American Cosmic

by D W Pasulka

  A C O M P U T E R S C I E N T I S T

  D O E S R E L I G I O U S S T U D I E S

  I N T H E 1 9 7 0 S

  The Invisible College is replete with al usions to Catholic his-

  tory and culture. The issues he focuses on are in fact the very

  issues I focused on in my own work on Catholic history, be-

  fore I had ever considered UFOs. I researched and wrote

  about the history of the metaphysics of purgatory. Purgatory

  is a Catholic doctrine that was defined in the thirteenth

  century. It refers to a state where souls go that are not per-

  fect enough to get into heaven. In purgatory, souls undergo

  a process of purification that will eventual y allow them to

  enter heaven.

  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, philosopher-

  theologians (known as scholastics) debated whether pur-

  gatory was an actual place or was more spiritual and purely

  immaterial. Respected witnesses reported seeing souls from

  purgatory and testified to physical traces left by them, like

  burn marks on tables. How could immaterial things like souls

  leave material traces? The scholastics had recently discovered

  the works of Aristotle and had begun to apply his dualistic

  ideas to their own theologies. They were working out what

  would later become the philosophical position called mind–

  body dualism, the belief that the mind or spirit is separate

  from the body and is immaterial.

  Jacques identified the very same conundrum with re-

  spect to the phenomenon. He wrote, “The UFO phenom-

  enon is a direct challenge to this arbitrary dichotomy

  between physical reality and spiritual reality.”5 He advocates

  that researchers throw out the dichotomy because it skews

  the data. Within ufology, there have arisen two main schools

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  of thought. One emphasizes material issues, and the other

  addresses subjective and spiritual issues. The materialist

  school focuses on the empirical effects of UFOs, like radia-

  tion burns on material objects or on people, blips on radars,

  and sightings. This school focuses on “the nuts and bolts” of

  the UFO event. The other school arose with the advent of

  the application of hypnotic regression to experiencers and

  with the contactee and abduction movements; it focuses on

  the experiencers themselves and the content of the extra-

  terrestrial messages. This bifurcation in UFO historiography

  was not only a property of the two schools, whose members

  were sometimes openly antagonistic, but also a character-

  istic of the UFO report itself .

  In his field research, Jacques found that people tended

  to report different things depending on to whom they were

  speaking. This happened in the case of Betty and Barney

  Hil . They reported empirical evidence to the Air Force, the

  sighting of the starlike object. But when describing their ex-

  perience to people they felt would not be inclined to scoff,

  like Donald Keyhoe and later their therapist (who, ironi-

  cal y, did not believe in UFOs), they divulged the story of

  the encounter with nonhuman beings. Jacques noted that

  this pattern was repeated so often that “when scientists

  and the military discuss UFOs, they are not talking about

  the same part of the phenomenon the public perceives.”6 In

  other words, there are two datasets, one of which consists of

  empirical and material effects, the other of which comprises

  the psychic or subjective aspects of the phenomenon . What

  keeps these two datasets separate— one secret, the other told

  to authorities— is the fear of public ridicule, or worse, the

  loss of one’s job or credibility. The “absurd” keeps the phe-

  nomenon hidden and on the margin of legitimate sociality.

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  A similar dual tradition is found within Catholic his-

  toriography. Devotional Catholicism is often interpreted

  as in conflict with, or less important than, doctrinal forms

  of Catholicism. Devotional Catholicism is associated with

  popular practices such as prayer to the Virgin Mary or the

  Sacred Heart of Jesus, and saying the Rosary. An individual’s

  religious experience is impossible to verify objectively.

  Personal testimonies of apparitions of Mary or Jesus are usu-

  al y met with disbelief and suspicion on the part of Church

  authorities. The testimonies of the witnesses, and even the

  witnesses themselves, become the focus of efforts to verify

  the reports. If the witnesses are well- respected members of

  the community, this helps; others will then take the experi-

  ence more seriously. This emphasis on the trustworthiness of

  the witness is a prominent feature within Catholic devotional

  traditions, just as it is within the tradition of UFO reports.

  This bifurcation within Catholic historiography is also called

  “private revelation” as distinguished from “public revelation.”

  Private revelation is associated with devotional Catholicism

  and Catholics are not obligated to believe in it, whereas

  public revelation is defined as scriptural revelation, in which

  Catholics are obligated to believe.

  The “nuts and bolts” school of UFO researchers believe

  that given time, and dependent on their complete disa-

  vowal of the psychic, weird, and subjective components of

  the events, mainstream science will embrace their findings.

  Yet this may never happen— at least, it will not happen soon.

  The reasons for this are hinted at in Jacques’s book, where he

  wrote that the subterranean and hidden nature of the UFO

  phenomenon is part of its logic. He proposed that something

  revolutionary was afoot, using the history of Christianity

  as an analogy. Early Christianity began as a subterranean

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  belief system, a fringe belief that circulated among various

  populations and was even actively suppressed by the elites

  of the era. “This counterculture was too absurd to retain the

  attention of a reader of Plato.”7 Yet this counterculture (or

  countercultures, as Christian communities in the first cen-

  tury were diverse) was vindicated when Christianity erupted

  into a state religion, eventual y enjoying its current status

  with billions of practitioners, many of them elites. This is the

  logic of camouflage. It is sneaky, and time is on its side.

  What were the mechanisms by which the subterranean

  forms of Christianity took root and eventual y supplanted

  Roman imperial theology? How did it maintain its relative

  dominance over two thousand years? Two drivers are im-

  portant, the first being media technologies, or forms of so-

  cial y mediated communication like art and iconography,

  then the printing press, and final y modern mass media.8

  Additional y, the messages of early Christianity appealed to

  slaves, women, and noncitizens of the Roman Empire. The

  Apostle Paul taught that Jesus had brought a message of sal-

  vation for all people, regard
less of gender or social position.

  This was a countercultural belief system. It seeped into var-

  ious subcultures of Rome until it exploded triumphantly into

  Rome’s state religion, Roman Catholicism, which literal y

  means Roman universalism.

  This message of salvation for all people had to appear

  absurd to the Roman ruling class. Certainly, the fact that

  Christians “ate” their god was scandalous to the Romans, who

  called Christians cannibals. When I remind my students that

  receiving communion entails “eating” Jesus, they are usual y

  horrified. They’ve become acclimated to the absurd. But the

  absurd is what kept the Christian message from being visible

  to the Roman ruling classes, while its other countercultural

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  messages appealed to the disenfranchised. This element of

  the absurd, Jacques points out, is part of the logic of the UFO

  phenomenon:

  Contact between human percipients and the UFO phenom-

  enon occurs under conditions controlled by the latter. Its char-

  acteristic feature is a constant factor of absurdity that leads to

  a rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society

  and an absorption at a deep unconscious level of the symbols

  conveyed by the encounter.9

  The absurd keeps many potential researchers from

  studying UFO events. Two former students accompanied

  me to a meeting with a well- known experiencer. In every

  way, the experiencer’s story was a textbook case of a UFO

  sighting. He was a credible witness in that he was a busi-

  nessman, and a pilot, and was well known in his commu-

  nity. One day when out fishing he saw a series of aerial

  phenomena. As a pilot, he knew they were not aircraft. By

  the time I got to know him, he had told his story repeat-

  edly on television and at conferences. My students were riv-

  eted by his testimony— right up until he described flying

  past the planet Mars on the astral plane and seeing Bigfoot.

  I recall my students’ stricken faces as they looked to me for

  guidance. Their lips formed silent questions: Should we be-

  lieve this guy? At that point I had become so accustomed to

  the absurd within both UFO testimonies and Catholic de-

  votional history that such claims didn’t faze me. The logic of

  religion is not rational, although it does form patterns. But

  that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have real- world effects or that

  it doesn’t proceed by an internal logic, which is what Vallee

  has argued. I told my students that I would explain the ab-

  surdity later that day.

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  Within some religious traditions, including Chan or Zen

  Buddhism, the absurd is intentional y cultivated to an ex-

  treme degree. Zen masters or advanced practitioners pose

  koans, or short, nonsensible anecdotes, to lead their students

  to experience an “enlightenment” or satori, a mystical expe-

  rience that is one of the goals of the religion. “What is the

  sound of one hand clapping?” is perhaps the best- known

  koan. It doesn’t have an answer, and that is the point. The

  koan fatigues the rational mind, which eventual y shuts

  down to allow for an experience of enlightenment. Jacques

  wonders if the absurd elements of the UFO event could be

  like a koan: something that allows humans to attain a state of

  mind quite different from that which characterizes normal

  consciousness. Could the UFO phenomenon be a mass koan,

  working on millions of people, not just a few?

  The logic of camouflage works partly because the element

  of the absurd keeps what is camouflaged underground and

  hidden, and the absurdity of UFO testimonies ensures that

  they are not studied in any official or public capacity. What

  academic would touch the topic of Bigfoot on Mars? George

  Hansen has written about the absurdity of UFO events in

  his book The Trickster and the Paranormal. He argues that a

  trickster element of absurdity is inherent to the paranormal

  and the supernatural, including UFOs. His central theme

  is that “psi, the paranormal, and the supernatural are fun-

  damental y linked to destructuring, change, transition, dis-

  order, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and

  blurring of boundaries. In contrast, the phenomena are re-

  pressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, reg-

  ularity, precision, rigidity, and clear demarcation.”10 He links

  the proliferation of practices and beliefs associated with the

  paranormal to cultural revolutions or instability.

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  When entire cultures undergo profound change, there is often

  an upsurge of interest in the paranormal. During the breakup

  of the former U.S.S.R. there was an explosion of paranormal

  activity throughout Eastern Europe. Healers and psychics fea-

  tured prominently in the media. This should not have been

  a surprise because anthropologists have shown that the su-

  pernatural has figured in thousands of cultural revitalization

  movements.11

  Similarly, historian William A. Christian has linked

  apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Spanish and European

  revolutions and social and political upheavals.12 The para-

  normal, provocative, and subterranean all come together in

  Jacques’s analysis of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

  A P PA R I T I O N S O F T H E

  B L E S S E D V I R G I N M A RY: T H E

  B E S T E X A M P L E O F T H E

  T E C H N O L O G I C A L A S P E C T S

  O F T H E U F O E V E N T

  Jacques’s most elaborate example of the technological

  patterns associated with the phenomenon is not a UFO event

  at al , but an event from religious history. For millions and

  maybe billions of Catholics, the apparitions of the Virgin

  Mary in Fatima, Portugal; in Lourdes, France; and on the

  hill of Mount Tepeyac in Mexico are formative to their faith.

  At these locations, the Virgin Mary has “appeared” at var-

  ious times, mostly to children. The apparitions attract the

  attention of local communities, and as word spreads to other

  vil ages and towns and eventual y to other countries, these

  locations become sites of hierophany— places where the

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  sacred touches down upon Earth. Apparitions of the Virgin

  Mary are a convention of Catholic devotional culture, and

  the mere mention of an apparition will attract crowds of

  believers and skeptics. The convention, as a spiritual genre,

  is so well known among the general population that it has

  spawned parodies and even major films.

  In The Invisible College, Jacques rereads several of the

  original sources about the apparitions that occurred in

  Fatima and Lourdes and places these within a tradition that

  includes modern UFO events. In other words, he performs

  a “biblical– UFO” interpretation, somewhat like Eddy W.’s

  interpretation of the Bible, quoted e
arlier. Jacques’s inter-

  pretation, however, is different in important ways. Jacques

  is not claiming that the apparitions are UFO events or, con-

  versely, that modern UFO events are apparitions. He ceases

  to define what they are, and instead breaks them down into

  their constitutive parts, noting their patterns, which he then

  graphs. He places these data points side by side in a table

  that he cal s a “Morphology of Miracles.” Later in the book,

  he does suggest a conclusion, but it is not what one expects.

  He doesn’t argue that these are visitations from a being that

  a culture once called the Virgin Mary and that moderns now

  call extraterrestrial. Instead, he suggests an analysis based

  on social effects, identifying both apparitions and UFOs as

  manifestations of a single control mechanism that works

  like a schedule of reinforcement. In psychology, “scheduled

  reinforcements” influence behavior by means of rewards or

  punishments. A well- known example of a reinforcement

  schedule is the case of Ivan Pavlov’s dogs, who learned to sal-

  ivate when they heard a bell and were given a treat. The sali-

  vation response was cultivated through the process of reward

  and association.

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  T H E E V E N T I N FAT I M A ,

  P O RT U G A L

  Within Catholic devotional culture, one of the most im-

  portant events in the history of the faith is the appearance

  of the mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, to three poor chil-

  dren in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. The apparition has re-

  ceived the official sanction of the Catholic Church, and

  several popes have expressed open devotion to “Our Lady

  of Fatima,” as she is called. Pope John Paul II believed the

  lady saved him from death when there was an attempt on

  his life on May 13, 1981. May 13 was when the lady first

  appeared to the three young children, and the pope was

  doubtless aware of the date. He later put the bullet that al-

  most killed him into the crown of a statue of Our Lady of

  Fatima.

  The apparition was not a one- time event, but recurred

  over a series of weeks. It started with the three children, nine-

  year- old Lucia Santos and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco

  Marto, who saw an angel in the spring of 1917. This angel

  appeared to them on three occasions and told them to follow

  a protocol of fasting and penance. On May 13, and again on