addressing these new global challenges. But self-restraint and renunciation of force, combined with the exercise of that power which connects us with the Earth and is most fully expressed in our love for one another, can bring us back from the abyss.

The most obvious manifestation of "dominance, greed and the power to control" in the international order at the time of writing was the Communist domination of Eastern Europe. A few months later that system collapsed, to the immense benefit of everyone living under or menaced by it. This outcome was secured not, as it happens, by the exercise of that power which connects us to the Earth, but by a determination to defend our liberties through the collective security provided by the Nato alliance.

At the time, I was dismissive of Mack's political views, but his later preoccupations make them - I now see - mainstream and unexceptionable by comparison.