Karin Austin
Managing Director of the John Mack Institute and Rice University’s Center For The Impossible. A former participant in John Mack’s “alien abduction” research and his personal assistant in the final years of his life, Austin helped the Mack family preserve his archives after his 2004 death and facilitated their 2022 transfer to Harvard and Rice. She now leads a multidisciplinary team conducting metadata analysis of experiencer materials across archival collections.
At the July 2026 “Breaking the Taboo” symposium (which she co-organized), Austin argues for rigorous, case-by-case assessment of contact testimony — building on michael-bohlander’s legal-standard witness-credibility argument — and presents the Center’s “first-of-its-kind” metadata analysis of “thousands of convergent” experiencer accounts.
Vault appearances
- src-breaking-the-taboo-uap-contact-symposium-2026-05 — co-organizer; Session 2 talk “Experiencer to Researcher.”