Lots of out-of-the-box thinking on this thread. Interesting stuff on theoretical physics, other dimensions, and so on.
I've been reading a lot lately about Dr. John Mack. Some of you may have heard of him -- brilliant, accomplished thinker; Pulitzer Prize winning writer, medical doctor and psychiatrist. And the one-time head of Harvard's Psychiatry Department.
In short, someone better educated, and objectively smarter than any of us.
But he ended up a highly controversial figure and an outcast from academia before his accidental death several years ago. Why? Because he came to believe, through patients he met as a psychiatrist, that Alien Abductions were real. And he wrote a couple books about it: Abduction in 1994 and Passport to the Cosmos in 1999.
To his friends at Harvard, his was a sad story of someone who followed something he couldn't explain -- seemingly authentic accounts of people who he judged to be sane and truthful about alien abductions -- so far down the rabbit hole that he became delusional.
I'm sure others would see him as a hero who was intellectually honest enough to follow the evidence whereever it led.
Either way, a fascinating character.
Here's a piece in the British medical journal Lancet written in a sympathetic way, but that agrees with the first of those two possibilities.