From: | skindrud@rosebud.berkeley.edu |
Title: | SHOW SENDS HARVARD'S UFO PROF INTO ORBIT |
Source: | Boston Herald |
Date: | Feburary 27, 1996 |
legal battle after a TV show airs tonight purportedly debunking the work
of a Harvard professor immersed in the culture of the extraterrestrial.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack, a longtime believer and
investigator of alien abduction claims, calls the 8 p.m. "Nova" broadcast on
WGBH an "unconscionable" and "terribly biased" attempt to examine stories of
hijacked humans in general and his work in particular.
The Boston Herald, February 27, 1996 Tuesday
"The effect of this program is to try to discourage anybody from taking the
reality of this phenomenon seriously," Mack said yesterday. "They try to
dismiss it as hallucinations or distorted thinking or people being led by
hypnotists,
and in my view, having worked in this field, that is patently false.
"Alien abduction is not something that yields its secrets to conventional
explanations."
Particularly galling to Mack - and what might trigger a defamation suit,
according to his lawyer, Eric MacLeish - is Nova's use of Donna Bassett, a
free-lance writer who trashes Mack's work in front of Bassett, dismissed by Mack and his lawyer as a "wacko" who latches on to a
new cause every few years, says she went undercover into Mack's alien
abduction subculture and paints the doctor's methods as fraudulent.
Mack has demanded that Nova cut out a four-minute interview with Bassett, a
demand that a Nova producer yesterday said had been denied.
Bassett, from her home in North Carolina, last night defended herself
against Mack's attacks but said she wouldn't let them get under her skin.
The Boston Herald, February 27, 1996 Tuesday
"Being called a wacko by the Mackies is like being called a liberal by Pat
Buchanan," she said.
Denise DiIanni, the producer of the hour-long Nova film, also mounted a
vigorous defense of tonight's show, calling it a "thoughtful and considerate
treatment of a complicated subject."
"We felt it was our job, however unpopular, to report whatever science said
about the alien abduction phenomenon," she said.
And science, at least in the person of acclaimed astronomer and biologist
Carl Sagan, dismisses alien abduction and the occasional abduction-and-rape
scenario as hallucination or other scientifically explainable phenomena.
In a seven-page letter to the Boston-based television show, Mack railed
against such thinking, likening alien abductees and investigators to the early
pioneers of science.
"We are facing a problem like that faced by the people of the fifteenth
century," he wrote. "In that day, many people could not believe the world was
round because common knowledge dictated that people would fall off any round
object."