But I was interested most of all in the dead man who remained an icon to many on the porch. John Edward Mack, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, spent years trying to fathom their stories and reached an astonishing conclusion: they were telling the truth. That is, they were not insane or deluded; in some unknown space/time dimension, something real had actually happened to them—not that Mack could explain just what or how. But weeks after attending the 2004 Newport gathering, days before his 75th birthday, he looked the wrong way down a London street and stepped in front of a drunk driver.

Aside from those of his circle and university colleagues, Mack is scarcely known today. But 20 years ago, when he burst onto the scene as the Harvard professor who believed in alien abduction, he was probably the most famous, or infamous, academic in America, “the most important scientist ever to dare to admit the truth about the abduction phenomenon,” in the words of Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling memoir, Communion, introduced millions of Americans to alien encounters.

Tall, impulsive, and magnetic to women and men, Mack was everywhere, or so it seemed—on OprahandNova; on the best-seller lists; in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time; at his Laurance S. Rockefeller–supported Program for Extraordinary Experience Research; in scholarly journals, documentaries, poems, theater pieces, and Roz Chast cartoons. And then suddenly he was under investigation at Harvard, the target of a grueling inquisition. “I didn’t think people would believe me,” Mack had confided to his longtime assistant, Leslie Hansen, who was in Newport last July. “But I didn’t think they’d get so mad.” In the end he achieved a measure of vindication, but his freakish demise denied him a final reckoning in an unpublished manuscript he saw as his cri de coeur against scientific materialism and “ontological fascism.”

He left behind another unpublished manuscript, with another mystery he was seeking to unravel, a secret as dark as death itself. And now his interrupted journey may be heading to the big screen. After a four-year negotiation, the film and television rights to Mack’s story were granted by the Mack family to MakeMagic Productions, which has partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, and a major feature film is currently in development. But two decades after Mack took alien abduction from the pages of the National Enquirer to the hallowed halls of Harvard, the question remains: why would a pillar of the psychiatric establishment at America’s oldest university court professional suicide to champion the most ridiculed and tormented outcasts of society?

On Cuvelier’s porch, a Vermont shopkeeper who wanted to be known as “Nona”—the way Mack identified her in Passport to the Cosmos, his 1999 follow-up to Abduction—remembered filling 300 pages with “abduction recollections,” which Mack struggled to accept as real. Had she actually traveled on shafts of crystalline light? “John, I know when I’m physically gone,” she remembered replying. “I know when I’m going through a wall.” Mack had had one nagging disappointment, Nona recalled. He had never undergone an abduction, or even spied a U.F.O. Why can’t I see one?, he wondered. Nona would twit him. “Probably because you’re not patient enough, John.”

‘I was raised as the strictest of materialists,” Mack told the writer C. D. B. Bryan. “I believed we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe, on this sometimes verdant rock with these animals and plants around, and we were here to make the best of it, and when we’re dead, we’re dead.” A great-grandfather of his had pioneered the use of anesthetics in eye surgery, and a great-uncle had been one of the first Jewish professors at Harvard Medical School. His father, Edward, was a noted literary biographer and scholar at the City College of New York who had remarried a widow with a young daughter after his wife died of peritonitis eight months after John was born. John’s socially prominent stepmother, Ruth Prince, was an eminent feminist economist and New Dealer whose first husband, a great-grandson of the founder of Gimbels department store, had jumped or fallen from the 16th floor of the Yale Club as the Great Depression deepened.