Unless you have a surround speaker setup, or a soundcard with a good HRTF capabilities, it'll be quite hard to solve with only left and right outputs. All I can suggest is to make sure your listener is oriented the way you want (alListenerfv(AL_ORIENTATION, ...)), and if at all possible, create some sort of visual cue on screen to trick the person in the seat to believing that the sound is coming from in-front or behind them

(a few speaker setup programs I've encountered have a symbol representing the sound source, circling what looks like the person's head, to indicate where the sound should be coming from).