Obituaries
	Major Gorden Cooper  October 4th, 2004 One of the original Mercury Astronauts and the last American to fly in space alone. On May 15, 1963 he shot into space in a Mercury capsule for a 22 orbit journey around the world. During the final orbit, Major Gordon Cooper told the tracking station at Muchea (near Perth Australia) that he could see a glowing, greenish object ahead of him quickly approaching his capsule. The UFO was real and solid, because it was picked up by Muchea's tracking radar. Cooper's sighting was reported by the National Broadcast Company, which was covering the flight step by step; but when Cooper landed, reporters were told that they would not be allowed to question him about the UFO sighting. Major Cooper was a firm believer in UFOs. Ten years earlier, in 1951 he had sighted a UFO while piloting an F-86 Sabrejet over Western Germany. They were metallic, saucer-shaped discs at considerable altitude and could out-maneuver all American fighter planes. Major Cooper also testified before the United Nations: "I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets... Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFOs." "I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them, of different sizes, flying in fighter formation, generally from east to west over Europe." And according to a taped interview by J. L. Ferrando, Major Cooper said:    "For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means." "I was furthermore a witness to an extraordinary phenomenon, here on this planet Earth. It happened a few months ago in Florida. There I saw with my own eyes a defined area of ground being consumed by flames, with four indentations left by a flying object which had descended in the middle of a field. Beings had left the craft (there were other traces to prove this). They seemed to have studied topography, they had collected soil samples and, eventually, they returned to where they had come from, disappearing at enormous speed...I happen to know that authority did just about everything to keep this incident from the press and TV, in fear of a panicky reaction from the public." BACK TO FRONT PAGE
	Dr. John E. Mack September 30th 2004 BOSTON -- Dr. John E. Mack, the Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Lawrence of Arabia and also conducted research on people who claimed to be abducted by aliens, has died. Mack was struck and killed by an alleged drunken driver in London on Monday while attending the T.E. Lawrence Society Symposium in Oxford, England, according to a release on the John E. Mack Institute Web site. He was 74. Harvard Medical School spokesman Don Gibbons confirmed the death. Mack, who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1977 for "A Prince of Our Disorder" on the life of World War I British officer T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, was one of several speakers at the symposium. Mack made two presentations at the symposium on Monday, and was struck in a crosswalk while walking to the home at which he was staying, according to police. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Mack's extensive research of about 200 people from around the world who claimed to have had encounters with space aliens found that they had a heightened sense of spirituality and environmentalism. He wrote about his subjects' experiences in two books, 1994's "Abduction" and 1999's "Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters." His work was also the subject of the 2003 documentary film "Touched." His efforts, which found that people claiming to be abducted came from all walks of life and generally had no evidence of mental illness, met with skepticism and criticism from some elements of the academic community. In 1994, Harvard Medical School established a committee of peers to review his clinical care and clinical investigation of the people he interviewed in the course of his alien abduction research and initiated proceedings to determine whether he should retain tenure. After the 14-month investigation, the school "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment." "I am just so devastated by this news," said Roderick MacLeish, the attorney who represented Mack during the Harvard investigation. "This is a great loss. John was one of the kindest, most compassionate mental health clinicians I have ever met, and I have represented many psychiatrists." Mack's early work focused on clinical explorations of dreams, nightmares and teen suicide and how world perception affects .relationships. He advocated a move away from materialism in Western culture, blaming it for the Cold War and global ecological problems. "He was so caring to his patients, and I hope that is what he is remembered for, and not for being the guy who believed in people's stories of alien abductions," MacLeish said. Mack was born in New York City. He earned an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College in 1951 and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1955. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1959-61.      { From The Associated Press }Mack spent five years interviewing more than 100 "experiencers" to produce his book Abduction - Human Encounters with Aliens. It made him a rich man, and a regular guest on television talk shows, but his emergence as a guru for UFO believers caused his university acute embarrassment. Paul McHugh, the director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said: "I've known John since the 1950s. He's a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he's lost it big time." Malkah Notman, Mack's head of department, was only slightly more guarded. "People have great respect for John's other achievements," he said. "But the perception is that this is not a productive area of research." But Mack was unrepentant, telling The Telegraph: "Look, something is really going on here." Mack's conclusion that there was "no conventional explanation" for case studies such as Ed, who remembered an alien woman taking a sperm sample from him; Jerry, who had given birth to a human-alien hybrid; and Peter, who had an alien wife in a parallel universe, led some colleagues to launch the "Knife the Mack" movement. Their concerns led to an inquiry at Harvard Medical School led by Arnold Relman, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. After a year-long investigation, in which Mack won the support of, among others, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor best-known for his involvement in celebrity trials, the school's ruling body "urged him not, in any way, to violate the high standards . . . of this faculty". But it also reaffirmed his academic freedom, and allowed him to continue his work on aliens. This he did with gusto, producing Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters in 1999. Reaction to his biography of Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, which appeared in 1976, had been markedly different, and several publications, including Time and the Contemporary Review, hailed it as the most insightful yet produced. But like his work on aliens, Mack concentrated on the psychology of the individual, and the spiritual aspects of character. He did not neglect factual research, however, interviewing Lawrence's brother and travelling to his birthplace at Tremadoc, and to Aqaba (by camel). He concluded that Lawrence's heroism derived from an attempt to live up to ideals he had created in his childhood, partly from shame that his parents, though strict and religious, had never married. John Edward Mack was born in New York City on October 4 1929 into an academically ambitious Jewish family. He was educated at Oberlin College before going on to Harvard, where he obtained his medical degree cum laude in 1955. He was an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital and did his residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He served in the US Air Force from 1959 to 1961, rising to the rank of captain and marrying his wife, Sally Stahl. In 1964, he joined the Harvard Medical School faculty, becoming professor of psychiatry in 1972. He was founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital. In 1983, he founded the Centre for Psychology and Social Change, to research "the full breadth of human experience, including spiritual experience not generally accepted by more conservative branches of psychiatry". It was renamed the John E Mack Institute this year. His most recent article, two weeks ago, compared the leadership qualities of T E Lawrence and George W Bush; not to the latter's advantage. That weekend, he enjoyed canvassing in the rain for John Kerry. He published almost a dozen books, including Nightmares and Human Conflict, which became a standard text, and edited Borderline States in Psychiatry. Mack was speaking at the T E Lawrence Society Symposium in Oxford on Sunday, where his afternoon talk was so well received that he was invited to give an additional speech that evening. The next day he was returning from dinner with friends in London when he was run down and killed. Asked what his message would be if he could broadcast to the world, he replied, "I would be humbled", but offered the following prescription: "Wake up, find your way, whether it is with prayer or psychedelics or abductions or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whatever it is, find your way to break out of the program, the commercial materialist program." His marriage was dissolved in 1995. He is survived by his three sons. BACK TO FRONT PAGE