John E. Mack

Excellent article on the late Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack.

On September 16, 1994, 62 children in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they saw a spacecraft land near their school. Some claimed they communed with the small, dark-eyed beings who emerged from it, and were warned about the damage humanity was inflicting upon planet Earth.

Two months later, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack was on a plane to Africa, where “he interviewed 14 or 15 kids,” says Randy Nickerson, whose work-in-progress documentary, Encounter in Ruwa: The Ariel School Sighting, screens in Cambridge on Friday. “One of the things that really fascinated me was the consistency of their stories and drawings. It still astounds me.”

Mack, who died in 2004, founded the psychiatric department of Cambridge Hospital and won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize in biography for his portrait of T.E. Lawrence. His life’s work was “preoccupied with the issue of human identity,” says Dominique Callimanopulos, a former colleague who also worked on the film. And as the years wore on, he became more and more intrigued by how that identity fit into a “cosmic context,” and in exploring “our place in the universe,” says Callimanopulos.

Read complete article here. {via The Boston Phoenix}