Posts Tagged ‘UFOs’
The UFO Experience – “Although I Am Only a Child, Please Believe Me”
April 26, 2013
A gentleman named Jordan Hofer, with whom I’ve had a stimulating exchange of comments in connection with my post “Drawing Dirty Pictures – Philadelphia UFO, January 1974,” tells me he has no objection to my calling attention in a new post to some of the points raised in our conversation. So that’s just what I’ll do.
Jordan’s a research specialist in anthropology for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. He’s the author of the book Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis, scheduled for publication next year; also a Young Adult novel on a UFO theme, Saucerville, scheduled for this October.
From Jordan Hofer's blog, on "Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis"
Jordan writes: “I taught human evolution at Oregon State University for seven years before the recession hit and my position was cut. Around that time my best friend of 33 years had a very clear sighting of a large, black, equilateral triangle, with white flashing lights at each apex, fly low and slow over his house, emitting a deep thrumming sound that rattled his windows. He was astonished, to say the least. The sighting deeply affected him. He had told fellow coworkers about his sighting and was called a liar to his face. He was in need of a friend who would believe him, take him at his word of what he witnessed. I was skeptical at first, but my loyalty soon won out (especially after I left the confines of academia) and I joined him in his search for an answer to what he had seen.”
I was deeply moved by Jordan’s story, and I told him so.
“As you may gather,” I wrote in my reply, “I am fairly committed to disbelief in the physical reality of UFOs. (Except in the banal sense that the planet Venus, mirages, etc. have a physical existence.) The history of the past 65 years of UFOlogy seems to me to demonstrate this. Yet we do have stories like your friend’s, which it’s impossible to disbelieve without outraging all that makes us human.”
Several months ago, at a lunch with my old friend Professor Rachel Elior, a scholar of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I expressed the view that people experiencing journeys through the seven heavens of traditional Jewish cosmology, seeing angels, demons and the like, are hallucinating. A graduate student who was there accused me of “epistemic violence.” The charge seemed to me nonsensical. After all, when people report seeing things that we know don’t exist—like those seven heavens—surely they’ve got to be hallucinating, don’t they? (Unless they’re lying. And I don’t like calling people liars.)
Especially if we accept the point I gather Oliver Sacks made in his recent book Hallucinations, which I’m sorry to say I still haven’t read–that it’s simply not true what we often think, that having hallucinations is a mark of insanity.
But would I have the courage to maintain this remorseless logic, in the face of someone like Jordan’s friend?
One of the things that makes J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience such an affecting human document, is that this broad-minded, warm-hearted scientist seems continually to have struggled with this question. He quotes the “frank and artless remarks” of children who’ve seen UFOs. “This is the truth, and there is no hoax implied since that is a serious offense at this school.” “ … we give you our Scout’s Honor that this is not a hoax or optical illusion.” (Though of course if it were an optical illusion, the three Boy Scouts who saw it presumably wouldn’t have been aware of that.) “Although I am only a child, please believe me.” (Referring to a sighting, of a cigar-shaped object, made on January 19, 1967; all quotes from p. 14 of Hynek’s book.)
UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), in his cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
Hynek also tells an awful story of the fate that befell an Ohio deputy sheriff named Dale F. Spaur who, in the early morning hours of April 17, 1966, chased in his patrol car a UFO “big as a house” and so bright “it’d make your eyes water.” Spaur wasn’t the only person who saw the object, or even who chased it; there were three other witnesses. Which makes what happened to Spaur all the more appalling.
“This,” Spaur told Air Force investigator Hector Quintanilla, “I have never seen nothing like it before or after or in the wildest far-fetched imagination. I know you can have an optical illusion or even see something moving or like if you look through a piece of glass or something … I can go along with this. But nothing this big. In my wildest dreams I don’t think I could have ever imagined or seen anything like it” (p. 106).
The outcome?
“Subsequently, Spaur was singled out for unbearable ridicule and the pressure of unfavorable publicity. The combination of events wrecked his home life, estranged him from his wife, and ruined his career and his health. He is no longer [as of 1972] with the police force, and, it is reported, he subsists by doing odd jobs” (p. 108).
I doubt if Dale Spaur is still alive in 2013, but it’s possible. I’ve often thought about what I would say to him if he confronted me, and my disbelief in UFOs, with his story. I know you’re not lying, I would tell him. (Although, to tell the truth, I don’t really know that.) And if you were hallucinating it wasn’t because you’re crazy but because the human mind has potentials we hardly begin to suspect, and hallucination is probably one of them. The bottom line is that I don’t have the slightest idea what you saw or what made you see it. I don’t think it can be a visitor from outer space, because if it was we’d surely have unequivocal proof of the presence of such visitors by this time, which after all is nearly a half-century after your experience. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency in figuring out what you saw, because a half-century later we still don’t know what it was, or what any of the really baffling UFO cases were, and we don’t seem to be any worse off for that ignorance …
Except, of course, for poor Dale Spaur.
How lucky Jordan Hofer’s friend was, to have had a friend like Jordan!
And remember the little boy who saw the cigar-shaped object on January 19, 1967, and begged the gentlemen of the Air Force UFO project to please believe him, even though he was only a child?
There’s postscript to that one, too.
Go to the “Welcome” post on this blog, and sift through the “responses” to it.
And wonder.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Psychology, UFOs | 
Tags: Dale F. Spaur, hallucinations, J. Allen Hynek, Jordan Hofer, Oliver Sacks, Rachel Elior, religious experiences, UFOs | 
9 Comments »
Trickster Tales – James Moseley, Sherlock Holmes, UFOlogy
April 19, 2013
I’ve been reading an unusual UFO book. It came out about six weeks ago, edited by Timothy Green Beckley, whom I’ve known from our teenage UFOlogist days in the mid-1960s. It’s entitled The Astounding UFO Secrets Of James W. Moseley: A Special Tribute to the Editor of Saucer Smear and the Court Jester of UFOlogy.
"The Astounding UFO Secrets ..." available from Amazon
Jim Moseley died last November, at the age of 81. Even those of us who didn’t quite approve of him are bound to miss him. By “us,” I mean those who are caught up in fascination with the bizarre, maddening, intriguing world of UFOs and UFO belief.
Though Moseley at least intermittently claimed to be a UFO believer, the skeptics were particularly fond of him. Naturally. He was their “Voltaire of the UFO movement” (Robert Sheaffer): a mouthpiece, wittier and more knowledgeable than they could ever be, of their contempt for the absurdities of the “UFOOlogists.” The more sober UFO researchers, who saw themselves as pioneers of a scorned and neglected science which didn’t need one more person making fun, were less amused. The late Richard Hall, responding to the claim that Jim Moseley “has been and remains a Presence in UFOlogy,” shot back: “Yes, like a steaming turd on the living room carpet. This sort of silly crap explains why you and your idol [Moseley], who constantly treat the whole subject as a joke, might just as well be on the Government payroll for UFO debunkers.”
Among the tributes to Moseley in The Astounding UFO Secrets is an academic-style article by George P. Hansen, entitled “James W. Moseley as Trickster.” Hansen, a magician and parapsychologist who’s the author of a scholarly book entitled The Trickster and the Paranormal, tries looking at Moseley from an anthropological perspective. More specifically, using the model of the “Trickster.”
“The trickster,” Hansen writes, “is a character type found worldwide in mythology and folklore, and trickster tales must number in the thousands. The trickster is something of an irrational being. He–the trickster is typically male–can be seen as a personification of a cluster of abstract qualities that often manifest together. These include deception, disruption, abnormal sexuality, boundary crossing, taboo breaking, supernatural/paranormal powers, marginality, and outsider-hood.”
The Trickster at Princeton, ca. 1950. From the obituary for James W. Moseley in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 3, 2013
Not only is Moseley personally an embodiment of the Trickster. To anyone who’s known him or followed his madcap activities–his long-running Saucer Smear, his merry pranks and hoaxes (often perpetrated in collaboration with his old buddy Gray Barker)–this is almost self-evident. But UFOlogy itself is a sort of collective Trickster. As Trickster, it’s “anti-structural,” and therefore “incompatible with hierarchical institutions. … UFOlogy has never established viable, long-lasting, well-recognized, widely-trusted institutions that study and comment authoritatively on the phenomena. … UFOs generate massive popular interest. UFO movies have grossed hundred of millions of dollars. In contrast, the more serious interest by MUFON, CUFOS, and other organizations gains meager support. Most research is done by individuals and small groups, who operate independently of larger institutions. This state of affairs illustrates the anti-structural nature of the field.”
This may contain an answer to the question posed by folklore scholar Thomas E. Bullard in his important book The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. “Why are UFOs at once so popular and so despised?” That’s the Trickster all over. Popular. Yet despised.
And not without reason. The Trickster is a type best enjoyed from a distance. Up close, he can be a pain in the butt. If you have to depend on him and trust his word, you may as well forget about keeping your sanity. I can sympathize, actually, with Richard Hall’s turd-on-the-living-room-carpet outburst. As a gravely serious 17-year-old UFOlogist, I pretty much shared those sentiments. At the Second Congress of Scientific UFOlogists in Cleveland, in June 1965, I presented a “code of ethics” that I recognize, from my 65-year-old perspective, as a slightly veiled denunciation of Moseley and everything he represented. (Photos and story on my Facebook Timeline for June 26, 1965.)
Yet it struck me, reading Hansen’s article, that one of my all-time heroes was also a Trickster. I refer to the world-famed “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes is a paradox: a Trickster devoted to defending the moral order, albeit with some modifications. (“After all, Watson,” he confides after allowing a confessed jewel thief to escape the law, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. … I suppose that I am committing a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.”) Yet if you run through Hansen’s checklist for the Trickster, Holmes turns out to have a lot of his features.
Deception. Holmes is a master of disguise. This is of course important for solving his cases. But often he indulges his talents, Moseley-esque, just for the fun of it. In the 1890 novella “The Sign of Four,” he shows up in his own apartment disguised as an elderly sailor fallen on hard times. Watson and Scotland Yard detective Athelney Jones sit with him, neither suspecting who their company is. Until …
“‘I think that you might offer me a cigar too,’ he said. We both started in our chairs. There was Holmes sitting close to us with an air of quiet amusement.”
Sherlock Holmes with Dr. Watson, as drawn by Sidney Paget for "The Strand" magazine. Holmes's pipe hasn't yet acquired its familiar curvature
(A note on “The Sign of Four”: it’s a jewel of a novella, brilliantly plotted, and developed with wit and suspense. It’s also grossly racist, and represents cocaine as a truly cool thing to do. NOT recommended as a Bar Mitzvah present.)
Supernatural/paranormal powers. Holmes wouldn’t call his powers supernatural or paranormal, of course. Unlike his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he has no belief in either one. (Check out “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”) He describes and then explains his feats as “very simple pieces of reasoning,” or words to that effect. Yet they come across as pure magic. “So, Watson,” he announces out of the blue, apparently reading the good doctor’s mind, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?” In the first chapter of “The Sign of Four,” he peers through his magnifying glass at a watch left behind by Watson’s deceased older brother. After complaining that the watch has been cleaned, “which robs me of my most suggestive facts,” he casually rattles off the following information about its owner:
“He was a man of untidy habits–very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.”
No wonder Watson at first accuses Holmes of having snooped into his brother’s past, and faking the rest.
Abnormal sexuality. Unless Holmes’s total lack of interest in sex constitutes “abnormal sexuality”–which, come to think of it, it may–I don’t see this feature in the Holmes stories. But where the “Trickster” classification really fits him is marginality, outsider-hood, boundary crossing. He solves his crimes without the help and often with the active opposition of those he mockingly calls “the accredited representatives of the law.” To Scotland Yard he’s an airy intellectual, at best a nuisance and at worst a menace–until, as inevitably happens, they realize they’re out of their depths and come begging for his assistance. As for Holmes–well, he’s prepared to be sporting about them. (“He is not a bad fellow,” he says of Athelney Jones, “and I should not like to do anything which would injure him professionally.”) But he takes the official constabulary about as seriously as Jim Moseley took establishment UFOlogists like Richard Hall. Which is to say, not in the slightest.
Here’s Holmes in action, from chapter 6 of “The Sign of Four.” Pompous, preening Jones, Scotland Yard dunce, has turned up at a murder scene and is making arrests right and left:
“Ask Mr. Sholto to step this way.–Mr. Sholto, it is my duty to inform you that anything which you may say will be used against you. I arrest you in the Queen’s name as being concerned in the death of your brother.”
“There, now! Didn’t I tell you!” cried the poor little man, throwing out his hands and looking from one to the other of us.
“Don’t trouble yourself about it, Mr. Sholto,” said Holmes; “I think that I can engage to clear you of the charge.”
“Don’t promise too much, Mr. Theorist, don’t promise too much!” snapped the detective. “You may find it a harder matter than you think.”
“Not only will I clear him, Mr. Jones, but I will make you a free present of the name and description of one of the two people who were in this room last night. His name, I have every reason to believe, is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side. His left boot is a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel. He is a middle-aged man, much sunburned, and has been a convict. These few indications may be of some assistance to you, coupled with the fact that there is a good deal of skin missing from the palm of his hand. The other man–”
“Ah! the other man?” asked Athelney Jones in a sneering voice, but impressed none the less, as I could easily see, by the precision of the other’s manner.
“Is a rather curious person,” said Sherlock Holmes, turning upon his heel. “I hope before very long to be able to introduce you to the pair of them. A word with you, Watson.”
Masterful. Brilliant. It’s no wonder that in my “tween” years, in the late 50s, I was completely mad for Sherlock Holmes. (Of course, I didn’t know back then that I was a “tween.” As far as the 1950s were concerned, I was still just a kid.) He was my ideal, the image of the man I hoped someday I’d be. Somehow or other I got hold of a pipe that vaguely resembled his. Sucking on the empty pipe, I sat in a reclining chair and read the old Ellery Queen murder mysteries. I loved their “Challenge to the Reader” pages, maybe 50 pages before the end. (“Reader, you now have all the facts …”; you can guess, or rather infer for yourself, who the killer is.) I always tried out the deductive skills I assumed I’d need in the real world before very long. I always got it wrong.
A couple of months before my Bar Mitzvah, I read Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, which offers (on pages 129, 140) a “challenge to the reader” that’s precisely similar to Ellery Queen’s–except that Barker doesn’t claim already to know the solution. A new world opened. I put away the pipe, along with other childish things. I became a UFOlogist.
by David Halperin
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Posted in UFOs | Tags: "The Sign of Four", "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers", Athelney Jones, Dr. Watson, Ellery Queen, folklore, George P. Hansen, gray barker, James Moseley, liminality, marginality, Richard Hall, Saucer Smear, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas E. Bullard, Timothy Green Beckley, trickster, trickster tales, UFOlogy, UFOs | 6 Comments »
“UFO 96″ – The UFO World of 50 Years Ago
April 12, 2013
"UFO 96," front cover: the UFO world of 1963, depicted by artist Gene Duplantier. Identifications on the back cover, at the bottom of this post. To download the first half of the full PDF of "UFO 96," click on this image; for the second half, click on the image at the bottom
If I wanted to do this properly, I suppose I’d issue an annotated edition. Something along the lines of Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice.
“No joke is funny unless you see the point of it,” Gardner wrote in his introduction to The Annotated Alice, “and sometimes a point has to be explained. In the case of Alice we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century, and we need to know a great many things that are not part of the text if we wish to capture its full wit and flavor.” Lewis Carroll’s version of “You are old, Father William,” in chapter 5 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is funny no matter how you read it. But once you know the Robert Southey poem of which it’s a parody–provided by Gardner in his annotations–it’s about the most hilarious thing ever written.
The stapled-together UFO 96, offered here (un-annotated) as a two-part PDF file–click here for part 1, click here for part 2–was published in 1963, evidently by Gray Barker and using the resources of his “Saucerian Press.” The influence of Barker’s close friend James W. Moseley, departed from this world last November, is evident throughout. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember how I got hold of my copy. I don’t think UFO 96 was ever sold commercially. I don’t know how many copies were made, or how many still exist. A search at http://www.worldcat.org/ turns up nothing. A Google search for “ufo 96″ finds only an MP3 of that name, distributed in 2008 by El Cosmo Group on an album entitled “Maha Lakshmi Dreams.”
UFO 96 was distributed, rather, among the cognoscenti; and although I was never really one of those, I did rub shoulders with them at the First Congress of Scientific UFOlogists in Cleveland, Ohio, in June 1964, and at the Second Congress a year later. (Described on the timeline of my Facebook Fan Page for June 20, 1964, June 24 and 26, 1965.) If I had to guess, I’d say my copy was given to me at some middle-of-the-night bull session of the 1965 Congress. I believe I was told at the time why it was called UFO 96. Some inside joke, which I’ve now completely forgotten and doubt if there’s any way to reconstruct.
When Gardner published The Annotated Alice in 1960, 95 and 89 years had passed since the original publication of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, respectively. UFO 96 isn’t quite that old–a mere half-century. Yet the UFO world it reflects and satirizes sometimes feels almost as remote as Victorian England was from Gardner’s readers. UFO abductions, and the Roswell crash, are entirely absent. (Abductions didn’t enter the cultural awareness until 1966, Roswell nearly 15 years later.) Of the gallery of notables represented on its cover–in brilliant caricature by Gene Duplantier, perhaps UFOlogy’s most gifted artist–very few are still with us.
Jim Moseley and the beautiful Sandy, to whom he was briefly married, are at the center of the tableau, to the right of the Little Green Man. Gray Barker stands just behind them. At the lower right Orthon of Venus, one of the space people who shared their celestial wisdom with “contactee” George Adamski, holds a picture signed With Love, GA. At the lower left Gabriel Green of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA), who ran in 1960 for the Presidency of the United States, wears a button saying GG for Pres.! (According to Jerome Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia, volume 2, “Green dropped out of the race before the election, but two years later, when he ran on a left-wing peace ticket for U.S. Senate, endorsed by no less than Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, he received a remarkable 171,000 votes.”) And of course Alfred E. Neuman, standing just beneath Moseley’s chin, is immortal.
I don’t believe Green ran again for President in 1964. But the last piece in UFO 96, entitled “A Moment With … the U.S. Air Force,” imagines what might have happened if he had. “On November 5, 1964, the two major U.S. political parties experienced their greatest upset in history. Gabriel Pink, running on the independent UFO Ticket, was elected President, along with his running mate, George Von Hassle.” (George Van Tassel was another of the 1950s “contactees.”) There follows a “Fact Sheet” issued by the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, as reorganized under the UFO administration with the promised “improvements in investigative techniques.”
Unfortunately a page is missing from my copy of UFO 96, so I can’t provide the details of “Case Number One.” (“CONCLUSION: The object was probably a scout ship from Venus.”) But enough remains of the post-1964 “Fact Sheet” to convey its drift. I imagine the younger people who read it will get enough of the joke to be at least mildly amused. But for us oldsters, who remember the solemn “Fact Sheets” issued by the 1960s Project Blue Book–with their incantatory reassurance, that if sufficient data were available the 2% “unknown” sightings could be explained away like the other 98%–it’s roll-on-the-floor split-your-sides-laughing hilarious.
Same for one of the early entries, The U.F.O. Instigator published by NIGHTCAP, “The National Integrated, Ghastly, Horrifying Theories Concerning Astral Phenomena.” (Takeoff on The U.F.O. Investigator of NICAP, National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena–the largest, most respected, and stuffiest UFO organization of the early 60s.) You really have to have known the original to appreciate the parody. Take the lead article, “WHAT WE DO HERE AT NIGHTCAP HQR.,” a takeoff on the articles of this genre–usually linked to appeals for money–that were a staple of The U.F.O. Investigator:
“Some members think of NIGHTCAP merely as a saucer magazine office. Others believe that the Fight for Congressional Hearings [on UFOs; NICAP's perennial obsession] take most of our time. Some think we are in it only for the money and point to the fancy home of the Director as an excuse for not donating. To give a more accurate picture, here is a partial list of the work done by our three full-time staff members, one part-time helper, and spies from SAUCER NEWS, who volunteer to work, pretending they are not stealing information …”
You see, SAUCER NEWS was Moseley’s publication (precursor to the later SAUCER SMEAR); and Moseley was the particular bete noire of NICAP, whose irascible assistant director Richard Hall–also now deceased–was long afterward to compare Moseley’s presence in UFOlogy to “a steaming turd on the living room carpet” …
That’s as far as I can get with The Annotated UFO 96. I’m still rolling on the floor.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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"UFO96," back cover: in case you didn't recognize them ... To download the second half of the full PDF of "UFO 96," click on this image; for the first half, click on the image at the top of this post
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – UFO Abductions Become Part of Us
April 5, 2013
There are some “banner years” in UFO history. 1966 was one of them.
It was a threshold year, leading from the classic UFOlogy of the 1950s and early 1960s to something new, which has left its mark on our culture to this day.
March, 1966: a rash of UFO sightings in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan. Air Force UFO expert J. Allen Hynek explained the mysterious lights as “swamp gas”–and was hooted down for it all over the country. Congressman (later President) Gerald Ford and others demanded an investigation. And so the University of Colorado UFO Project of 1966-68, better known as the “Condon Committee,” came to be.
The Condon Committee’s conclusion: UFOs are hot air. Taking a hint, the Air Force dismantled in 1969 its 17-year-old “Project Blue Book.” End of an era. Almost since UFOs were first spotted in American skies in 1947, there’d been an official Air Force project charged with investigating them, more often debunking them. Now the Air Force had left the UFO business for good.
Look Magazine, October 4, 1966. Was it Elizabeth Taylor who made this issue an unprecedented best-seller? Or "Aboard a Flying Saucer"?
Meanwhile astronomer Hynek himself came out of the closet–not as a UFO believer, exactly, but as an open-minded scientist who argued that witnesses to the extraordinary should not be dismissed with a horse-laugh. It was Hynek who, among other things, devised the UFOlogical taxonomy of “close encounters” of the first, second, and third kinds–an achievement that won him a cameo role in a 1977 movie by Steven Spielberg, the name of which I surely don’t need to mention. (But I do, in the caption to the picture below and to the left.)
This was the small stuff.
The real UFO action of 1966 happened not in the sky but in the publishing world. In its issues of October 4 and 18, Look magazine ran a two-part series entitled “Aboard a Flying Saucer,” by John G. Fuller. The Look articles, excerpted from Fuller’s 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, told the story of a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill.
Five years earlier the Hills, returning from a vacation in Canada, had been stopped on the road in the middle of the night and taken aboard a UFO. There they underwent bizarre medical or pseudo-medical procedures, and afterward were made to forget what they’d endured. Only under hypnotic regression, in a psychiatrist’s office, did their memories return–and Barney became so terrified that the psychiatrist was afraid he’d throw himself out the window.
In other words, UFO abduction.
UFO abductions have become so familiar that we forget that until 1966 no one ever heard of them. It was Fuller’s book, and still more his Look articles, that brought them to the national consciousness. I recall reading that the October 4 and 18 issues of Look outsold all issues before or since–and somehow I doubt if the cover picture of Elizabeth Taylor was entirely responsible.
Not that the UFO abductees–for Betty and Barney had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of successors–were the first humans to be taken aboard UFOs. The 1950s were the golden age of the “contactees,” who claimed to have met the UFO people. Your average contactee might be given rides on flying saucers, taken on visits to Venus and other planets, lectured by golden-haired “space brothers” about how we humans must abandon our wicked warlike ways. From time to time there might even be an interplanetary fling, like that of contactee Truman Bethurum with a gorgeous 500-year-old brunette, Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion. (Mrs. Bethurum, filing for divorce, supposedly named Aura Rhanes as co-respondent.)
But the abduction stories were something new, scarier, more essentially alien. Also more convincingly true. There’s little doubt that most if not all the contactees were charlatans, playing on people’s gullibility for their own profit. Whereas some at least of the abductees, starting with Betty and Barney, were evoking something genuine and terrifying from within themselves–something that normally had strong sexual overtones, dark and grisly, compared to which Bethurum’s affair with Aura Rhanes was strictly PG. (And one more distinction: the contactees were almost all men, the abductees predominantly women.)
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, appearing (as himself?) in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
So what does all this have to do with Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, the third chapter of which I’m making available for download from this page?
This: When I initially wrote Journal of a UFO Investigator, my goal was to weave the personal odyssey of Danny Shapiro into the not-quite-world-wide web of the UFO myth. I kept this goal as I trimmed the manuscript, from its original 1500 pages to the 304 pages that it ran in the Viking Press hardback edition. But I had to trim the tapestry, as it were. I kept, as background to Danny’s adventures, some of the prominent features of the 1950s UFO scene: the Three Men in Black, the Philadelphia experiment. (Or, as we used to call it, the “Allende mystery.”) But the chapters in which Danny participated in the UFO world’s transformation in the middle 60s–these ended up on the cutting room floor.
Here they are back, in this and the next few chapters of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator.
In Chapter 3, which you can download by clicking here or on the picture below, Danny gets his first hint of the Hills’ uncanny experience from a man who’s learned about it from the author of the Look articles. He defends his investigation of the marks left on the ground by a landed UFO–a “close encounter of the second kind,” in Hynek’s terminology–near the town of Scofield, New Jersey.
(“Scofield,” though fictional, is based on an actual incident in Glassboro, NJ, the date of which I shifted in Chapter 2 of the Outtakes from September 1964 to April 1965. You can read the true story on the timeline of my Facebook Fan Page, https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator, for September 12, 1964.)
And Danny tries to answer the question of what Ezekiel saw, when “Ezekiel saw the wheel.” Unfortunately he doesn’t get very far, before he’s overcome by the spirits he’s drunk as part of his initiation into the “Nationwide UFO Consortium,” whose conference he’s traveled to New York City to attend.
In other words, our teenage “UFO investigator” has sallied forth from his suburban Pennsylvania home to become part of the UFO world of the mid-1960s. If by some chance you also were part of that world, you may recognize some of it.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think, here or at my Fan Page.
Click on the picture to download chapter 3 of "Outtakes of a UFO Investigator" (PDF). Cover art by Rose Shalom Halperin.
Click here to read Chapter 1 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 2 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 4 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Would you like to have these Outtakes as podcasts–free of charge? Let me know! I’ll see what I can do to provide them.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Journal of a UFO Investigator, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, UFOs | Tags: "The Interrupted Journey", Aura Rhanes, Betty and Barney Hill, close encounters of the second kind, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Condon Committee, contactees, Ezekiel's wheel, Hillsdale UFO, J. Allen Hynek, John G. Fuller, Journal of a UFO Investigator, Look UFO articles, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, Project Blue Book, Truman Bethurum, UFO abductions, UFOs | 3 Comments »
“Outtakes of a UFO Investigator” – Father, Son
March 7, 2013
“Leon comes off much kinder in this episode than in the finished book.”
That comment appeared on my Facebook Fan Page about the first episode of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, which I published four weeks ago as a download from this blog. It was posted by my friend Bryan Gilmer–and he ought to know. Bryan’s not only read Journal of a UFO Investigator as a published book. A valued writer colleague, he earlier read and commented on multiple drafts of it. (In case you don’t know Bryan, he’s the author of the excellent thrillers Felonious Jazz and Record of Wrongs.)
Bryan’s absolutely right. In Journal of a UFO Investigator as it took final shape, Danny Shapiro’s father Leon is something of an ogre, of whom Danny goes in dread. Naturally. We see him exclusively through Danny’s eyes.
" ... a vaguely circular hole in a clearing in a New Jersey woods that had been left by an extraterrestrial vehicle in search of soil samples" ("Outtakes of a UFO Investigator," p. 29). Note, on the left, the limb of the sassafras tree, broken by the UFO upon its descent.
“I should begin to be frightened. Not of his walloping me when he comes storming in; he’s never done that. But of the tidal wave blindness of his rage, the bitter words that burn like lava, that will leave me scorched and desolate and sleepless afterward as I struggle to swallow what the three of us spend our lives pretending isn’t so. Namely that he hates me and everything I am.”
That’s Danny and his father, in chapter 1. By midway through the story, something’s changed. When Leon comes into Danny’s room in chapter 23, Danny feels his father’s exhaustion from supporting a family and caring for a sick, dying wife. He understands how badly Leon needed the encouragement of a flirty letter he’s received from an unnamed but apparently female correspondent in Long Island. When Leon quizzes him, Danny reflects that his father isn’t “using questions to prove to me how my life is all wrong, but like he’s genuinely interested. Like he really wants to know.”
“Still with those pimples,” Leon says, as he touches Danny’s adolescent face, and in his voice Danny now hears sympathy.
“Maybe it’s not true, what I’ve always believed. Maybe he doesn’t hate me. Maybe this is something complicated beyond my grasp, by things I don’t remember, that happened before I was born. And that aren’t written in the Bible.” (p. 156)
As Leon leaves the room, he gives Danny a look which Danny understands to mean: “I never walked out on you and your mom. Give me some credit for that, will ya?” To which Danny silently responds: “Yes, Dad, I will. I mean, I do.”
In other words–Danny’s growing up. He’s getting his first inkling that he’s not the center of his father’s universe, that Leon Shapiro’s rage and frustration are rooted in a past to which Danny was a late and perhaps incidental arrival. That it’s not about him at all.
When I spoke with an honors seminar at Northern Michigan University about Journal of a UFO Investigator, I asked the students whether they thought Danny will become more sympathetic to his father as he continues to mature. The consensus was that he will. I agree. This process of Danny’s growing empathy, for the suffering of a man whom he’d never really liked or trusted, is part of what The Color of Electrum–the sequel to Journal of a UFO Investigator–is about.
In the meantime, Leon Shapiro gets a bad press he doesn’t entirely deserve. It’s not something I’m happy about. When I wrote the first draft of the book that became Journal of a UFO Investigator, some 15 years ago, it was far different.
The novel is currently 304 pages long, in the Viking Press hardback edition. The first draft was 1500 pages of typescript. Inspired by John Wain’s 1978 novel The Pardoner’s Tale (which I liked a great deal better than I gather some of the critics did), I alternated third-person and first-person chapters. In the third-person chapters I told the story of Danny’s day-to-day life–as a junior high and then high school student, as a committed and slightly obsessed UFO investigator, as the son of a terminally ill woman who he doesn’t realize is dying until it’s too late. Danny’s inner experience, in the form of a surreal story unfolding in the world of the UFOs, occupied the first-person chapters.
Of course the book didn’t fly. How could it, bulky as it was? Besides, as novelist Ann Prospero pointed out to me after she read parts of it, the two parallel stories kept bumping into each other, detracting rather than complementing. “Keep the UFO story,” she advised. “Cut the rest.” And so, after more rewrites than I care to remember, Journal of a UFO Investigator took on its present form. All of it in the first person, as Danny’s UFO journal. The day-to-day context of his journal could only be hinted at, from within the framework of the journal itself.
I don’t regret having done this. It’s what made the book possible. But whatever choice you make when you write a novel, there’s a price to be paid. Multiple prices, normally. For me the heaviest cost was that Danny’s father was turned, from a full and often sympathetic human being, into a mostly sinister shadow onto which Danny can project his fears and angers. There’s a truth in this too–isn’t that very much how we see our parents? But the novel, in becoming tighter and more effective, also became in a significant way less rich. Leon Shapiro no longer came across–or, he came across only obliquely–as who he originally was: a limited man facing almost unbearable tragedy.
Actually, I once wrote a chapter–a long chapter–from Leon’s point of view. It flowed out of me. I felt, writing it, that I knew Leon almost as well as I knew Danny. If I were publishing it, I’d call it simply “Leon’s Story.” Come to think of it, I believe I will publish “Leon’s Story” this summer, as part of the Outtakes of a UFO Investigator.
Today I’m publishing a different episode. It’s set in the spring of 1965, when Danny’s a tenth-grader. One afternoon his mother gives him the thrilling news that a UFO has landed practically across the Delaware River from their home, in the town of Scofield, New Jersey (fictional; modeled on Glassboro). Danny, as a devoted UFOlogist, sets about “investigating”–and finds himself propelled into “alienness” of a sort he’d never bargained for.
(The photo above is from the real-life incident that underlies the story. You can read the details on the timeline of my Facebook Fan Page for September 12, 1964.)
Does Leon Shapiro come across as sympathetic in this “chapter 2″ of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, as he did in chapter 1? Probably not. Yet I don’t intend him to be a villain either. Just a man struggling with a reality beyond his control, and like most of us doing a job with it that’s considerably less than optimal.
I’ll ask Bryan what he thinks.
And you–once you’ve read the story–what do you think?
Click on the picture to download chapter 2 of "Outtakes of a UFO Investigator" (PDF). Cover art by Rose Shalom Halperin.
Click here to read chapter 1 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 3 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Click here to read Chapter 4 of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator. Click here to read the blog post to which it’s attached.
Have you enjoyed these episodes of Outtakes of a UFO Investigator? Either way, I’d like to hear from you. Post your comments here or on my Facebook Fan Page,
https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Journal of a UFO Investigator, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, The Color of Electrum, The Writing Life | Tags: Ann Prospero, Bryan Gilmer, editing process, father son, glassboro new jersey, John Wain, Journal of a UFO Investigator, Outtakes of a UFO Investigator, Pardoner's Tale, ufo landing, UFOs, writing process | No Comments »
Drawing Dirty Pictures – Philadelphia UFO, January 1974
January 22, 2013
A little boy goes into a psychologist’s office. The psychologist gives him an inkblot test, telling him “These are some pictures I’ve drawn. What do you see in them?”
What the little boy sees is sex. Sexual organs. Couples engaged in sex acts. In picture after picture.
After the fifth or sixth picture, the psychologist bursts out: “Young man, you’ve got a problem!”
“Why me?” the boy demands. “You’re the one who’s drawing all these dirty pictures!”
– Joke from my junior high school (as middle school used to be called)
So is it me? Or the picture?
"Tim's" drawing of the Byberry UFO
To the right you’ll see a witness sketch of a UFO, observed over Philadelphia in January of 1974. What that UFO looks like to me … Do you see it too? (But to be fair, I’ve already suggested to you the direction my thoughts are going. You can’t be unbiased now.)
Is it my own dirty mind that’s putting it there? (Sorry, sexy mind; such things aren’t dirty anymore, as they were back in junior high.) Or is it really in the drawing, a clue to what that UFO really was?
By which I mean, what it meant to the man who saw it.
I’ll give you the facts–as old E.J. Ruppelt said in his classic Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. You decide.
For these facts, I depend on an article by Matthew Graeber entitled, “The Cat and Mice Game,” in the November-December 2009 issue (Vol. 1, no. 4) of the journal SUNlite. I’ll summarize Graeber’s piece and give some quotations from it. But I’d encourage you to consult the article itself, available on the Web. (Go to http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite1_4.pdf and scroll down to page 20.)
The date: night of January 15, 1974. The location: a field on the grounds of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. This psychiatric hospital, with its grisly history of patient abuse and neglect, no longer exists. It was closed in 1990, demolished in 2006 (Wikipedia). At the beginning of the 60s, the name of the place was proverbial to those of us who grew up in its vicinity. “Aaaah, they oughta send you to Byberry!” we used to taunt each other on the school bus. Does the sighting’s taking place near Byberry have some significance? (And I don’t mean the significance it would have in some predictable, stupid joke about “loonies” seeing UFOs.)
The initial observer was a 23-year-old auto mechanic who wouldn’t allow his name to be used. Graeber calls him “Tim.” Later Tim was joined by his 22-year-old wife “Sarah” and her parents, whom he’d called from a pay phone. While the sighting was going on he also phoned Graeber, who set forth into the wintry night and futilely circled the area in his car, looking for Tim and his in-laws. Graeber was in the right place, he later discovered. But he never saw the witnesses, and never saw the UFO.
The UFO was a low-flying object, carrying lights though apparently not itself luminous. It flew slowly, noiselessly, at times hovering in the air. Sometimes it seemed close enough to touch the branches of the trees. Tim told Graeber’s wife, over the phone, that “the UFO was actually approaching his family as they were parked, and when he would turn his auto’s headlights on, the object would retreat back into the darkness. There were also times when the UFO would playfully blink back at the auto’s headlights as if in response.” As if it had some special connection with Tim and his in-laws; as if it were a part of them that had appeared to them in the sky.
Wait a minute! I can hear you saying. There wasn’t any UFO! This was obviously a nasty prank at Graeber’s expense (you say), to send him on a wild-goose chase into the frigid, snowy night. In his article, Graeber offers cogent reasons for thinking this isn’t so. Whatever was or wasn’t flying around the skies over Byberry, it certainly seems that Tim and Sarah and her parents–all of whom Graeber was able to interview the next day–were honestly convinced they’d seen something they weren’t able to explain.
The four witnesses sketched for Graeber what they’d seen. And here comes the really strange part. Tim’s drawing was so different from the others’ as to seem like he’d seen an entirely different object.
The illustration on p. 23 of Graeber’s article is based on their sketches. “Tim’s UFO was a cylindrical object while his wife and her parents were certain it was a double convex disc-shaped object”–like two soup bowls fastened together at the rims, with a Saturn-like ring around it and a bulb-like protuberance at its top. (In other words, a pretty conventional flying saucer.) “To compound the discrepancy, their UFOs lighting placement and coloring didn’t match Tim’s UFO either. Additionally, Sarah and her parents were positive the UFO had a revolving rim, while Tim’s UFO hadn’t such a pronounced feature.
“When I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the group they seemed to be genuinely surprised and dismayed about the whole thing. Tim simply couldn’t believe they thought the UFO looked as they had sketched it. While Stan shook his head in disbelief at what his son-in-law thought the object looked like.
“I had never encountered such a vast difference in a simultaneously observed multi-witnessed event. It seemed to me that if the incident were a hoax, the hoaxers probably would have been able to tell the same story about what the object supposedly looked like. One would think that would be one of the first things they would discuss and agree upon. Yet, here it was in black and white, three of four observers sketching a double-convex disk with a dome and revolving rim, and the fourth witness saying it was a cylindrical craft. Yet, all had observed the same UFO at relatively close range (50 yards being the closest estimate) with the aid of two automobile’s high-beam headlights.”
As Graeber interviews the family, he gradually gets to know them better. It comes out that Sarah is pregnant. It comes out that she and Tim live with her parents. It comes out that she and Tim aren’t exactly married.
Think back to the mid-70s, if you’re old enough to remember them. Among wide and growing segments of our population, it was accepted as natural and appropriate for unmarried couples to sleep together, live together. (A big change from ten years earlier; the sexual revolution came in between.) Unlike today, it wasn’t accepted for unmarried couples to have children. You made sure to use birth control. When that failed, there were big decisions to be made. Fast. Under pressure.
Now think of Tim and Sarah. Contraception has failed them. It’s no great leap to imagine that this failure has pitted Tim on the one side, against Sarah and her parents on the other, over what Tim ought to do about it. In the sky, Tim sees a mirror of his own life crisis.
Look at his drawing; ignore the labels; tell me what you see.
What I see is a penis detumescing, shooting out sperm, sheathed in a condom that’s ruptured precisely where it needs to stay intact. This is Tim’s UFO. Sarah and her parents, mirroring their (assumed) three-against-one conflict, agree it was something entirely different.
So what did these people see in the sky? (And why didn’t Graeber, driving around the same area, see anything like it?) More important–by what psychic mechanism did the mundane, agonizing, grinding tension of an unwanted pregnancy come to be translated into celestial vision, seen by four people at the same time though not in the same way?
And why at Byberry? Does this reflect Tim’s perception that his life had turned insane? That the home he had to share with his girlfriend’s parents, and the painful conflict that could never be quite escaped, was a kind of madhouse? I can’t answer these questions. But if you’ll grant that I’m seeing in Tim’s drawing what’s really there, and that it’s an uncanny reflection of his real-life situation, then we have no choice but to ask them.
“Generally speaking,” Graeber writes, “UFO witnesses would be cooperative with our investigators … but, when the subject of psychology came up many terminated their participation. I think they felt their personal life was not part of a random encounter with a UFO, and to imply it might have been was often felt to be an insult of some kind.”
Or, they knew unconsciously that the encounter wasn’t “random.” That a psychological inquiry would turn up something they preferred not to face.
At first, Graeber says, Sarah and Tim agreed to answer his psychological questions. But then Tim changed his mind. This about-face, and his insistence on strict anonymity, suggest there was something about the sighting Tim was deeply ashamed of–that he, and perhaps his in-laws too, wanted to communicate yet keep hidden.
Conveying yet concealing … that’s the function of the UFO.
Graeber writes: “I have taken the position the UFO experience is the observer’s encounter with the unknown [a reciprocal encounter--recall how the UFO responded to the witnesses--DJH]–and it really doesn’t matter what the researchers (Pro or Con) think of the experience–it’s much more a matter of how that sudden, shocking and unsuspected encounter was perceived by the witnesses– How it may have affected them on both conscious and subconscious levels of their being (e.g., how the experience impacted their model of the real world and their place within it).”
And the other way around.
by David Halperin
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Kennedy Assassination, “NJAAP Bulletin”
November 27, 2012
Thanksgiving, 1963. The saddest Thanksgiving in recent memory. It fell on November 28, the week after the nation had sobbed together as we saw our handsome, beloved young President Kennedy laid to rest.
(Actually, Kennedy wasn’t particularly beloved back then. Lots of people detested him. But in the wake of his assassination we mostly forgot about that.)
The Sunday before Thanksgiving, millions–my family among them–had watched horrified as the murderer was himself murdered, live before the TV cameras. And we wondered just what in hell was happening to this country.
My own UFO mag: NJAAP Bulletin, November 1963
I wondered; I grieved. Then I went back to my typewriter, to continue preparing for the event that for me made that week super-special.
This was the appearance of the NJAAP Bulletin, the official publication of the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena, the scientific research society of which I’d become Director the preceding summer when my predecessor had gone off to college. I was still in eleventh grade, so I figured I had two years of directorship before I did the same. “Volume II, Number 2″ appears on the Bulletin‘s masthead. But it was the first issue published during my administration, and I’d written it all.
I’d also typed up the mimeograph stencils (remember those? and the way they smelled?). I’d drawn onto the stencils the diagrams accompanying my “Special Article” on the mysterious craters that had been popping up in Great Britain, and the map of England, Scotland, and Wales onto which I’d plotted those craters. And one night, I’d guess the Monday before Thanksgiving, my aunt let me into the office where she worked and we ran off on the mimeograph machine copies of the Bulletin, to be sent to the entire NJAAP membership.
It probably didn’t take too long. NJAAP had a total of about 25 members.
The next day after school I collated and stapled the Bulletins, folded them, wrote the addresses on the backs. I mailed them out on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving–49 years ago today–and settled back, tired but content with my achievement, to enjoy the sorrow-darkened holiday as best I could.
Click on NJAAP Bulletin, and you can read the whole issue. I’ll quote only the headlines:
“UFO’S SEEN OVER PHILADELPHIA, DETECTED ON TWO SEPARATE RADARSCOPES
Cover-up of Reports”
“EDITORIAL”
“ORTHOTENIC CORRECTIONS”
“PUBLICATION OF NICAP REPORT ‘ASSURED’”
“‘BONFIRE’-LIKE OBJECT SIGHTED OVER PHILADELPHIA”
“Special Article: AN EXAMINATION OF THE RECENT CRATER ‘EPIDEMIC’ IN GREAT BRITAIN”
“FAMED AUTHOR, NATURALIST JOINS NJAAP PANEL”
(This last referring to Ivan T. Sanderson.)
And at the bottom of page 8, a single sad sentence: “NJAAP joins the nation in mourning the tragic and untimely death of President John F. Kennedy.”
JFK burial, Arlington National Cemetery
It’s kind of funny. I’d convinced myself that the world was on the brink of some unimaginable transformation. The UFOs, I thought, were probably hostile; we UFOlogists were the true scientists and prophets of our age, trying to alert the mocking throng and the bigoted intellectual establishment to the scary things zooming around our skies. Any day, any week, they’d land, reveal themselves, and very likely set about the conquest of Earth. So my friends and I believed, or at least told ourselves we believed.
Yet in truth UFOlogy was a cozy cocoon. Inside it, I felt secure. I knew the rules; I was in control. Then along came this assassination and tore open my little shelter, let in a blast of reality. Of times that were a-changing–that would continue to change, as the 1960s played themselves out–and mostly for the worse.
It wasn’t fair. UFOs should have protected me. How could a thing like this happen? Yet it had.
With the nation, I mourned. Then I went back to my bedroom and my typewriter and my UFOs, where it was safe.
At least for the time being.
“Journal of a UFO Investigator” is rooted in my experience as a teenage UFOlogist in the early 1960s. You can check out memories and photographs from that time on my Facebook Fan Page, http://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator.
Posted in UFOs | Tags: JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy assassination, Thanksgiving 1963, UFO belief, UFOs | No Comments »
UFOs and Apparitions – “They Weren’t There, But I Saw Them”
November 13, 2012
“I know they weren’t really there,” the lady told me. “But I did see them.”
She was talking about the UFO aliens she saw standing outside her home when she was a child, looking out through her bedroom windows. She’s a charming person, in her fifties although she looks much younger. I met her a couple of months ago, and she told me her story.
I believe both parts of her statement. No, the UFO beings weren’t really there. But yes, she did really see them.
Morton Schatzman, "The Story of Ruth"
Our conversation prompted me to reread a book I’d first read almost 30 years ago, Morton Schatzman’s The Story of Ruth (Putnam, 1980).
Schatzman, an American psychotherapist practicing in London, tells the story of a 25-year-old woman from the US who came to him in desperation. She was being persecuted by her father, a dreadful man who’d brutally raped her as a little girl. Only her father was still, physically, on the far side of the Atlantic.
What she was seeing was an apparition of her father, a being who looked and sounded and even felt so real that when he passed between Ruth and some object–let’s say, a portion of the far wall of the room she was in–he blocked it from her sight. As if she not only hallucinated his shape, but also the absence from her vision of whatever was behind the spot where that shape passed.
It’s an amazing tale. Not least remarkable are the parts where Schatzman, ever the dogged experimenter, tests over and over whether anyone else ever sees Ruth’s apparitions. (Because after a while she’s able to conjure up her apparitions, of her father and other people, in his office and elsewhere.) Mostly the results are negative; no surprise. But there are a few tantalizing clues that in certain circumstances Ruth’s visions can be shared, at least in part, by others. This may have implications for multiply witnessed UFO sightings.
As her therapy progresses, Ruth doesn’t lose her apparitions. She learns to control them, make them come and go at her will. To produce friendlier ones than her malevolent father.
Her husband Paul, for example.
Once when Paul is out of town and she’s feeling lonely, “I started making an apparition of Paul. When it appeared, it was nude and looked just like him. Neither of us said anything. I was lying on one side of the bed, and he lay down on the other beside me …”
I won’t repeat what follows. Suffice it to say that the apparition feels to Ruth absolutely real, solid, tangible. And male.
Under Schatzman’s guidance, Ruth gradually comes to see herself not as a half-insane victim of paranormal harassment, but as possessor of an extraordinary talent.
Extraordinary. Not unique.
Julian Jaynes, whose mind-blowing 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I’m now reading for the first time, speaks of a young biologist’s wife who told him after one of his lectures “that almost every morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long, informative and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead grandmother in which the grandmother’s voice was actually heard. This came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never previously mentioned it, since ‘hearing voices’ is generally supposed to be a sign of insanity.”
Those labeled insane often do have hallucinations. Which is a bad thing. Or not?
“At a suspicion of hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to eliminate this rival control over the patient. But it has never been shown that hallucinating patients are more intractable than others. Indeed, as judged by other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have more positive expectancies toward others in the hospital than nonhallucinating patients. And it is possible that even when the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be helpful to the healing process” (Jaynes, pp. 86-88).
Like Ruth’s visions.
Rereading Schatzman’s book in a cheap paperback edition (Zebra Books, 1981), I was disappointed not to find the passage that had most stuck in my mind from the hardcover. Did some editor eliminate it? Or did I hallucinate it?
In a footnote, perhaps, Schatzman quoted from Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. Hamlet, in his mother’s bedroom, sees his dead father and hears his commands. To his mother he says:
“Do you see nothing there?”
The queen replies:
“Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.”
And Schatzman–if my memory is correct–asked: “How did she know, I wonder, that ‘all that is I see’?”
Excellent question.
Think about it, the next time you look out your window and don’t see UFO aliens on your lawn.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Psychology, UFOs | Tags: "The Origin of Consciousness", "The Story of Ruth", apparitions, ghost in Hamlet, hallucinations, Julian Jaynes, Morton Schatzman, UFOs | No Comments »
Israel UFO – “Why Do UFOs Fly in Threes?” (Shlomo Shoval)
November 7, 2012
“Loneliness! What won’t people do on account of it? And this loneliness, what is it really, but the cosmic loneliness and dread of abandonment that I talk about all the time, from which you can be saved the moment the first UFO lands here and one sort of creature or another comes out of it and gives you a friendly greeting.
“And if you ask me how I manage always to get back to UFOs and extraterrestrials from practically any subject I deal with, I’ll ask you the opposite question: How come you always wind up talking about food or sex or money or health or soccer, no matter what you’ve started out discussing? … Extraterrestrials and UFOs aren’t serious, respectable enough subjects, compared to the ones you like to talk about?”
The paragraphs above are taken from the 120-page-long ramblings of a man who’s half an extraterrestrial–or maybe one-third, or one-quarter; he isn’t sure which–who’s wandered among the galaxies and their alien races through a multitude of incarnations and reincarnations, and now has returned to Earth as to his boyhood home. He’s the hero of Shlomo Shoval’s Hebrew novel Lamah ha-Abameem Taseem B’derekh K’lal Bishloshoht, U-madua ha-Haizareem Lo Ohaveem L’hitztalem? Which means: “Why Do UFOs Generally Fly in Threes, and Why Don’t Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken?”
Front cover: Shlomo Shoval, "Why Do UFOs Generally Fly in Threes, and Why Don't Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken?"
The book was published in Israel in 2000. As far as I know, it’s never been translated. All the passages quoted here are my own translations.
“And if you tell me that you don’t see [my extraterrestrial origins] in any obvious way just by looking at me, this is because all through my journeyings I tried really hard not to assimilate myself too much to them, so I could preserve some Earthly identity and quality–at least on the outside–maybe deliberately, or in my inner awareness that some day I’d come back here as a normal civilized person, and not just any civilized person but a kind of preacher, maybe a prophet in a certain manner of speaking, not to say redeemer or at least proclaimer of redemption, or if we want to use language that’s a little more cautious and a little less pretentious: as someone who deals in practical redemption.”
About halfway through the novel we began to get hints about the more mundane aspects of the (unnamed) speaker’s life. He’s a middle-aged man, married, with a three-year-old son and a somewhat older daughter. He’s currently engaged in building a landing strip for UFOs in his back yard, in consequence of which his neighbors and so-called “well-wishers” have gotten half a dozen restraining orders against him. His wife is threatening to leave. His mother-in-law is looking into psychiatric hospitals.
His otherworldly experiences have broadened his horizons. Especially where sex is concerned.
“My stand is unequivocal: we live today in an open, pluralistic, democratic universe. I don’t believe anyone has any call to meddle, for example, in whatever relations may develop between a beautiful female from Alpha Centauri with a perfected brain cluster and some total ass from the Nile Delta. If she’s hot for him and wants to have complete or partial sex relations with him by mutual consent and practicing safe sex, that’s her private affair. Even if she picks some invertebrate or mollusk to do it with, that’s still nobody’s business.
“I also think that, overall–in spite of the great multiplicity of life forms in the universe–when all is said and done loneliness is still the cardinal problem, and, some people say, even the number one killer. Not only, therefore, is there no need to criticize, condemn, forbid, ban, or vomit upon anybody who takes part in any sort of exceptional contact whatever, but rather the contrary: one ought to show acceptance and understanding for all of these, even organize meetings and symposia. … In the name of that loneliness … I salute all lovers, whatever they may be.”
A comic novel? I suppose. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. Yet a somber undercurrent keeps making itself felt–nowhere more powerfully than near the end, when the narrator tries to figure out what he’s been gabbling about for the past hundred or so pages of cosmic peregrination.
“When all’s said and done, I’ve tried to tell you a good story before bedtime, before that long and final sleep you’re going to have one of these days and from which you’ll never wake up in spite of all the stories they tell you, all the promises they make you, including everything I’ve said and promised and assured you myself. … The long night draws near, and I haven’t much more to say beyond Good night, sweet dreams.”
At the heart of the UFO fantasy: loneliness, death. Not unlike my own belief, which I’ve expressed in a variety of places, that the crux of the UFO mythos is the terrible paradox of death:
“Death–the most essential and familiar part of us all. Born in us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, the instant we’re born. Yet also death–alien! Beyond all alienness! Through it I’m not me anymore; I’m nothing at all. … Easier to conceive of the most fantastic star at the edge of the farthest galaxy, the most inhuman, unrecognizable form of life and intelligence than to conceive of death.” (Journal of a UFO Investigator, p. 185.)
Back cover: praise for the book from "Sirius Book Review," "Andromeda Times," and other distiguished periodicals
One of the greatest of our writers, the late Gore Vidal, appears to me to have had a parallel intuition. And now I detect something similar in Shlomo Shoval, in a novel written for a country to which, a generation or two back, UFOs meant nothing at all.
I learn from the bio printed on the back cover–just beneath the enthusiastic blurbs from distinguished publications like the Sirius Book Review (“At last! Something good has come out of Planet Earth”) and the Andromeda Times–that Shoval lives in Jerusalem, and was born in 1947. Same year as me. Facing his “long night” from about the same perspective as I face mine.
Why do UFOs fly in threes? (They don’t, actually.) Why don’t extraterrestrials like to have their pictures taken? Shoval never says. No matter. He’s written a strange, remarkable book, well worth reading by anyone, human or extraterrestrial.
Someone ought at least to translate it into English.
Posted in Israel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, Psychology, UFOs | Tags: death, ET, extraterrestrials, Gore Vidal, Israel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, loneliness, Shlomo Shoval, UFOs | 4 Comments »
Israel UFO – The Desert in Bloom
November 1, 2012
“I opened my eyes. The entire hallway was red. My first thought was: wow, an unidentified flying object come from outer space.”
—Nureet Granott, quoted in Ha-aretz newspaper (Tel Aviv), June 11, 1993
Turned out Ms. Granott’s house was on fire. But what interests me is that this lady, an Israeli living in Beverly Hills, first imagined the red glow that awakened her in the middle of the night to have been a UFO. A generation earlier, that thought would never have occurred to her. UFOs just weren’t, if you’ll pardon the expression, on Israelis’ radar screens.
"Ha-Abameem" - "UFOs" (March 1992)
I discovered this in 1964, much to my dismay, as a teen-age UFOlogist visiting the Holy Land and eager to report back on the UFO scene there. There wasn’t any UFO scene there.
Even the word “UFO” had no Hebrew equivalent. The current word abam, acronym for etzem biltee m’zuheh (“unidentified entity”), hadn’t yet been coined. You had to talk about them as tzalachoht m’ofefoht, “flying saucers,” which sounds a good deal sillier in Hebrew than it does in English.
“We are a practical people,” one Israeli woman explained to me. That’s why we don’t see such things, don’t believe in them. An astronomy professor at the Hebrew University, whom I phoned to find out who might be able to tell me something about UFOs in Israel—I had a fair amount of chutzpah at age 16—answered gruffly: “I hope there is no one in this country who will be able to help you.”
Eventually I did stumble across a tiny group called “UFO Friends in Israel,” composed mostly of German-speaking immigrants, who fell far short of my notion of how “scientific UFOlogists” ought to approach the subject. I came away disappointed. I wrote to my friend Jerome Clark, back in the States:
“The absence of UFO activity in Israel can only be explained as a conscious lack of interest on the part of the UFO beings. The Israelis are no more realistic or hard-headed on such subjects as [sic] the Americans and English, although they like to think they are. [How that “we are a practical people” remark had rankled!] The skies of the Negev are so fantastically clear and bright (the meteors are like fireworks) that it would be an ideal place for atmospheric illusions—if the skeptics were right in attributing the UFOs to such. The UFOs apparently just have more important things to occupy themselves with—and the situation of both UFO activity and research in Israel is as barren as the Desert of Judah.”
Around the beginning of the 1990s, it would seem, the desert began to bloom.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking: the Israeli woman I quoted at the beginning of this post lived in southern California. No wonder she had UFOs on the brain.
Could be. BUT—
In March 1992 appeared the first issue of a Hebrew periodical entitled simply Ha-Abameem, “UFOs.” The subtitle: “The exclusive periodical covering the phenomenon in the world and in Israel.” In his opening statement, entitled “The Riddle of the UFOs,” the editor, one Avi Greif, announces that “this periodical comes to cover an area … practically disregarded in our local media.” There follow 78 pages of UFO stories, mostly translated from sources overseas. Titles like “Hypnosis found helpful for UFO abductees” and “Chilean man makes love to female alien.” (My translations from the Hebrew.)
I have this “first issue” of Ha-Abameem in my files. I don’t remember how I got it. Were subsequent issues published? I don’t know.
Yet the UFOs had taken root in Israel’s ancient soil. The Jerusalem Post International Edition for December 15, 1990, reports on a rash of UFO sightings from the Haifa area in the late 1980s, the more dramatic of them occurring on Jewish holidays. Jerusalem Report, February 6, 1997: “Thousands of Israelis waited in vain on Tel Aviv’s beaches in the wee hours of January 6 for the arrival of UFOs after Israeli psychic Elinor Harar predicted that extraterrestrials would visit that night.” In the English-language Israeli comic strip “Dry Bones,” the hapless middle-aged hero Shuldig grumps: “We now have shopping malls, cable TV, fast food chains, UFO sightings … and a shallow national leader who looks ‘good’ on television?! [Benjamin Netanyahu was then, as now, Israel’s prime minister.] How much more like America can we get!?!” (To which Shuldig’s wife responds: “I don’t know but … did you hear the latest assassination conspiracy theory?”)
(Source: Jerusalem Post International Edition, November 15, 1997.)
Shlomo Shoval, "Why Do UFOs Normally Fly in Threes, and Why Don't Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken?"
I’ll post next week on a Hebrew novel published in Jerusalem in 2000, Shlomo Shoval’s intriguingly titled Why Do UFOs Normally Fly in Threes, and Why Don’t Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken? (Hailed by the Sirius Book Review, in one of the blurbs on the back cover, as “something good coming at long last out of Planet Earth.”) A book like this presupposes that UFOs have already found their niche in the Israeli consciousness.
How did this happen? Did the UFO pilots change their minds, decide that Israel was a worthwhile tourist destination after all?
More likely it was the country that changed. Became like America, as Shuldig says. More broadly, and I think more profoundly, it ceased to be the Third-World country that I visited in 1964. With the exception of South America—which I can’t explain—UFOs are mostly a phenomenon of the developed, industrialized world. US, Western Europe, Japan. And now Israel.
Or perhaps UFOs blossomed in the skies as Israeli self-confidence waned on the ground? The bumptious assurance that “we are a practical people,” realistic and hard-headed, has taken a few blows since 1964. The worst, perhaps, was the traumatic Yom Kippur War of 1973. Others, traumatic in different ways, have followed. When people, collectively, stop believing in themselves, do they collectively hunt up something else to believe in?
I don’t know the answers.
What I do believe is that the story of how UFOs came to Israel is an important story—important for understanding Israel, important for understanding the UFO as a human phenomenon. It needs to be explored, needs to be told. By someone who knows Hebrew, has some acquaintance with the Israelis and their land and their culture. Who combines this with a serious interest in UFOs and what they mean for us all.
Will somebody else please go ahead and do it?
Posted in Israel, Psychology, UFOs | Tags: "Dry Bones", Avi Greif, Israel, Shlomo Shoval, UFOs | 2 Comments »