Remember the late John Mack? He's the Harvard researcher who created a kerfuffle about 10 years ago over his research into people who claimed they'd been abducted by aliens. Now, a former journalist has looked over media coverage of Mack and come to a couple conclusions: Reporters were fair to him overall, but they also managed to reveal the limits of what's considered acceptable as science.
Journalists served as "boundary tenders, monitors of social norms and deviants," said Linda Billings, a "science communications researcher" with NASA. She was speaking today at the AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco.
Learn more about her research here. (You'll also find a PDF of her research.) And to learn more about scientific research into tales of alien abduction, check out a story of mine from Wired News here.
