UFOs, extraterrestrials, ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, zombies, monsters, witches, werewolves, devils, or, to quote the subtitle of the lovely literary freak show called The Wonderful Magazine, I’ve always been extremely interested in the “Marvelous Chronicles of Extraordinary Productions, Events, and Occurrences, in Nature and Art: Consisting Entirely of Matter Which Comes Under the Denomination of MIRACULOUS! QUEER! ODD! STRANGE! SUPERNATURAL! WHIMSICAL! ABSURD! OUT OF THE WAY! And UNACCOUNTABLE!” as I’m sure a number of (if not all) of you are. So today is devoted to the mystery of UFOs; but because there’s so much information out there about them, here are five sort of random things to blow out your brains on today.
1. The Bible and Flying Saucers
Among the literature of UFOs there are an extraordinary number of books detailing the influence of extraterrestrial life upon human religion—especially ancient religion, such as Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian but also, not surprisingly, the biblical tradition, and in particular Christianity. One exceptionally interesting study I’ve read on this connection is Barry Downing’s way out there The Bible and Flying Saucers: An Inquiry into Possibilities. Downing “believes that UFOs are real and have existed for centuries” and throughout the book explains “that many events once though miraculous may have their best explanation is natural science and the existence of extraterrestrials.” He discusses everything from Moses parting the Red Sea to the transfiguration of Christ (he suggests Jesus was lifted up “into space by some sort of UFO—a space cloud”). In chapter five (my favorite), “Where is Heaven?” Downing attempts to locate heaven in the physical universe, and uses passages from the bible as his launch pad into long, complex arguments about whether heaven is on another planet or another plane of existence (it’s on another plane of existence) and whether it is visible or invisible (invisible). Ultimately though, because Downing is only positing another theory among the millions of biblical interpretations, he ends up deliciously subverting the belief that the bible contains empirical evidence and truth not only about the workings of the universe but reality itself.
2. George Adamski (1891-1965)
Of the thousands upon thousands of purported UFO contactees, one of the most famous accounts of is that of George Adamski. Adamski is credited in many circles as the pioneer of extraterrestrial contact and UFO photography. After founding his own church in 1934 where he lectured about cosmic philosophy, Adamski wrote his first and only science-fiction novel in 1949 entitled Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus. He later plundered the book to write his bestselling (though now sadly out of print) nonfiction book, Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953.
Of Adamski’s many claims of contact, the most famous supposedly occurred in November 1952 when Adamski and some members of his church went out into the Californian desert, where they supposedly witnessed a flying saucer land. Adamski claimed he telepathically communicated with an alien from the spaceship. Supposedly the alien was named and was from Venus and was worried about the advancement of nuclear weapons. Adamski claimed he took plaster casts of the extraterrestrial’s feet but there’s no evidence of this. Throughout his life, Adamski maintained his claims of contact, including being taken for flights on UFOs countless times, and even being taken “around to the back side of the of the moon where he saw cities, UFO landing strips, and mountains covered with trees and snow.” Though there’s no evidence of this either. Adamski died of a heart attack in 1965 and according to Frank Edwards, author of Flying Saucers, Serious Business, “at the time of [Adamski’s] death he was offering to teach people how to visit the planets Venus and Mars by self-hypnosis for fifty dollars.”
(Photo: “On August 6th, 1997, a UFO seen by many witnesses in Mexico City and was caught on tape by one of these witnesses (who used a Sony Digital Camera). The UFO looks like a flying saucer as described by many UFO viewers. The day was said to be very hazy and no aircraft were cleared to depart except for two news helicopters. The video was received by Jamie Maussan who later broadcast it. The 24 second tape was seen by millions of viewers worldwide. It was then taken to a video analysis company in Phoenix and Jim Dilettoso, who had viewed over 5,000 other UFO videos, believed it was the best he had ever seen.”)
3. List of Things Mistaken for UFOs
(Photo: Elm Park in Worcester, Massachusetts. Those lights are not in fact the lights of a UFO but street lamps illuminating the sidewalk at the far end of the park.)
A list of things commonly mistaken for UFOs compiled in 1969 for a UFO symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Luminous weather balloons, non-luminous weather balloons, meteors, comets, moon, artificial satellites, planets, military magnesium flares, military test craft, military aircraft, clouds, rocket firings, hot air balloons, satellite, satellite re-entry, sky-hook balloons (discontinued), hot air balloons, helicopters, planes, plane running lights, plane landing lights, planes’ reflections of the sun, contrails, hand gliders, flocks of migrating birds, individual birds, luminous birds, stars, advertising blimps, illuminated blimps, dirigibles, sewage disposal bubbles, soap bubbles, chain lightning, streak lightning, sheet lightning, ball lightning, plasma phenomena, kites, leaves, spider webs, paper and other debris, luminous electrical discharges, swarms of insects, swarms of moths, milkweed seeds, parachutes, fireworks, radio astronomy antennas, oil refineries, domed roofs, cigarettes tossed away, lighthouses, lakes and ponds, automobile headlights, auroral phenomena, noctilucent clouds, reflections of searchlights, St. Elmo’s fire, reflections from fog and mist including haloes, pilot’s halo, and ghost of the Brocken, sundogs, moondogs, superior mirages, inferior mirages, hallucinations, chimeras, internal camera reflections, photographic development defects, reflections from bright sources, electric lights, street lights, flashlights, aurora borealis, smoker lighting a pipe, unsteady stars, stars changing places, falling leaf effect, autostasis, astigmatisms, autokinetic effects, dust devils, park lights, weathervanes, icebergs, fires, angels, transformers, water tanks, tumbleweeds, failure to wear glasses, reflection from glasses, retinal defects, vitreous humor, anomalous radar refraction, radar scattering, radar ghost images radar, insects on radar, birds on radar, multiple radar reflections, light aberrations, beacon lights, and hoaxes.
4. UFOs as Experiences of a Psychoid Nature
“Of all the experiences in the transpersonal realm, those of a psychoid nature represent the greatest challenge to our everyday perception of reality.” This is how Stanislav Grof begins the chapter “Experiences of a Psychoid Nature” in his book The Holographic Mind. In this chapter Grof discusses various Jungian archetypes that have a psychoid nature, which, with the help of Jung (who, interestingly, in 1979 wrote a fascinating book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies), he defines as belonging “neither to the realm of the psyche nor the realm of material reality. Instead they existed within a strange twilight zone between consciousness and matter.” These archetypes include ghosts, poltergeists, synchronicities, acts of psychokinesis—the whole smorgasbord of the supernatural and paranormal—and yes, UFOs.
In the section of the chapter on UFOs, Grof discusses how “discussion in this area is usually limited to the question of whether or not our planet has been visited by actual physical spacecraft from other parts of the universe. However, it seems that the situation is more complicated than that. Many UFO experiences seem to have a psychoid quality, meaning that they are not merely hallucinations, nor are they ‘real’ in the ordinary sense of the word. It is quite possible that they represent strange hybrid phenomena, combining elements of mental life and the physical world.” Grof goes on to explain this theory and talks about how UFO sightings are usually “associated with visions of lights with supernatural radiance, similar to mystical raptures. The descriptions of the extraterrestrial visitors, alien cities, and spacecrafts certainly have parallels world mythology and thus could easily be explained to the collective unconscious. However that is only one aspect of the story. What interests us in our present context is the fact that in many instances, UFOs have left physical evidence behind, thus relegating them to consensus reality. It is this aspect that gives modern UFO phenomena a clear psychoid quality.”
And here is where things really start to get out of hand. According to Grof, Jacques Vallée, a trained astrophysicist and UFO researcher, has “concluded that at least some UFOs have a physical reality but these are simultaneously tied in with unusual inner experiences on the part of those who report the sightings. He concludes that the spaceships come from ‘other dimensions’ of space and time that coexist with our own universe and may not be ‘extraterrestrial’ in the usual sense of the word. Vallée speculates that the alien intelligences that produce and control the UFOs might be able to manipulate space and time in ways that are completely beyond our present ability to even imagine…However, the UFOs are not products of the observer’s imagination; like Jung’s spirit guides they exist quite independent of our consciousness. In other words, rather than being fabrications of our own imaginations, the ‘extraterrestrials’ are using our consciousnesses as doorways into our everyday level of reality.” But for what purpose? Grof doesn’t answer this but instead articulates the problem these ideas pose. “If UFOs do exist and are the product of the advanced technology we describe here, we are brought face to face with the convergence of two areas that we have always viewed as polar opposites: the rational world of advanced technology and the irrational world of fantasy.”
(Photo: In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as “Russian hail,” and later as “ghost rockets,” because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained.”)
5. The International Raelian Movement
You might remember the Raelian Movement from the news a few years ago. In 2002, the movement made headlines claiming to have cloned a human being, which they named Eve. And just this May you may have read in the paper about the Raelian’s newly formed “Adopt a Clitoris Program” to fight against sexual mutilation. Or maybe not… In 1973 extraterrestrials known as the Elohim (which in Hebrew means “those who come from the sky”) contacted then French sports journalist Claude Vorilhon. But instead of expressing concerns about nukes and taking Vorilhon for tours of the galaxy (though he claims he was flown to the Elohim’s home planet in 1975 where he met Buddha, Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad), these ETs entrusted Vorilhon with the knowledge that life on earth was genetically manufactured (cloned) millennia ago by alien scientists from a saucerful of their own DNA. During this meeting Vorilhon was given the prophet name Rael, which means “The Messenger of the Elohim,” and ordered to spread this message to everyone in the world. In 1973 he dropped his journalism job, wrote Le Livre qui dit la vérité (The Book Which Tells the Truth) about the Elohim, and founded The International Raelian Movement. The Movement, now based out of Montreal, claims to have 60,000 plus members in over 60 countries. Not surprisingly, the movement is founded on the principles of love, pleasure knowledge and conscience, and freedom from money, sickness and war, and works to promote equality as well as harmony among the sexes.
In her in depth study of the Raelian Movement, Aliens Adored: Rael’s UFO Religion, Susan J. Palmer probes everything about the Raelians from their science of cloning to their radical sexual ethics. For example, in the chapter “Sexy Angels and Amorous Aliens,” Palmer writes about how Rael, following orders from the Elohim, basically set up a harem of women for the aliens. Rael encouraged his harem of “beautiful young women [to cultivate] the arts of Eros and their seductive ‘feminine charisma’…so as lure the aliens to earth to be their lovers—all in the ancient spirit of courtly love…” Palmer then quotes a passage from his 1978 book Les extra-terrestres m’ont emené sur leur planéte (Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet), in which Rael writes about his visit the Elohim’s planet. During a tour of the planet, Rael was invited by a robot to sample alien sexual mores. “I found myself transported in front of a machine used for fabricating robots,” Rael writes. “A luminous cube appeared in front of me…A magnificent young brunette with wonderfully harmonious proportions appeared in three dimensions…a second woman, blond and heady this time appeared in the luminous cube;…a red-haired person and…a magnificent black woman, then a very slim Chinese woman.” Since Rael was unable choose between all these robots, he took them all back to his hotel. “There,” he writes, “I had the most unforgettable bath I have ever had, in the company of those charming robots, absolutely submissive to my desires.” If you’d like to join the International Raelian Movement or learn more about their sexual politics as well as their message of peace and understanding, check out their website
Links:
UFO Maps, sightings, as they happen
Wikipedia's UFO page
A leading archive of UFO evidence including photo galleries and up-to-date sightings reports
Esoterica’s UFO Index
The Alien-UFOs.com Network Forum
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