American Cosmic

by D W Pasulka

  been subjected to the universal mass rumor of the UFO. It is

  something from which none of us could possibly escape. We

  have all been exposed, from childhood and throughout our

  lives, to media about the UFO, both as entertainment and as

  a possible reality, as when it surfaces as a topic on local news

  stations. How does one come to deem an anomalous event a

  “UFO event”? Often this is facilitated by a book encounter .

  T H E B O O K E N C O U N T E R

  Each of the people I interviewed who said they believed their

  anomalous experiences were connected to the UFO phe-

  nomenon had had a “book encounter.” At some point after

  their experiences, which sometimes persisted over half a

  lifetime, they were given, came upon, or in some perceived

  miraculous way were directed to read a book that put their

  experiences into perspective and seemed to explain them.

  Arthur Koestler describes the serendipitous arrival of the

  very book one needs when one needs it as the experience

  of “the Library angel.”7 It was Carl Sagan’s book about the

  cosmos that changed Tyler’s life and started him on a path of

  fusing what he learned in the space program with his ideas

  I N T H E F I E L D | 1 0 1

  about biotechnologies to form companies that helped heal

  people. The book appeared mysteriously in his luggage, at a

  point in his life when he was lost and desperate. For James,

  the book was John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters

  with Aliens, which he picked up on a whim, believing it to

  be science fiction. The book read like his own biography. It

  helped him frame his experiences as being related to UFOs.

  Scott’s book, Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for

  Extraterrestrials, popped out at him while he was walking

  through a bookstore. Although this is not surprising— he

  was in a bookstore, after all— the book was unlike anything

  that he would have chosen to read, yet he felt compelled

  to read it. Echoing James’s experience, the book seemed to

  Scott to read like his biography, and triggered the processes

  whereby he started to piece together his obsession. The book

  encounter differs from the library angel experience in that

  the books offer the readers an explanatory framework for

  their experiences.

  One doesn’t have to accept the book’s framework. Scott’s

  care and sophistication with regard to his belief structures,

  qualities he says he did not possess in the beginning of his

  research but forged over time, are instructive. It shows how

  anomalous experiences become connected to a cultural

  narrative. As I studied his photographs and placed them

  back on the table, Scott offered his observations.

  “After I read the book Out There, and numerous other

  books, I thought differently about the experiences I had as

  a child. Real y, I could not avoid the fact that they were so

  similar to what was being reported by people who said they

  were abducted and whose stories were in the books like

  Out There. But I also knew that I didn’t know this beyond

  a doubt. I could not, honestly, make a direct link between

  1 02 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  my childhood experiences and the aerial objects I started to

  record.

  “But, intuitively, I think there is a link.”

  Most people are not as careful or as restrained as Scott. If

  they have had anomalous experiences and they happen upon

  a book that seems to explain them, they will assume that their

  experiences relate to the theory presented in the book. This

  is a normal process, and it is what Jung was getting at when

  he proposed the concept of amplificatory interpretation, in

  which the unconscious amplifies the associations related

  to an image or a group of images and creates a meaningful

  framework that is then associated with events or experiences.

  It is partly how cultural narratives are produced, and while

  the concept appears reductive, it is not. It admits to a real,

  objective event; it just refrains from identifying, with cer-

  tainty, what the event is. Instead, it focuses on the meaning

  projected upon and associated with the event.

  I have delved into the processes of the creation of the

  UFO cultural narrative elsewhere.8 I’ve interviewed Edward

  Carlos, a professor of art whose anomalous experiences were

  featured in John Mack’s book Abduction. He resisted the term

  “abduction” so strongly that I felt the need to rewrite and

  publish his experiences from his perspective. His story and

  its subsequent publication il ustrate well the process of first

  experiencing anomalous events, then determining “what”

  they are, and ultimately determining what they are called.

  Carlos (as he likes to be addressed) noted that while Mack

  was attentive to his feelings, he felt that Mack never had a

  grasp of the real phenomenon. Carlos used the language of

  several traditions to il ustrate his experiences. He said the

  light beings he encountered were sometimes like angels and

  sometimes like aliens, but that they transcended the language

  I N T H E F I E L D | 1 03

  of both Catholic and contemporary UFO traditions. Yet his

  experiences became UFO related for a wide audience after

  the publication and success of Mack’s book. Carlos never

  called his experiences abductions or said they had to do with

  UFOs, but that is how they were understood after Mack’s

  book framed them that way.

  In my article, I described the experience of St. Teresa

  of Avila, a sixteenth- century Catholic nun. An extraordi-

  nary woman, she instigated such significant change for the

  Catholic Church of her time, both theological y and social y,

  that the modern church bestowed upon her one of its highest

  honors: Pope Paul VI made her an official “doctor” of the

  church, a title previously held almost exclusively by men. In

  the beginning of my shift away from researching Catholic

  history and toward modern- day UFO events, I revisited

  Teresa’s own testimony about one of her famous anomalous

  events. Her status as a mystic began with a most unusual

  occurrence, which even she had a hard time understanding.

  It is commonly referred to as the ecstasy of Teresa, or the

  “transverberation” of St. Teresa, which means “to be pierced

  through.” She wrote about it in her diary:

  Beside me, on the left hand, appeared an angel in bodily form,

  such as I am not in the habit of seeing except very rarely.

  Though I often have visions of angels, I do not see them. They

  come to me only after the manner of the first type of vision

  that I described. But it was our Lord’s will that I should see this

  angel in the following way. He was not tall but short, and very

  beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be

  one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. In

  his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there

  appeared to be a point of
fire. This he plunged into my heart

  several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he

  1 0 4 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly

  consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe

  that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by

  this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it

  to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.

  This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, though the body has

  some share in it.9

  I had read this account many times. An angel pierces

  Teresa, and she goes into a religious ecstasy. That is how

  I had always read this passage. After I had my realization

  that modern UFO reports were in some ways similar to his-

  torical accounts of religious phenomena, I decided to re-

  read some of the primary sources from Catholic history.

  My new reading proved very interesting. I had never paid

  attention to the fact that her description differs radical y

  from most of the artistic representations of it. There are

  paintings and also a famous sculpture by Bernini. They de-

  pict Teresa near a little angel with a small dart. They do

  not depict the il uminated nature of the small being, nor do

  they show Teresa’s confusion about the being (why it was

  real, and not imagined, which would be difficult anyway).

  I was particularly struck by her confusion. She doesn’t

  know how to interpret this being. Is it an angel? And why

  is it different from the angels she has seen in the past? To

  think through this event and make sense of it, she turns

  to the books of her time, Catholic angelology, which was

  known by her confessors, the men in whom she confided.

  Her book encounter, facilitated by her confessors, helped

  her understand her experience as religious, having to do

  with Catholicism and God.

  The book encounter is one step in the process of deter-

  mining that anomalous experiences are related to UFOs or,

  I N T H E F I E L D | 1 0 5

  as in Teresa’s case, to God and religion. In these examples

  the medium is a book, but it could very well be a movie or

  a documentary that provides the explanatory framework.

  Interestingly, these two interpretations— that the experiences

  are related to religion or that they are related to UFOs— are by

  no means mutual y exclusive. There is a “biblical– UFO” her-

  meneutic that provides a way to interpret these experiences

  as being both religious and related to UFOs. Several religious

  groups, such as the Nation of Islam, are informed by such a

  strategy.

  Eddy, an experiencer I met, saw no problem conflating

  UFOs with biblical events. I met Eddy at a local UFO con-

  ference where he related his experiences. He said that he reg-

  ularly saw flying saucers, usual y in formation, and always

  fifteen or more, though often nobody around him could see

  them, leaving him as the only witness. For a year he tried

  to get his wife to see the saucers, and final y she did. She

  even caught them on camera, producing ten pictures of the

  saucers. He had brought a magnifying glass to the conference

  so we could get a good look at them.

  When I asked him what he thought of these visitations,

  he asked me if I had read the Bible. I certainly had, I told him.

  “Then you should already know what these are,” he said,

  surprised.

  “I might know, but please explain.”

  “Jesus went up in the clouds on a saucer, and he will

  come down again just as he went up,” he explained.

  Some theologians read the Bible in a similar manner.

  For them, the UFO or flying saucer is equivalent to aerial

  phenomena mentioned in scripture. In the late 1960s,

  Presbyterian minister Barry Downing advocated for this in-

  terpretation in The Bible and Flying Saucers. The Reverend

  1 0 6 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  Michael J. S. Carter, a graduate of Union Theological

  Seminary, offers a contemporary version of this claim. His

  book, Alien Scriptures: Extraterrestrials in the Holy Bible,

  argues that the Bible is a history of human contact with

  extraterrestrials.10

  SY N C H R O N I C I T Y A N D

  T H E U F O E V E N T

  They’ve always been a reality; what they are is still a theory

  — Dav i d S t i n n e t t

  One of Scott’s mentors and inspirations is David Stinnett.

  David has been a UFO researcher for more than thirty

  years and served as the director of the annual New Jersey

  UFO conference. He has been a student of the Bible for over

  twenty years, and he is a Christian. He is an active field re-

  searcher who travels to hotspots of activity with his video

  equipment, the deployment of which is guided by the years

  of knowledge and experience he brings to his work. David,

  of all the researchers and scientists I met, is the least likely

  to draw any conclusions whatsoever about the phenomenon.

  His influence on Scott helped In the Field maintain its rig-

  orous standards.

  “Many years ago I was going about my business on an or-

  dinary day in New Jersey. I was on a back road in central New

  Jersey. I then saw a gun- metal- gray aircraft. It looked exactly

  like a C140 transport. It was creeping up very slowly, and

  that caught my attention. It was completely silent. I exited

  my car with my camera. When I tried to capture the object in

  my finder, it would not show up. I jumped back into my car

  I N T H E F I E L D | 1 0 7

  and tested the camera on other objects. My camera was just

  fine. I jumped out again to capture the image, and the thing

  was gone.

  “I went home and walked into the room where I keep a li-

  brary of UFO papers, white papers, research, books, and lots

  of information. Instead of grabbing what was most conven-

  ient, like something on the top of the pile of papers, I reached

  under a huge stack of papers and wrested out a VHS tape. It

  was a video of Dr. Bruce Cornet giving a lecture to the New

  Jersey UFO Congress. In the video, Cornet described, in per-

  fect detail, the craft I had just seen.”

  There was a pause in our interview. I said, “A

  synchronicity.”

  “Yeah, a synchronicity.” He said this deadpan.

  I could tell that he wasn’t buying it. He had related an

  event that was like a book encounter but involving a VHS

  tape, but he wasn’t taking the bait. I found this refreshing—

  and fascinating.

  “Synchronicities are one aspect of the phenomenon,”

  he elaborated. “If a researcher does not experience them, he

  or she is not real y doing the research right. But— and this

  is important— a researcher doesn’t have to accept that the

  synchronicities mean anything. They need to be careful, be-

  cause synchronicities are very convincing when you experi-

  ence them. They could lead you off the right track, and the

  right track is to not be convi
nced.

  “We see orbs, or we see unexplainable craft, and

  most people jump to the conclusion that it represents

  extraterrestrials from outer space. I don’t make that jump.

  “One aspect of the phenomenon, pointed out by Vallee

  as well as by George Hansen, is that it tricks and deceives.11

  Researchers, when they encounter the real phenomenon, are

  1 0 8 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  so amazed by these aspects of it that they go off the deep end

  in their theories and conclusions. They are convinced that

  only they have these meaningful synchronicities. These very

  real experiences dupe them into believing that the phenom-

  enon is what they think it is. Wel , it’s not.”

  Synchronicity, as defined by Carl Jung, is the coming to-

  gether of inner and outer events that are not causal y linked

  but are very meaningful to those who have the experience. The

  UFO community is not the only community that experiences

  synchronicity. In my research into Christian communities,

  I found that many people interpret synchronicities, or mean-

  ingful coincidences, as signs from God, or meaningful events

  that show them that they are on the “right path in life.” David’s

  position on experiences of synchronicity was atypical; he did

  not assume that they meant anything deep or profound. He

  certainly was aware of them, however.

  I had been introduced to a similar position of restraint in

  the midst of having a full- blown synchronicity. After college

  I had tried to read the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His

  work had come highly recommended, but the passages I read

  always seemed misogynist. After a few pages of reading

  I would close the book in disgust. Friends insisted, however,

  that I should try to get past that unfortunate aspect of his

  work. One friend had given me a copy of The Gay Science,

  which I placed on my nightstand and promptly forgot.

  It was New Year’s Eve. That night, I went to bed early

  and fell asleep immediately. At midnight I was awakened by

  fireworks and the merry- making of New Year’s revelers. Amid

  the noise, I had no hope of returning to sleep, so I picked up

  the book on my nightstand. I opened it up randomly. The

  book was organized as a series of aphorisms. I happened to

  open it to the only three aphorisms in the whole book devoted

  I N T H E F I E L D | 1 0 9

  to New Year’s Eve. The first was titled “Sanctus Januarius”