Somewhere in the Skies - The Believer with Ralph Blumenthal

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

On episode 204 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan speaks with Pulitzer-Prize- winning New York Times reporter, co-author of the now-famous 2017 NY Times Pentagon UFO article, and author, Ralph Blumenthal. Blumenthal walks us through the decades-long journey of writing the definitive biography on the life and career of Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John E. Mack. In 'The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack', Blumenthal tells the story of how renowned Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack became fascinated with a range of paranormal phenomena ranging from alien abductions to UFOs to past lives. Blumenthal interviewed dozens of Mack’s friends and colleagues, and conducted years of archival research, to understand what drew Mack to the fringes of science and what he learned there. Blumenthal also answers listener questions and discusses what may come next with his reporting on UFOs over at the New York Times. Buy 'The Believer' at: https://amzn.to/3kPT2Nf Visit Ralph Blumenthal at: www.ralphblumenthal.com Get the official SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES coffee! Use promo code: SITSpod for an exclusive discount: www.blacktrianglecoffee.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Episode edited by Jane Palomera Moore Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash Spotify.

Terms apply. Hey guys, Ryan Sprague here. And whether I'm researching, working on the podcast, or skywatching from my roof late at night, I need something to keep me awake, alert, and ready to tackle the mysteries in our skies. That's why I'm so excited to announce the launch of the official Somewhere in the Sky's coffee. That's right, we've got our own coffee roast. Black Triangle Coffee is a veteran-owned small-batch coffee roaster. out of Santan Valley, Arizona.

As a coffee fiend and former specialty coffee barista, I've been working very closely with owner and head roaster, Andrew Lowe, to create the perfect blend to reflect somewhere in the skies. Our beans are sourced from local farms off the shores of Lake Kivu. This Rwandan coffee bean is full-bodied with tastes of red apple, hybiscous, dried fig, sweet orange, and cocoa. It's bold, it's dark, and it is sure to keep you running on all cylinders. While you listen to the podcast, hunt down UFOs, or if you're on the run from the men in black.

So help support Black Triangle Coffee by ordering the Somewhere in the Skies roast today. Listeners of Somewhere in the Skies get an exclusive discount right now by using the promo code, Sits, Pod, at checkout. That's S-I-T-S-Pod. To order, head on over to blacktrianglecoffee.com. Remember, keep your feet on the ground, but never stop searching or drinking somewhere in the skies. Today on the show, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and author Ralph Blumenthal. Mac was very meticulous in knocking down all these straw men that were being put up by the so-called skeptics. We're not really skeptical because they don't approach it with an open mind. They're just determined to knock this down. So I would say that if you're going to go into this field, the first thing you owe it is to devote

some time to reading the literature by experts. Read the MIT conference. Eminent scientists of all walks of life debated this subject. So at least give it that. Learn the arguments. And then you can, you know, figure out why you think it's not true or knock it down. But don't go into it as, you know, ignorantly and say, ah, this is nonsense, it's crap, it's, you know, because that's not fair. A lot of people have devoted a lot of time to this phenomenon, a lot of expertise. It is a genuine mystery. If it was an easy answer, someone would have found it by now, but it isn't. And I think that's what I take away from it.

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I am your host, Ryan Sprague, and we have a very special guest of the show today. We're going to be talking to Ralph Blumenthal, the New York Times writer, the author of the new biography on the life and career of John Mack, The Believer. We're going to dive into the book and everything else that Ralph has been up to you. So for the very first time, Ralph, thank you for joining me on Somewhere in the Skies. A real pleasure, Ryan. Thank you. I got the book about, I'd say maybe two and a half, three weeks ago, and I could not put it down, man.

I thought I knew everything about John Mack, but that clearly was not. not the case. So this is going to be fun. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Well, you know, before we, I guess before we get to the book, I have to ask, since this is my first time actually being able to interview you, we got to start with the 2017 article. I know you're probably sick of talking about this at this point, but the article heard around the world. It changed the entire conversation about UFOs in the mainstream. So I'd love maybe if you could just run us through your experience with that, the process of the article, how it came about, how you felt about the whole thing when it finally came out. Yeah, could you give us the origin

story of the article? Sure, absolutely. So I was working on the John Mac book at the time. I've been working on it for actually for 16 years. So I was working on the book. And Leslie Kane, my colleague in UFO Matters and distinguished writer herself and now with a series on afterlife experiences on Netflix. Anyway, she came to me with a great story that she had been at a meeting in Washington, D.C., with some Pentagon people and others, and there was a secret Pentagon program to monitor UFOs, which nobody knew about, because the government. was keeping it, you know, really sub-roza, very secret,

while pretending, of course, it wasn't really interested in UFOs. So this was really exciting. Leslie came to me with a story. She was at the meeting. It was on the record or soon to be on the record. And we went to the New York Times through my contacts. I'd been at the New York Times for 45 years, and I retired in 2009 and started just contributing to the Times.

But I was not on the regular staff, but I still had a lot of friends among the editors there. And I pitched them. I said, this is an amazing story, the fact that the Pentagon has a secret program to monitor UFOs. And a guy in charge of it is quitting because he's unhappy. And they went for it. They were all excited. The important thing is that, which really changed the paradigm, as you said, we got this all on the record. There were no anonymous sources. There was nothing, you know, were secretive about our reporting. It was all straightforward. We had the documentation. We had the letter resignation. And people took us on the record. So we really didn't have much trouble

getting it into New York Times because I was experienced in what it took to get a story into the paper. The Times not only went for it, they put it on the front page, as you know. And it did cause quite a stir because here was the New York Times giving credence to this phenomenon, which had long been in the shadows. And a lot of things followed from that. The Navy videos came out after that. We got access to, actually, first ones came out with the story itself in December 2017.

We had actual Navy videos of encounters with objects. I don't know what they are, where they come from, who's behind the wheel. Nobody's talking about that because nobody knows. but it was the first time, really, it took, it established that UFOs were real, that they were not figments of imagination, they were not metaphysical, metaphorical, you know, objects, whatever, which people were debating for a long time. Now, people like you and experts in the field know that they've had a reality to them for a long time.

But scientists have been hard to convince that, There have been a lot of skeptics out there, as you know, who kept saying, well, we don't know what they are and are they real, and if they're real, why don't we see them land on the White House lawn and all that stuff? So we were able to show conclusively that at least our government thinks they're real, and Navy pilots who encountered them think they're real. And so that was the story of that. And then since then, we've come up with some other stories interviewing the pilots.

We got other videos. and that's been the story with the New York Times. Yeah, it's been quite a journey. And I definitely have a listener question for you towards the end here about one of those follow-up articles. But before we get to that, you're right. This completely changed, I think, the landscape of this topic. When it comes to the public overall, like you said, us in the UFO field, you know, we've known UFOs exist. It's those next harder questions, like you said.

What are they? Where do they come from? What are the motivations? What do they represent? And I think that's what our government is now, you know, trying to dig and look into just like you guys are at the times and in civilian journalists and researchers as well. So it's exciting. Yeah, well, they want to know what the technology is because right. But first of all, if another adversary nation, let's say, has this technology, we're in a lot of trouble. Now it does not appear to be the case that anybody has this technology. technology, any other earthly power, because if they did, we'd be way behind. So it is a race, not only us, the Russians, the Chinese, trying to figure out what this technology is, how do we duplicate it, how do we reverse engineer it? So that's probably the next step in the reporting that everybody's chasing. Exactly. And so I guess, Ralph, the sort of the gap we have here, you know, UFOs and the

government is one thing. Aliens and possible abductions and close encounters are another. And, you know, I struggle in the UFO field every day of this one extreme of nuts and bolts, scientific study of UFOs and this whole other side of the spectrum. It is a big leap. You're absolutely right. And you'll notice we did not go there in the New York Times because the level of verification is not there with aliens and alien abductions. It was hard enough to get the videos, the Navy videos of encounters with these objects, tick-tacks, so-called, some of them resemble giant tick-tacks. So, you know, we try to stick very closely to the facts, what we can verify, and not in areas of

speculation. People are always asking me to speculate. Well, what do you think they are? What do you think? Where do you think they come from? And I don't speculate. I mean, I'm just trying to get people to talk on the record and figure it out and report what we know. So there is a big leap. And the book, of course, deals with aliens and alien abduction

because that's what John Mack was concerned with. He, if you want to know a little bit about, as you say, the new generation may not be up on John Mack. Yeah, give us an idea of who he was, if you don't mind. And I guess how you got involved in writing all about him. Okay. So first of all, John Mack was a Harvard psychiatrist, very esteemed. He had written a biography of Lawrence of Arabia, which won a Pillar Surprise. You know, he went to the movies like everybody else to see the movie, Lawrence of Arabia. And unlike everybody else, he decided, I'm going to learn about this guy and see what makes him tick.

So he studied Lawrence, went to England and tracked down Lawrence's family and, you know, recreated, did a whole psychological workup of Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence and wrote a book that was a masterpiece. So he was very highly regarded. He was a peace activist. He met with the Asa Arafat in the Middle East to try to establish a peace with the Palestinians and the Israelis. He protested nuclear weapons. He did a lot of things very well grounded on planet Earth.

And then through a series of circumstances, which I can go into later if we have time, he became aware that people were reporting encounters with alien beings. They were seeing UFOs. They remembered either under hypnosis or even often without hypnosis, recounting these strange meetings with alien beings who captured them, captivated them, took them aboard spaceships for bizarre experiments, sometimes reproduction related to create a hybrid race of, you know, hybrid babies. Crazy stuff.

I mean, really extraordinary, not, not, grounded in our reality as we can, you know, understand it. Well, my experience has started when I was very young. I can remember as far back as six years old, you know, being in my room, being, you know, just going to bed, and then aware that there were six light shafts coming down through the ceiling and would stand around my bed and start turning into a human-like-looking form. They do seem to be able to walk through walls. and materialize these beings materialize into a physical form.

So it's hard to say they might be from another dimension, so to speak, or anything like that. This being rushed at me across the bed. She had a tool in her hand, and she was performing some mysterious procedure on me. What did it involve? I wasn't allowed to lift my head, so all I could see was what I could see looking down across my face. and I saw the tool. I don't even want to know what she was doing.

It was horrible. It was frightening, and it lasted a long time. And he was taken by this. He was a psychiatrist, so he knew when people were making stuff up and when people were lying to him. And certainly he knew when people were crazy. And he concluded pretty quickly that these people were not mentally ill, They came from a broad cross-section of humanity.

There were even young children, as young as two, who told them flying up to the sky, you know, being taken up by alien little men to their spaceship. And you can't say that these children were affected by the cultural milieu or movies or books that they read. So he was taken by all this. Some of these people had scars on their body. They didn't remember getting.

in life ever. There were indications that wherever they saw a UFO landed, sometimes there were physical remnants. The ground was different. It measured somewhat differently in various tests. Grass didn't grow properly afterwards there anyway. For all these reasons and many others, he came away believing that what these people encountered was true on some level. Probably these people were suffering from some new form of mental illness. But in the past four years, I've worked now with approximately 90 people who've had these experiences, and they tell a very similar story. And initially, at least in the early years, they hadn't been in communication with each other.

They were deeply distressed by their experiences. The experiences were reported in great detail. They were complex narratives of being taken by alien beings into UFOs on beams of flight. They were embarrassed, ashamed to come forward about it. And you think these were wild dreams, hallucinations? Not really. These are very solid people, healthy, mentally healthy people. And the only thing I knew that behaves like that is real experience.

This is not the way dreams behave. This is not the way mental illness behaves. It's not the way fantasy behaves. Some kind of real experiences occurring to these people. But if this is a real experience, that is some kind of, kind of entities, beings, intelligences are entering our world and affecting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, according to polls, then this is something really worth looking at. So that's what I've been trying to do, is get people at least look at it, think about it. Something happened to these people. He didn't know what it was. Nobody know, to this day,

nobody knows what it is, what the phenomenon entails. But that doesn't mean something didn't happen somehow on some level that we don't understand. Anyway, So that's John Mack. And then he wrote two best-selling books. He went on Oprah. He met with the Dalai Lama to discuss his theories. He really got around. And then when he was about to turn 75 years old, he went to London for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia.

He was being, you know, lionized for his book years later. And he got run over by a drunk driver in London. and he looked the wrong way. It was not a conspiracy. It was not an assassination. A lot of people thought, ah, they're getting them out of the way, you know. He got bumped off.

Not true. I checked the police records. I did a lot of reporting. That's my business, you know, hard-nosed reporting. So anyway, so that was the trajectory of his life, basically. And I was fascinated by his story, that he, that an eminent scientist, a physician, a psychiatrist, interest would get so taken with this question of aliens. So that was my interest. How I, you know,

we got into it. I mean, I picked up one of the books one day. I was the New York Times correspondent in Texas. And, you know, I was reporting on Texas. And I, you know, picked up in a used bookstore somewhere, a copy of a second book, which is called Passport to the Cosmos. And I said, wow, I mean, a Harvard psychiatrist who's, you know, investigating aliens, this is amazing. So I said, I'm going to write a story about this guy. I had no idea how famous he already was. I was very naive. I thought I discovered him.

He was very famous. As I said, he'd been on Oprah. He'd been written up countless times, including by the New York Times. And I said, I got to call this guy up and get an interview. And just then he was run over. So, you know, that put an end to that. That's how I got into it. Interesting.

Now, so you decide to write this book and you start digging into, you know, his personal files. I assume talking to friends, colleagues, family members. I guess the big question, as many of us in the UFO field get, Ralph, is how did his family react to him getting involved in this? his colleagues, I would imagine that was pretty interesting in terms of his responsibilities as a responsible psychiatrist, also working at Harvard. And then this whole other life he was leading in this alien abduction thing. So yeah, can you give us a little idea of how he was perceived by those around him? A lot of people couldn't understand what he was doing. I mean, his colleagues at Harvard, a lot of them who liked him personally thought he'd done off the deep end.

you know science is a conventional science is a pretty close field and head people have to they feel they have to follow a well-trodden path they can't be too out there you know science is as close-minded often as every other field in terms of not being open to to new discoveries remember there were people who refused to look through Galileo's telescope you know he invited them he said look what I'm seeing and no we're not going to look because you know we don't believe it well we have that counterpart today. So a lot of his colleagues at Harvard thought he lost it. But he had quite a few friends also who respected him as a scholar and thought he must be on to something.

His family also didn't always share his enthusiasm for this field. His wife, his long-suffering wife, Sally, put up with a lot, including Max's interest in other women, which I go into in the book. He was a pretty freewheeling spirit, loved humanity, loved women, loved life, loved a lot of things, and got him into a bit of trouble with his marriage. But she supported his work because she realized he was serious. But his family couldn't make much of what he was doing. So he had battles on a lot of fronts, including particularly with Harvard, with superiors at Harvard, who thought he was giving Harvard a bad name and put him under investigation.

But, I mean, as I point out in the book, the believer, Harvard has a long history of engaging with fringe subjects. I mean, William James, the father of psychology, was investigating seances and ectoplasm and, you know, all kinds of weird stuff 100 years ago. Now, of course, we have Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer, who's reporting on this object. Nobody knows what it is or was. It passed through our solar system. And it might have been a man, you know, not man-made, but intelligent object. Man-made. So Harvard's going through it again in a way.

But, I mean, so Harvard superiors at the time were quite put off with Max. research and they thought that he was a little too enthusiastic, which he was. He got caught up. He was very passionate and their title, passion is in the title of my book. So they wanted him to be more judicious somehow, more distant from his subjects. And that wasn't his style. He threw himself into everything he did. And he kind of admitted this when he was under investigation by Harvard. but that didn't take away from his rigorous methods. He interviewed people, studied them. He tried to see what other explanations there might be for this.

He was not close-minded. He really was open, and he attended a lot of conferences where these ideas were battered around because people were always trying to figure out what the hell is going on. What the source of this is, who these beings are, where they come from, what creates this intelligence, I don't know.

but there's something profoundly important going on here that is authentic and real. Anyway, but Harvard in the end found he was doing nothing really wrong. He was a little too enthusiastic, but he was not committing any breaches of, you know, of rules, and they basically exonerated him, and we had wonderful lawyers defending him. He had Danny Sheen, who had investigated the Iran-Contra scandal in the government, he investigated the Ku Klux Klan. He investigated Karen Silkwood's story about how she was possibly assassinated at her nuclear plant. He was a really red-hot lawyer.

And the other lawyer was Eric McLeish who investigated the Roman Catholic priest scandal. He broke that story, basically. You know, that became the movie spotlight. So Mack had three big lawyers who were very aggressive, and they made Harvard, you know, uh, true or try to prove the charges against Mac,

which they couldn't do. Wow. Yeah. And I know, you know, there's even points in the book where you pointed out, people like,

like Max Stepma, they're saying, never run away from a fight. And it's, it's small things like that, Ralph, in the book that really caught my attention, that give Mac this,

uh, this humanity that we don't have to see. You know, many of us see him in these interviews on Oprah or, you know, the, famous Rua Zimbabwe documentary videos, which I'd love to get your opinion on in a minute here. But I guess were there any of the actual abduction stories in the book that you cover that really

stood out to you? So one that like, you know, you just couldn't wrap your mind around. You know, there's so many. Yeah. But one of the ones that stands out, I mean, you can't really talk about Mac, by the way, without talking about Bud Hopkins, who was. the one who got involved. And Bud was a real pioneer. Bud was involved in alien abduction investigation before John Mack. He was an artist who, through a whole series of circumstances,

he spotted a UFO once, and he got interested. He taught himself hypnosis, which is not always the best thing for a non-professional. Anyway, he did his own investigations, and he came up with some phenomenal stories because he interviewed people, you know, coming forward with these abduction stories. And he, by the way, basically invented the concept of missing time. People who, you know, encounter a UFO, you know, alien beings, and then can't account for, you know, two or three hours of missing time. They arrive home late and they don't know why they were delayed.

and then later it comes back to them that they had all these experiences on a ship and there were subjective experiments and all. So these stories come to them later, but the missing time is common. And Bud Hopkins sort of investigated that. Anyway, Bud's most famous case probably was the Linda Cortile, so-called case, the Brooklyn Bridge. I laughed just thinking about the name, the Brooklyn Bridge abduction.

I know, considering you and I both live in New York, this case, it's just like, yeah, it's amazing that a case. Yeah. You know, you know, we've got cases that, I mean, that case has never been solved. It's a mystery to this day. But basically, they were witnesses. We don't know who exactly they were, but some have come forward, who saw a woman being levitated out of her 11th story window over the Brooklyn Bridge from her apartment and going into a spaceship

being escorted by three little beings and traffic came to a stop on the Brooklyn Bridge and I mean there's all kinds of accounts and Bud wrote a whole book about this the problem is there were two people two security guards who basically told Bud the story

originally, the original witnesses and Bud could never track them down to the point where he knew who they were. He got videos from them, audio tapes. He got letters from them, but he would never able to find out who they were who actually saw this. Now, later, you know, different witnesses have come forward and said they saw this, but the case had some holes in it. But it was really the most extraordinary story you could ever imagine because we who live in New York know the Brooklyn Bridge and we can imagine, you know, what it would be like to see someone levitating

out of their 11-floor window into the arms of three aliens into a spaceship that then flies over the Brooklyn Bridge and over the East River and plunges into the river. Even for New York, Ralph, that's pretty crazy, right? Yeah, that case is insane. I mean, as you know, Ryan, there's a lot of stories about underwater craft. And, you know, the UFO phenomenon is not limited to the skies. There are many accounts, including Navy accounts, that we have reported in the New York Times of objects going into the water or coming out of the water and operating in that medium,

you know, the water, which really blows your mind. You can sort of imagine something up in the sky, you know, like a plane, but operating underwater, you know, very, very strange. So anyway, that's one of the crazy, you know, cases that, that obsessed Mac and Bud Hopkins and everybody else who's ever, you know, looked into it. Correct me if I'm wrong. Bud was kind of Mac's, I guess, entrance into this whole topic. You know, I know they met up in New York at one point, started corresponding,

and that kind of got Mac on the path he led. But Ralph, I know in the book, you kind of show that just because they had a similar interest and whatnot, They had very different views on, you know, a lot of what was going on. They butted heads a lot. Is that right? They did. They did. Bud Hopkins and a third member of their group, David Jacobs, who was a professor at Temple University,

who became a really a noted historian on UFOs. He wrote a book in the 70s called The UFO Controversy in America that became a bestseller. And he really traced the history of UFO sighting, a real scholar in the field. And he also, he was attracted to the questions of alien abduction through Bud Hopkins and ended up using hypnosis to investigate his own cases of people. He attracted and collected. But as I point out in the book, in the believer, Hopkins and Jacobs seemed much more wedded to the idea that these were real events,

that they happened in a reality that we have to, you know, accept a physical reality. They were real events. And Mack, who started off thinking that that may be the case, more and more began thinking that it must be happening in some other, in some other dimension, some other plane, because it's just too hard to accept that it's happening in everyday reality. So they did have a parting of the ways. They reconciled later before Mac died. And Mac always respected, you know, the research that Jacobs and Hopkins had done. But Mac became much more spiritual and philosophical about it and began thinking, well, there are all these

other paranormal or anomalous events that have to be reconciled with this. And that actually was Max Big Mistake in the beginning, that he focused on alien abductions as something singular, let's say, special. And later he began to realize that it's really only part of a whole, spectrum of anomalous experiences that the old hag syndrome, for example, and basically a lot of people in Newfoundland, according to the research by David Hufford, a great scholar of this field, they would encounter these evil presences that would come upon them at night and sit on their chest and strangle them. And it happened to Hufford himself, the guy who wrote the book,

a scientist, crop circles, a near-death experience. There's a whole, you know, spectrum of experiences that are not classic alien abduction. Whitley Streber, for example, who really was another pioneer in this field with his book Communion, his experiences don't match the classic experience. They were totally wild and, you know, sort of atypical, if anything, he said to be typical. typical in this field. And so it's a much more complicated question than Max started off seeing. So but Jacobs and Hopkins sort of went along a different path. Right. And again, like you mentioned, I mean, none of us, including those three researchers, truly know what's going on. And, you know,

you have to hypothesize and go down these roads because this UFO topic seems to just be so malleable. You know, you can look at it through every lens. Like you mentioned, spiritually, psychologically, historically. And then, you know, one of the historical aspects, Ralph, I wanted to touch on too, was that part of your book. It was almost a kind of an interweaving of two different stories, the story of John Mell. and then tracing the history of UFO phenomenon throughout the years and how they kind of intersected. So I'd love to get your thoughts on,

why did you decide to structure the book that way? Yeah, I needed to, I mean, people who studied the field like yourself for a long time don't need to be reminded of Kenneth Arnold in 1947 and how he spotted nine objects over Mount Rainier. So there's sort of classic stories of UFOs of Roswell, for example. What happened at Roswell or some kind of crash in 1947? A lot of things happened in 1947, by the way. It kind of an interesting year.

But, and, you know, the war years and the post-war years are very important. But anyway, I felt for people who are not conversant with this field, they needed to know some history. And the hard thing was, frankly, to put in enough history so that, first of all, you didn't want to put in so much history that it would bore people to death. Because you could write a whole book on, you know, the origins of the UFO story. So there had to be just enough of it to bring people up to speed, not too much to take over the book. And it was kind of grafted on to the Mac story because Mac himself didn't really study UFO history. once he got interested in, you know, alien research, et cetera, I think he informed himself.

But he was not a person who, you know, got into it after studying the history. He studied some of the history after he began looking into it. But I felt it was actually hard to blend in the story. For example, the story of Betty and Bonnie Hill, the most famous UFO abduction, you know, in New Hampshire in 1960. I believe. That story I had to go into because that's sort of the load star of alien abduction. That's the story that brought alien abduction to, you know, the attention of the world through the book and later the movie. So I had to tell that story at some length.

So for people who are not familiar with, you know, the whole phenomenon, I think they needed to be told what, you know, what the origins of this whole thing are for other people who know the story well it might be a bit of a boy well we know that we know that but i wanted to you know um position the book for people who uh who needed to have that background what's up guys ryan sprague here and i'm just dropping in to remind you about our patreon campaign somewhere in the skies is always free to consume but it's not free to create so if you want to help the show on a monthly basis we have tons of rewards for you in return, including shoutouts on the show and website, bonus content and episodes, and free merge. Want to be my guest or pick a topic for the show? You can do that too. So if you'd like to learn more

and to help support the show, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you and keep looking up. It gives us context of what we're working with. Again, people are going to read your book that have never looked into a UFOs or their history. But then, the next level of the abduction phenomenon. So I think it does kind of, it gives the full picture of just how unbelievably weird and strange and possibly interconnected this all is. But I guess kind of wrapping up the book, Ralph, specifically, I definitely want people to go read it. What do you want people to take away with the book and sort of the legacy of John Mack? You know, like I mentioned earlier, we have these small snippets of him and interviews and everything.

So unless you knew him in your life, you don't get that full picture of who this guy was. So what legacy do you think Mac really brought? That's a really good question, Ryan. Well, I think what I take away from it is a story of, first of all, as I say at the end of the book, Mack exemplified the best of our species, meaning the human race. He was a human being who insisted on following clues to a mystery and would not be put off. In that sense, I call him a hero. And I think he went on a hero's journey, the classic hero's journey,

of initiation, obstacles, and eventually and reluctance to shoulder the task. And finally, some kind of triumph where he returns with a gift for humanity, which is the knowledge that he acquired. So in that sense, I consider him a hero. He was a flawed hero. He made mistakes.

He was very much of a human being. He had warts. He was too enthusiastic. He had problems with his marriage. He played around with drugs to enhance his mind. He was not perfect. But I think he was a model for people who encounter a mystery and are determined to run it back to its source. Whatever the obstacles, whatever the ramifications, the penalties, he paid a lot of penalties.

He was laughed at. He was ridiculed. He paid hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars. in legal fees during the Harvard investigation. But I think there was something very much admirable about the way he went about not turning his back, you know, on this mystery. And because it was, it subjected him to the ridicule factor. And it was like the third rail, you know, touching the third rail

for a distinguished academician to take on this field. And yet he did it anyway. So I think that's what I take away. And, you know, it is a mystery. And, you know, again, I have very little patience with the so-called skeptics and debunkers who think they have the answer to everything. And they know exactly what this phenomenon is, you know, it's mental illness or it's sleep apnea. And all these things can be debunked. They have an answer.

It's not sleep apnea necessarily because a lot of it doesn't happen during sleep. People are awake. not, you know, a function, that doesn't come out through hypnosis because people have conscious memories of these things. It's not a cultural artifact because little children have this. So you can, Mac was very meticulous in knocking down all these straw men that were being put up by the so-called skeptics who are not really skeptical because they don't approach it with an open mind. They're just determined to knock this down. So I would say that if you're going to go into this field, the first thing you owe it,

is to devote some time to reading the literature by experts. Read the MIT conference, the experts, eminent scientists of all walks of life, all fields debated this subject seriously at an academic forum like MIT. So at least give it that. Learn the arguments. And then you can figure out why you think it's not true or knock it down.

But don't go into it as, you know, ignorantly and say, ah, this is nonsense, it's crap, it's, you know, because that's not fair. A lot of people have devoted a lot of time to this phenomenon, a lot of expertise. It is a genuine mystery. If it was an easy answer, someone would have found it by now, but it isn't. And I think that's what I take away from it. Yeah, I like that. And you're right.

You know, so many of the people who have looked into this topic their whole lives, someone like Stanton Friedman, you know, who passed away just a couple years ago, left not knowing the answers. And we probably won't get them either. But I think you're right. It's working off, building off of that and respecting the work that came before that and having an appreciation that people risked a lot to look into this. You know, when I first got interested, all my friends and family and coworkers said, don't do this. Like, don't get involved with this. But, hey, I mean, again, Ralph, you were a big part of that story changing and that acceptance changing.

And now UFOs are more mainstream than ever. And we can start asking those harder questions. The government is much more open, as you know, there is a mandate to release a report within a few months. And if they do that in the Defense Authorization Act, the UAP Task Force is supposed to report. Some of it will be public. Some of it may not be. So the government has come a long way. I think they are genuinely puzzled as well as are we out there.

And so it's good that we're asking these questions, and it's good that we're devoting attention to this. And it is people like you who've taken the risk of going public with it and studying it who really should be commended. Well, thank you. The same could be said for the work you've done. And I know we have a lot of appreciation from the listeners. I've got a couple listener questions. If you're willing to stick around for those. Cool.

I'll run right down the list here. So Mike C through email asks, Dr. Mack's book Abduction, Mac painted a picture of something far. are more transcendent than just little scientists visiting Earth and metal flying saucers, like we talked about. Did you feel any need to avoid or underplay the strangeness of the personal accounts that Dr. Mac collected? I know when I first started interviewing witnesses and experiencers, I would often tend to leave some of the more weirder stuff out until I realize you're not doing a service to anyone

by doing that. That's part of the data. That's part of the story. So, yeah, what do you think? Anything like that? That's a very good point. That in a lot of the accounts, the strangeness is left out because people are so eager to preserve the core story,

the so-called core narrative of alien abduction. They lose sight of all the things that don't fit. Not everybody is subject to reproductive experiments in the spaceships. Whitley-Strieve is a perfect example. of very strange things he encountered that had nothing to do with being taken up in a spaceship. And what I'm glad this caller brought up this point because where Mack really differs from Hopkins, probably the most important difference, is that he found in the accounts he got from his experiencers a transformative element in their lives, that they were apprised of the threat

to the planet. They became more environmentally conscious, more spiritually inclined. They were not just traumatized, and many of them were not traumatized at all. They felt transcendent that they were connecting to the source, to God, to some great power. So this went against the abduction narrative that you were taken aboard by, you know, evil little men and, you know, subject to horrible experiments and some of that, you know, it was true that women came, particularly women, who said they were forced to give up their babies and their pregnancies were removed, which has never been scientifically proven, but it's certainly what they reported. But Max said, yeah, but there was another aspect to it, people who felt transformed by the

experience, whose eyes were opened up to the, you know, the beauties of the universe and the power of the universe, et cetera, et cetera. So that was also an aspect. And I put that in the book. I didn't feel I had to leave that out at all. I mean, that was an important part of Max research. And that is often lost, really, in the stories of alien abduction. You're right, that people stick to a core story, and they lose sight of all the things

that don't fit. But the real scholars in the field say those are even the most important things, the things that don't fit because why don't they fit? That's the answer to the mystery. And I know we glossed over the whole Zimbabwe case with Mac. We won't go into it here. I know a lot of listeners are familiar with it. I'll probably put a couple clips in from those famous interviews Mac did where, you know, 60-something students, children had a close encounter with something and just like you said, had transformative experiences. It was scary myself. scary because you saw something yourself?

Yes. I saw a little object hovering. It was quite big actually and then there was little ones all around it. It was silver and the ring around it was red. It was red. The light come from the whole thing?

There are lights around here. Lights along the edge there. How many of the strange beings did you see? I saw one over here. They had eyes like that and they were kind of just like looking at us, they were like kind of astonished.

Was he near the silver object or was he far? No, on top. On top of the silver object? Okay. And did you look at him? Yes. Did he look at you? Yes, then he gave me the creeps. Then I gave you the creeps.

Actually, in your drawing, you showed him standing up, didn't you? Yes, I had to do him standing up was I couldn't dream sitting. I spoke to Selma Sadiq, one of the experiencers that was. a child when that happened. And now, you know, she's a civil rights attorney, I believe it is. She's done incredible things with her life that she attributes to this thing that happened when she was a kid. Tremendously. And, you know, again, what I said about the children, these were, you know, young kids. I mean, they weren't two years old. They were, you know, eight and nine and ten, but too young to really make up stories, you know, to conform with movies they'd seen or so. So they were

witnesses in the sense that they were pure children. And Mac found it some of the most powerful evidence he had ever encountered. And he took videos of it and the videos are on his website. And I found it very persuasive. I must say, I have some of the children's drawings in my book. And I think people who are trying to explain this phenomenon away and say that it's crazy, it couldn't happen, you know, mental illness, et cetera. They have a very hard time dealing with the facts of that episode, the Rua, Zimbabwe, you know, episode, because it does not fit anything that can easily, you know, knock down. Exactly. It's definitely a case everyone should look into. Well, Kevin on Twitter asks Ralph, kind of playing into the abductees,

seeing how deeply traumatized many of them were, in your research with Mack, did he feel that the truth was owed to these abductees to learn what happened to them? Or should it just remain a mystery? Well, he was very insistent that they should at least be validated, that what happened to them is worth investigating. As he told the Harvard committee, he didn't tell people, yeah, you were abducted by aliens. He never said it that way. But he said, he felt they were owed serious studies. And he didn't, and other psychiatrists who had treated some of these people before they

got to Mac did, you know, blow them off and say, you know, it's some fantasy of yours. It couldn't be true. How could you can't believe this? And they left very unhappy because they were really puzzled because they knew what had happened to them. What happened was for me, the conscious memories that I had was in the middle of the night I woke up, very conscious, walked over to my living room, saw something in the room, felt the white light, felt the paralysis, and then I fell asleep. Several hours later I woke up and had these intense emotions

associated with the experience that just I couldn't fathom. Why was I so scared? Why was I terrified? You had a bad dream? That's what I thought. That's what I wanted to believe. That's what I wanted to believe for years. And I think that's what most people want to believe. What do you think this all means? Well, let me explain first why I concluded this is not psychiatric,

why these people are not psychiatrically disturbed. What? Because I was concerned, when I first heard about this, I thought it must be madness. But when I heard that hundreds of thousands of people all over the country. Why not just? Because these people, like Peter, I can't tell you how difficult it is to get people to go on television to talk about this. People are not interested in being before the public. They're very ashamed because they get ridiculed, humiliated about it.

This is not something anybody does. This is not a club anybody wants to belong to. This is not something people do because they want to be filmed or get on publicity. It's very difficult to get people to come forth and acknowledge they've had these experiences. Yes, and I've read interviews with people who have come forward years ago who wish that they hadn't. When I heard of it, hundreds of thousands of people all over the country from various polls, we know, maybe even millions of people, have had very similar experiences. They don't know each other.

The details that they're describing were not in the media. They have nothing to gain by it. They feel ashamed about it. That's number one. When I also heard that this was occurring in children as young as two or three years old, that ruled out personality explanations. It's associated with UFOs independently observed by witnesses, by media, by neighbors. It's also associated with physical findings, and, as said before,

the people when examined are not psychiatrally disturbed. So the only thing that behaves like that is real experience. Yeah, you say that it's trauma, trauma, that it's traumatic. Real experiences are the only thing that occurs like that. Psychosis and like madness is not like that. Dreams are not like that. Fantasy is not like that. Now, if these are real experiences, what is going on? What's the source of these experiences? Yeah, that's a question. What's going on? So these people, somehow, whatever happened to them on whatever level, they need. knew what had happened. And when someone would say to them, well, that couldn't be true, or that couldn't have happened the way you remember it. There were all kinds of experiments

they did to try to implant memories to see whether people could make up, you know, abduction scenarios. But I think Mack showed pretty conclusively that these people had deep-seated memories. actual memories of something that happened to them on some level. And what level that was is the mystery. Because it's not on an everyday level because we don't see it happening in the street all around us, obviously. When this had happened, it always happens when other people are switched off or no one else is around. It's not happening in a reality where you catch it on film, there's videos of it. Everybody has a video camera today.

if people are getting abducted off the streets with UFOs landing, someone would have a video of it today. I mean, come on. But it doesn't happen that way. So something else is going on. It's happening on some other level, whatever it is, that defies, you know, recording, or defies evidentiary procedures.

It's subtle, it's subtle, Matt kept saying. You know, and whenever he was asked in, interviews are so, you know, what is this thing that's going to, it's subtle, it's subtle. We don't know. We don't understand. But that doesn't mean it's not real to the people who encountered it. It's very real to them. Yeah. Yeah. And again, you can see the empathy with Mack. These aren't just, you know, patience or, you know, numbers to him. These were actual people who he felt genuinely had some sort of either mystical or consciousness experience or physical kidnapping aboard a ship.

So yeah, it's really fascinating. The entire abduction phenomenon, I think we've really only scratched the surface of what it could possibly be, Ralph, even Mack did as well. But I have to thank you for writing this book. I think it was needed and it was necessary for a name that is so, big in the UFO field. It never got, he never got, you know, I feel the credit he deserved. So, yeah, this was the right time, I think, for this book to come out. Well, took 16 years. Wow. There you go. I mean, I had a lot of material to go through. It was not an easy book to write. I've

written books before, but this was one of the toughest because just putting it, you know, fitting all these pieces together. It was very complicated. And he was a complicated guy. I mean, he was not a simple character. He operate on many levels. But I think you put your finger on it when you said he had the empathy that allowed people to come forward to him. And whereas some of them had gone to other therapists and psychiatrists before and were, you know, were blown off or they didn't feel they got the proper attention. He communicated that willingness to, to, to, to, to, you know, to, to hear their story and to fight for their right to be heard, to have their stories examined. And that took a lot of courage, to be out there with them and to be laughed at.

And so that's why I do think he's a worthy, you know, someone to follow and study. Well, I mean, yeah, sometimes it's just someone there to listen. And our last listener question, Ralph, this was our most popular one. If you're willing to discuss this at all, I'm just going to read this here. There's been rumors that the July 2020 article you co-wrote with Leslie Kane was edited down drastically by the New York Times. I'll leave it to you to either say that's true or not, and that there was a lot more that you both wish to cover. Are you willing to share if that's true at all? and anything you wish had made it into that one, the off-world vehicle, as everyone has called it.

It's probably time to stop calling people who believe in UFO's crackpots. After the recent revelation that there's actually a Pentagon task force looking into them, one astrophysicist who has worked for the Pentagon's UFO program since 2007, told the New York Times that he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency about retrievals from, quote, off-world vehicles not made up. on this earth. Are we on the brink of full disclosure about visitors from outer space? Well, there was a lot of speculation about that article before it ever appeared. People knew exactly what we were doing, what we were reporting, what we were holding back. They didn't

know what they were talking about because, you know, they were not there. Look, I'm not going to discuss, you know, the backstage at the New York Times. And, you know, the editing process. I'll say that this was a very difficult story to report. It was a story on materials. And, you know, to what extent material may have been recovered from crashes or retrieved, you know, objects. It required a lot of backup and reporting. As often happens with difficult subjects, a lot of material that is gathered. by reporters is gone over by editors and it's winnowed and editors and reporters together decide what is worthy of reporting, what can be backed up. So it moved the needle. It may not have been

everything everybody wanted to hear, but it was what the New York Times could back up. And I'm happy with it. I think there's room for more reporting. Certainly Leslie and I are continuing to, you know, poke around and to see what else we can do to move the story forward. There's a lot to be said still. It's not the end. But, you know, that's all I'll say about that. You know, there was a lot of Internet chatter about that story, which made our lives difficult because every time we call somebody, you know, the word was already out that we were working on this. And so that didn't make it easy. And I actually said that.

And afterwards I said people made our lives more difficult because of the gossip. But it's a difficult field and it has to be handled in a way that is responsible and, you know, with proper sourcing. And you can't just put in everything you feel or think you know until you can, you know, can establish it, verify it. So some things are easier to report another. The first story was probably easier. and stuff that was coming out now. So that's what I'll say about that. This episode is brought to you by Netflix.

Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best have you wait in the world, Frances Nganoe versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Karano. Live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. I'm happy to hear that, like you said, this isn't the end of the story.

This is a subtle thing. It's a developing story, as it always is. So that's exciting. And also your most recent article, we got to touch on this right before we go, if you don't mind. Your article about Robert Bigelow in his formation of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Anything I want to share about that one? Well, Robert Bigelow was one of the supporters of John Mack. He financed a poll that became very central to the study of abduction experiences to try to figure out how many people have been abducted. This is a very difficult thing to establish because you can't just ask people,

have you ever been abducted. You have to find some trigger experiences that might indicate that. So anyway, Bigelow. finance that. He's been very out front with financing research into paranormal experiences. You know, he bought Skin Walker Ranch, which is still a hotbed of very strange things. There was a movie and a book about it. George Knapp did a wonderful book and study of what was going on there. So Bigelow, again, is got to be commended. He's a scientist. He's got, you know, a module attached to the International Space Station.

He's very solidly founded, you know, founded in science and research. But he's got an interest in the paranormal. And now he's interested in what happens after death. And Mack was interested in that too. That was his last project, really, life after death. You know, what happens? And as I say at the end of the book,

there's some experiences people reported that they thought he came back to them after he died. And I said, look, I'm not vouching for that in the book, but these are stories that people are telling. And I think it's kind of interesting that it became part of the mythology of John Mack, that he reappeared afterwards to various people who were dealing with mediums and seances and stuff. But so Bigelow is interested in that. And, you know, near-death experiences are a well-known phenomenon. It's not just, you know, science fiction. It's real that people have encountered strange things as they physically actually died. And then they were able to come back.

Leslie Cain's series now on Netflix, you know, surviving death points that out. So, you know, I said somewhere the other day that John Mack had two billionaires supporting him. He not only had Robert Bigelow, he had Lawrence Rockefeller, who was very eminent and very supportive. And Lawrence Rockefell gave a lot of money for his, you know, research. And Lawrence Rockefeller was, again, very brave. for a member of the Rockefeller family to support research in, you know, UFOs, alien abduction, very courageous. And he was also involved in conservation and a lot of other things. But he gave a lot of his money to research into strange areas.

And so I said, John Mack had two billionaires. It's nice to have one. Oh, you're right. A boy can dream, right? Maybe someday. But he attracted that support people. And he, you know, he, people reached out to him because they trusted him. Absolutely.

And I think the work speaks for itself. He clearly not only had a passion like you have in your subtitle, but he had an understanding and a care for these people who were going through this. Again, I always say this topic, these issues. with UAP, UFOs, alien abductions. They say more about us than I think they say about the phenomena itself or what we're dealing with. That mirror seems to always come back to us as human beings and how we perceive it. So I really do think that Mac was onto something.

And now it's up to the next generation to build off of that. And they now have this amazing book to do that. But of course, the most important question, Ralph, before we go, where can we find the book and where can we find everything you're up to? Well, it's officially being published March 15th, but it's already making its way out. Amazon has it, Barnes & Noble is taking orders, bookstores. We're going to be making appearances at bookstores. Leslie Kane and I are doing a virtual.

Everything is virtual today, so it's a virtual appearance at Shakespeare and Company on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. So they all have the book stocked. So Dan Aykroyd, by the way, who gave me a nice blur, you and I had doing a event at a bookstore. in L.A. on St. Patrick's Day, Dan Aykroyd, he wrote a book, he actually wrote the forward to his grandfather's book about ghosts. So he doesn't just do busting. He actually has stories about ghosts and his family. And he was very supportive of my book. And so Dan Aykroyd and I are going to do an event. But the book, it's easy to find out. If stores don't have it already, they're shipping it. and Amazon is already taken,

people have ordered it, they've already received it. Of course, on Kindle, it's available instantly for people who can't possibly wait to have it, you know, access it. So it's available already. Awesome. And again, you know, you're the guy who's tackled everything from the mafia to Nazi war criminals and everything in between.

And now you have abducted. on that list, Ralph. And I think it's awesome, man. So again, thank you for the book and thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you, Ryan. Real pleasure. Thank you. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment Podcast Network.