COMMUNION CUPS AND CRASHED SAUCERS
Part 3.1

LOVE AND HATE

In one of the paradoxes of our age, it is here that the scientists troop back on stage. Science at least seems to offer a kind of certainty, and honesty in the search for the truth. Even for paranormalists the ‘closed and blinkered’ mind of science is still the touchstone of reality and approval.

The insight has been confirmed by responses to market research in the 1980s and ’90s into attitudes toward ‘the paranormal’. Over a period of some 15 years, the outlook of those most interested in paranormal and fortean phenomena has remained consistent. ‘Believers’ detested and reviled Science because of its alleged preconceptions, closed minds and reductionist principles; yet all wanted Science to take claims for the paranormal seriously and felt that the imprimatur of Science would confirm the reality of the phenomena.

The apparent paradox at the heart of these findings is expressed in three attitudes (or impressions) exposed by the research. These can be paraphrased as generic quotations:

1. "Scientists are narrow-minded and prejudiced against anything that threatens their world-view, and this shows in the way they refuse to accept the existence of paranormal phenomena."
2. "There is good scientific evidence that proves the reality of many paranormal phenomena."
3. "Of course this field is littered with frauds and hoaxes. They should be discovered, exposed and weeded out. But just one proven case of [insert phenomenon of choice] would prove that ‘the paranormal’ exists and would force science to alter its fundamental assumptions."

Quotations 1 and 2 appear to contradict each other.[27] On the one hand, believers reject Science (by which they really mean Scientism, as noted earlier), and yet science (real science, with no initial capital) – or scientific approval – remains a benchmark for the reality and acceptability of paranormal phenomena. Where it touches on science, Quotation 3 is both true – the laws of physics would be upset by definitive proof of, say, psychokinesis – and indicative of the rage revealed in Quotation 1: that the world and its intellectual guardians ‘oppose the paranormal’. Even so, at a popular level (regardless of class or education) there is little doubt that there is ‘something to it’.

Asking scientists to accommodate allegedly paranormal phenomena – which are rarely if ever amenable to the scientific method of investigation – amounts to asking them to abandon their perception of the laws of nature. This is not about to happen. Science, like an implacable god, remains the ultimate standard bearer even though it can never be satisfied (or propitiated). To endorse such a lost cause suggests a bent for martyrdom.[28] At the same time, Science has opened up a wondrous world – made the world more magical, partly by informing us of the astonishing intricacy of nature. Today Dr Johnson might kick his stone with rather less certainty, to prove the solid, bluff, physical reality of things. For both cosmology and quantum physics now put us on the edge of an immaterial Otherworld, whose apparent attributes have swiftly, if mistakenly, been hijacked by persons seeking scientific justification for their mystical inclinations. At the same time, there is a further twist of the knife in the martyr’s breast. The Big Bang and the ‘new’ physics reduce the world to a set of blind and capricious operations whose only certainties amount to a kind of cosmic lottery: namely, mathematical probability. So even as we are breathless in wonder, we may be gasping in horror.

The ambivalence toward Science (which is always caricatured as an immovable monolith) makes sense of the otherwise rather surprising endorsement of skepticism in Quotation 3. Well-conducted debunking that is seen to start out from a position of impartiality is well-received by believers for two reasons. First, in accepting it they manifest (to their satisfaction, at least) how unbiased they truly are. Second, it strengthens their faith in the cases that remain unassailed – which, because unexplained, appear to gain in impregnability.

At the same time, it is a fundamental characteristic of believers that they do not follow (indeed will even denounce) the rules of thumb of scientists: the reductionist principle of Occam’s razor; the informal principle that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’; the principle of the falsifiable hypothesis; and – most conspicuously – that reports of phenomena that appear to contradict the laws of nature may be assumed to be inaccurate until proven otherwise. Whatever the status accorded science, in paranormalism and in ufology faith overrides logic when dealing with what passes for evidence.

As noted, one can also discern an aspect of the professional victim’s cast of mind: a need to be ‘on the outside of whatever side there was’. For science, it is patently obvious, is not going to declare its inadequacy before the paranormal, move all its goalposts, redefine itself (as, for instance, Dr John Mack would seem to expect) and investigate what is not amenable to the scientific method. One wonders what would happen to these people’s Weltanschaaung (world view) if their wishes were granted, for the satisfaction gained in the game (‘transaction’) of decrying Science seems to outweigh any that might accrue from the essentially political victory that is ostensibly being sought. This relates directly to the elements of martyrdom and masochism noted in the Ufological Religion.

So we have another paradox. On one hand, Science appears to offer eternal truths – laws far more trustworthy than any scroll of Torah has proved to be in the last 100 years or more. And – ideally – science is utterly disinterested and impartial in its mode of investigation and its findings. Joseph Wright of Derby knew this: look at the impersonal faces of the scientists in his paintings.

But there is the rub. For on the other hand, it is crucial to this disinterestedness that Science has no truck with morals, no dimensions beyond mensuration and cold logic. Science does not, cannot, address the life of the spirit: neither of the human spirit, ‘unappeased and peregrine’, that recognizes that what is of value in human life cannot be quantified, nor the transcendent, spiritual life, which extends to the visionary. It cannot recognize either that the alternative is mere existence, in which ‘that which is only living / Can only die’, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase. And in the hands of a proselytizing atheist like Richard Dawkins, a notion of science is deployed to deride any attempt to detect meaning, intelligence or purpose in existence.

Because Science is perceived to be utterly dependable, it is drawn in to the Ufological Religion to replace the certainties once represented by faith. The symbolism of UFO belief is technological, the language of saucerian theology pretends to the scientific (see the writings of Budd Hopkins, passim[29]), and what in other religions would be taken for visionary experiences are deemed materially real events. This borrowing from the wider culture – ‘Science is truth, and truth science; this is all ye know, and all ye need to know’ – reveals a dependence and a contradiction (a species of dualism) that generate enormous tensions. On a more visible level, the new identity of science with godling is a kind of rebirth or resurrection of both, and a reconsecration of humanity as ‘godly’ – a theme manifested in the search for ‘star children’ and (less certainly) alien-human hybrids from ‘virgin births’.

Just as Semitic religions require a force of evil and are implicitly Manicheistic,[30] the Ufological Religion grounds its faith in the caricature of Science that it despises and distrusts but cannot, for the sake of appearing respectably rational, reject; it is a classic double-bind, which could also be called a form of dualism. For Science cannot deal with – an extremist would say it tells lies about – the kind of experience that instinctively we know defines us as human beings. Science fishes for knowledge, not wisdom, and it is maimed by its lack of ethics (it doesn’t have the balls to make a stand on principle) and its exclusion of the immaterial. UFO believers love it and hate it for that. Just as – it seems – we love and hate all things that have power over us.

The words I have emphasized here will recur again. And that brings us, finally, to the matter of crashed flying saucers. For who is it that examines, dissects, circumambulates and protects, the crashed flying saucers – but these very same scientists, in their subterranean, Hades-like haunts at Wright-Patterson or Kirtland or Area 51? In this way the crashed-saucer legends express a deep ambivalence toward Science, just as the abduction scenario dramatizes ‘inexpressible’ apprehensions of religion and sex; but there is also a religious dimension to the crashed-saucer myth.

INTO THE WASTELAND

If what fuels the UFO syndrome is religious at heart, the crashed-saucer legends should have a parallel in religious lore. And the corollary ought to be apparent without having to descend to the level usually frequented by the mind of M. Claude Le vi-Strauss.[31]

Incontrovertible, material evidence, that a saucer had crashed, and that aliens had been retrieved from the wreckage, would constitute irrefutable proof of the reality of the UFO myth, even of the ETH. For saucerians, it would make all things right – and the decades-long persecution of the martyrs of ufology would be justified and redeemed; the arguments, even within ufology, would have to stop. Skeptics and curmudgeons alike could be taken swiftly, and with a clear conscience, to the stake.

There is a similar object in Semitic religious mythology: Christianity has a wonderfully provocative myth that seems to fit the bill most closely. As the UFO pageant has emerged in its most elaborate forms in Christian societies, this should not greatly surprise us, and I feel reasonably comfortable in offering it to you. The overtly religious equivalent of the crashed saucer stories is the legend of the Holy Grail. They are different expressions of the same thing, each appropriate to the needs of its time and place. I don’t know of an equivalent in Islam, and the only proposed candidate in Judaism is distinctly weak. John Matthews[32] and Emma Jung[33] both suggest that in Judaism a role akin to the Grail is taken by the Shekinah, but this seems to me to reify that concept of the ‘presence’ of God to an extent that Jewish tradition and teaching fail to support. (Its nearer approximate counterpart in Christianity is the Holy Spirit.)

In broad outline, both the Grail and the crashed saucers are first found in open wastelands, deserts and high places: God reveals himself in deserts, an orthodox Jewish tradition runs, because they are accessible to all, and God is not the exclusive property of the Jews but of all mankind.[34] But, once retrieved, they are hidden in secret places accessible only to an elect. The Grail is kept by a maimed, immortal, Fisher King. The saucers and captured aliens are guarded by scientists: morally crippled fishers after knowledge who utter eternal truths and rule our intellectual activity.

No modern knight on a ufological quest has infiltrated Hangar 18 or Dreamland, seen the evidence, and lived both to tell the tale and be believed. So there isn’t a counterpart (yet) of the successful Grail Quest in ufology: the Sir Percival of the Mystic Saucer has yet to emerge. The tale, especially as told by Wolfram von Eschenbach, of how Parzifal achieved the Grail but did not himself pay the customary price and become an agonized immortal, is fascinating. But I wonder whether it will ever be told in ufological terms.

HOLY SAUCER

When one looks more closely at the Grail legend, the correlations with the religious crashed-saucer legend are quite uncanny.

As a young man, the keeper of the Grail, Anfortas, went looking for knightly adventures rather than concentrate on the responsibilities of his spiritual inheritance. He met a heathen knight, easily enough identified as a symbol of Nature, jousted with him, and caught a poisoned spear through the testicles.

The doctors did their best, but when Anfortas beheld the Grail, the pain of his wound increased – for by gazing on this spiritual Ultimate he had become immortal. Anfortas, like Science, had neglected his true, moral and spiritual, duty to his fellow man, gained a privilege we all secretly hanker for, and paid a terrible price. His fishing – for a single magic fish that will feed an entire company of guests – is limited by his pain, and what he actually catches can barely provision his own household.

Do I need to spell out the correspondences with the scientific hope for an ‘answer to everything’, and the eternal but unsatisfying, un-nourishing truths that it harvests from the waters of creation? And observe too the parallels with Jesus of Nazareth: the wound (from the heathen Longinus’ spear), the ‘fisher of men’ whose sacred acronym was Ichthus, fish.[35] Joseph Campbell notes: ‘The crown of thorns is a counterpart of the Bodhisattva’s turning wheel, and the Cross, of the wheel of Ixion [see below]. Christ’s role as the Man of Sorrows… corresponds to the Grail King in torture.’[36]

Campbell also makes a convincing case that the Grail – which is variously a ‘wide and slightly deep’ dish, a cup, even a stone, and in many traditions a spinning wheel, but always silver – is symbolically and inextricably related to the Moon. The Moon, like your average UFO, is a silver disk. Even Doris Day could sing that connection. The shining circularity of the Grail can be traced right back (like the Bluebeard legend and the ballad Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight[37]) to Indo-European roots, which are still visible in the Hindu epic of the Panchatantra. There, the ancestor of the Grail is a wheel whirling on a man’s head; it is torture to endure, but confers immortality.

Campbell spells out the symbology of the disk:

The image of the turning spoked wheel, which in the earlier period had been symbolic of the world’s glory, …became a sign, on the one hand, of the wheeling round of sorrow, and, on the other, release in the sunlike doctrine of illumination. And in the classical world the turning spoked wheel appeared also at this time as an emblem… of life’s defeat and pain… in the image of Ixion, bound by Zeus to a blazing wheel of eight spokes, to be sent whirling for all time through the air.[38]

And where did it come from? According to Von Eschenbach: ‘A host of angels left it on the Earth, then flew off, high above the stars.’

Von Eschenbach’s Grail is not the cup used at the Last Supper, as in other versions of the legend, but a magnificent emerald. It had been set in the crown of Lucifer and was dislodged either during the war in heaven or when the rebel angel finally fell, dropping ‘from the zenith like a falling star’.

‘By the power of that stone,’ we read in Wolfram, ‘the phoenix burns and becomes ashes, but the ashes restore it speedily to life. …Such virtue does it communicate to man that flesh and bones grow young at once.’[39]

John Matthews remarks of these qualities of the Grail that ‘it gives life and death, joy and suffering, because it is a vessel, an empty vessel capable of being filled by anything’, and elsewhere calls it ‘the symbol that unites all opposites’.[40] I doubt there is any direct influence from this to the Ufological Religion, but the dualism, paradox and power of resurrection in the Grail seen here set off some lively hares carrying questions about the creative processes of mythic thought.

So too does the knowledge that, according to several sources, the Grail temple or castle (‘that many seek but none has found; for he who seeks will not find it,’ Parzifal’s cousin Sigune says) had a tendency to spin, and that (in Albrecht von Scharfenburg’s version) while the castle was being built the Grail itself floated in the air over Mount Salvation. Caitlin Matthews cites several more examples and relates them to the Celtic image of the Wheel of Life and Death and the medieval Wheel of Fortune, and notes that the various embodiments of Lord of the Wheel in Celtic mythology are also the Lord of Wild Things and the Lord of Death and Rebirth. One incarnation of this idea is Ireland’s Mog Ruith (‘servant of the wheel’), ‘who flew through the air by means of his rowing-wheel – a kind of air-boat’[41] (somewhat after the fashion of Hiawatha, another airborne shaman-hero).

Coincidence? Not entirely, I suspect. But – although we have many hints and clues – we know too little at present about the innate symbol-making and mythopeic structures of the mind to ‘prove’ an exact correspondence, and perhaps proof will always be elusive. To cynics I can only say that the colloquial thought of the crashed saucer as the ‘holy grail of ufology’ occurred to me before I began enquiring into the nature of the original Grail.

I may as well deal here with another predictable response, although it comes from a different kind of cynicism – the suggestion that my argument is all backwards: that what I have been presenting – and over which I am, no doubt, in denial – is evidence that aliens have been with us all along. In other words, the Grail is an alien craft, and the Grail legends are distorted – even deliberately manipulated – records or memories of its visitation. This is an outgrowth of the same dreary refusal to give human beings the credit for building the pyramids, a position that ought to end in the argument that Albert Einstein was really a Zeta Reticulan, and that has led to the fatuous proposal that the transistor was back-engineered from alien technology recovered from the ‘Roswell’ de bris. While flipping my beautifuly damscened H. Samuel Eversharp Occam razor from my weskit pocket I might opine that this outlook is so self-flagellatory it merely confirms the religiosity of ufology. There really are more interesting things to consider.

THE EMPTY CUP

Ufologically speaking, we have not found the Grail. For all I know there is a Grail Keeper, a present-day Anfortas, a wounded and bemused scientist in charge of one of its invisible shrines, in Ohio or Nevada, pondering the wreckage of the magical, terrifying, addictive Other. But I beg leave to doubt that. For on a level deeper than any subterranean laboratory of the New World Order, we are all Grail keepers, staring in pain and bewilderment at the de bris of our spiritual life, which has been brought crashing to Earth, and we are unable to mend it or to heal ourselves.

The degree of our degradation as a civilization, the true ruinousness of our predicament, is shown in the way this most contemporary myth speaks to our condition – that is, in its inability to complete itself, to provide a Sir Percival for us. Nor do I see such a thing happening outside the paranoid confines of conspiracy theory. But I suspect there will be no Sir Percival for ufology in any guise. The Ufological Religion will remain as it is, inchoate, locked in its pathological mode of victim, martyr and masochist, deluded that the proof of its truth must take the form of ‘solid scientific evidence’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Bob Rickard of Fortean Times for trusting his instincts and first inviting me to expound on these themes at the FT UnConvention 1995; to Zoe Blackler, secretary of the University of London Graduates’ Society for providing the opportunity to discuss them further with her members; and to John Rimmer for letting me expand on them here – and for tolerating my chaotic subversions of his task as editor as graciously as he has the ataxic interventions of the Royal Mule. Danielle Rose, Dr Richard Baxter and Jeff King gave me very useful leads. I owe special thanks to Lesley Riley for her ever-reliable advice and guidance on the structure of this last, and most intractable, part of my argument.

FOOTNOTES

1 Harold Bloom, The American Religion, Simon & Schuster 1992.

2 Not entirely facetiously, I wonder if Hollywood does not encourage the notion, albeit in the context of secular violence (the conceptual traffic, however, probably runs both ways, between religious and seculular cultures). Randolph Scott, Christopher Walken or John Travolta may die in a spray of Kensington gore in one movie but we know they’ll be back in another before long. Even believe-it-or-don’t Ripley, a.k.a. the knee-melting Sigourney Weaver, has been reborn (by cloning) from grim death in Aliens III to continue the series this winter in Alien Resurrection.

3 Racquel Welch’s famous and oft-repeated plaint that she has felt ‘trapped’ inside her beautiful body is an extreme example of this affliction, and not a bad one of an incapacity for irony. To say nothing of ingratitude.

4 Mary Baker Eddy (whose ideas I had hoped to examine at greater length) comes to mind here: according to her, by abandoning the body, especially the mucky complications of sex, one overcomes the idea of death, and is resurrected.

5 I have borrowed this example from Kevin Randle.

6 Cf.: ‘It’s clear from all the descriptions of alien activities that they need our participation. …it’s all in the abduction literature, and outlines a scenario in which the aliens cultivate relationships with us. They may also be using all the advanced technology you decide they ought to have – while reverting to elementary procedures to make sure we know what’s going on.’ – Greg Sandow, post to the e-mail list UFO UpDates, 10 October 1997; archived on the Web and accessible from the URL: http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/updates. In other words, Sandow ascribes the primitive appearance of alien medical technology to an alien motive, the desire to communicate unambiguously what they are up to; although he offers no reason why they should wish to tell us this, in particular, so plainly, or why he believes it possible to read the alien mind. His perceptive point that (ostensible) aliens appear to ‘need our participation’ and ‘cultivate relationships’ with humans can be better understood when illuminated by the felt inadequacy of orthodox religion (not even to go so far as citing the ‘death’ of God treated by Nietzsche) in the face of the history of the 20th century; see below.

7 See Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine 1994, pages 264-71. Luria seems to have arrived at his ‘Gnosticism’ independently, without knowledge of the earlier, Christian texts.

8 At the same time, one recalls that the Mormon God is a material person, who created the Universe out of pre-existing matter.

9 Quintus Tertullian (160-c.225 CE), one of the most influential theologians of the Latin Church, who was able to look upon the savage God of the Hebrews without flinching (see his Adversus Marcionem) famously said of his Christianity Credo quia ineptum – ‘I believe because of its absurdity’ – and remarked of the resurrection of the Nazarene, Certum est quia impossibile est – ‘The fact is certain, because it is impossible.’

10 For wide-ranging discussions of these and related matters, see Geoffrey Cannon, Superbug: Nature’s Revenge?, Virgin 1995; Theo Colborn, J.P. Myers & D. Dumanoski, Our Stolen Future, Little, Brown 1996; and Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 1994.

11 Phillip Lloyd-Lewis, letter, ‘OnLine’ section of the Guardian, 30 March 1995.

12 F.R. Leavis, ‘Justifying One’s Valuation of Blake’, The Human World No 7, May 1972.

13 Ian Robinson, The Survival of English, Cambridge University Press 1973. See Chapter 2, ‘Religious English’, pages 22-65.

14 Prof. Henry Gifford, ‘English Ought to be Kept Down, Essays in Criticism, Vol XI (1961), pages 466-70; quoted by Robinson, op. cit.

15 Dennis Stacy, ‘Abductions and Abortions’, Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, Vol 3 No 5 (1992); Dennis Stacy, ‘Alien Abortions, Avenging Angels’, Magonia No 44 (1992).

16 One could argue – the large-headed, big-eyed alien having a long history in science fiction – that the association in abduction lore of aliens and babies is derived from a pre-existing image. In particular, the repeated image of a fetus, coupling the human adventure into space and rebirth, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. Nonetheless, Stacy’s hypothesis brings out the inextricability of the aliens’ alleged interest in humanity and those humans’ own conflicts over sex and reproduction. I discuss Stacy’s analysis in terms of a mythic restatement, in appropriate contemporary dress, of the shamanic process of spiritual rebirth, in Alien Abductions, Barnes & Noble (USA)/Blandford (UK) 1998. (Due for publication in April ’98; end of commercial)

17 The best and pithiest summary of whose principles in human terms in English remains the marriage service in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. The Jewish service confines itself to celebration (and includes the reading of the couple’s marriage contract). The Islamic service is positively perfunctory, but then so are Islamic divorce proceedings.

18 By the early 1980s even the service of one’s country in battle had been denuded of traditional sense. Mrs Thatcher, praising those who fought and died in recapturing the Falkland Islands, could bring herself to speak of no more than their exemplary ‘training’ and ‘professionalism’. Gallantry, courage, bravery, valor, the resolution to meet death – these were words and ideas beyond her power to conjure.

19 T.S. Eliot, ‘Fragment of an Agon’, Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber & Faber 1963, page 131. A little later (page 133) the character who speaks these lines is entirely explicit about their import: ‘Life is death.’ Cf: ‘that which is only living / Can only die.’ in Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (op. cit. page 194), quoted below.

20 Robinson, op. cit.

21 F.R. Leavis, The Living Principle, Chatto & Windus 1975, page 7.

22 ‘What one cannot say, about that one must be silent’: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 7. Routledge & Kegan Paul 1961, page 151.

23 Viktor E. Frankl, From Death Camp to Existentialism, [revised and enlarged as Man's Search for Meaning, 1964], Beacon Press (USA) 1959, page 105. On page 109 Frankl notes: ‘And let us not forget, homunculism can make history – has already done so. We have only to remember how in recent history the concept of man as "nothing but" the product of heredity and environment – or, as it was then termed "blood and soil" – provoked us all into enormous disasters. I believe it to be a straight path from that homunculist image of man to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidenek.’

24 Ibidem, page 100.

25 John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: a revolutionary biography, HarperSanFrancisco 1994, page 88. (As noted, the whole chapter deserves looking up.)

26 The first version of this paper was written in the days following the Oklahoma bombing on 19 April 1995. In it, I asked, at this point: What rough beast slouched into Oklahoma City this week? I next elaborated the argument a little less than a year later, in the shadow of the murder of 16 infant children and their teacher by Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane, Scotland, on 13 March 1996, an act that has been roundly denounced as ‘evil’ from nearly all quarters. From word on relevant grapevines, it appears to be at least possiblethat Hamilton was sinned against in whispered calumnies before himself sinning through an access of suicidal frustration. Other than the slaughter of innocents, there is no connexion between the two cases. The futile Oklahoma bombing was driven by a set of nihilistic beliefs whose links to the crankiest ends of ufology are unnerving (see ‘A Plague of Aliens’, Magonia #60, November 1997), and was inspired by the Federal assault at Waco, TX, in 1993, mythologized on the American far right as the defining moment of government gone out of control. Hamilton’s act on the other hand has no such immediately apparent cultural fuel. From media and political reaction to the Dunblane killings one can only conclude that direct moral accountability has become anathema in British culture. Hamilton, being dead by his own hand, cannot answer for his act, and so his means of destruction have become demonized. The wish to find evil is very strong. One can discern it in the Oklahoma bombing; in Dunblane, the rage of a mind at the end of its tether prevailed, perhaps nourished by a wider wickedness. But what has gone on trial and been condemned is an inert piece of precision engineering, and two British governments rejected the best available research in reaching the decision to disarm civilians. Waco, Oklahoma City and Dunblane saw terrible events, terrible not least because at face value they are mystifying. Reactions to incomprehensible circumstances are rarely scientific, or even very rational, and most of sc sy to denounce.

27 Quotation 2 is, of course, paranormalist folklore. The ostensibly scientific evidence for any anomalous phenomena remains questionable, and at best in limbo.

28 So we find Mr Ronald Pearson, a retired British engineer, writing reams of equations based on Newtonian mechanics that, he says, prove there is life after death. Mr Pearson is happy that his calculations involve the reinstatement of the ‘ether’ as a universal medium and demand the dismissal of Einstein’s theories of relativity. Not surprisingly, despite many attempts, his work remains unpublished in any recognized, refereed scientific journal. He is, however, endorsed by the British Spiritualist monthly Psychic World, and championed there and elsewhere by Mr Michael Roll and his one-man Campaign for Philosophical Freedom. Mr Roll is naturally convinced that a conspiracy of silence, driven by an unusual alliance between Science and the Church (both perceived as monolithic), is in play to suppress Mr Pearson’s world-shaking discoveries.

29 Hopkins would no doubt characterize this present dissertation as an instance of what he calls ‘stewpot thinking – an obstacle to science’. To which (see Magonia 59, page 6) John Harney has provided the compleat response: ‘What do the activities and ludicrous speculations of Hopkins and the other abduction ethusiasts have to do with science?’

30 The Tractarian Dr Edward Pusey (1800-82) declared: ‘Those who deny eternal punishment as inconsistent with the attributes of God do not really believe in the same God that Jesus revealed.’ Quoted in Eric Maple, The Domain of Devils, (Robert Hale 1966) Pan 1969, page 173. Maple quotes the 19th-century German theologian Sartorius in the same vein: ‘He who denies Satan cannot truly confess Christ’, and adds: ‘A typical Scottish sentiment of that time was that "A Kirk without a Hell’s not worth a damn".’

31 Levi-Strauss was right about one thing, however, and that was the need to take an inclusive view of a myth in order to assess its significance and its meaning. Some ufologists seem to imagine that ‘ufology’ consists of no more than the bits they find intellectually attractive, or the bits discussed by relatively rational ufologists. So it is offered as part of the UFO myth that ufology is not currently dominated by the ETH, despite the clear presumption in popular culture and tavern discourse (and supported by opinion polls) that to most people most of the time ‘UFOs/flying saucers’ means ‘spacecraft’ and that ‘aliens’ means ‘ET humanoids’ and, particularly, Grays.

32 John Matthews, The Grail Tradition, Element 1990, pages 55-7. Matthews also suggests an equivalence of the Grail with the derivative Sufi Sakina and the Islamic mutation of Sophia, which derives from Gnosticism. I think this is pushing the envelope to bursting.

33 Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, Sigo 1986, page 383.

34 Cf. Morris Adler, The World of the Talmud, Schocken (New York) 1963, page 98.

35 Transliterated: Iesus Christos Theou Huios Soter (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior). This works better in Greek.

36 Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology (1968), Penguin 1980, page 425.

37 See A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Paladin 1975, pages 142-154, for a summary of the origins of these ancient tales. ‘Lady Isabel…’ has been traced to a Siberian source dating to at least 300BCE. Literalists who scoff at folkloric interpretations of the abduction syndrome would do well to acquaint themselves with such concrete instances of the tenacity of mythic ways of thinking, and their adaptation to circumstances.

38 Campbell, op. cit., pages 420-1. See pages 413-428 for the full background, including related Grail imagery in Celtic mythology. Intriguingly enough, one series of interesting (and beautifully colored) sculptures made by Budd Hopkins is called ‘Ixions’.

39 Campbell, op. cit., page 430.

40 Matthews, op. cit., page 43; and page 84. Matthews also observes (page 95) that ‘the failure at the heart of the Arthurian kingdom, which is illustrated by the Waste Land, has become more directly linked with the actions of Arthur himself, [and his] failure of will… and sovereignty …and until both are healed, by the finding of the Grail, the sickness will not be cured.’ Cf. the Jewish concept of the dependence of God on humanity to fulfill a mutual covenant, and Note 4, above.

41 Caitlin Matthews, Arthur and the Sovereignty of Britain, Arkana 1989, pages 188-228.

From Magonia 63. Part three of a two part trilogy by the fastest pistol shot in ufodom, the admirable Admiral, Peregrine Mendoza

COMMUNION CUPS AND CRASHED SAUCERS
Part Three
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Gray aliens move in mysterious ways. The argument in this series has been that they bear more than a coincidental resemblance to certain rarely advertised aspects of the Semitic God. In the final part of his diagnosis, PETER BROOKESMITH further explores how this is so, and discovers some startling parallels between the legends of crashed UFOs and the imagery of a powerful Christian myth.

If, so far, the profile I have offered of the hidden aspects of the Semitic religions and of ufological belief is accurate, then the mythic imagery and mode of belief of ufology, and particularly of the abduction scenario, should belong to a particular religious type: I am suggesting that the American Religion, as defined by Prof. Harold Bloom,[1] has formed the template of ufology-as-religion. But plainly ufology thrives in a wider context than religious, or theological, thought and feeling. The successful export from the USA of a Ufological Religion may, for instance, be a symptom and a sign that a deracinated and relativistic Western culture has had to generate a new religious perspective to accommodate and resolve its own disturbing and destructive characteristics and their consequences. Among which are a paradoxical view of science, and a blankness and dumbness in the face of numinous experience.

Before touching on those issues it may be helpful to recapitulate:

UFOs, and in particular their folkloric offspring the crashed flying saucer and Gray alien abductors, were spawned in the USA. Therefore any theological dimensions of the UFO phenomenon ask to be measured initially by the yardstick of American religious constructs. The available statistics demonstrate that, overwhelmingly, the USA regards itself as a Christian country. If the analysis of Harold Bloom is admitted, it is clear that indigenous American Christian orthodoxies share a deep structure of belief and outlook even when they appear to be incompatible in matters of ritual and doctrine, and when politically they may be mutually hostile. Bloom captioned this deep structure the ‘American Religion’ exactly because it informs denominations and sects as diverse as Mormonism, Christian Science and the Black Baptist churches, and even, he argues, Black Islam.

The American Religion, Bloom says, is a ‘severely internalized Quest romance’, whose goal is immortality. Experience of that immortality is gained shamanistically – through direct revelation, without mediation, and in solitude. Immortality is already presumed or predicated in an underlying dualistic (Gnostic) belief that the individual harbors a remnant of divinity – the ‘divine spark’ – within himself, which is older than creation; it is symbolized by the empty, post-Resurrection cross of American churches. Lying beyond this and informing it, I would add, is the motif of America as Eden, which vastly predates the birth of the American Religion in the Great Disappointment of 1844, when (the deadline having already been put back from 1843) the world did not end as predicted by William Miller.

This fixation on immortality in an Edenic context leads one to the rather startling thought that part of the American psyche simply does not accept death.[2] The emphasis on resurrection, and particularly the corpse-free cross, suggests that such stubborn recusancy toward mortality is connected to a discomfort with the physical body.[3] This unease may have its immediate roots in English Puritanism; it is central to much of Gnosticism, and it has extraordinary manifestation in such American cults as Christian Science and Pentecostalism and the pre-Disappointment celibate Shakers, whose founding members were American by necessity rather than choice or destiny. Resurrection and rebirth – whether on Judgement Day, or as born-again Christian, or in the ecstasy of ritual worship – are out of and away from the human body, its cravings, agonies and ambiguous effluvia. While the American Religion is strikingly optimistic over spiritual questions, it exhibits classic Christian tendencies in recoiling from the flesh and in its fixations upon carnal sin and consequent (even arbitrary) hell fire. In this latter aspect, its self-contradictions are at least consistent with the traditions of its parentage in Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic.

CELESTIAL MECHANICS

These core notions are recast in ufological experience and discourse, and, although the emphases on the elements differ, they do so no more than their different proportions in (say) Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism and the Watchtower Society.

The ufological expression and manifestation of the American Religion predictably follows its ancestral, ‘orthodox’ pattern. At its most sumptuous, in the abduction syndrome, it too reveals itself as dualistic, masochistic, deeply uncomfortable with the human body, and much obsessed with sex, personal rebirth and resurrection. The last has strong millennial and apocalyptic concatenations on a social level. It seems likely that ufological religiosity appeals to people already steeped in such an outlook, and to that extent it should be easily exportable to cultures penetrated by similar forms of salvationism. But, if this is so, one can scarcely avoid noticing that the overt symbolic forms of the Ufological Religion are very different from those of its progenitors; and this allows one the choice of regarding it as a kind of sport from the ecclesiastic tradition.

More revealing, however (more fruitful to me, at any rate), has been to enquire what psychological and emotional niche is filled by the Ufological Religion, and why that niche is inaccessible to its (relatively) orthodox forebears, the sects of the original American Religion. Certainly the Ufological Religion has not displaced its precursors; indeed it may only be shadowing other forms of religious expression. Both forms of faith may, after all, co-exist in the same person.

In the Ufological Religion, revelation and the shamanic journey (itself a rite of psychic rebirth) are translated into the abduction scenario; resurrection is enacted in the ‘life-changing’ effects reported by participants in close encounters; immortality and the divine spark are confirmed in the human genetic contribution to the godlings’ evolution or survival. The aliens’ fascination with all things sexual, their somewhat uncaptivating bedside manner and painful manipulations and exploitation of their captives’ bodies are consistent with – and may well symbolize – torment arising from the limitations, unruliness and even sheer messiness of human biology, impediments that the aliens so noticeably lack.[4]

The mystifyingly primitive state (by current terrestrial standards) of ‘alien’ medical science is more parsimoniously explained in this frame of reference, by looking at it as a symbolic and psycholgical mechanism, than by retreating into notions of alien disinformation or deviousness. The aliens’ crude ‘genetic’ procedures (which a competent human DNA engineer could conduct more efficiently by sampling hairdressers’ sweepings[5] or the detritus of any tourist beach in summer) also make rudely plain the symbolic propinquity and interdependence of human and alien.[6] Fairies – another race of diminished and dying gods – too needed human bloodlines to preserve themselves, we are unavoidably reminded. Less familiar in a godforsaken age is the Jewish tradition of the dependence of God on mankind, a notion radically refreshed in the Safed Kabbalism of Isaac Luria (1534-72), which can fairly be described as Gnosticism without Christ.[7]

As previously noted, the magic technology of the aliens gives them and their craft what terrestrial science would regard as miraculous powers: even their divine capacity to read minds may be technological rather than inborn. The UFO myth is vague on this point. But this techno-scientific aspect of the aliens, along with their visible, material, and unavoidably biological nature, sets them most distinctly apart from the God of the Semitic traditions, and makes the aliens godlings.

Even so, aliens do have many attributes of full-blown gods: solid four-dimensional nature, of the kind Dr Johnson appealed to when he kicked a stone to refute the phenomenalism (esse est percipi) of Bishop Berkeley, does not constrain them. Despite their own material incarnation, aliens are reputedly capable of shape-shifting, and deliberate and even selective invisibility, for example, besides their notorious ability to ‘float’ themselves – and us – through walls and windows. Some of the paratheologians of ufology propose that the aliens are not (or not exclusively) extra-terrestrial, but partake of ‘other dimensions’, from which they manifest in our spacetime. Even superstring theory cannot accommodate this notion within physics, so the ‘dimensions’ inhabited by aliens take on a religious or even occult cast. According to believers, most gods, including the Semitic God and the Hindu pantheon (and the souls of the dead, whether in Heaven or Summerland) also exist on transcendental ‘other’ or ‘higher’ dimensions of being, which are inaccessible to both scientific instruments and flesh and bone.[8]

According to some not-very-much-wilder flights of UFO mythology, it was aliens who created humanity, and human religions – but not, apparently, the Cosmos. So like the Gnostic Demiurge they are ringmasters of the human circus, dancing between the Creator and ourselves. Nonetheless, the aliens’ manipulations of time and matter and their capacity to circumvent natural laws, while divine in nature, is based (it is said) in superior science and technology.

Something is going on here. What can it be?

IS SCIENCE IDOLATRY?

Erich von Daeniken deserves some credit at this point. He may havestolen others’ ideas, but his books’ extraordinary commercial success is testimony to the appeal of his implicit and very probably unconscious endeavor: to reconcile religion and science. The first is irrational,[9] but apparently necessary in some form to a sense of human wholeness and responsibility; the second is wholly rational, ostentatiously reductive, responsible only to itself, and perceived as an horne d adversary of religion, especially when a touchy subject like evolution raises its ugly head.

Scientists are often called priests of a modern religion, but they seem on reflection to be more like kings and princes – of an empire of savage materialism. We enjoy the fruits of their rule but do not entirely trust them. Their powers have a Faustian reek and their inclinations are worse than pagan. Scientists seem to combine amoral curiosity and hubris in equal measure. Nowhere do these qualities seem more obvious, and unnerve people more, than when they meet in genetic research.

Matters such as cloning – science fiction coming true – and the use of aborted fetuses as laboratory material produce reflexive moral reactions, behind which lie real ethical issues that scientists seem not to have considered before setting-to with their experiments. Even genetically manipulated crop plants, created for the best of motives, may have unforeseen ecological effects; as may the over-liberal employment of hormones in industrialized animal husbandry – effects that may already have come to roost in the human reproductive capacity.[10] The dehumanizing effects of technologico-scientific materialism have been debated by cultural critics since the 18th century: but the issues have never been so easily grasped as in the products of modern genetic research. These strike immediately at our senses of personal and cultural identity.

Individual scientists are not inhuman, and science and its technological progeny are not all wicked: but the scientific method as one of the intellectual glories of our age, or the endless personal, domestic and social benefits that science has brought to all manner of people are not really the issue at this point. For here I am speaking of the caricature of science that people apprehend at the visceral level, and that is more accurately called Scientism. But on the Clapham omnibus this is what is called Science, a capitalized entity often treated as if it were a sentient life form. Scientists are subsumed into the shadowy organism referred to as ‘They’.

The popular conceit of Science working with incorrigible, feckless and reckless amorality is shown well enough in this collation of paranoia and false oppositions:

Electrons give us electronic equipment, yes, but neutrons give us nuclear weapons. Chemistry creates plastics and drugs and thereby creates world-wide pollution and drug abuse. Where does the balance lie? Science cannot just take credit for the good things and deny responsibility for the bad things.

Bright scientific minds, given ‘free rein’ and unencumbered by ethical doubts, have ushered in a nightmare world of growing wealth, growing knowledge and growing destruction. Is unbridled curiosity so desirable?

…Which is worse, a tomorrow with no science for children to be interested in or a tomorrow with no children to take an interest in science?[11]

This is surely beyond parody; but there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the sentiment.

One of Science’s most salient by-products has been the gradual erosion of the credibility of religion in the West. The rot may have set in with Galileo, but the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw it gallop. Against a deracinating background of intense industrialization and urban growth came the findings of Lyell and Darwin, followed apace by Pasteur, Koch, Einstein, and Heisenberg. Scientists were not entirely to blame for undermining a religious outlook, although they provided a canting vocabulary for others who continued the work. Its drift may be indicated by F.R. Leavis’s formulation: ‘Though we have to recognize that Darwin’s life testifies to the existence of intelligence and purpose, his theory of evolution offered to dispense with the need for those words.’[12]

Claiming to be scientists but in reality cultists were Marx, Freud and Jung (who on breaking with Freud wanted to found his own religion), each in his way gnawing at the roots of faith and familiar concepts of human dignity, aspiration and meaning. Einstein’s concept of relativity trickled out of physics into the wider culture, where it mutated into a notion of moral relativism – the seductive proposition that there are no moral absolutes. Watered by Freud’s crocodile tears (his essential pessimism about human nature being essentially self-indulgent), this self-serving principle was destined to flourish in the social fragmentation following urbanization, and most especially in the stupefaction of the European intelligensia following the First World War.

THE ABYSS STARES BACK

No one, I trust, would take what I have written in this series as an advertisement for institutional Western religion. But it seems to me that the slow retreat of God from the West since the 1860s is intimately linked to inferences drawn from science and to pseudo-scientific assertions that no ultimate purpose beyond the mechanical or the self-serving informs existence; and the result has been the creation of an existential void so profound that it is scarcely recognizable to those engulfed by it.

A consequence of the atmospheric ubiquity of this emptiness at the heart of our civilization is the difficulty of demonstrating its existence: it is, to borrow a phrase from Paul Devereux, a ‘cultural bubble’, and accordingly nearly invisible to its inmates. But one can point to symptoms of its existence, in the hope that what is being indicated can still be sensed. One has to trust that words have not entirely lost their meanings in English. The symptoms of this collapse of a sense of meaning are many, but I will concentrate on two, since they are so closely bound up with my themes here. The first is the loss of a religious language in English.

In a long critique of modern translations of the Bible,[13] Ian Robinson has made a powerful case for concluding that the Jerusalem Bible, the New English Bible (NEB), and similar attempts to replace the King James version of 1611, are written in a language in which it is all but impossible to be religious, to worship God. The same, he argues in so many words, is true of revisions of the Anglican and Roman Catholic books of prayer. The decision (after Vatican II) to drop Latin as the universal language of Catholic worship in favor of services in the vernacular has always struck me as one of the most bizarre of many Papal whims over the centuries. By this move the Roman Church abandoned the universality of hieratic Latin, which spoke to the huge Catholic diaspora everywhere, and through which it worshipped with one voice; and so the church ceased to have any claim to catholicity, and made the language of worship mutually incomprehensible to its adherents: Babel was rebuilt overnight. In English, this has resulted in the Lord’s Prayer being debased in the RC ‘Missalette’ into virtual cant:

Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,
and grant us your peace in every day.
In your mercy keep us free from sin
and protect us from all anxiety

As Robinson says, these are not ‘the words our Saviour gave us’:

I can’t imagine a more irreligious wish than to be protected from all anxiety, about, for instance, one’s salvation: it is a prayer to be delivered from religious life into hebetude. …You might as well pray ‘let everything be nice’ which, on the tenth Sunday after Pentecost, the hapless R.C.’s pretty nearly have to do: ‘Grant us such full measure of your grace that we may hasten towards the good things you have promised.’ What could such good things be, in Mr Heath’s England or President Nixon’s America, but an easy life and an automatic annual wage-increase?…

Is it possible to attend to the Missalette with any depth of concentration? When the new services are most themselves they lull us into the pleasant Sunday slumber of churchiness. How can one wait on God in such words?

The King James’s ‘Lead us not into temptation’ of the Lord’s Prayer becomes, in both the NEB and the Jerusalem Bible, ‘Do not bring us to the test.’ ‘What does that mean?’ enquires Robinson. ‘One might find out by consulting a commentary; but that suggests the failure of the translation as translation.’ In another passage he points to the goofiness of the NEB’s attempt on Psalm 69 – ‘Save me, O God; for the waters have risen up to my neck!’

I object not that this is more immediate than the old versions, and not even that it is comic (with its derivation from the cliche ‘up to the neck in it’) but that the comedy is uncontrolled and unintentional. One is in no doubt about the degree and kind of seriousness of the 1611 version: ‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.’

The Jerusalem Bible (a work of American scholars) too provides lapses into incoherent bathos, as in its version of Genesis: ‘The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. "I have acquired a man with the help of Yahweh," she said.’

‘She couldn’t say so if she were speaking English,’ says Robinson tartly. The words have neither colloquial immediacy nor theological rigor.

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Robinson laments the atrophy of religious English, not as some failure of conformity to ‘tradition’ (the kind of ‘tradition’ understood by town planners and theme park designers), but as an abandonment of seriousness, and thus as a collapse of the community, continuity and understanding that give a tradition life and significance – which can exist only in individual lives:

Religious English is the style of our common language that makes religion possible (or not, as the case may be). Religious English can only make religious seriousness possible to the individual, in whom any religion is not restricted or standardized but perpetually new, unique, and his own; it could not do so, however, without the many generations whose lives have expressed themselves in our language, in the context of the many Christian languages, in their context of history and human nature.

The 1611 English Bible’s rightness of style ‘can never be only a question of style.’ That is to say, style is not some after-market extra bolted on to the meaning of the words to imbue them with elegance or an odor of sanctity; the rhythm, for example, ‘is the shape of the meaning… the rhythmic climaxes are the climaxes of sense’.

Such rightness of language can only be the result, and the medium, of a great creative effort in life, in this case the collaborative effort of the King James committee. It was a collaboration, too, between the translators and the language they found, inside and outside the Bible – itself the outcome of earlier collaborative effort. The result is a language of religion in which God can be spoken of; [one that] ‘only yesterday… controlled our speech, and provided a measure for high seriousness.’

In contrast, the language of the NEB and the new prayer books has emptied itself of any sense of the sacred: it offers no way to approach, imagine, or pray to anything recognizably superhuman, dread, or divine; in Henry Gifford’s words, it is ‘the language of sedentary men who have lost the capacity to see and touch’.

St Paul in the Authorized Version is an impressive though difficult writer…. ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked…’ Today he rattles this out on the keys of his typewriter: ‘Make no mistake about this: God is not to be fooled…’ …’Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ Christ asks in the Authorized Version (which follows Tyndale). ‘Are not sparrows two a penny?’ is wrong, because ‘two a penny’ is a cliche ; like the pennies that drop, and are offered for thoughts, the coin has no existence.[14]

The failure of style, the combination of smug journalistic cliche and an incapacity for wonder that amounts to hubris inevitably leads to a draining-out of any sense of the miraculous, too. ‘[In the NEB] Matthew’s miracles are about as cheap as his sparrows,’ comments Robinson, and the new versions make nonsense of the miracles by placing the centre of truth outside religion. If the only possible world is our world of newspapers and commonsense, then the miracles are not merely impossible; they are mischievous impostures. …For the first Christians the belief [in the miracles, including the Resurrection] was the centre, triumphing, perhaps a little madly, over what everybody knows. It is this anti-commonsense (and potentially evil as well as potentially good) power of the Bible that is present in the old versions and quite missing from the new.

The failure of modern translators of the Bible into English, and their cohorts who write modern prayer books, to produce a credible (or faith-ful) religious style represents a several collapse. For while it is impossible to be religious in this language (and so its style disinherits those who come after), this can be so only because of a failure of apprehension (of more than language or style) on the part of the translators. And they are of their age, with lives beyond the library and the cloister. They could not have produced what they did unless their age had itself lost its bearings, which are centralities of belief and conviction, whose absence the language reflects. Modern religious English is tongued not ‘with fire beyond the language of the living’ but with uncertainty, if not actual doubt, as to its meaning. The line between that and a pressing presentiment of meaninglessness is almost too thin to draw.

BIRTH, COPULATION AND DEATH

A sense of meaning in existence is critical to a human sense of wholeness; better to suffer misery that means something than vacant joy. No less central to being human is sexuality, which is inescapable in a way that even religious intuitions are not because it is rooted in a biological imperative. The evaporation (or extraction) of a sense of meaning from sexual behavior and language is the second symptom of an existential void at the center of modern Western culture that I want to discuss.

Precisely because sexuality is ineluctable, and yet peculiar to each individual, it is difficult at the best of times to analyse it. To make matters more intractable, I want to articulate a sense that sexuality has been trivialized and mechanized in recent decades. With only a few hundred words to spare, two instances of this shift in sensibility will have to hold the pass. I hope to illustrate that in discussions of sexuality there is a parallel to the dissolution of a language fit for religion. I will then deal with the consequences of the frustrations arising from the thwarting of both these means of expression.

In his 1992 articles[15] proposing an ‘abortion anxiety hypothesis’ to account for the prevalence of foetal imagery in abductions, Dennis Stacy noted that since 1972 in the USA, some 30 million women had had abortions. I discovered from US Census statistics that, in 1993, about 78 million women were of child-bearing age or had been since 1972. These two data together mean that in those 21 years nearly four in 10 women had abortions. Stacy also quoted polls showing that Americans held deeply-felt yet apparently incompatible and contradictory opinions on abortion. While 73 per cent supported abortion rights, 77 per cent viewed the operation as a form of murder. These figures can mean only one thing: that most people managed to endorse both ideas at once. Clearly, there is fertile ground here for internal conflict, guilt and shame.[16]

Yet the pro- and anti-abortion arguments have never touched on the central problems raised by these paradoxical attitudes. By and large, the arguments for abortion on both sides of the Atlantic are political (‘a woman’s right to choose’ – men, apparently, having no right to an opinion on the fate of their offspring) or economic. Moral questions are not faced. Nor are they faced by the so-called ‘pro-life’ campaigners except in absolutist and often sentimental terms. Neither party attempts to advance its case in terms of the meaning of sex within the relationship that led to the pregnancy (rape victims aside, and they are a minority among those seeking abortion). The effect is to consolidate a divorce of sex from procreation – the consequence that gave sexual encounters meaning and purpose, and that also imbued them with danger and adventure – that has been in process since before the 1960s. That divorce assumes a priori a disjunction of sex from passion, and from responsible, social responses to such distinctively human attributes.

The acceptance of abortion ‘on demand’, which for a huge majority of Americans at least entails simultaneously acquiescing in a form of murder, surely signals a sea-change in the generally perceived meaning of sex, the necessary prelude to conception. Sexual passion can be divine or demonic, and its disruptions have traditionally been encircled, given form and meaning and moral context, by the concept of marriage,[17] part of whose meaning is the nurture of children. This alteration in sensibility reduces procreation to a problem of mechanics, and leaves those who partake in abortion no language (no world of meaning) with which to cope with the consequences, which are not solely emotional.

Before abortion could be contemplated as a ‘right’, sexuality – and specifically sexual intercourse – had to be deprived of meaning. Nowhere is that operation plainer than in the tabloid press (British tabloids illustrate this best) and in the plethora of guides to sexual pleasure and – hardly removed from either in principle – ‘soft’ pornographic ephemera now available.

In these, sex is hardly distinguishable from off-road racing: ‘performance’, ‘technique’ and ‘satisfaction’ are all that are required to get you over the bumpy bits. Whether this competitive sport occurs inside a relationship of one human being to another, and what it might denote there from love to madness, remain unexplored.[18] Sex is reduced to a higher – and by implication measurable – form of masturbation: the self-absorbed infantilism that Aldous Huxley prophesied in Brave New World. Perhaps the worthy intention was to purge sexuality of misplaced shame; but, if so, something more profound has been lost in the process. It is one of the mantras of this new sexual enlightenment that guilt, an essentially communal attribute, must not trammel any of its transactions. Conscience, one of the more complex fruits of social life, is thereby abandoned too.

This is a world of isolates, in which life is shriveled to "Birth, copulation and death. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all" [19]

- which is mere existence, as of brute animals, not human life, and bereft of meaning, purpose, and potential. Even dogs, which are pack animals, are able to manifest guilt as a badge of their social being.

None of what I have said here should be construed as a dewy-eyed illusion that in former times all individuals were paragons of chastity and virtue and all marriages were filled with love, light and ‘happiness’. Cranmer, after all, promised no such thing in his prayer book, and neither did those taking the vows he prescribed. The point is that in an inclusive language of the fully human forms of birth, copulation and death, we find initiation, marriage, the building of love, procreation, and funeral rites. In that language even a living hell can have significance, and there are standards by which hell or paradise on Earth can be judged.

But what once demonstrably informed that language seems to be all but lost to us. Meaning is drained from a condition – no matter what its ‘orientation’ – that is a defining fact of our lives; and we have adopted impoverished, indeed anti-creative terms in which to speak to that condition. ‘We may reduce the human realities represented by words like marriage and burial to nonsense;’ writes Ian Robinson, ‘but without the possibilities they express there is no human life.’[20]

Lacking an outlet in the shared contemporary language, any sense of those ‘human realities’ will, like any other form of energy, seek expression elsewhere, in some other outward form. The UFO mythos has provided a symbolic language and, for some, a public platform through which an inarticulate religious drive and a tacit recognition of our general, cultural confusions about sexuality and its consequences can be discharged. The grotesque irony is that the symbolic terms are taken literally by those least conscious of their own investment in the religious aspect of this enterprise.

TOO MUCH OF NOTHING

Our civilization, Dr Leavis observed, ‘has, almost overnight, ceased to believe in its own assumptions and recoils nihilistically against itself.’[21] Leavis’s criticism of what he called ‘technologico-Benthamite civilization’ was that of a fully humane intellectual, and was deeply felt. When placed beside the kind of commentary exemplified by Leavis and Robinson, the abduction scenario (if not the entire UFO syndrome) can be seen as a visionary dramatization of the unquiet desperation of the disinherited and disenfranchised who have been deprived of an adequate or appropriate vocabulary (both verbal and emotional) in which to articulate a sense of loss and lack. Wittgemstein’s dictum: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen[22] could be adapted for the present discussion as follows: ‘What one cannot say will be acted out.’ The Ufological Religion and the abduction scenario in particular act t an inarticulacy, and a frustration, over religion and sexuality. And, as we shall see, crashed-saucer tales act out, or speak the unspeakable about, current and related intuitions and confusions about science and scientism.

Nihilism is abroad in our culture, according to the critics I have cited. Yet Viktor Frankl believed that the antithesis of nihilism, the ‘will to meaning’, is possibly more powerful than any other human impulse; and Frankl – whose branch of psychotherapy has been strangely ignored in Britain and the USA – came to that conclusion by finding meaning and purpose in existence as a prisoner in Auschwitz, one of the 20th century’s many synonyms for hell. Testimony from such experience is not easily scorned. And doesn’t this sound like a blueprint for the collapse of sense in religious and sexual terms that I’ve pointed to:

Nihilism has held a distorting mirror with a distorted image in front of [our] eyes, according to which [we] seem to be either an automaton of reflexes, a bundle of drives, a psychic mechanism, a plaything of external circumstances or internal conditions, or simply a product of economic environment. I call this sort of nihilism homunculism; for it misinterprets and misunderstands man as being a mere product. …Parents, teachers, scientists and philosophers have taught [us] all too long a time that man is ‘nothing but’ the resultant of a parallelogram of inner drives and outer forces. …’Man grows according to his interpretations of himself.’[23]

The will to meaning, however, must find something on which to feed. If the possible ‘interpretations of himself’ presented to a man are nihilistic, he has a fundamental existential choice: to persist in his condition and become narcissistic (the dominant cultural idiom of our era, I have argued) or to look outside himself. How he frames that ‘outside’ will depend on the culture in which he finds himself. Despite all inner good will, the ‘outside’ may remain narcissistic. Frankl again sets the context and makes a further crucial point:

Apparently, man must have an aim towards which he can constantly direct his life. He must accomplish concrete, personal tasks and fulfil concrete, personal demands; he must realize that unique meaning which each of us has to fulfil. Therefore I consider it misleading to speak of ‘self-fulfilment’ and ‘self-realization’. For what is demanded of man is not primarily fulfilment or realization of himself, but the actualization of specific tasks in his world – and only to the degree to which he accomplishes this actualization will he also fulfil himself: not per intentionem but per effectum.[24]

Such words may not go down well in California or on Lindisfarne. (Such is life.) But even if a culture is sufficiently powerful or addictive to circumscribe the attempt to seek some sense of meaning outside it, it may contain some accommodating grit on which a potential pearl may grow. So it has been with the Ufological Religion: the grit is the American Religion which, we may recall Harold Bloom notes, ‘can establish itself within nearly any outward form.’

We may also note here that the visionary aspect of religion, always denied by Science, also embarrasses the new reductionist enlightenment, but is accommodated by both American and Ufological Religion. Which is to say: if one cultural form cannot accommodate this ‘technology of consciousness’, another will be found in which it has sense and meaning. If such matters cannot be brought into mundane consciousness by being spoken of, because they are outlawed by contemporary language, they may have to be acted out in states of being that are also outlawed by our culture: John Dominic Crossan comments, in a chapter one would like to reproduce in full:

Trance is… perfectly natural human experience, but its control is a perfectly natural human necessity. Societies that have such processes do not need to apologize for themselves. Societies that have no such procedures may have to consider whether there is such a thing as unhealthy trance deprivation or pathological trance substitution within their borders. It may well be the absence rather than the presence of trance that is pathological. [25]

And I persist in finding it significant that the Roswell myth was revived (thereby refreshing ufological conspiracy theories), the abduction scenario was received with new fervor, and AIDS emerged – all more or less together, after an endless decade of dispiriting shocks to American self-confidence. One could hardly have asked for a riper or more receptive historical moment for a system of self-lacerating beliefs to emerge. The Moral Majority gained real political power at the same time and is part of the same response.

So we find ourselves in an age when God and humanism both have been seen to fail. Where, the disinherited modern mind will ask, was God, already reeling under the onslaught of the Western intellect, at Passchendaele, Treblinka, Nagasaki (which was the most Christian city in Japan)? The bomb was dropped and in the terrible light of that revelation the politicians saw that it was good. In stark contrast, bombs were not dropped on the railway lines feeding the Nazi death factories in Eastern Europe, because the politicians saw no advantage in it.

God let these things happen, but so did people. And they still do. Side by side with the march of science and the intuition of meaninglessness, the dreadful catalogue of butchery has continued to unfurl, from Mao’s China to the Gulag Archipelago, from My Lai to Pol Pot’s killing fields, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. [26]

We lack a beneficent God and are surrounded by fellows whose capacity for evil has so overwhelmed the imagination that – ironically, in the age of Freud – humanity has become incomprehensible to itself. The blankness is compounded by a culture that implicitly celebrates, and cannot escape, nihilism: as I hope I have illustrated with the examples of the regressive languages of religion and sexuality in present-day English. In such circumstances, one might indeed look about in some desperation for something that really is dependable.

From Magonia 56. Part two of a two part trilogy by the fastest pistol shot in ufodom, the admirable Admiral, Peregrine Mendoza

COMMUNION CUPS AND CRASHED SAUCERS
Part Two
THE GODLINGS DESCEND

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God may represent the overwhelming power of lovingkindness, but he is also the primordial creative force, the primum mobile, and the controller of all things. And so – as the canonical texts make plain – God is also the source and ultimate embodiment of all evil. In the second part of this series, PETER BROOKESMITH shows how the ambiguities of the omniscient Master of the Universe are reflected in UFO lore. In UFO-related reports there is a cluster of symbols and images that directly parallel religious symbolism and imagery. In this article I want to demonstrate and explore those parallels, and so indicate the similarities between the underlying structures of belief in UFOs as extra-terrestrial hardware and in the Semitic religions.

Argosies of the Divine

Jung pointed out the mandala-like nature of the flying disk, and its associations of healing and wholeness, coming down from the Heavens, the realm of the gods, to bring salvation:

A political, social, philosophical and religious conflict of unprecedented proportions has split the consciousness of the age. …Between the opposites there arises spontaneously a symbol of unity and wholeness, no matter whether it reaches consciousness or not. Should something extraordinary occur in the outside world, …the unconscious content can fasten itself upon it, investing the projection carrier with numinous and mythical powers. [*1]

I’d also add that the daylight disk is a hard, shiny, inaccessible thing; a thing from Elsewhere; a symbol of Otherness. And UFOs perform ‘impossible’ aerial maneuvers – such as flying, for a start, against all known laws of aerodynamics, as well as performing maneuvers that defy momentum, inertia and gravity. They can even change shape. While being essentially remote, they are at the same time capable of miraculous activity: they are in the world, and even interfere with it, but are not subject to the laws of the Universe. These are divine traits, and Jung could accommodate their disparaties in his symbol of wholeness, for he believed that although the ‘rotundum’ is a totality symbol, it usually encounters a consciousness that is not prepared for it… indeed is bound to misunderstand it and therefore cannot tolerate it, because it perceives the totality only in projected form, outside itself, and cannot integrate it as a subjective phenomenon. [*2]

One can remain agnostic about Jung’s particular slant on ‘subjective phenomena’ without being insensible to his perception of the analogous attributes of a salvific God and the flying disks: unapproachability, inexplicable powers, and an intimidating presence.

And, despite their sometimes gigantic size, UFOs have the knack of appearing only to chosen witnesses. Examples are legion; here are a few. On 9 May 1984 a vast object was photographed over Sao Paulo, Brazil – which, one can see from the photo, is clearly a lively town. But no one besides the photographer (and his magically sensitive camera) seems to have been aware of it. [*3] In the UK it was recently reported that at about 10:40pm on 15 July 1995, while barbecuing their dinner al fresco, four adults were abducted by aliens. The entities arrived in a UFO ‘almost 30 feet in diameter’ that shone ‘a powerful shaft of light’ into the garden. A photograph of the premises shows it to be surrounded by numerous dwellings of equally dismal architecture. [*4] The narrator of these events offers no evidence that any of the quartet’s hugger-mugger neighbors were disturbed by this huge craft or its brilliant beam of light, although he sternly adjures us not to deny the reality of the event. The highly populated backdrops in several of Willy Meier’s pictures show that the Pleiadean spacecraft that appeared to him managed the same stunt of exclusive visibility; so did the gaily-lit UFO ridden by Ed Walters’ molesters at Gulf Breeze.

Of course I hear the chuckles and snorts. But it doesn’t matter whether this ‘evidence’, or any other, is hokum or not. Such cases suck their credibility, artesian fashion, from a bedrock of ‘authentic’ reports, in which UFOs remain invisible to all but those they wish to impress (or, more simply, those who want to see them). And, merely by existing, fraudulent cases of exclusively visible UFOs (or any kind of UFO – there’s always someone ready to believe them) contribute to the accretion of received wisdom about the whole phenomenon; which has covertly evolved into a system of beliefs. The same exclusivity occurs, and is perfectly acceptable among onlookers who are believers, in visions of the Virgin Mary. Readers of Magonia will not need an exhaustive list of references. [*5]

The attributes of aliens and their craft, and the themes of ufological legends and parables do not always amount to a consistent whole. For instance: UFOs are ‘proven’ to be exotic hardware by radar/visual data; on the other hand, aliens have given America ‘stealth’ technology, while some say UFOs’ propulsion systems are knocked out of kilter by radar signals. All the contradictions within the catalogue can be resolved by UFO proponents, often by invoking additional extraneous premises, such as the ufonauts’ presumed motives. Both the inconsistencies and the explanations are signs of a belief system at work rather than a body of empirically derived and falsifiable knowledge. [*6]

Superior Beings

If unidentified flying objects themselves suggest the numinous and miraculous, their occupants are even more remarkable. They are always alleged to be not just different from, but vastly superior to human beings, and in all respects – Billy Meier’s Pleiadean friends claimed their civilization was 3000 years ahead of ours. Even sober writers on the scientific search for extra-terrestrial intelligence assume that anyone visiting us from the great Elsewhere will be phenomenally ‘advanced’. [*7] These assertions are not usually illuminated with details, but they seem to derive from a fairly quaint 19th-century notion of ‘progress’: moral, cultural and technological improvements are assumed to proceed at the same rate, if not actually hand-in-hand. This is not the rhetoric of the anti-technological, spiritually questing New Ager.

Although the cultural ancestry of the presumed attributes of the aliens provides some insight into the mechanics (and mechanicalism) of saucerian belief systems, it is almost irrelevant to point it out in ferreting for its underlying meaning. Likewise one swallows a huge red herring in arguing that primitive and degenerate humanity already has the wherewithal to voyage among the stars, if it wished to do so. Nor is it pertinent to employ the obvious liberal rhetoric, as one might by suggesting revealing parallels: was, say, CortŠs morally superior to Montezuma, or Rhodes to the Matabele? The argument, the questions and the analogy are all in the wrong language, being specific and concrete and open to informed debate. The logic informing ‘mainstream’ ufological discourse is characteristically inductive and consequently woolly. This vaporous imprecision of the committed ETHers’ and ancient-astronautists’ assertions is deliberate (if not necessarily conscious), because emotionally that is more suggestive. In fact – and this, finally, is the point – by talk of ‘superior’ and ‘unimaginably advanced’ aliens we’re implicitly being invited to be in awe of ufonauts even before we set eyes on one.

The Light of the Otherworld

When we do encounter aliens, these days, they don’t stop much any more to chat about organic farming, as they did with Gary Wilcox, or hand out the cup-cakes, as they did to Joe Simonton. They come and grab us, don’t they. And the abduction scenario, I am not the first to say, is rife with religious imagery and symbolically sacred routines. It is worth looking at components of this syndrome in some detail because it is through abduction narratives that the UFO phenomenon most richly reveals itself.

In both CE-IIIs and CE-IVs, the first thing the aliens commonly do is zap their victims with a beam of light. A light of revelation knocked Saul of Tarsus down, amazed the shepherds at Bethlehem, when ‘glory shone around’, and revealed the paraclete at the baptism of the Nazarene. The Christian texts call on a pre-existing tradition: a suitably poignant manifestation from the Tanach is the ‘fire infolding itself’ with ‘a brightness… about it’ that preceded Ezekiel’s first vision. Later, in a variation on this motif, tradition held that Mohamed’s mother was convinced her son was born to greatness for, as she said, ‘Satan has no access to him…. While I was pregnant with him, I saw a light issuing from me’. [*8] Mohamed’s first biographer remarks that when the Prophet began to receive revelations from Allah, his visions would come upon him ‘like the break of day’. [*9] (As the Koran says, ‘Would that you knew what the nightly visitant is! It is the star of piercing brightness.’) [*10] Still later, Joseph Smith recalled how, when he first called on God for wisdom, initially a ‘thick darkness gathered around’ him – ‘the power of some actual being from the unseen world’ that threatened to destroy him. Then just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. …When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. [*11]

Bertrand Méheust has pointed out how these visionary, revelatory light beams are not limited to the modern civilized world (or, I interject, to the long-vanished civilizations of its current prophets); and he notes:

The fact that [primitive and modern 'abduction'] experiences share so many elements, and have in common their underlying structure must be more than coincidence; at the very least, it points towards a permanence of certain elements in the universal language of the imagination, emerging in certain states of consciousness…. [*12]

One might say that the magical light of revelation drives back the darkness of the mundane world, which by implication is the Gnostic world of flesh and devil, the darkness that threatened Joseph Smith with ‘destruction’ and ‘ruin’. In UFO experiences, the light is often reported as blue which, it feels patronizing to point out, is the ‘color of Heaven’.

Both mystics and abductees agree that the light has a paralytic effect and/or generates a sense of floating. Mohamed was rooted to the spot when he was informed he was the Apostle of God by the Archangel Gabriel, who filled the sky in every direction. There is a condition of disembodiment of some kind as abductees are wafted (sometimes through solid walls or closed windows) up to a waiting UFO; just as, Hilary Evans points out, mystics are taken on a visionary journey by angels or demons. [*13] There is no evidence that this is a physical event, but there are clear parallels with out-of-the-body experiences and with the shaman’s ascent to the Otherworld to discourse with the spirits. As, rather less tentatively than Bertrand Méheust, Paul Devereux has noted:

The reality of UFO abductions is – I suggest, along with numerous other researchers – to do with altered states of consciousness. These states were known of in earlier cultures, but today… we have no cultural context for experiences of the Otherworlds – which… can appear totally real, with all senses involved. Rather than spirits and ancestors [encountered during altered states of consciousness in shamanic societies], our modern altered states of consciousness are peopled by aliens and machines. While shamanic initiates experience death and rebirth, we experience invasive examinations at the hands of impersonal beings. The machine is within the modern soul. And the ET robot or alien could be the very image of our estrangement. [*14]

Without quibbling with the essential drift of this, I am leading to the argument that death and rebirth, martyrdom and resurrection are fundamentally implicated in the abduction experience. I imagine Devereux would not disagree that the soulless clinical and mechanical images are the most appropriate metaphors in which to dramatize these themes in ‘modern times’. For now the key point is that we are dealing with ‘a permanence of certain elements in the universal language of the imagination’.

Magical Spaces

Once the abductee is aboard the UFO, the light becomes diffuse: symbolizing the immanence and ubiquity of the powers of this Otherworld. Furthermore, nothing can be hidden here – the light is everywhere; in any of the featureless chambers abductees report, the décor is as far removed from that of a cluttered Victorian drawing-room as one can get. That this place is Other is emphasized by curious features such as ‘seamless doors’ – that is, doors that merge invisibly into the wall once closed. Richard L. Thompson comments [*15] that ‘many of the uniform features that show up repeatedly in abduction accounts do not seem to be psychologically significant. For example, what would be the psychological significance of seamless doors in UFOs, or slitlike mouths in short humanoids?’ But at the level of dramatic symbolism, the image shouts. Indeed several interestings things follow from it.

Only the aliens can open these doors, reminding us that they are absolutely in control of the situation – or, to put it another way, that the abductee is trapped, and entirely at their mercy. They also suggest that this can be a one-way trip: there is no way back from (or to back out of) this experience – a point abductees have made many times, for in many instances it changes their lives. There is also the element of Wonderland – which, few seem to have noticed, Alice spends much of her time wondering how to escape. And there may be echoes of dreamscape journeys in which the surroundings through which one has passed turn out to be entirely different from those that appear when one tries to make the return journey. The doors vanish – are lost to memory – as if reprising the way the means and moment of entering the craft become obscure (‘doorway amnesia’). The doors become invisible too because the gateways to the Otherworld are always everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like the ubiquitous light.

‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’ [*16] Whatever their external dimensions, the abductees’ shining craft frequently turn out to be more spacious inside than they appear to be from without. Obviously this is a magical realm, but it is one designed to astonish, bemuse, and perhaps belittle, since it is a manufactured environment, not a natural one, that confronts the abductee.

Not Like Us

The aliens themselves are very alien. Despite the febrile insistences of the Hopkins-Jacobs-Mack axis, across the whole range of CE-IIIs and CE-IVs aliens come in all shapes and sizes, all of them essentially non-human, if largely of humanoid or primatial configuration. Some are horrid troll-like things; some are robotic, some monstrous; some are quite angelic – the so-called Nordics. David Jacobs has suggested that the ‘Nordics’ are alien-human hybrids, but this doesn’t alter their equivalence to angels – both are midway between gods and men, and prettier than most of the latter.

Nonetheless the little gray fellows have been reported more often of late by abductees, mainly from North America but from elsewhere too. One can, I think, safely grant both the extreme unlikelihood that these are actual organic creatures, and the strong probability that they are visionary beings. Their peculiar behavior and singular appearance must, then, derive from some set of elements that, in combination, speaks to the condition of those who encounter them, and perhaps to our general condition as well. It doesn’t matter whether the sources and inspirations of the ‘alien’ synthesis are cultural, pharmacological, neurological, imaginative, or anything else. We can take it that the gray alien type (and its activities) seem to be marginalizing the others because that is how people want aliens to be – this is what best embodies their idea of alien-ness. And I wonder if the little gray fellows have become so fashionable mainly because they are Incarnations, with a capital I, of all the godlike powers and properties attributed to the Otherworldlings.

Physically, the gray aliens have:

• Huge heads These plainly symbolize superhuman brains and intellects. (Speaking of cultural sources: I have yet to see the infamous Mekon mentioned in this connection. Dan Dare’s dread adversary in the old Eagle comic not only had a vastly oversized cranium, but floated on his own private miniature saucer and was green all over.)
• Bizarre eyes With which they gaze into abductees’ souls, read their minds, control their actions, and bind them psychologically and emotionally. For their captives, the aliens hold ‘the final way of escape, the most intimate of all places’, as Tillich said of God. Gods always see too much. Pagan gods consisting almost entirely of eyes, dating to 2500 BCE, have been found as far apart as Iraq, Spain, and Syria. [*17]
• Attenuated bodies This suggests the aliens have no physical warmth or emotional sympathy; no ‘earthy’ distractions of digestion and dirt; the implications are of frigid intellect and passionless asceticism. The Houyhnhnm-like gutlessness is the corollary of the huge heads: the creatures seem to ask to be taken as unfeeling, super-rational intellectuals – they are certainly not large, warm, comforting Earth Mothers! Reports that autopsies on aliens reveal a chlorophyll-based metabolism that depend on photosynthesis [*18] reinforce the image of emotional incapacity. The entities have as much visceral feeling as an aspidistra.
• No naughty bits They go straight round like my teddy bear, or like an angel, or like Satan in William Blake’s illustrations of Job; in which Satan was not the Devil of the New Testament, but a companion (i.e. angel) of God. Once more the aliens’ passionless nature is emphasized. There is also, in the context of the American Religion, a powerful suggestion of purity in this. Sex is ‘the chief obstacle to spirituality in Gnostic thought, and the source of all evil in medieval Christian thought’ [*19] – and in what passes for thought among fundamentalist Christians today, too. Lacking genitalia, the aliens can know no original sin, a dubious privelege otherwise accorded only to God, his angels, and the Nazarene. You may have noticed: uproar always greets any suggestion that Jesus of Nazareth had a sex life, and Protestant cultures are notorious not just for disapproving of sex, but for sexual repressiveness. [*20]

And what do the aliens do?

Meaning in their Madness

• Aliens physically invade their victims – Aliens poke, probe, bugger, impregnate, dismember, even de-brain their captives. This last was notably reported by Sandy Larson, who on 26 August 1975 had her brain taken out and a fresh (if not noticeably improved) one inserted in its stead.

These casually-inflicted horrors underscore the aliens’ indifference and Otherness, but also their ability to remake humanity: as gods can. At the same time, like rape in the real world, they are a display of power that humiliates and degrades the abductee. On one hand the imagery directly echoes shamanic accounts of symbolic death and rebirth: what else can one make of Ms Larson’s traded-in brain? On the other hand, the emotional content relates directly to the traditions of self-abasement, flagellation and self-degradation in some Semitic religions – most notably Christianity, which has made a cult of martyrdom. An apparent paradox is that, once they have submitted to the noxious embraces of the aliens, the victims proceed to do their owners’ bidding. But this too parallels the psychopathology of the victim in Christianity, and the doctrine of absolute predestination in Islam.

À propos the medical and sexual components of abductions: I am extremely glad for the personal safety of the ancient-astronaut brigade that none of them seems to have studied Islam, and that when their effusions were fashionable the abduction syndrome was not. There is a startling story in the earliest biography of the Prophet, written in the 8th century CE by Ibn Ishaq (AH 85-151, 707-773 CE). As a child, Mohamed had a wetnurse; as she told it, one day his milk-brother came running to me and his father, saying, ‘Two men dressed in white garments have taken hold of my brother [Mohamed], and have thrown him on the ground. They ripped open his belly, and are stirring it up!’ We hastened out and found [the boy] standing apparently unharmed but with his countenance quite altered. [*21]

It’s surely significant that later biographers put this incident in Mohamed’s adult life, immediately before his ascension to heaven; in any case the parallels with the abduction syndrome are glaringly apparent here.

• Aliens choose their victims – The abduction syndrome is very democratic, and yet also élitist. Just as anyone may be washed in the blood of the Lamb or be received into the bosom of Allah, anyone can be abducted. But once in the fold, you are someone special. The aliens reinforce this ‘chosenness’ by using implants to track abductees wherever they go (the themes of property and of no hiding place again), but most especially by passing on messages or ‘wisdom’ for the rest (the ‘gentiles’) of humanity. In other words,
• Aliens grant revelation – The messages either concern human destiny, which the aliens at least partly control, through genetic manipulation, for example (peace on Earth and mercy mild – God and Darwin reconciled!), or divulge particulars of the aliens themselves. These revelations fall into to four general categories:

  1: apocalyptic warnings (nuclear or, since approximately 31 December 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet empire, ecological disaster); [*22]
  2: moral injunctions;
  3: messianic appointments (the abductee as the aliens’ messenger to humanity); and
  4: the identity and purpose of the aliens.

All these messages, in one form or another, echo the fundamentals of all religions anywhere. More or less explicitly, they all suggest the means to human redemption, and they explain the purpose of life.

The Cult of Despair

This is the classic pattern of the gentle, positive warnings relayed by George Adamski, Willy Meier and others, who had them direct from aliens. Although it seems unlikely at first glance, the pattern holds true for the ‘Darkside’ communications [*23] from such as Linda Howe and William Cooper, who justify their apocalyptic paranoia by reference to real, false or imagined government documentation and whispers from insiders. And the claims of Paul Bennewitz, who instigated the whole Darkside saga, support the point. Bennewitz is really a Darkside contactee; he had (he said) much of his information from aliens – albeit different aliens from the ones reported by Adamski et al. – who transmitted it directly into his computer.

The most developed of the Darkside scenarios known to me comes from something called Cosmic Awareness, which confides in a channeling group based, aptly enough, in Olympus, WA. In 1990 the Cosmic Awareness purported to confirm all the usual grisly claims: secret alien-government treaties, hideous Nazi-style alien medical experiments on human subjects in subterranean bases, the involvement of the CIA and the ‘international bankers’ (guess who), the ‘creation’ of Jesus of Nazareth by the aliens, and the rest. But it added that the end of civilization/moral decay-as-we-know-it is due between 1996 and 2011CE; and instrumental in this apocalypse will be the arrival of 40 million reptilian humanoids from the constellation Draco [sic]. [*24]

All this seems a long way from the meaning of life and a means of redemption, but Cooper has solved the latter problem, with entirely consistent internal logic, by joining the militia movement and preparing for war against the US Government, which is merely a tool of the internationalist (or, if you prefer, cosmopolitan) New World Order. The militia movement has imported many of paranoid ufology’s themes and imagery into its mythology, from anti-semitism to wicked black helicopters. Thus the theme of martyrdom emerges again in political guise, out of a mythology that identifies Christianity with alien manipulation (Jesus as son of the omnipotent gods) and is entirely predicated on the notion that human existence is directed by aliens. One has the depressing suspicion that these obsessions are not as ‘fringe’ as they seem. Abductionist and jacuzzi player Dr Richard Boylan has lately linked (in Internet postings) the alien invasion with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, thus tying the Christian millennium, Armageddon and the aliens neatly together.

The ‘meaning of life’ is thus reduced to that familiar condition of the devotee of the Semitic (and most especially, Christian) God – subjugation to incomprehensible and uncompromising savages who, like wanton schoolboys, kill us for their sport. The Darkside conjures up the most extreme servitude: for the alien race is etiolated and moribund, and feeds on human flesh and blood to survive. But this is not so far from the actual behavior of the Semitic God. As noted in the first part of this series, he kills what most he loves, and one of the subtexts of the Christian Eucharist (=’Thanksgiving’) is cannibalism. And the internal logic of the sado-masochistic Christian myth leads, as Maccoby has shown, to the fiction of Judas Iscariot and the institution of anti-semitism:

Only if Christ truly suffered was there salvation for Christians. Every pang of pain, every contortion of agony, witnessed on the stage [in the Passion Plays] and enacted in the theatre of the believer’s soul, contributed towards release from the hell-fire which terrified the medieval Christian. The good Christian must feel sorrow for the agonies of Christ and never allow into consciousness his thankful and happy awareness that only these agonies stood between him and damnation. The best defence against such awareness was to hate and blame the Jews. The more he hated them, the more innocent he was of desiring the crucifixion of Christ. [*25]

Saucers Full of Secrets

The fourth of those alien revelations also bears interesting comparison with a religious theme. The aliens’ own accounts of their origins have shifted over the decades from the near and impossible to the distant and no less unlikely – Mars, Venus, Saturn to begin with, then the Pleiades and Zeta Reticuli and the like. Intermingled with these have been still more exotic, fabulous places such as Clarion, Zircon, Martarus, the galaxy of Guentatori-Elfi, and so on. But all said they were extra-terrestrial, and that they lived in utopian societies (i.e. Paradise) free from money, meat-eating, [*26] politicians, war, &c. Lately they have become distinctly furtive about the locations of their home worlds. Abductees who ask get shifty answers: ‘That is not for you to know’, ‘It doesn’t matter’, and so on.

‘Thou canst not see my face,’ God told Moses in the tabernacle at Mount Horeb. (Although he did offer to show him his back parts, which has always intrigued me.) Borges in his writings makes repeated reference to the 99 names of God, and the 100th which is unknowable and unspeakable; among Jews, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) is never pronounced, but signaled by the utterance ‘Adonai’ when reading the Tanach aloud. Apart from this magic of naming, but related to it, Semitic religion and alien encounters share another version of the secret that cannot be told. Saul of Tarsus, after his conversion, reported of himself that

(whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for man to utter.

Herb Schirmer, a seminal experient who was more contactee than abductee, also said that he had been given information he was not permitted to repeat; some abductees are vouchsafed great truths that they must forget, but that will be restored to memory at a later time. Another form of this motif is the ‘book of wisdom’ (of a blue hue, in Betty Andreasson’s case; Betty Hill was offered a similar volume) presented to abductees that is retained by the aliens at the last minute or mysteriously misplaced later.

To the percipients, the close encounter phenomenon can be revelatory in another, more radical and manifest fashion. For many (I don’t know what proportion) the experience changes their priorities, and they change their way of life. This is true of those who undergo revelation in a more overtly religious context, too, of course; the examples from the Bible alone are legion.

The abduction experience can thus, on one level, be seen a mythologized way of saying – of crying out – I am alone, I am misused, I am manipulated to the roots of my being, I am not in control of my life, not of even my most basic biological functions (my genes can’t even be selfish!), I am the victim of overwhelmingly powerful forces, my identity is at risk. To paraphrase Charles Fort – I am property.

Those who are transformed by the experience and adopt what they feel is a healthier and more fulfilling way of life seem to contradict this characterization. The apparent opposition here between symbolic statement and practical response is less of a paradox than it seems. It can even be seen as a species of the dualism that runs through the ‘American Religion’. These are issues I will explore in the next part of this series. (Coming soon)

THE ETH DEMANDS A MIRACLE

The aliens’ craft are miraculous, and they themselves, like God and his prophets and emissaries, perform miracles. I’m not referring to those rather sad cases of handing out vinegar as a cure for cancer, although there are instances of chronic illness reportedly being cured through an abduction or close encounter. I mean, for example, their adeptness with telepathy. This is so convenient, as it saves intergalactic travelers from having to learn so many languages, and no doubt explains their ‘psychologically insignificant’ slit-like mouths, which are not adapted for speech. But most especially I am thinking of the tricky means whereby they manage to get here at all.

As I said earlier, UFOs shouldn’t actually be able to fly, but they do. Unless you’re American, or know nothing about physics and biology at all, the extra-terrestrial hypothesis won’t impress you. There’s no good reason to assume life on other planets will have evolved along parallel lines to ours. But the aliens have, until recently (since they moved to Knotty Ash, I suppose), insisted that they are indeed from outer space. So how did they get here? You can write off conventional space travel, for literally dozens of reasons. Which leaves us with the fanciful notions of time travel or passing through hyperspace – ‘other dimensions’.

In superstring theory, theoretical physicists have developed Riemann’s metric tensor (a way of describing a point in space, in any number of dimensions) so that the previously irreconcilable qualities of gravity – that is, Einstein’s relativity theory – and quantum mechanics emerge naturally from the equations. This was long the Holy Grail of physics. The maths calls for 10 dimensions, nine in space and one of time, in certain circumstances and 26, 25 spatial and one of time, in others. ‘Other dimensions’ do, it seems, exist.

Difficulties arise over getting at or into them, however. They appear to have collapsed into loops somewhat smaller than 10-33 cm as the energy to sustain them dissipated in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. You have to generate 10 billion billion billion (10 followed by 27 zeros) electron volts to open them up – and you’ll rip four-dimensional spacetime to bits in the process and, of course, generate a gigantic amount of heat. Even if you could do that, and could shield yourself from the effects and enter hyperspace, alarming things would happen to you. Only in four-dimensional spacetime do knots stay tied, electrons stay in their orbits around atomic nuclei, stars shine, and does the home life of our own dear Queen run its habitually tranquil course. Things as we know them fall apart in hyperspace.

Extra-terrestrial aliens, then, can get here from their Otherworld only by a miracle. The best our science can offer cannot deny it.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers, [RKP 1959] Ark Paperbacks 1987, pages 148-9

2 Ibidem, page 170. For some inexplicable reason this passage puts me in mind of ‘believer’ versus ‘skeptic’ debates, polemics and monographs in ufology.

3 This picture, which is in the Fortean Picture Library, can be seen in color on the dust jacket and in monochrome on page 131 of my UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, Barnes & Noble (New York) and Blandford (London), 1995.

4 Anthony Dodd, ‘In the Heat of the Night’, UFO Magazine (UK) May/June 1996, pages 44-47. One assumes that the intrepid investigator did, in fact, take the basic step of making enquiries among the neighbors. That is what the police would have done, had the abductors been human.

5 They will have to make do with one, and very good it is too: Hilary Evans, Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians, Aquarian Press 1987. See especially the Preface and Part 2.5.

6 Cf. note 29 to Part One of this series in Magonia 54.

7 See, for example, Edward Ashpole, The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, Blandford 1990, passim, and page 157: ‘…what chance have we of guessing the attitudes of intelligent non-humans who will be thousands of years ahead of us at the very least. We cannot expect to find ETIs of a lower status.’

8 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, tr. Michael Edwardes, Folio Society 1964, page 20.

9 Ibidem, page 35.

10 Sura 86. Translation from The Koran, tr. N.J. Dawood, Penguin 1959, page 38.

11 Joseph Smith, quoted in the pamphlet The Prophet Jospeh Smith’s Testimony, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 1978, page 3.

12 Bertrand Méheust, ‘UFO Abductions as Religious Folklore’ in Hilary Evans and John Spencer (eds), UFOs 1947-87, Fortean Tomes 1987. See also Méheust, Soucoupes Volantes et Folklore, Mercure de France 1985, pages 58-60, where he refers to ‘piliers de lumière solide, sphères incandescentes ravisseuses de prophètes, pinceaux de lumière dardéés sur le mystique choisi’ found ‘dans l’imaginaire apocalyptique’.

13 Hilary Evans, Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors, Aquarian Press 1984. See Parts 1.8 and 1.9.

14 Unpublished paper given at the Independent UFO Network conference held at Hallam University, Sheffield, UK, in August 1993; transcribed from tape recording. See also Devereux, Symbolic Landscapes, Gothic Image 1992, Chapters 3 and 4. There are obvious lexi-links here, too, for those of Fortean disposition: aliens come from Other worlds; the word ‘alien’ literally means ‘belonging to another’. (And in common parlance people do or don’t ‘believe in’ UFOs.)

15 Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities, Govardhan Hill 1993, page 131.

16 John 14:2.

17 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin 1976, pages 124-6.

18 This curious characteristic is mentioned in William S. English’s summary of the Project Grudge/Blue Book Report #13 that he claims to have seen in 1976 (or ’77). English’s outline has circulated among ufologists and was posted on the Internet but, as far as I know, has not been published in its entirety anywhere. William Cooper’s account of Report #13 (he too claims to have seen it) can be found in Linda M. Howe, An Alien Harvest, LMH Productions 1989, pages 196-213; see page 208 in particular.

19 Hyam Maccoby, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil, Free Press 1992, page 106.

20 This is as good a place as any to explain why I have persisted with the traditional attribution of the male gender to God. There are two reasons. One: because the Semitic God is conceived as fatherly (although only Christians labor the point, as they would), not motherly or neuter. Two: because I cannot believe that anything with feminine qualities – anything other than a being saturated in a massive overdose of cosmic testosterone – would be as barbarous as the Semitic God is reported to be (in all derived religions). 21 This is a conflation of the translations in Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, tr. Michael Edwardes, Folio Society 1964, pages 19-20, and in Alfred Guillaume, Islam, Penguin 1956, pages 24-25.

22 I actually predicted that change of emphasis, not in print, but in a conversation with Paul Devereux in the early 1990s.

23 The Darkside scenario is as long and labyrinthine as it is pathological: there is an excellent summary in Jerome Clark, UFOs in the 1980s: the UFO Encyclopedia Vol. 1, Apogee 1990 under the entry ‘Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities’, pages 85-109.

24 This visionary rumor eventually issued in the unfortunate claim that Comet Hale-Bopp harbored an unseen artificial companion and the subsequent deaths of the Heaven’s Gate cult in 1997. One of its more ludicrous aspects, however, was an earlier announcement that the planetoid was due to arrive in 1986. When it failed to appear, the news was given out that the reptoids were delayed because they had underestimated the size of the larder they would need for their long, boring journey, and had had to return to replenish and enlarge their on-board tuckshop.

25 Maccoby, op. cit., page 110. Cf. page 94: ‘By washing their hands like Pilate, and mourning and bewailing the death of Jesus every Easter, [Christians] hope to avoid complicity in his death. The more they cover Judas and the Jews with obloquy and hatred, the more they can distance themselves from responsibility.’

26 If God did not intend us to eat animals, why then did he make them so tasty?

27 Exodus 33:23.

28 II Corinthians 12:3-3. A later translation makes the point still more forcefully: ‘…and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.’ The Greek literally says ‘sayings not to be told that must not be prattled about by people’.

29 Useful guides to the physics of all this are: John D. Barrow, The World Within The World, Oxford UP 1988; F. David Peat, Superstrings, Abacus 1988; P. Coveney and R. Highfield, The Arrow of Time, Flamingo 1991; Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, Bantam Press 1994; and Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford UP, 1994. The unique cohesion of thematerial world of threedimensions plus time is discussed by Kaku on his pages 49-51 and 339-340. Even a primitive understanding of these tracts suggests Dr Richard Hoagland’s recent utterances about hyperdimensionality are better taken as a form of satire than serious scientific comment. There is a telling discussion of the unlikelihood that extra-terrestrial life will be anthropomorphic in Robert Baker, ‘Alien Dreamtime’, The Anomalist #2, pages 94-137. The real reason the aliens of ufology look vaguely like us is that we require them to, the better to personify our condition and preoccupations. A slug-like ET, a space-faring headlouse, or a technologically advanced tapeworm would hardly reflect our concerns as human beings as parsimoniously.