UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘UFO Religions’ Category

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

There ought to be some sort of ancient astronaut believer gullibility test. Really.

If you want to have your faith in your fellow man lowered (again) by such nonsense (but perhaps raised by the fact that there are those hardy souls who investigate this sort of nonsense), have a look at this post from Silver Screen Saucers.

This “controversy” revolves around the wacky claim made months ago that yet another enlightened researcher (Raul Julia-Levy) had new, incontrovertible proof that the Mayans had been contacted by an ET civilization and was going to release it to a dutifully astonished world. To tease the world Mr. Julia-Levy before his explosive documentary film (“Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond“) made history, he released unprovenanced (and surely not Photoshopped) pictures of saucers and Mayan sculptures. <GASP>

Even more shocking, the Catholic Church was purportedly in cahoots with this shocking revelation. <B-MOVIE FEMALE SCREAM>

Predictably, as the post details (with links), Mr. Levy seems to be nothing more than a con man.  Too bad. George Lucas’ Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull film was so awful that I was hoping this one would be better.

Technorati Tags: 2012, aliens, extraterrestrial, Mayans, Raul Julia-Levy

Many readers are familiar with Coast to Coast AM, the most-listened to late night talk show in the world. I’ll be on the evening of Feb 2. I’ve been on Coast over twenty times, and it’s always fun and unpredictable. The topics tend to be fairly wide-ranging when I’m on, but no doubt things like ancient astronauts and how Christianity could deal with an extraterrestrial reality will come up for discussion. One new item I am offering listeners is English translations to the only three scholarly articles on the Anunnaki that I know of. They are all in German, and over the past two years I have had them translated into English. Hopefully Coast listeners will want to actually engage the original sources in regard to the Anunnaki, which are a favorite candidate for ancient astronaut mythology.

Technorati Tags: aliens, Anunnaki, research, Sumerian

The idea that there are people out there who think they are “starseeds” with tragic amnesia about their extraterrestrial heritage wasn’t new to me. But it may be to readers, who don’t have the benefit of having listened to thousands of hours of Coast to Coast AM like I did in grad school. Aside from that, I couldn’t pass up alerting readers to this funny post on this alternate religious anthropology (!) from the Skeptophilia blog. Enjoy it, earthlings!

Technorati Tags: aliens, amnesia, extraterrestrial, starseeds

I just blogged over at PaleoBabble about a thoughtful debunking of the Dogon “mystery” I recently came across on the “Above Top Secret” website. It may interest readers here, since the ancient astronaut theology is a significant UFO religion.

Technorati Tags: aliens, Dogon, extraterrestrial, Sirius, Temple