New York Times reporter, author joins local book club for Aug. 26 Zoom presentation

The Mesilla Valley/Southern New Mexico Book Club will host a Zoom presentation with award-winning New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, author of “The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.”

The Zoom presentation will be 4 to 5 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 26. The event is free and open to the public. 

“The Believer” was published in March 2021, the book club said in a news release. It is the biography of John Mack (1929-2004), a 1955 cum laude Harvard medical school graduate. After residency and a voluntary stint in the United States Air Force and work and certification in Boston with prestigious psychiatric programs, Mack was head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School from 1977 until his death in 2004.

 The dominant theme of Mack’s life's work at Harvard had been the exploration of how one's perceptions of the world affect one's relationships, the news release said. In the early 1990s, Mack commenced a decade-plus psychological study of 200 men and women who reported recurrent alien-encounter experiences. Many of those he interviewed reported that their encounters had affected the way they regarded the world. And the controversy began.

Blumenthal, a distinguished lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, was a New York Times reporter from 1964 to 2009. 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. Blumenthal also has written books on organized crime and cultural history.

He began his journalism career as a reporter/columnist for The Grand Prairie Daily News Texan in 1963.

Email bitsabookclub@gmail.com for the Zoom invitation or more information.

Visit www.ralphblumenthal.com.