The Believer is the weird and chilling true story of Dr. John Mack. This eminent Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer risked his career to investigate the phenomenon of human encounters with aliens and to give credibility to the stupefying tales shared by people who were utterly convinced they had happened.

Nothing in Mack’s four decades of psychiatry had prepared him for the otherworldly accounts of a cross section of humanity including young children who reported being taken against their wills by alien beings. Over the course of his career his interest in alien abduction grew from curiosity to wonder, ultimately developing into a limitless, unwavering passion.


Author Ralph Blumenthal, a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written and co-authored seven books on organized crime and cultural history. He co-authored the recent series of groundbreaking Times articles on the secret Pentagon program to investigate UFOs. He led the Times metro team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center. In 2001, Blumenthal was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to research the progressive career and penal reforms of Warden Lewis E. Lawes, “the man who made Sing Sing sing.” The book on Warden Lawes, “Miracle at Sing Sing,” was published by St. Martin’s in June, 2004. His most recent book is “The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack,” published by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press.