UFOs- Reframing the Debate

by Robbie Graham

  This statement echoes the sentiments of Massimo Teodorani that I quoted earlier. They also argue that UAP (UFOs) can be thought of both as physical and as psychic:

  We hope that it will prove stimulating as a unified approach to a puzzling phenomenon that presents both undeniable physical effects suggesting a technological device or craft and psychic effects reminiscent of the literature on poltergeists and psychokinetic phenomena.10

  “Nuts and bolts” ufologists pride themselves on having a scientific mindset. With this in mind, I would challenge them to consider what some professional scientists who have looked into UFOs have had to say in regards to high strangeness. One of the first scientific field investigations of UFOs was known as Project Identification, conducted by Dr. Harley Rutledge, and it has been well documented that several synchronicities were noted throughout the study. Astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani comments on Rutledge’s work and shares a similar experience of his own while musing on the possibility of a “mind-matter creation,” i.e.: a parapsychological event:

  Another point of great interest, which has been often experienced, is a synchronicity phenomenon between an observer and the apparition of anomalous light forms in the sky. This occurred to scientists, too.

  Rutledge himself experienced synchronic events many times, and if I must be honest and sincere this happened to me, too, 15 years ago. It happens that we suddenly turn our sight to a specific point of the sky and there see the (generally star-like) light.

  This is a clear example of synchronicity, and sometimes (as it has been already mentioned) of telepathy too.

  The question is who or what triggers this and why? Or is the light created as an archetypal form from our own consciousness due to reasons we don’t know yet, but where, once more, mind-matter coalescence occurs suddenly as a micro-creation effect? Therefore, this is a topic we should consider deeply, because it might be the signature of something extremely important that opens many doors to a supernal knowledge, and technology too.11

  Parapsychology and UFOs

  Parapsychology has a lengthy history in studying phenomena both physical and psychic, and this can be extended to the examination of the UFO experience. Having been immersed in the study both of UFO encounters and paranormal phenomena such as poltergeists, I can confidently say there are parallels to both, and this is currently being overlooked by most of ufology.

  This was also Scott Rogo’s conclusion. Rogo was one of the only parapsychologists actively to examine UFO encounters and he noted several commonalities between the UFO experience and poltergeist outbreaks. One example would be that UFO witnesses have reported that they have both thought of or talked about UFOs and then later go on to see one. Sometimes they feel a strong urge to look in a certain direction and it is at that moment they experience a UFO. This can be interpreted as precognition or synchronicity in action. Rogo went on to publish his findings in the book entitled The Haunted Universe:12

  In the spring of 1966 a young couple who were renting a small house in a semi-forested area of Woodstock in New York State noticed six greenish lights of about 6 feet in diameter in a nearby field. On another occasion, they saw something flying close to their car and move towards a wooded area while making a high-pitch sound like a vacuum cleaner droning. They heard these sounds many times over a period of several months. Then, one afternoon, the sound seemed to stop moving and stayed stationary over the house. The woman looked at all the electrical equipment in the house and could not find a source. It seemed to be located in one of the house’s walls. The couple verified that from outside of the house they could not see anything strange on the wall. But when they looked around at a nearby field they saw a green light and a smaller red one moving away from each other until they disappeared. They were frightened by the experience, but that was not all that was going to happen. They also heard a man’s voice and the sounds of someone walking. They were really panicked at that point, but the noise and sound eventually stopped. The next day, they noticed that the grass near their house was flat and scorched, and it did not improve much during the entire summer.13

  Was this a UFO encounter or was it a poltergeist? It appeared to be both.

  UFO accounts, much like dreams, seem to contain symbolic messages that are not necessarily reflective of what their content conveys. These experiences of precognition, synchronicity, and the expressing of one’s thoughts in absurd ways have also been noted during poltergeist disturbances. “For example, someone who wants to leave the house after having enough of the disturbance finds his shoes in the freezer.”14

  Within my own research, I have noted that the falling leaf motion is seen in both unidentified objects in the sky and experienced during poltergeist manifestations of objects that appear to be pushed or dropped by unseen hands.15 Considering these similarities, it is unfortunate that the subject of UFOs remains highly contentious among parapsychologists. The website for the professional association for parapsychology quite clearly states that they do not intake or investigate UFO reports.

  Part of this reluctance can certainly be laid at the doorstep of more outlandish UFO groups that maintain, without any scientific evidence, that the ETH is the only explanation for UFOs and that, any minute, now governments of the world will confirm this for them, or the aliens themselves will make their presence globally known. The lack of intellectual discourse within popular ufology and the steadfastness held to beliefs will understandably serve as a deterrent to most professionals.

  A Haunted Sky: Social PSI and UFOs

  Eric Ouellet, the Canadian liaison for the Parapsychological Association, is one of the few exceptions within the study that is chipping away at this. Eric has created the social scientific discipline known as Parasociology, and he is primarily focussed on exploring how societies interact with telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis or PSI. His first book on the subject, Illuminations: The UFO Experience as a Parapsychological Event, gives us fresher ideas to examine by asking: are UFO encounters, including UFO waves, a direct result of Social PSI?

  PSI is the anomalous phenomenon studied by parapsychology and generally falls into two categories: Extrasensory Perception (ESP), and Psychokinesis (PK). Social PSI includes the social dynamics for which the experience takes place.15

  When applied to individual cases and different UFO flaps, some interesting insights and patterns begin to emerge. This premise builds on the ideas of Jung, and it works well with Jacque Vallée and Scott Rogo’s findings that UFO witnesses tend to see what they are culturally conditioned to expect, and do so in a precognitive way that occasionally seems to anticipate future technology.

  Ouellet writes:

  People saw airships in the skies of North America at the end of the 19th century a few years before they were flown; Scandinavians saw many ghost rockets in the sky just after the end of World War II and before much more powerful rockets were available to reach Scandinavia; a few years before the launch of the space age with the Soviet Sputnik satellite, many people saw things in the sky that were interpreted as spaceships.16

  Could these UFOs have been apparitions of future events?

  One of the strongest cases for Social PSI as an explanation for a UFO wave is the Belgium flap that began on November 29, 1989 and lasted until March 1991. This UFO flap is very well defined in its time frame, and it was thoroughly documented in real-time by both military and civilian authorities, including UFO researchers, all of whom displayed an unprecedented level of cooperation in investigation efforts.

  There were numerous multi-witness reports that included various shapes and sizes of both UFOs and humanoid “aliens,” but the most commonly reported UFO was a dark triangular shape with a very bright white light in each corner and a weaker red light in the middle of the triangle.

  On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down; this set the stage for the ensuing rapid collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. While mostly non-violent, there was no way for people living through it to predict th
e turn these events could take, and it should not be difficult to imagine the anxiety, fear, and uncertainty they were experiencing.

  If we consider the turbulence of that time throughout Europe, and include the USSR, which was experiencing a similar concurrent UFO wave, the hypothesis that the UFOs were born of social upheaval becomes tangible. Instead of an individual poltergeist focus person, we have entire societies contributing to a psychic manifestation in the sky that mirrors, in a very symbolic way, the political and military unrest occurring on the ground.

  When considering the Belgium wave and the Social PSI hypothesis put forward by Ouellet, UFO scholar David Halperin asks:

  Can it be coincidence that Belgium, so singularly favored by the UFOs of 1989-90—sightings that seemed to stop at the German and French borders—housed the headquarters of NATO in its capital Brussels? That the NATO symbol was (and is) a white star, while the red star was a symbol of Communism? That the most common type of Belgian UFO displayed a Jungian-style quaternity of three bright white stars (lights) surrounding a faint red star?17

  In my opinion, this adds a dimension of synchronicity or a meaningful coincidence to these UFO events, and this, in the scholarly literature, plays a strong role in the overall UFO experience.

  Could the Belgium wave have been a societal cry for help to NATO by a population that had been living under Communist rule and experiencing very uncertain times? Like individual poltergeist cases where the focus person is unable to express their anxiety in a more conventional sense, we can, through the lenses of parasociology, speculate as to the effect this historic time had on people collectively and how it may, in turn, have manifested as a UFO wave over NATO headquarters.

  Summary

  To reframe the UFO debate we need to formulate new models for analysing existing and incoming data, and introduce innovative hypotheses by asking better questions than have thus far been asked.

  I have given examples from scientists and scholars of varied disciplines, who, like Allen Hynek before them, have studied UFOs and drawn similar conclusions of the phenomenon. Their findings encompass the totality of the UFO experience and strengthen the need for parapsychological and parasociological models as part of a multi-disciplinary approach to the further study of UFO events.

  The steadfast adherence to the ETH among many UFO enthusiasts is akin to religious faith. To a degree, the same can be said of those UFO skeptics who apply the Null hypothesis as the only possible explanation for unresolved cases. Such dogmatic stances are harmful to the subject, and certainly they do nothing to further the progress of our understanding. More importantly, by wilfully ignoring high strangeness cases or, worse, dismissing them as “woo woo,” we do a disservice to the UFO witnesses who have shared their experiences with those of us who study the phenomenon.

  Parapsychological hypotheses and models can more fully address the complex human and social dynamics of this rich and enigmatic experience. They can do so in a more flexible way than any of the dominant hypotheses, including the ETH, because they allow for the objective and the subjective to have influence over one another while incorporating the very well established physical and psychic nature of UFO events.

  By acknowledging the high strangeness and absurdity of UFO encounters and viewing them through these lenses we can finally begin a forward momentum. The Parapsychological Hypothesis is not a solution to the UFO enigma, but it opens and encourages exciting new research avenues within the field.

  * All UFO witness interviews cited within this essay were conducted in confidentiality. Names of interviewees are withheld by agreement.

  FRANKENSTEIN & FLYING SAUCERS: CREATING, DESTROYING, AND RE-ANIMATING A PHENOMENAL MONSTER

  Ryan Sprague

  On November 17, 2012, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), held a summit in England to determine if ufology was a dead field. It was based on the notion that UFO sightings were in steep decline. Directly following the summit, Chairman of ASSAP, Dave Wood, told the UK Telegraph: “We look at these things on the balance of possibilities and this area of study has been ongoing for many decades. The lack of compelling evidence beyond the pure anecdotal suggests that on the balance of probabilities, nothing is out there. It is certainly a possibility that in ten years’ time, it will be a dead subject.”1

  These were sobering words, and they made international headlines. The true believers simply shrugged off Wood’s statement as nothing more than aggressive UFO debunkery, and perhaps rightfully so. Similar words had been spoken many times before. In an article for Saucers magazine, Max Miller stated:

  … much of the enthusiasm over UFOs has vanished in recent years due to a lack of sightings and important developments. Also, the unimaginable quantity of material, almost wholly devoid of a new approach or even new data, has flooded the UFO field in recent years, and has done little more than to deluge a respectable subject with wholesale garbage.2

  The above quote by Miller was written in 1959, some five decades prior to the 2012 UK summit—essentially same discussion of the same issue separated by more than fifty years. As technology has evolved, anomalous objects in the sky have become increasingly identifiable. Year after year, the heartrate of ufology seems to weaken. Some would argue it’s already flatlined. But the phenomenon itself seems always to find a way to resuscitate the field.

  In a paper titled, Ufology: Is There Life After Death?, researcher and author Jenny Randles states, “Eventually, something will spark humanity’s desire to know about these things, which any prolonged absence of wide public reporting will fuel.”3 This spark of interest has taken many forms throughout the history of ufology—a mass sighting of a boomerang craft over the skies of Phoenix, Arizona in 1997, for example, or a disc-shaped object piercing the clouds over Gate C-17 of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 2006. More recently, the spark has come from the outer reaches of space with the discovery in 2016 of a habitable planet orbiting Earth’s closest star, Proxima Centauri. It is such events and discoveries that converge into a desire to learn more, and to know more about UFOs. Why, then, do some feel it necessary to hang a toe tag on ufology every time it hits a brick wall? We often fear that which we don’t understand, and, if the history of UFO study has taught us anything, it’s that we understand very little about these phenomena. Yet, even if we did, would we not fear that knowledge as well?

  In 1818 England, at the age of twenty, Mary Shelley brought her now iconic monster to literary life. It wouldn’t be until 1823 that her name would appear on the second edition in France. The novel, Frankenstein, is arguably one of the first examples of science fiction; the protagonist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, making a decision to create life using science, alchemy, and technology. He achieves this divine goal with results both fantastic and terrifying. The manifestation is the monster we’ve grown to fear and love.

  So how, exactly, does this brilliantly grotesque story relate to ufology? We can start with a sharp distinction between Shelley’s original novel and the classic 1931 film directed by James Whale. Near the beginning of the film, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant breaks into a university to steal a brain for his master’s experiment. He swipes a jar marked “normal brain” but is startled by a noise. This causes him to drop the jar, damaging the brain and rendering it useless. He then takes a second jar, labeled “abnormal brain.” This would subsequently be implanted into the monster with disastrous results. Interestingly, this entire scene had no part in the original novel. Regardless, in the film version, the monster’s consciousness was explored and the primitive creature found itself aware of its reality, causing it to lash out in a frenzy of emotions it could neither process nor control. Had the monster any understanding of who or what it was, perhaps the story would have unfolded differently. Or perhaps not. But the role of consciousness in the film narrative was not just valuable, it was essential. For me, this brings to mind ufology. We can look at the blood of the monster—seek to study its physical matter—or we can seek to und
erstand its consciousness. To do this, we might start by turning the microscope on ourselves to understand better how our own consciousness (individual and collective) interacts with phenomenal stimuli.

  Reality, in its simplest of definitions, is the quality or state of being actual or true. However, when we look at the definitions of actual and true, we find both words defined as: consistent with reality. The definitions not only contradict one another, they circle around in a whirlpool of unverifiable factors. Therefore, we find ourselves relying on something a bit more cerebral. In addition to taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing, we have a sense of awareness. We are aware of a reality, which we’ve believed into existence. This theme was explored by the late Jim Keith, co-author of The Octopus, and publisher of various alternative magazines. In November of 1995, Keith gave a talk in Atlanta, Georgia, where he went into a deep deconstruction of reality through the lens of human perception. In a published 1997 version of his talk in Paranoia Magazine, titled UFOs at the Edge of Reality, Keith stated:

  Awareness is potentially a creator, and it can create freedoms and it can create limitations. The fact that ten people or a thousand people believe the same thing, does not render said thing any more real in an absolute sense. But it does point out the structural underpinning of the determinant of this illusion called reality. What people believe deep down is what they consider reality.4

  Can we then extrapolate that the existence of UFO phenomena rests solely on our belief in them? Jim Keith noted:

  I think that their existence challenges the tightly-formulated definitions of reality and imagination, and points up the limitations of those definitions. It seems to me that UFOs sometimes happily cross these lines of demarcation, and defy the definitions. The way they do this gives us some clues to the something else, to the nature of reality, what is real and what is possible, in terms of the understanding and potential expansion of awareness.5