Psychiatrist Dies at 74. Dr. Mack was killed when struck by a car apparently driven by a drunk driver, while in London to speak at a conference. He was a founder of the psychiatry department at the Cambridge Hospital where I trained and was one of my mentors, with whom I collaborated on work on the psychological consequences of the nuclear threat. Mack attracted heaps of scorn (and an unsuccessful move to censure him at the Harvard Medical School, which ended up reaffirming him) for his final decades’ focus on people claiming to have been victims of alien abduction. His sophisticated take on the issue was widely misjudged and ridiculed as credulity, since he was often in the company of credulous abduction adherents. But the New York Times obituary has a more accurate bead on the context and the significance of this work:

“He was drawn to psychoanalytic analysis of the misunderstood or vulnerable, including children contemplating suicide, teenagers troubled by the threat of nuclear war and finally, people plagued by what they believed to be recurrent alien encounters.

In the 1990’s, Dr. Mack studied dozens of people who said they had had such contact with aliens, culminating in his book “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens” in 1994. In it, he focused less on whether aliens were real than on the spiritual effects of perceived encounters, arguing that “the abduction phenomenon has important philosophical, spiritual and social implications” for everyone. “