American Cosmic

by D W Pasulka

  June 13, the children saw a beautiful lady. The lady was ex-

  pected to appear again on August 13, but the local parish

  priest had become so concerned about the growing publicity

  the sightings were generating that he held the children in

  jail on that day. By that time crowds of people had begun

  showing up to experience the apparitions.

  The children reported seeing the apparition six times

  in al . The culminating event was the “Miracle of the Sun,”

  witnessed by thousands of people, including avowed skeptics,

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  on October 13, 1917. The Portuguese media covered the

  event and captured the phenomena with photographs.

  Although the story of Fatima is known by almost all

  Catholics, and even to millions of non- Catholics, Jacques

  notes that the actual events are mostly unknown and have

  been changed through media and over time. Few people

  realize

  that the entire sequence of observations of an entity thought

  to be the Holy Virgin had begun two years previously with

  a fairly classical sequence of UFO sightings. . . . The B.V.M.

  [Blessed Virgin Mary] may dress in golden robes and smile

  radiantly to children, but the technology which “she” uses is

  indistinguishable from that of gods and goddesses of other

  tongues and garb; it is also indistinguishable from the tech-

  nology surrounding the UFO phenomenon.13

  The technology includes recurring images (Jung would say

  archetypes) and elements, including the arrival of a shining

  being in a small sphere (much like the spheres described by

  Alison Kruse), spinning aerial discs, humming noises, heat

  effects, healing phenomena, some people witnessing it while

  others do not (as when Eddy W. saw the saucers and his wife

  did not), and the message of the beings, which seems absurd

  and often includes the injunction to remain silent (here, the

  secrets of Fatima).

  Months before the apparitions of the Virgin, Lucia was

  out walking on a hil side when she saw a shining cloud de-

  scend from the sky. In the cloud was the outline of a human

  form. She saw this again on a subsequent walk. Then one

  day when she and her cousins were out playing, a white

  light passed over them and the humanlike being appeared

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  again. This time she was clearly observable as a shining

  youth. She gave the children instructions. They were to pray

  and do penance. The experience left the children physical y

  enervated for hours; as noted by Jacques, this is a pattern in

  UFO contact events. The request that the children perform

  prayers and penances reminded me of Tyler’s protocol of

  practices that he believes help him connect with his beings.

  The records of the children’s testimonies indicate that

  they identified the lady just as “a lady,” not as the Virgin Mary,

  although the entity had said that she was from heaven. She

  first appeared to the children in an oval of bright light, and

  she instructed them to return to the same place every month,

  where she would greet them. They did so, and as rumors of the

  events spread, crowds swelled to thousands. Although only

  the children could see the lady, others reported seeing a cloud

  descend when the lady was supposed to appear and ascend

  when she disappeared. They also reported hearing a buzzing

  sound when the lady was supposedly speaking to the chil-

  dren. Journalist Maria de Freitas interviewed an eyewitness:

  “Lucia jumped up and exclaimed ‘Oh Jacinta, there she comes

  already, there was the lightning,’ and then ran to kneel at the

  foot of the oak.

  “And did you not see anything?” de Freitas asked.

  “Me? No ma’am. And no one boasted about seeing the

  lightning. We would follow the children and kneel in the

  middle of the field. Lucia would raise her hands and say ‘You

  bade me come here, what do you wish of me?’ And then could

  be heard a buzzing sound that seemed to be like that of a bee.

  I took care to discern whether it was the Lady speaking.”

  “And everyone heard it?” the reporter asked.

  “Wel , it could be heard very well!” she answered.14

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  At least thirty thousand and perhaps as many as one hun-

  dred thousand people showed up to see the display that the

  children predicted would happen on May 13, among them

  skeptics, journalists, and of course believers. The following

  account was written by Professor José Maria de Almeida

  Garrett, who was on the faculty at the Sciences of Coimbra,

  Portugal.

  It must have been 1:30 p.m. when there arose, at the exact

  spot where the children were, a column of smoke, thin,

  fine and bluish, which extended up to perhaps two meters

  above their heads, and evaporated at that height. This phe-

  nomenon, perfectly visible to the naked eye, lasted for a few

  seconds.

  The sky, which had been overcast all day, suddenly

  cleared; the rain stopped and it looked as if the sun were about

  to fill with light the countryside that the wintery morning had

  made so gloomy. I was looking at the spot of the apparitions in

  a serene, if cold, expectation of something happening and with

  diminishing curiosity because a long time had passed without

  anything to excite my attention.

  Suddenly I heard the uproar of thousands of voices, and

  I saw the whole multitude spread out in that vast space at

  my feet . . . turn their backs to that spot where, until then,

  all their expectations had been focused, and look at the sun

  on the other side. I turned around, too, toward the point

  commanding their gaze and I could see the sun, like a very

  clear disc, with its sharp edge, which gleamed without

  hurting the sight. It could not be confused with the sun seen

  through a fog (there was no fog at that moment), for it was

  neither veiled nor dim. The most astonishing thing was to

  be able to stare at the solar disc for a long time, brilliant

  with light and heat, without hurting the eyes or damaging

  the retina. [During this time], the sun’s disc did not remain

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  immobile, it had a giddy motion, [but] not like the twinkling

  of a star in all its brilliance for it spun round upon itself in

  a mad whirl.

  During the solar phenomenon, which I have just

  described, there were also changes of color in the atmosphere.

  Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming

  darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then ex-

  tended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw

  everything had assumed an amethyst color.

  Then, suddenly, one heard a clamor, a cry of anguish

  breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed

  all at once to loosen itself from the firmament and, blood red,

  advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its

  huge and fiery weight. The sensatio
n during those moments

  was truly terrible.

  All the phenomena which I have described were observed

  by me in a calm and serene state of mind without any emo-

  tional disturbance. It is for others to interpret and explain

  them. Final y, I must declare that never, before or after

  October 13 [1917], have I observed similar atmospheric or

  solar phenomena.15

  Different people reported seeing different things, yet all

  were convinced that they had witnessed something entirely

  supernatural. The church, after thirteen years of investiga-

  tion, approved the event as worthy of belief, albeit under the

  category of “private revelation,” as distinguished from “public

  revelation,” which is something Catholics are obligated to

  believe:

  The phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory reg-

  istered and which therefore was not natural, was witnessed

  by persons of all categories and of all social classes, believers

  and unbelievers, journalists of the principal Portuguese

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  newspapers and even by persons some miles away. Facts which

  annul any explanation of collective il usion.16

  Even without the church’s endorsement, the Fatima

  apparitions would have a deep influence on the imaginations

  and real lives of Catholics. One of the predictions of the lady

  was that Jacinta and Francisco would die before they reached

  adulthood, which sadly proved true. Lucia entered the Order

  of Carmelites as a nun and would live as a cloistered member

  of the convent until her death in 2005.

  In his close readings of the apparitions, Jacques’s strategy

  is to attend as much as possible to the first order of events

  as they transpired, keeping to the original language used by

  the experiencers, whom he cal s percipients. He ignores the

  second- order, evaluative interpretations of the entity as being

  the Virgin Mary. He takes the same approach to UFO events.

  He refuses to believe or disbelieve, for example, that Betty and

  Barney Hill received messages from extraterrestrials from

  the star system of Zeta Reticuli, which is what they claimed.

  He does not, however, dismiss the experiences as not having

  been real . He borrows his methodology from anthropologist

  Cynthia Nelson, who studied apparitions of the Virgin Mary

  in Zeitoun, Egypt. “As phenomenologists,” Nelson writes, “we

  suspend judgment as to whether the apparition is real y real

  (a question for scientific naturalism) and attempt rather to

  understand what people do when confronting stress. If men

  define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”17

  This makes it possible to analyze the social effects of the

  phenomenon without being distracted by the content of the

  experiences. This method helped Jacques discover that if

  one graphs the occurrence of UFO flaps, which are multiple

  sightings over time, the graph appears to suggest a schedule

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  of reinforcement.18 Jacques is not committed to the conclu-

  sion suggested by the graph, but offers it as a speculation and

  possible way forward in research. He is, however, committed

  to the idea that the phenomena appear to be technological.

  The idea that contact events like apparitions of the Virgin

  Mary function in ways similar to technologies was also

  suggested to me by another innovative scholar long before

  I had ever met Jacques or had even thought of UFOs. When

  I was applying to graduate programs, I took the opportunity

  to interview a professor whose work on technology inspired

  me. Donna Haraway was known for her work on how human–

  technological engagement effaces the conventional binaries

  between humans and technology, humans and animals, ani-

  mals and technologies, and so forth. Her work presaged fem-

  inist technoscience and cyborg epistemologies, or theories of

  knowledge. I arrived during her office hours, when she was

  official y available to talk to students, and explained my plan

  of study. I told her that I wanted to study the then- recent

  apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, a small town

  in what was then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  I explained that I thought I would use Freudian analysis to

  understand the phenomenon. After a silence that seemed

  to last forever, I quickly learned that this was a bad idea.

  Dr. Haraway asked why I would use a Western European

  theory to analyze another culture’s belief system. After an-

  other long, seemingly interminable silence, Dr. Haraway

  offered some guidance. She asked me to think about what

  was happening internal y to the experiencers who were

  watching the apparitions. I thought about that, and at the

  time, I had no idea. She then asked another question: What

  happens to you when you watch a movie? I still didn’t under-

  stand the point she was trying to make, but these questions

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  would later help me understand Jacques’s research on the

  connections between contact events and technologies.19

  Could media technologies, even movies like 2001: A Space

  Odyssey, function like apparitions?

  2 0 0 1 : A S PAC E O DY S S E Y

  R E V I S I T E D, A N D

  N E T WO R K R E L I G I O N ’ S

  AU TO N O M O U S AG E N T S

  Toward the end of The Invisible College, Jacques outlines

  a morphology of miracles. He places the elements of

  apparitions alongside elements of UFO sightings and events.

  They include the following: humming sounds associated

  with a sighting; the arrival of a shining disc, globe, or sphere;

  feelings of enervation after a sighting; sounds like thunder

  or booms; and unusual clouds. He does not mention, al-

  though he could have, the ensuing transformation of person-

  ality that often occurs, in which the experiencers feel as if

  they have a mission and completely rearrange their lives to

  fulfill it. There is also the “psychic component” that Jacques

  mentions, which was reported by the children who witnessed

  the apparition, as well as by St. Teresa of Avila. This compo-

  nent is experienced as a direct knowing of what the beings

  seem to communicate. It is as if the beings somehow get in-

  side the heads of the experiencers, as if there are no barriers

  between them.

  In the 1970s, Jacques offered technology studies as a

  possible explanatory framework for these odd events and

  strange patterns of effects. Subsequent research in the inter-

  disciplinary studies of embedded and extended cognitions

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  has sharpened the frame that Jacques constructed. The work

  of scientists like Andy Clark helps frame the psychic elements

  of the percipients’ experiences. Clark challenges the conven-

  tional assumption that what happens in the mind originates

  there. He argues that cognition, or thinking, or what’s in our

  heads, is not bounded by the skul
. Instead, “cognitive sys-

  tems may include both non- neural parts of the body and

  even the beyond- the- body environment.”20 The idea that

  technologies and other tools can extend human mental

  capacities is not new; Marshall McLuhan aired this propo-

  sition in the 1950s. What is new is the recognition of an au-

  tonomy that technologies have achieved or, probably, already

  had all along. This autonomy is now supercharged by the

  technologies’ ability to program themselves. As I write this,

  the headlines are abuzz with news that the social media site

  Facebook shut down two social robots that had created their

  own language that was unknown to their human creators.21

  Media technologies inhabit human consciousness in ways

  that have been largely unacknowledged and in ways that are

  disturbingly autonomous.

  This research, supplemented by neuroscientist Zacks’s

  analysis of film’s impact on cognition, helps make the

  connection between events like apparitions and UFO

  sightings and media technologies. Both movies and sightings

  are “events” in that they have distinct beginnings and endings.

  Zacks’s research indicates that people cognize some media

  or film events in ways that are similar to real- life events.22

  Returning again to the example of 2001: A Space Odyssey,

  one finds many of the elements of the UFO event. In Clarke’s

  book the monolith is described as exuding a humming

  noise. When the monolith appears in the opening scenes of

  the movie, in the soundtrack we hear Richard Strauss’s tone

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  poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra. It begins with humming and

  leads into methodic drumming sounds. In each scene in

  which the monolith appears, so does some form of humming.

  Technology is a constant feature in the movie, in which the

  artificial intelligence is named Hal, whose autonomy turns

  out to be deadly. The climax of the film reveals a baby (pos-

  sibly) within a shining globe or sphere. The appearance of the

  baby perhaps signifies the transformation of the main char-

  acter, astronaut David Bowman. It’s all there— the glowing

  sphere, the humming noises, the strange artifact, and the

  transformation.

  Placed within the context of human–

  technology

  networks, the film could certainly function like a mass ap-