07/02/95

THE SIMPLE furnish ings in Dr John Mack's office on the third floor of the Harvard Univer sity Medical School include a gallon-sized tub of peanut butter, a portable tape-recorder and a low couch on which, not long ago, a woman lay panting, whimpering and barely able to form the words that Mack would later publish for the benefit of a resoundingly sceptical world. "They are not like us," said the woman. "They are in control. I have to surrender to them."

As a psychiatrist of international repute, Mack had already established to his own satisfaction that "Sheila" was not insane. He was equally certain that she had suffered some form of extreme trauma. On the couch, in the little room, overlooking the flowering elms and flagged footpaths of Harvard's 18th-century campus, the woman eventually related a long, detailed story of being abducted by space aliens. In retrospect, the most remarkable aspect of it was Mack's inclination to believe her.

In the next few weeks Harvard must decide what to do about John Mack. To the acute embarrassment of America's foremost university, the 64-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning academic has emerged as the godhead of an entire global underground of UFO believers.

Diplomatically summarising the mood on campus, Mack's head of department, Dr Malkah Notman, says: "People have great respect for John's other achievements. But the perception is that this is not a productive area of research." A committee of inquiry, formed to investigate his activities, is about to deliver its verdict. Already a strong whiff of burning martyr is drifting around the campus.

As it has grown in scope and profile, Mack's "alternative" work has become the virtual gospel of those who claim to know that we are not alone. They flock to him from all over the world, these "experiencers" - as they are known in UFO jargon - whose accounts of being kidnapped by extraterrestrials have, for decades, been met with either hoots of derision or the offer of a stronger prescription. On the strength of Mack's reputation, their stories have lately been catapulted from the lurid pages of America's supermarket tabloids into the meaty main fare of Psychology Today and the American Journal of Medicine.

On the couch, under Mack's piercing, scholarly gaze, they tell tales so bizarre and impossible that, in taking them seriously, Mack seems to be chancing not so much their credibility as his own. "I worry about John," says Paul McHugh, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. "He is a brilliant man who is easily persuaded of things, but this time he has lost it."

Some of Mack's subjects claim to have been abducted regularly since childhood, forced to undergo medical experiments aboard spaceships, to have visited other galaxies and spawned alien children. They tell of being floated from their beds on beams of light, of having tracking devices inserted into their bodies, and of being given apocalyptic insights into the final fate of the world. Some believe that the aliens are preparing to take over the world, others that they are working for its salvation. All are convinced that their experiences are entirely real.

In Mack's professional opinion, very few of these people are mad. Nor are they an easily dismissible bunch of Walter Mittys and compulsive attention- seekers. The majority, he suggests, are ordinary people, with ordinary jobs and ordinary lives in whose scalded consciousnesses dwells a strange and terrible mystery.

Disciplinary hearings are extremely rare at America's elite universities. When they do occur, the charges almost invariably relate to such conventional acts of misconduct as plagiarism, drunkenness or sexual harassment. "The Mack case is quite different. Essentially, it is a dispute over ideas - it is about what he has written," said Jonathan Knight, the AAUP's associate secretary. "One doesn't encounter this sort of thing very often in American higher education.'

So why has Harvard - the mother lode of the East Coast liberal establishment - taken such an aggressive line against Mack? The man heading the inquiry, Arnold Relman, a fellow professor and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, last week refused to comment, but in an earlier statement the university cited an obligation to "review" Mack's methods of research for possible abuses of procedure.

In particular, it wants to examine claims that he has "planted" abduction memories on patients suffering from otherwise routine psychological disorders. One former subject gave a particularly damaging assessment of Mack's investigative techniques to Newsweek magazine earlier this year - alleging that he had bullied and manipulated her into accepting the probability of abduction.

Since starting his research five years ago, Mack has studied the cases of more than 100 abduction victims. As he painstakingly points out, most come across as regular, neighbourhood types - such as "Jerry", a 32-year-old Massachusetts clerical worker, who believes she has been kidnapped more than 50 times since she was a toddler. Now married, with three children of her own, Jerry says she knows when the terror is about to begin from a ringing in her ears and a strange crackling energy that straightens her hair. "I am awakened by a tap," she says. "I feel paralysed but awake. They invade you entirely. Then they float you out."

Like many "experiencers", Jerry claims the aliens have conducted experiments on her reproductive organs; eggs were removed from her womb, she believes, and embryos implanted. Jerry recalls that when she was 27 the aliens took her aboard a spaceship and showed her two little girls, "very angelic, with pale skin, wispy hair and huge blue eyes. They said to me: 'You are our mother.' After embracing them, I felt all the usual motherly instincts."

Born into a high-achieving, New York Jewish family, Mack has blazed a dazzling trail through Harvard, first as a student, graduating cum laude, then as a member of faculty, and co-founder of the university's school of psychiatry. He has lectured worldwide, and published several books, most notably a 1977 biography of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Disorder, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Several critics hailed it as one of the finest psychological personality studies of the 20th century. But it did not sell nearly as well as his book about UFOs.

NOW Mack has become rich and famous beyond the dreams of the average, chalky-fingered university professor. And that, he believes, is the real reason why he is the first Harvard professor of modern times to be effectively put on trial.

Tall, bony, with an unnervingly intense gaze, Mack is the subject of considerable gossip and innuendo on the Harvard cocktail-party circuit. There have been whispered stories about the real reasons for his estrangement from his wife, Sally, and widely circulated accounts of his supposedly eccentric behaviour at social gatherings. "Some people support me, and some think I'm outrageous," admitted Mack. "I won't deny the whole thing has been painful."

It was a chance meeting with the New York artist Budd Hopkins, a leading figure in American UFO circles, that first triggered Mack's interest in abduction theory. Hopkins has spent years collecting and analysing accounts of extra-terrestrial activity. "Nothing in my 40 years as a psychiatrist prepared me for what Budd had to say," recalled Mack, who would later dedicate his book to him.

Whatever the ultimate worth of his conclusions, Mack has provided the world with a useful guide to alien abduction techniques. From his case studies, it appears that virtually all victims are taken from their beds or motor vehicles - although one woman tells of being snatched from a snowmobile. The aliens' approach is usually indicated by electrical activity - a TV set suddenly coming on, interference on a car radio. Victims often report seeing an intense blue or white light and hearing a rhythmic humming noise. By way of corroborative evidence, Hack says claims of abduction are frequently accompanied by independent reports of UFO activity in the same area.

Most of the victims recall being "floated" on some kind of light beam to the alien craft. Under hypnosis they relive the panic of seeing their homes or vehicles slowly vanishing beneath them. Some can recite, verbatim, entire conversations that took place with their captors. For reasons that remain unclear even to Mack, very few can remember the circumstances of their return to earth.

Who are these people? Should we be listening to them? Joe, a 34-year-old psychotherapist, contacted Mack in 1992 hoping to discuss what he called, in his letter, "a variety of ET experiences going back to early childhood". One of eight children, Joe had been raised in the backwoods of Maine, with a healthy respect for nature and the big outdoors.

An alternative form of help is offered by a thoroughly sceptical, and distinctly earth-rooted, scientific establishment. Among mainstream psychiatrists, the overwhelming consensus is that the UFO phenomenon is the result of what Ronald Siegal, University of California researcher, calls "the normal hallucinatory powers of the human brain".

Mack's numerous detractors accuse him of peddling bad dreams as good science, of passing off old lore as new research and of failing to make a distinction between sanity and the absence of mental disorder. They accuse him of manipulating his subjects' "memories" to fit his predispositions, and of ducking some of the most elementary questions of the whole UFO debate.

ONE of Mack's most outspoken critics is the prominent University of California psychologist Richard Ofshe. "If there's a certain brilliance in backing the trendiest horses available, then Mack has it," said Ofshe. "He has made a stellar, absolutely spectacular, world-class series of mistakes."

If the aliens are really out there, why are their spaceships landing in suburban back gardens in Cleveland and not on the lawn of the White House? How come Herbert from Houston is selected for study and not the Duke of Edinburgh? What makes the aliens so shy of revealing their obviously superior capability? And if they are so capable, why have they been performing exactly the same experiments for decades?

According to most specialists, the consistency of the accounts that Mack found so striking can be simply explained by the popular cultural portrayal of aliens as leathery beings with big heads - a la ET - and exposure to the traditional comic-book images of flying saucers. Those who claim never to have encountered such images are merely resistant to the idea of having done so - rather in the way that people deny being influenced by advertising.

A 1993 Canadian study of 49 experiencers broadly confirmed Mack's view that such people are unlikely to be suffering from mental disorders to any clinically significant degree. What did set them apart was a strong predisposition "to believe in UFOs and the existence of alien life forms". In other words, the material was already in their heads.

The condition that makes alien abduction appear real is called "sleep paralysis", a comparatively rare phenomenon which may affect up to four per cent of people at some time in their lives. The senses are aware and functioning, but the controlling mechanism of the brain is still asleep. The effects can be terrifying and memorable. Sufferers have the sensation that their dreams are really happening. If ideas of UFOs and aliens are already deep in the psyche, sleep paralysis is almost guaranteed to bring them out.

"It's essentially a dream experience, made sufficiently realistic as to be logged in the brain as authentic memory," said Seigal. "It has been known about since antiquity. In German folklore the condition was represented by an old woman, known as the Mare, who sat on the sleeper's chest. It gives us the origin of the word "nightmare".

Will Harvard's bad dream end with the grounding of Mack's UFOs? Even without the contribution of the space aliens, this has been an annus horribilis for America's most illustrious university. A fatal helicopter crash destroyed its historic boat sheds; the head of the Singapore police force was mugged on campus; and a female student hacked her room-mate to death with a 10-inch carving knife. "It's been very tough," said the university's chief spokesman, Joe Wrinn, "and I am very, very tired."

But this is not the time to sleep. Sleep is when they come for you.