Ralph Blumenthal
speaker
27 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ralph Blumenthal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So perhaps tell us a little bit about Dr. John Mack. You don't hear his name in UFO world all that much anymore, but really you should. I mean, he was a trailblazer. He was courageous, brilliant, mercurial. Your book, The Believer, you can almost have a subtitle of sex, drugs, rock and roll. I mean, this guy was an interesting character.
I get the sense that you really learned so much about him, and you came to like him and admire him, even though you didn't get to meet him.
Yeah, your book is powerful. It doesn't paint him as a saint. It's warts and all. You include the warts to some degree.
Well, let's go into some of the criteria that he developed, because over time, he developed sort of a checklist of criteria that sort of, all right, if you're going to try to explain these things away as mental illness or something else, you have to count for X, Y, Z, right?
It was interesting, the title of your book again, The Believer. The first time I met Dr. Mack, it was early 90s at a conference, a UFO conference in the Ozarks. And I asked him about that label. And he bristled a little bit and said, I'm not a believer. This is science. I'm going about this as a scientist and a researcher in the correct way. Why did you settle on that title?
He put everything on the line, his reputation, his stature at Harvard, everything on the line in order to pursue understanding. As you document in your book, he got in a lot of trouble at Harvard and went through like a 15-month long inquisition, in essence. Harvard, of course, a place, as you write, has been known for cutting edge, out there kind of research for forever.
And here they are reacting to his increasing public profile on this abduction phenomena. And they initiated sort of a secret tribunal. Can you tell us, walk us through that part of the story?
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