90 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
90 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: UFOs ARE REAL-IN OUR NATIONAL PSYCHE FILE: UFO2633
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UFOs Are Real-in Our National Psyche
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Behavior: As in the 1950s, warnings about extraterrestrial invasion
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express our fear of impending cataclysm.
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05/27/92
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THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
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I've heard it said that no book has an effect on us comparable
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to the ones we read before the age of 16. The most powerful
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influence on my adolescent imagination was Marine Maj. Donald E.
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Keyhoe's "The Flying Saucers Are Real," which I read and reread in
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the mid-1950s until the paperback disintegrated.
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Keyhoe's advice, in the words of a sci-fi movie of the period,
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was to keep watching the skies. Aliens were scouting Earth, he
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said, and might land at any time to make their demands known.
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Astronomers, pilots and radar operators, as well as many citizens,
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had seen alien craft in our skies, Keyhoe claimed, but these UFO
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reports were being suppressed by the Air Force.
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Keyhoe seemed to have ample documentation for his charges of a
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cover-up. He was the first conspiracy theorist I had encountered,
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and he had me hooked. I kept watching the skies and the news, but
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nothing happened to confirm his predictions. Skeptics began to
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persuade me that what people reported as UFOs usually did turn out
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to be Venus or Jupiter, a weather balloon, a meteorite or just a
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hoax. As I grew older I became more interested in the question of
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why the rumors of interstellar spacecraft had such persuasive power
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over rational people like Maj. Keyhoe and myself.
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The classic text on this subject is by the great psychologist C.
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G. Jung, written in 1958. Jung asserts that UFOs are not cosmic but
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psychic disturbances and that reports of their existence coincide
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with periods of social and economic trouble. In the years after
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World War II, a time of Cold War frictions and a nuclear weapons
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race, one could expect people to believe in alien invaders. These
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trans-human creatures might help us construct a new world order, or
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they might dominate or annihilate us as punishment for our
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iniquities. Either way, they would resolve the unbearable tensions
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of modern history and deliver mankind from its fear of an uncertain
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future.
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My interest in UFOs faded after the 1950s; then, in the late
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1970s, I was reminded of my former fascination by "Close Encounters
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of the Third Kind." The media's interest, too, had revived; in
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addition to reports on "sightings," there were sensationalist
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interviews with "contactees." Tabloid journals exploited
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interracial fantasies with lurid reports of abductions and sexual
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relations between aliens and Earthlings.
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Now we are again experiencing an upsurge of interest in UFOs, at
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a time when the Cold War has ended and, indeed, the "end of
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history" has been proclaimed as a consolation for the survivors of
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the nuclear terror. Nobody, least of all in Los Angeles, would say
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that our troubles are over, but the paranoia of the 1950s and the
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sundering turmoil of the 1960s are far behind us. Why, now, do we
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need extraterrestrials to invade our imaginations?
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One answer seems especially pertinent as we near the end of the
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millennium. UFOs appeal to our desire for an "endtime," a closure
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of history like those prophesied in our religious literature. For
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many people, the end of the Cold War signals the beginning of some
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hopeful new cycle, and UFOs are the annunciation of that
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apocalyptic beginning. Because aliens are smarter than Americans,
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they will be our saviors, the big fixers of our broken society.
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Or perhaps UFOs are symbols of our resistance to our leaders'
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soothing promises of a new beginning. UFOs are manifestations of
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the certainty that some catastrophe (ecological? political?) is
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coming to disrupt our lives. Here, too, we can allegorize the
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aliens as any racial, religious, class or national enemy we choose.
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In a real sense, Maj. Keyhoe was right: An unidentifiable threat
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hovers over America, and our leaders won't admit it. UFOs are
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recognizable as authentic expressions of a profound civil and
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psychic disturbance. As in the pulps of our childhood, they bring
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us news of a coming war of the worlds, and once again it's the
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Others versus ourselves. The neuroses of the 1950s are back. Keep
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watching the skies.
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**********************************************
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* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
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