Tag: Alien Abduction

An Alien Abduction & a Fairy Tale: “Is that clear enough?”–A Note

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 14 Comments

In Forbidden Science:  Volume Four:  Journals 1990-1999, The Spring Hill Chronicles, Jacques Vallée writes in the entry for 1 January 1996:

In one recent case an abductee reports seeing human arms and legs piled up like firewood in a corner of a dark room, lit by a blue glow. Ufologists take it at face value. To me the scene has a stunning mythopoetic connection to Germanic fairy tales where a hero spends the night in a haunted castle; little men force him to play bowling games as they knock down bones using human heads that keep dropping down the chimney. In the tale a horrible being reassembles itself out of the members that have appeared chaotically. Is that clear enough?

With Passport to Magonia (1969), Vallée began to probe the relation between modern UFO sightings and entity encounters with premodern narratives, myths, legends, tales, and chronicles of aerial phenomena and meetings with nonhuman intelligences, arguing, at times, that their similarities suggest something about the mystery behind the UFO phenomenon. His approach, in general, has been richer and more sophisticated than the approach summed up in the name von Däniken, though not always. His journal entry (above) is hardly a summation of his own positions, but it is representative of certain pitfalls the line of inquiry can fall into.

As I have argued on a number of occasions, it’s not only the ufologists who take things at face value (as if “face value” were a simple, obvious notion…). All other provisos aside, a preliminary question is exactly how are an alien abduction narrative and a folk tale equivalent kinds of narrative? Before comparing these stories one need get clear on the narrative codes that govern or governed their composition and reception. For example, anyone who takes “at face value” the Hebrews’ forty years wandering in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt and Jesus’ forty days and forty nights retreat before beginning his ministry is simply ignorant of the rhetoric or hermeneutics at work in Biblical narrative.

But even before engaging such substantial and necessary matters, a number of other problems come to mind. Taken “at face value”, assuming that the abduction narrative was retrieved by means of hypnosis, a more parsimonious explanation is that the abductee had been exposed to the fairy tale Vallée has in mind in his or her childhood and the forgotten (i.e., unconscious) content has resurfaced in surreal fashion during the hypnotic regression. Or, if one wants to indulge a more Jungian than Freudian approach, one might posit that the dreamlike memories conjured up under hypnosis and the imagery of the fairy tale both spring from the same mental source, the creative or collective unconscious.

But most tellingly is what’s revealed to be at work in Vallée’s own mind. The “Germanic fairy tale” is very likely the fourth in the Brothers Grimm’s collection, “Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen” (“The Tale of a Boy who Went Forth to Learn Fear”). In this tale,  there are no “little men” (that might count as analogues to the diminutive Greys presumably present in the abductee’s story), nor, strictly speaking,  does “a horrible being reassemble itself out of …members that have appeared chaotically”:  first one half, then another half of a man falls through the chimney; the two halves then reassemble themselves into a “hideous man.” Vallée has only dimly (mis)remembered the tale himself, fabulating a version as fictitious as the abductee’s hypnotically retrieved narrative in line with the point he desires both to perceive and make. Once we undertake the simplest philological labour, we see that the abductee’s story and the fairy tale as Vallée remembers it have next to nothing in common, other than, perhaps, certain psychological mechanisms that might be invoked to explain their respective creation.

Whatever what might finally be made of Vallée’s speculations concerning the sometimes very striking parallels between premodern and modern “UFO” narratives (as is the case with Faery and Alien Abductions), if his approach is to have more than a mythopoetic value (which I prize highly!), then a certain minimum of philological and hermeneutic reflection is called for. Is that clear enough?

 

 

 

Synchronicitious Confirmation

~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

If the UFO is a mandala (as Jung proposed) then by synchronicity (again) I’ve come full circle.

Though I’d been fascinated by the ufological as a boy, that interest faded sometime before high school. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that, like Saul on the road to Damascus, I was struck by my own private revelation of the phenomenon’s meaningfulness. At the time, alien abductions were in the air, or at least on the airwaves. Many if not most of the abductees were women, and their stories were retrieved for the most part by means of hypnotic regression. By that time, I’d read enough Freud to guess that what these women recalled was as much a kind of manifest dream material as memory, and, as a dream, their stories must be expressions of certain desires or fears. This insight dovetailed into other matters being mulled by the zeitgeist at the time, the Human Genome Project, cloning, and developments in reproductive technology, such as In Vitro Fertilization. It seemed clear at that moment that alien abductee narratives were surreal expressions whose latent content was the understandable concern women might suffer whose bodies were the subject of such probing investigations and manipulations. What struck me in a flash with this understanding was how the infinite stories about UFOs and their ET pilots were a kind of collective dream expressing the anxieties and aspirations of technological civilization in general, an idea I articulated a few years later just before one of the last End Times dates, the turn of the Millennium, in the following way:

The present stands within the horizon of the death of God, understood as the domination of the assumption of the immanence of the world and the consequent disappearance of the meta-physical, the super-natural, and the supersensuous (at least overtly) or their fall into the merely paranormal. The paranormal or paraphysical is that realm of nature yet to be understood (and so ultimately controlled) by science. This assumption that science will continue along the path of discovery, knowledge, and power naturalizes or reifies science and technology. When our science and technology poison the biosphere, split the atom to release potentially species-suicidal energies and manipulate the genetic code of living organisms, humanity has taken upon itself powers and potentialities hitherto exclusively the domain of superhuman deities. That science and technology, whose worldview determines how things are, brings us to an unprecedented impasse demands they must in some way be transcended (i.e., survived). The flying saucer appears within this horizon as a symbol of just such transcendence, promising that precisely the causes of our quandary will be our means of salvation.

By chance, meaningful or otherwise, following up on the reading around conspiracy theories I did for my conversation with M. J. Banias and the post clarifying and expanding on its ideas, I came to the following passage in Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: from Kennedy to the X-Files (2000) uncannily setting forth those same ideas that had caught me up in that blinding vision of what the UFO mythology illuminates:

…the prevalence of alien abduction stories which feature invasive gynecological procedures speaks to concerns about rapidly changing reproductive technologies, in a decade whose political terrain has been scarred by battles over abortion, and fertility treatments such as surrogacy and cloning….alien abduction narratives in the 1990s express fears about medical science’s invasion of the body as the source of danger. It comes as little surprise, moreover, that the most frequent visitor, the so-called small gray alien, is typically represented in both personal accounts and Hollywood film as a creature with a disproportionately large head, huge enigmatic eyes, a tiny body and delicate hands. It forms an icon which recalls pictures of fetuses in the womb, a striking and uncanny image of the “alien within” that has only become available through new imaging technology in the last quarter century. The conspiracy-inflected dramas of alien experimentation thus say less about the particular makeup of the individuals telling the stories than they do about a society in which people’s (and especially women’s) relationships to their own body is so often mediated through technical expertise, be it medical, judicial, or ethical. (171-2)

 

Revelation in Reverse, or Myth, Synchronicity, and the Collective Unconscious

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

Two meaningful coincidences dovetail together to prompt the following thoughts.

First, in a post at Mysterious Universe, Micah Hanks speculates that unidentified delta wing aircraft, such as those witnessed by two Air Force colonels 24 July 1952 and perhaps those seen by Kenneth Arnold 24 June 1947, might have been early prototypes of what was to become aircraft like Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. Hanks bases his inference on the description of the UFOs seen in 1952—”three bright silver, delta wing craft with no tails and no pilot’s canopies. The only thing that broke the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the triangular wing was a definite ridge that ran from the nose to the tail”—which, he notes, bears a remarkable similarity to various stealth aircraft today, a flying wing aeroform originally that of the German Horton IX Go 229 that made its first powered flight in February 1945, prototypes of which were captured by American forces at the end of the World War II.

Prima facie, Hanks’ conjecture appears persuasive, given the shared features of the Horton, the UFOs witnessed, and variations on the Stealth design. However, one need answer several objections to make the case more compelling, the most serious of which was raised in the earliest days of the phenomenon:  if the UFOs were experimental aircraft, then why were they seen indiscriminately over land and sea globally, threatening both civilian populations in the event of a crash or capture by foreign powers? By 1952, for example, the American Air Force had already experimented with several flying wing designs, some of which had crashed during test flights, and had secured proving grounds since the earliest days of rocket research where experimental aircraft could be tested both securely in and in secrecy.

Regardless of how this or other objections might be answered in more sophisticated versions of Hanks’ argument (and there are more sophisticated versions), in the context of his post, the 1952 sighting appears explainable “in hindsight“, and it’s two features of this inference that caught my attention:  on the one hand, a later event (in this case, an aeronautical development) is said to reveal the hitherto veiled truth of an earlier one (the 1952 sighting) “in hindsight”, and, on the other, this revelation is based on a visual (or morphological) similarity that prompts the comparison of the two events.

ABYDOS-HELICOPTER-PHOTO

Anyone familiar with the discourse around Ancient Astronauts or Aliens will likely recognize this way of thinking. Ancient Alien enthusiasts pick out a helicopter among the hieroglyphs reproduced above: a modern aeronautical development reveals the truth of an ancient artifact because of how the two resemble each other. The same eye would likely see two flying saucers in this post’s featured image, a piece of rock art from Tanzania. In both cases, now is projected onto then because of a perceived resemblance.

One is likely more persuaded by Hanks than the Ancient Alien theorist. The Horton flying wing, the description of what was witnessed in 1952, and the variations on the Stealth Bomber are all modern, regardless of their relative places on the historical timeline, and the aeroform in question is unequivocally real and functional, whereas, in the case of the ancient Egyptian “helicopter” and the modern-day one, or the cave painting UFOs and UFO photos since the 1940s, we are dealing with historically distant artifacts and, more importantly, different conventions of representation (as I have explained before) that render the comparison questionable in the first place.

But these visual coincidences share something in an uncanny way with the second synchronicity that prompts this post. Anthropologist Christopher F. Roth in his chapter in E.T. Cultures:  Anthropology in Outerspaces (ed. Battaglia) “Ufology as Anthropology:  Races, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult” remarks the hypnotically-recovered testimony of two abductees. “Joe” tells John Mack that the alien-human hybridization program of which he is a part is “necessary” to preserve the human “race and their seed and their knowledge,” because “human beings are in trouble” due to an impending “electromagnetic” catastrophe caused by the “negative” technology humankind has developed. Concerns about electromagnetic pollution have been around for decades, but have ramped up considerably with the impending introduction of 5G technologies and their perceived and imagined threats. In a similar vein, Roth relates, famous abductee Betty Andreasson tells Raymond Fowler that the hybridization program is needed because of “escalating infertility,” a striking statement in view of recent declining sperm counts in the developed world and the even more recently discovered effects of global warming on insect fertility. Reading the words of “Joe” and Betty Andreasson, the UFO believer is likely to nod and believe their testimony possesses prophetic import. It seems to me, however, that these “prophecies” become so only “in hindsight.” Again, present circumstances are projected, in this case, onto words uttered decades ago, words whose generality is skewed and focussed to make them harmonize with contemporary developments.

But my purpose here is not to debunk a kind of fallacious reasoning at work among the ufophilic or ufomaniacal. If, as Jung words it, the practically countless stories about UFOs and their pilots constitute a “modern myth of things seen in the skies”, then the logic I sketch at work here is more interestingly understood as mythological rather than merely fallacious. One could turn to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in his monumental four-volume Mythologies, sets out to demonstrate that the logic underwriting myth is as rigorous and functionally valuable as modern-day science; whether stone or steel, an axe is an axe. Jung, too, posits a ground for the kind of connections made by Hanks, the Ancient Astronaut/Alien enthusiast, or the devotee of revelations of Experiencers, namely that source of dreams, visions, and myth, the Collective Unconscious. Jung’s Collective Unconscious is “exalted above all temporal change”, i.e., in it, everything happens at once; it is eternal (timeless). Correspondences between its elements therefore cannot be causal (since cause and effect are temporally related) but synchronicitious, meaningfully coincident, just like the correspondences remarked above. Because these synchronicities are essentially atemporal, revelation can operate in reverse, with the present illuminating hitherto occulted truths in the recent or distant past.

At this point, however, I am taking up Jung’s ideas not as explanations for that modern myth but as elements of it themselves. For that modern myth is not so modern, rising as it must from the Collective Unconscious (present in its own way in the radically different thinking of Lévi-Strauss), meaningfully coincident as it is with Alchemy (as Jung shows at great lengths) but also with archetypal symbols from philosophy and poetry, as well. As James Olney writes in his chapter “The Esoteric Flower:  Yeats and Jung” (in Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper, MacMillan, 1975)

There is one symbol…or a unified complex of symbols figured in a variety of related images, which tantalizes and frustrates (and has done for twenty-five centuries) more than any other, yielding many meanings to the seeker yet seeming at the same time to withhold at least as many meanings as it give up. That image or symbol—and it occurs as the central symbol as all esoteric studies from Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato down to W. B. Yeats and C. J. Jung—is the gyre, the cycle, the circle, the sphere. There are hundreds of ways it can appear (a winding staircase, a snake eating its own tail, a round tower, a cycle of history, the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists, the flight of a falcon, an Unidentified Flying Object…

What’s at work here is not faulty logic but the mythopoetic imagination, whether Jung’s Collective Unconscious; Lévi-Strauss’ myth, not spoken by human beings but speaking them; or the Magical Universe (MU) of William Burroughs’ own Mythology for the Space Age wherein, like in the Hermeticist’s Universe, everything is related to everything else, like in the vision of the ‘Pataphysician for whom the universal solvent, a version of the Philosopher’s Stone, that dissolves all things in their infinite relatedness is language.

And I see by way of a further “meaningful coincidence” that while I worked on this post UFO Conjectures posted thoughts on UFOs (and “alien encounters”) in the Qur’an!

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Persinger R.I.P.

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

The one post at Skunkworks that has sparked the most interest was that concerning the Electromagnetic Hypothesis (EMH), that some UFO/UAP sightings and perhaps even encounter experiences could be accounted for by observed but unexplained naturally-occurring EM and plasma phenomena.

One of the major researchers to develop this idea was Michael Persinger, who has died at 73. The Daily Grail has posted an obituary and summary of Persinger’s research and the controversy and criticisms it inspired. Interested parties will be pleased to find at least two videos and links to ten blog posts Persinger wrote in reply to his critics.

As a partial explanation for sightings and encounters, Persinger’s work strictly falls outside the purview of Skunkworks, exploring, as his research does, the being rather than the meaning of the UFO phenomenon. What is compelling, though, is the way his research suggests that the Earth herself might be imagined to communicate with human beings via EM phenomena.

That Flying Saucers arguably reveal more about how we think and feel about technoscience and the fate of society than about extraterrestrial visitors has been a mainstay since Jung’s pioneering speculations. That Contactees and Abductees both have received warnings concerning environmental catastrophe segues nicely with the notion that the Earth articulates her concerns via tectonic energies and an available image reservoir, whether a Collective Unconscious or not. That Earth itself transmits EM energies at 30-33 Hz (an instance of a numerological pattern that runs through the whole mythos) and that these transmissions are called Extra-low Frequency (ELF) waves is also poetically suggestive, especially in view of the links made to Faery lore and the UFO mythology by, among others, Jacques Vallee….

Having recently secured a copy of Persinger’s and Lafrenière’s Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events (Chicago:  Nelson-Hall, 1977) I hope to share a review sometime in the future.