UFOs- Reframing the Debate

by Robbie Graham

  But what of the other side of the former Iron Curtain? Most historians would agree in naming the fall of the Berlin Wall (which started in June 13, 1990) as marking the beginning of the Soviet Union’s collapse. My own personal calendar, however, identifies September 21, 1989 as the true date when the winds of change started blowing. This date corresponds with the commencement of remarkable UFO activity in the small city of Voronezh, involving the apparent landing of craft, sightings of enormous humanoid creatures, terrifying interactions with local boys, and more astounding accounts which would have made even the most trashy pulp fiction writer of the 1950s think twice before submitting such stories to his publisher.13 It is a remarkable case in the modern annals of ufology, more so for the fact it was able to trespass the traditional boundaries of censorship erected by the Kremlin decades ago which used to stop UFO accounts dead in their tracks. For many decades, this imbalance of reporting gave the impression the UFO phenomenon was exclusive to Western nations; the dissemination of the Voronezh case is, thus, another testament to Gorbachev’s Perestroika reforms. Empires bloom and crumble, and yet the mystery of the UFO remains, but the fact that a once-mighty empire was willing to acknowledge its powerlessness over a mysterious, external influence is truly remarkable.

  That which is a nuisance to the governing authority becomes appealing to those with a distaste for orders and regulation, and the unruliness of UFOs seems to stir something in the core of the most marginalized layers of society. This is by no means a modern trend. In his seminal book, Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallée puts this into perspective:

  Celestial phenomena seem to have been so commonplace in the Japanese skies during the Middle Ages that they influenced human events in a direct way. Panics, riots and disruptive social movements were often linked to celestial apparitions. The Japanese peasants had the disagreeable tendency to interpret the “signs from heaven” as strong indications that their revolts and demands against the feudal system or against foreign invaders were just, and as assurance that their rebellions would be crowned with success.14

  Rebellion, revolt, and social unrest. I first mused about their possible link to UFOs in the summer of 2011,15 when the streets of London were besieged by riots which had originally erupted in Tottenham. It was during that time that Mike Sewell, a BBC Radio 5 sports reporter, begrudgingly made public his own sighting of a large disc-shaped object on the morning of August 4, while he was driving to Stansted airport. Looking at the distance between these two London locations through applications like Google Maps yields a relative proximity, but finding a direct correlation between UFO activity and social unrest in the same geographical area throughout history is a tricky proposition at best. In his entry on “UFO waves” for The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters,16 Martin S. Kottmeyer points to the high levels of UFO activity in the United States, coinciding with times of deep disturbances in American society during the mid-1960s, as possible indicators for the validity of the “Paranoia Theory” as a psychological explanation to the UFO phenomenon. The paranoia theory extrapolates from the work of behavioral psychologists like Dr. Norman Cameron of the University of Wisconsin, and interprets UFOs as a form of “paranoid ideation,” possibly triggered by moments of “deep national shame and humiliation.” While the anti-war protests and the Watts riots occurring simultaneously with the UFO wave of 1965 seems to fit the bill, other periods of social instability and general anxiety won’t align so easily to this theory, such as the low level of UFO activity registered by Blue Book during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

  Still, given how several countries famous for their high levels of UFO activity in past decades also suffered periods of social repression and political authoritarianism—e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, etc.—looking for a possible link between this non-terrestrial phenomenon and episodes of earthly unrest is not without appeal. Of course, if a statistical and reliable link were to be corroborated, and we eschew the simplistic interpretation of UFOs as psychological delusions induced by mass hysteria, we’d still be left with the insurmountable task of finding an explanation for the activity, not unlike the metaphorical “chicken and egg” conundrum: are UFOs somehow attracted or conductive to manifestations of profound social change, or is the phenomenon directly or indirectly responsible for such events?

  Investigators like Mack Maloney17 have written extensively about the proliferation of UFO sightings during times of war, and yet extrapolating further than what the reports inform us of—i.e. that strange unconventional activity has often been observed in the theater of war throughout history—propels us to speculate as to whether the UFOs are merely observing our exploits of tribal combat as dispassionate witnesses, or if they are somehow intervening in the balance of those battles, the way Homer depicted it in his narration of the classic war which would give reference to all human conflagrations past, present and future—the Iliad. Do these entities give enough of a damn about the welfare and prospect of our species that they feel the need to foster the erosion and upending of stagnant structures of power from time to time?

  Or, do they just delight in inspiring mischief in our world for their own personal and inscrutable amusement?

  We’ve briefly explored periods of externalized turmoil, but what about internalized turmoil? Delving into the problem of UFOs one must, eventually, approach it from the point of view of human perception: its limitations and susceptibility through different factors, which can either distort, numb or sometimes even enhance it according to the given circumstances and particulars of the individual. Seriah Azkath, host of the weekly radio show Where Did the Road Go?18 which delves with all sorts of fringe and paranormal topics, has personally experienced a high degree of strangeness bumping into his daily life, which has left him with more questions than answers, along with a passion to pursue this topic from unconventional perspectives. One of Askath’s experiences happened back in the year 2000. As he was driving to his radio station one night at around 11pm, he observed what seemed to be a gigantic, brightly-lit object hovering over Cayuga lake, New York.19 He pulled over and rolled down the window, yet, despite its apparent massiveness, the object was completely silent. The eerie encounter stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun when the bright lights dropped below the tree line and were out of sight. Seriah asked around and searched for UFO reports the next day but, as of the time of this writing, he seems to have been the sole experiencer of this close encounter, which might be explained by the sparse population around that area and how late it was.

  Years later, when author and researcher Mike Clelland20 astutely asked about his state of mind around that time, Seriah conceded his life was “a complete chaos” back then, going through several upsetting changes and developments. A fact which raises the question on whether his internal mood was an influential factor conducive to the sighting, and makes one wonder if a hypothetical passenger riding with him would have been able to perceive the same thing… if anything at all.

  Are UFOs, then, akin to “crisis apparitions” or poltergeist activity, which parapsychologists have tried to link to the unruly “psychic” energy unconsciously released by troubled pubescent children? Paranormal researchers have sought for a “Unified Theory” capable of linking disparate phenomena, which some suspect have more in common than we’d care to realize—PSI, ghostly manifestations, cryptid sightings and UFO encounters. While many still find such propositions absurd and do all they can to keep their ufological peas from touching their cryptozoology carrots or phantasmagorical potatoes on their paranormal plate, others have come to the realization that consciousness plays a significant role in all of these phenomena. In all of these manifestations, whatever the triggering input (internal, external or a convoluted combination of both), it is human consciousness which is perceiving said input and parsing it through a finely tuned “cultural filter;” and while geographical location and chronological factors will surely play a role in the precipitation of UFO encounters, proposing that
some individuals seem more “sensitive” or “attractive” to such anomalies (even if only transitorily due to temporal circumstances) seems not too unreasonable.

  Internal turmoil and lack of rigidity are not just the earmarks of adolescence: they are also intrinsic to the creativity-prone, which is possibly the reason why artistic types tend to show a higher interest in the UFO phenomenon than people who choose a more conventional (read “conformist”) lifestyle; or, at least, they are more outspoken about it. From John Lennon’s famous observation of a UFO over New York on August 23rd, 197421—and let’s not forget Lennon had left Yoko Ono and was staying with his secretary-turned-lover May Pang, as possible indication of his state of mind at the time—to David Bowie’s reported sightings and life-long interest in extraterrestrial life and mysticism, it hints not only to the allure which the subject has for people with iconoclastic tendencies, but it also gives reason to speculate how such attitudes might yield a better understanding of the phenomenon than those who observe it from a more fixed paradigm. Consider Bowie’s astute hindsight about a sighting he had while traveling through the English countryside with a friend:

  I believe that what I saw was not the actual object, but a projection of my own mind trying to make sense of this quantum topological doorway into dimensions beyond our own. It’s as if our dimension is but one among an infinite number of others.22

  A finer, more elegant, and more sophisticated explanation to this mind-boggling mystery, I feel, than of those who are certain these craft hail from Zeta Reticuli II.

  “Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap.”

  —ALAN MOORE, V FOR VENDETTA.

  In his case to show the modern UFO phenomenon as being the same as the belief in the Faerie realm from old Europe or other folkloric customs around the world—only now clothed with the appropriate veneer of space visitation suited for 20th-century sensibilities—Vallée reminds us of how interaction with non-human intelligences has always been dissuaded by the Status Quo… to the point, even, of using the penalty of death as the ultimate deterrent, stereotypically portrayed by the effigy of the witch’s pyre. The result of this suppression was to force this body of knowledge to find refuge underground, spawning hermeticism in the Middle Ages. In seeking communion with these entities, one can delineate a tradition beginning with alchemists Facius Cardan and Paracelsus, going all the way to the George Adamski and the contactees from the “golden age” of the modern flying saucer era. Many modern students of the phenomenon would point to Aleister Crowley as a bridge between the early alchemists, summoning sylphs with arcane rituals, and the common citizens who claimed to be ambassadors of the Space Brothers. Indeed, Crowley sought conference with metaphysical beings through various (and sometimes devious) means, and claimed to have succeeded. One of those beings is popularly identified with the monosyllabic name of “Lam,” and, while Crowley’s pictorial depiction of it is interpreted by some as a psychic self-portrait,23 others see a striking resemblance to the archetypal Gray alien.24 Another “transmundane” entity that Crowley purportedly contacted was Aiwass, who passed along the anarchic commandment upon which the law of Thelema was structured: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

  What does “Do what thou wilt” really mean, anyway? According to students of Thelema, Crowley didn’t simply mean to satisfy one’s petty whims and desires, but finding one’s true path or purpose in life, the “true will” or higher purpose. In children’s literature The magical land of do-as-you-please—accessible by befriending denizens of the fairy-kind, according to British author Enid Blyton in her book series The Faraway Tree—inspired comic book writer and Chaos magician Alan Moore when he created his own treatise on modern anarchy, V for Vendetta, arguably the most influential piece of popular culture in the last three decades;25 a testament to its relevance is simply the ubiquitousness of Guy Fawkes’ smirking facade in any form of modern civil protest—the grinning man archetype emerges again.

  V, the superhuman terrorist hellbent on overthrowing the fascistic regime ruling over a disturbingly familiar dystopian England, explains to secondary character Evey how do-as-you-please needs not be interpreted in the same violent manner embraced by the Manson family, who slit the throat of the ‘60s psychedelic revolution to the tune of Helter Skelter. “Anarchy [means] without leaders, not without order,” says V. True order, for Moore, comes from voluntary acceptance of personal boundaries, without the need of a regulatory body imposing any limitations upon individuals.

  But anarchy, according to Moore, must be preceded by a chaotic stage in which all the obsolete structures upholding the status quo must be disrupted and obliterated. Those structures can be either tangible symbols, as in the case of the old parliament building destroyed by V in Moore’s graphic novel, or abstract ones like the respectability and trust in mainstream media.

  After the Condon Report, issued by the University of Colorado, gave the U.S. Air Force the long-sought justification to stop paying attention publicly to the UFO phenomenon, the press was also given permission no longer to take the issue seriously—a process that had already started with the Robertson panel. Ironically, the giggle factor imposed on the topic by mainstream media is one of the reasons that newspapers and TV news have become almost irrelevant in the 21st Century. The early Internet bloomed with online forums and chat rooms devoted to fringe topics never discussed by traditional media—alien abductions, Area 51 and the assassination of JFK—and has now turned into the preferred medium by which Millennials absorb the news. The veneer of officialdom is no longer a valuable asset in an era when lack of confidence in official channels has become almost second nature to the populace; much to the contrary, the smear campaign adopted by traditional journalism on fringe topics has completely backfired and triggered its rejection by an ever-expanding portion of a distrusting public, whose rationale is something like: “If they have lied to us for so long about something as transcendent as an alien presence in our midst, then why should we trust them on ANYTHING at all?”

  In a post-X Files age when pop culture needs not remind us that “government denies knowledge,” it’s the three Lone Gunmen, incarnated in a thousand alt-news blogs and websites, who get the last laugh.

  In such an upside-down state of affairs, what should we say about ufology’s obsessive appeal for “Disclosure”? Truly it would seem that, as we observe the events unfolding in the second decade of the 21st Century, the eventual disappearance of the Nation/State, as we currently know it, seems a more likely scenario than for those entities to recognize an anomaly over which they have no control whatsoever; an anomaly that refuses to conform to our ‘sensible’ expectations and seems hell bent on throwing into question everything we take for granted—even the nature of reality itself.26

  Preposterous? It would have been equally preposterous to suggest, in the 1970s, that the mighty Soviet Union would come crashing down in less than two decades. It was also preposterous to think Britain would vote to leave the European union, or that the American people would choose to elect a former reality TV celebrity to the highest office in the Free World. Empires bloom and crumble to dust, and yet the mystery of the UFO lingers still—for it, perhaps, is not a puzzle meant to be unlocked by a consensus, but confronted and dealt with by each and every one of us when the proper time comes.

  When will ufology stop yearning for official respectability, dare we ask? It seems as foolhardy and hopeless a pursuit as expecting street graffiti one day to be accepted as a fine art by ivory-towered academicians; not because there is always the occasional Banksy to serve as an exception to the rule, but because it is precisely the TRANSGRESSIONAL nature of these countercultural forces that endows them with their true power. For if history teaches us anything, it is that the most effective way to shape a society without disrupting it entirely is not from the inside, but from the outside.

  Change the Consciousness, and the culture will change i
n tow.

  Vallée saw, in the UFO phenomenon, a cultural thermostat occasionally nudging human affairs to a given, unforeseeable outcome. My rebellious nature prefers to regard it as a chaotic catalyst, ever turning human society up on its toes with its farcical displays of power. From an alchemical perspective, perhaps what this catalyst seems to be seeking is to create an appropriate state of Nigredo,27 a necessary stage of general decomposition which must be followed through if one is to reach the desired outcome of Albedo, in which the Great Work is complete and the final transmutation of crude matter into divine substance is finally achieved.

  Observed in such a way, perhaps the confounding trickery of these “Cosmic Jokers” is intended to shake us out of our collective stagnation, and force us to see a way out of our “dark (k)night of the soul” into a sunnier morrow.

  Maybe.

  For even if there’s no humanly comprehensible solution to this mystery, it doesn’t mean one can’t utilize these ultimate symbols of anarchy—which even dare to defy the law of gravity—for personal empowerment. I have successfully turned my lifelong obsession for UFOs into my personal alchemy, encouraging myself to pursue questions I know full well are without easy answers, and to grow both intellectually and spiritually for it. To assume one is certain of the phenomenon’s true origins and intentions at this stage is beyond arrogant—it is childishly naive. But if there’s one thing I’m certain of here, it is this: if you let your curiosity guide you through uncharted territories seeking not fame, nor selfish gain or dulling self-reaffirmation; if you seek NOT to conform to other people’s facile theories and answers, then I guarantee you this passion will propel you on a lifelong journey of childlike wonder for which there is no path of return.