When John Mack published "Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens" in 1994, Harvard Medical School convened a special faculty committee to review his work and determine whether it constituted professional misconduct. The committee, after fourteen months of deliberation, concluded that it did not.
The episode was remarkable: a tenured Harvard professor with a Pulitzer Prize had been subjected to institutional review not for methodological failures, but for taking his research subjects seriously.
Mack's methodology was straightforward. He conducted extended clinical interviews with individuals who reported alien abduction experiences using the same techniques he applied to other forms of anomalous experience. His subjects showed none of the clinical markers of psychosis, confabulation, or fantasy-prone personality. They described experiences in consistent structural detail across cultures and without prior knowledge of each other's accounts.
Mack did not claim to know what was happening to his subjects. He claimed to know that the available explanations were inadequate. He died in September 2004, struck by a drunk driver in London.