Is alien abduction real—or a creation of Hollywood?
A few years ago, Harvard University could claim not one but two sets of researchers studying, of all things, alien abduction. Naturally—this being academia—a sharp divide separated the two camps. As chronicled by the New York Times Magazine and Psychology Today, members of the psychology department alleged that people’s memories of extraterrestrial transport and unsavory probing could be explained by normal science—i.e., that controlled experiments were able to come up with a list of terrestrial factors that added up to an “abduction experience.” Over at Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, maverick psychiatrist John Mack had interviewed abductees and concluded that their experiences belonged to a mystical realm that science couldn’t explain. Abductees’ stories had convinced him that a “universal intelligence” resides in the cosmos, as he wrote in his 1994 best seller Abduction. The dispute at Harvard was a reflection, however baroque, of a long-standing divide within psychology, one dat
