UFO Religions

Myth and Mystery of UFOs: A Review

I just finished Thomas Bullard’s book, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, by scholar-folklorist Thomas Bullard (University of Kansas Press, 2010). Rather than write my own review, I found the work summarized nicely in this review over at Magonia review of books blog. I’ll just add a few thoughts below on this important work.

Bullard’s book is not light reading. It is an academic work. In my view, as an academic, it’s a wonderful volume. Bullard has detailed chapters, with the expected documentation in mainly academic sources, on all the major motifs of UFO studies: descriptions of alien craft, the aliens themselves, abduction narratives, and alien mission and homeworlds. In each case, Bullard painstakingly details how virtually all the UFO anecdotal evidence can be found in ancient, medieval, and early modern tales across the globe. Importantly, the vast majority of these correlations have nothing to do with other planets, inter-planetary travel, or extraterrestrials. That is, though the correlations are overwhelmingly present, it is only in the contemporary era that narratives about abduction and “otherworldly visitation” conforms to anything we would recognize as high technology. His point in this effort is to raise question of how any of the UFO phenomena could in reality be about visitors from space given the vast arrays of correlations. Good question.

Bullard’s (for the most part) explanation is the psycho-social approach. This is not a view that says a culture produces these episodes or encounters and their descriptions. Rather, it is the encounter with the anomalous that produces the descriptions — and the descriptions are far more likely to not be about genuine aliens from space than other deep-seated thoughts, fear, beliefs, yearnings, etc. The reason the overlaps are so high, reasons Bullard, is that experiences are parsed in such a way that new mythologies are constructed that serve the same fucntion or outlet as older ones.  The garb changes because we are living in a different era, our lives defined by technology and the “final frontier” of space.

Bullard doesn’t take a dogmatic stance on this, though. He simply feels it has high explanatory value, but not complete explanatory power. He leaves room for truly anomalous events that might include genuine extraterrestrial contact, and outlines in some details how such experiences might be winnowed from the those experiences for which the psycho-social explanation can best account.

I would encourage anyone interested in UFOs to read this book, and to keep it as a handy reference for its coverage and source material. In particular, those for whom the UFO subject goes beyond the nuts and bolts (questions of physics and reverse engineering which a priori assume that most UFOs are physical craft of non-human origin) will be well served by Bullard’s focus on how the UFO subject molds and produces religious experience and worldview.

Technorati Tags: abduction, aliens, Bullard, fairies, folklore, magonia, mystery, myth, review, UFOs

Video of Alleged Alien Corpse in Russia

UPDATE 4/20/2011

[In a shocking development it turns out that the alien corpse in the video is faked. Thanks to "Terry the censor" in the comments section.]

You can watch the video here. The head really looks fake to me, and I’d like the difference in discoloration explained as well. I’d also like to know why there are no debris, the location, etc. My best guess is that this alien body came from the Noah’s ark “discovered” a year or so ago by a Chinese team.

Methinks that we have some enterprising Russians who smell American dollars or a trip to the US.

Technorati Tags: alien, corpse, dead, Russia

Australian Teen Claims Video of Alien

I normally don’t blog on this sort of thing, but the video below produces a teachable moment — or, better, a logic check.  Try and set aside the fact that there’s some sort of light coming from the location of the “alien” (which looks too good to be true) that seems to suggest the alien is using a flashlight. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt — that the light is some sort of other video or visual effect and not a flashlight.  After you watch the video, bear with me while I run through a “here’s what we’re asked to believe” list.  That’ll tell you why I’m not real excited about the video.

An Alien? What are we being asked to believe when that is suggested?

1. That the gray aliens who, according to many abductee testimonials, can simply appear behind closed doors or go through walls, needs to hide from this teenager.  Why? Is he afraid of getting caught? Why would he be if walls and physical matter aren’t an issue?

2. That the gray aliens who supposedly regularly abduct humans and then given them messages about their intent are afraid to be detected? Huh?

3. That the gray aliens who can (again according to abductees) paralyze humans with mere eye contact, need to hide in the grass and actually flee from the teenager.  Again, why?  Why not just give the teenager a quick stare and immobilize him?

4. That gray aliens who can come and go without detection, even while cameras are rolling under controlled conditions set up by researchers to catch them on film clumsily gets too close and once (note the eye flashes) looks into the kids flashlight? Do the Zeta Reticulans have a class of remedial abductors? Do the trainees need to earn field badges so they can learn to come to earth and not be detected? This one relates to #5.

5. You can read the teenager’s story here - note that he “thinks” the alien entered his house on another occasion, but apparently he and his mom didn’t see it, but only heard it. Abductee literature is filled with tales of the aliens’ ability to keep everyone sound asleep when entering a room. They either awaken the victim or not when taking him/her. Even despite resistance and screaming the other people don’t wake up. So what’s with this inept alien in Australia? What happened to going through walls and putting everyone to sleep. Why is it he can’t get in and out of a house without being detected if he doesn’t want to be detected? Must be an intern.

6. Where’s the UFO or craft of the alien? Oh, wait — the ship is cloaked or they dropped the alien off because they didn’t want anyone to see the ship.  But . . . that sort of means they don’t want to be detected . . . so the goober they dropped off really screwed up. Is that the way aliens are portrayed in the literature? Nope. As I noted above, abductee testimony has thousands of anecdotal tales about ET’s ability to avoid detection . . . so the care show in hiding the ship in the above scenario didn’t transfer to the actual alien. What a doofus. I’d say reassignment is in his future.

7. And finally, departing from the abduction narratives, we’re supposed to believe that a space alien, with technological capabilities that enable him to travel faster than the speed of light, or through wormholes (or whatever means) doesn’t have (or bring) technology along with him to earth that can defeat a teenager?

Utter nonsense.

I hope you get my point. This is my ten minutes of thinking about what we’re asked to believe. Why is it that so many UFO believers can’t see that this video fails to conform to the body of abductee literature about these little gray guys? It’s just entirely inconsistent. If you put a trial attorney on something like this he’d destroy it.

Okay, that’s out of my system now. I’m better.

Technorati Tags: alien, Australia, teenager, video