“UFOs: Living the Myth”
by
Gene Stewart
People have always seen lights in the sky, especially at night. At first they had no idea what they were. Soon they noticed how many of the lights in the night sky kept to patterns that held together. These were constellations, and they repeated their circles yearly.
People noticed other lights that moved more randomly. They called these wanderers, or planets.
Every so often meteors streaked across the sky, comets wagged fiery fingers, and eclipses darkened sun and moon.
As for the day sky, it offered more than lights. Aside from birds, clouds, and storms, people saw, at first, flying animals unlike any on the ground.
People did not start seeing vehicles in the sky until they had vehicles themselves. Chariots in the sky came only once chariots were common on the ground.
And yet, the vehicles we saw in the sky always showed advanced designs. If we had chariots drawn by horses, the sky chariots had no horses. If we had wooden sailing ships, the sky skips had no sails. When we had propellors on ships and even planes, the vehicles above us had none, but zoomed faster than we could imagine.
Even now, with our stealth fighters and other swept-wing technological marvels, those others in the sky outperform us to mind-boggling degrees.
What ever we have seen in our skies have stayed ahead of our own technology.
Fans of the ETH, the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis, say sure they’re advanced, they came from outer space.
Others say no, they’ve been with us always, and are a parallel civilization that stays hidden most of the time, somehow, somewhere.
Ethnologists set aside the question of whether they are real. They view these amazing things as cultural artifacts. They are filtered through cultural norms, we’re told. We understand them according to what we already know.
In this way, ethnology places sky anomalies squarely in the subjective realm. Whether real or not, people interpret the sky objects according to their society’s technological levels and personal experiences.
Well, maybe.
Could we be projecting our advanced ideas into the sky in some collective cultural daydream? What if these seemingly advanced vehicles are glimpses of ourselves from possible futures, or visitors from other dimensions?
Might they not even be accidental tourists? They may not intend to be seen by us. Maybe our interdimensional multiverse leaks. Maybe UFOs are bleed-throughs.
Certainly the vehicles and machines we’re seeing these days violate, or seem to defy at least, our known physics.
Are they real?
Defying “real”. Does that mean physical? Thoughts are real but not physical.
UFOs may or may not be physical.
They move from motionless to thousands of miles per hour through air without causing sonic booms or other atmospheric disturbances. They stop on a dime from jet speeds and turn at right angles at supersonic speeds, all without coming apart or affecting the surrounding atmosphere. Such maneuvers argue against these things being physical. They behave more like projections.
Are they holograms? They look solid but act like light. The holograph hypothesis fits better than postulating an unknown way of violating physics.
And yet, it does not suffice. It covers only some of our UFO observations.
We find marks on the ground. We have on record collisions between UFOs and planes, ships, and cars. We have recorded physical effects from sound, ripples on water, and the disruption of clouds to more severe interactions such as burns from heat and even radiation.
And we have reports of abductions.
Some involve beams of light levitating people. Others feature beings moving through solid walls. We also have reports of teleportation, the instant moving of people and objects across long distances, again without the thunder air displacement alone would seem to demand.
It’s obvious that we’ve come a long way from simple lights in the sky. The UFO phenomenon is complex and may in fact be more a cluster of distinct phenomena, each requiring a separate approach and differing investigation techniques.
J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who worked at first as a debunker for the USAF and who later realized the evidence was too strong to dismiss, developed the Close Encounter Scale to gauge reports.
A Close Encounter of the First Kind meant seeing lights or machines or craft in the sky or even on the ground, from a distance.
Second Kind Encounters meant the UFO affected the observer somehow. Heat burned the skin, a car stopped and would not start, marks were left, etc.
The Third Kind is a sighting of what Hynek called “animate beings”. You see not only a craft but its presumed occupants.
And of course after this is Contact with Alien Beings, “alien” here meaning “other,” as in not anything we have seen before. Not of our ordinary Earth.
Note how the UFO Encounter Scale protocol parallels the ways people experience reality. We see, we touch, and we interact.
Can the UFO experience be related to the experiencer’s spiritual or existential development?
If UFO cults and the religious nature of contactee literature and speech mean anything, then it’s certain that spirituality is somehow involved. Contactees, however, often cite psychic links or quote disembodied voices, so their claims overlap into the psychological. They may simply be disturbed.
yet, would not an experience that challenges your conception of reality have profoundly unsettling effects?
If we examine what happens to people claiming Third Kind Encounters or Contact, we find many, perhaps most, exhibit personality decay over time, along with social withdrawal and eventual psychological collapse into mental illness and even suicide.
Alien Dawn: An Investigation Into the Contact Experience, Fromm International, 2001, ISBN: 0880642599, by Colin Wilson, is a recommended look at this situation. The book concludes that contact with what must be called the Trickster Other, due to its unreliable nature, is corrosive to our humanity.
A related book is The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides, by Joe Fisher, Paraview Press, 2001, ISBN: 1921044023, which deals with the dangers of trusting disembodied voices, regardless how convincing they may seem at first.
And here we have reached an overlap between UFOs and such matters as ghosts, Ouija boards, seances, Spiritualism, and other paranormal pursuits.
Are UFOs, then, just another manifestation of the same energy that produces ghosts, EVPs, and other anomalies? Are all the things people experience that seem to step beyond known physics flowing from, and stimulated by, the same source?
Some researchers think so, such as John Keel, whose masterful study, The Mothman Prophecies, New English Library, 2002, ISBN: 0340824468, was made into a very good movie with Richard Gere recently. Keel, along with noted naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson and others, believed that virtually all paranormal anomalies stemmed from our interactions with an interdimensional multiverse.
Is such a source outside us? Or is it part of our inner make-up?
Such questions inevitably arise with each new sighting. Those who argue against it being entirely psychological ask whether photographs, audio tapes, and other physical traces, such as crop circles, burns on trees, cars, or skin, would result from a purely mental source.
The answer to that depends on the nature of reality. Science shows us the world we experience is actually a projected mental model of filtered, selected parts of a much wider spectrum of energies, all interacting around and through us. We are the world, in a very real sense, and it is us. Further, the very idea that mind and matter are different things is shown to be an illusion. The observer affects the observed; this is a fact of physics that supports the Zen koan All is One, No Separation.
Even time, part of the space-time continuum, (which means it is all one thing, just different places on the same slide scale spectrum), is but a higher dimension we perceive imperfectly. The passage of time is, we’re told, more out mind’s viewpoint moving through a solid.
If we could see our lives at one glance we’d be looking at a solid shape. Except we’d be seeing all of history, too, and all of reality, knotting and intertwined into one big single solid thing.
Reality is an object.
Grasping that is difficult, perhaps impossible, according to set theory, because no subset can define the set containing it. Violates logic. All we can do is model such things.
We have wandered more than a few steps into the metaphysics of conceptual cosmology, all because of lights in the sky.
If we’re to be strictly honest, we must say that, yes, UFOs are real, but no one knows what they are. Same as ghosts and other things Fortean and strange. Visitors from other planets, other galaxies, even other dimensions, or our possible futures, or our inner depths; what ever they are, they are also what psychologist Carl Jung called them, in his final book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, 1959, Signet, ASIN: B000XN99E2 / Princeton U. Press, 1979, ISBN: 0691018227
“UFOs,” he wrote, “are a modern myth.”
He was concerned not with their reality as such, but with their meaning to us, and that is what matters about anything, when you think about it.
How the myth touches your life is, if you’re lucky, up to you.
Further study of UFOs on all levels and from all angles can only benefit us as we continue to live the myth.
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