Encounters, p.1
Encounters, page 1
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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INTRODUCTION
Though many may not believe, the truth is already here.
—KITE (SUZANNE KITE), OGLÁLA LAKȞÓTA
The path to writing about UFOs was unexpected but nonetheless a natural progression of my research. As a professor of the history of religion, I study reports of miraculous events and afterlife worlds in Christian history. This includes sightings of aerial beings of light, miraculous flying houses (that’s right), monks and nuns who levitate and bilocate, and a religious doctrine called purgatory. I relate this because my work reveals how people’s beliefs often emerge from their interactions with places and their exposure to media. Scholars in my field generally do not weigh in on the truth or falsity of religious claims to truth. Instead, we study the social effects of religious belief and practice. When I finished my work on the Catholic tradition, the shift to the study of UFO cultures seemed straightforward. Belief in UFOs, I wrote, is a rapidly growing spirituality that corresponds to the twenty-first-century shift to digital infrastructures. It is similar to religion because people see things in the sky, aerial objects, and they have had no physical evidence that they exist, yet they often attribute to them a spiritual significance. UFOs are, as Carl Jung famously wrote, “technological angels.” They are symbols and signs of a new epoch in human history.
The story of UFOs, however, turned out to be more complicated than I’d thought. In short order I found myself among scientists of aeronautics and space travel, experiencers—people who believe they are in contact with extraterrestrials—as well as various agents of intelligence communities, and countless journalists and media personalities. I developed friendships with many of them. The scientists with whom I worked were at the top of their fields—experts in biomedical technologies. They believed they had evidence that UFOs were real. I began to understand that the UFO event was a spiritual reality for many people, including these scientists, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, the topic of my research was just about to get very real.
Through my study I found several things to be the case, which I detailed in my published research. First, the public perception of UFOs is mediated and often managed by media and agents of (dis)information.1 Second, the claims of some of the people in my study—that they studied UFOs and that the study of UFOs has been ongoing since the 1940s—turned out to be true. I didn’t believe or disbelieve the claims made by the scientists in my study. Instead, I documented the development of what I believed is a new form of religion or religious expression. I was as surprised, as were many people, when the United States military and the Pentagon, in the summer of 2021, released an unclassified report that acknowledged that they had funded secret programs to study UFOs. Finally, this development pushed me to think beyond my training and the resources available in my field. In effect, the Pentagon report (Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) ratified this new form of religion and spirituality.2
We are currently at a fork in the road with respect to how UFOs are interpreted. The history of religions suggests that, with respect to new religious expressions, the creation of state-sponsored religious institutions often trump people’s lived experiences, usually through suppression and silence. Since the UFO is often interpreted in spiritual and religious ways, we can expect to see the same process at play. The early Christian Gnostics saw their books banned and declared heretical by the newly institutionalized Christian church in Rome, for example. The question I posed to myself, before writing this book, was: What, and whose, stories about UFOs are being silenced today? I didn’t pose this question for wholly altruistic reasons. The question would help me define the streams that are most revolutionary about this nascent religiosity.
THE WITNESSES
Among the people who study UFOs, one stood out to me as possessing an effective method of research, and he was far removed from the field of religious studies. Dr. Jacques Vallée has a PhD in information science from Northwestern University, is trained in astrophysics, and has worked extensively in the field of technology for the United States Department of Defense. He was a close associate and colleague of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was a longtime consultant for the United States Air Force on topics related to UFOs, and a key figure in most of the secret programs involved in UFO research. Vallée maintains a career as a well-known and successful venture capitalist and calls his work in the field of UFOs a hobby. His focus on witness testimonies and his recognition of potential disinformation is invaluable in the assessment of UFO cases and their social repercussions. I found that academics generally will not approach the topic of secrecy and disinformation related to UFOs. This is understandable as UFO disinformation is a murky topic that is difficult to understand. Yet secrecy and disinformation have been an intrinsic feature of the history of UFOs in the United States, so it is unavoidable. Responsible research into this topic must address disinformation. To avoid it is to avoid the totality of the topic. Jacques not only practices sound research but he also incorporates knowledge of how disinformation works, and this is a necessary tool in the tool kit of the researcher who endeavors to study UFOs.
Jacques wrote that the best way to study this phenomenon is to do field research, that is, to talk to witnesses and to visit the sites where UFOs are seen. It may seem simple, but this method has not dominated official or academic studies:
The only way we’re going to understand it is to stop talking to each other, and go back and talk to the witnesses. So, I put the highest priority on first-hand cases that had not been reported to the press or to the UFO community, because the moment the cases become part of ongoing discussion, they get polarized: the witnesses are bombarded with all kinds of questions; there are biases; the ego gets into it. I wanted to do a quiet kind of long-term research.3
What do the witnesses have to say? Generally, not what most people assume. In the interviews and talks that came after the publication of my research, it became clear to me that nonwitnesses have a view of contact that is informed by entertainment media—books, television, and popular culture. Their version of contact envisions a scenario in which nonhuman and extraterrestrial intelligence contact humans through beings that look humanlike and drive spaceships that resemble flying sports cars.
In interviews I fielded questions and comments such as, “Why don’t aliens land on the White House lawn?” or, “I can’t wait until ET asks to meet our leaders.” In comparison with witness reports, the prevailing idea of contact held by most people is unlike that which I heard from witnesses. Jacques also wrote about the narrow ways in which UFO events are interpreted and framed by media. Author Whitley Strieber’s book Communion came out in the 1980s. It is a harrowing tale of his own experience with beings he calls “the visitors.” The cover of the book features the image of what has come to be the iconic look of an alien being, with large almond-shaped eyes and greenish reptilian skin. The image pervaded culture to the extent that Jacques noticed that if witness stories did not conform to the look of Strieber’s alien, researchers discounted their reports. Media shapes how people view contact and determines how they envision UFO contact scenarios.
Researchers tend to focus on UFO events either as the appearance of advanced technologies or they focus entirely on the subjective experiences of the person who encounters alleged spacecraft or extraterrestrials. Yet many witness reports show that these positions are not mutually exclusive. When people see what appear to be unexplained aerial objects, they also experience realities that are not compatible with their ordinary reality. Additionally, there are aftershocks to these effects. People report episodes of knowing the future—or precognition—and other nonordinary effects. Rather than treat these experiences as nonrational and paranormal (in the sense of being strange), these events and effects can be understood by a shift in perspective for which there are precedents in religious traditions and within the lore of indigenous cultures.
When Harvard researcher Dr. John Mack published his classic book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens in the 1990s, his research focused on the initial shock that normal people have when they experience what they interpret as being in contact with either extraterrestrial or nonhuman intelligences. His research moved on from this initial shock, however, and he came to realize that most of human societies have recognized that people have these experiences. He learned that the knowledge systems of many indigenous cultures possess frameworks for understanding contact. They do not pathologize these events or experiences. Lakota are among the many indigenous cultures that report contact with members of “Star Nations,” or what others would call extraterrestrials. The realities of this contact are enfolded into a worldview in which “the distinction between natural and supernatural, so basic to European tho ught, was meaningless.”4
In 2018, an illuminating exchange occurred that shed light on the difference between the prevailing and dominant idea of UFOs and that of the lore contained within some indigenous cultures. It was a conversation between scholars of indigenous studies and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI reached out to the group and asked them to produce a statement in answer to the question, “What would you want SETI scientists to know about potentially making contact?” The scholars were impressed that SETI had reached out to them, and they diligently set to work. Soon, however, in conversations with the scientists at SETI, they reported that SETI had instructed them to keep their statement to two pages “to avoid all commentary about whether contact had already begun.”5 The scholars of indigenous studies, who are from indigenous communities, would not misrepresent their cultural knowledge, so they spoke up and explained that for them, contact has been an ongoing reality. The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, through their actions, seemed to discount that contact is an ongoing reality for many people from indigenous cultures around the world. Contact with nonhuman intelligence has also been an ongoing reality attested to within almost every traditional religion. Yet SETI does not acknowledge the information gained within these traditions. Why?
Just as in the case of the people who asked me why ET hadn’t landed on the White House lawn (ironically, UFOs did buzz the skies over the White House in 1952), it appears that SETI and many people have a specific idea of contact that is informed by media. If data emerges that contradicts this belief or idea, they dismiss it. This is called “confirmation bias” and it plays a huge role in the public perception of UFO events. Some aspects of confirmation bias seem to be based on fear. I call this fear because many conversations I’ve had with government officials and journalists reveal that they believe that contact with nonhuman intelligence would eradicate the religious beliefs of billions of people and thus create social mayhem. It won’t. Traditional religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as well as Buddhism, and Hinduism, in addition to indigenous communities, include some recognition, in parts of their histories and traditions, either acknowledging or pondering the existence of extraterrestrials or nonhuman intelligence, or do not discount it.
The fear was made clear in an exchange I had with a scholar who studies how scenarios of UFO contact might affect members of religious traditions. He thought that this would eradicate people’s belief in God and in an afterlife. My position is that it wouldn’t impact religious belief, as religions already have in place metaphysical categories for nonhuman intelligences of many types (God, djinn, angels, beings from other planets, etc.). He answered my suggestion with a scenario. He suggested that contact with extraterrestrials would be a problem for monotheistic religions if aliens thousands of years ahead of humans landed on Earth and explained that there is no God. He said that humans would be inclined to believe the aliens because they possessed technology more advanced than human technology.
As I read this scenario it occurred to me that this looks like how colonists might view themselves if they engaged in self-reflection. What are we afraid of from contact? If we happen to be an empire, it appears that we are afraid of meeting beings much like ourselves. The fear of this particular contact scenario happens to be a narrative of colonization, imbued with violence and subjugation. It could possibly be true, but it is one of many interpretations of contact.
This military-empire scenario is just one view of many about UFO contact. Identified sky objects are as old as the human societies that have identified them. As I delved into the indigenous written and mostly oral cultural knowledge about extraterrestrials and nonhuman intelligence, I found a direct connection between these ideas and the experiences and beliefs of the scientists I knew who worked within the programs that studied this phenomenon. Ironically, the scientists who studied what they believed are UFOs do not have a military scenario of UFO contact, and, like the indigenous scholars who spoke with SETI, believe that we are already in contact. They do not posit contact as a future possibility, but as a lived reality.
In my previous research I used pseudonyms to protect the professional reputations of the scientists with whom I had worked. Since then, one of the scientists, Dr. Garry Nolan, dropped his pseudonym and went public. The other is still known through the pseudonym Tyler D. Each shares the belief that contact has happened and is ongoing.
Why assume, like members of SETI and other institutions, that contact is only a future possibility? Perhaps, as Suzanne Kite writes, because it serves a particular agenda:
The colonial sense of progress is indelibly fixed to an unrelenting linear timeline towards a settler future, where Indigenous peoples are the uncivilized past, American white-superiority the present, and Mars colonization and extraterrestrials the future.6
This is one fork in the road regarding UFO belief and it is a direction that we don’t have to take. Assumptions of the most innovative of the scientists who study UFOs confers with the knowledge gleaned from indigenous communities’ centuries of contact. The other fork in the road appears to point in the direction of a comparison between patterns shared by these communities. It is time to take Vallée’s advice and turn back to the witnesses.
LISTENING TO PLACES: TERRESTRIAL, VIRTUAL, COSMIC
In my previous work two places instigated a transformation in my understanding of UFO religiosity. The first was New Mexico, and specifically San Augustin, where I visited the location of an alleged UFO crash-debris site that was reported to be among a flap of sightings and crashes that occurred in 1947. This was, obviously, a highly mythic and mythologized place, inextricably bound to the atomic bomb and military secrecy, as well as being the ground-zero location for UFO belief. I ended that research at the Vatican and Specola Vaticana—the Vatican Observatory—two other highly mythologized places and sites at the apex of Western religious and colonial culture. I could not have orchestrated, even if I had tried, a more fitting arrangement of iconic geography in which to experience and write about the new global cosmism—the belief in the cosmic evolution of the human species. Place, and its relationship to beliefs and practices, more than ever, revealed itself as a primary site of revelation.
Places, not only specific places around the globe but the planet we live on—Earth—figure prominently in the ensuing chapters. Human beings are venturing into spaces they have never traveled. These spaces are virtual and cosmic. That human beings are visiting both places at the same time is historic and momentous. New places bring new ways of thinking and being, and we are only on the cusp of learning what these are and will become. In referencing “new forms of consciousness” arising from these spaces, I am not referring to a new-age idea like a coming Age of Aquarius. Instead, these observations come from my work with scholars who identify novel brain states and consciousnesses that are associated with space and virtual environments.
For example, Dr. Iya Whiteley is a space psychologist and a cognitive engineer who advised the UK Space Agency as a Chair of the Space Environment Working Group. She finds that in space, astronauts develop their own rules and culture, which is often at odds with and significantly deviates from the common rules assumed by people in mission control. Her work identifies the very beginnings of a shift in global consciousness with respect to space. Her research contributed to a shift in the culture of aviation. Her research helped eliminate the stigma associated with pilot reports of anomalous phenomena. Her current hobby focuses on helping pilots safely process anomalous phenomenon. Her work with pilots and astronauts, as well as her knowledge of indigenous practices of health and well-being, inspired her to create a program developing means of communication with intelligent nonhuman life that already surrounds us. She also creates technologies that she hopes will transcribe animal languages. She is among a growing number of scientists who utilize technology to decipher the languages of animals. Chapters 1 and 2 feature her work and projects.
