Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Thomas E. Bullard, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, vol. 1, Comparative Study of Abduction Reports; and vol. 2, Catalogue of Cases (Mount Ranier, Maryland: Fund for UFO Research, 1987). A folklorist by training (Ph.D., University of Indiana), Bullard is widely cited in the ufological literature as one of the most respected and gifted writers, and for good reason. This is an absolutely massive comparative study of abduction reports by a trained intellectual, who comes to the careful conclusion that whereas many such experiences are probably psychological in origin, some also contain objective, physical evidence whose overall coherency suggests that they cannot be reduced either to the individual psyche or to the oral traditions of folklore. In my own terms, Bullard is an author of the impossible who is comfortable in that “place of hesitation” that defines the fantastic. Bullard has recently published a summary of his life-work on these materials as The Myth and Mystery of UFOs (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

  Ian Stevenson, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997). Twenty-three hundred pages of mind-blowing data from around the world speculatively linking odd birthmarks to a previous life’s violent death by gunshot, knife wound, and so on. Because such violent deaths are often surrounded by both traumatic memories on the part of the families and excessive paperwork and field investigations by law officers, Stevenson’s studies are often unusually rich (and grisly) in empirical detail. In the end, Stevenson resists identifying the causal or acausal mechanisms of such phenomena, choosing instead to concentrate on documenting the impossible evidence.

  Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D’Armada, Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon; Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D’Armada, Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident; and Fernando Fernandes, Joaquim Fernandes, and Raul Berenguel, Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science (San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2005, 2006, 2008). Although highly uneven in places, this trilogy—based on over one hundred firsthand testimonies and the original records of the children’s interrogations held at the Sanctuary of Fátima—constitutes the premiere ufological reading of the events of Fátima, Portugal, from May 13 to October 13, 1917. The second volume is particularly insightful, devastating really, in its exploration of the way the church manipulated the paranormal events for its own pious control of the people through the famous “three secrets” and its institutional support of the right-wing, dictator-style politics in Portugal from 1926 to 1974. “Without Fátima, Salazar would not be possible,” as one brave Belgian priest put it (199–201).

  Salvador Freixedo, Visionaries, Mystics and Contactees, trans. Scott Corrales (Avondale Estates, Georgia: IllumiNet Press, 1992). This is another radical attempt to come to terms with ufology and parapsychology from a dissident Roman Catholic perspective. Although again uneven, this text sparkles with a certain comparative courage and ends with the striking (and strikingly gnostic) conclusion that the history of religions is a long series of false prophets, pseudoen-lightenments, and manmade scriptures controlled by occult forces that pose as divine but are no such thing. We now “realize that whoever dictates the messages, whoever gives the demurrage [demiurge] his power, whoever breaks the natural laws, is not God but energy entities, intelligent and evolved to a greater or lesser degree, who interfere with human lives. . . . They have appeared and demanded to be worshipped as God. But they are not God. None of them is the Creator-God, the First Cause of the Universe” (151).

  Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (New York: HarperEdge, 1997); Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview, 2006). As a historian of religions who works with texts, symbols, and myths, I have consciously steered away from the extensive literature on the laboratory and statistical evidence for psychical phenomena. This does not mean, in any way, that I think this data is inconsequential. My favorite author here is Dean Radin. Besides effectively summarizing a vast evidential literature (and being very, very funny), Radin also happens to understand that “quantum theory says nothing about higher-level concepts such as meaning and purpose, yet real-world ‘raw’ psi phenomena seem to be intimately related to these concepts” (Conscious Universe, 287). The present book can be read as one long commentary on that single line.

  Mark Fox, Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). This very recent work, based on almost four hundred contemporary accounts, comes out of the Religious Experience Research Centre founded by Sir Alister Hardy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Now numbering up to six thousand case studies, this archive represents one of our richest, and virtually untapped, sources of real-world data on mystical experience. Fox demonstrates any number of strong comparative patterns that go directly against the present contextualist dogmas of the field, namely, that paranormal encounters with lightforms are cross-cultural, transhistorical, and manifest a certain “core” phenomenology around their crisis-timing, their benign or loving aspects, and their creative impact on the visionary.

  Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (New York: Harmony Books, 2010). From former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta’s foreword on, this is a game-changer. UFOs clearly exist, Kean observes, although we do not know what they are. Kean, an investigative journalist, presents the no-nonsense sightings of professionals from 1976 to 2007, from nine different countries no less; recounts the history that has produced the intellectual blindness, disinformation campaigns, and shaming techniques of the American government, media, and debunkers; describes the much more professional efforts of the Europeans; includes a powerful essay by two political scientists on the political roots of the UFO taboo, “akin to denial in psychoanalysis,” that protects the sovereign nation-state and the “anthropocentric structure of rule” from the threat of colonization, impotence, and “something analogous to the materialization of God” (276–79); and finally calls on government officials, scientists, and concerned citizens to organize major research programs around this potentially world-changing topic. If we could combine Kean’s rigorous investigative approach and courageous truth-telling, which unfortunately relegates the mythical and mystical dimensions of the encounter experience to “whacky everyday people” (118), with the approaches of authors like Vallee, Méheust, and Bullard, who turn to these same dimensions as one of the keys to the phenomenon, we would be well on our way to a much-needed maturity on the subject. In short, more science alone cannot get us there (Kean herself intuits this at 282–83). We will need more, way more, if we are ever to understand our present situation and all those human beings who have “been transformed, in one way or another, and sometimes drastically so, by this interaction with the ‘impossible’” (8).

  Some More Damned Anecnotes

  AN IMPOSSIBLE OPENING

  1. The “some time later” of Adam’s account here would have to be at least a good day later, as Kennedy was not declared dead until early in the morning of June 6, 1968. There is a debate about whether there was ever a live broadcast of the events immediately surrounding RFK’s assassination, as opposed to a report aired soon after the event from a previous audio recording. Adam believes that what he heard was the famous audio broadcast of Andrew West on KDKR AM 1150, which is easily available online. The assassination occurred at about 12:16 a.m. PSD, which (pending any daylight savings complications) would have been 3:16 a.m. ETD in Toronto. If Adam in fact awoke at 3:00 a.m., this strongly suggests that he heard a live broadcast, hence Adam’s memory of waking up at 3:00 a.m. may be incorrect. In any case, whereas the apparent precognitive element of Adam’s experience hinges on the historical questions of whether there was a live broadcast and when he awoke, its otherwise “impossible” nature does not. Whether read as an example of precognition or some kind of occult connection, Adam’s mind was inte
racting with history as it was presenting itself on the radio, be it live or recorded. My thanks to Jason Edwards for bringing my attention to these historical problems.

  2. Stanley Krippner, “Introduction to Third Edition,” in Dream Telepathy, ed. Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, with Alan Vaughan (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2002), xxi. As I explain below shortly, the subject of precognitive and telepathic dreams goes back to the very founding of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the Master himself wrote no less than six papers on the subject.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Jule Eisenbud, The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (New York: William & Morrow Company, 1967), 313.

  2. See, for example, Ann Taves, “Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003).

  3. I am relying here on the entries “Crookes, Sir William” and “Psychic Force” in Nandor Fodor’s wonderfully eccentric Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (University Books, 1966/1934). Where else can you find entries on “Copyright” (on the legal issues surrounding the intellectual rights to a channeled publication or spirit communication); on “Poltergeists,” those haunted people (as opposed to haunted houses) whose noisy and destructive externalized vital forces Fodor, as a paranormally oriented psychoanalyst now, would later interpret as “projected repressions”; or, most impossibly of all, on “Apports,” a five-page essay in which Fodor calmly offers two explanations for how things like scissors, flowers, metals, rocks, even a tree branch fall into a séance room out of nowhere: (1) interdimensional travel; or (2) “the disintegration and reintegration of the apported objects.”

  4. I spoke to the general editor of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion, Lindsay Jones, about this omission. He was not the least bit defensive, and he was entirely open about the reason: no one on his editorial board expressed any concerted interest in the subject.

  5. James H. Leuba, “Psychical Research,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1918), 10:423.

  6. E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (New York: Oxford, 1973), 176–77.

  7. My sincere thanks to Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston for two animated tellings of this anecdote.

  8. For the fire story, which is told in numerous places, see, for example, Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum World (New York: Paraview, 2006), 59–60.

  9. For Hegel’s engagement with the Hermetic tradition and various occult streams, see Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

  10. I am indebted here to Glenn Alexander Magee’s unpublished paper, “On the Will in Nature: Schopenhauer, Animal Magnetism and Magic.”

  11. See Stephen E. Braude, Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), ix–x.

  12. Stephen E. Braude, ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995); Immortal Remains; and The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Braude’s work easily constitutes one of the most reliable and philosophically astute oeuvres on psychical phenomena we possess. It also happens to be very funny in places.

  13. For the material in this paragraph, I am relying on Roger Luckhurst’s wonderful book, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160–67.

  14. Ernesto De Martino, The World of Magic (New York: Pyramid Communications, 1972), 63.

  15. For Turner’s encounters, see Edith Turner, “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness 4, no. 1: 9–12. For an example of Mead’s endorsement of the subject matter, see her appreciative introduction to what appears to be the first book on remote viewing, Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (Delacorte Press, 1977). For an astute anthropology of the cultural wars around the paranormal in America, see David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

  16. Michael Winkelman, “Magic: A Theoretical Reassessment,” Current Anthropology 23, no. 1 (February 1982): 44.

  17. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 141.

  18. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou, eds., William James on Psychical Research (New York: Viking Press, 1960). See also Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  19. For much more on this, see F. X. Charet, Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung’s Psychology (Albany: SUNY, 1993).

  20. Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: Scientific Evidence for Psi Phenomena (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 131. For more on Pauli and Jung from some rigorous philosophical and scientific perspectives, see Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, eds., Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science (Berlin: Springer, 2009).

  21. Cross-cultural surveys have shown that “about half of all spontaneous psi experiences occur in the dream state” (Radin, Conscious Universe, 68).

  22. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 3:380.

  23. Ibid., 394.

  24. I am indebted to Sudhir Kakar for this line of thought concerning Freud’s late skepticism and his linking of analytic empathy and telepathy: “The Resurgence of Imagination,” paper delivered at the Breuninger Foundation’s Symposium on Spirituality and Depth Psychology, August 4–8, 2008, Wasan Island, Ontario, Canada.

  25. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (New York: Bantam, 2007), 3.

  26. Ibid., xii.

  27. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 139; Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). For the British scene, particularly around Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, see Robert Lee Wolff, Strange Stories: Explorations in Victorian Fiction—The Occult and the Neurotic (Boston: Gambit, 1971).

  28. Quoted in Owen, Place of Enchantment, 41.

  29. Jacques Derrida, “Telepathy,” trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 10, nos. 1–2 (1988): 3–41 (originally published in 1981); and Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 11. See also Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000).

  30. Turner, “Reality of Spirits.”

  31. George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (XLibris, 2001), 366, 367. Hansen’s work stands virtually alone among parapsychological writings for its deep engagement with the humanities and social sciences.

  32. Mircea Eliade, “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge,” trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts, in Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader, ed. Bryan Rennie (London: Equinox, 2006).

  33. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 55.

  34. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49.

  35. Eliade, Autobiography, vol. 1, 1907–1937: Journey East, Journey West (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 190.

  36. Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth, 49.

  37. Mircea Eliade, Two Strange Tales (Boston: Shambala, 1986), x–xii.

/>   38. Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth, 147.

  39. Eliade, “Occult and the Modern World,” 56.

  40. Ibid., 54. Along very similar psychoanalytic-gnostic lines, it is probably no accident that Eliade chose to conclude this same volume on occultism and witchcraft with his “Spirit, Light, and Seed,” an essay that advances a strong comparative case for the symbolic equation of divine light and sperm in the history of religions.

  41. See especially Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

  42. Ted Anton, Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

  43. I. P. Couliano, Out of This World: A History of Otherworldly Journeys, from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston: Shambalah, 1991).

  44. Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

  45. Ioan P. Couliano, “System and History,” Incognita, 6. See also his “A Historian’s Kit to the Fourth Dimension,” Incognita 1 (1990), 113–29, and his Out of This World.

  46. Couliano, “System and History,” 9.

  47. To my limited knowledge, other than Couliano, the only other scholar of religion who has recognized the mind-blowing implications of Einstein’s physics for the practice of historiography is Elliot R. Wolfson. In his magisterial Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), Wolfson explores the curvature of spacetime and the possibility of time loops in order to entertain the idea that “the past is as much determined by the present as the present by the past” (ibid., xvii–xix).

  48. John E. Mack, as quoted in Christopher Partridge, “Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities,” in UFO Religions, ed. Partridge (London: Routledge, 2003), 35–36.