The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack

Blumenthal (Miracle at Sing Sing), a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, has written a compelling biography of Dr. John E. Mack (1929–2004), the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who provided mental health care in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Mack’s interests in alien abductions and alternate realities set him apart from his colleagues, but his defiance of scientific expectation in giving credibility to alien abductees’ accounts was risky for an academic and a scientist. The story begins in June 1992 at a secretive Alien Discussions conference held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and proceeds to follow Dr. Mack on his mission to discover whether we have been misunderstanding the basic concept of reality all along. This well-researched account uses Mack’s personal journals, archives, and notes, along with interviews of close friends and family members, to capture the full picture of Mack’s life and genius.