Viewing ufology with a magical eye is not novel (early pioneers like Allen Greenfield advocated this approach for years). It is novel to declare that we shouldn’t feel ashamed at this interpretation. It is novel to predict that, one day, their science will look a lot more like our science. All we have to do is keep our heads down and wait out materialism’s death throes. In the meantime, it is imperative that ufologists familiarize themselves with magical resources and thought.
One of the biggest things holding back ufology is that two thirds of researchers have never cracked open a grimoire. Had they done so, they would realize that the hodgepodge array of spirits, catalogued therein, mirror the varied appearance of extraterrestrial species in UFO literature. They would see how communing with deceased loved ones in alien abductions isn’t so odd when your paradigm encourages the construction of ancestor altars. They would see that there is very little difference between a tenth century mage summoning Ashtaroth and Steven Greer calling down UFOs from the night sky in 2017.
And they would begin to understand how non-human logic works.
“Magicians have personal experience of non-human logic; what it feels like, how it manifests in life and culture, and so on,” White wrote in his 2016 book Star.Ships. “It is characterized by atemporality, high levels of coincidence, repetition of motif and symbol in entirely unrelated contexts and a quasi-fractal capacity to look weirdly resonant at whatever level you observe the phenomenon, from the micro to the macro.”26
White describes the forces behind this non-human logic as “Magonian,” a term borrowed from Jacques Vallée’s invaluable 1969 book, Passport to Magonia. Vallée’s intercontextual examination of the UFO phenomenon drew parallels not only to faerie folklore of Northern Europe but also to medieval French stories of airship-piloting wizards from the cloud realm of Magonia.27 Calling these phenomena “Magonian” is connotation-free and handily strips away the artificial barriers, which mainstream ufology has erected between accounts of extraterrestrials, spirits, the fae folk, and Blessed Virgin Mary apparitions.28
In 1918, magician Aleister Crowley famously claimed to have repeatedly summoned an entity named “Lam,” which he sketched with a bulbous-head, highly evocative of modern descriptions of Gray aliens.29 Ufologists view Crowley’s interaction with Lam as extraterrestrial visitation; the magically operant view it as conjuration, but calling the experience “Magonian” gives us a much-needed lingua franca facilitating interdisciplinary discussion between these communities.
This heady ufological-magical blend is a promising avenue of exploration. Moving beyond materialism is about honestly confronting the fact that we know nothing for certain about UFOs, yet choosing to be inspired rather than frustrated by this realization, leading to a type of non-dogmatic gnosticism. Magonian phenomena encompass any number of answers to the UFO problem: aliens, yes, but also time travellers, demons, spirits, cultural poltergeists, interdimensional entities, the Jungian collective unconscious, daimonic higher selves, faeries, ghosts—or infinitely hybridized theories therein.
“If there are physical [extraterrestrial] lifeforms … I posit they are subject to the same nonphysical interaction and subsequent wobbles in technological complexity [as us],” wrote White. “Granted, it gets a little blurry when you allow for the fact that a universe-spanning spirit world must contain the Dead of numerous alien races and hence interaction with it implies a roundabout transfer of technology from one species to another… only separated in time.”30
The truth of the matter is that, as a ufological community, we have left the door open to a consciousness-based—and, by logical extension, magical—view of reality since the field’s inception. The cognitive dissonance of accepting telepathy in UFO encounters while simultaneously striving for mainstream scientific acceptance is a recurring stumbling block to contemporary ufology … we are collectively treading water by clinging to notions of flesh and blood extraterrestrials in nuts-and-bolts spacecraft.
There is yet hope, however. A field which is constantly marginalized need not be on the wrong side of history—the materialist paradigm will fall apart given time, and consciousness studies is the proverbial star to which ufology should hitch its wagon. The study of UFOs and alien abduction has zero obligations to a N&B/ETH model. What it does owe an obligation to is, to quote Alex Tsakiris, “follow the data wherever it leads.”
Perhaps Gordon White articulated this sentiment most evocatively:
To abandon interpretation to scientism is to shirk natural philosophy’s most sacred duty. Your tribe deserves better. And if you feel some residual squeamishness over who has legitimacy of interpretation in our culture, consider this. We are wholly justified in turning the question on its head and asking the scientists what it is they think they are doing swimming in our pool in the first place.31
You now have permission to wade into the deep end.
TOWARD A BETTER UFOLOGY: APPLYING SCIENCE TO THE STUDY OF UAP
Micah Hanks
“Of all the questions the Gallup pollsters have asked the American public, why have UFOs struck such a resonant chord with the average adult American?” This was a question asked by Allan Hendry, UFO investigator for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) throughout the late-1970s, whose work alongside J. Allen Hynek resulted in his book, The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings.1 Hendry observed: “It is true that the average individual is woefully ignorant of the way stars, aircraft, and balloons can manifest themselves. Yet so many of them have “flying saucers” registered in their subconscious and it is imprinted so strongly that there must be something about UFOs that has become important to our psychic makeup since the end of World War II.”2
Many who become entangled in the slowly evolving quagmire that has become “ufology”—that is, the effort toward scientific study of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), or, as I occasionally prefer, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—begin to get jaded with time. This is because, despite thousands of books written on the subject, and numerous studies conducted by scientific and investigative groups on both civilian and government levels, no serious headway has been made toward a consensus opinion about what the UFO phenomenon truly represents.
The majority of those interested in the subject, who advocate the existence of anomalous aircraft, gravitate toward an extraterrestrial theory of origin. However, this position remains controversial due to a lack of physical evidence that would conclusively help make this determination. Indeed, many leading UFO advocates would argue that there is no need for further “study” of UFOs at all; the data before us, scant though it may seem to any scientist, is already enough to have ushered in the era of “Disclosure,” which replaces ufology altogether.
This Disclosure, roughly defined, is the notion of pushing for release of government data about UFOs that may be withheld from the public, and it has become fundamental to the majority of the work carried out by UFO researchers, advocates, and personalities in the broader field of modern “ufology.” However, despite the passion and enthusiasm it has aroused in the UFO community for a number of years, there are a few reasons why it may not be the best focal point for obtaining knowledge about UFOs.
The Pitfalls of UFO Disclosure
The “Disclosure” idea, and the social movement that has formed around it in recent decades, is not without merit. It seems highly likely that at least some information on the UFO subject is being withheld from the public. History shows that groups like the CIA had secretly involved themselves in studies of unexplained aerial craft and other phenomena, while publicly downplaying the subject, for fear that knowledge of their role in ongoing studies might actually encourage belief in UFOs. As former CIA Chief Historian Gerald Haines has noted, this was considered undesirable at the time, since the CIA worried that rising interest in UFOs among the general public might foster social movements capable of destabilizing government authority (as had been a concern with many other, non-UFO social groups and movemen
ts, particularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s).
Thus, there is some historical precedent for why governments have withheld UFO data. However, as a ufological avenue of enquiry, the Disclosure movement may very well be a dead-end; certainly it is seen as such by an increasing number of researchers who hope to apply scientific study to the UFO mystery. By this, I mean gathering reliable information (as well as finding better ways to gather it, with the help of new, innovative technologies), and attempting properly to assess what that data yields.
This is not to detract from the idea of pressing for greater government transparency on subjects like UFOs. Nonetheless, a persistent danger exists in the presumption that such information exists, or that by lobbying for its release, something akin to an “Ark of the Covenant” for ufology will be revealed, laying out plainly, and for all to see, the “reality” behind the UFO phenomenon… whatever that might be.
Put more simply, overconfidence in the assumption that government agencies already have the answers, and that ufology is purely an aim toward gaining access to that information, may in fact be entirely counterproductive should it transpire that either of the following is true in relation to the UFO question:
No such information exists in the possession of government agencies, or
It does exist, but it continues to be withheld, despite political activism
I speak the above with full knowledge, of course, that many serious UFO researchers in years past have managed to garner new information through the FOIA process; three individuals that come to mind here are Stanton Friedman, John Burroughs, and Nick Redfern, each of whom I have spoken with personally about this subject at some length.
Thus, the argument remains that scientific UFO research, which really is the simple definition of the term “ufology,” is of utmost importance to the study of UFOs if it is to be determined that there is anything more to the subject than the simple misidentification of prosaic natural and manmade phenomena, paired with a variety of factors that contribute to the ways humans interpret it on a case-for-case basis.
Returning to Allan Hendry’s book, he offers the following analysis of the term “UFO,” as well as what it means, and how this applies to the scientific study of unexplained aerial phenomena:
The definition of a UFO given here is quite unusual, really; unlike other definitions that say what an object is or what it is like, this one describes a UFO by what it is not, or not like. If UFOs are, in effect, “everything in the sky that we don’t understand,” then this suggests that the number of kinds of UFOs is hopelessly large. Is this the case in practice? If ufology is composed of a chaotic jumble of dissimilar, unrelated events, then it can’t be amenable to study and therefore can’t really be a science.3
This assessment, without additional context, may sound hopelessly bleak. Hendry, however, though scientifically skeptical in his assessment of the subject, had not been a debunker of UFOs (in fact, he argued against the ideology that, “if 90 percent of all UFO reports can be explained simply, then why not 100 percent?”).4 Anyone who takes time to read Hendry’s comprehensive analysis of the subject, as presented in The UFO Handbook, must see that it is among the most thorough, non-biased scientific studies ever to have been presented on the subject; in fact, it may be the very finest instance of scientific UFO research collated in a single publication.
On the varieties of the UFO experience—and the oft-asserted notion that the term “UFO” refers to all varieties of unexplainable aerial phenomena, Hendry wrote: “In the past, UFO theories have shared one thing in common: the reductionist opinion that all UFOs belong to one generic class, i.e. that all unexplainable accounts of flying objects, ranging from distant Nocturnal Lights to exotic encounters with UFO-nauts, share a common blanket explanation scheme.”5 Thus, the majority of Hendry’s book examines what UFOs are not, with detailed surveys that examine how easily (and consistently) common aircraft and other aerial objects or phenomena have been misinterpreted by observers.
Of particular importance is Hendry’s emphasis on the way that “flying saucers,” as a social meme, have broadly influenced people’s interpretation of unidentified objects seen in the skies, particularly at night. This has led to a consistent trend toward assessment of natural or manmade things as being “UFOs,” “alien craft,” or other similar things. This is carried over into close encounter reports, where many claims of interactions with UFO occupants (though not all of them, perhaps) seem to indicate fantasies conjured by the observer, in response to this ever-present “flying saucer” meme. Hence, the differences between reported experiences from one UFO case to the next are almost infinite in their variety, further complicating the serious scientific treatment and categorization of such data.
With all the aforementioned in mind, Hendry offers a number of breakdowns and designations, which include extrapolations on possible sources that may account for many UFO reports, while allowing for the possibility that a minority of these cases do involve exotic or, at least, as-yet unexplained phenomena.
Still, a lot has changed in the world since 1979. The proliferation of drone technologies has added to the number of things we see darting through the sky on a daily basis. Also, the prevalence of smart phones and other handheld devices have allowed for the effective containment of small UFO investigative facilities carried within one’s pocket, thanks to apps that range in focus from astronomy and star gazing, to oscilloscopes, police radars, and even satellite and aircraft tracking programs.
With the changing of times, the ways that UFOs are studied, and the designations applied to the collective UFO data, must change as well. Yes, modern researchers must take into account the prevalence of drones operated both by civilians, as well as government agencies. This, in addition to a number of similar innovations since the beginning of the 21st century, all further complicate the way UFOs are studied, and what their underlying sources may be.
The prevalence of “IFOs”—that is, objects that account for the majority of UFO reports, but which can be ruled out as prosaic sources through careful scientific research—greatly informed Hendry’s work, and helped lead him to the novel concept of proposing what he called:
…a non-extraordinary plan to account for UFO reports at least as well as others mentioned (these “others”, it should be noted, are the common sensational or extraordinary theories proposed by UFO advocates, in view of the seemingly exotic elements many UFO cases appear to represent).6
Thus, a “non-revolutionary, alternative UFO theory” is useful, because it helps whittle down the sensational claims that surround the majority of UFO research and to bring things down to a level that may allow scientific study to be useful in solving the broader UFO mystery (and none of this is to say that there cannot be an exotic or otherwise unusual explanation for some UFOs, but merely that we would better serve the subject by not assuming such a position from the outset, since the data may indeed reveal otherwise further on down the road).
Out with the Old: A New Classification System for UFOs
Over the last several years, my attitudes toward the UFO subject have changed greatly. At the outset, my own neophyte views fell very much in line with generally accepted attitudes: UFOs were probably evidence of alien visitations. With time (and with virtually no evidence of anything that could rightly be considered “extraterrestrial”), my skepticism grew, and I began to consider alternatives to the extraterrestrial hypothesis that might still account for some UFO reports, in addition to whether much of the phenomenon could have terrestrial origins.
My present hope, as a UFO researcher, is to propose a new set of designations for UFOs, which involve possible origins of various UAP that are subject to scientific inquiry, given our current level and understanding of applicable science and technology. These will incorporate new sources of possible UFO sightings (such as drones), as well as the reformulation of older elements, with consideration given to new technologies and innovations. My reason for wanting to do this is twofold:
New technologies, as well as new scientific discoveries, have helped broaden the range of possible sources for UAP since the day of Allen Hendry and J. Allen Hynek; the kinds of “IFO” sources they were comfortable working with have also broadened to include things like drones.
The previous classification systems first employed by J. Allen Hynek were too general, even for the period in which they were created; by today’s standards, they no longer appear to provide a workable criterion for many modern UFO reports (we’ll expand on this in a moment).
Hence, I argue that a “modernized” UFO classification system, which draws from the sort of crude classification system first employed by J. Allen Hynek, should be instituted. Of his original classification framework, Hynek wrote in The Hynek UFO Report that, “A number of years ago, I devised a simple classification system based solely on what was reported as observed and not on any preconceived idea of what the actual nature of UFOs might be. It was purely an observational classification system, much like an astronomer might use to classify the different types of stars or a zoologist different types of beetles that he came across in his explorations.”
Hynek’s observational classification system was composed of the following: What Hynek called NOCTURNAL LIGHTS, followed by DAYLIGHT DISCS. For instances where radar data corroborated a sighting, Hynek employed the term RADAR VISUALS, and for observations that occurred close at hand, Hynek used a three-tier grouping called CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (CEs), which accounted for a UFO observed close enough to discern relative detail (CE I), a UFO observed interacting physically with its environment in some way, and possibly leaving residual evidence (CE II), and a UFO observed along with its apparent occupants, or entities otherwise associated with the object (CE III).7
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