John Mack, author and psychiatry professor, dies at 74

By Mary Rourke
Los Angeles Times

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Dr. John Mack, 74, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who stirred controversy in the late 1990s with his writings about extraterrestrial encounters, died Monday in a London automobile accident.

His death was reported by Will Bueche of the John E. Mack Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Mack was in England to lecture at a conference sponsored by the T. E. Lawrence Society and was hit by a car while walking across a street.

Dr. Mack's "A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence," a psychological study of the man better known as Lawrence of Arabia, won a Pulitzer in 1977.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Mack explored the meaning of dreams and nightmares. He also worked with suicidal teenagers and wrote "Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl" with Holly Hickler (1981).

He was primarily interested in how an individual's world view affects their relationships. The question was a starting point for his biography of Lawrence, the British army intelligence officer stationed in Egypt who became devoted to the Arab cause.

"The value of psychology in a biography is that it deepens our appreciation of the inner life of public figures," Dr. Mack later said of his biography. "I've used psychology to relate the motivations of historical figures to the larger picture."

After being widely praised for his work on Lawrence, Dr. Mack stirred controversy with his clinical studies about people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens. He interviewed several hundred people in the early 1990s who claimed to have encountered extraterrestrials. He wrote two books on his findings, "Abductors: Human Encounters With Aliens" (1994) and "Passport to Cosmos" (1999).

Dr. Mack concluded that the experiences of those who said they had been abducted could have been more spiritual than physical, but they were real nonetheless.

Harvard Medical School launched a formal academic probe into his controversial work, eventually concluding that Dr. Mack was free to study what he wanted and to state his opinions. Although his critics at the university claimed that he was no longer taken seriously, others saw him as a pioneer in the field of mental health.

Dr. Mack is survived by three sons and two grandchildren.