Indeed Vallée convincingly argues that rumours, anecdotes and theories relating to mysterious flying objects go as far back as 1560, contradicting many of the aforementioned theories of a more recent origin. For example, Pierre Boaistuau, author of Histoires Prodigieuses (Wondrous Tales), a sort of encyclopedia of bizarre natural phenomena and other mysteries, does an admirable job of prefiguring the history of ufology:
The face of heaven has been so often disfigured by bearded, hairy comets, torches, flames, columns, spears, shields, dragons, duplicate moons, suns, and other similar things, that if one wanted to tell in an orderly fashion those that have happened since the birth of Jesus Christ only, and inquire about the causes of their origin, the lifetime of a single man would not be enough. (Vallée; 1975: 7)
There seems to be the persistent sense that the UFO has a desire to cloak itself in absurdity, almost as if its will is precisely to confound. Evermore complex, elaborate schemes—and a strategic management of contexts—seem to place the UFO firmly in the domain of dream logic. In other words, a form of deliberate entanglement and subversion of all contextual ‘nets’ thrown out by mankind, in his attempt to yield some coherence or meaning, are a fundamental part of its nature. And, moreover, the enormous amount of time it takes to cross-reference all accounts, as Pierre Boaistuau pointed out, would take many lifetimes.
Beginning from this perspective one might say that the ‘drama’ of the UFO is as persistent as it is ambiguous, and, moreover, that it is apparently a real event that has haunted man throughout the centuries under different guises. The anecdotes, fraught as they are with their unreliable translations and inevitable biases, nevertheless add to the phenomenon’s mercurial nature. This, indeed, may answer for its preference for embedding its mythology on the fringes of society, thus constructing for itself a carefully protected form of mythological consciousness in man—appearing, like most mythologies, in the realm of the ‘merely anecdotal’, and while simultaneously being the birthplace of new stories of the eccentric, the unusual and macabre, novel and mysterious. All these stories bleed in to our collective minds, and thus they inevitably leave an indelible mark on our culture’s storytelling.
We may so far summarise that the phenomenon is a collective psychological event that modifies itself over time; all the time adapting and re-modulating itself almost in an experimental nature. Our stories do the same, constantly evolving and integrating more levels of information, pushing the boundaries of the ‘other’ into more elaborate forms, and allowing fertile ‘What ifs?’ to enter the cultural consciousness. Now, whether or not its shifting nature is our subjective doing is as important as it is as an external phenomenon—that is, an objective ‘thing’. But, until that is conclusive, we can only provide sufficient reason to penetrate its psychological and sociological ‘presence’.
Here we can posit the idea of a ‘psychic reality’ as does Wilson in World Famous UFOs (2005), that is, by proposing a reality that runs ‘parallel to our physical reality’ and that ‘ghosts, demons, poltergeists, fairies, even “vampires” are incursions from this “other reality” into our own’ (2005: 186). This ‘incursion’ seems to make the most sense, for the phenomenon does appear to be an experimental project that keeps renewing and rewriting its methodology. Wilson continues along this line of speculation: ‘Like the human race, the denizens of this other realm probably change and evolve, so their methods of drawing attention to themselves also change and evolve’ (2005: 186). In a sense the phenomena can be ‘read’ as if it were an unfolding story, authored by someone or some ‘thing’. There is also the idea that we are self-authoring the phenomena, in some deep sense, and deliberately stretching the limits of our unhealthily entrenched—or detached—views that cause a stagnation in some hidden and neglected aspect of our being.
One could even argue that mythology itself is a collectively sustained anecdote. Sustained, that is, by its retelling. The reason for its perseverance in our culture may highlight its importance in offering a form of sustenance to a part of our nature that is calling out in demand. Now, if there is an evolutionary imperative, an element of our collective psyches—or daemons—may partake in a cultural environment that informs the maintenance of a healthy evolution. And perhaps the language of metaphor is the most suitable vehicle for its task.
Strieber, allegedly abducted by entities related to the UFO phenomena, with his co-author, Dr Jeffrey J. Kripal, present a similar phenomenological approach by placing Strieber’s experiences into a sort of ‘suspension’, or as the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called it: epoché. Being a witness and abductee, Strieber nevertheless boldly proposes a method by which we ‘discard all the gods and ghosts, the demons, the aliens, and all the stories that go with them, the heroes and their journeys and their resurrections, and re-envision our relationship with this other world objectively’ (Strieber & Kripal; 2016: 44). He proposes we grapple with this newly emergent phenomenon on its own terms, rather than in an attempt to fit it within a ready-made mythology. What is implicit in Whitley and Kripal’s approach is that we include ourselves in the unfolding narrative, assessing how our own interpretive functions distort what is understood and misunderstood, experienced or imagined.
Strieber, upon reflecting on his own experiences, perceives it as a lesson about the embodiment of our very being. In other words, perceived as a sort of cycle in which man—as he experiences his everyday existence—is subject to a series of constraints circumscribed by his very embodiment in matter. And then, released back into the timelessness at death, is reborn, re-embodied and dispersed once more. By stepping back from his experience, and when looked at it without the ‘masks’ of mythological projection, Whitley reflects that one is instead presented with a fundamentally metaphysical perspective concerning life and death. Says Strieber:
… we may well see that there is a cycling back and forth taking place, the movement of souls into and out of bodies, living in time and outside of time. If those of us who are descended into time can acquire an objective understanding of why we have come into this state, we can make it vastly more useful to us than it is now. (Strieber & Kripal; 2016: 244)
Phenomena as bizarre and endlessly ambiguous as the UFO or alien abduction may lead to a sort of trauma—an existential vacuum that one is only too painfully aware. To strip away all the fabrications, compensatory mechanisms—what the mystic philosopher Gurdjieff called ‘buffers’—and staring into the heart of the UFO experience is, like any other phenomenological exercise, conducive to an existentially-tinted self-awareness. For Strieber, it is a case of seeing our lives as somehow reciprocal and cyclical, a matter of birth and rebirth. Interestingly, Strieber has also related that he returns to the work of Gurdjieff to recalibrate himself after these bewildering traumas. If we take Strieber’s experiences as real, then it is not surprising that he should ask himself, ‘Why me?’ which, in turn, will lead to the inevitable question, ‘Who am I?’ This, I believe, is what Strieber is able to extract from his own experience of the anomalous. For, in a sense, one’s own very being is as anomalous as that which it confronts—there is, in that gap of comprehension, an incursion of mystery that may cleanse habitual or ‘mechanical’ thinking.
In his earlier book, Solving the Communion Enigma (2012), Strieber emphasises the ‘power of the question’, being attendant to the mystery behind the mystery, so to speak. In doing so, he came to the conclusion that ‘who we are’ is ‘the greatest of all mysteries’. This, of course, is the fundamental tenet of existentialism. He goes on to say that we ‘present an appearance to ourselves of being a physical species that has evolved over aeons’ but, he continues, this is an ‘illusion that we have chosen for ourselves’ and that human bodies ‘are devices that we use to penetrate our attention deeply into the sensory world. But they are not us. We are something else, come here to rest ourselves and recover ourselves outside the endlessness that is our true home, and, above all, to evolve into something new’ (2012: 198).
Again, we can see in Strieber’s grappling with the phenomenon that there is this question of the meaning of life as well as death. Particularly he is interested in these two apparently divergent strands, for both life and death are fundament parts of evolution. The meaning occurs not when the two split away, death one way and life another, but in a sort of timeless convergence of the two—the evolutionary recognition, for Strieber, is that both life and death unify into an existential affirmation of the testing experience of life and, in Strieber’s case, the extreme fringes of anomalous experience itself. We will discuss this further in the last chapter in the context of shamanism and the psychotherapy developed by Stanislav Grof.
Elsewhere Whitley makes a curious distinction regarding the ‘visitors’ or ‘entities’ in which he argues that they ‘represent the most powerful of all forces acting in human culture’ and that they are indeed ‘managing the evolution of the human mind’ or ‘represent the presence of mind on another level of being’ (2012: 236). He concludes that it might be mankind’s fate to ‘leave the physical world altogether and join them in that strange hyper-reality from which they seem to emerge’ (2012: 236). Whether or not this is the destiny of an afterlife, or, a strange ascendance of mankind’s mind to a higher level of experience, it is difficult to tell. And yet, implicit in these conclusions is the notion that the mind can know other realities, truer and more ‘hyper-real’ perceptions beyond that which we ordinarily experience. They urge us to seek for the real reality behind what is merely presented to us by our five senses.
Questions such as these are the fundamental basis of religion, esotericism and even to some extent existentialism if what informs existentialism—questions relating to human existence—is the search for the phenomenological reality that underlies the experience of the transcendental or the anomalous. If these experiences are a part of our existential reality as human beings, it is therefore within the bounds of analysis for the existentialist.
All this brings us nicely back to Colin Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’, for Wilson incorporated Husserl’s notion of the ‘transcendental ego’ in the fundamental recognition that there is an unconscious element with authors, so to speak, our experience of reality prior to our apprehension of it. It is the energy behind our ability to grasp reality at all; it is, fundamentally, the ‘form-imposing’ faculty. Wilson places great emphasis on Husserl’s notion of ‘intentionality’, this active ‘will’ behind our perception that is ‘fired’ by the ‘transcendental ego’. For Wilson, as it was to an extent for Husserl, insights into the transcendental ego’s intentional nature would offer an insight into those states achieved in mystical visions, directing us in the direction of ‘the keepers of the key to the ultimate sources of being’ and to the ‘unveiling of the hidden achievements of the transcendental ego’ (1966: 62). Again, all this leads back to our own perceptual mechanisms, our very consciousness, and in turn this may allow us to stand back—like Strieber—and reflect more clearly on the often psychologically disorientating nature of the UFO experience.
If, for instance, something so baffles our consciousness and, in doing so, restructures our own relationship to ourselves, we may begin by reorienting our psychological mechanisms. We can see that to an extent Strieber concluded that the ‘entities’ themselves are managing our culture, that they are, in some deep sense, underlying mythological archetypes that run underneath our collective psyche, bursting forth occasionally into our psychic reality. One might even approach them as instrumentalities of our transcendental egos, or, for that matter, forces entirely external to us—evolutionary agents. Nevertheless, in examining our very depths we may develop a new type of logic that can integrate the intentions behind such phenomenon more generally. And, in turn, we may be our own directors, intending ourselves in a far more active manner.
Jorjani remarks that the ‘lurid character of so many of these [alien] contacts prevents them from being taken seriously by the scientific establishment of the target society, and instead these experiences are allowed to sink into the deeper, dreamlike psychical substrate that defines the mythic folklore of a culture’ (2016: 371). Whether or not this type phenomenon directly emerges from this ‘psychical substrate’ is the same question as the genesis of myth itself. Indeed, are myths ‘planted’, so to speak, to grow within a culture in order to shape its destiny? How are new ideas born? Such questions orientate the mind towards the study of esotericism. Strieber even refers to some of the more bizarre experiences he’s encountered as ‘living hieroglyphs’: a mystery drama to be decoded by the interpreter. Again, there is this emphasis on interpretation; the hermeneutic approach as well as the phenomenological. We will return to the subject of the esoteric in more depth later on.
The fact that Strieber is a novelist, a professional storyteller, and a weaver of horror stories, is perhaps significant, for, whatever these ‘entities’ might be, they have certainly selected an individual with the psychological tools and skills necessary to absorb and release their (sometimes terrifying) presence into the public consciousness. As I have mentioned above, it is curious that Strieber should follow the work of Gurdjieff, whose entire mystical philosophy is underpinned by a need to jolt man out of his passivity through necessary, but sometimes painful, ‘shocks’. This seems to be similar to Lachman’s interpretation in that they are intended to challenge our passivity, to frustrate and reinvigorate our sense of mystery.
Now, in comparing the ‘visitors’ to Gurdjieff’s system, Strieber remarks that, ‘What I got from the visitors was friction a thousand times more potent, friction that had the power to break the soul, to plunge me into a frozen paroxysm of hatred and fear.’ For, with each change in Gurdjieff’s theory of octaves, there is a required ‘shock’ for the further evolution and development of that octave to a higher level. And this higher level, this higher ‘I’, is very much similar to what Husserl meant by the ‘transcendental ego’––that which actively ‘intends’. Strieber has also mentioned the fact that the whole experience might be what evolution looks and feels like when it is immediately up-close––a sudden leap, sometimes precarious, and fraught with dangers when accelerated without due caution. Similarly Wilson argues in Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966):
If knowledge is really to fire my whole being, and cause it to expand, it must not be capable of merely of exploding my childhood prejudices and releasing me into a broader world of universal knowledge; it must also enable me to understand my inner-being… In being able to stand aside from my habits of perception, I shall have discovered the secret of poetry and mysticism. (1966: 54)
Of course, Gurdjieff’s philosophy is based on this notion of a ‘shock’ that would enable a more fully crystallized identity, a ‘super-ordinate’ self that enables one to ‘stand aside’ from habitual perception—it is with this very ability that we may understand the ‘secret of poetry and mysticism’. Essentially, this is the impression one gets from Strieber’s writings on the subject. They represent a disturbing but simultaneously enlightening voyage into the unconscious, inner-regions of man, in which the forces are enormous and sometimes impersonal, but nevertheless buoy up our entire being rather like a boat rests on a tumultuous and vast ocean. In other words, it is a vision into the ‘life force’—that origin of all intentionality, and the energy from which the transcendental ego ignites our perceptions in our most intense states of being.
To the uninitiated these experiences might be actively detrimental, even dangerous—but with a careful phenomenological discipline, they break the shackles of our habituated consciousness and allow a far more intense experience of a reality usually blinkered from our five senses.
A Personal Note: Existentialism, UFOs and Science Fiction
Now that I have described the fundamental theories and approaches that will inform this essay, I should explain its genesis. This is important to understand my own approach to ufology.
It was sometime in 2008 when I first picked up Alien Dawn due to my increa
sing interest in the UFO phenomenon. It was, as I have mentioned, a choice based on my previous reading of Wilson’s work—particularly The Outsider. The interest did not occur randomly or superficially; it was in part due to witnessing a UFO myself in February of that same year. At the time I was mainly interested in existentialist literature of the pessimistic variety—writers such as Michel Houellebecq and the Romanian arch-pessimist, Emil Cioran—I found particularly invigorating in the sense that it was so merciless and bold. There was something fundamentally stimulating about their firebrand approach to existence; they ranted and exploded, rather than carefully delineate their philosophies. I was, I should add, twenty-two at the time, and being in a rather working-class village probably demanded this sort of intensity merely for stimulation. My tendency at that time was to seek out existentially ‘authentic’ answers, and, as I was steeped in existential literature this tended to be pessimistic. It was, in short, as ‘authentic’ as I wanted it to be—that is, reflective of my own vacillating moods. Although I had read The Outsider before Alien Dawn, I had regarded it as an enormous acceleration of my understanding of existential literature; although strangely, I initially failed to integrate its essentially optimistic conclusion.
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 3
