If Däniken was only offering an hypothesis, than Graham Hancock was offering proof of the theory in his massive and exhausting work, Fingerprints of the Gods, which incorporates much of Däniken’s theories, though with much more evidence, research, field work, and history. Hancock does have his own take on the theory, postulating that there was a much more ancient and advanced human civilization that existed before recorded history, and who passed down their knowledge through construction of massive, enigmatic structures. Hancock concentrates largely on the legends of Viracocha—bearded, Caucasian, Christ-like god, whose idols the Incas worshipped and whose prophesied return they had long awaited.
Indeed their legends and religious beliefs made them so certain of his physical type that they initially mistook the white and bearded Spaniards who arrived on their shores for the returning Viracocha and his demi-gods, an event long prophesied and which the Viracocha was said in all the legends to have promised. This happy coincidence gave Pizarro’s conquistadores the decisive strategic and psychological edge that they needed to overcome the numerically superior Inca forces in the battles that followed.31
Hancock travels the world finding and cataloging not only the mysteries of ancient artifacts, but the similarities in the stories told from civilization to civilization. Modern-day fundamentalist Christian churchgoers would probably find it very interesting that the biblical stories they know have been recreated again and again in other cultures and religions; the great flood, heavenly beings taking human females as wives, and even the story of Christ. The Viracocha not only taught the Incas about mathematics and sciences, but also about love, benevolence, and morality, before he was carried out to sea on a raft made of snakes, promising to return one day. Both Däniken and Hancock postulate that humanity is much older than previously thought, and that the ancients were influenced and educated by beings far older and more advanced than we are even now.
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick collaborated to create 2001: A Space Odyssey, the greatest science fiction story ever told thus far. The story is based around the idea of an alien race setting in motion the beginnings of mankind and then monitoring their progress of evolution from the development of tools in the opening scenes to man’s ability to leave the confines of earth and reach for the stars. This ancient alien race was one that could be both benevolent and violent. The stark black monolith left by the alien race sounds like a beacon in the depths of space alerting the universe to our ever-growing presence. The idea is not without precedent. Some astronomers and scientists believe that the existence of water on earth could be due to an ancient collision with a comet comprised of ice, and that life on earth could have formed from bacteria and microorganisms that hitched a ride on a meteorite and eventually came to rest on this planet. Indeed, that is the explanation put forth by Charles Darwin as to how some land-based animals wound up on the Galápagos Islands.
In 2008 aerial photographs showed one of the last remaining tribes in the world that remain untouched by modern civilization in the Brazilian rainforest near the border of Peru. The flyover was conducted in order to prove their existence and thereby protect the land from deforestation and the tribe from extinction. The low-flying aircraft was met by tribesmen armed with bows and arrows and prepared to defend themselves from a machine that they feared and could not understand. “It is understood that when the plane first flew over the village, the people scattered into the forest. When it returned a few hours later they had painted themselves red and fired arrows into the sky. ‘They must have suffered some sort of trauma in the past and must know that contact is not a good thing,’ Fiona Watson, of Survival International, said.”32 Is it not possible to compare the fear and awe that this last surviving, isolated tribe felt when they sighted the airplane, with the fear and awe that has been passed down from generation to generation in the form of myths and legends about great gods that came from the heavens? Could our fascination with flying saucers be related to the deeply engrained myths of gods who possessed greater knowledge and power, and who descended from the skies to plant the seeds of our civilization? The gothic narrative of the flying saucer could be the ultimate reconciliation between the present and the ancient, ancient past, the heavens and the earth, the light and the dark. To see one of these alien craft or to have contact with alien beings is to commune with the gods. People who claim to have had these experiences come away forever changed; their old perceptions of reality have been altered and a new understanding has been imparted to them—just like Elisha after having viewed Elijah’s ascent into heaven in a chariot of fire or the epiphany rendered by Jung’s subconscious. Either way, the flying saucer embodies the idea of the past haunting the present, and the present reconciling itself to the past.
But what of the reconciliation between the mundane and the horror—the true cornerstone to the gothic ideal? There is a darker side to the flying saucer narrative, one that is more innately gothic and horrifying. In his collection of works, H. P. Lovecraft, the father of the modern horror story, talks about the “Old Ones”—ancient, malevolent beings that despise humanity and seek to harm and horrify humanity. Their evil is beyond the confines of human morality. “Never is it to be thought that man is either oldest or last of the Masters of Earth; nay, nor that the great’r part of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces known to us, but between them … As a foulness shall They be known to the race of man.”33 Lovecraft’s work involving the Old Ones became known as the Cthulhu Mythos. He wrote in the 1920s, and critics accused Däniken of being misled through Lovecraft’s fiction.
John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and Our Haunted Planet, also postulates that there are beings that are older than man who regularly interfere with the development and course of humanity, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. Keel also draws on the ancient texts, the complexities of the great ruins, and the existence and persistence of world religions. He refers to these beings as “ultraterrestrials” rather than extraterrestrials because he is not certain that their origins are otherworldly, but are perhaps much more ancient beings who have left the confines of corporeal bodies. They manifest themselves in the mysterious visions that haunt our planet—UFOs, aliens, ghosts, spirits, and demons. “The startling truth, as carefully recorded by the ancient historians, is that the ultraterrestrials have always been in direct contact with millions of individuals and that they actually ruled directly over mankind for many years. In recent centuries their influence has become more subtle.”34 Keel’s philosophies concerning UFOs, psychic encounters, and various other phenomena are all-encompassing and quite appealing, though they exist at the periphery of popular UFO and paranormal thought, belief, and influence.
Much more popular in our gothic culture is the idea of UFO abductions, cattle mutilation, and human experimentation. It has reached levels of both horror and comedy in popular culture, everything from Fire in the Sky to The Simpsons. People do claim that creatures from other planet have abducted them and that they have been subjected to probes and experimentation. Their lives are forever changed, and their experiences are often described as absolutely horrifying.35 Whitley Strieber recorded his hypnotherapy sessions with psychiatrist Donald Klein and presented them in his book, Communion. “I saw something that looked like it had a hood on it, standing over by the wall near the corner in our bedroom [breaks into panic] and I don’t want it to be there! I don’t want it to be there! Please! God, it—What’s it doing to me? Stop! Oh, oh, stop! What’s it doing to me? [Screams, prolonged, twenty seconds.] I cannot recall experiencing at any time in my life such panic as was evoked at this point in hypnosis.”36 Certainly the idea of finding anyone, let alone an alien being, in your dark bedroom is a terrifying idea. But what often horrifies abductees even more is their inability to move, while at the same time sensing the overwhelming awareness of a presence in the room and seeing visions of figures leaning over them and floating outside through a wi
ndow to a craft they have never before seen. This is the stuff of nightmares, the horror in contrast to the mundane.
While much fun has been poked at those who claim to have had these experiences, there is a very real human aspect of suffering involved that is often vented through psychotherapy and hypnotherapy. Professor of psychiatry at Harvard and Pulitzer Prize winner John Mack shocked the academic world when he began serious research on the UFO abduction phenomenon. He worked with such figures as Budd Hopkins, a famous proponent of and believer in the abduction theory, and Whitley Strieber.
Mack took the abductees’ stories seriously; he listened to them and worked with them, much to the dismay of certain figures of the scientific and academic world. But Mack’s compassion led him to work with a group of people who were isolated and unwilling to come forward for fear of mockery; individuals who had had very traumatic and horrifying experiences.
The trauma has four aspects to it. The first element is the experience itself—to be paralyzed, to be taken against your will, to be subjected to these intrusive, terrifying procedures. The terror is enormous, and it is buried or repressed for the reasons that I mentioned. The second aspect is the isolation that these individuals feel. They are very reluctant to tell their parents. They get told they are too imaginative or that they are dreaming. As adults, if the guy who is abducted tells what happened, say, in a bar, he will be told he is crazy. So abductees have each learned, as one of them put it, to go “underground.” They do not tell their experiences, so they feel very isolated. They know something of profound importance has happened in their lives, something that has great meaning; but they dare not talk about it. The third aspect, which is the one that has particular relevance to our discussion, is that it totally shatters their understanding of consensus reality, as of course it does for us.37
Mack admits that these stories do sound unbelievable, but the sheer numbers of unrelated individuals who claim similar, if not identical, experiences, and who have no history of psychiatric problems, lead him to conclude that there is something beyond the range of normal human experience that is occurring. “Keep in mind that I hear myself saying these words and I cannot believe I am saying them. You probably cannot either. Yet this is the consistent account of otherwise normal, healthy, sane people, who do not believe it either. They are only first confronting the truth of it with me or other investigators.”38
As indicated before, part of the gothic nature of these experiences that has solidified them into the consciousness of the United States is the psychosexual nature of the experiences. “The most prominent aspect of the experience is the urological-gynecological probings. Instruments are inserted into the vagina. Often, mothers claim to have had fetuses removed. While there is not a physically documented case of fetus removal, the experience is that they have been pregnant and the fetus has been removed. Men have had sperm samples taken against their wills. It is highly distressing.”39 It is true horror, though Mack notes that the horror of the rape-like experience does not compare to the horror of having one’s entire understanding of reality ultimately changed. It should also be noted that these reported abduction experiences coincided with Däniken’s assertion that alien races bred with humans.
The horror of these incidents holds a dark fascination for the public. It would be different if the aliens all brought cookies and milk for the abductees and sat around chatting about The Late Show. Most people would not find it to be a very interesting story. The cultural fascination lies in the movie-like horror of the experience. In the same way that Shriek of the Mutilated and The Legend of Boggy Creek created staying power for Bigfoot by portraying him as a horrific, sexualized creature, so films such as Fire in the Sky, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and more recently, The Fourth Kind, were able to take the abduction stories and turn them into entertainment, albeit scary entertainment. The abductions themselves, however, lay hidden behind the veneer of modern, scientifically fact-based life. It is the horror that lurks behind it all that man continually wants to explore. In essence, we want it to be true; we want the danger, we want the mystery, and we want the movies to be real. The stark reality for the abductees, however, is not a fun-filled movie adventure, but a true and horrifying experience. And the public fascination is one that is tied to the horror of these abductions, rather than to the transformative effects of these experiences.
What is truly interesting about the late John Mack’s work is that ultimately the abductees saw these horrific experiences as a catalyst to personal transformation. As Carl Jung had indicated 30-plus years earlier, these visions of flying discs in the air and our psychic interaction with them is an epiphany, a new understanding of ourselves and the reality in which we exist. Sometimes those epiphanies and realizations can be painful and frightening, but the ultimate result is a new awareness and understanding.
The second important dimension of the UFO abduction phenomenon, and one I want to underscore, is the element of transformation. What I and others who have worked with the trauma of this have discovered is that the abductees begin to feel that their experiences were for a purpose or had a positive meaning to them. That is, when the trauma has been fully experienced and processed intensely in the non-ordinary state of consciousness, after more than one, two, three, or four hypnosis sessions—something begins to happen in the abductees and in their perceptions of their experiences. They feel that the experience is expanding their consciousness, that they are connecting with themselves, that they are opening up to a whole new perspective on the universe.40
He notes that this only occurs through therapy; if left unresolved, the experience can actually have the opposite effect. But there it is in Mack’s work: the spirit of Elijah imparted to Elisha the gift of understanding and prophesy—an image of the divine imparted to the ordinary. Confronted with the unexplainable, people experience horror and a breakdown of their vision of reality, but they emerge with a new understanding. The flying saucer narrative persists because of its uniquely American gothic qualities; the blurring of lines between past and present, known and unknown, the mundane and the horror. Only through the reconciliation of these things can a person find peace, understanding, and a new enlightenment.
Holy ground, the inner Wildman, and the vision of the flying disc in the sky all hold their witnesses in complete and utter awe. These visions, whether scientifically real or not, fundamentally alter the way an individual sees the world and the way he or she lives his or her life. No one can possibly step into the realm of the paranormal or the unknown and not be changed by it. The fascination with the paranormal persists, in part, because of the gothic nature of the phenomenon and the American culture. As Mark Edmundson put it, our modernism is like the Bates motel, quaint and new, but shadowed by a frightening, dark, and unknown Gothic castle. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are truly beginning to make our way into that castle of our own fears and dreams, absurdities and pathologies. We are fascinated by the dark, unknown reaches of life, and the paranormal provides that for us. Whether it is walking on the same ground where thousands upon thousands of soldiers died to birth a country, or finding a giant naked footprint in the sands of the wild, or seeing a disc that could not be anything man-made, these phenomena transcend our known reality and blur the lines between what we think we know and what we see; between what we read of the past and what was actually lived; between the mundane of our lives and the waiting horror that lurks beneath the quaint visage.
During times of trauma and great cultural change, people turn to the paranormal. Despite humanity’s vast achievements in understanding the world, sciences and technology, it would appear that the paranormal and the gothic narrative belie all of it. Erich Fromm said that modern religion is merely a veneer painted over the ancient beliefs of totemism and animism. I would take it a step further, and say that our modern world of science, technology, and progress is merely a veneer over ancient, gothic belief systems. Witchcraft, wild giants in the forest, gods from heaven, and the darkest
reaches of the human experience hover like a shadow over our brave new world—they walk where we walk, see what we see, live what we live.
They can also drive us to action the way that Christine O’Donnell’s witchcraft comments drove the public debacle. And this can happen on a global scale. Throughout the centuries, dating back to pre-Roman times, the ritualistic sacrifice of infants has been a recurring theme in the belief of witchcraft and evil, and one that was the major theme of the satanic panic. However, it was also cited as a reason to go to war with Iraq in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. According to the Guardian:
We recall the horrifying stories, incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad—312 babies, we were told. The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old ‘nurse’ who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion.41
We as a nation, incensed by this act of pure evil—one with its base in witchcraft and Satanism—cheered when the bombs began dropping.
The 2001 World Trade Center attack left the nation utterly speechless and terrified. It was an evil act on such a massive scale that the public had difficulty dealing with it emotionally and psychologically. However, a reason appeared in the smoke pouring from the North Tower: the demonic image of Satan.
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