Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/misc1/misc088.txt

Internet Message Format | 1995-10-20 | 38KB

From: [e-mail] (Don Allen)
Subject: Call to Adventure
Date: 16 Jul 94 03:44:08 GMT
Organization: FidoNet node 1:2430/2112.3 - The Temples o, Springfield IL


Excerpt from "Angels and Aliens" by Keith Thompson. UFOs and the
Mythic Imagination. A Fawcett Columbine Book. ISBN: 0-449-90837-2

*****  This is posted for informational purposes only. *****

** Begin Excerpt **

Chapter 14 - Pages 181-195

Of ALL the difficult questions asked by people who have had UFO
experiences, perhaps the most perplexing, and the most common, is "Why
me?" It is the sense of having been selected For some unknown reason
to carry out some unknown purpose or mission that I want to discuss in
this chapter. Through many long conversations with dozens of
individuals who have chosen - quite bravely, I feel - to come to terms
with their experiences, I have found that the "Why me?" question
usually manifests itself as "Have I been inducted or initiated? If so,
by what or whom? Toward what end?"

That the metaphor of initiation comes up again and again for so many
witnesses seems appropriate, for there are significant parallels among
the stages, structures, and dynamics of traditional initiation cere-
monies and experiences with the unknown Other called UFOs. Here I am
concerned with what people report about their experience, not about
what is ultimately "objectively" true. As we have seen, the latter
domain is a vast unknown, whereas it is possible to take as primary
data the body of UFO encounter reports.

The intensity of the existential and spiritual crisis that may be
precipitated by a UFO experience (UFOE) does not appear to depend on
whether a percipient feels he or she has interacted with a tradi-
tional flying saucer or other "unidentified flying object," or instead
feels he or she has had a powerful "psychic," "imaginal" "archetypal,"
"mythological," "near-death," "shamanic," "out of body," or "angelic'
experience. The experiential authenticity of a UFOE seems largely to
depend on the extent to which the percipient experiences interaction
with otherworldly beings, presences, entities, or objects as
significantly substantial and fundamentally real, even as "more real
than real."

If these conditions are met, neither does the profundity of a UFO-
related crisis seem to depend on whether the percipient hypothesizes
the "UFO beings" to be denizens from "outer space," "parallel uni-
verses;" "the collective unconscious," "heaven;" "hell," or other
numinous locales. It is the patterns that appear common to these
account that I take as a starting point in exploring UFO experiences
as modern initiations and rites of passage.

Professor Arnold van Gennep has defined rites of passage as "rites
which accompany every change of place, state, social position, and
age." The passage from womb to tomb is punctuated by a number of
critical transitions marked by appropriate rituals meant to make clear
the significance of the individual and the group alike to all members
of the community. Such ritualized passages include birth, puberty,
marriage, and religious confirmation, including induction into mystery
schools of various kinds - to which I add a new category of
experience: the human/UFO encounter.

Looking at what seems the central paradox of human-alien interaction -
namely, the continuing unsolvability of the UFO phenomenon by
conventional means and models, coupled with the continuing mani-
festation of the phenomenon in increasingly bizarre forms - it is dif-
ficult to avoid the impression that the very tension of this paradox
has had an initiatory impact. While the debate between true believers
on both sides of the UFO question passes on with predictable banality,
personal and collective belief systems have been changing in ways that
have been at once imperceptible and momentous.

Without our notice, the human mythological structure has been
undergoing a fundamental shift. Public opinion surveys and other meas-
ures of the collective pulse reveal that more people than ever now
take for granted that we are not alone in the universe - "inner" as
well as "outer" universes, if such a division is finally possible. The
very unwillingness of the UFO phenomenon either to go away or to come
considerably closer to us in a single step has been conditioning us -
initiating us, if you will - to entertain extraordinary possibilities
about who we are at our depths, and what the defining conditions of
the game we call Reality might be.

Van Gennep showed that all rites of transition are marked by three
faces: separation, marginality, and aggregation or consummation
(return). Phase one, separation, involves the detachment of
individuals and groups from an earlier fixed social position or set of
cultural conditions, detachment or departure from a previous state.
For example, the young male who proceeds into a male initiatory
ceremony in a traditional culture is forced to leave his
self-identification as "boy" at the door of the initiation lodge.

Phase two, marginality, involves entering a state of living in the
margins, betwixt and between, not quite here and not quite there.
Marginality (also called liminality, from the Latin limen, meaning
"threshold") is characterized by a profound sense of ambiguity about
who one really is. The young male is no longer a boy but has not yet
become, through specifically designated ritual, a man.

Aggregation, then, is a time of coming back together but in a new way,
moving out of the margins into a new state of being. This is the time
of consummation or culmination of the process. Now the male has earned
the right to be called, and to consider himself, a man.

Joseph Campbell, easily the late twentieth century's most creative and
insightful mapper of mythic realms, wrote a great deal about the many
forms the separation phase might take. In his classic work on the
universal myth of the hero's journey, "The Hero with a Thousand
Faces", Campbell writes: "A hero ventures forth from the world of com-
mon day into a region of supernatural wonder." What a magnificently
succinct description of the first moments of a UFO encounter - even
though, of course, UFOs are not mentioned once in Campbell's book. He
speaks further of this first phase of the journey as the Call to
Adventure, signifying

 that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual
 center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone
 unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be
 variously represented- as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom
 underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island,
 lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place
 of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments,
 superhuman deeds, and impossible delights. The hero can go forth of
 his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he
 arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible story of
 the Minotaur; or he may be sent abroad by some benign or malignant
 agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds
 of the angered god Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere
 blunder, as did that of the princess in the fairy tale "The Frog
 Prince"; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when
 some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one from
 the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infi-
 nitum, from every corner of the world.

I have quoted this passage at length because of the many parallels
between the hero's call to adventure in mythology and the numerous
examples from UFO lore of individuals summoned "from within the pale
of society to a zone unknown ... a place of strangely fluid and
polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and
impossible delights" Popular legend has of course familiarized us with
the way UFOs seemingly disappear "above the sky," but there are a good
many impressive reports of luminous disks retiring "beneath the
waves."

Many contactees open with curiosity, even excitement, to the en-
counter with aliens, just as Theseus went forth voluntarily. Most
abductees report being taken away against their will, like Odysseus
buffeted by the winds of angry Poseidon. And, of course, we have
learned in the preceding pages of a far more common motif: the UFO
encounter entered into through some kind of "blunder," or in
consequence of witnesses simply going about their lives, minding their
own business.

In any case, the hero (or contactee or abductee; for present purposes
the terms are interchangeable) is separated or detached from the
collective, the mainstream, in a powerful and life-changing way. This
brings us to the quite frequent response to the Call to Adventure: the
refusal of the call. Because separation from the collective is
fearsome, the hero often simply says, "Hell, no, I won't go," or
later, "I didn't go" The contactee or abductee concludes (often as a
way to preserve his or her sanity) that "it couldn't have been
real...It didn't happen to me...It was only a dream ...If I just keep
the memory to myself, maybe it will go away ..."

Refusing the call, writes Campbell, represents the hero's hope that
his or her present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages
might be fixed and made secure through the act of denial. The world's
great religious and philosophic traditions speak in different ways
about the crucial aftermath of declining the call, which may be
described, based on Jacob's experience in the Old Testament, as
wrestling with the angel "One is harassed, both night and day, by the
labyrinth of one's own disordered psyche. The ways to the gates have
all been locked: there is no exit." (*)

The numinous Other in any of its guises - as alien, angel, or ar-
chetype - frequently demands something that seems to the initiate
unacceptable; yet refusal seems impossible in this new and unfamiliar
zone. The terror is often overwhelming, as Whitley Strieber writes in
"Communion" :

 "Whitley" ceased to exist. What was left was a body in a state of
 fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating
 curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to
 death. I do not think that my ordinary humanity survived the
 transition...

How graphic this depiction of being forcibly separated from one's
deepest sense of oneself by an utterly alien agency, and left hanging
in the ambiguous margins of being. We recall Antonio Villas-Boas's
unsuccessful attempt to flee on a disabled tractor, Hickson and Parker
being grabbed by "claw-men" from the dusky banks of the Pascagoula
River, and Barney Hill's incredulous response to the creatures who
peered back at him from inside a landed saucer' "I don't believe it! I
don't believe it! This is ridiculous!"

Are we justified in supposing that what is at stake in human-alien
encounters is a certain concept of humanity? Professor Carl Raschke of
the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver
suggests the answer to this question is yes. The correct problem "is
not whether [UFOs] exist, or in what sense they exist, but what
ultimate aim they serve," says Raschke. "Our interest in them should
center on how the spreading and deepening convictions about them
subtly, yet

=====================================================================
(*)  At collective levels of the UFO rite of passage, it is the
debunker's job to refuse the call posed by the shape-shifting
phenomenon whose aliases include Proteus, Hermes, Trickster, and
Dionysus. In an archetypal sense, the debunker serves to shore up the
collective psyche's sense that "yep, everything's fine here, just
another meteor ... just another misidentification of Venus ...just
another psychotic fiction writer claiming abduction by aliens ...just
another instance of ball lightning ...," and so forth, like a
repeating tape on a telephone answering machine intended to provide
reassurance at all times. Here and there, the debunker succeeds, but
the Call to Adventure is larger than any single case.
======================================================================

irreversibly, remolds [sic] not just peripheral religious or
metaphysical ideas, but entire constellations of culture and social
knowledge" Raschke maintains that UFOs serve as "agents of cultural
deconstruction," referring to

  a process whereby long-standing and pivotal "structures" of thought
  and action are dismantled so that new, more fluid, and semantically
  fruitful modes of reflection can take place...The work of
  deconstruction is not sudden, but slow and inexorable. It is more
  akin to a sculptor chipping away at stone so that he can craft a
  figure... So far as UFOs are concerned, the deconstructive movement
  works upon human culture as a whole, although it may also have
  devastating effects at times on individual lives.

>From the perspective offered by Dr. Raschke, it seems likely that our
culturewide ambivalence toward accepting the UFO phenomenon as real
reflects a collective sense that the stakes of the game are high
indeed. Meeting the gaze of the Other requires embracing the poet
Rilke's painful recognition: "There is no place at all that is not
looking at you: You must change your life."

As a culture - perhaps as a species - we seem fatally drawn to, beck-
oned by this mysterious unknown; and yet abductee Whitley Strieber's
fear is not his alone. (*) Acknowledging the long-term existence of
what Strieber calls the "visitor phenomenon" invites us to accept, in
his words, "that we very well may be something different from what we
believe ourselves to be, on this earth for reasons that may not yet be
known to us, the understanding of which will be an immense challenge."

The ancients knew the importance of maintaining an intimate con-
versation with one's double or daemon, called "genius" in Latin,
"guardian angels" by Christianity, "reflex man" by Scots, "vardogr"
by Norwegians, "doppelganger" by Germans. The idea was that by taking
care to develop one s "genius," this spiritual being would provide
help throughout the mortal human's life and into the next. Humans who

================================================================
(*) One variation of the fear associated with the UFO phenomenon finds
expression in a book entitled "UFOs, Satan and Evolution". Author
Sidney J. Jansma offers that "UFOs are neither flying nor normal
objects. They are IDENTIFIABLE as SATANIC paranormal APPARITIONS by
their violation of the laws of nature in speed and motion and to
dematerialize at will. The coldness of UFOnauts, their sulfuric
stench, and their lying also testify to their Hellish origin. They are
ISAs, not UFOs."
==================================================================

did not attend to their personal Other became an evil and menacing
entity called a "larva," given to hovering over terrified sleepers in
their beds at night and driving people to madness.

The hero, then, moves beyond refusing to accept the call because
finally, it is impossible not to accept it - which brings us to the
sec- ond, and in some ways even more difficult, initiatory phase:
living in the ambiguous not-quite-here-and-not-quite-there. In his
classic essay "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of
Passage," the anthropologist Victor Turner writes that the major
function of the transition between states is to render the subject
invisible. For ceremonial purposes, the neophyte - the one undergoing
initiation - is considered structurally "dead." That is, classifiable
neither in the old nor in a new way. Invisible - not seen.

In his book examining the details of several alleged UFO abductions
"Intruders", Budd Hopkins includes an extensive section of a letter he
received from a young Minnesota woman who reported having been
abducted by UFO aliens as a child and then again as an adult. Because
this woman is so articulate in describing the existential crisis faced
by abductees, I quote at length from her correspondence:

  For most of us it began with the memories. Though some of us
  recalled parts or all of our experiences, it was more common for us
  to have to seek out where they were - buried in a form of amnesia.
  Often we did this through hypnosis, which was, for many of us, a new
  experience. And what mixed feelings we had as we faced those
  memories! Almost without exception we felt terrified as we relived
  these traumatic events, a sense of being overwhelmed by their
  impact. But there was also dis-belief. This can't be real. I must be
  dreaming. This isn't happening. Thus began the vacillation and
  self-doubt, the alternating periods of skepticism and belief as we
  tried to incorporate our memories into our sense of who we are and
  what we know. We often felt crazy; we continued our search for the
  "real" explanation. We tried to figure out what was wrong with us
  that these images were surfacing. Why is my mind doing this to me?

This woman shows that she understands quite well the feelings asso-
ciated with being rendered "invisible" by virtue of reporting an
experience at variance with the possibilities allowed by "consensus
reality" :

  And then there was the problem of talking about our experiences with
  others. Many of our friends were skeptics, of course, and though it
  still hurt us not to be believed, what could we expect? We were
  still skeptics ourselves at times, or probably had been in the past.
  The responses we got from others mirrored our own. The people we
  talked to believed us and doubted us, they were confused and looked
  for other explanations, as we had. Many were rigid in their denial
  of even the slightest possibility of abductions, and whatever words
  they used, the underlying message was clear. I know better than you
  what is real and what isn't. We felt caught in a vicious circle that
  seemed to be imposed on us as abductees by a skeptical society:

  Why do you believe you were abducted?
  You believe it because you're crazy.
  How do we know you're crazy?
  Because you believe you were abducted.

To summarize, many UFO abductees and contactees, along with those who
have had other forms of "spiritual emergency," know what it feels like
to be invisible to those who have not been similarly called - or who
may be refusing their own "call" to move beyond a way of life devoid
of vitality and meaning. This ambiguity is no less pronounced for
those who have returned from the edge of death. Having been declared
clinically dead and having floated toward a tunnel peopled by
beckoning beings of light, only to return to the living with an inex-
plicably radiant sense of being and purpose, many near-death initiates
report no longer feeling human in exactly the same way.

Likewise, the traditional shaman - skilled at traveling between worlds
and interacting with nonordinary beings - often remains critically
apart from his community because of what Kenneth Ring terms "his
special knowledge and his unusual and sometimes disturbing presence."

Here we begin to get a sense of the metapattern that our comparisons
in chapter twelve brought to view. Without doubt, there are signifi-
cant _surface_ differences between UFO encounters, angelic
visitations, shamanic journeys, and near-death experiences. Yet in all
of these realms we find archetypal images of initiation involving
otherworldly journeys amid extraordinary - and apparently autonomous -
beings. Many ufologists, seeking to keep their precious field of study
unique and discrete, question such parallels because, they say, there
is no evidence that the beings described in non-UFO reports are "from
the same place" as UFO beings. What they seldom point out is that
there is no evidence either, of where "UFO beings" are from!

Even if the passengers of flying saucers originate from zip codes in
outer space (a proposition for which verifiable evidence has yet to be
produced), it requires an act of will not to notice thematic parallels
between ceremonies of dismemberment undergone by shamanic initiatives
inside traditional round initiation huts, on one hand, and the
invasive "medical" procedures experienced by UFO initiates inside
rounded operating theaters inside disk- or oval-shaped craft, on the
other hand.

In the process of conducting research for this book, I spoke with many
UFO contactees and abductees - including an insurance agent, an
elementary school teacher, a cab driver, an architect, a journalist,
and a senior vice president of one of America's largest banks - who
instantly identified with the feelings of marginality. For some, the
"UFO" appeared to be an actual craft. For others, an anomalous light
triggered a profound experience. One spoke of "UFO entities" appear-
ing without any vehicle in view.

These differences seem less important than the fact that it is as if
the "UFO initiate" glimpses something so profound that certain facts
of life prior to the experience are no longer exclusively true. Often
he or she is frustrated that others do not see that the rules of the
game no longer hold, or that the old rules were always only one of
many ways of organizing perception rather than ironclad "laws of
nature." A good many abductees identify themselves as "victims" during
the period following their encounter, understandably mourning the loss
of clear boundaries, of black and white, right and wrong, us and them.

Over time, many come to see that on the other side of the frustra-
tion of life in the margins lies a perception available to those
willing to enter it: that not being able to classify oneself is also a
freedom from having to cling to a single identity. Willingly embracing
the marginal, liminal, twilight realms of being, the domain of
uncertainty and not-knowing, can make possible new insights, new ways
of "constructing reality." In this sense, the UFO encounter experience
prods us to take apart easy ideas about the supposedly interminable
gulf between mind and matter, spirit and body, masculine and feminine,
nature and culture, and other familiar dichotomies.

While many UFO researchers continue their search for definitive,
unambiguous answers, it is impressive to meet subjects of close
encounters who move from an initial view of paradise lost to
celebrating the freedom from having to keep a particular
one-dimensional sense of paradise intact. They realize that they can
choose to enter paradox and live there, as social psychologist Donald
Michael puts it, "landing with both feet firmly planted in midair."

This is a place where fuzzy edges present not simply a challenge to
reimpose lost order (the characteristic response of mainstream ufology
ever in search of the Single Correct Pattern), but an opportunity to
play in the vast polymorphous perversity of the Creative Matrix. This
is the space where Trickster resides, part Mother Teresa (the saintly
angelic aliens of Adamski), part Darth Vader (the demonic Men in
Black), part Pee-wee Herman (the absurd messages given Ed Walters and
other witnesses by their alien-angel communicants, as we shall see in
the next chapter).

There is also a collective dimension of marginality, as the continuing
borderline awareness of UFOs since the late 1940s makes clear. Whether
we like it or not, our culture, human culture, is also living in the
margins, on the edge, in between. Heidegger has said that we are
living in the time between the death of the old gods and the birth of
the new, theme that resonates with Jung's idea that UFOs are
fundamental symbols of "changes in the constellation of psychic
dominants, of the archetypes, or 'gods' as they used to be called,
which brings about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the
collective psyche."

But how are we to ground, to real-ize, such ideas? By starting where
we are - here, spanning the "crack in the cosmic egg " By definition,
transitions are fluid, not easily defined in static or structural
terms; and so it is with UFO initiations. In 1904, America's first
great psychologist, William James, wrote that "life is in the
transitions as much as in the terms connected." James noted that
events at these transitions - as between the visible and the obscure,
the mundane and the marvelous - have a special vibrance, as if the
slight hesitations we experience there significantly heighten and
energize life.

As an experiment in experiencing the "blurred reality genre" that
characterizes many kinds of UFO experiences, Professor Peter Rojce-
wicz, a folklorist and philosopher of anomalies, suggests standing in
front of your bedroom mirror with an apple cupped in both hands "As
you look at the mirror, it appears as if you and apple fuse with the
reflected image," Rojcewicz notes. "The area extending from the
mirror's surface beyond to your reflected image is ... an ambiguous
reality, neither entirely real nor entirely unreal, but lying
somewhere indeterminate between these two states."

Rojcewicz hypothesizes that "there exists a continuum of experiences
where reality and imagination imperceptibly flow into each other" as
through a "crack between worlds ... where one realm passes through and
blurs the boundary between two realities - for example, the mundane
and the sacred, the material and the imaginative - that are simul-
taneously perceived by the same witness."

This description comes close to the idea of juxtaposition as put for-
ward by the 1920s-1930s surrealist movement, which sought to blend the
perceptions of the unconscious mind with the external realities of the
phenomenal world. The surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy defined _jux-
taposition_ as "the bringing together of two realities which are more
or less remote. The more distant and just the relationship of these
realities, the stronger the image - the more emotive power and poetic
reality it will have"

The UFO close encounter literature offers abundant testimony to the
efforts of witnesses across lines of age, sex, race, and geography to
reconcile fantastic events that seemed to emerge out of, and blend
into, mundane reality. I have been deeply touched by my conversations
with many such witnesses, people who through an unexpected encounter
with strange beings alighting in equally strange luminous craft have
been left with a gut sense of juxtaposition of two very different
realities whose relation appeared both distant and just, profoundly
different yet intimately connected.

Many UFO witnesses emerge from their sighting experience or close
encounter with a surrealistic appreciation that the world is filled
with enormous vistas and abysses. It is as if they have glimpsed the
edge of reality so precisely defined by the surrealists, and now can
never go back to the mechanistic Newtonian world absent of depth,
beauty, significance, and soul. In contrast, both extremes of the UFO
debate - proponents and debunkers - seem committed to forcing witness
interpretations into narrow boxes that witnesses themselves tend to
see as inadequate. This is surely one of the richer ironies of the
unfolding UFO epic.

If the UFO phenomenon is a rite of passage, personal and collective,
how will the initiation culminate? Joseph Campbell speaks of the one
who moves from ordinary reality into contact with supernatural wonders
- and then back to ordinary reality again - as the Master of Two
Worlds. Free to pass back and forth across the divisions between
realms, from time to timelessness, from surfaces to the causal deep
and back again to surfaces, the Master knows both realities and
settles exclusively for neither. Says Campbell:

  The disciple has been blessed with a vision transcending the scope
  of normal human destiny, and amounting to a glimpse of the essential
  nature of the cosmos. Not his personal fate, but the fate of
  mankind, of life as a whole, the atom and all the solar system, has
  been opened to him; and this in terms befitting his human
  understanding, that is to say, in terms of an anthropomorphic
  vision: the Cosmic Man.

Notice Campbell's insistence that the transformative vision is
revealed "in terms befitting his human understanding." The witness is
faced with the inevitable challenge of holding a transpersonal vision
in personal terms. This is no simple task. Precisely because the UFO
vision seems absurd to ordinary, "noninitiated" consciousness, the
experience (and the one who had it) will be ridiculed by the
collective. With feelings of rejection as insult added to the injury
of the reality-shattering UFO experience, the UFO initiate is
constantly tempted to relieve the feeling of being thus rendered less
than ordinary by pretending to be super-ordinary, sometimes taking on
the role of cosmic prophet who has glimpsed the new cosmic horizon.

More and more abductees seem to be taking a middle road between the
1950s-style contactees pursuit of publicity, on the one hand, and
complete isolation and invisibility, on the other. Many have concluded
that being "invisible" to the culture at large can be as much a
blessing as a curse, and that the burden of being disregarded by
skeptics, scoffers, and debunkers is preferable to the burden of
trying to convince doubters that they as UFO witnesses, have had an
experience that makes them "special."

"I'd rather spend my time comparing notes with others who have seen
and experienced what I've seen," one abductee told me, "than trying to
convince the Carl Sagans of the world that UFOs are real." A growing
number of witnesses share this perspective. They seem genuinely
pleased to be free from having to know what reality is ultimately all
about, satisfied to have the opportunity to thrive outside accepted
realms of classification, to ask questions about matters they once
took for granted, to focus on what they see as an even larger
transition than their personal one: the shift for a new way of being
for humanity.

What about the collective UFO initiation?

Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist in private practice in Laramie, Wyo-
ming, has interviewed many hundreds of UFO witnesses over a period of
more than twenty years. Sprinkle is convinced that UFO activity -
ranging from sightings to close encounters - is part of an
"educational program for humankind on planet earth." He hypothesizes
that aliens have placed an embargo on communications with Earth in
order to minimize panic. "It is possible that we are being slowly
introduced to ETs through movies and science fiction, until the
evidence of ET visitation becomes more acceptable to the 'morality' of
physical scientists," Sprinkle says. With a weary smile, he adds: "Of
course, I can't prove this, and I have given up trying!"

Longtime UFO observer Jacques Vallee takes a different view of the
collective significance of sightings and encounters, focusing not on
stages leading to eventual "contact" but rather on what he calls the
"recursive unsolvability" of the overall phenomenon. In mathematics a
recursive function is one in which a solution can be reached not by
predictable linear operations, but rather through continuous, partial
tallies, each of which gradually redefines the problem itself. Vallee
notes that the UFO phenomenon began with the expectation of an
imminent, concise, and straightforward solution, but through
successive, partial tallies has revealed an increasingly murky
horizon.

"What we see emerging in the UFO phenomenon is not gradual contact
but rather gradual control - of our beliefs, expectations, fears,
hopes and dreams ... We know from behavioral psychology that the best
schedule of reinforcement is one that combines periodicity with
unpredictability," says Vallee, citing the ongoing pattern of intense
UFO activity followed by quiet periods when it seems to have gone away
entirely. "Learning is then slow but continuous," he adds. "It leads
to the highest level of adaptation. And it is irreversible. It is
interesting to observe that the pattern of UFO waves has the same
structure as a schedule of reinforcement."


But who or what is behind the control system? What are its mechanisms?

"Those are the questions to which I most want answers," Vallee
responded. "I have been led to conclude that there is a spiritual
control system for human consciousness and that paranormal phenomena
like UFOs are one of its manifestations. It is possible that this
control is natural and spontaneous. It might be explainable in terms
of genetics, or by the principles of social psychology, or as an
unknown aspect of ordinary phenomena. It is possibly artificial in
nature, under the power of some superhuman will. Perhaps the answer
consists of a combination of these - no one can say for certain."

Vallee finds the metaphors of initiation and rites of passage helpful
so long as they aren't taken in a literal or linear sense. "The very
expectation of a 'culmination' may simply reflect the larger schedule
of reinforcement," Vallee suggests. "Today's predictions of an
imminent resolution continue to be put forth with no apparent
recognition that each of the past four decades has featured similar
prophesies which remained unfulfilled." He adds:

  What interests me is that with each new wave of sightings, the
  social impact becomes greater. Conventional science appears more and
  more perplexed, befuddled, at a loss to explain. Pro-ET ufologists
  become more dogmatic in their propositions. More people become
  fascinated with space and with new frontiers in consciousness. More
  books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of
  a new image of man. Meanwhile, the phenomenon offers occasional
  rational elements to entice credible researchers, while offering an
  equal number of ludicrous elements so as to effectively deny itself,
  annihilate evidence of itself. Ufologists, by and large, remain
  blissfully unaware of their role in the feedback loop.

As for the new generation of researchers who announce that they have
finally "cracked the code" of the abductions phenomenon, Vallee is not
impressed. "What kind of alien doctors are these, who need to produce
such trauma in hundreds of patients to collect a little blood, a few
embryos? The idea that aliens must travel many light-years to perform
such experiments to enrich their race is merely another contribution
to the absurd character of the entire phenomenon."

By absurd, Vallee means that, if the phenomenon is forcing us through
a long-term learning curve, "then it has no choice but to mislead us."
Like a rat in a maze pushing buttons for food, seeking to hit upon the
right one, "man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an
intelligence behind the UFOs it must have taken this into account."
Also like the rat, we have no real choice in the matter, given our
hunger. "We must eventually study UFOs, and the study, unavoidably,
will in turn contribute to the reinforcement itself."

To say that Jacques Vallee's words fell on deaf ears is not quite
accurate. Budd Hopkins and other UFO researchers committed to taking
abduction reports at face value attacked his views as "unsubstantiated
conspiracy thinking." (Ironically, those who challenged Hopkins's
ideas about abductions had leveled the same charge at him.) It is more
accurate to say that Vallee's views were heard, but not really _heard.
In a sense this was inevitable, for Vallee's irritating (to mainstream
ufology) habit of consistently and persistently directing attention to
ufology's unconscious seemed to undercut the basic premises of the
struggling discipline.

Most UFO researchers found such fundamental self-criticism a luxury
they could ill afford, especially since there were so many important
sightings to resolve. Vallee and many other new-school antiufology
ufologists responded that the very impulse to "actively resolve" the
phenomenon by pursuing the same kinds of cases in the same ways could
only consolidate profoundly mistaken assumptions about the
phenomenon's scope and depth. And so it went, into the decade of the
1990s: fresh variations on a well-established circular debate about
the appropriate focus of UFO investigation.

Yet the confusion in communication indicated much more than that two
basic schools of UFO researchers had come to speak very different
languages. The deeper issue was the ambiguous "grammar" of UFOs
themselves. In any communication, writes philosopher-psychologist Paul
Watzlawick, "when one of the messages is garbled, leaving the recipi-
ent in a state of uncertainty, the result is confusion, which produces
emotions ranging all the way from mild bewilderment to acute anxiety,
depending upon the circumstances."

The Greek god Hermes might object to his messages being called
"garbled." This guardian of thresholds, passageways, and margins
simply prefers not to be pinned down to one set of meanings - just
like his spiritual brother Proteus. After all, how very boring
compared with the more boisterous alternative presented in Genesis
11:7 -

 Let us go down and there confound their language that they may not
 understand one another's speech.

*** End Excerpt ***

--
Don Allen - via ParaNet node 1:104/422
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