Diary of an Alien Life Form

Ancient Aliens or Modern Misconceptions?

2011-12-29T12:42:00.000-08:00

I'm going to share (not much of) a secret with you:

I will watch almost anything with a paranormal/UFO theme to it, even paranormal reality shows, even the Ancient Aliens series on the History Channel.

I also have fond memories of the release of the first Von Daniken book, Chariots of the Gods!

You have to like a guy who isn't ashamed to use exclamation marks at the end of every sentence, no matter how silly or far-fetched.

Wait. What I meant to say is,

You have to admire a guy who isn't afraid! To use exclamation marks! At the end of every sentence! No matter how silly or far-fetched!

I also really, really like the Greek fellow with the crazy hair who edits his own magazine about this stuff. He is always very well-dressed and well-spoken, and he has hair that defies the laws of physics. Seriously, that hair is proof enough for me of almost anything he has to say.

I know I'm being a bit of smart aleck here and I usually try not to do that. But it seems to me that there are a number of basic misconceptions underlying the ancient alien hypothesis. Un-coincidentally, mainstream archeology shares a few of these too. That way, we get the classic crackpot/debunker deadlock polarity that for some reason HAS to emerge in any discussion of the unexplained.

Here are just a few of those (for my money) faulty assumptions:

The Myth of Progress. This myth has it that human beings are naturally progressing toward greater and great sophistication and intelligence, so that anything in the deep past that we can't replicate and improve upon today must be evidence of some kind of intervention by a superior force. We can't build Stonehenge without machines so aliens must have done it. We can't build a system of aqua ducts to Roman specifications so aliens must have done it. We don't know how the Pharoahs slapped up those pyramids so quickly and so mathematically/astronomically correctly so aliens must have done it. This assumption is deeply disrespectful of ancient peoples, many of whom were as sophisticated and intelligent if not more so than today's top scientists. It is egomaniacal in the extreme to assume that we are the pinnacle of human development and therefore anything we don't understand must have inhuman origins.
The Aliens Are a Lot Like Us Assumption. Not only are aliens assumed to be bipedal, hominid-type organisms of more or less the same height and girth as homo sapiens, they are assumed to be 'technologically advanced', meaning they have an affinity for shiny aerodynamic shapes, bright lights, and tight-fitting jumpsuits. But even a cursory look at alien species invasions on our own planet--and there have been many--reveals that aliens can be as small and goopy as a zebra muscle or as florally lovely and rabid as a strand of purple loosestrife. In fact, the first aliens we meet from outer space might have already arrived--in the form of microscopic viruses. So the 'a lot like us' assumption seems more a byproduct of science fiction stories and movies than common sense. If the aliens are aliens, you would, if anything, expect them to be so different from us that we would barely recognize them as living things.
The 'They Want Our Wimmin' Assumption. So, let's just get this straight. Alien invaders came from across time and space to visit Earth eons ago, and the first thing they did when they got here was try to get laid? Seriously? When was the last time a zebra mussel put the moves on your wife? Even if that did happen, how far do you think such a mussel would get with its dishonorable intentions? Why don't humans try mating with chimpanzees so we can get them to run our Walmarts? Because it's disgusting, that's why! I mean, come on! We have some good-looking wimmin here on earth, but they're not all that and a bag of chips.

You get my drift.

I could go on, but I won't.

I actually think the notion that alien species found their way to earth in our deep past is a real possibility and a credible one.

It's just that the analysis going on on both sides of the fence, at least for now, isn't.

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop watching the show.

I still haven't figured out how that guy gets his hair to stay like that.

Happy Anniversary Kevin Arnold

2011-06-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

Sixty-four years ago, on June 24, 1947, Air Force pilot Kevin Arnold reported that he had seen several silver flying discs from his plane that moved like stones skipping over water.

Arnold's description of the objects as 'disc shaped' led to invention of the term 'flying saucer', and the modern era of ufology was born. Arnold later modified his report to say that some of the discs were shaped more like flying arcs (see photo).

Kenneth Arnold had over 9,000 hour in flight and was widely respected both within and outside of the military. He claimed that he was not worried about the sighting at first because he assumed the discs were classified U.S. military aircraft.

When that assumption turned out not to be the case (so far as we know), Arnold became more involved in the investigation of UFOs, interviewing several witnesses and contactees and eventually writing a book on the topic.

Some UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists (i.e., Bruce Macabbee, Jim Marrs) claim Arnold had seen UFOs over Yakima Washington and even had some contact with military intelligence agents (either knowingly or unknowingly) in early 1947, before his famous sighting.

Whether or not that is true, after a few years Arnold refused to talk about UFOs any further and began to decline all interviews.

Make of it all what you will.

If nothing else, these claims prove that dissembling and controvery are par for the course when it comes to UFOs, and have been from day one.

And that is a fact you can take to the bank.

UFOs have been seen in the skies and reported in detail for millennia of course (see the recent book, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck), but Kevin Arnold's sighting is widely regarded as the beginning of the 20th century incarnation of these elusive phenomena.

Whether you believe, just want to believe, or think it's all total rot, why not celebrate?

Have some star jelly on your toast today.

Make cupcakes!

Super 8 and Alien Anger Management Issues

2011-06-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

The new J.J. Abrams movie "Super 8" could have been called "Cloverfield Goes to Steeltown and by the Way I Really Like Stephen Spielberg," but that doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, and it doesn't fit on the screen any easier than its rampaging (but mostly absent) extraterrestrial star.

Basically a monster movie set up as an homage to Spielberg's "ET: The Extraterrestrial," "Super 8" is less sugary and hopeful than Spielberg's alien offerings, but tamer and less noisy than Michael Bay's roller coaster ride of back to back explosions (i.e. "Transformers").

Oh, there's lots of explosions and noise in "Super 8," but the young actors are great and the story is good too.

I liked it.

But then, I like ALL monster movies, with alien movies being a close second, so you can't totally trust my judgment.

Watching "Super 8," it did hit me how much aliens have changed since Spielberg first gave us that cute little bug-eyed thing with a glowing finger and a heart light. By the time "Close Encounters" came out, aliens were still friendly, though more mysterious.

But then we got the "Alien" series with Sigourney Weaver and that black bitch creature dripping acid (really they were mirror image bitch creatures, very cool, Ridley), and then came the Predator series, and then "Independence Day", so that today, 30 years post-Super-8 setting (Super 8 takes place in the 80s, when Abrams came of age), you can pretty much count on aliens being pissed off, even if it is only because they are so misunderstood.

So basically, we've seen aliens morph into really scary incarnations of the Goddess: Kali, maybe. And that's interesting because 4,000 years ago the Goddess is exactly who these big-eyed critters served. (See image, left.)

Monsters are almost always about the Goddess or an incarnation thereof, and the connections in "Super 8" are obvious enough to knock you out.

(I won't spoil the movie by describing any of them here.)

"Super 8" isn't a great movie, and it isn't Spielberg, but it isn't "Lost" either. It's a fantastic 'B' movie though. I hope more are in the works.

If the 'B' monster movie comes back, I will be one happy camper.

In the meantime, go see "Super 8" if it's really hot out and you need a break.

Take the kids. Buy popcorn.

Just don't expect an epiphany. (It's a MOVIE for chrissakes!)

Area 51: A New Book by Annie Jacobsen

2011-05-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

The sad thing about the publication of Los Angeles Times Magazine reporter Annie Jacobsen's carefully researched book about Area 51 and the history of covert aerial U.S. intelligence operations, is that all readers will take away from her treatise is the very last bit about where the three little bodies recovered at Roswell really came from.

And no wonder!

As alien/ufo stories go, it's a doozy.

That's what bothers me most about it, actually.

It's impossible to tell whether any part of the surprise ending of Area 51 is true, and though Jacobsen's explanation makes compelling fodder for conspiracy theorists (as if they needed any more compelling fodder), the claim itself is problematic.

Why?

Well, for lots of reasons. Here are just a few:

U.S. military intelligence has a long, well-documented history of screwing with people who are writing UFO books. They approach then with juicy tidbits, then feed them disinformation. Right now, there are so many bits of fantabulous false info out there--all of them planted by 'reliable inside sources' and all of them contradicting one another in some way, that it's hard to know which way is up. Every author believes his or her particular source is unimpeachable, and swears that that person would never, ever lie. OK. Whatever.
I'm pretty sure that a series of X-Files episodes featuring Jacobsen's revelation were televised fifteen years ago or so. If you are an X-Files geek like me you probably remember them: They were the ones in which Mulder finds a bunch of railroad cars filled with alien bodies buried in the Arizona desert and the Cigarette Smoking Man shows up and torches them.
The revelation itself is internally inconsistent in some ways, which is to say, some details make no sense and the answers to questions about them are unconvincing.

In short, Jacobsen claims that the bodies recovered at Roswell were genetically and/or surgically altered human children, made to look like aliens by using the insane 'research' of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. Jacobsen's source claims that when the Soviets saw the internal chaos created by the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds, they hatched a covert operation to create chaos within the U.S. by faking an alien landing. Roswell was the first attempt.

The dates are off though. Roswell happened in the summer of 1947. The Nazis abandoned Auschwitz in 1945. How could children have been genetically altered for such an experiment in two years? When NPR hostess Terry Gross put this question to Jacobsen, she had no answer.

But a bigger problem with the story is why keep it secret then? If the U.S. meant to discourage UFO stories after Project Blue Book ended (as many assert), why not just disclose what really happened? People would be appalled, but once proof was produced they would accept it and write it off to the horrors of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The end. Mystery solved.

Jacobsen's source had a strange answer for this, one I personally find less compelling than the timing issue. (Mengele did do a lot of horrifying surgical 'research' on dwarves, so it is not inconceivable that the Soviets could have replicated this in two years, although it is quite distasteful to think on it.) He said that the U.S. has not disclosed this information because we have continued the genetic research.

Why? To what purpose?

It makes a good conspiracy story or X-Files episode, but beyond that, it's hard to understand what the U.S. government might gain by genetically changing children into creatures that look like aliens.

Still, it's good to see serious books being written about UFOlogy as various files become declassified. If they catch on, perhaps we will get serious books that ask harder questions and avoid sensatonal cliffhanger endings.

How Would You Talk to a Snail?

2011-04-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

OK, my last entry was dense and unreadable.

In my own defense, I did post a warning beforehand that it would be. And this is my obligatory apology afterward.

Look, sometimes I just have stuff I need to get off my chest, and I know it's weird unreadable stuff that only about six people on planet earth give a shit about (hence the title of this blog), and you know, I can't help it.

I just can't.

(Hence the blog itself. A container for my personal madness.)

Anyway, that all reminds me of a joke an employer of mine used to tell about a snail:

A guy is sitting in his living room watching television when suddenly there's a loud knock at his front door. He goes to the door and opens it, looks around, sees no one, shuts the door and goes back to his TV program. No sooner has he sat down than that loud knock comes again. Again he gets up, opens the door, sees no one, and stomps back to his seat, irritated. Almost immediately the knocking starts again, so he gets up, stomps over to the door, yanks it open, and this time looks down at the porch and sees a snail sitting there, facing the door. Infuriated at the constant interruption, the guy starts cussing wildly, picks up the snail, and hurls it as hard as he can and as far as he can out into the street.

Five years later he's sitting on his couch watching TV when again, BAM! BAM! BAM! He hears that same knock on the front door. He gets up opens the door, and there sits that very same snail. The snail looks straight at him and asks in all innocence,

"What the hell was that all about?"

The scene is kind of poignant, really. I mean, here's this snail who's perfectly cool with a five year crawl back up to the door. And here's this guy who is in meltdown mode after losing a mere minute or two of a leisurely afternoon.

Time is relative.

I think about that a lot in regard to aliens and how they might communicate with human beings should they desire to do so.

The truth is, we'd have a hell of a time even having a decent conversation with a snail never mind a creature from another world. For one thing, we're on different time schedules. Then there's the language barrier and the size barrier.

And yet, even though we can't even converse with a lowly snail, we figure mega-advanced but totally alien life forms will approach us, speak in language that makes sense to us, and do it on our schedule and in terms of our interests.

So many alien abduction and alien encounter stories involve distortions in time that make no immediate sense. I've often wondered if this is because we are receiving communications from a species with a completely different conception of time, one we don't fully grasp.

The message, the content of the communication, is also at issue. If you were a snail trying to convey some snail concerns about humans to a human, your first move attempt might not get total uptake. Probably the human would wander away before you were one tenth of the way through it (that or throw you as hard as possible into the street).

Now think of these poor aliens. We'd like to think they'd show up understanding English and armed with some mathematical formulas to bridge the creature gap, but possibly their agenda and their schedule is quite different than ours.

That's what makes the notion of using visual symbolic communication so appealing as a possibility. Symbols are dense and capable of carrying an enormous amount of information in seemingly simple form. Work them into narratives and dramas and they're even more powerful and complex. Symbolism and visual information also cuts through the language and the education barrier.

We like to imagine that intelligent aliens would seek out brilliant scientists or powerful politicians as their first point of contact, but why would they? Again, if that's our bias.

I have another alien/snail story that really sticks with me even though most people think it's stupid.

Suppose a snail was sliming slowly along a damp sidewalk. A human comes by, picks up the snail, moves it six feet forward in a matter of a second or two.

The snail would have absolutely no clue what just happened. Also, it would seem to the snail as if no time had passed, as if it was just suddenly somewhere else.

That kind of thing actually happens to abductees and experiencers.

They're not snails, I know.

Are they?

Aliens in the Mirror: Message or Mirage?

2011-04-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Counter culture psychologist R.D. Laing argued that mental illness is often socially manufactured. Laing believed that if you examine the contents of psychological 'delusions' you will often find perfectly sensible commentary on real situations... commentary no one much wants to hear:

"For Laing, it is the family (or perhaps even society) which is destructively mad; those whom society labels as mad are only reflecting the craziness by which they find themselves surrounded. Their mimetic response to the insanity of the world into which they are thrust takes the form of a creative reworking of the insanity to which they are exposed. This response is labelled by that diseased world (or family) as an 'illness' and this view determines how the individual is perceived.."

Sander Gilman, from "The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History, and Degenerate Art", Journal of Contemporary History, (London), Vol 20 (1985), 575-597.

http://jch.sagepub.com/content/20/4/575.extract

Laing was talking about individual mental illness, not cultural phenomena, but his thinking can easily be expanded to illuminate alien abduction experiences and other strange claims.

If we look at alien abduction as a form of cultural madness (a perspective many researchers vigorously reject a priori), then Laing's views can useful as an interpretive lens.

Laing's theories don't provide a full explanation of alien abductions: what they are, why they are happening, whether or not they are materially 'real'.

Laing's theories do, however, provide a different framework for interpretation of alien abduction experiences; an interpretive framework that opens up a whole new set of questions.

Living in a Material World

Most of the resistance to framing alien abduction experiences as a cultural analog to individual psychosis stems from a form of reductionism that dictates that only matter is real.

Science tells us that images, experiences, emotions, sensations--all of these universal dimensions of human existence are merely reflections of or reactions to the primary reality of physical matter.

As refections, science says, images are often distortions; as reactions, both experience and emotion are highly subjective and unreliable. Only a detached observer rigorously trained in the scientific method can sift out the underlying physical reality; the only reality that is really real.

This is the mainstream view, anyway.

Craving authority and epistemological legitimacy, ufologists therefore accept this view and try hard to 'prove' the physical reality of UFOs. They bristle at any kind of psychologized, mythological, or creative interpretation of their subject.

Most ufologists rigorously reject the testimony of anyone who may be the least the bit unstable (sic: mentally ill) and they almost always make a big point of vouching for the sanity and ordinariness of their witnesses. If UFOs, alien abductions, or any of the common features of such phenomena are frequently found in psychotic delusions, they certainly don't want to know about it--much less include that fact in their data.

Weirdly, ufology and mainstream science start from the same premise: that only physical matter is real.

Ufology says, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the material reality of UFOs and aliens. Science says, bring us a corpse and a fusilage or get lost.

That is a very boring (and also very dated) discussion.

And yet it's been going on for over 60 years.

More Things in Heaven and Earth

Weirdly, this material version of reality is already obsolete, and science knows it.

Science knows, for instance, that there is really no such thing as a detached observer; that the very act of observation impacts and alters the behavior of whatever is being observed. This dictum has not been handed down from Star Trek, but rather from quantum mechanics; an especially difficult branch of theoretical physics that is already busily imaging parallel universes--tons of them.

OK, this is not where I make the argument that, "Hey, aliens are from parallel universes!"

Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. Who really knows?

That's not the point of this essay. The truth is, quantum mechanics is hard to understand, and if you want to really irritate a quantum theorist, just start babbling about how that branch of physics proves absolutely that aliens are popping into your bedroom while you sleep, or whatever other pet New Age belief you currently hold.

Seriously, they hate that kind of thing.

The point of this essay is that the paradigm used by both ufologists and scientists to investigate and discuss UFOs and alien abductions (the one that says only matter is 'real'), is already obsolete and everyone knows it. So why not try something else?

That's where Laing's theory comes in handy.

Abduction as Parody

Campy depictions of alien beings as they carry off swooning terrestrial females have populated pulp fiction and B-movies for decades.

Before that, as early as the late 19th century, Freud, Charcot, and others performed the same feat in front of eager audiences of male medical professionals--in that earlier case using female 'hysterics' and the new discipline of hypnosis.

(See my previous post for some illustrations of this emblematic pose.)

The similarity of the female posture in all these illustrations and its relationship to 1) male authority, then 2) robots, then 3) big-eyed aliens is visually striking and symbolically telling.

First there is the extreme control (of the hynotist) and the total submission (of the female patient). Control calcifies into a robotic agenda, with robotic others now carrying off swooning women. Finally, the robots morph into monstrous alien 'others' with huge eyes (recalling the hypnosis cliche, "Look into my eyes...) who carry off prone women.

The scene dramatizes extreme control mirrored by extreme lack of control, but it quickly moves from a male/female human agenda (male hypnosis of women with an invented illness), to an increasingly psychotic displacement in which the agent of control is not the male dominated intellectual establishment, but a feared 'other' that becomes stranger and stranger and more and more alien and monstrous.

The scene can be understood as a symbolic image that portrays the Western intellectual tradition in the midst of a complete psychotic break.

More than one alien abduction researcher has noted that the typical abduction experience resembles a symbolic mockery of how contemporary human science actually proceeds: by use of advanced technology that is devoid of basic emotion, an inability to reproduce (in science, imagery and emotion are invalidated as legitimate ways of knowing), and an obsession with human sexuality and control and yet a complete inability to make the simplest human connection.

In other words, the aliens are us. Or a mockery of us.

In my next post I'll raise some issues and questions that naturally follow when alien abduction experiences are viewed as an artifact or symbolic depiction of a kind of cultural psychotic breakdown.

The main question of course is this:

If alien abduction experiences are a symbolic parody of Western science, is this parody generated by humanity itself? (As Jung and company theorized in the 1950s.)

Or is something else--something not-human--trying to tell us something using its own highly condensed visual language?

Forbidden Swooning & Sexual Alienation

2011-03-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here with an essay about R.D. Laing, Freud & Charcot, hypnosis, alien abduction, science and imagination, and social hysteria swirling around in my head, and words are kind of spilling out of my ears all over the floor and I keep tripping over them and watching the dog skid across the kitchen floor on all the loose punctuation and stuff so... while I grapple with my Pam-thinks-too-much demons (and the essay), I thought it would be cool to just post some artwork.

The first image (above) is of Charcot hypnotising a female 'hysteric' around the turn of the century (from 19th to 20th) for an audience of scientists and physicians. What tools those guys were!

This is what R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz said in so many words: that those guys were major tools.

Anyhoo...

Next we have Tobor the Great (representing mechanistic science and logic and so forth) with a similarly swooning beauty. Tobor is starting to rattle humankind a bit... I mean, the robot is out of control and worse, he wants our wimmin!

Like most men, Tobor the Great has 'every human emotion" (see top of poster), but not the slightest clue how to handle said squishiness. I mean, eeuuuwww.

But what he can do is make really dishy blondes faint and carry them off to...well, we don't know yet, but he can sure carry them off, huh?

These alien intelligences continue to carry off our wimmin until the situation approaches meltdown, as illustrated in a later poster.

They are now triggering RAW PANIC! and worse, they are about to TARGET EARTH!

Something has to be done about this, right?

Something IS done about it, and pronto!

Now we have human men carrying off swooning women again. (Whew!)

But seriously, is it enough?

What if, what if, what if this thing that wants our wimmin isn't robotic at all? What if it isn't symbolic of hardware headed science nerds who can't remember their wedding anniversaries and still think women are, eeeeuuuwww...gross!

What if, instead of that, it's really bug-eyed aliens carting off our swooning gals?

Oh the creeping horror of it all!

In such a situation, it is indeed hard to know how to proceed.

It might be a good idea to start by asking the girls themselves. I mean, how do we know they aren't asking for it? You know how girls are.

But they don't speak science!

How can we ever get to the truth about this alien invasion when the humans closest to it are devoid of legitimate language?????

Luckily, some tools who were pretending to practice neurology back in the late 19th century found a way to neutralize the inherent gooiness of the female race and to get at the truth by telling these females--rendered harmless by the old hynotic gaze of course--what the truth is.

Thank God for Freud!

Seriously, you can't be asking GIRLS what's going on without first telling them what's going on, right? That would just be cruel and unusual.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, it turns out that what is going on is that aliens are abducting and making hanky panky with our wimmin.

This has been going on for awhile.

This makes the women they are making hanky panky with quite mad. (How could it not? I mean, it's disgusting, right? We have no idea how much goo is involved in such activities, but it has to be really, really super-gross.)

Luckily, we do now have a way of keeping tabs on these nefarious activities...Yes, that's right...

Abductee Betty Andreasson under hypnosis

Hypnosis!

By rendering the victims immobile and dreamlike, we get at the stunning truth of the matter (and if we sell tons of paperback books and get invited to conferences by doing so, hey, is that our fault? Is that wrong? A guy has to eat, right????)

OK, I'm done being a smart ass.

(For now.)

All I'm saying is, we might get more interesting answers about alien abduction if we asked more interesting questions.

Also, we might get more interesting answers if the popular books posing the questions had cool pictures like these.

Yes I will write my boring ass essay. I promise.

But this is the internets, you know.

If I'm going to write academic blather and use big words I must first atone with pop graphics and an appropriate amount of snarky commentary.

You might want to skip my next post.

Pam & Rocky Get Buzzed by a Black Helicopter

2011-03-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

So I'm walking my dog out at Asylum Lake Nature Preserve, over by the prairie, and along comes a HUGE black helicopter, flying low enough for me to see that it has no markings.

It flew past us, then circled back, hovered right over us, circled again, hovered again, and then took off slowly to the west.

It would be cool to imagine this had something to do with UFOs, but I think it had to do with some National Guardsman learning to fly a big Chinook helicopter and wanting to check out a big Alasksan Malamute trotting alongside the prairie.

Have you seen this dog?

Later, driving home from our walk, I saw the helicopter parked at the National Guard amory.

Tons of cars were parked by the side of the road checking it out. I don't know what was going on, but it caused a small stir in the neighborhood.

Chinook helicopters are HUGE. (So are Malamutes.)

I am still all tingly over having this X-Files moment, right here in Michigan.

The truth is out there, kids.

Let me know if you find it and I'll blog about it.

Are You Paranoid Enough?

2011-03-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

Back when I was an undergraduate psychology student (about a hundred years ago), our Abnormal Psych professor told us that every year a significant percentage of paranoid schizophrenics were discovered to have been telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth all along.

In other words, they really were picking up radio signals with their tooth fillings, or were followed by creepy government agents who knew their every move, or were stalked by unknown malevolent others who wanted them dead.

At which point the psychiatric hospital would update their charts and release a report that said, "Oops."

Ha, ha. No not really.

Psychiatric hospitals don't apologize!

Crazy people do regularly turn out to be telling the truth though, which brings me to a point I keep meaning to make in this blog and keep putting off because it makes my head hurt.

In a nutshell (so to speak), the point is this:

In a sea of conflicting disinformation, the most compelling disinformation, the disinformation that seems the most 'out there', the most disinformed if you will, is always the truth.

Every good con man knows that the best place to hide is in plain sight--the trick is to set up the situation such that the truth is indistinguishable from bullshit--not that hard to do, really, if you make the effort.

So here's how that gambit goes with UFO stuff: lie, story, lie, delusion, delusion, lie, truth, lie, delusion, story... Hey! That sixth explanation is BONKERS!

Can you believe someone actually believes that?

The U.S. government has been messing with the minds of ufologists and others since the late 1940s. Are they really covering up some kind of alien agenda?

I'm thinking, no. I think they started out trying to deflect public attention away from the atom bomb, discovered how effective it was to mess with people's heads that way and how broad the applications were, moved into various 'Shock Doctrine' psy-op experiments that yielded creepy good results, and now, having done all that experimentation, have gotten to be experts at keeping us all talking about utter nonsense 90% of the time while they continue whatever dasterdly crap they are up to these days for whatever dasterdly reasons.

So when I'm looking at UFO stuff, I always think to myself, "Which of these things is not like the others?" Where in this mess of weirdness is the paranoid schizophrenic telling the bald truth?

Because he's there all right.

He's probably monitoring my thoughts right now.

Are You An Alien? (Or Just Alien-ated?)

2011-03-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

Recently I responded to an internet post about the U.S. economy. I don't do that very much anymore (for reasons that will shortly become obvious).

This time it seemed safe.

It wasn't.

My response was fairly bland, general and dispassionate (for me), citing a book I read recently about how industrial jobs have been slipping away from the U.S. for the past 30 years while the financial sector has grown enormously.

I wasn't saying industrial jobs should come back or that banks are evil or anything like that (although sometimes I do think both things), I was just stating what most people of most political persuasions see as basic statistical fact. As in, Ok, this is what's been happening here for awhile.

Within minutes someone showed up with an essay length post in which I was called a Lou Dobbs fanatic (I'm not even a fan!) and was told how wrong I am about everything and how misguided. Then, this person proceeded to make all the same points I just made along with suggestions for changes that would help the U.S. economy.

In other words, s/he was agreeing with me and attacking me at the same time.

That happens so much anymore on the internet that it's barely even interesting to mention it, but I thought I would mention it in this context because it strikes me how anxious we are to define ourselves by how we are different--or better still, opposed--to others, even when we aren't!

It's as if we need to find an area of opposition to exist as a unique human being, even when there isn't one.

Every time we define ourselves by what we are not (not a liberal! not a conservative! not poor! not rich! not sick! not lazy! not you!), we choose to disregard who and what we are. We choose to disregard our common experience as human creatures and our shared thoughts as persons among other persons in favor of standing out as a solitary, unique individual.

Recently I saw a PBS program about magic and psychology that made the point that in order to perceive an object or event, human beings don't just focus on that object or event and passively ignore what else is going on.

No, what human beings do reflexively in order to perceive is actively suppress the background in order to absorb and define the figure. This active suppression of the background is also the perceptual mechanism that allows a magician to perform illusions and sleights of hand.

The surprising fact is, magicians do much of what they do in plain sight. They understand that we're looking over there while unconsciously blocking out over here. So they do what they do over there, in plain sight, and we don't see it.

We can't help it. It's how we are made.

It's clear to me human beings do the same with who we think we are. We focus on what what we are in opposition to others, while actively suppressing everything else. We do this order to feel like a separate individual, which is a really big deal in our culture.

The result?

To some degree, we end up alienated from ourselves and others, and this perceived separateness becomes abrasive and dysfunctional, even painful.

Last but not least, consider this:

If a stage magician can learn to do things in plain sight without being seen by simply understanding human perception, what else might also understand human perception and lurk in the corners of consciousness we actively ignore?

These are my rambling thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon--shared on a blog I've been severely neglecting for some time, mostly due to a terrible case of writer's block and a sense of having no opinions whatsoever on anything at all.

Seriously, I'm detoxing from opinions and blah blah. I'm sick to death of even my own opinions and don't give a rat's ass about them anymore. I don't know anything and I don't think anything, but if I can shut up long enough, I do see the world as constantly amazing and stranger than fiction at every turn.

It's not a bad place to be, right now, that one. It feels like coming home. But I'll venture out again soon.

See you in space.

"Wonders in the Sky" by Vallee & Aubeck

2011-01-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

I am a major, major, major Jacques Vallee fan.

(In case you haven't noticed.)

When I saw that Vallee had at long lost authored a new book about UFOs, I was so excited I could hardly stand myself.

I might have had a small spontaneous seizure or something. I'm not sure.

(It's hard to tell these days, given my increasingly space-ranger-ish demeanor. Suffice it to say I was very excited.)

The new book, called Wonders in the Sky is a chronology of brief historical accounts of anomalous aerial phenomena taken from original sources.

Starting with a recorded event from 1460 B.C. in Lebanon and continuing up until just before the first airship took flight in the late 1800s, Wonders in the Sky provides persuasive evidence that UFOs and all the attendant weirdness that surrounds them were being reported long before Kenneth Arnold made his famous 'flying saucer' sighting in 1947.

These historical accounts were meticulously compiled by Aubeck and the crew of his Magonia Project over a period of about six years.

The Magonia Project is an informal collection of like-minded historians and computer scientists who started out as friends of Aubeck, and who all saw a need for a more analytic, less anecdotal approach to this controversial material.

Neither debunkers nor true believers, Aubeck, Vallee, and the members of the Magonia Project are now taking an almost unheard of approach to UFO research consisting of:

1) serious scholarship, and

2) computerized data analysis.

Let us now pause for moment, while a rendition of the Hallelujah chorus masks my joyous whoops and hollers and 'yahoo' woot woots!

Okay then. That felt good.

Moving right along...

As you read Wonders in the Sky, it quickly becomes obvious that Vallee's imprimatur was added to the byline to boost sales. Don't let that stop you from buying a copy or at least reading one. Aubeck's analytic, historical approach is a direct outgrowth of Vallee's earlier writings.

In fact, the forward by Penn State Professor David Hufford (author of the groundbreaking folkloric study on the Old Hag and sleep paralysis, The Terror that Comes in the Night) is worth the cost of admission in and of itself.

In the course of the first five pages, Hufford references the ontological implications of his own work, as well as the careful criticisms of renowned philosophers of science Charles Fort, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyeraband.

Be still my heart!

If you've spent even half an hour wading through the lurid drek in the New Age section of most bookstores that passes itself off these days as UFO research, you know that this is heady and rare stuff indeed.

Vallee thinks UFO phenomena are important and worthy of serious study, and because he takes the phenomena seriously was also one of the first contemporary UFO writers to reject the ET hypothesis. Vallee has for years now been openly calling for serious academic study and careful data analysis for years.

Breaking through kneejerk ridicule is no easy task, but if anyone has come close to doing it, it's Jacques Vallee.

Vallee vigorously argues against forming premature theories and explanations--a position that quickly made him the target of emotional attacks leveled by much-published ufologists who frankly make their living selling exactly that.

(Are you listening Budd Hopkins, Mark Jacobs, and the rest of you? You know who you are.)

As early as the late 1980s, Vallee was constructing a persuasive case that UFO phenomena shouldn't really be interpreted without invoking higher standards of data collection and then carefully analyzing that data using established science.

All of Vallee's books anecdotally recount aerial phenomena in historical literature dating back the dawn of writing and in the oral history and mythology of native peoples and early man.

This position departs significantly from the 'ancient astronaut' theory espoused by authors like Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Daniken, and others. While Vallee does believe that these phenomena have been around as long as man has been around, he argues that we have no clue what it's all about and that ancient astronaut theories are premature and probably misguided.

How about if we try to find out using actual science and tried and true research methods?

You wouldn't think such a sane proposal would upset or offend anybody.

You'd be dead wrong.

Vallee's detractors continue to misrepresent his ideas as a slippery form of debunking. Critics charge that Vallee tries to equate real spaceships and aliens with fantasy, fairies, and folklore, and to thereby dismiss the importance of the phenomena.

I believe those charges have way more to do with critics protecting their own intellectual turf (such as it is) and loyal following than with what Vallee is actually saying. Wonders in the Sky contains some terse zingers directed at these folks, and I have to say, I especially enjoyed those small moments.

In recent years a new crop of researchers represented by postmodern writers like Nick Redfern and Mack Tonnies have tapped Vallee's writings and come closer to his perspective, seriously questioning the ET hypothesis and by so doing also lending support to his call for better research. This has caused quite the tempest in the ufological teapot.

Go back to that Hufford intro and read about Kuhn and you'll see it's all to be expected, really.

If careful historical data collection is the early first step in getting closer to a theory if not an explanation, then Wonders in the Sky is the first baby step of that early step. It's an easy read.

The blurbs drawn from historical texts and reprinted here form the first third of the three part collection. They are by turns fascinating, obscure, humorous, and sometimes completely baffling.

A middle section outlines some of the most popular myths and hoaxes still floating around the blogosphere and ufological world as fact.

The final section outlines the methodology used by the Magoniax project to collect the material.

I hope that, as promised, this is only the beginning of a serious study of these phenomena.

I look forward to future offerings. In fact, I can't wait.

Angels Talking Through Their Eyes

2010-12-29T11:58:00.000-08:00

Still trying to climb out of this numbing exhaustion, but finally I am at least able to sleep. Last night I slept for a good 10 dream-filled hours, and it was heavenly. I wish I had written down the dreams.

Speaking of heavenly, the Biography Channel aired one of its low-budget paranormal marathons the other night--on this occasion the show in question was, "I Survived! Beyond and Back;" an hour long collection of first person accounts of near death experiences.

I watched three full episodes before conking out myself. Most of the stories were filled with fairly standard stuff: the white light, the tunnel, the transcendent presence(s), the loving long lost relatives come to guide the newly departed into the afterlife just before, BAM! Did we say heaven? Nope, gotta go back! Sorry!

One detail of one specific account stood out for me in a big way though:

A young woman who had been severely injured in an auto accident found herself watching a complicated operation to repair her broken back from a vantage point high up in a corner of the OR. As she watched, she realized she was surrounded by angels, whom she described as being, "about nine feet tall and surrounded by light. They spoke with their eyes, which beamed this same light outward as a form of communication. The light itself contained the message."

I was struck by the similarities between this description of telepathic angelic communication via light and eyes and the standard abductee description of aliens with huge black eyes that communicate via intelligent, living darkness. In the angel NDE story, the light beams outward from the eyes.

In most alien abduction accounts, the person is transfixed by the blackness of the eyes, drawn in, and the communication in these cases is also nonverbal but quite clear. In both examples, there is a sense of shining, of a light/darkness that is itself intelligent/loving or (in the case of alien abduction) intelligent/terrifying.

The two experiences are mirror images of one another in many respects.

The apparent opposition may well be superficial. It is worth pointing out that terror in the presence of angels is as commonly reported (perhaps more commonly reported) than love and reassurance, so some significant overlap is at play here. Angels and aliens have a lot in common.

I think this interesting detail gives a bit of experiential weight to the possibility that angels and aliens are in fact the same creatures--an idea floated by lots of interested parties in lots of different ways. Light and reassuring one moment, dark and terrifying the next, angels and aliens may be two manifestations of a single phenomenon.

BTW, I'm currently reading the new book by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, "Wonders in the Sky." It's pretty cool. As soon as I turn the last page I'll post a review, I promise

Tomorrow I have to get a root canal before work.

I think I'd rather have a near death experience.

Was Jesus an Alien?

2010-12-23T11:54:00.000-08:00

I've been absent from this blog for nearly two months, working a temporary Christmas retail job at the mall. Nice as it's been to see a regular paycheck for a change, however teeny weeny, I'm looking forward to the end of Christmas.

I've missed this blog.

And--I've been having predictably weird thoughts: 1) Because I always have weird thoughts, and 2) because I've been taking on lots of hours I and am tired now in places I didn't know existed. Tired in my toenails. Tired in my earlobes and eyelashes.

December 25th can't come fast enough for Pam this year.

I've been thinking a lot about the ambivalence built into religious experience and all anomalous experience, including UFO sightings and encounters--and about how much the two categories of experience overlap. Much has been written about this, but usually the slant of such writing is that UFO experiences and NDEs and mystical experiences of all sorts are just a variant on religious experience; a modern expression of a single phenomenon that is as old as the human race.

A question posed much less often is this one:

What if religious experience is a variant of UFO and anomalous experience,but is interpreted as religion because that's how human beings are wired--to think religiously.

Probably the reason you don't hear that question as often is because it offends people more easily than its opposite. It's harder to sell too. Has a much smaller target market, as it were.

I got to pondering this less popular question while hearing "Silent Night" on the store intercom for the gazillionth time and remembering the movie, "Starman" with Jeff Bridges. In that movie, an alien falls to earth, takes human form (by slipping into the body of a dead guy), is taken in by a nice young woman who falls for his charming peaceable alien style and just after he leaves earth--miracle of miracles--finds herself pregnant.

Do I need to point out the parallels?

I do not.

The odd rumination I had on the heels of that was about NDEs.

You know how people who have NDEs seem to always come out of them with psychic and/or healing abilities and a much more religious (or at least spiritual) inclination? Well, I had an NDE in my 30s.

In the years immediately following my NDE, I went on one of those grand spiritual quests (fodder for another post) so common among experiencers, and I also studied all kinds of esoteric traditions in depth, obsessively--very common as well. I did seem to develop a degree of psychic ability post-bright light moment; one I still retain. On a darker note, I fried hair dryers, coffee pots, and other small electronic appliances for years thereafter. I no longer buy such items.

My NDE happened over 20 years ago.

Today, I'm much more ambivalent about its meaning, if it even has one. I wonder, why me? What for? And on what basis do we categorize such experiences as divine?

Couldn't such experiences just as easily be generated by something much more prosaic--some intelligence with a better understanding of human cognition and anatomy than we ourselves possess? And the fact that we can't understand their motives, what of it?

As a line from the popular movie The Mothman Prophecies puts it:

"You're more intelligent than a cockroach, right? Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one?"

(Poor John Keel. Was he a prophet? Or a paranoid schizophrenic? Will we ever know? At least he dared to explore the territory.)

Perhaps we simply can't understand. Perhaps we lack the cognitive apparatus to understand, to know what this is. But does that mean de facto that the source of our anomalous perceptions must be divine? Maybe, but maybe not.

NDEs and other out of body experiences tend to be so overwhelmingly positive and eternal, so 'other' in a totally blissful way, that we automatically ascribe positive intent and value to them.

Heroin is like that too.

Somewhere between genius and madness a great mystery beckons. Is it friend or foe, God or alien? Or is it none of the above--experience for the sake of experience itself, perhaps. Something truly and wholly (holy?) Other.

Merry Christmas. See you on the other side.

Nick Redfern and the Alien/Monster Connection

2010-10-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a fascinating book by Nick Redfern called Three Men Seeking Monsters.

I had such a good time with it, that afterward I went to You Tube and found an interview with Redfern on his latest ufology treatise, Final Events: A book about a covert U.S. government research group that made a link between UFOs and demonology way back in the 50s.

Although many people do not realize it, UFO researchers have been making connections between UFOs and monsters for decades. Wherever UFOs show up, Bigfoot, phantom cats, spectral cavement, sea serpents, and dragons are not far behind.

Some witnesses have reported the emergence of cryptid animals from what can only be described as a small, luminous UFO. Other witnesses see these creatures vanish in a flash of light that, again, is more remniscent of ufology than zoology.

Hot spots for UFO activity frequently overlap with cryptid hotspots. In fact, several mainstream UFO researchers have admitted to Redfern privately that they are aware of this, but because it does not fit their own theories or the theories of their readers, they try to ignore it.

Three Men Seeking Monsters and Final Events examine this link between UFOs and other paranormal phenomena such demons, cryptids, time slips, channeling, possession, and occult magical traditions head on. So far I've only just read this single book by Redfern, but a quick scan of his other titles suggests this theme runs through most of his work and has become more focused over time.

Redfern is neither the first nor the only researcher to reject the ET hypothesis and conclude that UFOs have a paranormal or occult origin. John Keel came to the same conclusion back in the late 60s, followed by Jacques Vallee--the inspiration for the Frenchman in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the 70s and 80s.

Keel eventually came to see UFOs as demonic in the Christian sense of '"something evil and deceptive that is up to no good spiritually and practically." Toward the end of his career Keel became obsessed with U.S. intelligence involvement in the occult and in Nazi mind control techniques.

I'm not saying that's all paranoid hysteria on Keel's part. It may well be true, at least in part. But it is one murky pail of creepy slimy stuff that, thus far, I haven't really had the stomach to dissect.

Vallee was less perjorative in his assessment than Keel, concluding only that UFOs and the paranormal phenomena that often accompany them are profoundly deceptive by their very nature.

Vallee noted after spending some years writing about these phenomena that anyone who does any amount of research into them enters a twisted world of high strangeness that just gets more slippery with every new bit of evidence and every new firsthand report.

Some writers go over the edge and never come back. It happens.

Vallee did not believe it was possible (at least not yet) to know what the motives of the 'aliens' in question actually are, but he argued convincingly that whatever they are up to, they've been getting up to it right here on planet Earth for thousands of years.

Vallee's best guess was that the 'aliens' are engaged in shaping human culture and consciousness by means of mythic intervention: a really interesting idea that he took no end of abuse for floating.

It bothered Vallee greatly that UFOlogists as a group tend to edit out the stranger elements of encounters in order to make UFO reports fit the 'visitors-from-space' explanation. Vallee felt that this was just bad methodology, a concern that Redfern shares, and one that has always bothered me as well and that I've written about here in this blog maybe a little too much.

Redfern is closer to Vallee in his outlook than he is to Keel, although there were times reading Three Men in Search of Monsters and listening to the interview when I felt like Redfern was definitely leaning toward seeing UFOs, monsters, and other paranormal phenomena as more malignant than friendly. If you come to see them as being generated (or at least summoned) magically, it's hard not to at least get a case of the willies. I mean, you'd have to be dead not to feel that.

But what does it all mean? That's harder to parse.

Redfern explains that both aliens and monsters do seem to feed on human emotion and belief, and that the emotion of fear seems to be an especially tasty treat for them. Therefore, these paranormal entities will try to generate as much of that emotion as they possibly can, and they seem to become all the stronger to the degree that they are successful in doing so. This is not the same thing as saying they are imaginary and fed by our fears. They're real enough, but not real in the way we are used to.

I've noticed this bit about fear and belief and deception myself and, again, I've spent rather more time thinking about it than is probably healthy. For me, it's a riddle. Although I experience bursts of fear and an occasional case of the heeby jeebies when delving into this stuff, in general I don't get scared by it very easily anymore.

At this point in my life, I just want to know WTF.

I realize I might not find out before I die, but I'd like to.

Hence this blog. And my infatuation with bad 50s sci fi.

Anyway, as we approach Halloween, when the veil between this world and theirs grows thin and things start to go bump in the night, if you're looking for a good read about men, monsters, aliens, and the virtues of punk rock music, you could do way worse than anything written by Nick Redfern.

Well, gotta go. I hear something growling by the back door...

P.S.--A film based on Three Men Seeking Monsters is due out in 2013. Hope they don't muck it up, because the book is way cool.

Mythic Reversals: The Hero Versus the Abductee

2010-10-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), often called the "father of modern anthropology," was a French linguist who believed that both primitive and modern cultures are organized around symbolic structural templates known popularly as 'myths'.

Levi-Strauss did not define myth in the same way that earlier anthropologists defined myth: that is, as something akin to "a made-up story created by primitive peoples to explain things they don't understand." Nor did he understand the word 'myth' as a synonym for falsehood or popular misunderstanding.

Instead, Levi-Strauss argued that a myth is a story that contains all the organizing structural elements of the society that creates it, and conveys in story form the deepest truths about that society by means of intensely symbolic material. Levi-Strauss believed that all cultures are structured according to the same basic elements, which explains why myths across cultures and times are so remarkably consistent.

The symbolic content of myth is capable of conveying many layers of meaning in a deceptively simple format. Levi-Strauss believed that cultural myths are like a compressed catalog of everything important within that culture--a story-form 'zip file', as it were, that contains all of the culture's values, limits, relationships, morals, goals, and roles.

The structure of any given myth also contains clues about where that specific culture might be headed in the future. That's because, according to Levi-Strauss's theory, cultures advance by constantly reconfiguring their myths around pairs of symbols that are polar opposites.

In other words, cultures evolve and change by progressively reversing the elements of the main stories they tell about about themselves. As a culture changes, the myths reverse themselves, although the specific reversals and how they occur vary. These changing myths impact the culture and change it, and vice versa, in an ongoing dynamic relationship centered around simple storytelling.

The Hero as a Modern Archetype

Much has been written about the myth of the hero as the central organizing narrative of modern culture. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a crossover text that achieved huge popularity both within and outside traditional academia, mythologist Joseph Campbell carefully details why the heroic quest exemplifies all that we value most in modern life and in individual modern persons.

The journey of the hero is essentially a story of individuation and separation; of setting sail for unknown territories, encountering monsters and slaying dragons, overcoming terrible dangers and completing impossible missions, and then returning to one's tribe at the end of it all victorious, transcendent, and whole.

From a psychodynamic perspective, the monsters encountered and slain by the hero are symbolic denizens of his own unconscious mind. His victory is the symbolic victory of the individuated ego over the dark, chaotic, unconscious forces that created it; the separation of a child from its mother.

If the unconscious mind can be seen as feminine, and the rational ego as masculine, you could also say that the heroic relationship between the ego (male) and the unconscious (female) is one of domination and control. The ego becomes a separate entity, it separates itself from the unconscious by pulling away, by setting sail alone, and then dominating and controlling its own dark origins.

We see this dynamic of control and dominance of heroic (male) ego to dark (female) unconscious forces reflected everywhere in modern culture: in patriarchal religions, in authoritarian hierarchies and political structures, and in definitions of gender that revolve around character traits that are pegged as either dominant or submissive.

In short, in the modern era we value individualism, initiative (and even aggression), action, and dominance above all else, and the myth of the hero codifies and replicates these values.

The Abductee as Harbinger of a New Age

The heroic ego sets out on a necessary quest. Without individuation, awareness of self is scarcely possible. A self split into ego versus unconscious ground is a self aware of itself.

The relationship is a nervous one by default: The unconscious is so much larger and so much more powerful than the ego that the ego has to be constantly on its guard against being engulfed or overwhelmed.

Put more plainly, matter and consciousness include the entire universe, while the ego sees itself as an arbitrarily defined separate organism that begins and ends with a thin, vulnerable layer of human skin. When these two are pitted against each other the fight is neither fair nor evenly matched, but it's a fight the ego sets up on purpose in just this way so as to emerge as a self-aware separate entity.

But the heroic ego can't survive indefinitely like this. The ego emerges from the unconscious and will eventually return to it at death. All of the heroic ego's energy, all its creativity, all its imagination come from that original dark source.

So how does the hero reconnect with the monstrous dark without regressing, without 'failing' in its initial heroic quest? How does the hero return (short of death), not to the tribe, but to the source? How does the hero evolve to forge a relationship with its origins that is not based on domination?

One way to save face is to be taken, to be abducted, raped, and psychically opened up by the very force the ego went to such pains to push away in the first place.

The story of the abductee is a reversal of all the major elements of the myth of the hero:

The hero sets off on a dangerous quest/The abductee is taken from a familiar 'safe' place.
The hero chooses his quest and volunteers/The abductee is chosen and taken involuntarily.
The hero controls monsters or slays them/The abductee is controlled or used for procreation.
The hero is usually male and strong/The abductee is usually female and vulnerable.
The hero dominates dark forces/The abductee mates with dark forces.
The hero emerges as a victorious separate self/The abductee emerges with dual identities or multiple selves.
The hero draws and maintains the boundary between self and other/The abductee softens and blurs the boundary between self and other.
The hero develops reason and wit/The abductee develops intuition and creativity.
The hero controls/The abductee yields.
The hero conquers fear/The abductee assimilates and transforms fear.

Many UFOlogists, experiencers, and abductees move past the initial terror of their encounters to see the aliens as friends and to see UFOs and abductions as harbingers of a New Age.

In my view, many experiencers arrive at this conclusion prematurely by applying a kind of unimaginative literalism to the whole phenomenon, a literalism that eases tension within themselves but that quickly leads them astray. That's a polite way of saying that I personally think a lot of New Age UFO stuff is just wrongheaded and mildly psychotic.

Yet on symbolic level, many philosophers and cross cultural scholars have pointed to UFO/abductee phenomena as heralding a major change in modern consciousness, a movement from the modern era of the separate heroic ego to the postmodern era of the connected Divine Child.

Carl Jung saw this sea change symbolically encoded in the earliest of UFO sightings back in the 1950s and wrote a book about it. Jacques Vallee has said on many occasions that he sees UFO/abductee phenomena as either causing and/or being the product of a major shift in human consciousness.

What Does It All Mean?

Just as literal interpretations of the Bible lead to harsh conclusions and serious distortions of the text and a loss of symbolic complexity and nuance, so literal interpretations of the abductee experience lead to personal errors and a certain inflated religionism and silliness--a kind of false spirituality that is too big, too self-conscious, too superficial and foolish.

In the worst case possible, such literal interpretations can and do lead to a kind of cultural psychosis, as evidenced in extreme form by the Heaven's Gate suicides, and in a less dangerous but annoying form in silly 'ET-as-savior' cults currently splattered all over the net.

(Abduction is, after all, a way of 'cracking' the ego open so that unconscious contents can begin to flow in and creatively charge daily life and personality, so in some fundamental sense, abductees literally are 'cracked'.)

In the best case possible, abductees go through a post-abduction transformation over an extended period of time that results in gifts from the old gods. When everything unfolds as well as it possibly can (which often it does not), this transformation ends in increased creativity, easier access to imagination and dreams, a looser more fluid conception of self and other, and practical intuitive abilities that can be uncanny and even amazing.

Not what you'd normally expect as a result of being raped by little green men.

Perhaps most important of all, the post abduction ethic that tries hard to emerge (again, often unsuccessfully) is based not on domination and control but on assimilation and acceptance--on meeting the other on the other's terms, taking the other into one's self, and ultimately making the other a part of self. This is a very different approach to life and the world than the one we currently know; an approach that is more feminine, more receptive, more open to change.

Will the abductee symbolically supplant the hero and move us into a different age, a different time, a bigger space? Over the course of half a dozen decades, the abduction story has already become a major part of our cultural narrative. More people today 'believe' in UFOs than disbelieve.

Will abductions really usher in a more creative, receptive New Age?

Weirder things have happened.

Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs

2010-10-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

If your favorite X-Files episodes were always the ones with the Cigarette Smoking Man and the Spy versus Spy endless backstory, then Mirage Men is your kind of UFO book.

You'll probably eat it up in a single sitting and not even need an antacid afterward.

If, on the other hand, you were there for the supercool monsters and the overall hotness of Gillian Anderson, then you might find yourself feeling kind of woozy about a third of the way into this well-written, uncharacteristically rational ufology treatise.

In fact, you might need to lie down for a bit afterward. Just for a few minutes. Just until the room quits spinning and you no longer feel like you're going to hurl.

In case the title isn't enough of a tip off, Mirage Men chronicles the various and sundry methods used by the U.S. intelligence community to f**k with the general public (and more specifically, the UFO community), using specific examples that stretch all the way back to the 1940s, before Roswell.

In the movies this is the stuff that is always "on a need to know basis."

Well, if you are a UFOnut or naut, you need to know. Read the book. Most of it is probably even true.

Having made that necessary disclaimer--that yes, you should read this book and pay attention to what it says because a lot of stuff that passes for fact in UFO lore really is disinformation and nonsense--I have to also say that about a third of the way in I began to have, well, qualms.

Like so many UFO adventures, the beginning of my journey into their journey was promising. I was beyond happy when author Mark Pilkington straight up validated my pet theory about the Roswell myth, right out of the gate. Nobody is ever nice to me when I ruin Roswell for them, and that gets so lonely. So when that specific topic got a thorough and early deconstruction, I was all like, "Oh cool! I KNEW it!"

Who doesn't like to feel right? I know I do.

But things quickly went south.

For a tiny taste of why, contemplate the following statement for just a minute or two:

Everything I say is a lie.

What does it mean? When I say that I'm lying am I actually telling the truth? But how can I tell the truth ever, even by trick or deception, if I have stated as a given that everything I say is a lie?

Back and forth, back and forth.

That feedback loop is fun for about as long as it takes you to realize you're trapped in it, at which point it's time to pull down the shades, take a Percocet, and pull the covers over your head.

I got my first queasy feeling early on when, not long before the splendid Roswell deconstruction, Pilkington explains that he and his friend John are longtime members of a group of pranksters who make crop circles. From there he goes on to boldy declare that "...yes people make crop circles--all of them--and have done so since the early 1970s."

Seriously? Every single crop circle since the 1970s? These guys weren't even born until the 1970s!

I mean, I like to dress up like Rue Paul on Halloween, but that doesn't prove that drag queens--all of them--are really women pretending to be men pretending to be women, and always have been, ever since the invention of Spandex sometime in the late 1960s.

All I'm saying is, A does not equal B simply because C said so.

That's all I'm saying. (Is this ride moving already?)

By the time Mark and John set off for a Nevada UFO conference to meet the infamous UFO spook Richard Doty (if, as they themselves openly wonder, this guy really is the *real* Richard Doty, assuming a *real* Richard Doty exists anywhere except in Spy versus Spy lore and legend)--by the time they show up at this conference to drink beer and make snarky comments about the heavy American food (which is awful, yes, and who would know awful food better than the British?)--by the time they are quaffing brewskis with the possible Richard Doty and swapping opinions on film clips of purported Grays--by that time, I'm lovin' it all just a little bit less.

They discover that they really, really like this Doty guy. It's like love at first bullsh*t, and the longer they listen to his ever-evolving disinformation monologues and plausible denials, the more deeply they all fall in love with each other.

That blossoming love affair is weird for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Richard Doty (or someone who plays him in this book) is a pasty-faced, sweaty, middleaged life insurance agent sort of guy who wears outdated polyester clothing that barely covers his enormous ego.

Richard Possibly Doty is kind of a jerk. His jokes are not funny, he drinks a lot, and as if what I've said so far isn't already enough to send any sober woman running to the ladies room and out the back door, it turns out that Doty's most impressive UFO intelligence achievements involve undermining, falsifying, or totally destroying UFO films, books, documentaries, and investigations before they are ever fully completed.

Doty does this by approaching the investigators/authors/filmmakers and feeding them BS, which he is, you know, doing with these very guys as you read their very book.

Tums, anyone? Percocet?

Bottom line: The truth is not out there, and it's not in here either.

Seriously, stop looking for it before your brain falls out. Lighten up. Those rubber rooms are so hard to decorate.

I wish ufologists were more skeptical. Or skeptical at all. I wish skeptics were more imaginative. Or imaginative at all. I wish debunkers were more open to creative tension and possibility, instead of so mean-spirited and autocratic. If wishes were horses, I'd have finished my own book by now.

Alas, I'm just a girl who loves monsters. And Gillian Anderson.

A Biological Approach to the Grays

2010-10-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

No one with any scientific or academic street cred is studying Gray aliens.

We all know this.

But what if they were?

I got to thinking about this the other day, as I mentally ticked off the characteristics of Grays most widely reported by experiencers.

It hit me like a lightening bolt from the land of the Obvious:

These things sound like animals.

As animals, it's completely possible that the Grays are animals that really do come from outer space. I mean, when you know nothing for sure, anything is surely possible.

But what is most likely?

If the Grays are indeed animals, and if, as it appears, they've been messing with human beings for thousands of years (not just since 1946), then it seems to me a lot more likely that, like all the other animals we know about right now, the Grays probably hail from the very same planet humans currently inhabit:

Earth.

Consider the following list of commonly (if not universally) reported characteristics and ask yourself if this doesn't sound like a description of a creature that could be a part of ordinary, earthly reality:

Huge black hypnotic eyes with no pupils. Creatures on earth come equipped with many different kinds of eyes. The complex eyes on a fly are as bizarre, if not more so, than anything Lovecraft could have invented for a horror story. Not only that, we know that many creatures do use eye contact to render prey immobile or to signal dominance. Praying mantises do this, for instance. Dogs and many mammals signal dominance this way. So it isn't as if this feature is so alien that it must absolutely originate on some other world. It exists here, now.
Smooth, glistening skin that can be grey, green, golden, white, or changeable in color. The skin of Grays leaves a vivid impression on many experiencers, who describe it as being similar in appearance to the kind of skin an amphibian might have.
Skin that is whisper-soft to the touch or rock hard. Experiencers who have been touched by these creatures report that it feels almost ethereal, yet when restrained by the very same creatures the skin takes on the feel of armor and Grays seem super-strong. Some say that this variability proves that Grays are creatures of fantasy, but nature is filled with examples of perfectly real creatures that have exoskeletons or skins that exhibit amazing, changeable qualities. It's not impossible.
Insectoid movement and social structure. Many, many repeat experiencers have pointed to similarities between the Grays and certain kinds of social insects, like ants. At least three different body types have been reported: short stocky 'workers' that seem to possibly be robotic, short thin Grays with large heads and long fingers and big eyes (the Close Encounters of the Third Kind version of the Gray and the most recognizable), and tall white beings that share characteristics of the Close Encounter Grays but that seem to be elders or leaders--these are often described as having a praying mantis-like appearance.
Insect-like motivations. Again, many social insects exhibit behavior that is both amazing and seemingly alien, yet they hail from right here. Who is to say that a highly evolved insect species doesn't predate ours and doesn't regularly interact with ours for their own purposes? Some experiencers have speculated that the Grays seem not to understand 1) individualism, 2) human emotion, and 3) sexual reproduction. This lack of understanding is reported so often that it may well be part of their reason for studying us. Such a motive seems consistent with the notion that Grays are similar to (or even are) social insects, for whom these qualities are completely unnecessary or not central to their survival.
Nighttime abductions, altered consciousness. Grays appear beside people's beds in the dead of night and seem to come through walls or drop down through ceilings. Sometimes non-abductee witnesses see UFOs and brilliant lights at the same time that abductions occur, lending credence to the idea that something 'real' happens during abductions--not something delusional. While the bizarre, dreamlike nature of Gray encounters is often used to discount their validity, consider that we really don't understand our own need for sleep, what dreams are, why we need them, or how other species might perceive or use these states. When you find a grasshopper, does it see you? If it does see you, what does it see, exactly? When we don't understand our own perceptual apparatus it seems naive and self-serving to assume no other creature on earth could possibly manipulate it.
Feet with two split toes, sometimes described as 'cloven'. Pretty straightforward anatomical data, and not a detail you'd expect to remain consistent across reports.
An odd smell. Some experiencers report a sour, damp odor. Others mention a spicy/sulfurous smell. Others associate the Grays with a burnt smell. All of these share a quality of pungent earthiness; something you'd associate with an animal that lives underground. Some species of ants do scent mark their trails to communicate to other ants how to get from here to there.
Lack of genitalia. Not that weird. Hundreds of species of creatures on earth lack the equipment for sexual reproduction. Do worker ants have genitals? They don't need them. So, no.

I don't know what is happening with Gray aliens and abduction experiences.

But I do feel strongly that when we close ourselves off to experience out of fear or arrogance, nothing good happens as a result.

The more seriously I consider Grays, the more I think they are animals that share our planet.

We might want to ask ourselves, what are they up to?

The answers might be surprising indeed.

The Mystery of Ed Leedskalnin's Coral Castle

2010-09-17T03:46:00.000-07:00

Many ufologists believe that the pyramids and the Great Sphinx could not possibly have been built by human beings. They point to the existence of these ancient structures as evidence of early alien intervention.

Yet right here in the U.S., on a 10-acre site near Homestead, Florida, a monument to human ingenuity challenges the idea that alien intervention is necessary for the accomplishment of amazing feats.

Ed Leedskalnin was a small, Latvian immigrant who spent his life building what is now known as The Coral Castle. Composed of a collection of huge stones, some weighing as much as 30 tons, Ed built the unconventional structure for a woman and family he knew he would never have. One 9-ton revolving gate inside the compound is so perfectly balanced it opens easily with the push of a single finger.

Leedskalnin worked at night, by himself, and never revealed his methods. He also moved the entire structure, alone, from its original location to its current location on 10-acres years after first completing it near Florida City. No one knows how he did that either.

Leedskalnin claimed to know the secrets of the builders of the pyramids and when asked how he did it would say that he understood weights and counterweights and used a system of simple pulleys. Experts who have examined the structure, which is often compared to Stonehedge and the Pyramids, have not been able to replicate his methods.

Leedskalnin was also very interested in magnetism and wrote a highly unconventional book in which he argued that gravity does not really exist; that every object on earth carries a magnetic charge that connects to the center of the planet, and that what we take to be gravity is a side effect of this natural, innate magnetism.

Many people have theorized that Leedskalnin figured out how to reverse the magnetic charge of the stones so that they could be levitated, though no one has been able to prove this is possible.

With regard to aliens and UFOS, Leedskalnin's obsessive interest in magnetics and his unconventional life and accomplishments are intriguing. UFO sightings are often linked to magnetic disturbances. and many have theorized that the propulsion system behind UFO 'craft' is based on something to do with magnetism.

Nonetheless, Leedskalnin did not attribute his building methods to aliens or even talk about aliens.

The Myth of Progress

A common assumption of modern science is that human knowledge progresses and accumulates over time, so that today's knowledge is the best and most comprehensive knowledge ever, the sum total of all previous methods and discoveries distilled into a single best discipline.

Yet history seems to tell a different story: A story of increasing complexity and expertise followed by collapse and new beginnings. The people who built the Sphinx are long gone and so are their methods. They cannot tell us how they did what they did or why they did it.

Similarly, we still do not know how the Romans built their aquaducts. Much of their technology is lost to us. We cannot reconstruct it no matter how hard we try.

It seems that human knowledge develops in cycles, and that at the end of each cycle, as things fall apart, much if not all of the accumulated wisdom of the era is lost. Assuming that previous civilizations were more necessarily primitive than modern civiliation is most likely an error--a self-serving one.

Ancient civiliations were different. Their goals and motivations were different. Therefore their technology and organization was different. But were they primitive?

No.

Ed Leedskalnin's Coral Castle remains a mystery--one that is open to the public, open to anyone with a probing mind and healthy curiousity.

If you happen to be traveling near Homestead, Florida, stop in.

And if you figure it out, shoot me an e-mail!

Witchcraft and Aliens: Were Medieval Witches Actually Early Abductees?

2010-08-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

Between the 14th and 18th centuries, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people on the European continent were tried and executed for witchcraft. Most of these people were burned alive in the public square of the nearest town, and most were also tortured before burning. Between 70% and 80% of all 'witches' executed were women, but many men, children, and even animals were executed as well.

What is most strange about the witchcraft trials of medieval Europe is that, despite being studied in great detail by historians and scholars of many stripes and biases, no single persuasive explanation has emerged for why they took place.

What is also interesting is that medieval 'witches' had much in common with today's 'abductees', and the witch hunters also resemble some of today's abduction 'researchers' in surprisingly consistent ways.

Something fairly powerful has to be going on either inside the public imagination or out in the real world or both, in order to sustain nearly four centuries of torture, carnage, and religious persecution. The Church did not simply try and burn witches: It aggressively sought them out to try and burn them.

The infamous Malleus Maleficarum (compiled in 1486) is a detailed instructional Church manual on how to identify a witch and what to do when you find one. Professional witch hunters, employed by the Church, roamed the European countryside searching out witches and delivering them into the hands of Church inquisitors who usually ended up torturing and killing them to save their souls.

Although the Malleus isn't a word-for-word precursor to Intruders or Missing Time, many elements are similar enough to warrant a closer look.

How to Identify a Witch or Abductee

Although today we do not burn alive abductees alive, the modern process for identifying an abductee is remarkably similar to the medieval process for identifying a witch. Witches and abductees share the follow characteristics:

Marks on the Body. Abductees and witches are both thought to be physically marked in some way. In the case of witches the mark might be a mole or birthmark, or if no such mark was found, the examiner declared the discovery of 'an invisible mark.' In the case of abductees, researchers look for scoop marks, triangle-shaped scars, or evidence of alien implants.
Supernatural Sex. Witches were believed to have sexual intercourse with inhuman agents of the Devil called incubi (male demons) and succubi (female demons). Abductees are often believed to have intercourse with inhuman or half human alien beings during the abduction experience.
Flying by Night. Witches had the ability to fly through the night sky. Alien abductees often have vivid memories of flying or being transported through the sky or through space.
Messing with Animals. Witches were said to possess the ability to kill farm animals without drawing blood. Alien abductions are often associated with bloodless cattle mutilations or the draining of blood from small farm animals (chupacabra incidents are often paired with UFO sightings).
Miscarriage and Disappearing Fetuses. Witches were believed to have the ability to cause miscarriage or cause fetuses to disappear. Alien abductees often report disappearing pregnancies or mysterious anomalous events involving human reproduction.
Circular Meetings in the Deep Woods. Witches were thought to meet with the Devil in the woods, holding highly sexualized rituals naked in a stone circle. (See drawing above.) Abductees are taken into a circular craft, often from remote or wooded locations, where they are then examined naked on stone or metal slab.
The Devil and the Greys. The physical description of the 'Devil' of the medieval witchcraft trials (to whom witches were said to agree to a pact or contract) bears remarkable similarities to the tall Greys described by abductees. Tan or grey in color, the Devil and the tall Grey both have cloven feet, strange skin, and demand perverse sexual allegiance. The Devil's eyes are said to 'pierce' the eyes of women and control them in this way. The Greys control by means of their hypnotic huge eyes.
Associations with Bright Lights in the Sky. Both Satan and aliens are associated with bright lights in the sky. Satan was said to be the "brightest angel in the sky" before he fell to earth for rebelling against God. Alien abductions are often (though not always) associated with brilliant lights in the sky (UFOs) that come down to earth to release frighting Greys with a baffling sexual agenda.

David Hufford's The Terror That Comes in the Night

Folklorist David Hufford wrote a landmark paper about the relationship between sleep paralysis and the legend of the 'Old Hag'. This tale occurs in every age and across all cultures. In the story, a sleeping person wakes to find a hideous creature (the 'Old Hag') sitting or pressing down upon his or her chest. The victim is unable to move during this experience, which often includes sexual intercourse with the fantastic other. The incubus/succubus tales of medieval Europe are variants of the 'Old Hag' myth, and Hufford believes many alien abduction stories are modern variants of this universal tale.

However, Hufford's groundbreaking thesis was that the 'Old Hag' narrative was universal because it referred to a real human experience.

This was controversial stuff in the dry, methodical world of academic folklore research. Up until the time of Hufford's paper it was assumed that narrative traditions and physical experience were rigidly separated categories. Stories were just stories. Folklorists collected them.

Folkloric tales were assumed by definition to refer only to imaginary events and experiences passed down by specific cultural groups for various sociological purposes: indoctrination into the mores of the group being one of the main purposes. Hufford was saying that at least some universal myths and legends appeared to be an attempt to convey the content of a genuine experience in the language of the culture and time in which the experience occurred.

So during medieval times when the Church held enormous power and controlled people through vivid descriptions of hellfire, damnation, and the wages of sin, the experience was interpreted as demonic and the abductor as Satan. In ancient Sumeria the experience was intrepreted as divine. In modern technological culture the experience is interpreted as extraterrestrial. But the same experiental elements are repeated in each instance; they are simply spun with a different explanation of what it all means.

Hufford was careful not to ascribe any particular interpretation to the raw experience underlying these stories; he only sought to make the argument that some kind of real experience was at the base of the stories. Hufford made a careful, exhaustive (and rather dry) philosophical argument that the scientific term 'sleep paralysis' is a description (and hence, another myth), not an explanation.

Hufford felt that the experience itself remains unexplained.

We don't know what causes these experiences. We don't know why the experience has these predictable and bizarre elements. We've just slapped a descriptive label--'sleep paralysis'--on something that has apparently been plaguing mankind for as long as man has been able to tell stories about it.

The Problem With the ET Hypothesis

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding UFO and alien abduction phenomena is the ET hypothesis, the belief that visitors from outer space are causing these experiences and events. We really don't know that, but the tendency to interpret all these phenomena through a modern technological filter is so strong that today the term UFO has today become synomymous with 'spacecraft', even though its original meaning was simply something flying through the sky that could not be identified. 'Unidentified Flying Object' means we don't know what it is. And we don't.

If we KNEW it was a spacecraft, then it would NOT be a UFO. It would be a spacecraft.

What are the chances that our current cultural filter is any more correct than the medieval one that ascribed these phenomena to devils, or the ancient one that ascribed them to Isis, or the medical one that ascribes them to a mysterious brain disorder called sleep paralysis, or the northern Scandavian one that ascribes them to the appearance of the 'Old Hag' (a folkloric harbinger of death)?

Weirdly, Huffords ideas get little uptake in ufology because they are seen as acribing the phenomena to 'myth', which is popularly understood by ufologists (who seem not to actuall read this stuff) to mean 'made up story that isn't true in any way'.

That understanding is the exact opposite of the compelling original argument made by Hufford, an argument that supports the notion that something real is going on, but that we just don't know what it is. Hufford's work could be used to support further scientific or academic study or these phenomena, but in a weird twist of illogic, it is used to dismiss them by both camps.

At least we aren't burning people alive over the experience these days.

But it would be nice to know what it was actually all about.

Why Ufology is Dying a Slow Horrible Death

2010-08-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

I recently had an unpleasant run-in on a ufology site that I realized is pretty much emblematic of why ufology today is on the decline.

The relative dearth of good, new books on ufos and anomalous experience is not just a function of lack of public interest.

The public is definitely very interested.

No, the decline is more a function of infighting within ufology itself and a struggle between various camps for 'authority' and control.

This infighting and nastiness is killing new inquiry, since mainstream science already shies away from any real research, and now new people who are willing to take a chance on entering the discussion have to face the wrath of these little, little self-proclaimed ufology gods and make offerings to them and so forth and so on to even be allowed to speak.

Not a good way to encourage new ideas.

Within ufology there are a few major camps and you have to choose one straight up and be accepted to get any uptake--no small task in itself--and the thing is, not one of them has the whole answer:

The New Agers. These folks tend to believe that aliens are here to raise our consciousness and save the planet, and often have a whole cosmology of alien types and agendas readily at hand, with complex attendant beliefs and explanations that have to be learned and publically accepted if one is to gain entrance to their temple. No matter if any of it is correct.
The Conspiracy Theorists. Be afraid, be very afraid. The government is behind every bad thing that ever happened in your life, most especially abductions and ufo sightings and remember that time you stubbed your toe when you were 8? MK-Ultra. And BTW you'd know that already if you were as informed as those in the inner sanctum but clearly you are not, hence your ignorance you ignoramus you. (Would you like a little abuse with your abuse? How about some abuse for dessert?)
The Aliens-Are-After-Our-Wimmin Witch Hunters. OK, I'm just going to say it. Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs creep me out. They might be nice guys, they might have positive motives, but I have my doubts. Neither of them has had any direct experiences of UFOs or aliens, and both spend all their time sitting on the bedsides of hurting people with painful sexual memories involving aliens, luridly transcribing every word and publishing it. They brook no criticism and have already decided what is going on and who knows the most about it: Them.
The Folklorists and Neoplatonists. I like these people the best because at least they are aware of the magic words, "I don't know," and are willing to say them out loud in front of others. Basically they see these anomalous phenomena as modern manifestations of something very old and very earthly. Most of them reject the entire ET hypothesis but do believe that another intelligence is at play.
The Debunkers. These folks are just annoying. They're always about 'bring me the flying saucer,' totally ignoring the fact that millions of sightings and contact reports are in and of themselves enough reason to ask, "Um, what's going on here?" One of the most famous debunkers, Joe Nickell of Skeptical Inquirer fame, spends much of his time questioning other people's credentials. He himself holds a bachelor's degree in English. Wow.

Why would I even care about the decline of a pseudoscience anyway?

Because I want a good answer, and mainstream science won't look for one. It's really that simple.

Modern science is clearly in trouble, and that means we are all in trouble. What science can't explain, it tosses aside. Plus, the language of science is so exclusive and the population at large so undereducated that only a very select few people get to participate in any scientific discussion of anything at all.

So if, like me, you are hooked by an unexplained experience or event, you're kind of doomed to roam the margins of the known, looking for like-minded others with firing brain cells. When those others bite you too, it's even worse than being gaslighted by mainstream academia. Lots of brilliant people--Jacques Vallee being my favorite, but there are others--have given up on ufology for this reason.

Science is not bad. Science gave us radios, and computers, the electric car, and quantum physics and so forth, but one look at the world today and it's clear that something is wrong with science, epistemologically speaking. Science should not be a worldview. It's more like a tool, like a hammer.

To a guy with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Hence, ever since the 17th century, science has been like a runaway truck barrelling backwards down a mountainside. It's a very powerful tool, yes, but if you don't know how to drive and you don't have a map, well, stuff goes wrong and keeps going wrong, faster and faster. (Kind of like now.)

The pace of change today is so ridiculous that geezers like me have to buy cell phones by the six pack because by the time the one we own breaks, we'll need all new skills when its time to replace the damned thing. (Seriously, some of us just want to make phone calls on them. That's really true.)

We know how to punch holes in the bottom of a sea bed and to get to oil two miles down, but we don't know what to do if something goes wrong. We know how to make chickens grow to three times their normal size and pop eggs out of their mouths (OK I just made up that second thing), but we have no idea what effect that will have on the humans who eat them. We'll figure we'll invent something later to fix that.

Sure we will.

So I'm interested in fixing that flaw, that runaway train quality to modern life, by finding a way to ground us culturally, and I think that UFO phemonena offer a way into that. I think that for a lot of reasons. So did Jacques Vallee. So do a lot of people way smarter than me who nevertheless know better than to poke a rattling snake with a sharp stick at a ufology conference.

It isn't easy to stay open in the face of a great mystery, but what if that is exactly what is required?

It would be really nice if someone could. Or would.

Whitley Strieber Revisited

2010-08-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading Whitley Strieber's UFO books and listening to old interviews with him on Coast to Coast and other You Tube radio and TV clips, and frankly I'm finding the exercise a lot more enjoyable than the first time around, back in the late '80s when Communion was selling like hot cakes and everyone and their mother suspected aliens were lurking in their closets (or at least their driveways).

Coming back to this stuff after 25 years or so, it is striking how the whole alien contact/abduction thing has become normalized and at the same time, bracketed off, more or less put on the shelf indefinitely.

Aliens? Oh, that. Aisle 5, right next to the werewolves.

I think U.S. government intelligence helped this mainstreaming process along, but it's also a function of the enormous tension the topic generates. It's hard to stay hyped up forever.

At some point, there's the dog and the wife and the electric bill.

Life goes on.

Today no one really cares too much about this UFO stuff anymore except for people with direct experience, and even those people have come to some conclusion about it all long ago and have either 1) let it go and moved on with their 'normal' lives, or 2) started their own religion, web page, investigative organization, or whatever based on UFOs, aliens, or New Age philosophies.

UFO interests today subdivide into odd but passionate little factions: the religious contactee New Agers, the dark Malleus-wielding 'investigators' and their victim devotees (a la Hopkins and Jacobs), the MUFON folks and other mechanistic pseudoscientists, the annoying and often woefully un-credentialed debunkers (if you're going to ridicule and be snotty, shouldn't you yourself have a leg to stand on?), the consciousness gurus, the neurologists and psi researchers... it's quite the circus, and you have to pick your act, straight up.

Declare your bias or bug off.

Strieber is almost unique in being a direct experiencer who not only has no axe to grind, he refuses to pick any specific bias or declare it. Instead, he insists on the importance of not pretending to know more than we really do. This is refreshing coming from anyone talking about UFOs these days, since most folks seem to want to impress you with their credentials immediately (or at least slam someone else's credentials and then compare themselves favorably by contrast).

Strieber on the other hand talks repeatedly of the importance of not choosing a box and not putting this stuff on the shelf prematurely, of allowing the mind to stay open and admit, "I don't know what this is or why it is happening."

That's really hard to do.

It's SO hard to do, in fact, that I think it may well be the whole point of the experience--at least from the human side. Can you let go of certainty? Can you stop yourself from forming an explanation that nails it to the wall? Can you stop yourself from labeling it evil OR good and just let it be what it is?

Most people can't. Not for long.

As a culture we value knowledge and authority, but personal experience we discount ruthlessly. I believe we've paid a high price for this highly selective epistemology. In fact, I personally think it is killing us.

Descartes said that his cogito statement was founded in a moment of radical doubt. It seems to me that the ability to stay open in the face of mystery requires exactly the opposite--a moment of radical trust.

This is not to say that Strieber's 'greys' are trustworthy--if anything they are the penultimate tricksters--but only to say that perhaps the medicine for runaway rationalism and its ill effects involves openness and a willingness to dream--no matter how strange the dream, no matter where it takes you.

Strieber's current website is called Unknown Country, his broadcasts Dreamland, and he refuses to even use the word, 'paranormal' because it doesn't mean anything.

There is no normal versus paranormal experience. There is only experience. Experience is what it is. If we don't edit it, sometimes we are utterly amazed at what we find.

Mac Tonnies on the Crypto-Terrestrial Hypothesis

2010-08-04T05:44:00.000-07:00

Fascinating guy. I just discovered him, and sadly he died very recently at only 34 years of age. But this is pretty close to what I think is going on with much of the abduction phenomena.

My Weird Alien Dreams

2010-07-27T04:22:00.000-07:00

At the age of 36, in the middle of what I took to be a normal life, I awoke inside the following bad dream:

I am sitting at a kitchen table with my brother, who in real life is one year younger. In the dream, we are eight and nine years old or so—not quite into puberty, but not little kids either.

The table belongs to one of those 1950s Formica-topped dinettes, the kind with grooved chrome side trim, metal legs, and matching chrome chairs with red vinyl seats.

(Today these retro sets are popular fixtures in soda shops, hamburger joints, and Atomic home décor. When I was a kid, every household had one.)

The Formica table, my brother, and I are all suspended in black space. The scene reminds me of one of those 1950s existential stage plays in which the theater goes completely black except for a spotlight on an actor or two who blather on about (supposedly) deep stuff.

My brother is wearing pajamas, also from the 1950s, the seersucker kind with cowboys and Indians and lassos printed all over them. His expression is blank and a little strange. I reach out to shake his shoulder, as he seems to be in some sort of trance, and just as I begin to stretch out my hand I hear a voice inside my head hiss, “Don’t touch him!”

But it’s too late.

By the time I hear the voice I’ve already touched his shoulder. The moment my hand makes contact, he is suddenly not my brother anymore but some alien creature with huge deep eyes as black as space itself, only much, much deeper and vast beyond imagining. ‘Hypnotic’ is a shallow word for these eyes—They are infinite and alive, dark in a way that almost gleams or shines.

I recognize this creature. In fact to this day I can see its face clearly and vividly. I have never forgotten it. The face is so real that in the dream it feels hyper-real, as if it is somehow more real than everyday reality, and it is clear to me right away that the warning voice and this thing are in fact one and the same.

The thing has staged this scene somehow for my benefit, but my touch has destroyed the illusion and now I am face to face with it instead, locked in its gaze. It is nearly impossible to explain how this feels, but the moment includes extreme terror, paralysis, and the sense of being completely controlled by this other being.

The creature’s skin glistens golden or slightly green-golden, iridescent, like the skin of some colorful Amazon frog. The eyes take up most of the bulb-shaped head. There is no nose to speak of and no proper mouth. Beneath the eyes, which dominate the entire top half of the face, in the place where the mouth and nose should be, a network of what looks like veins or ridges or some kind of wrinkled skin disappears into an almost nonexistent neck.

Then suddenly this thing, which has no mouth, smiles. It smiles with its eyes somehow and yet it feels like the whole face smiles. The smile is transmitted telepathically in some sense, and yet looking at the face it is still clear that it is in fact smiling—in somewhat the same way you know that a dog is smiling even though dogs don’t have human features.

The smile is not reassuring at all, but weirdly sickening and terrifying. I sense that the creature means to reassure me by smiling, but the smile is so ‘off’ that it only deepens my terror.

*************

The dream ends abruptly. I wake to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking and drenched in sweat. Relieved that I’ve only been dreaming after all, a deep unease and mild nausea settles in nonetheless.

I am convinced against logic that this vignette has not been a normal sort of dream but something dreadfully familiar and all too real, and I now feel as if I am losing my mind. Yet my experience is so visceral I cannot make myself chalk it up to hallucination.

The next night, a follow-up nightmare seems tailor-made to validate these fears:

In this second dream I believe that I am just waking up, as if I am not asleep at all but am in my normal bedroom about to start my day. Standing at the foot of my bed is the creature from the night before, only this time, I sense that there are others with him nearby, even though I can’t see them.

The minute I see this creature again I am frozen in terror. I can’t move and I can’t cry out. The thing is absurdly dressed in what looks like a very ornate, heavily embroidered medieval red robe, and is holding a thin white metallic rod about a foot long that is slightly pointed at the end. The tip of the rod glows.

This thin rod looks exactly like the sort of ‘magic wand’ a stage magician might use as a prop, and the ridiculous ornate costume that the thing is wearing heightens that absurd association. I seem to already ‘know’ that this rod holds a charge of some kind—I recognize it--and I immediately begin to plead in my mind with the thing to please, please not touch me with it.

Of course it does touch me with it, and the second that it does, I am no longer frozen in my own bed but find myself running hard through a downtown alleyway at night, still dressed in my bedclothes.

Just as in the scene from the night before, the run through the alleyway feels hyper real—more real than real—I can feel the cold night air on my skin and I recognize the location.

I come round a corner (I am ostensibly running from this creature though I don’t see it anywhere) and run smack into a street person, a man, in very dirty clothes and wearing an odd expression. He smiles in a way that is oddly reminiscent of the smile on the thing in the other nightmare, but he’s clearly human. I can smell him, and he doesn’t smell good.

“Are you all right?” he asks me solicitously, and reaches out his hand. The minute his hand touches my shoulder (again, much like in the dream the night before where I reach out to touch my brother’s shoulder) I wake up.

*************

Once again I wake from this dream in my own bed, drenched in sweat, short of breath and more than a little nauseous, still smelling this street person and still stuck with the sick feeling that none of this is a dream, that it’s all way too real and way too horrible.

That same day, I return some books to the public library downtown and check out some new ones. The books I check out are about trauma, PTSD, and multiple personality. I hold a BA in psychology and have a legitimate academic interest in these topics, but my interest is also personal. I’m trying to figure out if I’m cracking up, and if so, exactly what the nature of my insanity is.

I’m about to walk out the door when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I wheel around, and standing there in front of me is the very same bum from my dream, still smiling that odd, inhuman (but not really threatening, just weird) smile, still dressed in the same dirty clothes and still smelling really bad.

“Are you OK?” he asks, and then goes on, “I was worried about you last night.”

I run, literally run, out of the library without responding.

*************************

Well, there's more to this story, a lot more, but I won't go into it here.

I wonder how many people have these odd experiences and never discuss them for fear of ridicule. I have been unable to completely swallow the ET hypothesis when it comes to alien encounters, and weirdly, since all this happened I have found some of the weirder, more ridiculous elements of my dreams (like the wand, the ornate clothing, the wrinkled 'mouth' of the creature) repeated in other people's stories, giving the whole thing a sort of credence that is not exactly welcome.

One thought I've been entertaining lately now that the movie Inception is in theaters is that someone or some thing may well know how to move in and out of other people's dreams for a purpose. This idea is not as fantastic as it sounds. In fact, modern scientific culture is the first in history to NOT believe that such things happen routinely.

That being the case, it does make you wonder WTF.

More later.

Alien Encounters as Personal Deconstruction

2010-07-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

If you want to feel better about not being able to afford or attend college, pause right now for ten minutes or so and educate yourself about the philosophy of famous 20th Century Frenchman Jacques Derrida, a philosophy more popularly known in academic circles as Deconstruction.

Just click the hot links in the above paragraph and start reading. Then come back.

OK, done yet?

No, it sure doesn't take long to have more than enough of that, thank you very much. In all fairness though, most philosophy reads like that, not just Deconstruction. The only differance between Derridian texts and other kinds of philosophy is sheer Europineal attitude, but then the guy was French.

He had a cultural standard to uphold. Not to mention a sartorial one.

Anyhoo, Derrida's big philosophy idea du jour was that the bit that's excluded or absent from any given text is what makes the whole text meaningful, and that if you locate that bit--that excluded bit that he referred to as differance--if you find that central differance embedded in any given text and invert it, you can then take apart the whole sense of the thing, as in, unravel the text completely (as in, literally de-contstruct it) and render all the meanings therein utterly nonsensical.

Voila!

Start with Shakespeare. End up with overcooked spaghetti!

What could be better than that?

OK, a lot of things could be better than that. OK, ok.

But here's my point:

What if UFO encounters are personal, experiential deconstructive moments?

Think about what happens to an individual's view of reality and self after such an encounter. At first, the experiencer may just feel a bit stunned and awed by the whole incident, but as minutes, hours, days, and eventually months tick slowly by, more and more questions about the very nature of reality and self begin to present themselves, whether that person is ready for such questions or not.

Often, the experiencer becomes increasingly aware of a little glob of 'missing time', a break in the normal personal narrative of memory that seems to attach itself to other bits of existing memory that once seemed fairly solid, but now, not so much.

It's a contagious little bit of nothing, this 'missing time', and it seems to have a penchant for dissolving all the little certainties and assumptions that make life possible and pleasant. Gradually, lots of things the person thought he or she 'knew' for sure about the present and the past and about who he or she actually is seem to be up for grabs, interpretively speaking.

In the end, the contagion may spread to the experiencer's very sense of self. Many abductees eventually come to see themselves as having dual identities: one human, one alien; and they discover that these blank moments of absence stretch all the way back to their earliest childhood recollections.

When strung together, these deconstructive moments create an alternate history that is bizarre in the extreme, a sort of shadow self and shadow reality that looks like the direct inverse of this one. 'Real' life at this point becomes somewhat dreamlike and the dreamlike alien encounters become primary.

When things get to this stage, we pretty much have our pile of deconstructive spaghetti.

But why?

Well, that's the gazillion dollar question. Why indeed!

Here are a few possible answers:

(What? You thought I was going to give you the one right answer just like that, just off the top of my head? Au contraire, sugar bear! Clearly you haven't been reading UFO stuff for very long if you actually thought that was going to happen...)

Somebody is actually doing this on purpose to individual people: the government, evil magicians, aliens, guys who wear too much black clothing and smoke funny little cigarettes... who knows? The thing is, we know it can be done on purpose, so maybe someone or some thing is doing it on purpose for reasons we have yet to understand.
The organizing structure of the experiencer's consciousness has lost all functionality, and the deconstructive alien encounter is a sort of massive spontaneous 'reset' experience; kind like rebooting a computer when it's all bugged up or frozen, or reinstalling the operating system.
The deconstruction of individual personality and personal history is part of an initiation experience similar to the kind of vision quest sought by shamans in premodern cultures. Post-experience, many abductees and contactees exhibit increased psychic abilities, and many also develop an acute awareness of how permeable the membrane that separates dream states from waking states really is.
The experience is exactly what it seems to be, and the whole of what we refer to as 'real' life is implanted into our consciousness by creatures with big eyes and suction cup fingers--kind of like in The Matrix. Sometimes I do wonder if people aren't actually larval aliens and the whole fabric of our lives isn't just one big pupated dream. We'll wake up one day on Zeta Reticuli.

None or all of the above could be true. We just don't know, really. And we aren't likely to find out any time soon. But since most of us are out of a job these days anyway, throwing out ideas is not a bad way to pass a Thursday afternoon. Derrida probably wouldn't like it.

But he's just another dead white guy now.

The Roswell Before Roswell

2010-07-14T02:35:00.000-07:00

Right now I am reading and enjoying a book by Jim Marrs called Alien Agenda.

Marrs is a natural story teller, which gives his book a narrative hook that many UFOs books just don't have.

Even if you think UFOs are rot and nonsense, it's fun to read Marrs because he can spin a good yarn.

When Marrs gets to Roswell, (he starts on the moon, moves to the 1876 airship mystery and ancient aliens, and then heads for New Mexico), he goes into some detail about the Roswell that came before Roswell on June 24, 1947 on Maury Island in Washington State's Puget Sound.

(The Roswell story began a week later on Tuesday, July 1st, 1947.)

According to Marrs, the Maury Island incident began when:

"Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman, reported that at 2:00 PM he--along with two crewman, his teenage son, and his dog--had guided his boat into a Maury Island bay to escape bad weather when they saw six doughnut shaped objects about two thousand feet in the air. They were described as gold and silver metallic objects approximately one hundred feet wide with a hole in the center and what appeared to be portholes around the perimeter and a dark hole underneath."

A small explosion in one of the UFOS caused hot slag to suddenly shower down from above, killing Dahl's dog and burning his son's arm. Dahl took some photos and upon his return gave his camera and some samples of the hot slag to his boss, Fred Lee Chrisman.

Although this incident is rarely discussed in UFO lore today (outside of Marrs' book), it is significant because Fred Lee Chrisman was a CIA guy whose weird little career linked him to all kinds of government disinformation campaigns over the course of many years.

When Kenneth Arnold (yes, that Kenneth Arnold) was dispatched to investigate the sighting, he found that the slag samples looked like ordinary rocks and that he wasn't able to see Dahl's son at all--the excuse was that the boy was in the hospital for his UFO burns. All the motel rooms in the town were filled up, yet someone had mysteriously prepaid for a room for Arnold in the best hotel.

The whole thing smelled, and when the small cargo plane on which the rocks were sent on their way to DC crashed for no apparent reason, the whole thing smelled even worse.

Marrs goes on to talk about how Arnold was never convinced that the Maury Island sighting was a hoax, even though the military ended up dismissing it easily, but what seemed clear to me on reading Marrs' speculations was that the US intelligence was mucking about with planted UFO stories well in advance of Roswell, and it was working out pretty well for them.

I have always thought that Roswell felt like a psychological operation and that the whole thing seemed planned in advance: the initial announcement that a saucer had been recovered, the quick retraction and lame weather balloon story, the subsequent rumors about alien bodies and reverse engineering: All designed to get people talking and keep them talking.

Look over there. Not over here.

In Melanie Klein's political critique The Shock Doctrine she talks about Nazi research into how to use shock to make prisoners more compliant and easier to control, and how the US government picked that research up and continued it after the war. Marrs talks a lot about the Nazis too, and how they seemed to have been working on a saucer shaped craft right before WWII ended.

What we do know for sure is that Roswell diverted the attention of the American populace away from weapons development and nuclear build up and toward little men from space. In fact, to this day UFOlogy is used effectively over and over again to divert attention away from military activities and government malfeasance.

For instance, whenever the public seems a little too itchy about biological warfare or covert military research of any kind, the Pentagon just leaks some tantalizing bit of info to Linda Moulton Howe about cattle mutilations and then retracts it, and boom! We're off to the races again.

Problem solved.

I'm not saying that all UFOs are fake or made up by the US government.

But it seems clear to me that at least some of them are, and that the American public is still falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

Missing Time and the Mystery of Memory

2010-07-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Alien abductions are frequently marked by periods of what has come to be called 'missing time'.

For example, Betty and Barney Hill, the first 'official' modern abductees and certainly the most famous, were driving on a well-traveled highway when they saw a UFO with some strange small inhabitants visible through the windows.

The UFO began to follow the Hill's car, and very soon landed in front of them, blocking their progress.

The next thing the Hills knew, it was two hours later and they were far away from the spot where they spied the craft, driving along as if nothing had occurred.

The two hours between the time the Hills saw the UFO and the time they realized they were driving again many miles away from the location of the sighting is called 'missing time'.

What is really missing though, is not the time itself but any memory of the missing hours. This discontinuity of experience is behind the title of the book and movie describing the Hill's ordeal, Incident at Exeter: The Interrupted Journey.

Later, under hypnosis, both Betty and Barney Hill separately 'remembered' remarkably similar events that involved being forcibly taken aboard that same UFO, examined medically, and then released and sent on their way. Betty Hill remembered being shown a star map showing where the aliens were from, and was able to reproduce it under hypnosis years later.

Much has been made of the unreliability of this kind of hypnotically recovered memory. What is not often discussed is the fact that we actually know that ALL memory--not just recovered memory--is creative, selective, and mutable. That's why three different people in the same family can all remember the same family gathering differently, and why our parents seem one way when we are in our teens, another way when we are in our 30s, and different still when we are elderly ourselves.

Our parents are still our parents. They are the same people no matter how we remember their past behavior. The same events comprise the story of our lives no matter how we interpret those events. But our memories of people and events change as we change, and evolve as our circumstances and our understanding evolve.

Normal memory constantly shuffles and adjusts the 'facts' of an experience to fit our current situation and what we know now; highlighting some bits that we discarded earlier, and discarding other bits that we cling to for years.

This process is not the same as lying or fudging the truth; it is adaptive and normal. It is as if memory is less like a bank of discrete bits of data stored on some internal hard drive, and more like language.

Language is symbolic. It means nothing until we put it together to form a story and share it with others or use it to understand our environment. Memory is like this too: It is not just a collection of facts, but also a constellation of meanings.

Letters are just letters until we actively form them into words. Words are just sounds until we use them to tell stories. Stories that are irrelevant get discarded in favor of ones that shed light on current circumstances. Language and memory are both ongoing processes that help us figure out where we are in relation the rest of the worth and to other people.

So what happens when a period of time simply vanishes after a strange event? What happens when there is a big gaping hole in a story that has just gotten a little too interesting?

Skeptics say that human cognition abhors a vacuum, so memory automatically makes stuff up to create an illusion of continuity--even if the made up stuff is outlandish and strange.

The idea here is that there are really two kinds of memory: 'true memory' tied to things that really happened; and 'false memory' implanted by the hypnotist or created by the subject in order to explain hours of inexplicable amnesia.

This idea is actually profoundly deceptive.

What skeptics don't say is that memory itself is in part the the process by which we take random experiential data and make a story out of it, and that all memory is partially false and partially true. All memory is full of errors and highly personal interpretations, and is subject to change over time.

If there is no such thing as strictly 'true memory', there can be no such thing as strictly 'false memory'. Even memories that are not 'real' in a material sense often are rich in symbolic emotional content and therefore do contain a kind of truth, even though it might not be reductive or empirical. For that matter, material reality itself is a LOT more slippery than we generally assume.

Things are not always what they seem.

I personally distrust UFO 'researchers' who get ALL their data from hypnotic regressions and take whatever emerges as material fact, but I also don't think it's right to trash the phenomena just because the methodology has been sloppy and the facts are baffling.

If anything, you'd think that would encourage more serious study.

The Eyes Have It

2010-07-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

What is it about aliens and big black eyes?

Whatever it is, it isn't new. Take a look at the drawings below of ancient Mesopotamian eye goddesses unearthed in Syrian circa 3000-3500 B.C.

For at least 5,000 years, human beings have attributed supernatural powers to beings with huge, mesmerizing eyes.

One theory about big-eyed aliens is that they are actually adult memories of an infant's experience of a mother's face.

The idea is that infants can't speak, so communication seems telepathic (just as aliens seem to transmit thoughts telepathically instead of speaking), and that infants zoom in on the mother's eyes, which then seem huge and out of proportion with the rest of the face.

I think that's a creative and interesting theory, and it's especially intriguing given that the early eye goddesses were (of course) female--sort of super religious mother figures. However, it doesn't account for the supernatural terror and surreal quality of these experiences. Why would an infant respond to a mother's face with sheer terror?

The element of terror doesn't fit.

The prototypical grey alien face seems an ungenerous representation of anybody's Mom, to put it mildly.

Eyes as a supernatural feature are every bit as as duplicitous as the aliens themselves.

On the one hand, you have the tradition of the 'evil eye' common to many European cultures. When someone gives you the evil eye a kind of bad luck curse sticks to you that is transmitted via a malevolent stare.

On the other hand, you have a long tradition of the eye as an amulet of protection against evil. The Eye of Horus carried this protective power, and the eyes found on currency serve a similar purpose.

Eyes are also associated with control and sexuality. Eyes play a key role in inducing trance or auto suggestion by means of NLP or hypnosis. In terms of human sexuality, a direct prolonged gaze by a female signals sexual availability, whereas the same prolonged gaze by a male can signal dominance or even threat.

I'm not sure what to make of any of this--much of it is conflicting and complex--but I think it's interesting and relevant to the visual appearance of aliens.

In the cheesy and mostly trashed movie, The Fourth Kind, the abducting aliens are emissaries of the Sumerian eye goddesses. They speak Sumerian. They are bossy and unpleasant.

I wonder if the ancients didn't know some things that we don't about what is in the world and how to perceive it. More and more I lean toward the idea that we share this earth with creatures and energies that are not easily perceived through a modern cognitive filter.

I don't think they come from outer space.

But I do suspect they are real.

There is too much consistency over too many thousands of years to shrug off that possibility.

Men in Black and Shades of Gray

2010-06-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've been reading up on 1950s UFO writers lately, and honestly, I'm beginning to think that these guys in the 50s who first started writing about aliens and UFOs were even more colorful and slippery than their mercurial subject matter.

There's a hell of a book in THAT for anybody with the time and means to write it--Hey maybe it will be me. (Weird things have happened.)

Yesterday I watched an excellent documentary about Gray Barker, the one time editor of the 1950s rag The Saucerian Review, and author of such classics as They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, The Silver Bridge (Barker's book about the sightings of the Mothman creature that preceded the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, WV in 1967), and MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us.

The documentary film, entitled Shades of Gray, is focused more on Barker than it is on flying saucers, but it's well worth watching, and it opens up quite a few compelling questions about the nature of paranormal research and the motivations of the people who do it.

Gray Barker and John A. Keel both wrote books about Mothman and the collapse of the Point Pleasant Silver Bridge, and both tied the events to UFOs to a greater or lesser degree. Barker's book preceded Keel's by five years, and took a more methodical, detached approach to the topic that didn't stress the UFO connection as strongly as Keel's more popular Mothman Prophecies.

Some years after Keel's book came out, Barker complained to the skeptical press about Keel's tendency to whip up witnesses by inserting his own paranoia and is own theories into his interviews, and he also accused Keel of changing some of the 'facts' presented in his version of the events.

While it appears to be true that Keel's personality was impossible to extricate from his investigations and his theories (some of Keel's witnesses said many years later that Keel terrified them, and that for weeks after he left they were unable to sleep or relax), it's also true that Barker himself was quite the hoaxer and that he loved playing mean-spirited jokes on fellow authors and subjects. Keel's counterfeit letter from the State Department to contactee George Adamski is now famous--a staple of ufological history and myth--so the very idea of Barker criticizing Keel's integrity is pretty funny.

Barker was a complex man by any standard. The Saucerian Review was the first publication of its kind to present contactee information as plain fact. The more outrageous the content, the better Barker liked it.

At the same time, Barker clearly believed that something genuine was going on with some UFO phenomena, and that paranormal phenomena were sometimes more than simple delusion.

He was fascinated by his subject matter, yet he wasn't above exploiting its weirder aspects in order to make a buck. He also had no problem with pranking others in the field or with mocking his own contributors, a quality that on the only hand is less than admirable, but on the other makes him all the more interesting a character in his own right.

I thought that one of the strangest and more poignant aspects of Barker's career was his attempt late in life to market the true story of his daily life as a fictional novel. This came after years of marketing patently ridiculous stories as plain truth and having all kinds of fun doing so. In some sense, Barker could only write his true story as fiction. This irony could not have been lost on a man of his unique genius and bizarre humor.

Barker was a homosexual in the South at a time when it was a lot safer and less awkward to be from outer space. The kind of duplicity and secretiveness required of a writer in such a position had to be toxic beyond imagination.

I hate armchair psychoanalysis, especially when it comes to writers and historical figures, (so here I go, diving in anyway), but it really is hard not to see relevance in this case. Barker's work revealed an obsession with dangerous secrets, duplicity, and illusion. It put me in mind of Charles Fort's procession of the Damned, the march of the excluded--or even, one might say, the alienated?

I also find no small measure of romance in the gritty, drinking, smoking, 50s sleaziness of these guys--Keel and Barker both seem larger than life, the kind of writers who pound out the latest bit of pulp insanity on a manual Royal typewriter with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There are photos of a young John Keel floating around the internet that make Brando and James Dean look like pussy poseurs.

They were bad, bad boys. That much is undisputed.

I've lately been playing with the idea that UFOs can't really be studied in a detached way, that it isn't even possible--that at least when it comes to this specific topic, the observer needs to be embedded in the observation in a way that science does not allow. Gray Barker gave me much to think about in this regard, and now I want to know more.

You can watch Shades of Gray yourself on your desktop at Netflix, or order it from the filmmaker's website.

BTW, if you find a copy of The Saucerian Review at a yard sale this summer, jump on it.

Those little rags are worth hundreds of dollars now.

And anyway, how cool is this stuff? I'm on the hunt from here onward, rest assured.

UFOs and Marian Apparitions

2010-06-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien Contact REVELATIONS: Alien Contact and Human Deception Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=eyeonlifethep-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;o=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;p=8&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=bpl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;asins=1933665289&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;fc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;IS2=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt1=_blank&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;m=amazon&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;f=ifr" style="padding-top: 5px; width: 131px; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" align="left" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=eyeonlifethep-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;o=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;p=8&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=bpl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;asins=097572004X&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;fc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;IS2=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt1=_blank&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;m=amazon&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;f=ifr" style="padding-top: 5px; width: 131px; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" align="left" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

When I was small child, I had a recurring nightmare that should not have been a nightmare at all:

In my dream, I'm standing on our neighbor's front porch. (I used to walk to grade school every day with two kids who lived in that house--a boy my age and his younger sister. I also spent a lot of time on that porch playing with those kids and with other kids on our block.)

So in the dream I'm standing on this large porch which spans the whole front of the house. The front door is positioned in the center with two knee-to-ceiling windows on either side. One pair of windows looks into the living/dining area of the home, and the other pair looks into a small bedroom.

As I look through these windows (it's hard not to peek into them, because of the way the porch is set up) I see, standing there, either in the bedroom or the living room--it doesn't matter, it's the same no matter which set of windows I look through--the Blessed Virgin Mary, just kind of looking back at me.

Immediately I am struck through and through with a paralyzing, overwhelming terror. It is as if something wholly and completely 'other' is wearing a full-body Virgin Mary mask, and a lame one at that--kind of like one of those Richard Nixon masks, only the BVM. This 'other' thing is looking right at me, and I cannot move.

The reason this should not have been a nightmare is that the BVM is supposedly a beloved, merciful figure and a special favorite of Catholic children, especially Catholic girls--kind of like the best Mom a kid could ever want.

This characterization (which is still very much a part of being a Catholic kid) is in itself kind of weird. Whenever the BVM puts in an appearance anywhere around the world (as she did at Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje, to name a few of her most recent visits) she almost always appears to children, tells them God loves them and blah blah blah, but too bad, humankind is about to die, fry, starve, kill each other, wreck the planet [fill in your own catastrophic future event about to occur as a consequence of our innate sinfulness].

She usually brings scary, scary news. To little kids. So why do they adore her? I can't answer that.

It always goes down like this:

"You kids are great. Too bad my Son has to fry your little carcasses on account of the horrible things the grown ups are doing. Don't take it personally. Oh yeah, and tell your folks and the rest of the village about the warning. Gotta run, but I'll back so keep your eyes peeled."

The BVM always comes armed with prophecy, usually dire prophecy. This is interpreted as merciful by the Catholic Church. Presumably the BVM could just not tell us at all and leave us to the natural consequences of our sins, but because she's the BVM and she cares, she intercedes for us on her Son's behalf and advises, "Clean up your act. Do it now."

Marian apparitions have much in common with UFO sightings and close encounters, so much so that some of the most prominent and credible UFO researchers have written about the connection extensively.

The Marian Apparition

The typical Marian apparition begins when a group of small children unexpectedly encounters a very bright light. As their eyes adjust, 'a beautiful lady' emerges from this light. Interestingly, the beautiful lady never claims to be the Virgin Mary--this is assumed by the witnesses.

(The Catholic Church does not approve all BVM apparitions as official miracles and has its own concerns about them.)

If the religious interpretation is dropped out of the eyewitness and percipient descriptions of Marian apparitions, what is left strongly resembles a standard UFO encounter.

Here is Jacques Vallee talking about Fatima:

"The crowd that stood in a field
in Fatima, a small village in the district of Leiria, some sixty-two
miles north of Lisbon, on October 13, 1917, was waiting there for a
miracle, because three children had been assured such an event would
take place after a number of meetings with an 'entity' that came from
the sky in a globe of light. The witnesses were three shepherds:
Lucia, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco Mario and Jacinto Marto,
aged nine and seven. Today, Fatima is one of the most celebrated
places of pilgrimage in the entire world. 

"...According to the very words of the Reverend General Vicar of
Leiria, who was one of the witnesses, the lady came in an 'aeroplane
of light,' an 'immense globe, flying westwards, at moderate speed. It
irradiated a very bright light.' Some other witnesses saw a white
being coming out of the globe, which several minutes later took off,
disappearing in the direction of the sun. 

"The last episode was the miracle itself. It was seen by seventy
thousand persons, among whom were pious individuals and atheists,
clergymen and reporters from a socialist newspaper. As promised, it
happened on October 13 at noon. Among the crowd was Professor Almeida
Garrett, of Coimbra University, a scientist, who described the
phenomena in the following terms: 'It was raining hard, and the rain
trickled down everyone's clothes. Suddenly, the sun shone through the
dense cloud which covered it: everybody looked in its direction. IT
LOOKED LIKE A DISC, OF A VERY DEFINITE CONTOUR. It was not dazzling.
I don't think that it could be compared to a dull silver disk, as
someone said later in Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear,
changing brightness, which one could compare to a pearl. It looked
like a polished wheel. This is not poetry. My eyes have seen it. This
clear-shaped disk suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing
speed. Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The sun
(disk?), revolving all the time, began falling toward the earth,
reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everyone under its fiery
weight...'"

Ultraterrestrial Messengers of Deception

Jacques Vallee, John A. Keel, J. Allen Hynek, and many others abandoned the ET hypothesis fairly early on in their UFO investigations, noting that encounters with UFOs and the beings associated with them resemble encounters with angels, fairies, ghosts, demons, and other paranormal phenomena, and that significant psychological elements also appear to be at play--not psychopathology necessarily, but elements of mind control and deliberate manipulation of human consciousness.

John A. Keel, an amateur hypnotist and professional magician, believed that the bright lights at the beginning of a UFO/alien encounter represented the material aspect of the experience, but that once attention was captured with the bright light, a hypnotic state was induced such that much of the rest of the experience was hallucinatory or psychic. This psychic dream-like experience or vision was then interpreted according to the belief system of the percipient. This analysis fits Marian apparitions very well.

What is actually seen by the children initially is a very bright, often pulsating light that descends from the sky. The lady is seen after that, emerging from the light itself, and she is seen only by thc children.

Keel used to use the word 'demonic' when talking about UFO phenomena, but he did not mean the word in the way Christians would use it. Though he did see a dark side to UFO phenomena, when he called himself 'a demonologist', he was referring in a value-neutral way to the duplicitous nature of the supposed aliens--they were like the 'daimons' of ancient Greece and earlier, like 'spirits of place' or nature spirits.

Keel, a Fortean with a unique background and perspective, observed that absurd elements were often a part of these alien encounters and that the absurdist element was edited out by ufologists as often as skeptics. He noted that although genuine and correct prophecies were made with unsettling frequency, once belief was established in a human subject these accurate prophecies were often followed by catastrophic false prophecies. Aliens (and Mary) are especially fond of gathering believers in fields and on hillsides to await the end of the world, which then does not come.

The spiritual content of Marian apparitions is also very similar in tone to the generic, bland, New Age-y sort of content channeled by UFO contactees. Vallee also noted this similarity as well. These prophetic apparitions/aliens don't tell us much spiritually that we don't already know, and they tend to prey on the fear of the day. At the time of Fatima, the Soviet Union and nuclear build up was a hot topic so they talked about that. Today, the aliens are worried about the environment.

Vallee and Keel both suspected that a genuine 'other' intelligence was at work in Marian apparitions and UFO contact/abduction experiences, they just didn't believe it was extraterrestrial. They both felt that the materialistic emphasis was wrongheaded and that more could be learned by taking detailed accurate accounts and doing information science on the results--analyzing patterns and taking everything into account, not just the bits that fit preconceived pet theories or beliefs.

Vallee, an esteemed information scientist who currently runs a venture capital firm in France, eventually got very disgusted with the circus that surrounds ufology and backed away from the subject almost entirely.

Vallee still thinks the phenomena are real and deserve serious attention, but he became sick of all the drama and duplicity surrounding both the topic and the community pretending to 'study' the topic. Vallee feels that ufology has devolved into cultish religion at this point and is part of the problem, actively making things worse rather than shedding much light on anything.

Keel believed that the aliens (disguised sometimes as the Blessed Virgin) are actually from earth, that they have always been here, and that they inhabit a dimension of time and space we do not fully understand. He often called them 'Ultraterrestrials'. Keel saw the aliens as another race of beings that share this planet with humans and for their own reasons enjoy messing with us sometimes.

Both men (and many others) see mechanisms of social and psychic control in the human interventions initiated by these ancient Ultraterrestrials. In other words, these beings, whatever they are--angels, demons, ultraterrestrials, aliens, fairies--intervene in human affairs by choosing susceptible people, changing their consciousness in very specific ways, and messing with the culture of the day through magic and hypnotic mind control tricks.

The alien agenda is opaque. Their intentions may be positive, negative, both, neither, or they may have reasons for messing with us that we can't begin to understand.

One thing is certain:

Just like the Catholic Church, they know how to put on a hell of a show.

Shiny Scary People: UFO Cults

2010-06-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

The clip above is from a longer program about UFO cults that can be found in its entirety at the History Channel or You Tube. It gives just a flavor of what these cults are all about.

Recently I was sent a little video I won't be posting because it is a fine example of this sort of cult propaganda, and the clip is also a bit sickening and unsettling to watch. The person passing this around was very impressed. I was definitely not.

Over the years, I have noticed a few things about UFO cults myself, even before receiving that clip:

A focus on transcending the body and getting beyond the earthly problems that come with embodiment. This may be done through energy work, 'ascension' teachings, bogus and incredibly confusing pseudoscience, psychic messages, 'higher' states of consciousness, other dimensions, other worlds, or whatever. The goal is always "get higher."
An emphasis on fake nonstop happiness and bliss, the like of which you might also get from really good heroin, except in the latter case you'd be nodding off and drooling on yourself and people would be less likely to follow you around, except maybe to steal your stuff.
A charismatic leader or two or three. Often this person emits a quality of light around the face that is mesmerizing and yet is more disturbing than comforting. Charles Mansion has this quality about his face and eyes, which I find both creepy and instructive. All that glisters is not gold.
The idea that the universe is arranged hierarchically and that matter is the crudest, most 'corrupt' form of energy. 'Energy' is presented as better than matter. It's superior. More evolved.
A conviction that the leaders have been chosen for a VERY SPECIAL MISSION AND TIME IS RUNNING OUT! This same pitch is often made on ordinary TV infomercials for vegetable choppers and hair removers and such, except that with the vegetable choppers you don't have to wear weird clothes and then kill yourself at some point to prove your absolute faith and devotion. You just have to agree to pay four installments of $29.95.
A tendency to run down people who see things differently, even a little differently.

Let me be clear here: I think that many UFO and alien contact experiences are real and meaningful and deserving of deeper and more thoughtful consideration than they usually get. That's why I put up this blog, and that's why I write about the paranormal in general and aliens and UFOs in particular.

But I also think that ufology makes really bad religion.

You know, there's bad religion, and then there's really bad religion.

Ufology would be that second kind.

In general, I have long noticed two common extremes in response to experiences of aliens or UFOs, and I believe both of them are wrongheaded and disturbing.

At one extreme are debunkers who mock, ridicule, and harass experiencers into seeking out small groups or keeping quiet altogether. These people are just bullies, half of them aren't even scientists, and I honestly don't see the point in acting like a dick just because you personally think something seems weird or funny. What is up with that? Ugh. It's very self-involved and hostile.

At the other extreme are people who take their experiences SOOOOOO deadly seriously they fall off the edge of the earth and start founding their own wrongheaded religions based on the space Masters or whatever--I mean, make up anything here and insert your own dogma, and make sure you have lots of good graphics and lots of cool New Age clothing to wear while you expound upon your crackpot convictions in workshops.

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes is something really fascinating and worth contemplating that I spend enormous amounts of time researching, reading, writing, and thinking about.

That's the part I'm personally interested in--that middle area, that creative tension betwixt and between extremes.

Weirdly, that perspective puts me on the 'fringe' of ufology, puts me 'out there' with respect to others who consider these strange things, alienates me from self-proclaimed experts in both extreme camps.

Doesn't make me wrong though.

The life we have here is the only life we have. I have no desire whatsoever to transcend it. Nature is good. Bodies are good. Matter is great, especially when it involves chocolate or aparagus. (I love asparagus.)

Nobody feels good all the time. Life can be confusing, unpleasant, and unfair. Spiritual work can be painful and always requires great courage and honesty, and an ability to face pain and loss.

The spiritual life is not a fast path to happy land and never has been. It's a difficult, twisty path, and lots of people who embark upon it--Jesus being one notable example--suffer much and come to a difficult end.

These are my beliefs, such as they are. Tomorrow, they may well change.

Alien Abduction and Dissociation

2010-05-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Dissociation is a term from clinical psychology that refers to a pathological state of detachment.

An online medical dictionary describes the condition as follows:

Dissociation: In psychology and psychiatry, a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body. Dissociation is characterized by a sense of the world as a dreamlike or unreal place and may be accompanied by poor memory of the specific events, which in severe form is known as dissociative amnesia.

Over the course of the 1990s, dissociation became a sensational topic on talk shows and in the popular press under the rubric of multiple personality disorder.

MPD has since that time been changed to the more clinically precise dissociative identity disorder.

The concept of personality is vague, subjective, and currently out of favor with clinical psychologists, (who BTW change their minds a LOT). Identity is--at least for now--seen as a more neutral term that refers to the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known.

Abductees and researchers alike take great pains to 'prove' that abduction experiences are not the result of mental or emotional pathology, and yet even a casual observer can recognize problems of dissociation and dissociative identity in alien abduction accounts.

Many abductees say openly that since remembering their abductions, they have realized that they possess a 'dual identity', and now understand themselves as both human and alien.

People who believe abductions are real say that abductees experience something similar to PTSD post-abduction because the experience is so terrifying. Symptoms such as amnesia for the event, hypervigilance, nightmares, confusion, persistent anxiety, etc., are all common.

People who believe that abductions are fantasies, dreams, or out of body experiences suggest that people who already suffer from PTSD for some violent earthly trauma can be induced to believe they were abducted by aliens as a kind of 'screen' for the memory of the real event.

At first glance, the idea that alien abduction memories make good 'screen memories' might seem ridiculous. Abduction researchers commonly protest that the consequences of coming forward with an alien abduction story are so negative (people accuse abductees of being crazy or of being attention-seekers, for instance) that no one would choose to do this unless the experience was genuine.

This point only makes sense however if the alternative is saying nothing and feeling fine. If a person is already feeling anxious and disturbed, or is plagued by nightmares, or is baffled by a relatively non-emotional instance of missing time, the mind has a strong inclination to resolve this tension.

What is less upsetting in this context? The notion that you might have blocked out a brutal assault, rape, or murder--which, seriously, no one wants to hear? Or the possibility that you were abducted by aliens, which, although upsetting and bizarre, lots of people are ready to validate?

I'm not saying the alien abductees are all victims of earthly trauma suffering from PTSD and a culturally suggested delusion. All I'm saying here is that researchers often fail to ask hard questions because they want so badly to believe the phenomenon at face value.

In fact, MPD came under fire for similar reasons shortly after it made the rounds of the talk show circuit back in the 1990s. Debunkers appeared hot on the heels of the dramatically damaged, armed with 'false memory' research, damning studies, and convincing examples of lying and hysteria.

After a time, clinical psychology had to to admit that at least some of the 'multiple personalities' who had written books based on their supposed early sexual traumas were not what they appeared to be, and some of the therapists who had been treating them were quacks.

The problem was that some of the MPD patients were not lying and their originating traumas could be proven. Many reputable psychologists came forward to defend dissociation as a clinical reality.

In the furor and uproar that ensued, both at universities and within clinical practice, much confusion was generated and little was accomplished. In the end, the DSM-IV changed some terms around and refined diagnostic categories, pitching the term 'MPD' in favor of 'DID', and adding subcategories and variants that were meant to provide clarity.

Is anyone feeling better yet?

Well, not really. PTSD is now one of the most common mental illnesses, and dissociation is pretty much a feature of everyday life for most people.

It always was, really.

Who hasn't had the experience of driving home from work only to realize that absorption in some issue or thought process has all but blanked out the entire trip? Who doesn't act one way in one situation and another way in another, to the point that it sometimes feels like two different identities altogether? It's hard to hold a corporate job these days if you don't know how to put on a identity and remove it on command as if it were a three-piece suit.

I personally believe that something real and interesting is going on with abduction experiences, but that we are asking all the wrong questions--those of us who are even asking questions.

"...a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body..."

Doesn't that describe the normative way we approach the world as a culture? Doesn't science always attempt to detach itself from emotion? Isn't the body seen as separate from the mind? Aren't human beings seen as separate from nature?

Maybe, just maybe, abduction experiences happen not so much to provide us with the answers we seek, as to get us to ask better questions, different ones.

Or, maybe I'm just being too detached about it all.

Aliens and Faeries

2010-05-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

The ET hypothesis in ufology is more controversial than its adherents like to admit.

Briefly, the ET hypothesis is the notion that UFO sightings and alien encounters are instigated by intelligent creatures from outer space. Some branches of ufology even name the specific part of the galaxy the visitors call home.

Betty Hill, who was abducted with her husband Barney from a rural New Hampshire road in 1961, claimed under hypnosis that the aliens who abducted her had shown her a star map--a map which she was later able to reproduce and which coincided accurately with a cluster of stars around Zeta Reticuli.

Thereafter the Hill abduction came to be known as "The Zeta Reticuli Incident."

But many of the most prominent features of alien abduction experiences, as well as some of the features of UFO sightings (that is, experiences that do not include direct contact with alien beings) were present for hundreds of years in faery lore.

Today faeries mostly inhabit children's books. At least, that's what we tell ourselves.

The faeries of old were experts in messing with human perception. They could appear to humans in any form them wished and could alter the experience of time. Like the aliens of today, faeries abducted children and young people, and were especially drawn to young women, with whom they were thought to mate in order to strengthen their line. Faeries sometimes took human babies and left faery children--called 'changelings'--in their place.

Faeries depicted as cute, Disney-like imps that flutter around trees and flowers are not the same faeries of medieval times and earlier. Before the rise of science, faeries were considered dangerous, and every culture had them. Being taken by the faeries was like being taken to the realm of the Dead. You might not ever come back, and if you did return, you might not be right ever again.

Like today's abductees, people taken by faeries typically went missing for a period of hours, days, or even longer, and then reappeared suddenly with no memory of what had happened to them and no sense of the amount of time that had passed. When the memories of faery abductees did begin to return, they included the recollection of coming upon small beings unexpectedly, and being invited into their circle.

Today's abductees usually do not remember what happened at first either, but only notice that some time is strangely missing from their lives. Their memories come later, under hypnosis, in dreams or in spontaneous surreal fragments.

Documented examples of fairies arriving in small airships are also plentiful The similarities between these creatures and the smaller 'grey aliens' described my modern abductees are striking, though saying so won't usually garner a round of applause in ufology circles.

It may not be the case that fairies and aliens are one and the same creature, but it seems to me at least worth considering that SOME 'aliens' are possibly not from outer space at all, but from right here on earth.

Every other culture, except ours has thought so.

Roswell, Bamboozelment & False Scholars

2010-05-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

I suppose ufologists will still be debating Roswell if we make it to the 22nd century. Yet everytime Roswell comes up I have the same thought:

There goes the Jedi mind trick.

Every American knows the story by now.

In the summer of 1947 something technological crashes just outside Roswell, New Mexico. At first the Air Force sends out a press release announcing that they've recovered a flying saucer. The next day however, they hold a press conference explaining it was really a weather balloon.

Major Jesse Marcel, the Air Force officer who initially accompanies rancher 'Mac' Brazell back to the crash site spends the rest of his life insisting that no, it really was a flying saucer. Rumors of recovered alien bodies surface, and for the next 60+ years writers like Kevin Randle and Stanton Friedman write books and go around the country insisting that there was a big government coverup.

Meanwhile, skeptics and debunkers like Joe Nickell--English major and UFO hater of Skeptical Inquirer fame--perform lame experiments meant to show that the whole thing is not true. So we have lame UFO researchers on the one hand insisting on veracity, and lame debunkers on the other insisting it's all a big lie. Harsh words are exchanged. Believers and non-believers come forward to voice their positions and contribute snark.

Every so often the military comes out and denies something, or denies a denial, or releases some heavily censored document a la The X-Files to keep the argument going.

Every fire needs an occasional shot of gasoline--even one as old and tired as this. This puppet show is still going strong, right now, right this minute--which in itself is unbelievable, because the discussion is not complex, interesting, or especially polite.

The Roswell problem is always framed this way:

Either UFOs are physically real and their material reality can be readily proven by 'science', or else UFOs are figments of the public's hungry imagination (and therefore 'not real') and 'science' must therefore do everything it can to laugh them off.

Yet neither side of this debate is very scientific and both sides use dubious research and logic so rudimentary and so bad that even I can see it is kind of pathetic. The government deliberately adds periodic confusion.

Here's what I think:

I think that some UFO sightings/experiences are genuine and worthy of further study, and that their material reality (or lack thereof) is their least interesting and least germane attribute. Information scientist Jacques Vallee, a guy who now runs venture capital firms and is hardly a nut, thinks the same thing.

I also think that whether or not a UFO was recovered at Roswell is by now almost certainly less important than the fact that the main players in this boring game are now running an old con also commonly known as "baffle them with bullsh*t, or "control through the confusion."

Street thugs know that one good way to lift a wallet quickly is to confuse the victim by presenting contradictory, baffling cues that distract and disorient the person marked for robbery. Create a diversion, take that cash. Similarly, hypnotists sometimes use a technique of deliberate confusion and contradictory cues to get stubborn subjects to relinquish conscious control long enough that they can be 'put under' and be made open to suggestion.

In short, UFOs may well be a real phenomena worthy of study on many levels, and many different and separate phenomena might be unfolding simultaneously. A UFO might have crashed at Roswell AND the government may well be opportuntistically using that to mess with the public's mind.

Or not.

One certainty is that a disinformation campaign waged by the U.S. military to divert attention away from their own unsavory activities--and there are many--is not at all hard to imagine, and they've certainly done such things before. And why not keep it going for 60 years, Roswell bodies or no Roswell bodies? It's working. If a thing ain't broke, you don't fix it.

When people are arguing about the reality of UFOs (or their unreality), they are not arguing about weapons development, biological weaponry, military intrusions on civilian life, poisonous chemicals, medical experiments (Google 'Tuskegee' for more on that), or any number of other legitimate issues that the general public maybe just ought to care about a little more--or at all.

In 1947, the U.S. military needed attention diverted away from the bomb and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Today, the dangers we should not be considering (per the military) are so many and so lethal it would take far more than a blog post to list them all.

"Look over there!" is a sad distraction, but it's a distraction that works, and really well too.

Distraction and deception is a definitely a part of UFO lore and history, but it isn't the most interesting or most valuable part--just the most annoying one.

To get to the heart of the matter, I'm convinced we have to think outside of that tired old box.

Charles Fort: A Man Ahead of his Fortean Times

2010-05-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

Fortean Times is a classic British magazine about the paranormal and other odd ephemera.

Founded in 1973 to provide "...news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents," Fortean Times is based on the work of the little-known but fascinating philosopher Charles Fort, who lived from 1874 to 1932.

Fort spent a good part of his brief time on earth researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library.

Charles Fort did not leave a huge body of written work, but what he did write packed quite a punch. He annoyed big people, but also found a few fast friends in the world of publishing--friends who respected the uniqueness of his mind, his wit, and his vision. His most famous works, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932), all concern themselves with what Fort felt was a serious flaw in scientific explanations of what constitutes 'reality'.

Fort argued that science, when rigorously examined, looks a lot more like a belief system than a methodology, and that its conclusions can only stand if anomalous data and experiences are systematically excluded, suppressed, or explained away. Fort blasted the reductionism embraced by mainstream science and its tendency to isolate, separate, and objectify phenomena. He saw science as a force that actually distorts understanding by denigrating mystery in an effort to maintain control.

Fort thought that everything in the known world was in a constant state of flux, always becoming one thing or another, and that the interconnectedness of all things was an obvious given. Like Lovelock (only earlier), he speculated that the universe itself might be more akin to a living organism than to a infinite expanse of inert matter.

Fort was one of the first to wonder publicly whether UFO phenomena might well be craft from outer space, and to this day Fortean Times is one of the first and most willing to publish new UFO findings, theories, and sightings.

Fortean Times has a weird, tabloid sort of vibe that earns it derision by logically minded persons and scientists, but this absurdist quality is grounded in a carefully constructed and always entertaining philosophy that goes back nearly a century. The mocking tone is part of the point.

Fort was notoriously critical even of his own theories, contradicting the oft-made charge that ufologists and lovers of weirdness are unthinking zealots in the process constructing a new religion. Although sometimes this charge rings true, it is by no means true across the board, and the kneejerk need by science to make it true often feels like defensiveness... perhaps because it is.

Fort famously said of science, UFO speculations, and his own work that:

"I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."

That's a perspective that, true or false, leaves room for the creative expansion of the human mind and heart.

Stephen Hawking Says Aliens Are Real But Probably Dangerous

2010-04-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

The hot minute item du jour is that famous physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking says in his new Discovery Channel TV Show Stephen Hawking's Universe (previews May 9th at 9:00 PM) that aliens are probably real but are probably not friendly.

Hawking bases these opinions--which he admits are speculative--on probability theory and direct observation.

Given the number of possibilities for life beyond Earth, Hawking says that alien races are statistically likely. Given what usually happens when one culture drops in on another for the first time however, Hawking believes an alien visitation is probably not going to result in anything resembling peaceful sharing, space brotherhood, or warm woo woo fuzzies for all.

Hawking cites the arrival of the first white people in the Americas and the effect that exploration had on indigenous peoples as an example. Even if aliens didn't mean to harm us initially, they would likely carry germs and social practices that would detrimental to our health. They'd be looking after themselves, not us. As anyone would, really.

But the greater likelihood is that they'd drop by specifically to steal our natural resources.

After all, that's what we do.

Hawkings asks, why would aliens be any different?

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

2010-04-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the 1951 landmark alien invasion flick The Day the Earth Stood Still is playing on the American Movie Channel.

Thank God for AMC! We keep getting more and more cable channels for less and less money from our local provider, but we only watch a few, and often AMC is the only one with anything good showing.

It's weird how cinema has access to so much more money and so many more special effects today, and yet movies aren't better.

Anyway, I remember watching this movie again and again as a kid, and just loving it. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and King Kong versus Godzilla were our all-time favorites, and we were always allowed to stay up late and watch them when they were shown on TV.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is still is rated four stars by reviewers and online movie sources, but watching it now feels oddly disappointing. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it's striking how innocent a time the 1950s was. That time seems so far away now. Not that I'm nostalgic for it (and panty girdles! ack!), but a certain cultural innocence has been lost since then, and I doubt we'll be getting it back anytime soon, if ever.

In 1951 we had just recently exploded the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and human beings still had the carnage of world war fresh in their memories, but it's clear that people still thought human beings were basically decent and that somehow, some way, things would work out for the best. Aliens were still in their savior phase for the most part. Today's aliens have outgrown that role and moved into darker agendas.

I think we are a lot more cynical these days, and some of us are downright apocalyptic.

Some tidbits floating through my aging brain as I watch:

Aunt Bea from The Andy Griffith Show is one of the supporting characters. I'd forgotten that. She lives in the boarding house run by Patricia Neal, the one Klaatu stays in while he's getting to know the human race a little better.
Michael Rennie was so hot in those days. I've always had a special attraction to lean dark men who are little cool and a little weird. Hey, I'm only human.
1950s kids are annoyingly saccharine. God, the kid in this movie make my teeth hurt.
It seems darkly funny that the message of the film is something like, "We come in peace to ask y'all to put down your weapons... otherwise we're blowing your whole planet to smithereens." Although, seriously, that was the message American had just delivered to the Japanese.
Aliens today are such bastards compared to Klaatu. Even with the annihilation threat. I mean, they really are jerks. And not half as cute.

I was reading online that the movie was criticized from some quarters when it was first released because of its pacifist message (pacfist, really?) and because actor Sam Jaffe, who plays Professor Rutherford, had openly leftist politics. Even so, the movie now holds an esteemed place in the Smithsonian collection of 100 Hollywood classics and is still highly regarded.

If only repeating, "Nicto Klaatu barrata!" could save us now. What a nice Earth Day event that would be. Maybe a saucer will land tomorrow and put a word in for the porpoises.

Gort, where are you when we really need you?

Aliens, True Believers, Debunkers, and Me

2010-04-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

I saw a comment on Facebook the other day that sort of snagged my attention. I resisted the impulse to respond to it directly because I've had this discussion before and it never goes well.

The comment went something like this:

"I don't even talk to people who don't believe in alien abductions anymore. They're so boring."

Really? You don't even TALK to people unless they believe in alien abduction? How do you buy groceries? How do you work out problems on your telephone bill? How do you meet girls?

One thing you discover fast when you start to study this topic is that UFO researchers and alien abductees sort into about four general categories and none of them like each other very much:

True believers. This camp includes the ancient astronaut theorists, the New Agers who see aliens as trying to teach us about peace and whatnot, the creepy 'researchers' like David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins who sit on the bedsides of young women and ask them to recount weird alien/human sexual encounters under hypnosis, and pretty much anyone else who takes the phenomena at face value.
Skeptics and Debunkers. The mirror image of true believers, these guys can ONLY question and discredit, even if their methods of discrediting individual stories are as hypothetical and beside the point as the stories themselves. People like Joe Nickell and magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer (the printed arm of CSICOP) see only hokum and BS in UFO stories and pretty much devote their lives to exposing it. They are the lid to the True Believer's pot.
The Mythologists. This group examines alien abductions in the context of myth, magic, and humanistic psychology. Although few people realize it, psychoanalyst and famous Freudian antagonist Carl Jung wrote a treatise on the psychoanalytical importance of UFO phenomena as early as 1953, so this group is hardly new. They get no respect and are generally misunderstood. They are scorned by both True Believers and Debunkers. That's because the modern understanding of myth as "dumb made-up story explaining something science has since figured out much more coherently" is not the understanding of myth they deploy, and you can't explain their point of view in a sound byte. So they lose. All the time.
Me. I don't think I fall cleanly into any of these camps (probably because I myself am an alien life form) but also because I am especially personally fascinated by the persistent cultural divide between the realm of the imagination and the realm of intellect. For this reason I am forever getting bludgeoned by all three groups whenever I open by mouth about aliens or UFOs, and I am forever whining a sad response along the lines of, "Why can't we all just get along?"

That's right: I am the Rodney King of alien abduction lore.

Seriously though, why can't we use the best of all these perspectives? Why can't we think critically about the phenomena and apply some science while acknowledging that the human imagination is not an annoying vestigal pathology for which science will soon find a cure? When a story takes on this kind of cultural strength and power, why can't we admit that that is, all by itself, kind of a big deal and deserves to be examined carefully and thoughtfully?

Anyway, I just thought for now I'd lay out the cast of characters and explain what role I play in this particular form of Kabuki theater.

Stay tuned for drama!

The Thing From Another World

2010-04-16T03:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday TCM ran The Thing From Another World (1951), one of the very best of the 1950s alien invasion flicks. I hadn't seen it in awhile and noticed the following threads for the first time:

The alien was kind of a cross between a prototypical 'Grey' and Frankenstein. Stockier than a grey but bald, tall, and emotionless with huge creepy eyes and a keen interest in breeding, he was supposedly way smarter than us but spent most of his time staggering around making 'grrrrr' noises whilst looking for blood.
The snowy, arctic setting was a great visual Cold War metaphor.
It struck me that when you get megalomaniacal scientist types together with bumbling military types nothing good ever comes of it, and that has not changed in 59 years.
The tall reporter guy could be Jeff Goldblum's dad. I don't think he is, but he could be.
That woo woo background music during the scene where everybody pokes at the severed alien hand is classic. I can't get enough of that music. I wish I could make that sound here but you can't really even spell it in a blog so I guess you'll have to watch the flick to hear what I'm talking about. 'Woo woo' is as close as I can come to it.

I get frustrated by alien talk today. It always sorts into the True Believers versus the Skeptical Debunkers and that whole kabuki argument is so boring.

I think a LOT is going on with ufos and alien abduction reports, but no one ever is the slightest bit interested in my alien perspective on it. I figure I have enough material, thoughts, links, and news items for a blog on specifically that complaint, so here it is.

Stay tuned. If you get bored while wating for the next post, go watch The Thing From Another World.

It's still awesome.