EP210, Ralph Blumenthal: Portals to UFOs

A New York Times reporter chases coincidences to uncover fantastic stories.

In this episode, Ralph Blumenthal describes his journey from New York Times crime reporter to writing about alien abduction. He believes in the power of books to "choose their authors," rather than seeing the process as authors always being the ones to choose what books they will write. 

Ralph gives a sample story of the coincidences revealed in his work: Noted Harvard psychiatrist and alien abduction researcher John E. Mack was run down and killed by a drunk driver in London on the night of Sept. 27, 2004, days before his 75th birthday. At nearly the same time, J. Wesley Boyd, a fellow psychiatrist and protege of Mack's at Harvard, was landing in St. Petersburg, Russia, to attend a medical conference. In a taxi from the airport, Boyd looked out of the window to see a car ram into a crossing pedestrian. Boyd saw the man's head slam onto the sidewalk and his legs crumple under the car. Later Boyd learned that his friend John Mack had been run over and killed in London at almost the same time, and in a very similar way. He was haunted by the painful synchronicity. 

Connecting with Coincidence with Bernard Beitman, MD (CCBB) is now offered as both an audio podcast--anywhere that podcasts are available--and in video format on the Connecting with Coincidence YouTube channel. Please SUBSCRIBE to our channel to be notified when future episodes are posted! Also available, there are 138 archived episodes of the CCBB podcast available, HERE. We would love to hear from you as well! If you have a coincidence story to share, please leave it in the comments below, and we will respond. 

Our guest Ralph Blumenthal is a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009. Ralph 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 March 15, 2021 by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press. Learn more at www.ralphblumenthal.com.

Our host Dr. Bernard Beitman is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to attempt to systematize the study of coincidences. He is Founding Director of The Coincidence Project. His book, and his Psychology Today blog, are both titled Connecting with Coincidence. He has developed the first valid and reliable scale to measure coincidence sensitivity, and has written and edited coincidence articles for Psychiatric Annals. He is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He attended Yale Medical School and completed a psychiatric residency at Stanford. Dr. Beitman has received two national awards for his psychotherapy training program and is internationally known for his research into the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder. Learn more at https://coincider.com.