John Edward Mack (October 4 1929 – September 27 2004) was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor who served as head of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for nearly three decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his biography A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence.

Mack is best known in UAP circles for his pioneering research into the psychology of individuals who report alien abduction experiences. In the 1990s he conducted extensive clinical interviews with hundreds of such individuals, concluding that their accounts could not be explained solely by psychopathology, fantasy, or deception. His 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens brought the phenomenon into mainstream academic discourse and sparked intense controversy within Harvard and the broader psychiatric community.

In 1994 Mack traveled to Ruwa, Zimbabwe, to interview children at the Ariel School who claimed to have witnessed a UFO landing and non‑human entities. He later co‑founded the John E. Mack Institute, dedicated to exploring the implications of extraordinary human experiences. Mack’s work remains a foundational reference in the study of the psychological and cultural dimensions of UAP‑related encounters.