Any good invasion would be done before anyone realized it had happened. His advice: Next time you see a saucer—“Run like hell.”
UFOlogists rejected the body of claims surrounding the Dulce Base for the most part, but they spread in the general culture, particularly by radio talk shows and the Internet. The spread of the word Grays to label bald big-headed aliens was one side effect of this development, but it also formed a basis for further tales of malevolence in the nineties.
GRANDER OR GRANDEUR
Raymond Fowler’s third book on the Andreasson case, The Watchers (1990) brings the viral metaphor back. He feels “Like a medical researcher who has inoculated himself in order to experience and treat a disease under study.” To his horror, he finds the UFO phenomenon linked to the future extinction of mankind through sterility. He calls it inconceivable, but he also feels it is authentic.
Vallée returns to the UFO scene in 1990 with Confrontations. He tallies up twelve cases of fatal injuries attributable to UFOs, and announces the phenomenon is more dangerous and technologically complex than we thought. He feels “a renewed sense of urgency” about UFO study.
In a 1990 interview, Donald Ware expressed his belief that the Hybrid Program is intended to develop bodies to house our souls in future incarnations—a future species with a 35 percent larger brain, telepathy, and a capacity for unconditional love. This has some resonance to a revelation passed along by Strieber that the visitors say they recycle souls.
Terence McKenna, more a high-profile thinker than UFOlogist, notes that UFO contact is perhaps the most common motif that is found in recreational psilocybin experiences. They are real in some sense. They are “apocalyptic concrescences that haunt the historical continuum, igniting religions and various hysterias, and seeping ideas into highly tuned nervous systems.” They “act as a kind of ideological catalyst.” UFOs will wreck science, sweep it away. A UFO-related religion would embody an archetype of enormous power. The UFO represents a crisis between the individual and the Overmind. “It comes from this murky region, beyond the end of history, beyond the end of life…. It is both the apotheosis and the antithesis of the monkey’s journey toward mind.”
In Revelations (1991) Vallée debunks the Dulce Base stories and warns that belief in the imminent arrival of aliens is a powerful fantasy, poisonous as any of the great irrational upheavals of history. The 1997 Heaven’s Gate tragedy might give this line a cache of prescience. Vallée also speculates UFO entities “could even be fractal beings. The Earth could be their home port.” (Emphasis in the original.) He calls upon Oscar Wilde’s dictum that an aesthetic truth was such that it’s opposite is equally true: “Perhaps the truths about alien contact, like those of the metaphysical kind, are the truths of masks.”
David Jacobs, in Secret Life (1992), echoes Hopkins in his belief that aliens are neither malevolent nor benevolent and share the anthropological policy of noninterference to save us cultural shock, or perhaps prefer secrecy to avoid human efforts of resistance. They do not seem headed for conquest or colonization, at least as we know the term.
George Andrews collects much of the Dulce Base or EBE mythos into his 1993 work, ExtraTerrestrial Friends and Foes. Grays are “other-dimensional predatory parasites” and may lack souls. We “must confront the all-or-nothing emergency situation that is now staring us in the face.” They are “paralyzing our evolutionary development.” Insectoids are invading us to complete their own evolution. Negative material like this is common on the Web. Lear’s talk of future invasion is elaborated upon, for example, by Cosmic Awareness in a 1993 reading that predicted a full-force invasion by reptoids in 1999.
Linda Howe’s Glimpses of Other Realities volumes (1993, 1998) similarly builds upon this mythos and includes portrayals of aliens as “neither benevolent nor neutral,” with some considered a “black group” thriving on control, destruction, and chaos. Despite a lot of negative material, Howe ends with a curiously positive gloss: “Ultimately, there is a common bond among all life forms ebbing and flowing on different spirals of different frequencies supported by a singular force, an invisible matrix of energy from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.” They are watching us, guarding our future as a species, “and will not allow humans to destroy the earth.” Our concept of them “has shifted from fear to curiosity to maybe even ‘one of the guys’ in cozy, human social terms.”
Timothy Good concludes A1ien Contact (1993) with his assessment that we are being visited by several different groups of extraterrestrials. Some are less than benign, but others are lending us a helping hand “as we reach, falteringly, toward the stars.” Advantages will hopefully outweigh disadvantages, “leading to a more complete and profound understanding of our place in the universal scheme.”
In 1994, John Mack concludes in his study of the phenomenon that “Abductions seem to be concerned primarily with two related projects: changing human consciousness to prevent the destruction of earth’s life, and the joining of two species for the creation of a new evolutionary form.” It might be an educational mythic drama intended by a “transcendent intelligence to move our being to a higher level.” It “is not evil.”
Similarly, Richard Boylan says his hopes for humanity took a “decided upturn…with politically correct, large-minded neighbors like the ETs vowing to step in if necessary to make sure we don’t blow up each other…” ETs will soon land and “The open presence of ETs on earth will mean that we will have the benefit of some of the wisest minds from some of the older and more enduring minds in the galaxy available to help us design a civilization that really works for all.”
Jenny Randles’ The Star Children (1995) suggests alien experiences are part of a spiritual evolution. We are being turned into cosmic citizens, our consciousness is being raised. “We are climbing a stairway to the stars with a dazzling light far ahead of us at the top … We will all get there in the end.” Our joy may be short-lived, however, when we learn we have only reached the first floor of very tall building. Still, there is symbolic beauty in the Hybrid Program where people are helping “to build a new and better race.” She was clearly not being pessimistic: “Yes, something wonderful might well be happening.”
With Watchers II (1995), Raymond Fowler suggests a connection between near-death experiences (NDEs) and UFOs: “I am convinced that there is no other explanation—barring alien deception —that UFOs and their entities come from behind death’s Great Door.” They come from a world of light unimpeded by physical laws. They care about our health. The Light Beings give a treatise on life and death that tells us “life is wonderfully fair.” Evil will be wiped out at some distant time, but on this plane, it must exist. They are monitoring the life-essence of the forms dwelling on Earth as we develop in our paraphysical evolution.
Hopkins in Witnessed (1996) thinks it evident aliens unwittingly add to the world’s health problems. The proposition that aliens are here to teach us environmental consciousness is firmly termed “a colossal failure.” He sees more devoted ecologists among skeptics than abductees. All evidence points to the Hybrid Program as their central concern. Reprising earlier conclusions, “Despite the fears of many, nothing in my 20 years of research into this phenomenon suggests that the UFO occupants are inherently malevolent. I have seen absolutely no evidence that they are bent upon invasion and enslavement of the human race.” But neither are they benign or saviors from eco-doom. Forget demonic conquest or angelic rescue. Their goals are their own. Their presence will in time become inescapable even to the most die-hard skeptic.
Looking at cases in Brazil, Bob Pratt remarks that while “some UFO beings may be kind and well-intentioned … others definitely are not … UFOs may or may not be significant to mankind in the long run, but until we find out, we should treat them with the greatest of caution.”
Joe Lewels in The God Hypothesis (1997) sees UFOs as part of a transformation of reality. The aliens may be godlike by having evolved beyond our understanding, or were
simply created at a higher level of God’s natural hierarchy of intelligences. He knows religious fundamentalists will brand them demonic, but fear can be averted by “the calmer voices of those who are able to embrace the grander perspective,” accept the paradoxes, and go beyond good and evil to realize they are but the same thing from God’s perspective. “The ET presence can have a positive result.” We must all love unconditionally and understand we are all one.
Colin Wilson argues in Alien Dawn (1998) that aliens have moved beyond the stage of human evolution where we merely mark time and know how consciousness can operate at full pressure. They are not malevolent or hostile, but like Neanderthals, an evolutionary dead-end stuck in a spiritual cul-de-sac. They are creating a new kind of human being and evidence exists in the form of hundreds of super-intelligent kids. The UFO phenomenon is making an increasing impact on the human mind by a Sheldrakean morphogenetic induction.
In 1998, Jacobs changes his mind and announces that abductions are indeed the threat some people had earlier thought they were. He chronicles the views of the Positives faction of abductionology, including Leo Sprinkle, Dr. Hunter Gray, Richard Boylan, John Mack, Joseph Nyman, and Leah Haley. Curiously, no word of Fowler. He echoes Hopkins’ conclusion that the environmental messages of the Positives look useless, since abductees don’t become activists. A change is coming with hybrids and insectoid aliens assuming control of the planet. Non-abductees are expendable and only a small breeding population will be maintained in case the Hybrid Program has unforeseen problems. “It may very well too late” to do anything to stop this. “I have come to the conclusion,” Jacobs says, “that human civilization may be in for a rapid, and perhaps disastrous change, not of our own design…” Human freedom is doomed. “The aliens have fooled us…I do not think we will have to wait very long.”
Michael Heseman exults that contact with a superior civilization could be the greatest chance for humanity, opening up new perspectives. Communication with them could give us a new perspective, a holistic view of creation and our role in the universe. “That would be the first step in the next phase of our evolution: the birth of ‘homo cosmicus,’ …this alone probably makes the UFO phenomenon the secret key to our entrance into the 21st century.”
Steiger returns fully to the Positives camp in 1999 with UFO Odyssey. The UFO phenomenon awakens one to an awareness that “there exists one central, unifying energy on this planet that has the potential to transform our entire species.” Contactees maintain that the evolution of humanity successively brings him to a more ethereal, purely spiritual state, a perfection of the soul. UFOs are a mythological symbol, in some way more real than the Internet or industrial averages, helping us regain our lost paradise as spiritual beings.
Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos (1999) broadens the conclusion of his earlier book. “The abduction phenomenon seems to me to be part of a shift of consciousness that is collapsing duality and enabling us to see that we are connected beyond the Earth at a cosmic level.” One must posit “an ultimate or overarching creative principle or intelligence in the cosmos that is doing its work through this and other phenomena…” Abductees variously call this intelligence God, Source, Home, One, “God-Goddess-All that is.” Grays and the like are “intermediaries between us and the Divine Source.”
ASSESSMENT
Credit must be given where it is due. The Air Force got it right and told it straight. No material threat to national security existed. The invasion never took place. Mirarchi’s Pearl Harbor, Riordan’s knockout attack, Keyhoe’s final operation, Wilkins’ death ceiling blockade, Michel’s Sword of Damocles, NICAP’s danger to the fabric of society, the Lorenzens’ mass drugging and toppling of civilization, Edwards’ imminent Overt Contact, Fawcett’s disaster beyond imagination, Steiger’s full scale annihilation, Hynek’s Russian Breakthrough, Clark’s swamp-lurking village-slayers, Palmer’s ongoing titanic war, Fowler’s cultural disintegration: all were concerns with more basis in fantasy than reality.
The sense of urgency, the sense that it may be too late, the sense that our existence depended on a properly conducted investigation was an irrational fear. The Air Force repeatedly tried to get across the message that UFOlogists were wrong, but they were in no mood to listen. It is dogma among UFOlogists that the Air Force was incompetent or worse, yet if that is accepted as a proper, measured evaluation, what word is proper to describe the body of thought presented by these UFOlogists? The Air Force did not perform flawlessly in the details, but they had the big picture in more than sufficient focus to understand it was a nuisance problem and not one of life and death significance.
The same cannot be said of UFOlogists. For them the big picture keeps changing. In the fifties they were considerate and peace loving. In the sixties they were a source of danger and death. In the seventies were perversely irrational and a source of hope. In the eighties they were traumatizing though they didn’t realize it. In the nineties they are grand things involved in our spiritual evolution and linked with God. Are these changes a progressive march to truth? Doubtful. The sixties were clearly worse than the fifties. The nineties’ drift into theological and metaphysical realms is worse than the seventies and pretty overtly anti-scientific. Are these changes in fashion? Possibly, though the word doesn’t seem right since the conclusions are at times laced with fear and dread rather than enthusiasm.
Much of this resembles the way paranoia changes over time. The initial presumption of alien benevolence is a puzzle I have yet to fully understand. My sense is that aliens tended to be malevolent in science fiction. Perhaps it was a carryover from the writings of science popularizers and astronomers. The myth of the canal-builders of Mars implied a superior race that was also industrious and evolved beyond war. Specifically, Lowell said “international conflicts and wars are unknown” for the inhabitants had united against the common enemy of a dying world. I can’t point to any more contemporary source of the idea. We can dismiss the idea it was somehow obliged by the roundness of saucers for the dominant theory that they were secret weapons by either us or the Russians, possibly developed from Nazi scientists, and implicitly had a malevolent, future war connotation.
Regardless, the interpretative drift towards malevolence is consonant with the darkening worldview of paranoids as they withdraw from social contact and turn inward. The hypochondriacal stage is entered as the ego collapses and the fear of death asserts itself in a variety of forms. End-of-world fears are a common feature of collapse and these are numerous among the early UFOlogists. Persecution fantasies arise and this feature has led some to call this phase the ‘pursuit’ stage of paranoia. The sixties, of course, did have such themes in the spread of UFO chases, UFOs shadowing people, and the Men-in-Black stories, but they constitute a subset of a much wider range of fears more broadly recognizable as dealing with encroaching death.
To term the sixties a hypochondriacal era seems apt on several points. There is a universal call for some authority who will tell everyone that UFOs are real. The authorities decline. The idea appearing in both Lorenzen and Steiger that UFOs would put sleeping drugs in reservoirs is an obvious parallel to poisoning fantasies found in individual paranoia. The concerns over blackouts and vehicle interference might be analogous to the loss-of-life-energy notions that develop around the depression aspects of some cases of schizophrenia. Concerns over war and the toppling of civilization or endangerment of the social fabric seem familiar variants on projective world destruction fantasies. The talk of invasion is as well, having obvious parallels in prior invasion panics like the 1789 Great Fear rumor-panic in France, the 1913 Scareship mania, and the sizable literature ruminating on invasion and future war that spawned War of the Worlds.
The viral metaphors indulged in by UFO writers are a delightful expression of the hypochondriacal style. Though some will dismiss them as a mere literary device, it is perhaps worth mentioning that they routinely appear in other genres of paranoia. Believers in the Jewish world conspiracy usually de
scribed their enemies as bacilli, syphilis, the plague, and viruses. They entertained poisoning fantasies such as the fear that mass inoculation programs were plots to inject Gentiles with syphilis.
Hypochondria is not a permanent condition. The ego attempts to reintegrate eventually through the building of psychological defenses against the masochistic attacks of the conscience. Ideas of reference form to disown the crazier aspects of one’s fears. Retrospective falsifications arise to rewrite personal history. Conspiracy logic forms pseudo-communities to organize the chaos of social reality. Later, delusions of grandeur arise and overcompensate the injured ego. The final stage is cosmic identity—the individual is God, the universe, and interlinked with everything.
As we pass from the sixties to the seventies, the calls for investigation drop away, “urgent” slips from the language, invasion and mass drugging is replaced by more up-beat thoughts. The bizarre aspects of alien nightmares and horrors become more evident and efforts are made to discount them on some level—enter control systems. Ancient astronaut lore rewrites Darwin to make us descendants from Starfolk rather than merely apes, and rewrites the Bible to be a product of super-science rather than superstition. In the eighties we get Roswell, MJ-12, and some other conspiracy theories. The Dulce Base secret agreement manages to incorporate both conspiracy and new threats of invasion for the Internet generation. With the nineties, delusions of grandeur and cosmic identity come to the fore among the Positives. The Dulce Base crowd and other Regressives stir in the background to retrace the cycle.
It is human nature that people don’t often go around proclaiming their mistakes and there is no point in feigning surprise when observing that it seems impossible to find any UFOlogist who has reflected on the remarkable misjudgments and the spectacle of error that took place in sixties UFOlogy. It would have been nice to even find someone who expressed relief that the invasion was called off. Look through the UFO histories of people like Paris Flammonde, David Jacobs, Jerome Clark, even Curtis Peebles and Steven Dick, and they are sanitized of any account of the wild fears that UFOlogy had about aliens and UFOs. It is an open question if UFOlogy learns from its mistakes given such silence, and it is one probably left unasked for the obvious answer will be emotionally incorrect.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 108
