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