Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2023
The Evolving UFO Discussion: What’s Next?
by: Brent Raynes
Karin Austin
This isn't an easy journey for anyone who enters this field. You naturally want to have something to hold onto, to cling to, that gives you some sort of sense of knowing and certainty, but you have to allow for a realistic level of uncertainty while you probe and ponder this great and complex unknown. My good friend psychologist Dr. Greg Little likes to quote Carl Jung: "Something is seen, one doesn't know what." He translates that to mean that there's something there indeed, but there's a cloud of uncertainty as to exactly what it is, and we tend to interpret or color it with personal and cultural expectations and understandings.
To be truly objective with this enigma one mustn't jump to premature conclusions. It's obvious to me and many others that we have a first-rate mystery on our hands. It has a very long history too. Lots of beliefs and explanation attempts have come and gone, although many resurface again and again, rather like a Mobius loop. Most reports have reasonable explanations. Misinterpretations of natural phenomena (i.e., temperature inversions of Venus on the horizon, ball lightning, etc.) and misidentified man-made creations (i.e., drones, airplanes, satellites, weather balloons, etc.) while there remains that smaller but yet ever so intriguing grouping of reports that continue to stump those of us who are willing to push aside biased preconceptions and genuinely delve into this anomalous evidence thoroughly and objectively.
The trek can certainly be a confusing, at times downright insane one, like walking through a hall of mirrors where an honest person of integrity and discernment wonders, "Where the heck do I go next? What do I believe? What's this all about?" Journalist John Keel declared "belief is the enemy," as it tends to sabotage one's efforts at examining the full-scale database of this enigma because elements of it would conflict with their pet theories and beliefs. Researchers and experiencers can have a hard time finding their place in this field, their "comfort zone."
My experience has been that many researchers I've come upon in ufology didn't just read a book that drew them into it but actually had anomalous experiences themselves that motivated them to enter the field and participate in the process of research and investigations - hoping that this would help them to better understand what had taken place in their own lives, in addition to contributing something worthwhile and meaningful to the field too.
I recently enjoyed chatting on Zoom with Karin Austin, the newly appointed executive director of the John E. Mack Institute. Dr. Mack (1929-2004) was a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. He authored two books on cases involving people who described experiences of so-called "alien abductions" - encounters with alien, non-human beings - and being taken aboard strange craft, frequently for apparent physical exams or testing. The books were entitled Abduction (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos (1999).
Karin is both a serious researcher and experiencer herself and has been working at a feverish pitch for months trying to digitize Dr. Mack's extensive archival collection related to his research with experiencers. Karin connected with Dr. Mack in late 1996 as an experiencer herself. She participated in his research for several years and afterwards, evolved into a role as his personal assistant. Following his death, she stepped away from the UFO world to process her grief and metabolize the impact of her abduction-encounters. For the better part of two decades, she was almost singularly focused on her career as the owner of a boutique home renovation business. After reflecting on her early encounters with the media during public education events she attended with Dr. Mack, she came to realize that a hundred credible experiencers with compelling witness statements wouldn’t fundamentally move the needle of public opinion regarding the abduction phenomenon’s veracity.
Karin was thus surprised to find herself, in the midst of Covid lockdown, inspired by a vision to reanimate the John E. Mack Institute. After incubating the idea for a few months, she plucked up the courage to draft a proposal that she finally presented to Dr. Mack's eldest son Danny Mack, a Boulder, Colorado based tech entrepreneur. Danny had been "holding down the fort" at JEMI — along with Will Bueche, JEMI's longtime archivist — following his father's passing in 2004. Ultimately, Danny greenlit the project and in doing so, breathed new life into Dr. Mack's decades-old non-profit organization.
Currently, the JEMI team is collaborating with Jeffrey J Kripal's Archives of the Impossible, and head archivist, Amanda Focke at Rice University, to complete the digitization of Dr. Mack's abduction-related research materials. They have undertaken this task in preparation for a meta-data research project they intend to initiate in 2024 with the oversight of Rice University’s Internal Review Board and an interdisciplinary panel of scientists and academics. The research will apply rigorous methodologies and protocols to the anonymized raw data in Dr. Mack's materials so that it can be statistically analyzed and utilized by scholars in their thinking about the phenomenon. Ultimately, JEMI's intention is to make the results of Dr. Mack's research easily accessible to the general public and an international community of researchers interested in learning more about Dr. Mack's work.
Karin states that her time and "intellectual resources" are fully committed to seeing all of this through. She hopes JEMI's efforts on behalf of a community of credible abduction-experiencers will help elevate and amplify their voices in the mainstream dialogue as an important counterpoint to the “national security threat” narratives currently being espoused by America’s national defense apparatus and various congressional representatives. Karin agrees with many UAP investigators that focusing on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the phenomenon to the exclusion of abduction-experiencer knowledge, is as problematic as it is disappointing. Especially, as the pace of “official disclosure” seems to be quickening in response to recent whistleblower testimony and the persistent reports of verified UAP sightings filed by trusted military aviation personnel.
One can't help but reflect, that in these intriguing but uncertain times, it’s important that public officials, ufologists and indeed, all of humanity, remain open-minded and objective in considering the mystery unfolding before us all.
References:
https://thedebrief.org/the-experience-the-cultural-rise-of-alien-abductions-and-those-who-encounter-them/
http://johnemackinstitute.org/2023/05/karin-austins-remarks-at-archives-of-the-impossible/
