John Edward Mack, a Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, spent years trying to fathom their stories [those who claimed alien abduction] and reached an astonishing conclusion: they were telling the truth. That is, they were not insane or deluded. In some unknown space/time dimension, something real had actually happened to them. Mack graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School and, while only a resident, founded one of the nations first outpatient hospitals. Days before his 75th birthday, he looked the wrong way down a London street and stepped in front of a drunk driver. But 20 years ago, when he burst onto the scene as the Harvard professor who believed in alien abduction, he was probably the most famous, or infamous, academic in America. Suddenly he was under investigation at Harvard, the target of a grueling inquisition. But two decades after Mack took alien abduction from the pages of the National Enquirer to the hallowed halls of Harvard, the question remains: why would a pillar of the psychiatric establishment at Americas oldest university court professional suicide to champion the most ridiculed and tormented outcasts of society? As he later said, "These individuals reported being taken against their wills sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive purpose. In a few cases they were actually observed by independent witnesses to be physically absent during the time of the abduction. These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder, except the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with powerful emotion what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore these experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, family members, or others in the community, including media reporters and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individuals' bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically identifiable pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. In short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview."