Picture This: another note on premodern “sighting reports”

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

At a Facebook UFO page I haunt was shared a post on Paul R. Hill’s Unconventional Flying Objects, Hill’s attempt to engineer a flying saucer. Hill’s book brought to mind the similar attempt by NASA engineer Josef F. Blumrich to similarly reverse engineer the space ship he believed to be described in the Book of Ezekiel. Blumrich’s book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel, is a remarkable exercise in “speculative engineering,” so much so, at times, it seems to transcend the perversity of its hermeneutic. What I mean is that Blumrich, like every other Ancient Astronaut/Alien “Theorist,” “reads” (interprets) premodern artifacts, texts and otherwise, in a manner alien to, if not utterly ignorant of, the context of their composition, the conventions of written expression or artistic representation of the time.

As chance (synchronicity?) would have it, The Public Domain Review recently shared some images from The Comet Book (1587) (one of which I reproduce, above). Many of the images are precisely of the kind that Ancient Alien enthusiasts point to as examples of premodern sighting reports: as no comet surely looks like that, the ancients must have mistaken a UFO/UAP for a “comet”, given their unfamiliarity with what is common knowledge to we moderns, shoehorning the strange into a more-or-less familiar category. But such a reading, of, e.g., the illustration above, assumes the picture is rendered according to modern, not ancient, conventions of representation, a mistake that grounds the inference that what is depicted is something strange (a UFO/UAP) made natural (a comet). Premodern pictures are not pretechnological attempts at photographic representation, just as premodern texts are not technologically-ignorant “sighting reports.”

I’ve made this argument at greater length and with regards to two, specific examples: the Nuremberg 1561 and Basel 1566 broadsheets and the tales of Medieval sky ships (posts collated, with related others, here), and with regards to Jacques Vallée’s presentation at the first Archives of the Impossible Conference (other responses to Vallée’s readings of premodern UFO and “alien” encounters can be read, here.). The question can be taken up more rigorously (and, thereby, problematically)—there is no knock-down argument one way or the other—but an ahistorical reading of history, i.e., one that fails to take into account historicocultural difference is, simply, “chronocentric” and mistaken.

Anchored in philology: an addendum to “When a sighting report is not”

September 18, 2019March 31, 2022 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 9 Comments

The latest example of Rich Reynolds’ irrational tenacity sent me to Aubeck’s and Vallée’s Wonders in the Sky. For all its failings, catalogued at length by at least two tenacious critics and admitted by no less than Vallée himself, the book is not without its saving graces.

I was recently moved by being shown John Carey’s study of sky ship tales from medieval Ireland to use his scholarship to make an argument about the interpretive dangers of reading narratives from distant times and cultures. At the time, I went to Wonders in the Sky and was surprised I could find no mention of these sky ships. It turns out Aubeck and Vallée were one step ahead of me in this regard, however.

I was unable to find such stories among the 500 they present in their “Chronology of Wonders”, because they include them in the second section of illustratively questionable tales, “Myths, Legends, and Chariots of the Gods”. The authors base their own analysis (pp. 405-11) on Carey’s, noting both the scant references to the sky ships in the annals and the increasing embellishment of the basic story line over time.

Most impressively (to me) they resolve the mystery of how the most famous (and fabulous) version of the story, wherein the sky ship’s anchor is caught in the church’s door arch, is repeated during the Phantom Airship flap of 1896/7: according to Aubeck and Vallée, the Boston Post published an article “A Sea Above the Clouds: Extraordinary Superstition Once Prevalent in England” that recounted two British folktales, one a version of the more famous Irish one. Two weeks later, the story was updated to the present and relocated to Merkel, Texas as reported the Houston Daily Post 28 April 1897, two days after the incident was said to have occurred (p. 409).

A (very) little more digging turns up that the article Aubeck and Vallée refer to also appeared (seemingly for the first time) in the 7 March 1897 edition of Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune and the next day in the Nebraska State Journal. It remains nevertheless no less astounding, however, that so recherché a philological tidbit should make the rounds as a syndicated article of all things in America’s newspapers at the time!

To paraphrase Chaucer: The life so short, the bookshelf so long to read!

Correspondence from the Art History Department of the Invisible College concerning the Glaser and Coccius Broadsheets

September 14, 2019September 18, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

During my recent debate concerning the sixteenth century broadsheets from Nuremberg and Basel made famous by Carl Jung in his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (plates VI and V, respectively), I reached out to an art historian I know for whatever light they could shed on the question. I reproduce our short e-correspondence, below.

I was surprised they were more persuaded that the broadsheets reported on and depicted actual observations than I was. You can read my first essay on the matter and view the broadsheets here, and my second take, here.

SKUNKWORKS

I’m in a discussion with another ufophile concerning two 16^th broadsheets, first noted by Jung in his book on Flying Saucers.

The first is from Nuremberg 1561 (an account of the story accompanying the illustration can be read, however rough and ready, here.)

The second is from Basel 1566, here.

Illustrations attached [viewable at the link, above].

My interlocutor insists the illustrations are merely and only allegories for the religious tensions of the day. I contend that, however stylized they in fact are, they are 1. Artist’s illustrations of the accompanying texts, which 2. Refer to events on specific dates, not to the general struggles of the day.

I readily grant both broadsheet pages are religiously informed (e.g., the crosses in the Nuremberg picture), but I am skeptical about their being merely allegorical pictures.

What illumination can you bring to the pictorial conventions at work in these pictures: are they reducible in the way my interlocutor contends, or do they employ stylizations of the day to depict what they texts report?

ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT, THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE

Having looked at the illustrations and the accompanying texts, I am of the opinion that they are related to specific events. The texts sound quite precise and have a scientific tone, they don’t sound allegorical. They are news notices so the medium does have an impact on how the message would have been understood at the time. An allegorical text would refer to the Bible or the Old Testament. There are such images pertaining to the religious wars and they depict things like the Tower of Babel, the Ruins of Jericho or Sodom and Gomorrah. They show armies battling it out and good being triumphant or evil being punished. Many artists did biblical series using thinly veiled metaphors that their public would have understood as religious or political commentary of the events of the day. Your debate is complicated by the fact that there are two camps, the iconoclasts and the iconophiles.

Look at the works of Michelangelo, Titian, Dürer, Cranach. They all had to deal with the impact of these wars and the changes imposed on them by their Churches. The Catholics depended on the Church’s patronage to survive. The Church expected them to use the Bible as a point of departure for their work and their work was closely scrutinized during its production. If they strayed, they paid a heavy price. Catholic artists fared better than the Protestant artists who lost their patronage altogether. In addition, the Protestants had their works destroyed in the riots.

In the Coccius illustration, the onlookers seem surprised or in awe but not cowering in terror. The Nuremberg one actually has an explosion but I am not seeing the usual binary confrontation between two camps, which is typical–good confronting evil.

The artists of the time had to answer to their respective Churches. Coccius and Glaser both seem to have had much more leeway than other artists of their time. In Switzerland, where Coccius worked, there were Catholics and Protestants from one canton to the next. The illustration doesn’t seem to follow the edicts of the Catholic Church but it would not have pleased the other side either. Glaser was on the fence as well. From what I can tell, he lived in Catholic Bavaria but surrounded by Lutherans. I believe that Illustrations of specific non-religious events would not have been questioned in the same way as artworks with a religious theme.

Paolo Veronese had to go before the Inquisition because of heresy for irreverently painting “buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities” in a painting that could have initially been about the Last Supper. I am including Veronese’s responses to the Inquisition excerpted from H.W. Janson’s History of Art on Paolo Veronese’s “The Feast in the House of Levi” (1573, oil on canvas) [the featured image for this post]. It contains the transcript of the interrogation of the Inquisition and is quite entertaining. This is what the art of the time looked like. He didn’t redo the painting as he was directed to by the Inquisition, he just changed the title. Ah those weaselly artists! To conclude, I believe the two illustrations you sent me are just that, illustrations of phenomena. If the Churches weren’t happy, the artists faced serious repercussions, like the Inquisition and/or the destruction of the works themselves, that is not nothing.

Have a look at Glaser’s other works, here [and, better, here].

SKUNKWORKS

Merci for your specialized comments. One small wrinkle in the matter came to light after I wrote you. The Reformation and Counter Reformation inspired a tremendous interest in anomalies, wonders, miracles, and prodigies. The two broadsheets were printed to meet this demand. Glaser (responsible for the Nuremberg one) printed a number along these lines (some dozen are in the holdings of the Zurich State Library, where Jung found these two examples and reproduced them in his book on ufos in the ‘50s).

You can see my two takes on the matter (when you have time and inclination)[at the first two links, above]:

ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT, THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE

Yes, I am aware of the miracles and wonders illustrated at the time. These two cases however are specific events, which were chronicled in the news of the time. I am not saying that they are exact illustrations, nothing was that straightforward, but I believe they were likely meteorological events, possibly a combination of phenomena such as waterspouts, hail, firestorms and yes, a blood moon. There is the question of these artists place within the hierarchy, They had more freedom because they were not uppermost in the minds of the religious regulatory bodies of the time. These institutions were put in place to force artists (and others) into submission. As for fake news, yes this is possible but both of these illustrators tend to be quite literal in their approach and are very detailed when it comes to illustrating fortifications and ramparts or botanical curiosities. In my opinion, Jung had his own perspective on these from the onset. And, yes, certainly we project our own knowledge base, prejudices and lacunae onto these images.

We witness a stylistic shift in artists working for the Catholic Church during the second part of the 16th century, with the rise of Mannerism. During this time, the Church is actually fighting wars and has a fleet of ships. It is fighting the spread of Islam but also protecting its trade routes and economic concerns. in the last quarter of the century, Italian artists suffer major losses due to fires that were deliberately set by their enemies (both Bellinis, Carpaccio and several artists whose works are part of the collections held by the more progressive Doge). This is not a comfortable or safe time to live in. Add to that the decimation of a third of the population after an epidemic of the plague in 1576. Titian, who had managed to live to an advanced age, died that year. All that to say there were plenty of reasons to look for wonders in the sky.

I read the texts corresponding to the links, very interesting insights on the matter. Not a subject I know much about. It was fun.

“Signs on the Heaven” and “strange shapes in the sky”: Giving the Devil his due

September 10, 2019September 10, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

As I wrote concerning stories of ships in the skies in medieval Ireland, “Just how to understand temporally and culturally distant narratives concerning anomalous aerial phenomena, let alone nonhuman entity encounters, is no simple matter.” The reasons for such stories and the ways they were communicated are more complicated than would appear offhand.

It’s such complexities that underwrite the difference of opinion between me and Rich Reynolds concerning just what to make of two broadsheets from the sixteenth century, one from Nuremberg (1561), the other from Basel (1566). I maintain they are what they purport to be, stories and artists’ impressions of aerial prodigies witnessed on specific dates and times of the day, Reynolds, that they “are ‘editorial rabble-rousing’ by the newspapers and ‘cartoonists’ (the guys who provided the drawings) about the ongoing societal consternations of Luther’s Reformation and the Catholic Church’s Counter-reformation.” My case, with links to our disputations, can be found here.

Exactly what was witnessed in 1561 and 1566 is a question that persists from those years to our own. My own stance concurs with the writer and illustrator of the Nuremberg broadsheet, Hans Glazer: “God alone knows.” Reynolds seems to be of the opinion that, in fact, nothing was seen, but he nowhere provides a explicit interpretation of the broadsheets themselves that would make clear just how he understands them, aside from their being “editorial rabble-rousing.” So, in the interests of intellectual balance, I want to attempt to argue here that the question as to whether the broadsheets refer to actually witnessed phenomena at all is indeterminate.

I must still disagree with Reynolds’ understanding. Pegging the broadsheets as “editorial rabble rousing” and their accompanying illustrations as “cartoons” is just too vague and ahistorical to do justice to the concrete facts of the print media of the time. The documents in question are best understood as examples of a popular genre of the day, that concerning prodigies and wonders. As Jerome Clark helpfully informs us: “Rediscovery of the prodigy book of Osequens in 1508 set off a flood of similar works. The most comprehensive was the Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon of Conrad Lycosthenes, which appeared in 1557 at Basel” (48) [my emphasis]. But the appetite for such materials is not accidental.

Reynolds’ whole case is motivated by the historical context, the religious strife that raged through Europe with the Reformation (which begins in 1517) and Counter-Reformation (beginning with the Council of Trent, 1545-1563) culminating in the nightmarish carnage of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). And, indeed, Glaser himself interprets what his text recounts and picture illustrates in religious terms, as “signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance”. The heightened religious fervour of the time, like at the turn of the millennium five centuries earlier, inspired an acutely heightened interest in supernatural signs and wonders. As Clark tells us, “Leading religious figures such as Martin Luther reaffirmed that signs must precede the end of the world, and Puritan belief fostered awareness of the supernatural by emphasis on a daily struggle between God and Satan in the worldly arena” (48). The historical context is analogous to that no less anxious one following the Second World War that, as Jung would have it, duly witnessed its own signs and wonders “seen in the sky”, flying saucers.

On the one hand, therefore, broadsheets, such as those from Nuremberg and Basel (both Protestant cities) could imaginably serve a propagandistic function. Disseminating accounts of “signs on the heaven” and “strange shapes in the sky” would affirm the populace’s belief in the momentousness of the times and the truth of their beliefs, as Glaser’s own gloss suggests. These reports, moreover, need not be true, but only seem to be true, bolstered by reference to specific times and places and witnesses and accompanied by artists’ impressions. The broadsheets, then, might be thought of as their days’ “fake news”.

On the other hand, however, the broadsheets do refer to specific locations, dates and times of day, which makes them easy enough for the skeptical to verify. Glaser’s broadsheet was printed a month after the events it claims to report; I have been unable to ascertain how long after the events of 27-28 July and 7 August the Basel pamphlet was printed. This is to say that the broadsheets could just as well be sincere reports of anomalous atmospheric phenomena, or not-so-anomalous phenomena (e.g., parhelia, a “blood moon”, etc.) interpreted through the eyes of the spirit of the day. In the final analysis, the question of “the truth” of these broadsheets turns on the question of just what status we grant the genre of print media of which they are an example.

So, either religious enthusiasm inspires visions of signs in the sky (how, exactly, is an interesting question…), which are duly reported by the broadsheets, which confirms and feeds this ferment, or the spiritual excitement sets up an expectation and desire for such wonders, which the broadsheets meet and maintain. In either case, the significance of these documents can be more or less ascertained only through a scrupulous attention to their own features and whatever can be discovered about their own communicative conventions in the context of their society and its concerns. Whether they are factual or fake, “God alone knows.” Nevertheless, and this is the most important point, however “obvious” their meaning might otherwise appear is a symptom of the invisibility of our own prejudices and ignorance.

“There is nothing outside of the context”

September 9, 2019March 31, 2022 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 4 Comments

Hot on the heels of my post on the air ships of medieval Ireland, Rich Reynolds at UFO Conjectures offered some, well, conjectures of his own concerning two sixteenth century broadsheets introduced to ufological consciousness by Carl Jung in his famous book on Flying Saucers.

The first is from Nuremberg in 1561 by Hans Glaser:

The second is from Basel, 1566, by Samuel Coccius.

Reynolds and I agree on dismissing out of hand the all-too-common Ancient Astronaut / Alien theoretical interpretation that sees these as premodern UFO sighting reports. Reynolds, however, goes a step farther, somewhat along the lines I pursue with regard to the medieval Irish airship tales, positing that these broadsheets’ illustrations are, in his words, “editorial cartoons” concerning the religious strife that was dividing post-Reformation Europe at the time. Interested readers can follow our dispute on this matter at the link to UFO Conjectures, above.

I maintain, maybe surprisingly, that the broadsheets are reports of real, if mysterious, occurrences. I base that claim on two main features of the broadsheets. First, both illustrations relate to the text they accompany, stories of anomalous aerial phenomena. These stories are, furthermore, specific as to date and time of day, which they wouldn’t be were they satirical allegories of current affairs. (They would, moreover, likelier be in verse, as was the convention of the time).

Reynolds takes exception, especially with regard to the Nuremberg broadsheet (the first of those reproduced, above), pointing to the smoke billowing in the lower right hand corner (which he sees as “the wrath of God, afflicting either Luther’s heresy or the Church’s vivid rebuttal”) and the prominent black spearhead that points to the left over the city (“A spear? Or some kind of Germanic weather icon…?”).

Reynolds is mistaken on two counts, I argue. First, the text that accompanies the picture that illustrates it refers to “globes, which were first in the sun” and that

flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. [my emphasis]

The text continues: “After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west” [my emphasis]. So, it isn’t difficult to relate what the text refers to and what the illustration depicts. More seriously, Reynolds resists the highly stylized artistic conventions of the illustration, ignoring, for example, a striking evidence for this in the sun’s having a face, let alone how the picture neglects perspective.

So, the context of the illustration (the details of its accompanying text) and the artistic conventions of the day both contradict Reynolds’ attempt to write off the picture (he never gets around to the text) as allegorical treatments of the times and support the contention that they are illustrated reports of actual events.

But Reynolds is right when the historical context of religious strife moves him to see things the way does. Hans Glaser himself offers the following gloss:

Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen.

Clearly, Glaser understands whatever in fact is described in the text as signs from heaven, and he does so precisely because of the concrete historical situation that determines his writing and illustrating the broadsheet.

Not only does Reynolds abstract the illustration from the immediate context of its accompanying text, however, but he (mis)understands the illustration, viewing it through conventions of visual representation foreign to Glaser’s time and place. He’s right to find inspiration for his interpretation in the historical situation, but neglects another dimension of that context.

Jerome Clark in The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial (1998) in the entry for “Anomalous Aerial Phenomena Before 1800” (44-58) remarks the tremendous appetite for books of prodigies and wonders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the following telling tidbit: “Rediscovery of the prodigy book of Osequens in 1508 set off a flood of similar works. The most comprehensive was the Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon of Conrad Lycosthenes, which appeared in 1557 at Basel” (48) [my emphasis]. The broadsheets then are most likely best taken to be examples of this genre, catering to the public appetite for news of wonders.

What’s important here is not Reynolds’ and my dispute, but the kind of thinking at work in understanding historically distant documents. Ironically, though we both eschew the Ancient Alien misunderstanding of these broadsheets, Reynolds’ own take is led astray by the same kinds of errors: abstracting the illustration from its immediate context and viewing it apart from the artistic conventions and discoverable material cultural interests of the time.

What then is reported and depicted by these broadsheets? Glaser, perhaps, gives the best answer: “God alone knows.”

Addendum: Reynold’s replies in his own inimitable way here.

When a sighting report is not

September 8, 2019June 3, 2020 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 6 Comments

Visitors to tha Skunkworks will know how little patience I have for those (whose name is legion) who insist on taking premodern tales or artwork to be the equivalent of modern-day UFO sighting reports. I’ve taken Vallée to task for conflating alien abduction reports with fairy tales and Velikovsky, Jaynes, and Ancient Astronaut theorists (not to mention even scholar D. W. Pasulka, who should know better) for their no less ahistorical errors. My point has always been that the way we communicate today differs from the ways of other times and places (linguists would refer to differing “codes”), and, so, it’s just ignorant to read texts or interpret art universally according to how we write and represent things here and now. Friend and Irish Studies scholar Antoine Malette has provided me with an excellent case in point.

Celtic Studies scholar John Cary (presently at University College Cork) presented a paper in 1992 titled “Aerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic Marvel” (interested readers without access to JSTOR can sign up for a free membership to read it, here). In his study, Cary scrutinizes variations of a story familiar to readers of Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (144). In Cary’s version:

There happened something once in the borough called Cloena [=Cionmacnoise], which will also seem marvellous. In this town there is a church dedicated to the memory of a saint named Kiranus [=Ciarán]. One Sunday while the populace was at church hearing mass, it befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky as if thrown from a ship; for a rope was attached to it, and one of the flukes of the anchor got stuck in the arch above the church door. The people all rushed out of the church and marveled much as their eyes followed the rope upward. They saw a ship with men on board floating before the anchor cable; and soon they saw a man leap overboard and dive down to the anchor as if to release it. The movements of his hands and feet and all his actions appeared like those of a man swimming in the water. When he came down to the anchor, he tried to loosen it, but the people immediately rushed up and attempted to seize him. In the church where the anchor was caught, there is a bishop’s throne. The bishop was present when this occurred and forbade his people to hold the man; for, said he, it might prove fatal as when one is held under water. As soon, as the man was released, he hurried back up to the ship; and when he was up the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed away out of sight. But the anchor has remained in the church since then as a testimony to this event.

Curiously, Vallée (and Donald B. Hanlon from whom he cites the story (and Harold T. Wilkins, Hanlon’s ultimate source)) remarks the tale’s variations from eighth century Ireland to Merkel, Texas in April, 1897 and (along with Hanlon) the provocative if no less problematic analogues between the medieval and modern versions but neglects to unfold the implications of this variation, unlike the scholar Cary.

All in all, Cary examines no fewer than six versions of the story, including the newspaper report from 1897. He summarizes their development as follows:

(a) In the mid-eighth century, a notice that ships had been seen in the air was included in the annals. The apparition was subsequently localized at the assembly of Tailtiu, and said to have been witnessed by the then reigning king of Tara.

(b) By the late eleventh century the story had been transferred to the reign of the tenth-century king Congalach Cnogba, and embellished with the detail of the lost and recovered fishing-spear [thrown from the ship]; there was now only one air ship,

(c) By the end of the twelfth century the story was shifted to the monastic milieu of Clonmacnoise, and an anchor took the place of the fishing-spear.

So, the version Vallée and Hanlon compare to the 1897 newspaper story is already so embellished it can’t be seriously considered anything other than a fanciful (i.e. fictional) tale of the marvelous (a medieval genre with its own features and purposes). But I’m not interested in the tiresome exercise of merely debunking Vallée et al. The philology of this tale’s development is more complex and interesting in its implications.

Having surveyed the tale’s variations, Cary conjectures about how it might have arrived at its final, thirteenth century version. The sky ship’s anchor getting caught echoes a motif from around the world and from at least two extant Irish texts, the saga Tochmarc Emere and an extended gloss on the hymn “Ni car Brigit buadach bith“. The tale reaches its fullest elaboration with the Clonmacnoise version likely because, as Carey writes, “Clonmacnoise in the later Middle Irish period seems to have been greedy for marvels: quite a number of little tales, drawn in all likelihood from many disparate sources, associate the monastery with fantastic occurrences of all kinds.” Therefore, Cary concludes, “it seems likeliest that it was in the heady atmosphere of Clonmacnoise mirabilia-collecting” that previous versions and other material “were fused into a single tale.”

The very scheme of the story (aerial ships) and other marvelous elements woven into it by the monks of Clonmacnoise are part of a larger tapestry in Irish and world literature. Cary cites the example of “the famous encounter between the mortal Bran in his ship and the divine Manannán in his chariot, and the [ancient, pagan] poem in which the god declares that what is sea to one is land to the other”. Cary proposes that

such flourishes of paradox and surreality subordinate our habitual frame of reference to an alien [!] and unreckonable scheme which lies beyond it. The stories, in [Proinsias] Mac Cana’s words, explore “the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, between this and the other world, together with the ambiguities and relativities of time and space which were implicit in their interaction.”

Cary’s and Mac Cana’s point here is all the more persuasive when one reflects that the clouds’ being compared to the foam of the sea is ancient, and the revery that inspires it is likely one many of us will remember from our childhood.

However much the story of sky ships is caught up inextricably in daydream, poetic inspiration, and embellished retellings, the matter is still more complex. As all authors here—Cary, Vallée, and Hanlon—admit, the problem of how the modern, newspaper story follows so closely upon the thirteenth century version cited above is “a recalcitrant one.” Moreover, Cary, being the sincere scholar he is, admits up front that

the date, the range of attestation, and the fact that the item [the appearance of aerial vessels] was first recorded in Latin all suggest that we have here to do with a contemporary notice of an anomalous occurrence [my emphasis]. We will of course never know what it really was which some person or persons saw overhead in the 740’s, or how many retellings and mutations separated the first testimony from its distillation in the annals.

In the case of the newspaper story from the Houston Daily Post, the story either records a real event, copies the tale from the thirteenth century Norse text Konungs Skuggsj, or uncannily draws from the same sources of inspiration that coalesced in that version; each of these possibilities equally strain credulity. More to the point, we’re still left with the mystery Cary notes, “what it really was which some person or persons saw overhead in the 740’s.”

Those inclined to believe the Psychosocial Hypothesis will maintain that even those earliest, lost passages from the annals record nothing more than rumours, themselves merely stories like that of Bran and the god Mannanán, inspired by the same imaginative schema as the Irish poem. But this response, ironically, commits the same error as taking all stories to be equivalent to witness reports, conflating the genre of the annal or chronicle with that of mirabilia, forgetting that Herodotus called his writings “histories” motivated by the meaning of the ancient Greek verb at the root of our word ‘history’, meaning to inquire, explore, or, as the poet Charles Olson so forcefully put it, to see for oneself. This is to say, no less ironically (or dialectically) that Herodotus’ histories and medieval annals and chronicles are closer in spirit and linguistic code to modern day witness or newspaper reports than the marvelous tales worked up the monks of Clonmacnoise. And a sufficiently persuasive account for how the 1897 version of the story came to be written is still wanting.

Thus, a further irony leads us to a notion central to Ancient Astronaut theorizing, that the body of literature under scrutiny here, like all those myths such theorists point to, is the pearl formed by the oyster of the Unconscious or Creative Imagination around the hard grain of truth of “what it really was which some person or persons saw overhead”. But this proposal doesn’t get us very far either, for just what the medieval annals record, in this case, at least, is lost, and, ironically (…), the modern-day version is, in Hanlon’s words, all the more “strange and, in fact, downright suspicious” precisely because of its mirroring the thirteenth century, demonstrably fabulous version.

What should remain beyond a reasonable doubt is the need for and value of the application of intelligent, sensitive specialized erudition in such matters, an application neglected by all the ufological authors in question. Just how to understand temporally and culturally distant narratives concerning anomalous aerial phenomena, let alone nonhuman entity encounters, is no simple matter. Indeed, similar scrutiny can be applied even to the hermeneutics, productive and receptive, of modern-day witness reports, as if their being contemporary makes them any more immediately comprehensible. By a further turn of the screw of irony, such considered and well-informed analyses and explanations render the topic all the more mysterious, leaving as well the hard kernel of the mystery of just what was seen along with the strangeness of its apparent transhistorical consistency as further grist for the mill of reflection, investigation, and speculation.

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

June 6, 2019June 7, 2019 ~ 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?

The Promethean Lure

June 3, 2019June 9, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 2 Comments

As Kevin Randle and others have remarked, recent U.S. Navy pilots’ encounters with UFOs are nothing we haven’t seen before. Since the Second World War, air force pilots have observed, pursued, and even fired on what appear to be aeroforms capable of instantaneously accelerating to hypersonic speeds, making impossible forty-five degree angle turns, and stopping, all performance features that outstrip the aircraft of the day. And then just as now it was speculated whether or not these aeroforms were domestic or foreign (not necessarily extraterrestrial) experimental aircraft. But beneath these analogues, a deeper pattern is discernible.

It’s an old chestnut of the Ancient Astronaut / Alien line of thinking that the culture heroes of world mythology, those deities that gifted humankind with fire (Prometheus) or writing (Thoth) for example, were in truth extraterrestrials leading homo sapiens down the path of technological development. A not unrelated story concerns the back-engineering of extraterrestrial technology recovered either from crashed saucers or intact ones secured through agreements with their pilots’ civilizations. On our own or under the guidance of ET advisors, the study of ET-tech has given us the transistor and fibre-optics (as Philip J. Corso contends in his 1998 book The Day After Roswell) and promises free-energy technology, and, with it, the advanced aeroform of the flying saucer, which, some believe, the American military or some break-away civilization has already developed.

A more circumspect version of such reflections was recently expressed by Dr Garry Nolan, who, thinking out loud, imagines the possibility that metamaterials left as physical traces of UFO sightings may be a gift, a kind of clue, so that their unusual characteristics might prompt us not only to develop ways to reproduce them but to imagine uses for them. The 2018 film UFO presents a similar scenario, where the mathematics needed to understand the ETs’ communications becomes increasingly complex, leading researchers along a line of mathematical and physical speculation toward the understanding of nature that enabled the ETs to overcome precisely the same threats to the survival of civilization we now face. In the same way such metamaterials function as hints to lines of inquiry, the aerial antics of the UFO become (in the words of Tyler Rogoway) a kind of “Holy Grail of aerospace engineering.”

Extraterrestrial technology becomes, then, either retro- or prospectively, a projection of next generation human technology. On the one (sociopolitical) hand, this projection is an expression of the ideology of the so-called advanced societies: one haphazard inflection of human civilization imagines itself to be in line with a pattern of technological development characteristic of intelligent life universally, the kind of thinking that underwrites Maitreya Raël’s claim that his extraterrestrial teachers, the Elohim, are “25,000 years ahead” of us. On the other (more mythological) hand, the extraterrestrial symbolizes the alpha and omega, the arche and telos, of technological humanity: ET either gifts us technology or teaches us by means of teasing puzzles; more radically, in other speculations, ET interbreeds with us or biotechnologically “makes us in His own image” to raise us to its own level.

The Extra-Terrestrial, then, can be understood as an eminently mythological figure, “mythological” in the sense of making universal and necessary an historical contingency (reifying this moment of technological civilization) and, in a more compelling sense, an emblem of that reification, an idol embodying “the essence of technology”, simultaneously a transformation of the Promethean culture hero and a radical revision that remakes the mythic past in the image of now or what we thereby imagine tomorrow to be.

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

February 18, 2019June 3, 2020 ~ 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.

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!

The Dark Side of the UFO: Racisms, Nationalisms, and Extremist Politics

February 2, 2019June 20, 2021 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 9 Comments

I had the pleasure to explore with M J Banias the relation between the UFO mythos and various racist and extremist ideologies. The thoughts that follow I owe to Banias’ welcome invitation to discuss the matter and to our subsequent lively conversation, which, happily, posed more questions than it answered!

That UFOs might impinge in any way on “the real word” is a bizarre thought. That flying saucers and their extraterrestrial pilots have been ubiquitous in the popular imagination for a lifetime now will meet with ready acceptance, but that such a flighty fantasy might bear in any way on the grave matters of real life is a proposal not to be taken seriously. At least until one learns that the leader of a Brazilian UFO contactee group carried out false-flag terrorist attacks with members of Brazil’s security forces between December 1967 to August 1968 to prop up the nation’s dictatorial regime, or that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a fan of Bill Cooper’s radio show, had visited Area 51 and while on death row watched Contact six times in two days.

On the face of it, it shouldn’t be surprising that members of the UFO community, being ordinary people, too, will have their opinions concerning politics and society, from the banal to the extreme. That Jacques Vallée has little patience for the French Left or that Richard Dolan believes that the marriage of free market capitalism and liberal democracy is the best of all possible worlds have likely little or nothing to do with their ufological concerns. Likewise, racist ideas shared by a member of MUFON or racist and anti-Semitic slurs from the mouth of a channeler are probably inspired by the racist and anti-Semitic ideas of these respective people not their ufological or New Age interests and beliefs.

But the relation can be more complicated. James Gilliland’s pronouncements from the ECETI ranch, despite their claiming to take up “an objective non-party non-political approach” are vehemently anti-“Left”, critical of identity politics, pro-Trump, and conspiracist. That his newsletters evoke both the “lame stream media” (modern American English for that bit of Nazi propaganda, die Lügenpresse (“lying press”)) and New Age “Universal” or “Natural Law” suggests a less than accidental relation between his politics and ufological beliefs.

Right wing politics and ufology are even more intimately related for Michael Salla, who finds support for his exopolitical beliefs in the Q Anon conspiracy theory. He gathers that some of the crumbs dropped by Q confirm his beliefs about human-extraterrestrial interaction and a Secret Space Program. However, in the same mouthful, he also swallows the line that Trump was recruited and placed in power by a group of “White Hats” working to unmask and destroy the “Deep State” (“aka Cabal / Illuminati / Global Elite“). Here, he takes up whole cloth an old elaborate conspiracy theory first elaborated by fellow Australian Stan Deyos in his 1973 The Cosmic Conspiracy, which weaves strands of the UFO myth together with older threads about the Illuminati, which, in turn, Salla twists together with fantasies about Satanic pedophile rings and even more sinister, anti-Semitic ones, in this case, attacks on the Rothschilds and George Soros.

This tendency of certain aspects of the UFO mythology to combine with extreme right wing ideologies was noted with some anxiety by Jacques Vallée in his 1991 book Revelations.

Another aspect many researchers of this field—with a few courageous and notable exceptions—have studiously ignored, is the link between the more eager proponents of imminent extraterrestrial contact and the American extreme right….

It could well be that the same kind of fanaticism that leads people to join neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and survivalist movements in the American southwest also induces them to believe in the imminent arrival of aliens from the sky. It could be that these groups who are convinced that government secrecy is abused in order to hide political truths from the public also believe that the reality of UFOs has been kept from us… (256-7)

That nexus of stories about “imminent extraterrestrial contact and the American extreme right” had been growing in the decade leading up to Vallée’s expression of concern and was about to effloresce in the years following. Ufologically, an important set of rumours was begun, first thanks to Stanton Friedman’s groundbreaking research into the crash at Roswell in 1978, which was quickly followed by Berlitz’s and Moore’s 1980 The Roswell Incident. By 1984, the MJ-12 documents had surfaced, and, by 1988, an entire submythology had developed, about crashed flying saucers, retrieved and back-engineered alien technology, recovered ufonauts living and dead, treaties with alien races that traded technological know-how for the rights to mutilate cattle and abduct human beings, underground bases both human and alien, and the struggle to reveal this “horrible truth” that culminated in the TV documentary “Cover-Up: Live!” and the most ambitious synthesis of these tales with New World Order conspiracy theories, Bill Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (1991). Following the incidents at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993), those “neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and survivalist movements in the American southwest” and the conspiracy theories that went with them would in turn explode in number, only to slowly decrease until the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump breathed new life into their paranoia and sense of legitimacy.

The belief that “that the reality of UFOs has been kept from us” has a long ufological pedigree. Donald Keyhoe already in his first book The Flying Saucers are Real (1950) posits that the USAF knows UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships but suppresses this acknowledgement and actively debunks sightings in the name of national security; the truth will be revealed only after a careful process of acclimatization via strategic leaks, disinformation, and the entertainment media, all leading up to a moment of “disclosure”. It’s not until the process of decay of public trust in the US government sets in, with the growth of the American national security state, beginning with the founding of the CIA in 1947, and with “deep events”, such as the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and, most recently, 9/11, (which in turn lead to notions of an “invisible government” as early as 1964, the “shadow government”, and the “deep state”) that The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (the title of Keyhoe’s 1955 book) devolves into the “horrible truth” expounded by the likes of Bill Cooper and John Lear that finds affinities with the New World Order conspiracy theories of the American militia movement.

This parallel development of narratives around UFO secrecy and the conspiracy theories held by various American anti-government groups arguably shows that UFO conspiracy theories are not essentially racist and that those of anti-government groups don’t necessarily entail an interest in UFOs. The UFO conspiracy discourse is merely consistent with and can therefore all the easier enter into conversation with the anti-government conspiracy theorizing of the various American patriot / militia groups, whose ideologies are also often racist and anti-Semitic, White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi, and vice versa. Thus, it is the intersection of anti-government sentiments that creates the space where a certain kind of UFO belief and extremist ideology can fuse.

However little UFO and New World Order / Illuminati conspiracy theories entail each other, various extremists haven’t shied away from invoking advanced aeronautical technology or extraterrestrial origin stories to bolster claims to their own legitimacy. One instance are stories about Nazi flying saucers, whether as experimental prototypes recovered by the Allies or Soviets at the end of the WWII or as actually functioning aeroforms developed by the genius of Germany’s scientists, with or without extraterrestrial coaching, stories already extant at the writing of Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers are Real (1950). These rumours are often promulgated as evidence of the superior intelligence and technical ingenuity of the Third Reich and sometimes developed into narratives about a “Fourth Reich”, with bases in South America, Antarctica, the Moon or other planets, or even as an element of the evolving New World Order. In this extended form, the idea of the Nazi flying saucer is used as a tool for Neo-Nazi recruitment, fund-raising, or a means to insinuate Neo-Nazi ideas into more conventional conversation. As the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel explained:

I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book [UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?] was for fun. With a picture of the Führer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I’d talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about.

Of course, white supremacists make reference not only to imagined technological achievement, but lay claim to the totality of human knowledge, science, and civilization in general, as ex-MUFON director John Ventre so infamously did in 2018. Not only that, but it has been remarked that a similar imperialist rhetoric is at work in Ancient Astronaut / Alien Theory, that, since we moderns cannot imagine how the non-white peoples of antiquity constructed certain instances of monumental architecture, whether the pyramids, Macchu Picchu, or the heads of Easter Island, for example, they must have received technical support from extraterrestrial “gods”. However much some particular versions of the argument might find their inspiration in or lend support to white supremacist beliefs, a little research quickly shows that the same discourse also points to the “equally impossible” construction of Stonehenge or the Goseck Circle in Germany. More importantly, the white supremacist sentiments that underwrite views about the inability of ancient, nonwhite peoples to construct monumental architecture spring not only from beliefs in European intellectual and technological superiority, articulated and entrenched in natural history and anthropology (race theory) but from the more deeply-entrenched technocentric / technophilic prejudices characteristic of European colonists, race theoretical hierarchies, and ufology in general, because it is the ideology of the so-called advanced societies.

Curiously, such appeals to technological achievement are not restricted to Neo-Nazis or white supremacists. In 2015, Y. Sudershan Rao, recently appointed by India’s ruling Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party to head the Indian Council of Historical Research made glowing references to vimanas or Vedic aircraft. “Capable of interplanetary travel and invisibility, possessing radar systems and mine detectors, they capture the imagination of this resurgent, neo-Hindu India like nothing else.” Just like allusions to Nazi technological genius, references to a mythic Vedic Golden Age of futuristic technology by Hindu Nationalists support claims to cultural / racial / national priority and ascendancy. However much references to fictitious vimanas and other technology belong more to discourses concerning Lost Civilizations or Ancient Discoveries, ufophiles will be quick to recognize the vimana from Ancient Astronaut / Alien Theory. In any case, the rhetoric at work is recognizable.

Upping the ante from boasts of technological prowess to extraterrestrial ancestry is the anti-Semitic, Greek nationalist Team Epsilon. We owe what we know about Team Epsilon in the anglophone world to religious studies scholar Tao Thykier Makeeff. He draws our attention to various forms the ideas of this very protean group have taken. Like the Neo-Nazis and Hindu nationalists, Team Epsilon asserts its members have been involved in the invention of an array of science-fictional weaponry. An important figure in this regard is physicist and inventor George Gkiolvas,

who claims to have worked for NASA developing a number of secret weapons including a sound cannon and special anti-aircraft technology. Gkiolvas’ real claim to fame is the invention of the so-called Bevatron, which according to epsilonist mythology is a secret weapon, sometimes referred to as the Greek ‘Golem’ against the Jews.

The Epsilonists add to technical prowess extraterrestrial ancestry. George Lefkofrydis in his Spaceship Epsilon: Aristotle’s Organon: The Researcher (1977) advances that “Aristotle was an extraterrestrial from the star Mu in the constellation Lagos.” In 1996, Anestis S. Keramydas expands on this notion of extraterrestrial descent, stating that “not only the Greeks, but also the Jews, were originally from outer space.” For this reason, modern Greeks, descendants of a divine alien race (the gods), possess superior DNA, which is not to be mixed with that of lesser races.

Not to be outdone, American Black nationalist groups The Nation of Islam and a protean group whose various incarnations might be collectively termed Nuwabians enlist the UFO and extraterrestrial mythology to support their claims to being superior to “the blue-eyed devil.” The Nation of Islam’s founder, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, makes of Ezekiel’s Chariot a wheel-shaped “Mothership”; his followers, therefore, have taken UFO sightings as verification of their founder’s prophetic knowledge. The Nuwabians, on the other hand, have developed a mythology concerning their own descent from the ancient Egyptians, who were themselves interstellar refugees, the Annunaqi Eloheem, from the planet Rizq. This genealogy lets the Nuwabians claim both extraterrestrial ancestry and the technological ingenuity and know-how of these ancestors.

These Hindu and Black nationalist appeals to technical virtuosity, however, fall into a problematic dialectic. Every appeal to technical superiority, because such superiority is in the first instance always associated with European / Western / White civilization, must always, even and especially when it’s enlisted to empower the Hindu or Black, play into a white supremacist discourse. By trying to “beat the White Man at his own game” one plays by his rules, plays the opponent’s game, thereby affirming the prior and inescapable legitimacy of one’s opponent’s position, namely, his prior superiority.

Most importantly, this dialectic is itself governed by what I’ve come to term “Promethean idolatry”, the unquestioned valorization of technological sophistication and power that Jürgen Habermas already in the 1970s fingered as the ideology of the so-called developed world. In every case examined here, the same fateful orientation is at play, which allows one to speak of more or less technologically advanced societies at all, whether in the future, the lost past, or the far reaches of space. This ontotheological foundation of arguably all ufological discourse is the most obscured, if not the darkest, side of the UFO.

Addendum: Any member of the cognoscenti reading the above will likely notice how schematic my account of those pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s is. Interested parties are here referred to Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy (2nd ed., 2013), especially chapters 5-9, whose summation of the version of events (98) confirms mine. I regret not having had Barkun’s study, which I cannot recommend highly enough, in hand at the time of writing this post. As I have observed in this regard, the phenomenon and its attendant study both possess an ever deepening history, and to know or claim to have broken new ground requires a knowledge of that history, a task made greater every day.

Plus ça change… Jung, Skunkworks, and UFO Reality

January 29, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

If the number of hits a blog post generates might be thought a sort of Gallup test, then events this past (first!) year at Skunkworks seem to confirm Jung’s own experience with the world press in the 1950s, “that news affirming the existence of the Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable.”

Skunworks was launched 21 February 2018, and the first post after the inaugural one was an encyclopedia article I had compiled for James R. Lewis’ UFOs and Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth on attempts to explain UFO phenomena and close encounter experiences as resulting from electromagnetic effects. It garnered over 400 hits. Then, most recently, with a little help from two, initial friendly notices from UFO Conjectures and The Anomalist that, in turn, resulted in the post’s being shared on even more platforms, a essay on the logic of ufology Concerning the Unreal Reality and Real Unreality of the UFO generated, again, over 500 views. Meanwhile, posts exploring why UFOs and in particular the ETH prove so compelling, due to deep sociocultural patterns with equally grave implications (What’s so compelling about ET, Cover-up and Disclosure?, The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: Symptom or Pathology?, and Ancient Astronauts, the Linguistic Turn, and the Hermeneutic Circle) generated less than a hundredth of the interest.

This pattern would seem to support the intuition that inspired another post concerning the enduring if unacknowledged influence of Donald Keyhoe, that the views Keyhoe presents in his first book The Flying Saucers are Real (1950) still govern and guide most of what passes for ufology to this day, that the various stabs at understanding the nature of the UFO are curiously, obsessively repetitive, that ufology seems frozen in a certain schema since the modern advent of the phenomenon over seven decades ago. In that most popular, recent post, I distinguished scientific ufology that seeks to identify the object or objects that underwrite UFO Reality from phenomenological ufology that brackets the question of the being, reality or nature of the UFO to turn its attention to the UFO Effect, how the UFO phenomenon affects human beings individually and collectively, what it might be said to mean. Here, it seems, is another holding pattern, another compelling aspect of the UFO Effect, the way UFO Reality possesses such an exclusive fascination for the ufophilic.

The well-known poet T. S. Eliot famously observed that

the chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be … to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.

Eliot-the-ufologist might say that the question of UFO Reality diverts the mind of ufophiles and most ufologists, while the phenomenon does its work upon them….

Ancient Astronauts, the Linguistic Turn, and the Hermeneutic Circle

January 20, 2019January 24, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 9 Comments

The topic of a recent private (and very brief) correspondence concerned (Immanuel) Velikovsky and (Julian) Jaynes. The former is famous for his Worlds in Collision (1950), the latter for Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Velikovsky’s is a work of speculative cosmology, while Jaynes’ one of speculative psychology, i.e., the claims of both concern, respectively, cosmological and psychological developments in the relatively distant past. And what’s of importance here is that both take their initial impulse from ancient texts. For example, Velikovsky refers to the Long Day of Joshua (Joshua 10: 12-15) and Jaynes to the poet’s invocations of the Muse at the beginning of the Iliad.

Velikovsky’s and Jaynes’ appeal to premodern texts are arguably analogous in some ways to the same appeal made since the dawn of the modern UFO era (post-1947) in support of the claim that UFOs have been, in fact, a constant in human history. For example, Desmond Leslie in the book he wrote with George Adamski Flying Saucers Have Landed published soon after Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision eschews the freshly-minted expression ‘flying saucer’, preferring “to use the ancient names for the sky disks such as ‘car celestial’, ‘vimanas’, and ‘fiery chariots'” (14). Ancient Astronaut “theorists” refer also to ancient art, seeing there depictions of flying saucers and extraterrestrials.

All such argumentative moves make the same questionable assumption, that premodern texts and art are universally representational. This assumption is not utterly unfounded: Heinrich Schliemann’s taking Homer at his word resulted in his making important archeological discoveries (though it remains debatable that he in fact discovered the Troy of the Iliad), and it was precisely the strikingly realistic manner of the then newly-discovered cave paintings of Altamira that gave an impulse to the visual arts at the beginning of last century, most famously perhaps in the work of Picasso. On the other hand, I’m unaware of any paleontologists inspired by the Odyssey to search for the remains of the Cyclops nor does anyone, to my knowledge, believe The Sorcerer of Les Trois-Frères to be a realistically-depicted humanoid. Indeed, this interpretive move parallels “literal” readings of the Bible that support the belief in the reality of a global inundation in the distant, mythological past. All these hermeneutics (interpretive approaches) err in the roughly the same way: they project a historically, culturally, and socially local communicative convention (namely, one of our own) onto human textual and artistic production in general.

pintura_trois_freres — The Sorcerer of Les Trois-Frères

As the examples of the Cyclops and The Sorcerer of Les Trois-Frères should make clear, premodern texts and art cannot legitimately in general be understood as merely distorted or embellished representations of historical events. Such a representational use of media is historically and culturally local, to us. Moreover, the very notion that language can be said to represent a ready-made world (as in the picture theory of meaning in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) or that it should, as admonished by Francis Bacon in his inaugurating the Scientific Revolution, is itself a notion that has undergone a devastating critique from the perspectives both of philosophy (e.g., Novalis’ “Monologue”) and linguistics (e.g., the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis). Any attempt to enlist any not explicitly representational text as evidence must always undergo the philological labour of establishing the linguistic conventions that underwrite the meaning of that particular text in order to claim to have understood it all in the first place. And since this hermeneutic task is a historical one, undertaken by interpreters of a particular time to understand a text produced in a distant place and time, it is open-ended, always unfinished, perennially open to revision. These are the lessons of what philosophers term “the hermeneutic circle” and “the linguistic turn”, whether one takes this latter to have begun after the Great War or the French Revolution.

The error of taking all linguistic and artistic media in the same way, projecting our own practice onto the entirety of humanity in all times and places, finds its analogue in the prejudices evident in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), as I have been at pains to make clear in several posts, most recently in regards to the example of Donald Keyhoe. The difference between the crimes-against-interpretation sketched above and the errors of the ETH is one of scale: the linguistico-artistic error restricts itself to human cultural production, while the ETH projects an anthropocentric and culturally, historically, and socially restricted notion of intelligence onto all life in the universe.

The Anthropocene as the Beginning of our Descent to Eaarth

April 8, 2018January 16, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 7 Comments

The myriad, variegated narratives inspired by UFOs—from sighting reports to the wildest, baseless fantasies to more sobre, scholarly research and reflection, as well as fiction, films, documentaries, and even poems—taken in toto can be grasped, as Jung proposed, as a “visionary rumour” or “myth of things seen in the sky”, the manifest content of a collective dream expressing the anxieties and aspirations of a technological civilization that can imagine its own species suicide as readily as relocating to another planet. It makes perfect sense then that the Contactees of the Cold War era were warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons or that in the 1980s Abductees were shown by their captors depictions of environmental devastation.

The UFO mythos in this way takes up in its vortex both our aspirations to interplanetary travel and the Anthropocene. That is to say, humankind can be imagined to be already on an interplanetary journey, from Earth to Eaarth, propelled by the same man-made forces that have driven the world from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

Regardless of when the Anthropocene might be said to have started (as if geological epochs are so finely demarcated) and to a lesser extent of whether we term this new age the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Cthulhucene, the earth is no longer the relatively temperate place that nurtured homo sapiens’ recent cultural development, the civilization we live in. It is undeniable rising levels of atmospheric carbon, ocean acidification, and ubiquitous “plastification” have markedly modified the earth, along with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, the extinction and pressurized evolution of plant and animal species, and human transformations of the landscape and sprawling, artificial constructions all have changed the earth in unnerving, unrecognizable ways. Given a description of the chemical composition of the environments of two planets, we wouldn’t be too far amiss to believe we were observing two different worlds, rather than one in two different epochs. Humankind has transported itself en masse from Earth to Eaarth by an unconscious and unintentional “exoforming” (rather than terraforming) and now faces the challenge of having to colonize a planet unpredictably different from its homeworld.

What propelled human beings to this new planet itself gets caught up by the myth, which points to a Promethean intervention that created the sapience that underwrites the cultural explosion and rapid technological development within the matrix of the Holocene that results in the exoforming of the earth as a by-product of industrialization. The laughably perverse hermeneutic of the Ancient Astronaut Theorists like dreams, slips of the tongue, and other psychopathologies of everyday life, unconsciously discerns a truth, that our present predicament seems destined and out of our control. Whether the cultural heroes and gods of antiquity were Extra-terrestrial teachers, or if they interbred with proto-humans or genetically modified them, the Ancient Astronaut Theorists intuit that human beings are not quite at home on the earth (an insight they share with, among others, certain strains of Gnosticism), that there is something uncanny and “alien” about us, whether we call it sapience, intelligence, science, or technology, or, as I do here, technoscience.

It is just at this point that for all its way-outness the myth harmonizes with those concepts and values that make the accidents and historically and socially contingent forces that led us to this cultural point seem natural, universal and necessary. The assumptions that orient the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), for example, posit that intelligent life is intelligent in the way humans conceive themselves to be, that ET civilizations will follow the same tool-using vector as our own, that technological civilizations follow a linear path such that they can be judged more or less advanced than each other, and that our and their histories will be sufficiently analogous in these regards that once we make contact and learn to understand each other then perhaps we can learn from them how they negotiated their way through the impasses that seem to threaten the existence of the very civilization that led to these crises. In more mundane terms, we tend to have faith that scientific ingenuity will be what will get us through precisely the grave dangers that ingenuity has wrought. This faith in science or “being-scientific”, this assumption that the radically contingent and social history of our civilization’s history as we write it from this moment is somehow more assured than that equally chance-ridden story of our or any species’ evolution and that it is moreover universal to all beings like us is the ideology that underwrites and guides both the speculations that UFOs are spaceships from other planets and that our stories of the gods who descend from the sky in chariots of fire (or more elaborate mechanisms, like that witnessed by Ezekiel) to remake if not make human beings in their own image are actually ancient astronauts.

And it is just here that a darker, more paranoid thread of the myth can be picked out. If we bring together the proposal that ETs have genetically engineered homo sapiens from the beginning with the stories about alien abduction and human-alien hybridization (a most extreme version being perhaps the more recent work of David Jacobs) then it becomes imaginable that the earth and human beings have been undergoing a process of colonization from the inside-out. The genetic and cultural interventions or intrusions simultaneously culture a technological intelligence and behaviour that exoforms the earth while the human species is transformed into an alien species fit for the planet the earth is becoming. I am unsure if any Gnostic in their most pessimistic speculation has outlined such a destiny and fate for humankind. In this view, the technoscientic knowledge outlined above and science-fictionally projected here is an alien technology whose end is at the same time the repression of the recognition of all non-human intelligence on the earth (the matter for another note, surely) and the extinction of homo sapiens and the earth as we knew it.

N.b. Let me be clear: I hardly believe the contents of the myth I sketch here. I merely set out to constellate and cast the horoscope as it were of patterns I find in the UFO mythos and its implications and suggestions. It is therefore not a question of the truth of the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis or the views of David Jacobs but of what meaning can be gleaned from them, reading them as if they were just what I suppose they are here, aspects of a myth for our time.