Word: macklis
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...when Dr. John Mack, a tenured professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, published his best selling Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Dean of the Medical School Daniel Tosteson promptly established a committee to investigate the matter...
...book represents the culmination of a series of interviews Mack conducted with people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, taken aboard space-ships, and forced to engage in sexual activity with their captors. A farout delusion, right? No, says Mack. He argues that the abduction experience cannot be captured by our limited imagination that sees objective and subjective, or real and unreal as eternally opposite categories...
Beginning with this notion of the limits of our scientific nomenclature, Mack goes on to explain that the abduction experiences which he describes in his book are neither real nor imagined. Instead, they belong to another realm altogether, one that does not admit of a tidy distinction between reality and fantasy...
...come as a great surprise to some that the Medical School decided to conduct a peer review of Mack's work. Mack is quite proud of his Harvard affiliation. Harvard Medical School is, in all likelihood, a bit less enthusiastic. Presumably because Mack was besmirching the good name of Harvard (on the talk-show circuit, among other places) and because Mack's scholarly rigor was questionable, the peer review was put in place...
According to the New York Times, the report filed by the committee (which has yet to be presented) is sharply critical of Mack's scholarly methods even as it defends his right to think and write about any subject that interests him. What will become of the report is itself uncertain. Again according to the Times, Dean Tosteson could do anything from recommending that Mack's tenure be rescinded to congratulating him for his intellectual honesty...