This is the story of a skeptic who became a believer.  His  fight for academic freedom.  His quest to get the scientific world to take an objective look into a fascinating human experience.   John Mack was tragically killed in 2004.  This story will be told through the alien abductees whose lives he touched, his family, friends and colleagues that were astounded by his courage, and his critics who grew to respect him.

 

DESCRIPTION

The Believer is a 1 hr documentary about the spiritual transformation of Alien Abductees, and the Harvard Professor who was persecuted for believing them.

SYNOPSIS

Four  million people in the US alone believe that they have been abducted by beings from another world, more people than the population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city.  This massive portion of the population is regarded by the scientific community as attention starved, delusional or having false memory.  

One man, fought to change that:  Pulitzer Prize winning psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard Medical School - John Mack. In 1989 Mack began a decade long study of 200 men and women who reported alien encounters.  He remains the most esteemed academic to ever study the phenomena.  Mack initially believed that his subjects were suffering from mental illness but soon realized that something much more mysterious was going on.  Mack found that his subjects had no symptoms of mental illness, but were experiencing the genuine psychological after effects of a very real traumatic experience.   Unable to find any mental or physical explanation for these peoples abduction experience, Mack gradually came to the realization that there was a genuine unexplainable phenomenon at work.   Something impossible had happened to these people, which instantly transformed their lives and perception of the world.  Perhaps even more interesting, the majority of the abductees fear eventually subsided and they came to see the experience as positive.  Most became more spiritual and showed a much-increased concern for the environment.

When Mack released his findings he became the focal point for what has been called a modern day witch-hunt to remove him from his post at Harvard.  The first and only such investigation in Harvard’s history.  After 14 months the prestigious university publicly apologized and cleared Mack’s name.