UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘Paranormal Phenomena’ Category

For those who have not read Nick Redfern’s book, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, shame on you … but now you can catch up a bit very quickly. Nick just posted a summary of the timeline that underlies the major points of his contention, that the event at Roswell was very human, and inhumane, hence the cover-up. (Note: I reviewed Nick’s book on this blog).

Technorati Tags: balloon, bodies, body snatchers, experimentation, Fugo, Japanese, progeria, redfern, Roswell, UFO, Unit 731

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

The Magonia Blog posted a review today on an important new book by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck entitled, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, and Their Impact on Human Culture, History and Belief (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010). You can read the review here. Two paragraphs of note:

Of course these accounts are not without interest, and the portions relating to strange lights in the sky may well contain material of interest to astronomers and meteorologists. This is particularly true of the material from the nineteenth century. For example some of the observations of dark objects crossing the sun might be early accounts of near-earth asteroids.

Though the second section entitled ‘Myths, Legends and Chariots of the Gods’ is supposed to be the one in which more mythical or even fictional material is presented, once it moves out of modern hoaxes, the differences between the two sections become rather academic. Again, it seems to invoke the sort of arguments which plagued projects like INTCAT, trying to separate out the ‘genuine’ from ‘spurious’ cases, often on the basis of personal belief and boggle factor. Again if we cannot make easy judgements about events in our own time, how can we possibly make them about events and experiences centuries ago?

I’m reading the book now, and will no doubt have similar sentiments, though I’ll probably be harsher. To this point, while this book will be valuable as a reference source, it is a parade example of over-promising and under-delivering. Stay tuned to find out why.

Technorati Tags: ancient, Ancient Astronauts, signs and wonders, ufos antiquity, Vallee

Many readers will know that Vallee has commented on crop circles before.  This offering, however, is new. While Vallee cannot prove his thesis with the kind of empirical power we’d like to see, his thinking on this odd phenomena is worth reading. In my view, any ET explanation is the farthest reach. If you think crop circles lend weight to an ET presence, you’ve probably watched Signs too many times.

Technorati Tags: crop circles, military, Vallee

This is a bit peripheral to the main thrust of UFO religions, but I was asked by a reader on another blog about it. Discussions of UFOs and ETs often (right or wrong) gets lumped in with other “paranormal” phenomena. One such phenomenon is orbs (those little circular things that appear on photographs). Many people have presumed orbs indicate ghosts or some other “non-terrestrial” life forms (there’s the oblique connection to ETs). Is there anything to that idea? Not really.  Here’s a peer-reviewed article from the Journal of Scientific Exploration on the topic. In case you are not familiar with the JSE, it is a publication of the Soceity for Scientific Exploration, an association of scientists open to the paranormal (i.e., they aren’t debunkers).

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, orbs, paranormal, UFOs