JW: They were driving ahead for some time and then ordered me to stop—they didn’t speak in words but expressed it with hands to stop. So, I understood it and began urging the horse to stop but he [one of the beings] caught the reins and pulled back urging the horse to stop. And when it stopped they got off the cart—in the same way as they previously got on and they gave me a sign with hands to go with them.
I tied my horse, then got off and went after them toward that machine.
There was a tiny elevator of some kind for two people to hold—maybe it couldn’t carry two large people but surely could delicate ones… And then he went forth and set his foot onto this craft, I followed him and it soon lifted up rapidly—in front of that craft door. And the whole craft could be about 4m. above the ground, maybe 4.5m. [The corners of the roof and the “small lift” connected with “cord”—cables or wires with a diameter similar to that of an electric cable of modern irons.]4
It was a purely white craft—from outside. It could be 4.5 maybe to 5m. in height and it was as long as a bus, so it looked in that way [Jan Wolski on other occasion mentioned that there were 4 “barrels” on the craft corners with “drills.” Those black drill-like objects seemed to be made of black material and were rotating around its axis with great speed although without creating any disturbances in the air. They generated the hum Wolski mentioned].5
This is a fascinating case featuring a visual description of both the small men and their craft. It also featured the requisite medical check-up in which the little green men in scuba suits had Wolski strip down. The seemingly interstellar craft has all the hallmarks of both the surreal and technological magic present in high-strange events. The cable system for the platform and Wolski’s own nonchalance throughout the entire event, including his polite refusal of an icicle-shaped cake-like material that the beings were eating and offered to him, all speak to a shared creative event. His perceptions of the experience appear to be drawn from both his own personal life experiences in combination with what must have been an extremely bizarre external stimulus.
There are sociological and cultural symbols that help to organize and structure our society and define a normative representation of reality. There are perhaps also species-specific symbols lurking in the reptilian brain that create emotional responses in the limbic system that we use to navigate the essence of our reality. The value of Jungian concepts such as The Shadow, The Other and The Trickster may be valuable in how they represent common expressions of human experiences as stories. There is also the archetypal experience of “The Visit by The Stranger,” where rare external stimuli, which like any stimuli we can never truly perceive in a veridical manner, may cause certain human beings to have what others may define as an irrational experience, like a Polish farmer from Emilcin who meets two strange small green fellows in the middle of the field who hop on his wagon and take him by metal rope system up to their spaceship. This illogical event challenges our cultural ideas about transportation in the sky and positions us as specimen. It is a stimulus being injected into our collective society on a global level—is it a species-specific symbol? It would seem so.
The symbolic structures of society may either see this as dangerous or may conversely welcome the creative narratives of those who can imagine a reality beyond known maps and borders. They are the wayfarers to Ultima Thule, sojourners of the high-strange whose perceptions challenge stagnant structures and reveal other possibilities related to technology and culture. For now, the close encounter UFO witness is rarely cared for, and often exploited or demeaned. Meanwhile, the original narrative is rarely interpreted, but translated into confirmation of the ETH. This leaves little room for imaginative processes to respond to something potentially much more fascinating taking place inside and outside of the witness, who are collaborators with an external stimulus and are often removed from the equation of the event itself. Their story is reduced to singular testimony or event. Who they were before, during, and after the events are equally necessary engagements by any investigator or treating physician. Like all evolving species, we must embrace the innovative narratives in our culture so that the doorways of knowing continue to open. We must welcome the UFO witness and give them a more appropriate response by caring for their narratives in the way we would care for any human being having extraordinarily difficult and traumatic experiences. They have had a glimpse of the unknown country, and they come to us buzzing with a vision of innovative transit and, sometimes, alien beings. In many ways, the close encounter UFO witness event is an invitation to be explored.
The late Bruce Duensing, a highly imaginative commentator on ufology, paranormality and the witness experience, identified the UFO as an overt invitation to explore the limits of how we understand the reality of human transit. There is a distinct history of invention that is being mapped out by what is seen:
One aspect of everything involved with this phenomenon that struck me this morning relates to the general concepts whose axis is a vehicle to overcome time and space in our three dimensions, and how in a sense our defining of the possibility of how this can be accomplished has evolved from earthbound vehicles to air borne mechanisms to space faring vehicles and now physics that transcends the former materials of earth, then atmosphere and then space, to our changing the materials themselves in a quantum sense. Have the forms of anomalies seen in the sky shown a trending of this by the predominance of one form versus another…? Are these simply semiotic metaphors as a form of feedback… suggesting a form of “transit” always one step ahead of technology? They could reflect a transition from hard craft plying various mediums to changing the medium itself by way of physics…. a changing of ‘vehicles’? If so could this be a form of feedback that suggests an invitation? Sometimes I am struck by how this resembles a carrot on a stick… that prods a changing of context in our conceptual models in terms of our means of transit.6
The UFO challenges the witness with regards to their own known paradigms of transit in the skies, presenting impossible materials, mediums, shapes and forms. They also leave their mark on the witness as seen in the case of Dr. X, investigated by both Aime Michel and, later, Jacques Vallée. The absurd high-strange events that continued to follow Dr. X and his family, from teleportation and levitation to poltergeist activity, demonstrate the capacity the UFO experience has for the deconstruction of commonly held beliefs about reality. For two years following this experience, Dr. X and his infant son, the only two witnesses to the event, experienced recurring triangular red marks on their stomachs centred around the navel. Michel writes about the wife’s experience of events in their home following the incident:
Mme “X” consequently felt at first an unendurable sensation of unreality, as she has often told me. She expected me, and the other people whom she consulted, to find an explanation which would bring everything back once more onto a basis of logic and reason. When she began to perceive that this was impossible and that she and her family would be obliged—at least for the time being—to resign themselves to the realm of the irrational, despair was added to her impression of unreality.7
Michel’s continued investigation of the many high-strange reports by Dr. X defined unique consequences for the witness who was subjected to a prolonged experience of the destabilization of their previously held beliefs about the physical truths of the world.
Symbolically, the UFO may signal advances in technology. Perhaps we are being prodded, by a conscious agent, to consider how we reinvent aerial vehicular forms of transportation. Each witness to such high drama is imprinted by such visions. When the narrative includes “aliens” it also positions the human being as a specimen, subjected to banal medical experimentation, or at its most torturous and medieval, they become the object of sexual violation and extreme medical experimentation. When reports of such nature are being made, as in any case of violent transgression, the witness must have access to state-provided, professional medical and psychological support systems, rather than an individua
l collecting new material for their next podcast.
The symbol in the sky is more than mandala. It is an icon that represents a distinct human experience that commands attention when a witness is impacted dramatically by such altered experiential spaces. In an essay titled, “Are UFO’s a Cosmic Art Project?,” Greg Bishop asks, “When a witness sees something flitting through the sky (or perhaps closer) s/he is often forced to at least temporarily suspend what they think about “reality.” Some cases (like great art works) achieve a permanent shift in the witness’ worldview. It’s strange that most researchers tend to ignore this aspect of the UFO experience.” Later in the same essay he closes with the following pertinent observation: “So the non-human intelligences knocking at our collective consciousness may have no other message than ‘look,’ or ‘think,’ or perhaps even ‘you don’t know everything.’ Ultimately, what the UFO subject does is throw a mirror in front of us, to look at what we are, and how we perceive our reality, which is of course one of the things that great art is supposed to do.”8 Great artworks should destabilize and alter the viewer through their innovation and intensity. In the wake of the UFO experience our cool reality is shattered. We are forever changed when allowed to see the world in a manner not known before.
If we subtract our own innate bias, context, and psychology from the history of UFO reports, what we have left is the pure art of the universe: energy=information. And that might be all we can grasp at this time. The phenomenon seems to be shifting as it responds to our own technological inquiries. The other possibility is that the mind of the witness creates their own iconic skin to dress whatever the stimulus is behind the UFO in the technological clothing of the times. It is best described as a co-created event.
We might do well to engage in more long-term studies of witnesses who have been altered to get a better measure of the unknown external stimulus. For while we cannot know the UFO, we can know how we’ve been changed by seeing it. In this way, we have a direct connection to the phenomenon measured by our internal shifts; which, in turn, make us a part of the unknown. In knowing that much about ourselves, we can know something of the phenomenon as well. We are a part of this metaphor, this cosmic art project, for, like the UFO, we are also transitional and transformative beings who live and breathe symbolic reality.
We have evolved to use photons to sense the world and to see things. We will always be seeing things. The colors of the world signal to us, as people signal to us to mate with them, love them, be with them to work and create together. Let us let the alien Other who signals to us from sky and ground merely be one more sign that reaffirms our essential humanity, our essential love of the Other. If we start from such a premise, then treatment of the witness with great compassion will extend beyond their narrative and examine more the one who sees.
Knowing Iris: Finding Humanity in the Alien Other
“Once you realize the phenomenon may be deliberately misleading, then you can use certain safeguards. I’m not saying that safeguards are always going to work. There is an element of danger you really can’t avoid. There’s no way to do that kind of study just by reading books.”
—JACQUES VALLÉE
The alien Other is us. We are alien to each other in all our exchanges with other human beings on this earth. We may speak the same language and see similar things, but our experiences of reality are incredibly different. We want to connect to each other through the tools and symbols we have fashioned. But in our solitary experiences we are still utterly alone and apart from the other. We try to mitigate these distances through common attempts to fashion a shared symbolic reality, to express what we’ve seen and lived through. Still, there are chasms of meaning that we cannot truly overcome. These chasms are most evident in what Chris Rutkowski describes as Alien Abduction Syndrome. He describes the people who are having the experience of contact with aliens as having difficulty with dealing with reality: “For some reason certain people appear to think they have been contacted by aliens. This could be because of various contributing factors: dissatisfaction with life; stress; domestic problems; peer pressure; rape trauma; chemical imbalances or child abuse. Perhaps any one of these or in combination of them.”9 Trauma appears to be an essential component of the alien contact/abduction experience. For the individual experiencer, there is the highly symbolic event of the stranger who visits us from far away and you are abducted into their realm. Suddenly, it seems as if reality is broken and what you are seeing and feeling cannot be, but it is there nonetheless. This experience has happened twice in my life.
In 1977, at the age of nine I saw two classic illuminated and seemingly metallic ships descend upon me and a friend at night while on an ice rink in Northern Ontario. They made no sound and hung still in the sky. One started moving towards us until it was only about two telephone pole heights above us. Multi-colored lights were on its perimeter and it remained utterly silent. I heard my own voice in my head say, “You know what’s going to happen. You’re going to get abducted.” This flying saucer hung in the air for around a minute and then slowly drifted along the edge of the backyards of the houses bordering the ice rink field. I remember hearing the voices of the adults inside calling out about the lights in the sky and one shouted for binoculars, which was strange in retrospect because what I was looking at certainly didn’t require magnification. I suspect we were all seeing very different things in the sky at that moment. The ‘ship’ continued to drift in a straight line until it paused over a roof and tall tree in the backyard of a friend’s house. I had the distinct impression it was ‘scanning’ the people in the house. It slowly went up to join its counterpart and the two of them lazily moved across the neighbourhood to the north and hung above the main intersection of Sault Ste. Marie at Highway 17 North and then they rapidly burst up into the sky at an incredible rate. We watched those two lights join the stars and then fade into nothingness. The next summer, along with a friend, we saw that the top third of the tree described previously now appeared to be dead and burnt. We also noticed that the shingles on the roof where the object had paused now looked as if they had been burned and overturned in a radial arc. I am a UFO witness.
The second of my experiences is captured in the story at the beginning of this essay; it is a visionary description of the events leading up to my first contact with Iris Phalene, a self-described alien living a lonely life here on planet earth. One night in 2005 I had a very strange experience of an object in the sky while walking in the woods at night. While meditating on the light, I allowed my mind to drift into hallucinatory territory, as was often my practice when completing walking mediations in the evening. I allowed the orange light to transform into an altered object and watched with delight as it in turn altered my perceptions of the natural world around me, transforming the woods into a surreal aquatic phantasmagoria, which was followed by meeting a strange woman who came out of the dark woods. She was short and unnaturally thin, and her conversation was immediate. She described herself as an alien that had just arrived on earth.
For as long as I can remember, my significant experiences with human beings have been around their sharing of traumatic experiences with me. I grew up in a space of domestic trauma, have experienced permanent life-altering traumas at various points, and have since found myself to be the receiver of the narratives of many others who are trauma survivors. Beyond being listener and sometimes friend, their life narratives have often become entangled in my own. While some I still maintain contact with, many others, at my own advising, have sought out professional psychological and psychiatric supports to help them navigate the difficulties they were having with their own experiences of reality.
My contact with Iris Phalene lasted for only three months and altered me permanently. Our brief communications were destabilizing at the time, but through her I discovered something about the nature of humanity and what it means to make contact with the alien Other. During our time together I interviewed her over a series of brief and strange meetings,
often in the woods:
Robert Brandstetter: Why do you identify with aliens?
Iris Phalene: Because they are far away and they visit earth and that’s what I do. I’m from far away and I visit earth.
RB: How long are you here for?
IP: I don’t know. I’m stuck here. I fell here by accident because I fell from the moon. I adore her. She is my lover, and my mother and myself.
RB: Did you leave anyone behind there on the moon?
IP: No. It was solitude.
RB: Have you had contact with similar aliens here on earth like yourself?
IP: There’s some people who aren’t exactly people; they are special. They have minds that work.
RB: Compared to the rest of the people here? Their minds don’t work? Are they filled with bad stuff?
IP: They don’t necessarily have bad stuff. It’s filled with longing and desire. They live this life just to die and that’s their mission. They keep staying the same. They don’t know what they are working towards and they are working towards death.
RB: Are you working towards death?
IP: No, I wish for death. And then I would have no presence and I would not exist anymore. I would prefer to have quiet and nothingness.
RB: Do you experience desire and longing as well?
IP: Yeah I do. We all do. Some people experience it but don’t know what to do with it. It’s not bad, but if you have no desire and longing then what else do you have? You are always looking for something but you don’t know what it is. Sometimes people call you, or it’s death that calls you and you go there because you want to see what that song is.
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 29