When John Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens in 1994, he was already one of the most respected figures in American psychiatry: a Harvard Medical School professor, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of T.E. Lawrence, and a founder of Harvard’s psychiatry department’s community mental health program. The publication of Abduction threatened all of that. It also may have been the most important thing he ever did.

Beginning in 1990, Mack began interviewing people who reported being taken by non-human entities. His initial expectation was that these individuals would show signs of psychopathology — delusional thinking, fantasy-prone personalities, histories of trauma that could explain the imagery. What he found, consistently, was the opposite: people who were psychologically healthy, who had no prior involvement in UFO culture, and who described experiences with a specificity and consistency that he found clinically impossible to dismiss as imagination or delusion.

Over four years he personally interviewed more than two hundred individuals. He conducted hypnotic regression sessions with sixty of them in depth, gathering accounts of abduction, medical examination, interaction with entities, and in many cases transformative after-effects — heightened environmental concern, changed relationships to mortality, a persistent sense of having been contacted by something genuinely non-human. The accounts matched not only each other but dozens of reports documented by other researchers worldwide.

Harvard launched a formal inquiry into whether Mack had violated professional standards — an action essentially without precedent in the university’s history. After fourteen months, the committee concluded that Mack had the academic right to conduct the research and to reach the conclusions he had reached. The inquiry itself became, for many observers, as significant as the book it investigated: evidence that the establishment understood, on some level, just how seriously Mack’s work challenged the conventional picture of reality.