Space Alien Studies Hit Turbulence : Harvard: Faculty panel questions whether psychiatrist’s research meets school’s standards for scholarship. He wrote best-selling book on people who say they’ve had sex with beings from other worlds.

A year ago, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack cruised the talk-show circuit promoting his best-selling book about people who say they had sex with aliens.

Now, a committee of colleagues is investigating whether Mack’s alien abduction research meets the school’s standards for scholarship.

The Harvard Medical Committee expects to complete its report within two months. Based on the peer review, the dean, Dr. Daniel Tosteson, will make a decision that could range from trying to oust Mack to applauding his perseverance in doing work his colleagues might call quackery.

Attorney Roderick MacLeish, representing Mack during the review, said Harvard’s action violates the principle of the tenure system, which gives professors jobs for life so they can feel free to pursue radical or unpopular research.

“History has not been kind to those who have unorthodox ideas,” MacLeish said. “That’s the whole point of having a free and open academic community. That’s the whole purpose of tenure.”

Before he started talking about space aliens, Mack was a well respected professor at Harvard Medical School. He founded the psychiatry department at Cambridge Hospital, one of Harvard’s teaching facilities. He won a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Lawrence of Arabia.

Mack drew a different kind of notoriety for the book “Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens,” about his treatment of patients who say little gray space creatures kidnaped them and took them away in flying saucers for sexual experiments.

The book’s 13 case studies include Ed, who remembers an alien woman taking a sperm sample from him when he was in high school; Jerry, who says she gave birth to a human-alien hybrid; and Peter, who told Mack he had an “alien wife” in a “parallel universe.”

After the book was published in April, 1994, Mack appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Larry King Live” and other talk shows.

It may have been publicity that inspired the medical school to investigate Mack’s scholarship, said a source close to the case. The source also said that the down-to-earth medical school professors felt threatened by Mack’s otherworldly research.

“If Dr. Mack is right, it undercuts so much of the work of people over there. These people don’t think anything is true unless they’ve got a controlled study with rats,” the source said.

Leading the committee is Dr. Arnold Relman, a kidney specialist, emeritus medical school professor and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Relman would not comment on the content of the review.

“We are now in the process of preparing a report, and what, if anything, happens after that is out of our hands,” Relman said.

Other Harvard faculty members would not comment about Mack’s research or the school’s review.

But Dr. Paul R. McHugh, director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said Harvard’s investigation into Mack was justified and “long overdue.”

“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. He is saying there are people who have been abducted by aliens and need treatment for it, and that is just outrageous.”

Mack, 65, did not return telephone calls. He told the Associated Press last year that he does not necessarily believe in space aliens. Mack said he does not believe that his patients are mentally ill or experiencing the effects of incest, rape or other abuse. His patients experienced trauma, he said, and trauma is the response to something outside the body, not inside the mind.

As for his debunkers, Mack said he understands why they might find his work troubling.

“We don’t have room in our culture for this. It’s the elite people, my colleagues, who decide what we’re supposed to believe, and to them this isn’t supposed to be,” he said.