Original subtitles

-It was September 1st, 1969,

when this was a site of a very famous UFO encounter.

There were so many people that saw it,

and people reported it in different parts

of the Berkshires,

not just Great Barrington.

-It was Labor Day weekend.

My dad and mom picked my sister and I up.

I was 12, she was 14.

And we drove to Lake Mansfield.

All of a sudden, there was this light, huge,

huge light coming over, and my dad was like,

“holy (bleep)!”

[Tom Warner] I was 10 years old.

I was right about here and all of a sudden my hands

just jerked back.

And I looked up and I was on the UFO just like that.

[Melanie Kirchdorfer] I remember being on this table.

And on that table, there was like a bright

orange metallic light.

And I don’t know what they did to me,

but after that I remember being in a room

with all these children.

[Tom Warner] I saw a fair amount of kids on that UFO.

The first two girls were like,

they were really, one was much more hysterical

than the other.

And so when she screamed,

I looked this way,

and then I got an alien touch my shoulder.

And the guy with telepathy said,

“We’re done now.”

The beam went off. I rolled to my right.

I stood up, watched the UFO.

And it slowly went away.

It was gone.

[Melanie Kirchdorfer] It had to have been 5:30

in the morning and I woke up on the beach

at Lake Mansfield.

My parents weren't there.

My sister wasn't there. My brother wasn't there.

And I was all curled up with really horrible,

horrible stomach pains.

And I had to walk home alone.

And when I got home, they were all sound asleep.

And I crawled in bed with my sister.

And it was never talked about in my family.

[Tom Warner] I don't remember how I woke up.

I just remember standing the next morning

in the bathroom and my brother,

Bo, who was out there, he goes, “Was it scary?”

And I just remember saying, “Yeah.”

And he said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

I said, “No.”

Took me many years to process it.

A lot of people did see it.

I kept wondering how many others experienced what I did.

[Melanie Kirchdorfer] There were so many people that

saw the UFO.

People called the radio stations.

-To have that many witnesses to the UFO

that night and that many witnesses actually involved

with a close encounter is very unusual.

-Why would there be that many people that this

is happening to?

[Tom Warner] It’s something you just don’t want to talk about.

Because who’d believe you?

[♪ theme music playing]

-We get reports every night.

-I don't know what the hell it is.

-Rotating right around it.

[♪ theme music playing]

[Leslie Kean] When we look at what it means today for

scientists to take on the study of UAP,

the focus has been on the hardcore, you know,

boots on the ground,

physical data about these objects in the sky.

But there's a whole range of ways that these close

encounters seem to affect people.

And the people who are impacted like this have been

really marginalized from the dialogue,

and nobody really knows what is going on with them.

But the experiencers themselves know that

something profound has happened.

The challenge is how to bring this into a more

respectable environment and to engage

scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, analysts,

brain scientists, medical doctors to try to find

ways to study their experiences and what

they might mean.

-You’re about to meet people who say they’ve

been abducted by aliens.

Virtually nobody believes them but the

exception is significant.

He’s a professor at the Harvard Medical School.

-John Mack was a renowned Harvard psychiatrist who got

very interested in this phenomenon of

alien abduction experiences.

-After working with many of them,

Mack came to believe that psychiatry could not explain

away their stories.

-I would never say that,

“Yes there are aliens taking people.”

I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon

here that I can't account for in any other way.

[Ralph Blumenthal] He came to believe it was a

legitimate subject of inquiry.

And he was not afraid of the risk to his reputation.

-Dr. John Mack.

(Applause)

-John invited me to give a talk in his research group for

extraordinary experiences here in Cambridge.

And I thought, wow,

we ought to study the alien abductees,

you know, because I was convinced that these

people are mistaken.

They were not kidnapped by aliens.

So we did psychiatric diagnostic assessments and

John and I did certainly agree on a couple

of different things.

First of all, that these people are not lying.

They're not making these things up.

They're being sincere,

and they're also not psychotic.

So, one might wonder why do these

stories keep surfacing?

-I've had a lifelong interest in non-ordinary experiences or

anomalous experiences of consciousness.

And when I discovered John Mack's work,

I said to myself,

how does a Harvard psychiatrist who also has

won a Pulitzer Prize,

how does an individual like this come to deeply

question and believe that something interesting

is going on?

And so as a therapist, I started working with

experiencers, running groups,

because their earnestness was intriguing to me.

The majority of them,

after they've had a close encounter with a UFO,

they're very, very ashamed and afraid to

come out with what they've gone through.

They’re afraid of being publicly humiliated or they

don't want this to be true.

So the intention behind putting this group together is to

provide community, support,

to make sense of what's happened with them.

-I know in the past, people, you know,

skeptics have said as far as my case is concerned

“Oh, she just dreamed it.”

Because there were a lot of times,

and you'll see a lot of video of me where I'll say,

“I've always just called it a dream,”

because I have to live here and I have to be sane

because I have children who depended on me, you know?

-I think you’re very brave. I've avoided it.

I pushed it all away for years and years.

[Simon Bresler] Tell us why you pushed it away, Melanie.

-Because I was told I was crazy.

Anytime I would talk about it,

I was told it's all in your head.

You're crazy. Do not talk about this ever.

[Ricki Stern] When you showed up in the morning

after having been out all night,

what were your parents saying?

-They just said, “You saw a shooting star.

Don’t be ridiculous.

We’re not gonna talk about this anymore.

Don’t discuss it.”

And then one day, my mom, like three years ago,

called me up and said,

you need to go to the Historical Society and tell

them what happened.

And I said,

“What do you mean, tell them what happened?”

And she said,

“Oh, about the UFO sighting at Lake Mansfield.”

And I said, “You told me that that was all in my head,

that that never happened.”

And she goes, “Oh, no, that really did happen.

We just didn't want you to talk about it.”

Talk about confusing?

People think it's a joke.

You have no idea how traumatic something like this is.

[Simon Bresler] Certain critics of this phenomenon have said

that it could be the result of psychosis.

They could suffer from hallucination,

from schizophrenia, from proneness to fantasy.

[Ralph Blumenthal] The first reaction of many people is,

well, they're looking for publicity.

But if anything, the people who came to John,

they were deeply ashamed and embarrassed.

-This is not a club people anybody wants to belong to.

This is not something people do because they want publicity.

It's very difficult to...

-I’d go to the grocery store and people would make fun of me.

I tried to go to church,

and the pastor asked me not to come.

-You know you make it so hard for people to

come forward and I feel like every one of us

has a little piece of the puzzle and there’s

no way you’re gonna get it assembled if you don’t

at least keep an open mind.

[Leslie Kean] A lot of the reason you see abduction

encounters covered by daytime television shows is

because there was really nowhere else for anyone to

go to get the word out.

I mean, the academic community was not touching

this with a ten-foot pole.

But it was fascinating to the general public.

So the natural place to put it out there

was through television.

And that's where it ended up a lot of the time.

-You know, there's this circular problem, right?

That nobody can take the phenomenon seriously,

because science and academia hasn't taken it seriously.

But scientists and academics can't take it seriously because

the establishment doesn't take it seriously.

You know, so at what point do we interrupt that cycle?

-I came to in my bedroom one night and I was just

overwhelmed by this vibration.

-I'm kind of following it as I go out into my driveway and

it disappears and reappears like 1,000 feet away.

-Whatever I had contact with, this entity,

I never saw the mouth move,

but yet they talked to me or I heard them

in some way.

[Simon Bresler] The term “experiencer” means so many

different things to so many different people.

And people have had a variety of different

types of experiences.

So the idea would be to have some clarity around

what we mean when we say an experiencer.

-My name is Courtney.

My first experiences were what I would call psychic,

and they were through dream states.

I would hear the emergency broadcasting system.

And I would feel this terrible fear that there

was something happening.

It would happen over and over and over.

I would wake up from some of these profound epic

dreams and I would be paralyzed.

There is a lucidity to it that feels extraordinary because of

the level of awareness.

And I always had fear about going to sleep that

I was going to have this nightmare-type dream,

but I never had any other kind of nightmares.

No night terrors, nothing like that.

-Many people awaken from a nightmare with

profound emotional force,

that doesn’t mean that the nightmare is true,

it means that something went on inside our head.

-We did psychiatric interviews.

And I'd ask the question, well, how did this all begin?

And they would say things like I was asleep

at night at home,

and shortly before dawn,

I woke up, and I couldn’t move.

I was totally paralyzed.

I think what they're describing largely were

sleep paralysis episodes.

-Sleep Paralysis has been with us forever...

...and it’s indicative of the experience of waking up

and you’re in a kind of semi-conscious state,

still dreaming but not being able to move a muscle.

I'm Dr. David Forest and I'm a clinical professor of

psychiatry at Columbia.

When you first fall asleep, you fall deeply into sleep.

Which is almost a dreamless sleep.

And then after a while,

you rise up to almost the level of conscious experience.

And in that period you dream.

Your eyes move,

but all the rest of your muscles are paralyzed.

Sleep paralysis is where you wake up but you are still

paralyzed and that can be a very frightening thing.

If you're paralyzed and you can't move or you feel

restrained in your chest,

that could easily be figured into a creature

sitting on your chest.

Because the mind fills things in.

That’s why sleep paralysis is likely the

cause of a lot of imagined phenomena,

like alien abductions.

[Simon Bresler] There are some prosaic explanations

for some of the abduction cases,

and they certainly could be true,

but if someone says,

“Well, this is really a sleep paralytic experience,”

I would say abductions don't only happen at night.

[Richard McNally] Occasionally, you hear these reports of

people who are driving a lonely road,

and suddenly they say they've encountered aliens,

but I don’t know.

I didn’t see that so I honestly don't know.

I don't know what to make of those accounts.

[Simon Bresler] These experiences happen to people

during the day.

Sometimes people are driving.

Sometimes people are walking in the woods.

And it happens with multiple people sometimes

at the same time.

-So I run outside and I look up and I saw

a hexagonal craft.

It was like a hexagon with rounded edges and

a light fixture in the center.

And then I see that there's three different crafts that are

just like it with the lights going around.

I told my family that,

you know, you got to come outside.

And they came outside and they were able to witness

this too for almost 25 minutes.

-We were on a journey to take my daughter to college

and three lights came down and hovered over the truck.

And the lights are pacing us.

Then one light came down really low and hovered over

the truck and then it split into two and we didn't know

what was happening.

-Oh. Oh no.

[John Mack] Wait what just happened?

You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay.

-I saw them.

[John Mack] You saw them?

-Yes.

-When John Mack took on experiencers,

it was a very culturally powerful thing because here was

a major psychiatrist who was affirming the reality

of what these people were experiencing.

[John Mack] What has happened to these people is

what they say has happened to them.

Even though I fully recognize that that’s not

possible in the worldview in which they and I were raised.

[Ralph Blumenthal] In the early 90s,

a very high-level physics professor at MIT

named David Pritchard decided to call a conference.

And he recruited to this conference a lot of very

eminent scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists,

including John Mack.

And they all came there to examine the evidence.

Because science is not an enemy of this subject.

Science is and should be an ally in trying to figure out

what this experience is.

[Simon Bresler] And so John Mack was talking about this publicly.

The head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department is going

on Oprah talking about people who claim to have

been abducted by aliens.

-Why are we so goofy about this?

Why do we treat people like they're crazy and

humiliate them if they are experiencing

some other entity,

some other intelligence that's coming across?

Why is everybody...

-John says to me,

“Well, Rich, clearly something has happened.

Look at the responses here.”

And when I tried to give him an alternative account,

he says, well, I was sort of trapped in

kind of an empirical worldview that misses

a lot of things.

-In our kind of antiquated, western, I’m here,

you’re there, physical notions,

then it doesn’t exist at all.

Is that what you’re saying?

-John had such intellectual courage in what he was doing,

he was a bit of a maverick in this way.

He didn't try to make this narrative fit within the

boundaries of the dominant Western worldview,

where we understand the world as a purely

physical construct.

And that’s part of what got him in trouble

with Harvard University.

[reporter] Concerned by mounting scientific criticism of

John Mack and his research,

Harvard University launched a

lengthy internal review.

[Karin Austin] When Harvard’s name started ending up in

the newspapers and in magazine articles associated

with one of their professors talking about aliens,

they called him to task for it and ended up

investigating him in an unprecedented fashion.

[Arnold Relman] We’ve been constituted by the dean

as an ad hoc Committee,

so we can gather information.

There’s been some critical comment

of the involvement of a member of the Harvard faculty

in this kind of activity

and the dean thought that it would be prudent

to find out the facts.

And then the dean will decide what, if anything,

ought to follow from that.

-I was told this was an inquiry that could end up

in a Harvard Medical School faculty member’s

tenure being revoked.

But Harvard had never removed the tenure of a

faculty member ever.

My name's Eric MacLeish and I've been a lawyer for

a long time.

My expertise is not involving UFOs.

But I looked at this as an academic freedom case,

you know, this is pretty kooky,

but he's entitled to write about it.

-I mean, there's nothing more provocative a question

as to whether we were alone in the universe.

And why, why be shy about looking into that if people say

they have been contacted by these beings and

they've had the following experiences,

which we cannot explain?

[Richard McNally] Some people were concerned that

Harvard Medical School was going to tell him that

certain things should be out of bounds for

legitimate scientific inquiry.

I don't think that's the case at all.

I think that they were trying to suggest to him that the

methods he was using are likely not to

produce accurate results.

[Eric Macleish] The Committee was there to look at how

he was treating patients.

There was criticism of John because he did not

you know immediately label these people as psychotic.

[Allan M. Brandt] Obviously one of the concerns

here would be that

some underlying psychological condition

could be missed, to which

some of these patients might have succumbed to

traditional therapeutic approaches.

[John Mack] There's a fair amount of that has happened.

I mean, were people have been to more traditional therapists

they get worse or it doesn’t help them.

[Eric Macleish] So, the case was really about

accusing John essentially of malpractice by listening

to these people.

[Karin Austin] They said to him,

John if you had just said that this is some new pathology,

you know, and that we didn’t have to change our

understanding of reality, you would have been just fine.

You’re in this situation right now because you’re telling us

that our understanding of reality is incomplete.

But people are having, you know, profound experiences

all the time.

[John Mack] Did you see the eyes?

What did they look like?

-They were, um, going like that.

[Simon Bresler] You have people who have been talking to

the public saying,

we’ve had encounters with non-human intelligence and

they’re deeply disturbing and deeply transformational.

-I thought I was losing my mind.

I-I just, I couldn't believe it.

You don't walk away from a UFO experience as

the same person ultimately.

[Simon Bresler] So we have two choices here.

We can say that there's some mass hallucination going on

cross-culturally and all across the world or we can sort of

question our ontology and ontology is what we know

to be true.

[interviewer] How is it possible?

-Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Either we try to shrink the phenomenon into something

where, as far as I can tell, it won’t fit,

or we’re gonna have to stretch our notions

of the possible.

-We take for granted that the world operates

a certain way.

And in an ideal world,

if we were going to learn that the world

operates differently, then you want some time

to think about that.

We want time to metabolize it.

But in these interactions with these

non-human intelligences, there is no time.

There's no cushion because we're not in control of it.

-So they undergo what I call ontological shock

which means everything they thought was real is

sort of shattered by this.

-Maybe something did happen to these people,

but there's no explanation for where these craft or

beings might be coming from that are kidnapping them,

abducting them, probing them.

-Science is never going to be happy until they can

be there with cameras, with recorders, etcetera.

-An experiencer is somebody who claims an interaction,

let's say an abduction.

What I don't have are the psychiatric bonafides to

interpret whether or not they have psychological issues.

But if there is a material reason in their brains that

might help explain why they saw what they saw,

I can do that.

[reporter] Professor Garry Nolan,

he’s one of the most reputable immunologists on the planet.

He’s very fast becoming one of the public faces

of UAP commentary.

[Leslie Kean] So Garry Nolan,

has taken an interest in studying experiencers,

and he's done that through looking at brain scans of

a significant number of people.

He’s trying to see if there's some kind of

biological manifestation within the brains of people

that have had experiences.

[Garry Nolan] Around 2012, these two gentlemen from the

government showed up,

and they said they wanted to talk to me about

the health consequences of individuals who'd

claimed certain injuries.

These images here are two different brain scans,

one from a normal individual and one from an individual who

had claimed some kind of injury post a UFO experience.

So there's nobody who could look at these two brain scans

and not see that one of them has a problem.

And the second one here on the right is the one that

has the problem.

You can see the clear areas of dead tissue

throughout the brain.

Now what caused it is still yet to be determined.

[Garry Nolan] This was the kind of data that was shown to me

when the CIA came to me and that was what

convinced me that at least what was being shown

to me was real in terms of damage to these individuals.

And so obviously an interest of mine would be

collecting enough so-called experiencers to see if they

have a common brain structure.

So we have taken brain MRIs of many individuals now.

We've applied artificial intelligence programs to look

at the neural conductivity maps and we already know

of one difference with so-called experiencers.

And what we noticed here were these,

you can kind of see these interlacing fingers between

these two regions of the brain here,

the head of the caudate and the putamen,

that's in the basal ganglia.

You have one on each side of your brain.

There's a closeup of the area and these connectivities

across the region are really not supposed to be there.

In fact, in a normal individual,

they're only in here.

This is more circuitry per unit millimeter connecting

areas of the brain that normally aren't connected,

which means it's an ability, or a dysfunction even,

that the majority of people don't have.

You only find it in about one in 100 to one in 200 people.

But in our cohort, it was present in more than 50%.

And so let's think about this area of the brain and

what it does.

It is an information-gathering area that listens

to all sensory input.

That means sight, sound, feeling, emotions.

In the past, they were largely understood to be

associated with motor function.

But then as people began to think a

little bit more about that,

you realize that motor function requires awareness

of your environment.

You can't move your arm without knowing that you're

going to bump into something.

But then it also requires knowledge of the environment

in the future and where you just were.

This area of the brain is the one that lights up when

a chess champion makes an amazing decision.

They come up with the move that is unexpected.

And what that tells you is that an area that accomplishes

not only goal planning,

but the intuitive leap is the area of the brain that

seems to be overdeveloped in individuals who have

these UFO experiences.

So if there is such an ability,

these people claim telepathic interactions,

where is it going to happen?

It's going to happen in those sensory apparatus.

I don't want to say that anybody with a UFO experience

has this or that UFO experiences caused this.

This is a correlation,

not a causation in any direction.

-Was I born with the ability to comprehend them in

this way or did they do something to

me to facilitate that?

-What I didn't expect was a lot of the cognitive

things that happened afterwards that were

just completely profound.

Telepathic experiences, precognitions.

-It’s changed my life so much, you know.

I didn't used to be a very spiritual person.

Now I am.

It's completely, you know, transformed my reality.

-An important part of the UFO mystery is the effects

it has on the lives of the witnesses.

If you're not looking at that,

you're missing an important piece of the puzzle.

Is this a real phenomenon?

Yes.

Is it a 100% physical phenomenon?

Not all the time,

but that doesn't mean that it isn't real.

My name is Kimberly Engels.

I'm a philosophy professor.

I'm also the Director of Research and Development

at the John E. Mack Institute.

Growing up, I always had a fascination with UFO stories,

primarily because the witnesses were so sincere.

As I worked through John Mack’s work,

I started to see the patterns of individuals expressing that

these experiences had led to profound changes

in their values and in their worldview.

And I realized, huh, there's something here.

And so that's why I decided to conduct a formal

human subjects study on the matter.

Okay, when you say “speak,” did you hear a voice?

-I heard an audible voice.

-But its mouth wasn’t moving? -Its mouth was not moving.

And I was like, this just can't be happening.

This can't be real.

And I, yet I couldn't snap out of it.

-Of the fifteen people that I interviewed for the study,

some of them were very adamant that what occurred to

them was as real as me sitting in this room

speaking to you.

And others were a little bit more unsure.

They said it wasn't a dream,

but it kind of seemed to take place in an

altered sense of reality.

But even if it did take place in some type of

altered sense of reality,

that doesn't mean it wasn't a real encounter.

We always have to ask the question when you say,

is this a real experience?

What do we mean by the word real?

In the dominant worldview,

to be real is to be physical and to have some type

of physical evidence.

And I want to emphasize that some of these encounters

did have physical evidence.

-My experiences reached a point where I no longer

looked at them as dreams,

but as something else when I received some

physical markings on the back of my left leg on my calf.

This is the photo I took the second that I saw it.

-Wow.

[Leslie Kean] Over the years we've collected data on

physical marks on people's bodies.

-Is that what that is right there?

-That’s what this is. Right here.

[Leslie Kean] And some of them look alike from case to

case in different locations over different time periods.

And they can't explain how they got them,

but they know that they didn't have them

before the encounter.

And then right after the encounter,

they do have them.

And one of the examples of this would be

the scoop marks.

And what was interesting about them was that there

was never any blood associated with them.

It was like this clean scoop.

And these things were seen on people’s bodies from

all over the world.

-I had a dream one night and I woke up and I found

this little thing in my arm.

Now I have no idea what this is.

[Richard McNally] So a lot of these people will say,

"Why, I think I've been abducted by aliens because

I've got these certain marks from probings or implants,"

or God only knows what,

but those things could come from all

sorts of encounters.

And there's usually a terrestrial

explanation for them.

-It looks like it could be a mole...

-On the inside?

[John Mack] If somebody has a cut or a scoop mark

and a dermatologist sees that, he'd say,

"Well, I can’t prove that that was done by an alien.

They’ll say, "Yes there’s a scoop mark there.

Yes there’s a cut there. Yes I feel a nodule. But...

that by itself isn’t going to validate that this was done

from these experiences.

I am hoping that there’s enough substance here that

some people will be encouraged to look further into it.

-My name is Jim Segala.

I did a lot of research into delivering radiation treatments

for cancer patients.

That got me started analyzing different aspects of how people

get hurt in situations where there might be

spurious radiation in the environment.

My specialty catered itself very nicely to looking at the

strange phenomena.

So these are just a few pictures of injuries that have

happened to people that have seen UFOs and then the

following day or two,

they would develop rashes on their skin that

they couldn’t explain and then they would go

to the doctor,

the doctor can't explain it either.

-I was a mechanical engineer for almost 25 years.

Decided to go back to school and get a degree in

physics and become a scientist.

I think what really drove me there is really my excitement

about understanding some of the things that we

then described as science fiction and turn that

science fiction into more of a science reality.

Part of my research was actually going out with

medical professionals to analyze different injuries

that are occurring in people that experience UAP events.

So typically when people report that they’ve seen UFOs

and they have these experiences,

there could be a wide range of symptoms that they develop.

Sometimes we see lesions coming off the body.

We see these herpes-like pimples that are developing.

So like all of these,

there was so many of them and you could see that

they're pretty profound and they appear on all sorts of

parts of the body.

They did biopsies, they did a lot of cultures

and things like that.

There's no fungus,

there's no bacteria or anything that caused this.

And all these symptoms are pointing to the fact

that maybe this is a radiation event that we're seeing.

Very much like a radiation burn that you would get

if you were having cancer treatments.

-There are cases of people suffering radiation damage and

physical effects from being in close proximity to a UAP.

And that's a rather shocking idea.

There's one case called the Cash-Landrum Case.

Cash-Landrum case involved some civilians driving in Texas

on a rural road.

They encountered a very large diamond-shaped object,

very bright, sparking,

intense heat emanating from it.

[passenger] Inside the car,

it was so hot that my handprint is yet on the

dashboard of Betty’s car.

[Chris Mellon] One of them gets out and starts to approach it.

-Here was this huge object, and flames shooting from it.

[Chris Mellon] It appears to be in trouble,

it’s moving back and forth and emitting sparks and then it

flies off and reportedly is being chased by helicopters.

And they did suffer severe health effects that were

consistent with radiation poisoning.

-My eyes were burned,

and they were tearing til I could lay down at night

and the next morning my pillow would be completely wet.

-The first time that I went into the hospital they were

treating us as burns.

But then they started treating us as radioactive burns.

And since, I have had cancer.

[Chris Mellon] Clearly, something physical,

something powerful transpired there.

-Cash-Landrum case, to me is a very significant case

because we have a situation where we had a

very large flying machine

that came over the road that actually left marks

on the road, so you know where it was exactly.

It left burns on the trees, it left burns on the people.

-If there's something physically in the air and it's

moving at a high speed,

it must take a huge amount of energy.

It's very possible that that energy source is leaking energy

at the same time.

It could be the thing that's leading to all that kind of

radiation type of injuries that people have been experiencing

all this time with UAP events.

But you can't answer that definitively.

It could be some other thing.

And one of the first things you learn when you

start getting into an area of fringe science

is that you have to be even better and more exact

than anybody else that is doing research

because it's scrutinized so heavily.

-Science has these rigorous standards by which we

judge a piece of data.

And the problem for UFOs is that the evidence has

never risen to the standards that scientists would require

for any field, for any topic that they do.

[Jeff Kripal] The case of the UFO,

you have the nuts and bolts people,

and you have the spiritual or metaphysical people.

And I'm saying it’s both and I think we need other

methods to look at these experiences

because the abduction experience is not something

amenable to the scientific method.

You can't reproduce it in a laboratory and measure it and

mathematize it and predict it.

The abduction experience is physical and anecdotal,

so we need to listen to all these stories and

look for common patterns,

and try to isolate what's different about them,

but also what's the same about them.

-You have a clear phenomenon that everybody

has agreed is real.

The DOD has multiple times admitted that UAP are real.

So why should we be afraid to tell people that

these things are happening?

I've had three or four experiences that fit into many

of the stories and experiences that people have given.

I saw a UFO, little men in the bedroom,

I remember them, clear as day.

It’s kind of like these touch-points across my life.

Having seen something and experienced it yourself I don't

need anybody to validate it to me.

I know what I saw.

And maybe I can use that experience to move

the field forward.

[Eric Macleish] Hearings with Harvard had been going on

for a long time before I got involved.

It started in 1994.

I believe that I first got involved in April of 1995.

[Arnold Relman] There’s nothing, nothing like evidence.

And, I mean, you’ve haven’t reported any.

[John Mack] Not evidence in the sense as physical proof...

[Arnold Relman] Not even proof! There’s no evidence.

There’s no evidence.

-I always, from the very beginning,

looked at this as an academic freedom case.

And my views really changed when I started to talk to the

people who claimed that they were abductees.

I talked to probably close to 100 people who'd been

treated by John.

I thought I'd be talking to a lot of people that, you know,

wanted to go on Jerry Springer and have a fistfight

with each other.

But that was not the case.

These people, many of them had never told anybody

about what had happened to them, except John.

And that was a shock to me.

So we presented witness after witness and

affidavit after affidavit.

And we got other people on the Harvard faculty and

the people who were academic freedom experts.

They said, and I don't necessarily agree with what

John is saying,

but he should have the right to say it.

And Harvard basically said, okay,

we've got to make this look good.

[Arnold Relman] Um -

Are there any... any other last minute...

Thank you very much, John. Appreciate it.

[Richard McNally] They suggested that he refrain from

hypnotizing the subjects when he's interviewing them.

They didn't say, "Don't do research on this."

They said, "Do it in a way that's likely to

get accurate results."

[Eric Macleish] They said that it had been a useful proceeding

and that they reaffirmed John's academic freedom right

and they didn't mean to intrude on it.

And that's what ended the case.

[Karin Austin] Ultimately, they cleared him of any wrongdoing

and allowed him to keep his tenure and you know,

continue on with his research.

But of course at the time, you know,

the subject matter was absolute napalm so it wasn't

like there were a bunch of colleagues from

Harvard who were knocking on his door wanting

to be associated with, you know, research into

alien abduction.

[Eric Macleish] The memory of what happened to him is

something that's very ripe within academic

and mental health circles,

so why would anybody else want to do it?

It's just to me, that, you know, this lives on.

[reporter] When John Mack threw his reputation and the

name of Harvard behind this strange phenomenon,

abduction stories gained credibility.

[Karin Austin] John planted his flag in the ground of

“These people are credible.

They’ve had some kind of authentic encounter.”

-And so he was kind of a heroic figure in that regard.

And unfortunately, he was killed in an accident in 2004.

-He was the real deal. He really knew.

And I hope we find somebody like him to continue this work.

[Simon Bresler] John Mack sort of understood that

when you talk to someone who's an experiencer,

it's impacted their entire life,

their social relationships, their sense of safety,

their worldview and their connection, often,

to the divine, to nature, and to purpose on this earth.

[Garry Nolan] When I look at the UAP phenomenon,

there's clearly data that I can believe here and so we need to

have a fairly broad spectrum of both native science,

interpretive abilities,

math, and how to, as I often call it,

see the data off the curve because it’s never the data on

the curve that tells you how something is working.

It's never the data on the curve that gets

anybody a Nobel Prize.

It's the thing that everybody else missed.

-I feel like with the experiences I’ve had,

I look at human beings and the planet in a whole different way.

It’s just changed me that much,

in the deep connection and respect for everything alive.

-You look full of feeling right now.

-I am.

[Simon Bresler] What are you feeling in this moment?

-Love.

[Simon Bresler] Yeah.

-Just an intense love for everything alive.

[Kimberly Engels] You know, the people who have these

experiences are changed forever,

you know, and they're changed in similar ways.

I see a pattern emerging, and it's rooted in a sense of

compassion and respect, not a sense of retribution,

but a sense of community and helping.

[Karin Austin] We don't know what this is.

They could be extraterrestrial.

They could be inter-dimensional.

They could be from the future.

But we need to be able to ask these questions and be okay

with not having the answers for a long period of time.

We're not here to try to start a movement to persuade people.

It's just, give us the freedom to study it.

-I think the human body and brain is set up to split

reality into a mental world and a material world and

never the twain shall meet, as it were.

And I think what's happening in a UFO event is

that that's collapsing.

And we realize that consciousness is somehow

connected to the cosmos out there,

and they're likely the same thing.

-It originated from outside the solar system,

and it was unusual in that it was moving faster than the

speed necessary to escape from the solar system,

that meant that it's interstellar in origin.

-There have been reports that we've received about

unidentified submerged objects.

-Splash! Splash!

-If there are these objects, where are they coming from?

Is there undersea infrastructure that

they reside in?

-The question that we've been asking is, what are they?

Well, that's the wrong question,

because what we should be asking is how can we find out

what they are?