Throughout his career, Mack valued public engagement. He felt that his education and scholarship conferred social responsibilities. He had been a founding director of the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age, and a member of both Physicians for Social Responsibility, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Yet his work on alien abduction eventually made him suspicious of the media and its ability to relay accurate summaries of his findings. He instructed his assistants to very carefully vet all interview requests, and he was particularly sensitive to any communication with his colleagues at Harvard.
Mack’s interest in alien abduction was first sparked by a meeting, in January 1990, with a New York City author-artist who shared his interest in alternative psychotherapeutic modalities. That author, Budd Hopkins, had written a best-selling book about alien abduction. When reviewing interviews and testimonies of abductees, Mack was particularly struck by one specific aspect he identified, as reported in the Psychology Today profile: “[T]he internal consistency of the highly detailed accounts [of abduction] by different individuals who would have had no way to communicate with one another.” Starting in 1990, Mack began seeing and evaluating abductees, employing controversial applied analytical modalities, such as hypnotic regression, to obtain their stories. In all, he treated approximately 90 clients, of which 13 served as case studies for Abducted.
Mack eventually settled on several “factors” that skeptics of alien abduction needed to refute to disprove his theory:
[T]he extreme consistency of the stories from person after person. […]
[T]he fact that there is no ordinary experiential basis for this. In other words, there’s nothing in [abductees’] life experience that could have given rise to this, other than what they say. In other words, there’s no mental condition that could explain it. […]
[T]he physical aspects: the cuts and the other lesions on [abductees’] bodies, which do not follow any psychodynamic distribution […]
[T]he tight association with UFOs, which are often observed in the community, by the media, independent of the person having the abduction experience, who may not have seen the UFO at all, but reads or sees on the television the next day that a UFO passed near where they were when they had an abduction experience.
And […] the phenomenon occur[ring] in children as young as two, two and a half, three years old.