American Cosmic
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event, except my invitation to him to attend the site with me
in New Mexico. James would have traded a thousand dances
with Katy Perry for that simple opportunity.
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T H E S I T E : JA M E S A N D
T H E A F T E R M AT H
I first introduced the two men over email; I wanted James
to come to the site with me and Tyler. After Tyler decided
that James should go to the site, realizing that I wouldn’t go
there without him, they started an email correspondence
that led to a working relationship, just as I had anticipated.
Tyler invited James to his home laboratories. At first, they
kindly kept me in the correspondence and phone cal s, but
soon they were working so closely that I was left behind. By
the time we traveled to New Mexico, they were already close
associates.
Tyler and I arrived in New Mexico before James, so we
picked him up at the airport. James’s schedule is packed with
international travel for talks at universities and other invited
visits, yet I could tell when we picked him up that this was
the highlight travel moment of his year. The excitement was
evident on his face, and he couldn’t suppress his smiles. I was
happy too, but not for the same reason. I was still suspicious
of the whole thing. My role was to document how the site
impacted the belief systems of these scientists. I wasn’t sus-
picious of James. As a fellow academic, even in a completely
different discipline, I knew that we shared a common set of
assumptions and values. We valued transparency, as long
as it did not endanger anyone, as well as honesty and peer
review. The last is basical y a process whereby other smart
people can call out our work for errors or stupidity, obliging
us to correct or defend it. These were the ethics we followed.
Tyler’s profession was so opaque to me at this point that
I wasn’t sure how to relate to him. I valued James’s presence
74 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
on the trip because I knew that he would be able to help me
assess Tyler.
That evening, Tyler related a brief history of the
site. It was the site of one of the crashes that occurred
in New Mexico in 1947, but had been largely forgotten
over time. It was not the Roswell event. There were some
eyewitnesses. Tyler knew one of them, who had been a
child at the time. Tyler told us that the site had a partic-
ular “feel” to it, and that whenever he had traveled there,
inevitably people would get into fights, whether due to the
intensity of the situation or the “energy” of the site itself.
Maybe Tyler was preparing us for this; I wasn’t sure. I cer-
tainly was not going to fight with him or James. The last
time I had “fought” with anyone it was with my brother
and I was twelve.
“I’ve never been to the site without feeling the energy,”
Tyler whispered.
James and I listened. This wasn’t typical field research.
“The last time it was between the eyewitness and a sci-
entist who we took out there,” he said. “Nobody real y knew
what it was they were even fighting about. They probably
didn’t even know. They almost came to blows. The place will
work on you over time. You wil see.”
I could tell that James was more interested in this than
I was, and I soon found out why. Later that night, giving us
an overview of his own research, James indicated that some-
times the phenomenon acts like a contagious agent. Once it
attached to a given individual, it would sometimes spread to
others who came into contact with that individual. This in-
formation, coming from James and not just Tyler, was dis-
concerting. I prayed that night for protection— from what,
I wasn’t sure. But I prayed.
J A M E S : M A S T E R O F T H E M U LT I V E R S E | 75
The next day, when we arrived at the site and our
blindfolds were removed, James and I were both struck by the
stark beauty of the place, made more vivid by the brisk wind
that whipped through the desert valley. The site was spread
across several acres. James and I took several opportunities
to confer while Tyler was busy with something else. We had
both been convinced on some level that we were being set
up. Later that afternoon, when James found the artifact, my
commitment to the theory of a setup weakened, although it
would never completely disappear. James’s metal detector
had indicated something down between the rocks. He spent
some time digging and even after all that effort had to reach
far down into the rubble and weeds to retrieve the material.
The material looked like crumpled tin foil that was also a
type of fabric. It was clumped with dirt and debris.
James’s preliminary analyses of the materials, months
later, made it hard to believe they were made on Earth. In
fact, he said he wasn’t sure, given their structure, that they
could be made anywhere— and certainly not on Earth in
1947. That’s how weird they were, and how they defied con-
ventional explanation. They were just . . . anomalous.
The ensuing analyses of the material had a significant
effect on James’s and Tyler’s beliefs. Although Tyler was al-
ready convinced that an extraterrestrial craft had crash-
landed at the site in 1947, James’s analyses further justified
Tyler’s belief. Real y, James didn’t know what they were, but he
knew that they were genuinely anomalous. It didn’t matter to
James whether a craft had crash- landed at the site or whether
Tyler (or someone else) had planted the materials for me and
James to find. The artifacts potentially substantiated that
something material associated with the phenomenon could
be studied or confirmed. James could not understand how
76 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
on a multiacre site he had been able to find this structured
object. For James, his side interest and hobby now took on a
very different flavor.
Having studied religion for many years, I can offer
the following observations. First, here are two eminently
credible people— scientists no less— claiming that there
are artifacts whose provenance is truly unexplainable. This
amounts to having the testimony of credible witnesses,
which is pretty much what one finds in the first written
documents of Christianity and Buddhism. The Christian
Gospels are the testaments, or testimonies, of credible
witnesses— the apostles, which is a Greek word that lit-
eral y translates as “those who are sent,” or “messengers.”
Second, the credible witnesses are attesting to something
truly unexplainable, truly anomalous. In religious studies,
this would be a miracle, either a miraculous object or a mi-
raculous event, such as a healing.
Of course, this is not how James or Tyler would speak
about the site, but it is my assessment. The sit
es in New
Mexico function as sacred sites for a new religion, the reli-
gion of the UFO event and, as I will argue, the religion of
technology. They are the places of a hierophany, where non-
human beings descended to Earth and left us a “donation,” as
James, chuckling, once called it. It was something for us to
ponder, a window to another reality too obscure to fathom
now, but evidence of the “other.” James and people like him
will eventual y crack its code. I was reminded of the first
scene in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A group of hominid
human ancestors are losing a fight with a rival tribe. After
a night’s sleep, they wake to find an anomalous object, the
monolith. The monolith, and the idea it inspires, drives them
to develop one of the first tools of war and is the catalyst for
J A M E S : M A S T E R O F T H E M U LT I V E R S E | 7 7
human evolution and dominance. Arthur C. Clarke’s insight
is compelling: not all ideas are benign gifts.
What do I think about the artifacts? And the site? I be-
lieve that James’s analyses are correct. They are artifacts and
accomplished scientists cannot understand them. Do I be-
lieve that they were delivered, either intentional y or uninten-
tional y, by extraterrestrials or beings from other dimensions,
that is, nonhuman intelligences? This is where the story gets
complicated, and religious.
Suffice it to say that although James and Tyler don’t know
who or what produced them, their instruments and analyses
seem to confirm that the artifacts should not exist. The pure
impossibility of their findings motivates the pursuit of their
unorthodox science, which, James reminds us, is as real as
what he does in his day job. Tyler and James are very com-
fortable in the gray area of not concluding, of not knowing
what it is they found; it is what prevents them from making
dogmatic, and even ridiculous, assertions, such as that these
are spacecraft debris from Mars. They both leave open the
possibility that the materials are of human origin, perhaps
from some military program. Like Socrates before them,
they show that they are wise by admitting that they do not
know. That doesn’t prevent them from trying to find out—
because the truth probably is out there.
T H E M Y T H B E G I N S
When I got back to North Carolina, I realized that I had in-
advertently walked into some version of the “myth” of what
has become known as the Roswell event. I was never inter-
ested in the topic of UFOs until 2012, and so knew nothing
78 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
about the conspiracies and theories surrounding Roswel ,
New Mexico, beyond what the general public knew. I knew
it was a place where UFO enthusiasts believed an alien
spacecraft had crashed in 1947, but that was it. Because
of my training, I knew that the town functioned as a pil-
grimage site for believers and people who wanted to believe.
Coincidental y, I am writing this during the annual Roswell
UFO Festival, which is a four- day festival expected to attract
over fifty thousand people this year. Its social media pages
are filled with pictures from the alien- costumed pet event. It
is a carnival.
I was aware that my experience with James and Tyler
could lend support to the myth that alien technology had
been found in New Mexico. My question became, How could
I write about the two scientists and what they found and
believed without inadvertently folding myself and my own
story into the already- existing, convoluted, mind- bending
myth of Roswell? The practical answer was that I could not
prevent this.
James said that if the parts came from a crashed non-
human vehicle of sorts, then it was a gift or donation for us
to figure out. Tyler’s interpretation of Roswell was different.
Tyler was always fond of saying that the best place to con-
ceal the truth was in a mess of confusion. In other words,
a lot of covert things could have happened or could still
be happening around Roswell and Area 51, and the UFO
narrative was a good cover story for it, or a way to cam-
ouflage it. Because of the myth, reasonable people would
scoff at any news associated with that location. It was a
good way to keep such people from looking into it. Of the
books that I had read about the topic, two struck me as rel-
evant, but for very different reasons. Additional y, they were
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completely different sorts of books. Annie Jacobsen’s Area
51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military
Base strikes me as probably correct on one count, namely,
that there are top- secret military programs going on in and
around that area. Tyler’s hypothesis that the UFO carnival
masks this activity makes sense to me. The other book is The
Day After Roswell: A Former Pentagon Official Reveals the
U.S. Government’s Shocking UFO Cover- Up, by Philip Corso.
It suggests a completely different story. Jacobsen is a jour-
nalist and does not in any way affirm the reality of UFOs or
of nonhuman intelligence. Corso, on the other hand, insists
that there real y was a crash in New Mexico and that it was his
job to disseminate the debris and parts from the alien vehicle
to private industry, with the story that they were advanced
Chinese or Russian technology and that it was our duty to
reverse- engineer them to produce whatever technologies we
could. Whereas I tended to believe Jacobsen’s narrative, I felt
as if I was living within Corso’s. I decided that, on some level,
both accounts were true. It was Tyler who brought me to this
conclusion.
“Roswell is difficult because not only do humans not un-
derstand what is going on within the topic of nonhuman in-
telligence, but the topic has been intentional y confused and
aggravated by some other forces, human and possibly non-
human. Also, two people can have a first- hand credible ex-
perience and both of them not agree on what they witnessed.
Humans don’t like to admit to themselves that they can’t
figure things out, so we tend to be pretty arrogant about our
abilities. But I’ve noticed over the years that progress is fairly
incremental, and many have died not figuring anything out.
For me, I’ve tried to use it mainly as creative inspiration and
a force within me that is bigger than myself which has good
8 0 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC
intentions and seems to serve the greater good— almost like
reading science fiction, except like in the movie business
where a show that is based on a true story seems to carry
more energy and attraction to people. I get enough of the
truth to keep my vision and inspiration going. I’ve helped a
lot of people heal, so I know it is a good force.”
This brought me back to two ideas of how the artifacts
functioned. I
thought of Jacques Vallee’s idea of the UFO not
being an object, but a window through which we might view
other worlds. The myth of the crashed alien craft functioned
like this, perhaps. But there was another idea, not necessarily
incompatible with the window idea: if the legend and the
artifacts that inspired it covered up the truth of the develop-
ment of secret weapons by the US military, then the legend
was also a weapon— a weapon of information, like Kubrick’s
monolith.
F R O M T Y L E R A N D JA M E S
TO I N F O R M AT I O N O P E R AT I O N S
The interesting commonality between James and Tyler is
that each had anomalous experiences and each believed he
had come across anomalous materials but refused to draw
conclusions about them— except that the materials were
anomalous and couldn’t be explained by the tools they
possessed. This is not general y how experiencers proceed.
People like answers. Answers come through interpretation.
One thing that UFO events and religious experiences
have in common is that they don’t begin as UFO events or
religious experiences. They become UFO events and reli-
gious experiences through interpretation. I have not met
J A M E S : M A S T E R O F T H E M U LT I V E R S E | 81
one experiencer who has seen an anomalous aerial ob-
ject and immediately thought, That is a UFO! Usual y they
think of all the things it could otherwise be: a falling star, a
satellite, a weird airplane, secret military aircraft, a special
holographic video produced by tech- savvy neighborhood
teenagers. Nobody wants to be known as the person who
has seen a UFO, so, if they see something anomalous, they
usual y choose the least unlikely explanation and leave it at
that. The same is true of religious experiences. People who
have reported experiences that are ultimately deemed reli-
gious have at first been confused by what they see or hear. It
is not immediately clear to them that they are having a reli-
gious experience. A good example of this is found in the Book
of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament. The young
Samuel is asleep one night when he hears his name being
called. He wakes up and assumes that it is his teacher, Eli.
He awakens Eli, who says he didn’t call the boy. It happens
again, and again Eli says that he didn’t cal . When it happens