Any light or object that is seen in the atmosphere and is not
immediately identifiable is by definition an unidentified flying
object, or UFO -- which does not necessarily mean an
extraterrestrial spacecraft. There have been hundreds of thousands
of UFO sightings all over the world during the past 50 years. It is
generally agreed that up to 90% of all sightings can be attributed
to misidentification of familiar phenomena. Of the other 10%, some
remain unexplained due to lack of sufficient evidence, but in a
great many instances there is abundant evidence from reliable
witnesses, but no conventional explanation. As Lord Hill-Norton, a
former Chief of the British Defense Staff, has said: ’the evidence
is now so consistent and so overwhelming that no reasonably
intelligent person can deny that something unexplained is going on
in our atmosphere’
[1]. He criticizes what he calls the
’little
green men ha-ha-ha’ syndrome -- the tendency to dismiss with
ridicule a phenomenon that merits careful investigation.
The total number of unexplained UFO cases on record worldwide is
well in excess of 100,000. What’s more, surveys show that only 1
witness in 10 comes forward to report what they have seen, usually
out of fear of ridicule. There are between 5 and 10 thousand reports
of close encounters, involving observations of UFO occupants and
sometimes interaction with them
[2]. Close-encounter reports in
particular are often so bizarre and surreal that even many ufologists prefer to ignore their full implications.
Scientists in general have failed miserably to take up the challenge
presented by the UFO phenomenon, though there have been several
notable exceptions. Many academics who have shown serious interest
in UFOs have suffered harassment, intimidation, and derision. A
number of prominent scientists have devoted their lives to debunking
UFOs. One of earliest and severest critics was Harvard astronomer Dr
Donald Menzel. He had a simple, scientific explanation for all UFO
sightings: they were caused by temperature inversions. This
meteorological condition is created when pockets of cold air get
trapped in warm air; the difference in density causes lights from
the ground to be reflected or refracted. The fact that the theory
simply didn’t work in most cases did not dampen his enthusiasm. John
Keel writes:
Refracted light from air inversions explained the funny glows in the
sky but how did Menzel explain all the car chases,
abductions, landings, and weird manifestations? His scientific
answer was that all the witnesses were liars, fools, or drunks.
That took care of that.
[3]
UFOs have been investigated by every major government on earth, and
are still being studied at official level in countries such as
China, France, Spain, Russia, the US, and the
UK. Yet although the
military have numerous unexplained cases on record, they have not
seen fit to divulge all their data and findings. The history of UFO
investigations carried out by the US Air Force (Projects Sign,
Grudge, Blue Book, and Stork, the Robertson Panel, and
the Condon
Committee), and the documents released under the Freedom of
Information Act since the mid-1970s show that military officials who
took UFOs seriously tended to be sidelined, while the debunkers have
generally had the upper hand.
However, the military’s often-repeated claim that there is nothing
unusual to explain is blatantly contradicted by the data assembled
in official reports. For example, the 1969 Condon Report concluded
that further scientific study of UFOs could not be expected to
contribute anything worthwhile to scientific knowledge. Yet by its
own admission as many as one third of its cases were unexplained
even after in-depth scrutiny. Moreover, some of its proposed
’explanations’ were grossly inadequate, as the following case
illustrates.
On 30 June 1954 the crew and some of the passengers on a flight from
New York to London saw a large cigar-shaped object, constantly
changing shape, with 6 smaller black globular objects milling round
it. After about 15 minutes the 6 small objects entered the large
object, which sped off and disappeared. When the plane landed at
Goose Bay, Canada, to refuel, the crew were told there had been
several recent UFO sightings in the Labrador area. The official
explanation issued by the Air Ministry in London was that the
phenomenon was associated with a solar eclipse -- one that had not
yet begun when the sighting took place! In 1969 a member of the
Condon Committee studied the sighting and suggested it had been a
mirage. He admitted there were problems with this explanation, and
concluded with the following remarkable statement: ’This unusual
sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost
certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently
has never been reported before or since’
[4].
Following publication of
the Condon Report, all the project’s files
were destroyed. Edward Condon himself, a professor of physics and
astrophysics, lumped UFO studies, spiritualism, and psychical
research together as ’pseudoscience’, and argued that any publishers
or teachers found guilty of presenting pseudoscience as established
truth should be ’publicly horsewhipped and forever banned from
further activity’
[5]! By the late 1960s the Air Force was tired of
the expense and public controversy associated with
Project Blue
Book, and the Condon Report gave it what it wanted: an excuse to
terminate its official involvement in UFO investigations. It is now
known that while Project Blue Book was in progress, a classified,
extensive UFO investigation known as Project Stork was also being
conducted, unknown even to Blue Book personnel
[6]. It is widely
suspected that covert investigations have continued to the present
day.
Some researchers believe that senior military and government
officials already know the whole truth about UFOs. The military have
allegedly recovered crashed UFOs, test-flown them, carried out
autopsies on alien bodies, and even struck a deal with the aliens.
According to one claim, all the major technological advances of the
past half century derive from captured alien hardware! However,
there is a distinct lack of any hard, compelling evidence to support
such assertions.
The most famous alleged ’UFO crash’ took place near Roswell, New
Mexico, in June 1947. There had been several UFO sightings in the
preceding weeks, and when unusual debris from a downed object was
found on a ranch, the local air base immediately issued a press
statement saying that a crashed flying saucer had been recovered.
This statement was quickly retracted and the debris was instead said
to be the remains of a weather balloon and its radar target.
Listen to
ABC News reporting on a crashed flying saucer, Roswell
N.M. 1947.
Little more was heard of
the Roswell incident for the next 30 years,
when new ’evidence’ began to emerge. Today Roswell has assumed
mythic proportions in the public imagination. But in a cogent
deconstruction of the Roswell legend, Karl Pflock shows it to be a
sorry tale of questionable and conflicting claims, dubious
witnesses, and blinkered investigators; evidence that at first sight
seems substantial invariably evaporates when subjected to close
scrutiny. Secret government documents declassified since 1975
together with the history of US defense programs show beyond
reasonable doubt that no ’crashed disc’ was retrieved at Roswell
[7].
Fig. 1.1. Debris found near Roswell, June 1947. It includes pieces
of plastic-like and rubber-like material, foil-like material, short
balsa struts, and parchment-like paper. A week and a half earlier, a
657-foot-tall balloon array, launched from a nearby army air base
under a top-secret project code-named ’Mogul’, had gone missing in
the area. Its balloons, radar-reflectors, parachutes, and other
components consisted of the types of material found at Roswell. The
device was certainly more than a ’mere weather balloon’. The arrays,
equipped with special microphones, were intended to detect Soviet
atom bomb tests and to provide early warning of rocket attacks.
However, some people contend that the wreckage only resembles
ordinary foil, balsa, plastic, etc., and is actually debris from a
crashed flying saucer. It is claimed that the struts and foil
possessed unearthly strength -- even though the photos clearly show
the debris to consist of shattered and shredded fragments! As time
has passed, the Roswell incident has taken on a life of its own,
spawning additional, contradictory tales about a second and even
third crash site, and the recovery and examination of alien bodies.
It appears that some elements of the intelligence community are
eager to fuel rumours of a grand conspiracy to keep the public in
the dark. They have sometimes gone to elaborate lengths to spread
disinformation by leaking false documents to selected ufologists or
by titillating them with ’deep-throat’ revelations about ’the coverup’
[8]. Tales of crashed spaceships and alien bodies have come
primarily from ’former’ military intelligence personnel, yet
curiously none of them has received so much as a slap on the wrist
for revealing ’state secrets’. A vocal and influential conspiracy
subculture has developed among UFO enthusiasts, possessing its own
magical words of power -- Roswell, Hangar 18, Majestic 12, and Area
51/Dreamland.* But the inordinate amount of time devoted to
conspiracy-mongering has done nothing to advance our understanding
of the core UFO mystery.
*Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is rumoured to be used
for storing recovered alien bodies and crashed discs.
Majestic 12 is
supposedly a higher-than-top-secret panel of military officers and
scientists responsible for overseeing the study of crashed discs and
alien corpses.
Area 51 at the Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada
desert is another alleged site where crashed discs are stored,
reverse-engineered, and test-flown.
Many researchers think that the military are actually just as much
in the dark about what is behind the UFO phenomenon as anybody else
but are unwilling to admit it -- they are more interested in
concealing their ignorance and impotence rather than their
knowledge. Scientist
Jacques Vallee says:
UFOs may not
be spacecraft at all. And the government may simply be hiding
the fact that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on air
defense, it has no more clues to the nature of the phenomenon
today than it did in the forties when it began its
investigations. [9]
A massive concealment of puzzling data is not the same as a global
-- or even ’cosmic’! -- conspiracy to hide the ultimate truth about
UFOs. As we shall see, unless the military have a deep understanding
of occult dynamics they are unlikely to have much of a clue as to
what UFOs are really about!
The level of official secrecy varies from country to country.
France, for instance, has an established system of report-collecting
by the national police, and the reports are then analyzed by a
government-funded team of scientists known as SEPRA (formerly
GEPAN).
However, this group does not seek publicity for fear that some
people might find the large number of well-documented but
unexplained cases disturbing.
The Spanish Air Force gradually began
to declassify some UFO documents in 1992 after a long process of
negotiations beginning in 1978.
Australian ufologists have been
given open access to Australian Air Force UFO files.
In Belgium the
Chief of Operations of the Air Force cooperated with civilian UFO
groups and the police in providing radar and other data during the
massive wave of UFO sightings in 1989-91 [10]
The astonishing narrow-mindedness that afflicts many scientists when
confronted with the UFO phenomenon is illustrated by the following
comment by Albert Einstein about UFO witnesses:
’These people have
seen something. What it is I do not know and am not curious to
know’ [11].
The general failure of official scientific, academic, and
governmental bodies to mount a serious, public investigation, means
that ufology has attracted many amateurs, and the quality of
research is highly uneven. Jacques Vallee comments:
’The field has
been overrun by people who don’t need to undertake any real
research, because they already know all the answers’ [12].
Serious UFO study is also hampered by the media, which almost always want to
treat the subject in a jocular or sensationalist manner.
UFO investigators tend to select only those data that fit their
preconceived hypotheses. Thus debunkers, who dismiss the idea that
there is anything unusual going on, prefer to discuss cases where
UFOs turn out to be hoaxes or misidentifications, and then conclude
that no further explanation is required. ’Natural’ explanations for
UFOs include stars, planets, meteorites, satellites, rockets,
flares, guided missiles, weather balloons, conventional aircraft,
unmanned aerial vehicles, birds, and optical illusions. However,
debunkers’ torturous attempts to explain away more challenging cases
can be very entertaining.
Most mainstream ufologists believe that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts
spacecraft piloted by flesh-and-blood visitors from other planets,
who are carrying out a reconnaissance of the earth. They therefore
focus on sightings of apparently solid, highly advanced spacecraft
reported by well-qualified pilots and military personnel and then
conclude that we are dealing with advanced extraterrestrial
technology. Cases that don’t fit into the extraterrestrial
straitjacket and wilder details of cases its supporters do report
are distorted or suppressed to avoid discrediting witnesses and the
hypothesis. For although UFOs are sometimes physical enough to be
tracked by radar, to interact with their surroundings, and to be
seen by hundreds of people at the same time, the wide range of
paranormal phenomena involved in close encounters suggests that we
are confronted with visitations from the psychic world rather than
from other planets.
References
1. Timothy Good, Beyond Top Secret: The worldwide UFO security
threat, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1996, p. xii. 2. Jacques Vallee, Confrontations: A scientist’s search for alien
contact, London: Souvenir Press, 1990, p. 18. 3. John A. Keel, Disneyland of the Gods, Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet,
1995, pp. 24-5. 4. Jenny Randles, The UFO Conspiracy: The first forty years, New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1993, pp. 46-7; Beyond Top Secret, pp. 190-2.
5. Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities: Ancient insights into
modern UFO phenomena, Alachua, FL: Govardhan Hill Publishing, 2nd
ed., 1995, p. 21. 6. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science: Journals 1957-1969, New York:
Marlowe & Company, 1996, pp. 284, 311-2, 425-7, 439-41. 7.
Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient facts and the will to
believe, New York: Prometheus Books, 2001. 8. Jacques Vallee, Revelations: Alien contact and human deception,
New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. 9. Jacques Vallee, Dimensions: A casebook of alien contact, New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 227. 10. Charles F. Emmons, At the Threshold: UFOs, science and the new
age, Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press, 1997, pp. 25-6. 11. David M. Jacobs (ed.), UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the
borders of knowledge, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
2000, p. 60fn. 12. Revelations, p. 185.
2. UFOs past and present
Throughout recorded history, people have reported seeing strange
objects in the sky.
In ancient and medieval times portents and objects in the sky were
taken more or less as a matter of fact, perhaps because there was no
known human air traffic at the time with which to confuse them. ...
The Assyrians saw flying bulls, ancient Greeks and Arabs saw flying
horses, the opulent Persians thought they saw flying carpets, the
warlike Romans watched flying shields and spears and whole battles
in the sky at the very moment that they themselves were engaged in
earthly combat.
As the ancient
world became Christianized, the aerial sightings became fiery
crosses and other threatening signs of doom foretelling plagues
and disasters. ... When the Renaissance opened up people’s minds
to the exploration of the world, UFOs appropriately took the
forms of galleys and caravels, and then, as the French first
began experimenting with balloons, certain vast globes were seen
floating in the upper heavens ...[1]
The most ancient detailed sighting comes from the
royal annals of
the pharaohThutmose III, about 3450 years ago. One morning, a huge
fiery circle, some 50 m across, was seen in the sky. It made no
sound but emitted a foul odour, and caused great consternation. A
few days later, in the evening, numerous similar fiery circles
appeared, and the pharaoh and his army watched them move towards the
south, shining brighter than the sun. On this occasion ’fishes and
volatiles’ fell from the sky [2].
According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, in 793 AD ’terrible portents
appeared in Northumbria [England], and miserably afflicted the
inhabitants; these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery
dragons were seen flying in the air, and soon followed a great
famine’. In the 13th century Albertus Magnus
challenged the idea that lights in the sky were literally
fire-breathing dragons and argued that the phenomenon probably
involved ascending and descending ’vapours’ that burned and gave off smoke
[3].
Luminous phenomena seem to have been commonplace in the Japanese
skies during the Middle Ages. On 27 October 1180 an unusual luminous
object described as an ’earthenware vessel’ flew from a mountain in
the Kii province beyond the northeast mountain of Fukuhara at
midnight. After a while, the object changed course and was lost to
sight at the southern horizon, leaving a luminous trail. On 24
September 1235, while General Yoritsume was camping with his army,
mysterious sources of light were suddenly seen to swing and circle
in the southwest, moving in loops until the early morning. The
General ordered what we would now call a ’full-scale scientific
investigation’. His consultants finally reported that the event had
a completely natural explanation: it was only the wind making the
stars sway [4]! (Nowadays the arguments used by official
’experts’
to debunk such phenomena may sound more sophisticated, but they can
be just as vacuous!)
Western Europe, too, had its share of strange flying objects and
celestial manifestations in the Middle Ages, including ’bearded,
hairy comets, torches, flames, columns, spears, shields, dragons,
duplicate moons, suns, and other similar things’ [5]. A Latin
document found at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, England, describes an
incident in 1290 when a ’round, flat, silver object’ flew over the
monastery exciting ’maximum terror’ among the monks [6]. A German
publication from 1493 describes how a cigar-shaped object surrounded
by flames flew in a straight path through the sky from south to
east, then turned towards the setting sun. In Nuremberg in 1561 and
Basil in 1566, witnesses reported seeing large aerial ’tubes’ from
which spheres and discs emerged and appeared to fight with each
other in aerial dances [7].
Fig. 2.1. A medieval representation of a flaming celestial object.
From an incunabulum dated 1493 (courtesy of Jacques Vallee)
[8].
Nostradamus reported that on 1 February 1554 hundreds of
French
people in Provence saw a large, bright fire in the form of a
’burning rod or torch’ flying from east to west, emitting sparks and
flames, and leaving a fiery trail. Its size was estimated at 200 m.
It flew ’as rapidly as an arrow’, with a loud rustling sound, and
leaves and trees moved to and fro as if shaken by a violent storm.
It then changed direction and headed south towards the sea. The
sighting lasted some 20 minutes [9].
The following report was entered into the records of a Russian
monastery in August 1663. A great sound was heard in the heavens and
many people emerged from the church in the village of Roboziero to
see a large ball of fire, which passed over the church towards a
lake. It measured some 140 ft in diameter and emitted 2 fiery beams.
The object came back twice over the next couple of hours, and
fishermen in a boat on the lake were severely burned by the heat.
The witnesses regarded the event as a sign from God [10].
On 5 December 1737 an astronomer from Sheffield, England, observed
’the apparition of a dark red cloud, below which was a luminous body
which emitted intense beams of light’. The light beams moved slowly
for a while, then stopped, and intense heat was felt. A similar
object was seen the same day in Ireland and then in Romania, where
it stayed still for 2 hours, separated into 2 parts which then
rejoined, and finally disappeared towards the west [11]. In the
evening of 26 December 1785, Edinburgh was illuminated as bright as
day by a sphere with a sort of cone-shaped attachment, which was
seen from a number of distant places [12].
One January evening in 1878, a man in Texas saw a fast-moving object
in the southern sky. When it passed overhead, he noted its
resemblance to a ’large saucer’. From November 1896 to May 1897
newspapers all across America were filled with hundreds of stories
about mysterious ’airships’ -- over 6 years before the first
heavier-than-air flight by the Wright brothers [13]. They included
cigar-shaped craft and mechanical birds with giant wings (which
reportedly flapped in some cases). The sightings included reports of
human crews and bright searchlight beams at night. No such man-made
craft existed at the time.
In 1904-05 a series of sightings of lightballs and other luminous
phenomena took place around 2 small villages in Wales. They became
associated with a religious revival, and were seen as divine signs
by the local populace. In 1909 a wave of airship sightings occurred
in Great Britain, the US, New Zealand, and Australia. Most of the
British sightings were of torpedo-shaped vessels moving at a
’tremendous pace’, with flashing lights and searchlights. Another
airship wave erupted across Europe in the autumn of 1912. As before,
the airships were capable of hovering and moving at great speeds,
even against the wind. Unidentified cigar-shaped objects have
continued to be reported since then, though they are no longer
called ’airships’.
One evening in 1917, 2 women and their children were walking home
across a field in the American state of Maine, when a huge silent
object suddenly appeared overhead, emitting hues of red, blue,
green, and yellow, and causing the witnesses to take to their heels
[14]. In 1926 a stunt pilot was startled to see
’six things that
looked like huge shiny manhole covers’ circling his airplane while
en route to Colorado [15].
Between 1933 and 1937 mysterious, conventionally shaped, unmarked
aircraft appeared over Scandinavia and, to a lesser extent, the US
and Britain. The ’ghost fliers’ flew very low, projecting powerful
searchlights onto the ground. And although engine noises were
generally heard, the aircraft sometimes performed low-level manoeuvres in complete silence. They frequently flew in heavy fogs
and blizzards -- conditions that would have grounded most biplanes
of the day. The governments of Sweden, Norway, and Finland launched
large-scale investigations but failed to find a satisfactory
explanation for all the sightings [16].
During the Second World War, Allied pilots in both the
European and Pacific theatres were confronted with what they called
’foo
fighters’, which followed and sometimes buzzed their planes. They
usually took the form of small orange balls of light, but sometimes
small discs -- some translucent -- and occasionally larger
phenomena. They occurred singly and in formations. The pilots’ fears
that they were secret enemy weapons eventually dissipated because
the objects failed to carry out any aggressive action. German pilots
reported the same curious phenomena near their aircraft and assumed
they were Allied weapons. ’Foo fighters’ were seen again during the
Korean war, and aircraft pilots today continue to encounter strange
balls of light, which often appear to play games with them
[17].
In 1946 over 2000 reports of ’ghost rockets’ and other unidentified
flying objects were reported by witnesses in Finland, Norway,
Sweden, and Denmark, followed by reports from Portugal,
Morocco,
Italy, Greece, and India. The ’rockets’ left fiery trails and
sometimes performed fantastic manoeuvres, crossing the sky at
tremendous velocity, diving and climbing, though at other times they
proceeded in a leisurely manner. Some of them were seen to crash
into lakes with great explosions, but detailed searches failed to
find any wreckage. These objects were thought to be of Soviet
origin, perhaps test vehicles built by captured German rocket
scientists, while the Soviets themselves suspected the Americans
[18].
On 25 June 1947, businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private
plane over Mount Rainier in the state of Washington, when he spotted
9 shining objects flying in formation at high speed. He compared
their motion to that of ’a saucer skipping over water’. Soon
afterwards a headline writer coined the phrase ’flying saucer’ and
-- thanks to widespread media coverage -- the modern UFO age was
born. Ironically, the objects Arnold saw were not disc-shaped but
heel-shaped, with the rounded end pointing in the direction of
motion. Over a year earlier, in May 1946, UFO sightings were
recorded in the former Soviet Union. The observations included
landings, thereby contradicting the theory that landings belong
solely to a ’later phase’ of the phenomenon [19].
A key feature of the UFO phenomenon is that sightings occur in
waves, with brief peaks followed by longer periods of lesser
activity
[20]. A wave of sightings -- mainly of daylight discs --
occurred in the US in the summer of 1947 following Arnold’s initial
report. The immediate concern was whether they might be Soviet
technology, but by the end of the year this possibility had been
virtually eliminated. The next major outbreak of sightings occurred
in the US during the summer of 1952, with reports following
worldwide. At the height of the flap, the US Air Force was receiving
200 reports a day. This wave was dominated by reports of nocturnal
lights, and included radar/visual sightings over Washington National
Airport on 2 consecutive weekends in late July.
A major UFO wave took place during September to November 1954.
Activity centered in both South America and Europe, but concentrated
mainly in France and Italy. In a large percentage of the French
cases, mainly oval or elliptical UFOs appeared on the ground in
association with small humanoid entities. Numerous cigar-shaped UFOs
were also reported in France during the same period. In November
1957, UFOs were back over the US with a vengeance. Several witnesses
reported that their car headlights and engines failed when a UFO was
present but returned to normal when it departed.
Another wave began in the US in the fall of 1965, continuing into
1966, and yet another in October 1973. UFO activity continued in
Australia and Europe into 1974. The 1973-74 wave was one of the
biggest in UFO history; thousands of people across the US reported
distant and high-level silvery discs, nocturnal meandering lights,
car-chasing incidents, instances of UFOs interfering with mechanical
and electromagnetic equipment, UFO landings that left traces behind,
frightened animals, and had physical and psychological effects on
humans, and occupant sightings. The autumn of 1978 saw another flap
over Italy, Australia, and South America.
From 1982 to 1987, the Hudson Valley area of New York was haunted by
reports of lighted boomerang-shaped UFOs, allegedly as wide as
several football fields. They were seen by over 5000 witnesses,
sometimes hundreds of witnesses on a single night. Around the same
time, Brazilians were reporting relatively small,
refrigerator-shaped UFOs which emitted burning beams of light. The
former Soviet Union experienced a major UFO wave in 1989-90; earlier
waves had occurred in 1966-67 and 1977-79. A spectacular UFO wave
struck in Belgium between November 1989 and April 1991. There were
some 3500 sightings of giant, dark-coloured, triangular-shaped UFOs,
often flying silently at low speeds and altitudes. They were seen by
a total of about 10,000 people, and by as many as 100 people at a
time [21].
Reports of alien beings emerging from landed craft have been around
since the beginning of the modern UFO age, but have tended to
increase as time has passed. They met with great resistance from
early ufologists, who tended to suppress them for fear of
jeopardizing their chances of winning official backing for a public
investigation of UFO sightings. Needless to say, human encounters
with a wide variety of otherworldly entities, from ’divine’ to
’demonic’, have been reported throughout history, and interpreted in
the light of the prevailing religious or scientific beliefs. Some
ancient reports mention flying beings or associate entities seen on
the ground with aerial objects or bright lights.
A 9th-century French text describes how 3 men and a woman were seen
descending from a ’cloud ship’ in Lyons, France. They said they had
been taken on board by beings called sylphs from Magonia, a magical
land located somewhere in the sky. The local populace regarded them
as evil magicians and were about to cast them into the fire when the
Bishop of Lyons, Agobard, saved them by denying the reality of
sylphs, magicians, and Magonia [22].
Reports of encounters with humanlike entities occurred during the
airship sightings in the US in 1896-97, and included attempted
abductions. In 1914 a German bakery worker saw a cigar-shaped object
hovering just above the ground. 4 or 5 little humanoids, 1.2 meters
tall, were standing next to it, and then entered it by a ladder. The
object rose vertically without making a sound and disappeared
[23].
One afternoon in the spring of 1928, a 17-year-old American was
driving along a country road when he saw an object coming into view
in the sky. It appeared to be a metallic hexagon with a domed top,
22 ft wide and 7 ft high. Rivets could be seen at the edge of each
side of the craft. It had a window in which he saw the head and
upper torso of a man in a dark-blue uniform, who ’would pass for an
Italian in this world’. The object moved very slowly but did not
stop. The occupant looked towards the car, then the object rotated,
flew across the road, and abruptly went off at ’terrific speed’
[24].
In the summer of 1948 in the German province of Sauerland, a man was
looking after his sheep in some woods when suddenly they scattered
in panic. He heard a rushing sound and saw an object, 30 m long and
about 3 m high, emerge in front of him from what looked like an
’artificial fog’, and land on the grass. When the man touched it, a
strong electric shock knocked him to the ground. He lay unconscious
for a while, then awoke some 80 m from where he had collapsed. All
around him stood entities about 1 m tall with large heads, big
slanting eyes, and short, stubby hair. In front of their chests they
carried boxes with tubes hanging down, which they put into their
mouths from time to time. They spoke to each other in an unknown
language. Next to the craft, which was still enveloped in mist,
stood another 4 or 5 humanoids, who were examining the soil or grass
and collecting samples. Finally all the beings got into the craft,
which emitted a high-pitched whining sound and flew rapidly away. At
the place where it had landed the man discovered 6 to 8 circular
areas of burnt grass in a line, 2 to 4 m apart, and about 1 m in
diameter
[25].
In the early 1950s some flamboyant figures began to claim ongoing
contact with benevolent, handsome, Nordic-looking ’space brothers’
from Venus, Mars, and other planets. Prominent
contacteés included
George Adamski, Daniel Fry, Howard Menger, George Van Tassel,
Truman Bethurum, and Orfeo Angelucci. Through these ’ambassadors’, the
space brothers allegedly wanted to warn humanity of the dangers of
nuclear energy, and to spread their message of peace and
brotherhood. ’Physical contacteés’ such as Adamski received messages
in face-to-face encounters, while ’psychic contacteés’ such as Van
Tassel received messages via dreams, automatic writing, voices in
the head, or visions. The contacteé movement continues to this day,
though on a much smaller scale. For instance, Swiss farmer
Billy
Meier claims to be in contact with beings from
the Pleiades. They
include Semjase, who is said to be over 400 years old and to visit
earth regularly to buy cosmetics.
Some contacteés claimed they had been taken on rides in saucers to
other planets.
Adamski reported that he saw forests, mountains,
lakes, and even people on the moon, and inhabited cities,
snow-capped mountains, and vegetation on Venus.
Menger’s encounters
are the most bizarre of all. On one occasion he gave some of the
female aliens some bras, only to be told they did not wear such
garments. He also claimed he would regularly cut the aliens’ long
hair so they could move around on earth without attracting
attention. In exchange he was taken on a trip to the moon, where he
claimed that the atmosphere was similar to earth’s. He said he had
brought back some ’lunar potatoes’, which were subsequently
confiscated by the government!
Angelucci claimed to have met
Jesus,
who revealed he was an extraterrestrial. Some contacteés said the
space people had enabled them to do some time travelling [26].
Most
researchers dismiss the whole contacteé phenomenon as bunk. But
although some hoaxing may have been involved, the absurdity of many
of the tales could also mean that the contacteés were simply
reporting what they sincerely believed they had experienced.
Many researchers found the flood of alien contact stories emerging
from Western Europe and South America in 1954 much more difficult to
dismiss. The aliens were often seen repairing their craft or
collecting rock, soil, or water samples. In contrast to the friendly
space brothers, these aliens tended to be short and sometimes rather
aggressive, often paralyzing witnesses with beams of light.
For instance, at about 10.30 pm on 10 September 1954, Marius Dewilde
was alerted by the sound of his dog howling and trying to get inside
his house near the French village of Quarouble, not far from
Valenciennes. When he went outside he saw a dark mass sitting on the
railroad tracks. He then saw 2 beings, less than 1 m tall, wearing
huge helmets and diving suits. He started to move towards them, but
a bright light from the craft paralyzed him. The creatures hurried
back to the craft, there was a loud whistling sound, and the object
rose into the sky emitting ’thick dark steam’. Later examination
showed depressions in the railroad ties that suggested a craft
weighing 35 tons had been standing there [27].
In a number of cases during the 1954 wave, the creatures seem to
have been trying to abduct the witnesses. In Brazil, 2 boys who had
been hunting were attacked by 4 small hairy creatures who tried to
drag off one of the boys. In Venezuela, Jesus Paz walked into some
bushes and began to scream. When his friends came to his aid, they
saw a hairy creature run off and escape in a disc-shaped object. In
another case from Venezuela, four 3-ft-tall hairy dwarfs stepped out
of a hovering UFO and attempted to abduct a young man. His companion
struck one of the entities on the head with his gun butt, which
splintered as if it had collided with solid rock [28]. These
witnesses were able to fight off their attackers, in contrast to
modern reports in which victims report being unable to resist the
alien abduction attempts.
In the decade and a half that followed, several highly significant
cases occurred that convinced many investigators that occupant
reports were not only real but potentially threatening. The first
was the abduction of Antonio Villas-Boas in Brazil in 1957,
apparently for sexual purposes. The tale was considered so absurd
even by UFO researchers that it was not written up in English until
the mid-1960s. By then a second landmark abduction case had
occurred, that of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire in
September 1961. It bore many similarities to the Villas-Boas story,
but did not reach the press until 1965 (see section 9).
On 24 April 1964 a third landmark close encounter occurred. Police
officer Lonnie Zamora was on patrol on the outskirts of Socorro, New
Mexico, when he heard a loud roaring noise and saw a blue tapering
flame low on the horizon. He drove at once to the location and saw
what he thought was an overturned car. When he got out of his car,
he saw 2 small people in white coveralls near the object, which was
white, metallic, and egg-shaped. When they saw him, they scrambled
inside their craft, and moments later it lifted off with a roar,
emitting a flame. Left behind were a burning bush and impressions of
the landing gear. Other witnesses reported seeing a mysterious flame
or hearing a deafening noise. The FBI, CIA, and Air Force all became
involved, but the case was never solved [29]. Thanks to such
high-caliber
cases,by the late 1960s the reality of UFO-related entities was no
longer such a taboo subject.
Fig. 2.2. Artist’s
interpretation of the UFO observed by Lonnie Zamora, April 1964.
[30]
Abductionsor attempted abductions were initially extremely rare,
numbering about one a year, but they began to increase during the
1973 wave, and have multiplied in recent decades, until today some
UFO organizations are interested in little else. In the 1970s,
abductees often reported encountering UFOs on lonely roads, and
later recalled under hypnosis that they had been abducted. The first
report of a bedroom abduction occurred in 1973, and nowadays bedroom
encounters are standard. Abductees claim that little gray beings
with large black eyes take them against their will to a secret
location, usually assumed to be a spacecraft, though it is rarely
seen from the outside. They sometimes claim that they pass through
solid walls and doors in a beam of light, and that spouses and
others in the house are ’switched off’ so they will not notice the
abduction. They report undergoing painful medical examinations,
often including the collection of sperm and ova, supposedly to
produce alien-human hybrids. They often communicate with the aliens
telepathically. As might be expected, such claims have generated
intense controversy.
Of course, what witnesses report is one thing -- the reality of the
experience, and its meaning, are a different matter! What is certain
is that the complexity and diversity of the UFO phenomenon rule out
the possibility that there is a single, straightforward explanation
that fits every case.
References
1. Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident, New
York: Berkeley, 1988 (1980), pp. 5-6. 2. M.K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO, New York: Citadel Press, 1955,
pp. 179-81. 3. Paul Devereux, Earth Lights Revelation: UFOs and mystery lightform phenomena, London: Blandford, 1990, pp. 35, 41; Jerome
Clark, Unexplained! 347 strange sightings, incredible occurrences,
and puzzling physical phenomena, Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press,
1993, p. 349. 4. Jacques Vallee, Dimensions: A casebook of alien contact, New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989, pp. 10-1. 5. Ibid., p. 13.
6. The Case for the UFO, p. 176. 7. Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the mythic
imagination, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1991, p. 70. 8. Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, folklore, and
parallel worlds, Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 1993 (1969), plate
4. 9. Illobrand von Ludwiger, Best UFO Cases -- Europe, Las Vegas: NV,
National Institute for Discovery Science, 1998, pp. 2, 17. 10. Jacques Vallee, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A cosmic
samizdat, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992, pp. 134-6. 11.
Best UFO Cases -- Europe, p. 3. 12. The Case for the UFO, p. 177.
13. Unexplained!, pp. 1-5. 14. Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities: Ancient insights into
modern UFO phenomena, Alachua, FL: Govardhan Hill Publishing, 2nd
ed., 1995, p. 59. 15. Charles F. Emmons, At the Threshold: UFOs, science and the new
age, Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press, 1997, pp. 2-3. 16. Timothy Good, Beyond Top Secret: The worldwide UFO security
threat, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1996, pp. xviii-xx. 17. Best UFO Cases -- Europe, pp. 4-8.
18. Ibid., pp. 8-9; Beyond Top Secret, pp. xxviii-xxxiv.
19. UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, p. 76.
20. Dennis Stacy and Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to UFOs: A
classification of various unidentified aerial phenomena based on
eyewitness accounts, New York: Quill, 2000, pp. 151-5. 21. At the Threshold, p. 162; Best UFO Cases -- Europe, pp. 31-40.
22. Dimensions, pp. 15, 261-6. 23. Best UFO Cases -- Europe, p. 46.
24. Jacques Vallee, Confrontations: A scientist’s search for alien
contact, London: Souvenir Press, 1990, pp. 147-9. 25. Best UFO Cases -- Europe, p. 46.
26. Nick Pope, The Uninvited: An exposé of the alien abduction
phenomenon, London: Pocket Books, 1998, pp. 17-31. 27. Passport to Magonia, pp. 17, 209; Beyond Top Secret, pp. 108-9.
28. Kevin Randle and Russ Estes, Faces of the Visitors: An
illustrated reference to alien contact, New York: Fireside, 1997, p.
262; Passport to Magonia, p. 247; Unexplained!, p. 177. 29. The Field Guide to UFOs, pp. 72-3; Patrick Huyghe,
’The best UFO
case ever? A review and update of the Socorro incident’, The
Anomalist, no. 8, 2000, pp. 113-36. 30. Ibid., p. 113 (illustration by Chris Lambright).
According to the popular extraterrestrial hypothesis, UFOs are
’somebody else’s spacecraft’. The earth is allegedly being visited
by beings from other solar systems who are carrying out a survey of
our planet and its inhabitants. Various objections have been raised
to this hypothesis [1].
The possibility that there are numerous intelligent civilizations in
our galaxy is now widely accepted. The SETI project is trying to
detect their presence by analyzing radio signals from space. Some
scientists, however, argue that alien civilizations must be very
rare or even nonexistent because if they were as numerous as
commonly believed, the earth should have been visited by several of
them by now; these scientists dismiss the idea that UFOs are
extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Those who believe that aliens are already here are often asked why
the visitors don’t land on the White House lawn. One possible answer
is that they have got more sense! Others argue that there is no need
to as the aliens have already struck a secret deal with the
authorities! A more common argument is that the aliens are obeying a
’prime directive’ not to interfere in earth affairs -- though this
is clearly contradicted by the enormous impact the UFO phenomenon
has had on human society over the past 50 years, if not the past
several millennia.
There could conceivably be obstacles preventing humanlike lifeforms
from surviving a journey through interstellar or intergalactic
space, but none are known at present. It has, however, been argued
that UFOs cannot come from another solar system because the enormous
distances involved are prohibitive. However, even with our present
technology it is possible to travel to another star, though it would
take numerous generations. Moreover, some alien civilizations could
have developed technologies far in advance of those on earth. And
although standard relativity theory forbids faster-than-light
travel, reality may not. Just as sound waves cannot propel an object
to supersonic speeds, so electromagnetic forces cannot accelerate
objects to superluminal speeds. What gravity control may yet
achieve, remains to be seen.
Another objection to the ET hypothesis is that it is highly
improbable that intelligent lifeforms on other planets would be
humanoid in appearance and display human emotions. Others disagree
and argue that since the basic human form is highly functional and
efficient, it could be fairly common in the universe.* It is also
speculated that extraterrestrials may have played a role in
genetically engineering the human race, or that they have
genetically modified themselves in order to make themselves more
humanlike -- though given their rather ’alien’ appearances, the
attempt does not seem to have been a complete success! A stronger
objection is that it is unlikely that intelligent beings from other
planets would be adapted to our own gravity or able to breathe our
own atmosphere.
*According to theosophy, every mature sun has a family of planets,
and kingdoms corresponding to those on earth will evolve on every
planet, though at any one time only one kingdom is dominant on each
of the 12 globes (located on 7 different cosmic planes) making up a
complete ’planetary chain’. The ’human’ kingdoms on the 7 ’sacred
planets’ of our own solar system (i.e. those most closely related to
earth) are said to approximate our own form to some extent
[2].
We are in no position to absolutely rule out the possibility that
the earth has been or is being visited by one or more
extraterrestrial humanlike races. However, it is estimated that
there may have been over a million UFO landings in the past half
century -- a number that far exceeds the requirements for a
sophisticated survey of our planet [3]. Moreover, a single, small
probe orbiting 1000 miles above the earth would be able to capture
in a few weeks most of the important facts about the planet’s
geography, weather, vegetation, and culture.
Another major problem facing the ET hypothesis is the incredible
diversity of UFOs and their occupants. Is it realistic to think that
dozens or even hundreds of extraterrestrial races are visiting earth
simultaneously? A further problem is the often weird behaviour of
UFO entities. Many have been reported to appear and disappear
abruptly and float through the air. In addition, it is difficult to
believe that extraterrestrials have travelled all this way to do the
strange things that witnesses have described: these include chasing
cars and aircraft, terrifying people, talking nonsense, collecting
soil and rock samples, and kidnapping and violating people. Our ’extraterrestrial’ visitors have even been known to do a spot of
rabbit poaching, as the following case illustrates.
On 14 November 1954, at Isola, Italy, a farmer saw a bright,
cigar-shaped object land nearby. 3 small beings in metallic diving
suits got out, and centered their attention on rabbits in a cage
while speaking to one another in an unknown language. Thinking they
were going to steal the animals, the farmer aimed a rifle at the
intruders, but it failed to fire and the witness suddenly felt so
weak he had to drop the gun. The beings took the rabbits and their
craft departed, leaving a bright trail. The farmer then found
himself able to move again [4].
If we adopt the ET hypothesis, alien abductions, too, are thoroughly
absurd. The aliens supposedly have a science that allows them to
cross light years of space in craft that outperform our best jet
fighters. Yet they are apparently such poor doctors that they are
unable to draw blood, collect sperm and ova, or take tissue samples
from patients without leaving scars, and inflicting pain and trauma.
As Jacques Vallee says, ’The ufonauts should go back to medical
school’
[5]. The claim by some abduction researchers that the aliens
may have already abducted several million Americans verges on the
grotesque. And since some abductees claim to have been abducted
dozens of time, it is strange that no one has noticed the busy UFO
traffic over American cities that this would entail. It is also
curious that aliens prefer to abduct white middle-class Americans
while largely ignoring the rest of the world!
Since aliens can supposedly pass through solid objects, why don’t
they just raid a blood bank, a sperm bank, and a collection of
embryos at some major research laboratory? In fact, genetic material
recovered from just 2 adults would be enough to create hundreds if
not thousands of hybrids in a laboratory. Furthermore, the aliens’
alleged attempts to erect mental blocks in the minds of the victims
to prevent us from learning of their activities are so pathetic that
even an amateur hypnotist can break through them, whereas there are
drugs available on earth that could do the job much more
efficiently.
Other behaviour incompatible with the hypothesis that aliens are
members of a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization is animal
mutilation -- a phenomenon which many ET believers prefer to dismiss
or ignore [6]. In these disturbing incidents, carcasses of animals,
usually cattle, have been found with vital organs such as eyes,
tongues, udders, genitals, or rectum having been removed, often with
’surgical precision’. In many cases blood has been completely
drained from the animal, with no traces on the surrounding ground.
Sometimes the cattle appear to have been lifted to a height above
the ground and then smashed by being dropped.
Such incidents first became prominent in the late 1960s and have
been reported in Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico,
Brazil, Europe, the
Canary Islands, and Australia, as well as in the US. Some
mutilations might be the work of animal predators, but the latter do
not produce long, clean cuts of the kind seen on some mutilated
animals. And the number of incidents appears to be too high for
satanic cults alone to be responsible. The lack of footprints or
predator tracks also undermines these explanations.
Moreover, on some occasions strange lights and UFOs have been
observed at the scene. In 1983, a couple in Missouri watched through
binoculars while 2 small, silver-suited beings somehow paralyzed a
black cow and then levitated it out of the pasture and into a
cone-shaped craft and disappeared [7]. Sometimes mysterious
helicopters are seen overhead that appear to be illusions; 2 of them
are occasionally seen flying with their rotors meshed together like
eggbeaters! Clearly animal mutilations must be the work of very
negative forces. Some ET enthusiasts concede that certain aliens may
be ill-disposed towards humans -- and towards cows, too, by the
sound of things!
Jacques Valleeis a vocal opponent of the ET hypothesis, and
advocates the ’intradimensional’, ’interdimensional’,
’transdimensional’,
or ’parallel universe’ interpretation of UFOs. He argues that since
UFOs have been seen from time immemorial, and ’alien’ entities have
always behaved in similar ways, it is unreasonable to assume that
they must be extraterrestrial visitors. The ET explanation, he says,
’is too simple-minded to account for the diversity of the reported
behavior of the occupants and their perceived interactions with
human beings’ [8]. He writes:
[A] UFO is both a
physical entity with mass, inertia, volume, and
physical parameters that we can measure, and a window into another
reality. ... [T]hey need not represent a visitation from space
visitors, but something even more interesting: a window toward
undiscovered dimensions of our own environment.
The phenomenon has stable, invariant features ... But we have also
had to note carefully the chameleon-like character of the secondary
attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the
appearances of their occupants, and their reported statements vary
as a function of the cultural environment into which they are
projected.
The UFOs are physical manifestations that simply cannot be
understood apart from their psychic and symbolic reality.
[9]
The patterns of close encounters, contacts, and abductions are not
specific to our century, contrary to what most American ufologists
have assumed. In fact, it is difficult to find a culture that does
not have a tradition of little people that fly through the sky and
abduct humans. Often they take their victims into spherical settings
that are evenly illuminated, and they subject them to various
ordeals that include operations on internal organs and astral trips
to unknown landscapes. Sexual or genetic interaction is a common
theme in this body of folklore.
I propose to regard the UFO phenomenon as a physical manifestation
of a form of consciousness that is alien to humans but is able to
coexist with us on the earth.
[T]he UFO phenomenon is able to act upon the minds of human beings,
to induce thoughts and images that are similar to those described by
people who have had near-death or out-of-body experiences and even
to medieval witnesses of demons and elves.
[10]
Saying that aliensemerge from other ’dimensions’ raises the
question of what sort of ’dimensions’ are being referred to. It is
very fashionable nowadays for physicists to speculate about
additional dimensions. M-theory, for example, postulates 7 extra
spatial dimensions, which are said to be curled up so small (10-33
cm) that they are undetectable. But these are just mathematical
abstractions for which there is not a shred of evidence. They
certainly do not resemble the other planes of energy-substance
spoken of in the occult tradition. These planes, which are beyond
our range of perception, interpenetrate our own physical world, and
are said to be inhabited by a variety of entities. Interestingly,
the same scientists who fantasize about extra ’dimensions’ usually
reject any talk of paranormal and otherworldly phenomena out of
hand.
In its broadest sense, a ’dimension’ is any measurable quantity.
Examples are length, breadth, and height, which are commonly
referred to as the three ’spatial’ dimensions. Other dimensions are
temperature, mass, charge, time, etc. If entities are said to be
living in other ’dimensions’, an obvious question is: how many
spatial dimensions do these other ’dimensions’ have? Some
researchers actually speak of a three-dimensional parallel universe
existing in a superior ’dimension’. This clearly shows that the word
’dimension’ is being used in different senses. It is therefore
better to speak of other (invisible) worlds, realms, planes, etc.
than of other dimensions. Moreover, common sense dictates that no
entities or objects, on any plane, can have fewer than three spatial
dimensions; nor is there any reason to suppose that they can have
more than three.
Vallee seems to have great faith in current ’scientific’
speculations that space can be ’folded’ so that it might be possible
to travel from point A to point B almost instantaneously via a
’wormhole’ whose length is only a fraction of the distance between A
and B! Equally irrational is the claim that aliens could not just be
from ’any place’ but also from ’any time’ -- past, present, or
future! There is nothing to suggest that time travel is anything
more than science fiction.
Everything that happens is part of a sequence of events linked by
cause and effect; the succession of cause and effect defines the
direction of time. Anything that is actually happening is happening
now. Once something has happened it belongs to the past and exists
only as a record imprinted on the substance of nature. It is
impossible to return to the actual past, but the records of past
events can be viewed clairvoyantly by those with the necessary
occult powers. It is equally impossible for us to visit the actual
future or for beings from the future to visit us, since the future,
by definition, has not yet happened. However, since the future
unfolds out of present (and past) causes, it is foreshadowed in the
present, and it is therefore possible to see clairvoyantly the
future that is most probable at any given time.
An advocate of the
time-travel theory is Illobrand von Ludwiger, who
argues that UFOs ’are visitors from our own future carrying out the
task of rejuvenating their genetic stock by interbreeding with
humans’
[11]. One of the pieces of
’evidence’ he presents in favour
of time travel is that a corporal in Chile grew a 5-day beard during
an absence of only 20 minutes. This is supposed to prove that he travelled into the future and back -- assuming of course that beards
continue to grow when moving backward in time! Clearly, such
arguments border on the moronic.
Vallee says that,
’the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through
which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is
communicating with us symbolically’, and that paranormal phenomena
like UFOs are one of the manifestations of a ’spiritual control
system for human consciousness’ [12].
Remarks such as this make it
sound as if UFO events are orchestrated by a single, overarching,
’alien’ intelligence, albeit one closely connected with the earth.
However, the variety of UFO manifestations suggests that such
phenomena involve a wide range of different entities, from demonic
and subhuman to spiritual and superhuman.
Some researchers have proposed that the alternate reality from which
UFOs derive is the imaginal realm, a planetary thought-field created
and sustained by the power of the human imagination.
Kenneth Ring
hypothesizes that UFOs can be projected from this realm, and that
UFO encounters partly take place in it.
Likewise, Michael Grosso
proposes that all paranormal appearances with a public or
quasi-physical dimension -- e.g. of UFOs, aliens, religious figures
like the Virgin Mary, fairies, demons, or monstrous animals -- might
be thought-forms telepathically generated by the collective
subconscious minds of the people of a community or culture.
Both
researchers believe that there is also some sort of extramundane
agency, ’an Oz of cosmic proportions’, or ’planetary Overmind’, at
work, helping to orchestrate extraordinary experiences
[13].
It certainly seems doubtful that ordinary humans alone have the
power to call into being flying objects that can reflect radar,
chase jet planes, and interfere with cars. As Richard Thompson says,
’If human imagination had so much power, then why don’t typical
sci-fi movie monsters materialize in American cities?’ [14].
The
ways in which the UFO phenomenon manifests do seem to be linked to
the world of human beliefs and imagination, but the phenomenon also
seems to have a dynamic of its own. The ’imaginal realm’ is
therefore best conceived of as a collective mind containing but
transcending individual minds, and as a transphysical world that
interacts with the physical world -- in other words, as the astral
realm of occult tradition. In particular, UFO phenomena could
involve temporary physical manifestations of shape-shifting,
elemental energy-forms and thought-forms or other astral entities,
which either materialize and dematerialize spontaneously or whose
manifestations are partly directed by other intelligences.
The UFO phenomenon throws up major questions: What determines the
place and time of UFO manifestations, the form they take, and who
witnesses them? A variety of attempts have been made to explain the
timing of UFO waves. They certainly cannot be blamed on media
interest: studies show that an increase in UFO reports generates
greater media coverage, rather than the other way round. Debunkers
predicted that the release of the film Close encounters of the third
kind in 1977 would spawn a major flap -- but it never happened.
Attempts have been made to correlate UFO flaps with social unrest,
political tensions, and military crises.
One researcher sees a
certain correspondence between UFO flaps in the US and periods when
national self-esteem is at a low ebb
[15]. However, no single-factor
hypothesis is absolutely convincing; a whole constellation of
personal, regional, national, and global factors could be involved.
Only someone with a deep understanding of the astral world and its
interaction with our physical world, and of the karmic background of
witnesses could identify all the causes in any particular case.
References
1. Jacques F. Vallee,
’Five arguments against the extraterrestrial
origin of unidentified flying objects’, Journal of Scientific
Exploration, v. 4, 1990, pp. 105-17; Robert M. Wood, ’The
extraterrestrial hypothesis is not that bad’, Journal of Scientific
Exploration, v. 5, 1991, pp. 103-11; Jacques Vallee, ’Toward a
second-degree extraterrestrial theory of UFOs: a response to Dr.
Wood and Prof. Bozhich’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, v. 5,
1991, pp. 113-20. 2. See ’Life on other worlds’, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/lifeworl.htm.
3. Jacques Vallee, Revelations: Alien contact and human deception,
New York: Ballantine Books, 1991, p. 265. 4. Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, folklore, and
parallel worlds, Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 1993 (1969), p.
244; Kevin Randle and Russ Estes, Faces of the Visitors: An
illustrated reference to alien contact, New York: Fireside, 1997, p.
271. 5. Jacques Vallee, Dimensions: A casebook of alien contact, New
York: Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 240. 6. Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities: Ancient insights into
modern UFO phenomena, Alachua, FL: Govardhan Hill Publishing, 2nd
ed., 1995, pp. 309-15. 7. Charles F. Emmons, At the Threshold: UFOs, science and the new
age, Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press, 1997, p. 10. 8. Dimensions, p. 158.
9. Ibid., pp. 202-3, 140, 253. 10. Jacques Vallee, Confrontations: A scientist’s search for alien
contact, London: Souvenir Press, 1990, pp. 143-4, 152. 11. Illobrand von Ludwiger, Best UFO Cases -- Europe, Las Vegas: NV,
National Institute for Discovery Science, 1998, pp. 154-8. 12. Dimensions, pp. 243, 257.
13. Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project: Near-death experiences, UFO
encounters, and mind at large, New York: William Morrow and Company,
1992, pp. 218-46; Michael Grosso, Frontiers of the Soul: Exploring
psychic evolution, Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1992, pp. 204-24; T. Peter
Park, ’Reading the strangeness: second order anomalies’, The
Anomalist, no. 8, 2000, pp. 85-110. 14. Alien Identities, p. 168.
15. Martin Kottmeyer, ’UFO flaps’, The Anomalist, no. 3, 1995/96,
pp. 64-89.
