277 lines
18 KiB
Plaintext
277 lines
18 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: VISIONS OF COSMOPOLIS FILE: UFO2252
|
|
|
|
|
|
ARTICLE BY ANTHONY MANSUETO for OMNI
|
|
|
|
|
|
Great wheels of light appear over the high desert at night. Spinning against
|
|
the starry sky. Messengers from the heavens come to ordinary people. Bearing
|
|
new wisdom and warnings of cosmic catastrophe. Men and women are taken from
|
|
their beds at night and return with stories of intercourse with strange
|
|
beings, their bodies scarred with circles and triangles. Like so many aspects
|
|
of our culture, the UFO is the cause of controversy, a controversy which
|
|
extends to the very existence of the object in question. Like God, the UFO
|
|
divides our society into believers and nonbelievers, cautious hopefuls and
|
|
equally cautious agnostics. But whether we believe in the UFO or not, its
|
|
presence in our culture clearly has a great deal to tell us about ourselves-
|
|
about where we are as a species and where we are going. This kind of cultural
|
|
observation does not rule out the possibility that UFOs really do exist, nor
|
|
does it require such existence. It merely asks what we can learn from the
|
|
phenomenon regarding the current state of human civilization.
|
|
|
|
While the biological and metaphysical explanations vary and contradict one
|
|
another, there seems to be at least one constant about our nature as human
|
|
beings-and that is that we are not alone. We have a drive toward wholeness
|
|
and completion which is apparent in everthing we do. For instance, we join
|
|
together in intimate union-and produce a new whole, the child. We live in
|
|
groups because we can accomplish more together than a single individual ever
|
|
could.Even our intellectual history is one of endless struggle to make what
|
|
we know of the world fit into a larger pattern of significance.
|
|
|
|
But our desire for unity and completion is, perhaps, nowhere more clearly
|
|
expressed than in our need for religious experience or understanding. Derived
|
|
from the Latin religio, which means to reconnect, religion is the process by
|
|
which we strive to link ourselves to the divine or cosmic order of things.
|
|
Similarly, salvare, to save, originally meant to make whole. Salvation, the
|
|
ultimate aim of religion, is the moment of reconneciton-with God, with
|
|
Christ, with the Universe, with the sublime. It is a moment of mystery and
|
|
reverence, terror and fulfillment. It is the experience of connection,
|
|
touching, and becoming a part of something alien-something outside of us and
|
|
very different.
|
|
|
|
Whatever the physical reality of UFOs and aliens may be, it is easy to see
|
|
the religious dimensions of the phenomena. Carl Jung, as early as the 1950s,
|
|
noted the resemblance of flying saucers to the amndala, an ancient symbol of
|
|
wholeness and salvation. More recently, tales of abduction and alien
|
|
encounters suggest that finding the Other-a being from beyond-connects these
|
|
experiences to our underlying religious need for contact which transcends the
|
|
daily intercourse of human existence.
|
|
|
|
This said, it is necessary to point out how the symbolism surrounding the
|
|
UFO phenomenon differs from other types of religious symbolism. At least in
|
|
its original form, the UFO was a machine, a technological artifact. While the
|
|
technology which it embodies may be far in advance of our own, it is,
|
|
nonetheless, something which beings like ourselves might eventually be able
|
|
to create. The UFO literature is full of stories of attempts by the
|
|
government to reverse engineer UFO propulsion systems. If only we could get
|
|
our hands on a piece of their equipment, then, well, with a little bit of
|
|
Yankee ingenuity....Similarly the aliens-even as their otherness has
|
|
intensified over the years and they have manifested such paranormal powers as
|
|
the ability to walk through wall, to levitate, and so on- have remained
|
|
finite, humanoid beings who have real limitations and who, in some
|
|
inscrutable way, seem to need us as much as we need them.
|
|
|
|
All this suggests that we humans are beginning to see ourselves as real
|
|
participants in the process of creating unity and organization. Where older
|
|
myths regarded humanity as the plaything of the gods, or as the essentially
|
|
powerless subject of a transcendent divine sovereign, the myth which has
|
|
emerged around the UFO treats humanity as a real partner in the creation of a
|
|
cosmic society. The scientific and technological advances of the postwar
|
|
period brought with them grave dangers to be sure. But they also made it
|
|
possible, for the first time, for humanity to end its earthbound existence,
|
|
to visit the heavens and return to tell of the journey, and to imagine
|
|
someday, on our own efforts and through our won merits, to become citizens of
|
|
the great heavenly city.
|
|
|
|
There have, however, been a number of distinct-and even mutually opposed-
|
|
reactions to the mythic character of the UFO phenomenon. It is possible to
|
|
distinguish among these responses along three distinct axes. There are those
|
|
who believe that the UFO comes to us, whether from another star system or
|
|
another dimension, and those who regard it as merely a product of the
|
|
collective psyche. There are those who interpret the phenomenon in language
|
|
which is drawn from the scientific tradition, even as they stretch the limits
|
|
of official science, and those who express open hostility to the scientific
|
|
establishment. Finally, there are those who see in the UFO a sign of hope and
|
|
a catalyst for growth, and those who sense something evil and profoundly
|
|
destructive.
|
|
|
|
The dominant response to the UFO in the larger culture has been one of
|
|
tentative, hopeful anticipation. Broad layers of the population either
|
|
believe, or want desperately to believe, that the UFO represents the real
|
|
presence of a superior technological force, probably form another star system,
|
|
interaction with which is a catalyst for human social (and spiritual)
|
|
progress.This trend is connected to a fascination with the new science with
|
|
unified field theories and complex systems theory, holistic biology and
|
|
ecology-disciplines which are pushing us beyond the old worldview which
|
|
regarded the universe as a system of externally related atoms, toward an
|
|
understanding of the relationality holism, and self organizing character of
|
|
the universe. There is, at the same time, a desire to respect scientific
|
|
norms, and to avoid explanations which lack scientific credibility.
|
|
|
|
Probably the clearest and most powerful expression of this vision came not
|
|
from the UFO movement at all, but rather from Steven Speilberg, whose two
|
|
films, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, and E.T. both articulated and gave
|
|
form to powerful popular images of the phenomenon. In Close Encounters, a
|
|
series of UFO sightings disrupts the stifling routine of small town life and
|
|
the loveless marriage of a utility company worker, drawing him and newfound
|
|
companion into the Wyoming wilderness for an encounter with benevolent aliens
|
|
whose mother ship descends from the skies like a technological New Jerusalem.
|
|
He is chosen over the best and the brightest to accompany the aliens on a
|
|
journey in to the heavens. The score by John Williams is a clear expression of
|
|
the cultural myth at work in these films. Built around a series of complex
|
|
and often highly abstract variations on the theme from Pinocchio, it relies on
|
|
a common cosmic connection echoed in the refrain, When you wish upon a
|
|
star/Makes no difference who you are.
|
|
|
|
Moving out from this mythic center, there are two other trends which see the
|
|
UFO as a sign, or at least an expression, of hope, but differ in their
|
|
attitude toward official science-and thus in their willingness to regard the
|
|
phenomenon as objectively real. On the one side are the secular, humanistic
|
|
skeptics closely aligned with official science, such as the cosmological
|
|
principles championed by Carl Sagan. These skeptics share the UFOlogists quest
|
|
for an inhabited universe, but regard UFO as little better than a modern
|
|
superstition. Contact, when it comes, will be in binary code and will be
|
|
received by a large radio telescope operated by a consortium of universities.
|
|
The message will be interpreted by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and
|
|
conveyed to the secretary general of the United Nations.
|
|
|
|
The hard since approach here, however, is not devoid of a sense of awe at the
|
|
vastness of the undertaking of establishing contact. Keith Thompson, while
|
|
conducting research for his book, Angles and Aliens, visited with a scientist
|
|
working on the SETI project in the California desert. He was Harvard Ph.D.-
|
|
type, cream of the crop, Thompson recalls, and he sat there and told me with
|
|
an almost religious kind of astonishment, how many channels they had open, and
|
|
how much of the heavens they were searching.
|
|
|
|
At the other end of the spectrum are those who reject more or less completely,
|
|
or are willing to ignore, the limits of occicial science. Rather, these
|
|
believers borrow scientific concepts to explain social psychological
|
|
phenomena. David Stupple, in an article published shortly after his untimely
|
|
death in 1983, documented the continuities between the Theosophical movement
|
|
and UFO contactee and channeling cults which developed in the 1950s and 1960s.
|
|
Not infrequently UFO groups in the theosophical tradition will see themselves
|
|
as drawing out the implications of new developments in relativity and quantum
|
|
mechanics. Much of what Charles Spiegel, currently director of the Unarius
|
|
Educational Foundation, says-phrases such as The universe is an inner
|
|
dimensional energy system, or the mind is a giant computer running off of this
|
|
system, or We misunderstand the universe if we think only of the finite factors
|
|
of the infinite creative intelligence-sounds surprisingly like popular
|
|
accounts which treat the philosophical implications of the new physics.
|
|
|
|
The bibliographies of Unarius tracts are filled with references to Desecrates,
|
|
Spinoza, and Einstein. Indeed, Dr. Spiegel, who received his degree in psychic
|
|
therapeutic science from the Unarius Academy of Science, wrote his doctoral
|
|
dissertation on the political structure of the Interplanetary Confederation
|
|
which had bee transmitted to him by the chief scientist Alta of the planet
|
|
Vixall. He informed me that his immediate predecessor, Unarius cofounder Ruth
|
|
E. Norman, had recently made her transition to a nonatomic state where she
|
|
functions as the archangle Uriel. One Unarius film depicts the trails of an
|
|
aborigine contactee who suffers persecution at the hands of his tribe's high
|
|
priest whose name, interestingly enough, just happens to be Seti.
|
|
|
|
More recently, theosophical contactee and channeling cults have given way to
|
|
New Age interpretations of the phenomenon which are less audaciously offensive
|
|
to a scientifically trained audience, but perhaps even more profoundly at odds
|
|
with the whole scientific enterprise than their theosophical predecessors.
|
|
Ethnobotanist and psilocybin guru Terence McKenna writes in his book, The
|
|
Archaic Revival, that the UFO is an idea intended to confound science, because
|
|
science has begun to threaten the existence of the planet. At this point a
|
|
shock is necessary for the culture, a shock equivalent to the shock of the
|
|
resurrection on Roman imperialism. This shock is being applied by the
|
|
overmind...a level of hierarchic control being exerted on the human species as
|
|
a whole....Our destiny is not ours to decide. It is in the hands of a weirdly
|
|
democratic, amoeboid, hyperintelligent superorganism that is called Everybody.
|
|
Where the technophiles seek wholeness in a continuation of the scientific
|
|
project of our own civilization, the New Age movement rejects the whole
|
|
enterprise of rational knowledge and technocratic control in favor of a
|
|
religion centered on the maxim let go and let the UFO.
|
|
|
|
This theme of letting go has also found resonance among evangelically oriented
|
|
abductees. Betty Andreasson Luca, the subject of several books by UFO
|
|
investigator Raymond Fowler, told me that her abduction experiences had taught
|
|
her how real God is and how he is a control of all things. Even those
|
|
abductees who regard their experience as a catalyst for growth report initial
|
|
fear and resistance which they overcome only through what amounts to an act
|
|
of religious submission to their captors.Whitley Strieber repeatedly
|
|
challenges the right of his captors to abduct him and perform medical
|
|
operations without his consent. Their reply: We have the right. It is only
|
|
after he has accepted this that he is able to come to terms with the
|
|
experience and learn from it.
|
|
|
|
Not everyone, however, sees in the UFO a sign of hope. Once again the
|
|
original, and perhaps definitive, perception in this regard comes from popular
|
|
culture rather than the UFO movementitself. Ever since the publication of H.G.
|
|
Wells War of the Worlds and Orson Welles famous broadcast of the same, we
|
|
have had a fascination with alien invasion. We are desperately afraid that we
|
|
are being taken over by a force more powerful than ourselves, the motives and
|
|
modus operandi of which are too complex to be apparent to merely human reason.
|
|
|
|
The notion that the phenomenon is somehow malevolent cuts across the lines
|
|
between technophile and technophobe, and even across the lines between
|
|
believer and nonbeliever. Visions of a technological New Jerusalem find their
|
|
counterpart in an emerging countermyth of secret invasion by gray aliens from
|
|
Zeta Reticuli, who are breeding hybrids in underground bases hidden beneath
|
|
the mountains of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. This countermyth has found
|
|
resonance both among abductees who, far from felling healed and challenged by
|
|
their experiences, are more inclined to say that they have been raped and
|
|
violated, and among political conspiracy theorists convinced there is a
|
|
history of secret contact between the aliens and a secret government centered
|
|
in a high level group known as the MJ-12.
|
|
|
|
One partisan of the Reticulian invasion hypothesis is physicist John E.
|
|
Brandenburg, who claims to have worked on directed energy weapons and other
|
|
space defense projects. He says that the Star Wars program in which he served
|
|
was actually intended as a defense against the Reticulian invasion. His
|
|
prescription: God, GUTS, and Guns. GUTS refers to the Grand Unified Theory of
|
|
Science which he hopes will allow us to control gravity with
|
|
electromagnetism. He has also proposed a Rainbow Declaration which declares
|
|
that on all matters concerning extraterrestrial peoples, the nations of the
|
|
earth shall be as one.
|
|
|
|
The theme of political conspiracy, however, is not confined to those who
|
|
believe we are actually undergoing a secret alien invasion. William Cooper,
|
|
author of Behold the Pale Horse, is a former military intelligence and
|
|
defense research personnel, claims to have been shown documents relating to
|
|
government contact with extraterrestrials. Originally he, too, took the
|
|
documents at face value. Gradually, however, he came to the conclusion that
|
|
the phenomenon is one great big hoax, exclusively of human origin...designed
|
|
to bring into being One World government. The religious overtones of the
|
|
phenomenon are all part of the plot. One World government requires a New Age
|
|
One World religion. Mr. Cooper, whose answering machine informs callers that
|
|
they have reached something called the Intelligence Service, traces this
|
|
conspiracy back to John Dewey who, according to Cooper, noted that the
|
|
prospect of extraterrestrial invasion might serve to unify earth's warring
|
|
nations. The conspiracy, so the argument goes, is promoted by a secret
|
|
government which includes the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign
|
|
Relations, and other organizations.
|
|
|
|
Outwardly it might appear that this sort of negative reaction to the UFO
|
|
phenomenon represents a kind of resurgent Yankee individualism that seems at
|
|
odds with the religious unity incorporated in more positive versions. However,
|
|
there is an underlying need even in these conspiracies to connect the
|
|
individual experience to a larger whole. The conspiracy theorist searches for
|
|
the pattern which will make his experience of the world a coherent whole. The
|
|
intelligence officer, who maps out these secret networks, is the high priest
|
|
of this peculiar antireligion. Salvation comes from knowledge of the
|
|
conspiracy. Indeed, one often gets the sense that many conspiracy theorists
|
|
actually hope that there is a secret government operating behind the scenes,
|
|
holding together what often seems like an increasingly fractured and fragile
|
|
social reality.
|
|
|
|
What are we to make of this complex range of responses to the UFO? When he
|
|
first addressed the phenomenon in the 1950s, Jung wrote that the presence of
|
|
the UFO signaled fundamental changes in our culture-the passing of one era and
|
|
the beginning of another. This is indeed what is happening. Science is
|
|
beginning to grasp the relationality, holism, and purposeful self organizing
|
|
complexity of the universe. New technologies enable us to tap into the self
|
|
organizing dynamics of matter and to end our earthbound infancy and go out
|
|
into the cosmos. New means of transportation and communication have drawn the
|
|
planet together into one tightly knit, interdependent global civilization.
|
|
The powerful images of holism and integration which lie at the heart of the
|
|
UFO phenomenon serve as a testament that we are becoming real participants in
|
|
the life of the cosmos.
|
|
|
|
Ed Conroy, author of Report on Communion, says that the UFO is a mirror of
|
|
individual and social psychology...people tend to get the UFO experience they
|
|
deserve. A careful look in this mirror can tell us a lot-the ways in which we
|
|
are growing and becoming whole, and the ways in which we are still fractured
|
|
and even disintegrating. What do you see in those wheels of light over the
|
|
high desert, spinning against the starry sky? A New Jerusalem? A pale horse
|
|
which heralds apocalypse? Or the memory of very ancient dreams clothed in a
|
|
technological symbolism which speaks of new tools with which to make all our
|
|
dreams come true?
|
|
|
|
|
|
**********************************************
|
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
|
********************************************** |