-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 sh**ting 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 sh**ting 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
k*lled 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?
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02x05 - The Experiencers Pt 2
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The five-part series explores the government's decades long investigation into UFOs.
The five-part series explores the government's decades long investigation into UFOs.