FIGURE 2. The Philadelphia UFO of January 1974, drawn by the late Matthew J. Graeber on the basis of the witness’s sketch. Image provided through the kindness of Matthew J. Graeber, Jr.
Scenes from Magonia
IN JULY 1959, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh paid a visit to Carl Jung’s home in Bollingen, Switzerland, to meet the grand old man of depth psychology. He and Jung fell to arguing about—what else?—UFOs.
We have the story only in Lindbergh’s version. “I had expected,” Lindbergh wrote afterward, “a fascinating discussion about psychological aspects of the numerous and recurring flying-saucer reports.” But to Lindbergh’s surprise, Jung seemed to have no interest in the psychological question. No, no, he insisted, the flying saucers were real. Lindbergh protested. Why, no less a personage than General Carl Spaatz, chief of the US Air Force, had assured him there weren’t any such things! “Slim,” Spaatz had told Lindbergh, “don’t you suppose that if there was anything true about this flying-saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?” To which Jung retorted: “There are a great many things going on around this earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know about.”
“More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy.” That line from Hamlet had been a mantra for Jung’s old teacher, Sigmund Freud; Jung himself certainly accepted its truth. Were UFOs, for him, among those undreamt-of things? The question has been debated since the 1950s, when Jung began issuing pronouncements on the subject of flying saucers. The pronouncements were always ambiguous; hence the controversy. Even the publication of Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies—in the German original in 1958, in English translation the following year—did little to resolve the issue of what exactly its author believed or didn’t believe.
This book proclaimed the essence of the UFOs to be something arising from within us, their physical existence a puzzling byway. In its final, very brief chapter, “UFOs Considered in a Non-Psychological Light,” Jung acknowledged that any purely psychological explanation is bound to run into some inconvenient facts. UFOs have been photographed; they’ve been detected on radar. The archskeptic Donald Menzel, Jung declared, “has not succeeded, despite all his efforts, in offering a satisfying scientific explanation of even one authentic UFO report.” He added, “It boils down to nothing less than this: that either psychic projections throw back a radar echo, or else the appearance of real objects affords an opportunity for mythological projections.”
So which was it? Jung continued to waffle. On the one hand, UFOs behave as no physical, mechanical objects could possibly behave. To perform the aerial maneuvers typical of UFOs, a spacecraft would have to be without mass or weight, which is inconceivable. But if a weightless vehicle is “a hard hypothesis to swallow,” the alternative notion of a “materialized psychism”—a mental projection that somehow takes on tangible reality in the physical realm—“opens a bottomless void under our feet.” I’ve already said how I read Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth at age thirteen and, unsurprisingly, got rather little from the experience. One thing, at least, I did manage to understand. Jung didn’t turn everything into sex, as I’d imagined all psychologists did. As part of his long-running quarrel with his dead Papa Freud—about which, of course, I knew nothing—Jung dismissed the idea that might have been Freud’s if he’d lived into the UFO era: that the flying saucer was “a sexual fantasy . . . a repressed uterus was coming down from the sky.” But what did Jung think UFOs were? I couldn’t make any sense of what he was trying to say, or the weird dreams and paintings he invoked in support.
Nearly ten years later, long after I’d dropped out of active UFOlogy, I met a man whose ideas seemed to dovetail neatly with Jung’s, and the encounter prompted me to give Jung’s book a second reading. The man was Jacques Vallee, and even those who’ve never heard his name probably know a version of him. The character Claude Lacombe, the French scientist and UFOlogist played by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was modeled after Vallee.
In 1969, the year before I made his acquaintance, Vallee published a book that was perceived at the time as groundbreaking and that has reverberated through UFOlogy ever since. It was entitled Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Its central point was that the reported sightings of diminutive UFO occupants, which by the late ’60s had begun to pile up and to be taken seriously by even the stodgiest UFOlogists, bore an odd resemblance to traditional folktales of fairies and elves and leprechauns.
Vallee didn’t conclude from this parallel, as he well might have, that UFOs and their pilots didn’t exist any more than fairies and elves did. It was easy, after all, to explain away centuries-old stories of human encounters with the “wee folk.” The human experiencers had probably never existed in the first place. Even if they were once real people, they’d surely never claimed to have seen or done the impossible things rumor fathered on them. But the witnesses in close-up UFO encounters certainly existed, and if you wanted to deny the encounters, you had to look those sober-seeming people in the eye and call them lunatics or liars. An oft-repeated story, almost certainly apocryphal, has Thomas Jefferson brushing off reports of a meteorite with the snide remark that it’s easier to believe witnesses can lie than stones fall from the sky. The UFOlogists weren’t about to repeat that mistake.
Vallee chose a more exciting if vaguer path. The folktales and the UFO reports both described actual events: visitations from some realm that wasn’t outer space—that was a twentieth-century conventionalization—but an aspect of human existence on this earth, coterminous with our ordinary world yet somehow beyond it. His code name for this realm was Magonia.
The name derived from a medieval French folk belief in a place in the clouds called Magonia, “land of the magicians,” from which sky-ships come to plunder the crops of honest farmers. (The belief was literal and concrete. On one occasion a peasant mob got hold of four people they thought had fallen from a “Magonian” ship and came close to lynching them.) As Vallee used the word Magonia, it wasn’t quite identical with Jung’s “collective unconscious.” But both pointed in the same direction, toward something that’s part of us yet at the same time beyond us, manifesting recognizably in the Middle Ages and in the twentieth century, with superficial alterations like the replacement of cloud-ships with spaceships.
Thus was born the “psychosocial” theory of UFO reality.
The idea caught on. How could it not? It had a seductive appeal to both imagination and common sense. It insisted on the reality and importance of the UFO phenomenon, if not the UFOs themselves, and at the same time recognized what could not be evaded: that UFOs seemed to mirror and to be rooted in the human conditions of their times. It was an advantage that you didn’t have to be a UFO believer to appreciate its virtues. The debunkers, less squeamish than the UFOlogists about calling people liars or deluded, found they could put the psychosocial theory to excellent use.
Gradually the psychosocial advocates divided themselves into two branches. There were the skeptics who used the approach to reduce UFOs, insofar as they weren’t simply errors in perception, to familiar manifestations of individual and group psychology. Then there were those, more faithful to Vallee, who insisted on some irreducible mystery, redefined now as an essentially human enigma. For answers they looked not to the spaceship but to the soul and the transcendent dimensions Jung had attributed to the human unconscious. Along these lines, they argued, the solution would be found.
But it wasn’t. By the late 1980s the psychosocial hypothesis had lost its luster among UFO proponents. It had led nowhere except to implausible New Agey speculations about the power of the mind to shape the physical world. The reality represented by the name Magonia remained as vague and elusive as ever. If you said UFOs were spacecraft from some remote, hypothetical planetary system—Venus and Mars having dropped out of the running long ago—you still had the problem of all those light-years in between. But at least you were talking about our normal physical universe. You didn’t have to mess around with “materialized psychisms” or enter some fairyland of Jungian archetypes. The old “extraterrestrial hypothesis,” for all its implausibilities, seemed the safer way.
Now here I am, proposing to revisit that Jungian fairyland. How does one do such a thing?
The way two porcupines make love: very, very carefully.
In what remains of this chapter, I’ll set forth four case studies, in thematic rather than chronological sequence. In each of them I’ll construct, step by step, a psychological bridge between reported experience and postulated cause; I’ll hope to persuade you to come with me across that bridge. Inevitably I’ll turn to Jung. But as Jung himself did in his career as a psychologist, I’ll begin with Freud.
The Jungians, after all, have never denied Freud’s insights or that he was the pioneer without whom their psychology could not have existed. Freud was right, they say; his only significant mistake was to believe he’d discovered the whole truth, when in fact his sexual theories represented only a portion of it. And it appears that every so often a repressed uterus, or its male equivalent, does come down from the sky.
PHILADELPHIA, 1974
“It ain’t a fit night out fer man nor beast” runs a recurrent line in a classic W. C. Fields movie. The weather in Philadelphia on the evening of January 15, 1974, suited that description. Philadelphia in January is not noted for the splendors of its climate. But that night was particularly unpleasant, and if UFOlogist Matt Graeber’s phone hadn’t rung just as he was sitting down to a late dinner, it’s doubtful anything could have sent him racing out into the snowy, bitter darkness.
But ring it did.
A young man was on the line, and he sounded excited. “Is this the place where you report seeing a UFO?”
“That’s right,” Graeber said. Graeber was representative of a private organization called the UFO Report and Information Center, normally referred to by the whimsical acronym UFORIC. (Never say UFOlogists are without a sense of humor.) The young man had phoned Information asking where he could call to report a UFO sighting, and he’d been given Graeber’s number.
Graeber asked when the sighting had taken place.
The man said it was happening then. He was calling from a public phone, watching the object as he spoke.
Graeber asked him where he was located.
Parked at the edge of a field on the property of the Byberry state mental hospital, the caller said. The UFO was flying low over the field, occasionally hovering. The man told Graeber he was waiting for his wife and her parents to get there so they could watch it with him.
If Graeber engaged in any snickering speculation over the sighting’s locale, he doesn’t mention it in his report. Most likely the thought never crossed his mind. He knew from long experience that most UFO witnesses are sane, rational people who’ve seen something they can’t explain and report it in the hopes of getting an answer. He assumed, correctly as it turned out, that his caller was in that category. He told the man he was on his way.
That “way” was a thirty- to forty-minute drive from his home. Despite the snow and the icy roads, he managed to find the area the caller had indicated. But, though he circled repeatedly through the dark streets, he saw no sign of any UFO or four people standing by a car looking into the sky.
It occurred to him he’d been the victim of a nasty prank, sending him out on a wild goose chase on a miserable night. But when he got back home, his wife told him that the caller, whom Graeber refers to as Tim, had phoned several more times to describe what he and his in-laws were seeing. The UFO, Tim claimed, “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.”
Trying to communicate?
If this were a joke, why did Tim keep calling back? Why did he want report forms to use for the sighting? Why did he want Graeber to meet with him and his in-laws the next day? Surely a prankster would have pulled his trick and then vanished into the darkness.
So the following day Graeber did meet with the witnesses: Tim, his pregnant wife, “Sarah,” and Sarah’s parents, with whom the couple was living. Tim was twenty-three years old, one year older than Sarah, an auto mechanic by trade and a student pilot.
Graeber interviewed the four separately and together, at the family’s home and at the scene of the sighting. They seemed sincere, surprised and baffled by what they’d seen the night before. None of them gave the impression of any prior interest in UFOs. Their stories meshed: “They all agreed a strange object was silently flying about very slowly and hovering in the area. They all told of how the object reacted to the auto’s headlights, they even said they thought the UFO had struck the tops of the trees.”
But then Graeber looked at the sketches the four of them had drawn, independently, of the UFO. It was as if they’d seen two different objects above that field.
Sarah and her parents drew a more or less conventional flying saucer: two soup bowls joined together at the rims, the upper one inverted on the lower, a Saturn-like ring at the point of juncture, and a raised dome on top. Whereas Tim had drawn . . .
“When I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the group,” Graeber wrote in his subsequent report, “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 Sarah’s father “shook his head in disbelief at what his son-in-law thought the object looked like.” Graeber was as baffled as the rest:
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 automobiles’ high-beam headlights.
A page or so later, Graeber adds what seems a throwaway detail. Tim and his pregnant young wife—well, they weren’t exactly married.
Think back, if you’re old enough, to the mid-1970s. Among wide and growing segments of our population, it was accepted as natural and appropriate for unmarried couples to sleep together, live together. This was a big change from ten years earlier; the sexual revolution came in between. Unlike today, it was absolutely not accepted for unmarried couples to have children. If a couple were having sex, as they probably were, they made sure to use birth control. If that failed, there were big decisions to be made. Fast. Under pressure.
FIGURE 2. The Philadelphia UFO of January 1974, drawn by the late Matthew J. Graeber on the basis of the witness’s sketch. Image provided through the kindness of Matthew J. Graeber, Jr.
Now look at Tim’s drawing. Ignore the labels. What do you see?
What I see is a detumescing penis shooting out sperm, sheathed in a condom that’s ruptured precisely where it needs to stay intact.
At the beginning of 2013, I posted the drawing to my Facebook Fan Page and asked my readers to tell me what they saw in it. Not everyone saw the same thing I did. But I got enough support to reassure me this wasn’t some figment of my own sex-addled brain. A woman, the first person to post a comment, wrote, “Looks like a worm,” but added, less than a minute later, “Or maybe a condom.” “Looks like a snake or maybe a dick,” wrote one man. Another man: “It’s the infamous condomous maximus Trojanus.” Another posted a link to a ribald YouTube video featuring an outrageously phallic UFO, testicles and all.
One man made a comment that didn’t answer the precise question I’d asked but was an eye-opener anyway: “I’m not sure what it looks like, but the obvious thing that sticks out is the fact, one side had a blinking green light, the other side a red one. This is a standard set by the FAA for all aircraft flying. I don’t think UFO’s have to follow FAA regulations.”
There’s the answer. What Tim saw, and presumably the others as well, was an airplane.
But airplanes don’t hover, unless they’re helicopters; and Graeber contacted a nearby airport and “found no helicopters were aloft the night of the 15th.” (Besides, a low-flying helicopter would have made an unmistakable racket.) An airplane doesn’t hang around the same spot for a half hour or an hour, which must have been the duration of the sighting. It doesn’t come within fifty yards of people on the ground. It certainly doesn’t withdraw when those people turn on their automobile headlights or “playfully blink back at the auto’s headlights as if in response.”
So what are our choices? Do UFOs obey FAA regulations, at least while they’re within our airspace? Was it pure coincidence that this space vehicle sported green and red lights like any earthly aircraft? Or was there some truly astounding gap, which we’d be tempted to call unbelievable, between the physical stimulus for the sighting and the sighting as the witnesses experienced it? This last option doesn’t seem any more appetizing than the first two—until we recall that there had to have been such a gap. Otherwise, how to explain the divergence between Tim’s drawing and the other three?7
It’s in this gap, between stimulus and perception, that the real UFO mystery lies.
The essential point is this: Tim’s UFO was a vehicle for meaning. Interplanetary spacecraft, if by some chance they exist, don’t mean anything, any more than an airplane means something. They just are. But for Tim, the thing in the sky was a graphic representation of the agonizing dilemma into which he’d been plunged. His seeing it as he did doesn’t indicate anything abnormal about him beyond the emotional turmoil that anyone in his position would experience. It’s precisely because he comes across as so sane, so normal, that his experience can serve as an entry point to understand what happens when other sane, normal, honest people see inexplicable things in the sky.
When a young lady is pregnant, and she and her young man are living with her parents (who presumably aren’t thrilled at the situation), and the young man looks into the sky and sees a ruptured condom—really, there has to be a connection. But did the heavenly apparition bear other meanings as well? Did the three-against-one split in perception mirror a conflict of Tim versus Sarah and her parents over what ought to be done about her pregnancy? Did the sighting’s taking place over a notorious insane asylum reflect a perception, shared by all four, that their lives had turned into a madhouse?
Here our bridge grows shaky. The psychological information is too sparse to tell us all we want to know. Shrewdly, Graeber intuited this and tried to elicit more. At first Tim and Sarah were willing to talk. Then they clammed up. Almost as if they’d had a visit from three men in black . . . Or, to translate from mythical to psychological terms, as if they’d become aware there was something concealed within the UFO that, if brought to light, would be too unbearable to be faced.
Says Graeber:
Generally speaking, 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.
But a UFO encounter is not random. The witness’s psychic life is an essential part of it. That’s what this book is about.
BELGIUM, 1989–1990
The UFOs invaded on November 29, 1989. From then through the following spring, the skies of Belgium—oddly, not those of neighboring countries—were filled with them. By the time the wave subsided, more than twelve hundred sightings had been recorded.
Some of the incidents were dramatic, like the aerial chase of UFOs by F-16 jets one night in March 1990, which the Belgian military declared in its report to be beyond their power to explain. Radar as well as visual observations were involved in that incident, recalling Jung’s puzzlement as to how it can be that “psychic projections throw back a radar echo.” There were photographs taken by witnesses of what they saw; none showed anything of the smallest interest. The one exception turned out to be a fake.
The first really impressive sighting happened at about 5:20 p.m. on November 29, when two police officers east of Liège “saw a luminous patch about 120 feet in diameter in a field. Then, they saw a flat object in the shape of an elongated triangle with three large lights underneath in a triangular position. They estimated it to be about 90 to 100 feet across at the base, 70 feet in length, and 6 feet thick. The object was at about 375 feet up in the air. It was silent. There was a red rotating light in the middle of the white lights.”
I’m quoting the description of the officers’ experience given by Canadian sociologist Eric Ouellet, based on the documentation assembled in two dense five-hundred-page volumes by a UFO group called the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena (Société belge d’étude des phénomènes spatiaux, SOBEPS for short), which provide the definitive history of the Belgian wave. Ouellet notes that what the two policemen saw was the single most characteristic shape reported in the wave: a triangular object with a very bright white light in each corner and a weaker red light in the middle. The UFOs of 1989–1990 came in all different shapes, but Ouellet estimates that about half of them were triangular.
The systematic history of the triangular UFO has only recently been undertaken. Such things were unheard of in my teenage UFOlogy days. The two classic shapes we had to reckon with were the disk and the cigar-shaped UFO, which was normally bigger than the disk and which we assumed to be the “mother ship” sending out the smaller disklike craft. That was back in the sixties. Gradually, through the next two decades, reports of triangular objects began to trickle in, assuming some prominence among the Hudson Valley sightings of the mid-1980s. But it was in Belgium that they claimed their full share of the UFO stage.
Multiple witnesses, their sincerity beyond question, saw the flying triangles, often at low altitudes and very close range. Some were able to photograph them. Developed, the photos showed vague blobs of light or else nothing at all. In April 1990, a young man known as “Patrick M.” supposedly took a photo that clearly showed the now-classic Belgian UFO: a triangle, white lights at the points, red light at the center. Twenty-one years later, Patrick confessed he’d hoaxed the picture and explained how he’d done it. But he was a minority of one. All through Belgium, honest and sane people were seeing things in the sky, sometimes several people seeing the same thing. Yet what they saw corresponded, as far as we can tell, to nothing that was there. As in Philadelphia in 1974: the gap between stimulus and perception. And as in Philadelphia, the key question that needs to be asked about the Belgian UFOs is, What did they mean?
November 1989 was not exactly an uneventful time in European history. On November 9, twenty days before the UFOs showed up en masse, the Berlin Wall had come down. What no one could have anticipated—the fall of Communism in central and eastern Europe, for the most part without bloodshed—was happening before the world’s amazed eyes. The process didn’t begin with the demise of the wall. But that event accelerated it, and over the coming months the “evil empire,” as President Reagan had called the Soviet Union and its satellites, was visibly crumbling. Those were the months during which Belgium, whose capital, Brussels, houses NATO’s headquarters, experienced its great UFO wave.
Can this be coincidence?
Of course it can. Wilder coincidences happen every day. But Ouellet has called attention to a symbolic link that brilliantly answers the question of the meaning of the Belgian UFOs and makes the idea of random coincidence entirely unappealing.
Think about what people were seeing in the skies: three brilliant white lights, surrounding and enclosing a dimmer red light. Aha, Jung would have said: that’s the “quaternity,” the archetype that manifests as a group of four, of which the fourth is in some way different from the other three. (We’ll soon take a closer look at the quaternity and its role in Jungian thought.) But substitute star for light, and a more concrete historical symbolism begins to emerge. The red star, as Ouellet points out, was a symbol for Communism. The white star was and remains the symbol of NATO.
This all feels very archaic, very medieval. In the Middle Ages into the early modern era, and indeed back in Roman antiquity, men and women saw “signs and wonders” in the skies that crystallized in visual form what they knew to be happening around them. Was war about to break out? They looked upward and saw marching men, or flying shields or stars or “large black balls” battling amid the clouds. We might properly speak of their experiences as “visions,” and it’s an apt word for the UFOs of 1989–1990. The people of Belgium felt themselves in a world transforming itself, the once-triumphant and menacing red star fading away, hemmed in by the brilliant, shining power of the West. They projected that intuitive awareness into the sky, in symbols organized through Jungian archetypes and given nuts-and-bolts detail by the machinery of the Space Age.8
So were those UFOs “real”? Or were they not?
I’ll be the last to claim that Ouellet’s insight accounts for everything that happened in Belgium that winter and spring. The aerial chase of the night of March 30–31, with its radar as well as visual observations of unidentified things in the sky, remains baffling. We UFOlogists had grown used to thinking of “radar-visual” sightings as our best evidence, proof that solid, unknown machines were flying around up there. Yet radar is not infallible—“anomalous radar propagation,” in which unusual atmospheric conditions cause blips to appear on the screen without anything physical corresponding to them, is a documented phenomenon—and we preferred to ignore the instances where radar and visual observations fail to jibe. The fact is that the Belgian pilots who went up after the UFOs never saw the lights they were supposed to be chasing. They got brief radar locks on objects doing the most extraordinary things—like shooting off at speeds that would have broken the sound barrier, without creating any sonic waves. (Proof, by itself, that they can’t have been solid objects.) But where their radar said the objects were supposed to be, the pilots saw nothing at all.
So plenty of questions remain, yet the balance of the evidence is that the Belgian UFOs had no physical reality. If I were a debunker, I would declare victory, case closed. But my conviction, which dominates this book, is that psychic realities are every bit as significant, every bit as “real,” as physical ones. What the Belgian people saw in the sky may in some cases, possibly most cases, have been triggered by something physically there. But this “something” was not the UFO. The UFOs came from within, and they were seen, not because they were there—they weren’t—but because they came bearing meaning.
In Philadelphia in 1974, the “meaning” borne by the UFO was the personal dilemma of one family. In Belgium in 1989, it was a world made new.
ON SEEING WHAT ISN’T THERE
Are we speaking, then, of hallucinations? Probably. But I don’t want to use that word unless we can first cleanse it of its pejorative connotations, the images it evokes of falling-down drunks seeing pink elephants or six-foot rabbits. Since such purification seems unlikely, I prefer to find a different term.
Several years ago I met a charming, intelligent, obviously sane librarian in western North Carolina—she was in her fifties but looked much younger—who told me of the UFO aliens she’d seen standing outside her home as a child looking out through her bedroom windows. “I know they weren’t really there,” she said. “But I did see them.” I believe both parts of her statement, and part of my project as a UFOlogist is to understand how they are both true—how, without benefit of drink or drugs or sensory deprivation, far less insanity, we genuinely see things that aren’t physically there.
Perhaps we’ll call them apparitions, following Morton Schatzman, an American psychiatrist resident in London who treated a young American woman he calls “Ruth.” She came to him for relief from the apparition of her father, a monumentally nasty man who’d abused her as a girl and now was sending his shape across the Atlantic to continue the torment. The apparition was real in every meaningful sense, apart from the fact that when it appeared in Schatzman’s office, he couldn’t see it any more than Hamlet’s mother could see the ghost of her late husband.9
Not only did Ruth’s father’s shape appear, but when it passed before a portion of Schatzman’s wall or a piece of his furniture, these things vanished from her sight—just as though blocked from view by a physical entity. Nor was sight the only sense through which the apparition manifested itself. She could put her hand to its beard, compare it with the touch of Schatzman’s beard and judge them equally prickly.
Schatzman chose to treat Ruth’s apparitions not as pathological symptoms but as marks of an extraordinary talent, perhaps more widespread than we know but seldom so fully developed. He taught her to control the apparitions, banishing her abusive father and evoking others more to her liking. Once, when her husband was away on a business trip, she summoned an apparition of him in their bedroom, wearing undershorts, which he then removed. The apparition and she went on to have blowout sex.10
Or maybe Ruth’s talent wasn’t so extraordinary after all. Historian Ronald Hutton has recorded his conviction, based on his experiences researching the witch religion in modern Britain, that “there is a significant minority of people within British society (and doubtless in many—perhaps all—others) who regularly see, hear, or feel phenomena which most others do not perceive to be present, but which are very real to them.” He adds:
Let no readers of these paragraphs feel that their personal belief systems are being challenged; the experiences concerned may be the products of chemicals in the brain, or of communications from God Almighty, the Goddess, angels, the spirits of the dear departed, or a range of other entities. The only limitation that I myself would place upon interpretation of them is that the empirical evidence causes me to reject the notions that they are caused by mere overactive imaginations, or by general mental imbalance. I also find it highly significant that modern Western society is apparently unique in the human record in that it provides no generally accepted frame of reference for them and no system of explanation within which they may be sustained or discussed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the witnesses to the “Miracle of the Sun” on October 13, 1917, suffered from “overactive imaginations” or “general mental imbalance.” A crowd of seventy thousand (according to some estimates) had gathered at Fátima, Portugal, to watch the climax of a series of appearances of a diminutive female humanoid whom the Church had declared to be the Virgin Mary. Put that many people in one place, and you’re bound to have some whose ties to reality are less than secure. But the vast majority of the observers at Fátima were sane, normal human beings, and all saw much the same thing that October afternoon. The sun danced in the sky, changed colors, appeared to some as “a metallic disk as if of silver.” Then it fell to the earth.
Can we agree that, remarkable as our sun may be in many ways, there are some things it can’t possibly do and falling to the ground is one of them? Yet tens of thousands of men and women saw it do just that. The UFO books I knew as a teenager often had an obligatory chapter titled “Flying Saucers of Other Days” or something like that. The aim was to show that UFOs are nothing new, that our ancestors saw mysterious objects in the sky which they called by different names, not realizing they were interplanetary spaceships.
I don’t think any of the books I read mentioned the Miracle of the Sun. Possibly the authors sensed it might antagonize religious Catholics to see one of the Blessed Virgin’s most extraordinary miracles dismissed as “just” a flying saucer. Yet religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal, following the suggestions of Jacques Vallee and drawing on archival research by Portuguese UFOlogists, has pointed to intriguing resemblances between the appearance and behavior of the sun that day in 1917 and the UFO phenomenon thirty years later. The “small, pretty lady” from the sky who had appeared five months earlier to the three young shepherds of Fátima, her eyes black and her dress white and her height a little over one meter, would have been at home in an “occupant” report of the 1950s or ’60s. The three children were eventually persuaded by their elders, who of course knew better than they, to believe that the lady they met was none other than Our Lady. But at first they made no such identification.
The UFO writers of my youth might have declared the lady of Fátima to have “really” been a spacewoman.11 Kripal does no such thing. To label her an extraterrestrial, he argues, is no less a conventionalization than to call her Mary. Rather, treat Fátima and the UFO as manifestations of the same phenomenon, the one Hutton kept running up against. It’s a human phenomenon, and since the human animal remains much the same from one century to the next, premodern experiences of it are bound to be relevant to understanding the modern ones.
And so we come to one very special premodern “sighting” that you won’t find in any UFO book. I wasn’t looking for UFOs when I discovered it. I was trying to understand an extraordinary man of the seventeenth century, in the process of translating a sample of his writings from their original Hebrew. But a UFO, manifesting as a moon as uncanny as the sun at Fátima, was what I found.
ÇANAKKALE, 1683
On the evening of July 5, 1683, the Jewish magus, theologian, and cult leader Abraham Cardozo stepped outside his house and looked at the moon. What he saw there triggered a series of visions that lasted for weeks, nearly destroyed his health along with his faith, and would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Cardozo was then living in Çanakkale by the Dardanelles, where Turkey thrusts itself into the Aegean, about two hundred miles east-southeast of Istanbul. He was in exile, banned and excommunicated as a heretic. Eighteen years earlier he’d been caught up in the disastrous enthusiasm stirred up by the would-be Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. When Sabbatai converted to Islam and the mass movement grown up around him fell apart, Cardozo kept on believing. And preaching. And writing. And making himself generally obnoxious to the rabbis of his time, who paid him back by harassing him every way they could.
I’ve never been to Çanakkale, but they tell me the moon there on a summer night is a sight to inspire awe. It was approaching fullness on the evening of July 5, when Cardozo noticed it didn’t look quite as usual. He turned to his wife, his son, a serving boy, and two houseguests who were with him at the time. He said, “I see what appear to be shapes on the moon.”
The others saw them too. They recognized them. There on the moon were Sabbatai Zevi, the man who’d been Sabbatai’s prophet, and a sixteenth-century mystic named Isaac Luria. All three had been dead for years. Also “a fourth shape that looks to be a woman,” Cardozo’s companions told him.
He could see them clearly now. He wasn’t yet ready to make contact. The company must first eat, then say the evening prayer. Only afterward, “about a half hour past nightfall,” did they hear the mysterious entities “speaking with us from the moon, loudly, in human voices . . . as distinctly as though they were conversing with us in the garden.” Cardozo invited them down into the garden, suggesting they might stand on the trees. And they came.
So travel from the moon to the Dardanelles happens instantaneously, and you can hear the voices of lunar beings from your garden. Cardozo must have known better. People in his time may not have been able to calculate the precise distance of the moon from the earth, but they knew it was many thousands of miles. (Fifty thousand, the pioneer astronomer Johannes Kepler had calculated.) Carried by wild swans flying at propeller-plane velocity, like the hero of a science-fiction bestseller of 1638, you’d need “Eleven or Twelve daies” to get there. Cardozo’s “moon,” which like the UFO in Philadelphia and many in Belgium seemed only a few hundred yards away, was a psychic construction of his own, bearer of meaning within his symbolic universe. That moon-apparition superimposed itself on the real moon, the two fusing together.
The moon-people stayed two hours in Cardozo’s garden, discussing religious subjects with him and his friends. The next night they reappeared in his bedroom—only three of them, however. The fourth “shape,” the one like a woman, seems never to have left the moon. It was during this second visit that things began to turn ugly.
Cross-examined, the visitors admitted they weren’t the blessed ghosts they’d at first appeared to be. They’d come to reveal a dreadful truth: Cardozo’s God has been dethroned, stripped of power. The Devil now rules the world. They proved their point by spewing out blasphemies, taunting Cardozo to call on his God to “send fire to burn us up.”
Cardozo realized he was dealing with demons. It was too late; he couldn’t get them out of his bedroom. Horribly, it wasn’t they who burned in fire but Cardozo himself. He took to his bed with fiebre ardiente, “burning fever,” while the three men stood gloating beside the bed, “all dressed in black.” Three men in black: here they are in Çanakkale, 270 years before coming to visit Albert Bender in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and we realize Bender was lucky to come out of his encounter with three days of an upset stomach. Cardozo almost died.
Was that fiebre ardiente, perhaps, the only part of Cardozo’s story that belonged to the real world? Was the rest a fever-hallucination, projected back into the time before the onset of the disease? Maybe. But it’s also possible that he and his five companions really did experience a shared vision on the evening of July 5, perhaps triggered by some irregularity in the moon’s appearance, some odd contours that atmospheric conditions had lent to the lunar markings. Either way it’s a weird encounter, with beings at once earthly and extraterrestrial. It yields its meaning on two levels. And the enigmatic Fourth—the woman on the moon, who appears at the beginning of the story and then vanishes—is key to both.
For Abraham Cardozo hadn’t always been Jewish. He had been born in Spain in 1627 to a family that had converted to Catholicism in 1492, when all Jews were expelled from Spain. He had been christened Miguel and brought up a Catholic—in a country awash in paintings and sculptures of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception standing on the moon.
In this artwork the Virgin is usually accompanied by cherubs, often three of them—winged, so they might be imagined to fly down to earth while she stays on the moon. She’s very beautiful. We can almost see little Miguel staring, openmouthed with awe, at some portrait of the tender, mysterious Lady who rules the night sky. He’ll grow up to convert to Judaism, spurn his childhood faith and damn its “Blessed Virgin” as a supreme she-devil. The powerful, seductive images will stay lodged in his brain. They’ll erupt one summer night many years later, in a compelling, devastating vision.
That’s one level of interpretation, and it will explain much of Cardozo’s experience. But something else is operating here also, more archaic and universal than Cardozo and the culture from which he came. Like the symbolism of Communism and NATO in the Belgian UFO wave, the seventeenth-century art of the Immaculate Conception came flowing through channels hewn out thousands, perhaps many thousands, of years earlier. Dr. Jung, please call your office.
WHAT JUNG WAS TRYING TO SAY
We humans, according to Jung, are hard-wired to organize our perceptions into a number of fixed and universal patterns. These patterns, these matrixes as it were, are called archetypes. They’re fixed within the collective unconscious of our species and will crop up spontaneously, independently, and without any influence from one culture to another in the art and religion, the myth and the literature and the folkways, of societies in all ages and everywhere on the globe. Archetypes also turn up, just as prominently and just as spontaneously, in the dreams of individuals. Properly analyzed, they serve as benign guides to the unfolding of our spiritual lives.
One of these archetypes is the quaternity. This is a group of four—doesn’t matter four what; the content of the archetype will vary but the organizing pattern remains stable—organized as a 3 + 1. In other words, three of the four are alike, while the fourth is in some way different. Again, it doesn’t matter how it is different. But that difference is always of immense importance for understanding how the archetype functions.
Take, for example, the New Testament Gospels. Three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the Synoptic Gospels because they see eye to eye (“syn-optic”). They tell, with variations to be sure, essentially the same story of Jesus’s life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection. The Fourth Gospel, John, is different.
For the early Church, at least as far back as the second century, there could be four Gospels and only four. Their fourness was something embedded in the fabric of reality. It was prefigured in the four “living creatures,” one human and three with animal faces, in the Book of Revelation. Also farther back, in the Old Testament, Ezekiel sees four “living creatures,” each of which has four faces, three animal and one human. 3 + 1 once more.
The Christian Trinity, Jung thought, is a mutilated quaternity. In that mutilation, the suppression of the Fourth, lies the basic flaw of the Christian religion. What is that Fourth? Jung wavered between two alternatives, which, from a psychological perspective, can be seen as complementing one another: The Fourth is Satan. Christianity had suppressed its dark side, forcing its “shadow” (to use the Jungian term) into the unconscious. From there, unrecognized, it could work havoc that would have been impossible if it had been acknowledged and properly integrated (as, according to Jungian psychology, we all need to do with our “shadows” if we’re to become whole human beings). Or the Fourth is Mary, the feminine aspect of God, expelled into the darkness by historical Christianity’s one-sided insistence on masculinity.
“One, two, three—but where is the Fourth?”12 This is the question that, for Jung, must be asked whenever we come across a Three—in our dreams and also in our myths, which Jung understands as a kind of shared, communal dreaming.13
The method has its dangers. After reading Freud, you see sexual symbols wherever you look. Once in the Jungian mindset, you find archetypes everywhere. Quaternities turn up in places like the ancient rabbinic literature, where Jung himself never thought to look for them, dramatically confirming his ideas. That’s the danger. Pretty much everything can serve as confirmation for the system, while there’s hardly anything that can disconfirm it—a sign that, while the theory may be true, it also can give the illusion of truth because its own rules make it impossible to argue against. A cigar, Freud is famously though improbably reported to have said, is sometimes just a cigar. Does every threesome in this world have to be a Trinity? Every foursome a Quaternity?
Well, but a cigar in a dream is never just a cigar. It’s not necessarily a penis, but it’s something beyond itself. Otherwise it’s meaningless. When three dead men and an unknown woman appear together on a visionary moon, it’s a fair guess their number is not accidental.
It’s still less likely to be accidental, in that a parallel quaternity crops up in a different corner of Cardozo’s psychic life. Four Messiahs, he says, are destined to come into the world, three of them male. The fourth is a woman, a mysterious lady without any precedent in Jewish tradition, whom Cardozo never tries to explain. Like the woman on the moon, he leaves her an enigma.
The two quaternities mirror each other. One is divine, the other demonic. Both are divided by gender, 3 + 1; a cryptic female is the pivot of both. It’s likely that Cardozo doesn’t try to identify his woman Messiah because he himself has no idea who she is. She springs unbidden from his unconscious.
The same can be said of all four of the entities Cardozo and the other witnesses saw on the moon that July night in 1683. Only these manifested not as a theological hypothesis, but as an observed phenomenon within the physical world. That’s what makes them UFOs.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA, 1959
We’re now equipped to understand what was seen in the sky at Boianai, on the coast at the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, on the nights of Friday, June 26 and Saturday, June 27, 1959. It’s referred to in the UFO annals as the “Gill sighting”; researchers have hailed it, for good reason, as one of the best and most baffling “close-encounter” cases ever recorded, indeed as “history’s best case.” To this day it’s never been satisfactorily explained.14
Like many of the Belgian UFOs, like Cardozo’s sighting of the people on the moon, the event was multiply witnessed. Again, as in Cardozo’s sighting, the primary witness was a figure of some religious authority, in this case a young Anglican priest in charge of the mission at Boianai. “Presumably a reliable witness,” we UFOlogists used to say smugly of any clergyman reporting a UFO, in those innocent days when it was taken for granted that people of the cloth were upstanding folk who would never tell a lie. This presumption has been a bone in the throats of the UFO debunkers, who’ve had to find some way to explain how the priest didn’t really see the amazing things he said he saw. Even the caustic Menzel felt bound to declare that “there is no question, of course, of the integrity of Father Gill,” while hinting not too subtly that he didn’t entirely believe that. But Philip Klass, Menzel’s successor as archskeptic, belonged to a younger, more openly cynical generation. Klass was less circumspect in saying what he thought of the Reverend William Booth Gill.
The incident for which Gill became famous began at 6:45 on the evening of Friday, June 26. “Sighted bright white light from front direction N.W.,” runs the first of the jottings in Gill’s notebook, into which he recorded his impressions of the strange events as they happened. Then: “Coming closer, not so bright. Coming down 500 ft?, orange?, deep yellow?”
Gill sent one of his assistants “to call people.” Soon a crowd of thirty-eight had gathered. Later that evening, twenty-five of them would sign their names to a series of sketches made independently by Gill and two of the Papuan teachers at the mission school, attesting that they too had seen the object depicted in those drawings. “One object on top, move—man?” Gill wrote in his notebook. “Now three men—moving, glowing, doing something on deck. Gone.”
First one man, then three, self-luminous (“glowing”), as one might expect angels to be. Soon they were four, apparently distinct from each other and recognizable as individuals, like Cardozo’s foursome on the moon. “Men 1, 3, 4, 2 (appeared in that order). Thin elct. [electric] blue spot light. Men gone, spot light still there.” (To judge from the sketches, the “spot light” was shining at a 45-degree angle up into the sky.) The “men” returned to the UFO’s deck, or at least two of them did, until at 7:20 the “spot light” went off and the “men go,” and the “UFO goes through cloud” and could no longer be seen.
The disjointed quality of these notes speaks for their genuineness. If Gill were fabricating a story, surely he’d have come up with something more coherent. He’d have made up his mind, for example, whether the UFO’s color was orange or yellow. As an honest, baffled observer, scribbling down his impressions of something beyond his ken, his wavering on this point makes sense.
Over an hour after disappearing in the clouds, the UFO was back. By 8:50 there were four of them, the original “mother ship,” or “Mother,” as Gill calls it, and three “satellites” “coming and going through clouds.” Here’s the 3 + 1 quaternity—once again, shades of Cardozo.15 (The woman Cardozo saw on the moon, if indeed the Virgin Mary, was the Mother par excellence.) One or more of the UFOs remained intermittently visible until past 10:30. The four luminescent humanoids, however, didn’t show themselves again until the following evening.
At about 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 27, a Papuan woman who worked as Gill’s medical assistant noticed a “large U.F.O.” in the same spot in the sky where the mother ship had been the evening before. A few minutes later Gill saw it too. “I called Ananias [Rarata, a teacher at the mission school] and several others,” Gill wrote two and a half weeks later in his report, “and we stood in the open to watch it. . . . We watched figures appear on top—four of them—no doubt that they are human. Possibly the same object I took to be the ‘Mother’ ship last night.” No doubt that they are human. Yet their luminosity points to something more, and Gill would remember years later, “I thought they were angels.” The paradox, that the visitors were human and also beyond human, must be allowed to stand intact.
Two smaller UFOs, stationary, could also be seen in the darkening sky.
On the large one two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the centre of the deck—were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or “setting up” something (not visible). One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved, to our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same. Ananias and self began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise perhaps both).
As in Philadelphia in 1974, the UFO responded to, even mirrored, the actions of the observers.
As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch [flashlight] and directed a series of long dashes towards the U.F.O. After a minute or two of this, the U.F.O. apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth. Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the U.F.O. began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further. After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared “below” deck. At 6:25 p.m. two figures re-appeared to carry on with whatever they were doing before the interruption (?). The blue spot light came on for a few seconds, twice in succession.
Five minutes later Gill went inside to dinner.
So, apparently, did everyone else. At 7:00, when Gill checked back, “No. 1 U.F.O. still present, but appeared somewhat smaller—observers go to church for Evensong.” Forty-five minutes later, the service over, Gill found the sky covered with cloud, the visibility very poor, and the UFOs gone.
Gill’s self-reported behavior seems odd by any standard. As far as Philip Klass was concerned, it gave the lie to Gill’s whole story. How could anyone, on the brink of the first human contact with extraterrestrials, have interrupted the thrilling event to eat dinner and lead a church service? To this criticism Gill offered a string of rejoinders. He didn’t realize at the time there was anything “eerie or otherworldly” about what he was seeing; he imagined it was probably some kind of American or possibly Australian “hovercraft.” Anyway, he and the Papuans weren’t getting anywhere with their efforts to persuade the pilots to land and have dinner with them. So why not go eat?
This all has the feel of after-the-fact rationalization. For me, what’s important is that nearly three centuries earlier Cardozo and his friends, faced with a similar circumstance, reacted in precisely the same way. “After our meal,” Cardozo told his fellow witnesses, “we shall say the evening prayer”—and only afterward return to communicate with the moon-beings. It sounds very much as if this impulse, to eat and then to worship, is not a distraction from the experience but part and parcel of it.
What were the UFOs, really? To which I’ll respond: what do we mean by really? Reading the report, I come away with the same impression as Menzel: heavenly bodies seen under unusual atmospheric conditions. This would explain why the objects came and went as the clouds parted or thickened—a detail that also has deeper resonances of the Magonian sky-ships of medieval France, which were said to “come in the clouds.” Nearly twenty years after the sighting, Gill visited the United States and met with two UFOlogists, who had him point out the positions his UFOs had occupied in the sky. Their conclusion was that the “satellite” UFOs, but not the “mother ship,” could be explained as bright stars and planets. But this is too modest. Skeptic Martin Kottmeyer’s close analysis of Gill’s diagram of the positions of the Friday evening UFOs, done in 2007, shows convincingly that Friday’s “mother ship” (and therefore Saturday’s also) was the planet Jupiter, its three “satellites” the planet Saturn and the stars Spica and Rigel Kentaurus.
Of course the witnesses’ perceptions underwent a distortion that borders on the incredible. So what else is new? We saw the same thing in Philadelphia in 1974, where an airplane was transmogrified into a low-flying, hovering object that blinked or retreated in response to the witnesses’ auto headlights. We saw it at Fátima, where a crowd of many thousands—not a mere twenty-five as at Boianai—collectively saw the sun do things it couldn’t have done. The process will seem less fantastic when we recall that the external stimulus for the UFO sighting is only a trigger. The “real” UFO, the bearer of significance, comes from inside.
Menzel, more reluctant than Klass to call Gill a liar, made another supposition almost as insulting. He conjectured that “the priest, perhaps unknown to himself, has considerable myopia and astigmatism in his eye.” As for the Papuan witnesses, Menzel dismissed them as docile, impressionable primitives eager to please their “great white leader” and echo whatever he said. Gill, who wore glasses and would have noticed if they were missing, scoffed at both ideas. His parishioners were educated, strong-minded men and women who’d been doing all their schoolwork in English since third grade. When they attached their names to his report, they knew perfectly well what they were signing. They saw the UFO too.
Yet they didn’t see it independent of Gill, or of each other. There must have been cries—mutually intelligible, in whatever language uttered—of “Do you see that?” and “Yes, yes, I do!” (just as Cardozo didn’t know quite what he was seeing on the moon until his friends told him). Nonverbal cues and inflections of tone must have played their part. We humans are capable of conveying extraordinary amounts of information to one another in the most extraordinarily subtle ways, much of the time unaware we’re doing it. The construction of the disk-shaped craft with its four luminescent beings—or better, its displacement from the psyche into the sky—was a joint activity of all the witnesses, Gill included. Or, more accurately, of those twenty-five who signed their names to the drawings. The thirteen who didn’t sign were presumably those who, despite their best efforts, couldn’t quite manage to see what the majority saw.
Menzel’s and Klass’s assumptions to the contrary, it’s not at all obvious that Gill was the sole or even the principal architect of that process. An indigenous belief, widespread in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, held the sky to be inhabited by humanlike ghosts or spirits who sometimes take full human form and descend to earth. This was the land of the cargo cults, religious movements aimed at manipulating the ancestral sky beings into disgorging plentiful “cargo” for their children on earth, as the Japanese and Americans did for their soldiers in World War II. In 1981, a Papuan university student who “was trying to be very respectful of the traditions of his people” told his Australian professor how he had once seen “the heavens open and a group of angels in white clothing high in the sky. I saw it with my own eyes.” Subtract the “white clothing,” add the up-to-date hovercraft machinery, and we have an experience akin to the collective vision at Boianai.
“That ‘great white leader’ business,” said Gill—referring back to Menzel—“might happen in Hollywood movies about African missionaries, but certainly not where I was.” (In 1959 Papua New Guinea was a “territory” governed by Australia. It wouldn’t get its independence for another sixteen years.) “I was sent to Boianai to sort things out,” Gill explained, “because there were certain problems caused by a growing anti-European feeling. They didn’t want a European there at all, really, and they wanted me least of all because I was a stranger to the district. . . . We had some real difficulties.” Those difficulties, whatever they were, evidently proved intractable. Three months after the sighting, in September 1959, Gill was no longer in Boianai.
And I’m left wondering whether the visions shared by Gill and the Papuans those June evenings represent a joint psychic effort to transcend their difficulties, to integrate their tensions. For Jung the “mandala”—the circle, the wheel, the sphere—is one of the most widespread and powerful of the archetypes, a representation of “totality whose simple round form portrays the archetype of the self . . . uniting apparently irreconcilable opposites.” It’s a profoundly religious manifestation, for is not God “a circle whose centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”? No wonder that when Jung heard about flying saucers in the sky, his thoughts went to mandalas.
So the mandala-disk and its quaternity of riders complement each other, like Cardozo’s “moon” and the quaternity he saw standing on it. Confronted with this vision, what does Gill do? He goes to dinner.
Alone? Or with the others, his Papuan congregants with whom he must have shared deep feelings of affection, along with the tensions that soon were to drive him away? The evidence is ambiguous. “At 6:30 p.m. I went to dinner,” Gill wrote in his notebook—I, not we. On the other hand, he spoke afterward of his hope that “if we got them to land we would find the pilots to be ordinary earthmen in military uniforms and we would have dinner with them.” We, not I. I’ll guess that the second version conveys the truer picture, and that the “dinner” was to be a shared communion at which the four shining visitors were anticipated and honored guests, like the angelic trio to whom Abraham offered his hospitality in Genesis chapter 18 (and whom the Bible story, like Gill, calls simply “men”). The meal was followed, appropriately, by a communal act of worship.
Seen from this perspective, Gill’s and the Papuans’ response to the UFO’s numinous presence wasn’t at all odd or unsuitable. Vision and rite worked in tandem toward a goal of reconciliation and unity. If the rifts proved too deep to be healed, that wasn’t the fault of the UFO.
And maybe Gill was lucky the UFO couldn’t be persuaded to land. Cardozo tells what might have happened if it did.
In this chapter I’ve offered a fair number of conjectures. I can’t expect the reader to accept them all. But I hope I’ve established the following main points:
First, the external stimulus for the UFO sighting is apt to undergo major and seemingly fantastic distortion in the course of its transformation into the UFO. This doesn’t always happen—which is why many UFO sightings are easy to explain—but it’s a common feature of the phenomenon.
Second, the distortion is not random or meaningless, but rooted in and explicable through the psyche of the observers. The stimulus is mundane. The distortion—or better, the transformation—is the true UFO, and the real object of inquiry.
Third, the psychological roots of the transformation may be relatively shallow—as in Philadelphia, where they reflected a transient crisis over a young woman’s pregnancy. They may go deeper, into collective awareness of a decisive historical moment, as in Belgium. Or they can plunge very deep, into layers of the human psyche that transcend centuries and cultures. Call this the “collective unconscious,” “Magonia,” or whatever you will. It’s something real—and no less alien, no less mysterious, than any planet in the depths of interstellar space.
It’s a realm we’ll need to explore if we’re to understand one of the most baffling aspects of the UFO enigma: the alien abduction.
Notes
7. The UFO annals attest to perceptual and memory gaps of this sort. On the night of March 3, 1968, fragments of the Soviet moon probe Zond IV came streaking through the upper atmosphere. Some of the people who witnessed the dramatic reentry accurately described meteor-like lights moving along straight paths. But others saw an object “shaped like a fat cigar” with “square-shaped windows” and “a metallic look about the fuselage,” which was “constructed of many pieces of flat sheets of metal-like material with a ‘riveted together look.’” Or it was reported, “The object flew at about tree-top level and was seen very clearly since it was just a few yards away. All of the observers saw a long jet airplane, looking like a vehicle without wings. It was on fire both in front and behind. All the observers observed many windows. . . . My cousin said ‘If there had been anybody in the UFO near the windows, I would have seen them.’” On November 17, 1975, two college students near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, watched what seem to have been the lights of airplanes landing at a nearby airport. One student preserved a more or less accurate memory of what he’d seen, though he was at a loss to explain it. But within two days his friend had begun to remember “a domed disk that had a glassed-in cockpit. And just days after that, she was telling people that she had seen humanoid shapes behind the lights.” The investigator who reported the case found no reason to doubt the young woman’s sincerity. The mundane stimulus had been transformed within her; or, as I would put it, the UFO had come from inside.
8. This machinery included the American F-117 jet, unveiled earlier in the 1980s, whose near-triangular shape is likely to have had some influence on the Belgian “visionaries.”
9. HAMLET: “Do you see nothing there?” QUEEN: “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see” (Hamlet, act 3, scene 4). Schatzman quotes this passage and wonders how she knew that “all that is I see.”
10. An experience known to more than one UFO abductee. A single mother in her thirties, in California in 1992, went to bed after watching mysterious golden globes dancing around the night sky. She “felt a warm sexual tingle between her legs” which “grew to waves of orgasmic passion as she felt something hard penetrating her in a way that could not be mistaken for anything other than raw sex.” She awoke with her thighs scratched and red. Challenged as to whether she might have been dreaming, she retorted, “I know the smell of sex.”
11. A spacewoman such as Aura Rhanes, a petite, stunning five-hundred-year-old brunette from the planet “Clarion,” who shared enlightenment and rides in her flying saucer with American contactee Truman Bethurum in the 1950s. Bethurum’s wife, suing for divorce, named Aura Rhanes as co-respondent.
12. Quoted by Jung from the beginning of Plato’s Timaeus.
13. Or in the communal rituals we call sports? It’s possible to see the baseball diamond, with its three identical bases + home plate, as a material embodiment of the quaternity.
14. The primary source for the Gill case is a typewritten report prepared in November 1959 by the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society (VFSRS, of Victoria, Australia) and incorporating an earlier report by Gill, dated July 15. I am more grateful than I can say to Martin Kottmeyer for having shared with me his copy of this report. All quotations from Gill, unless stated otherwise, are taken from it.
15. Adding one more “four” to the mix, the sketches by Gill and the Papuans show four legs—functionless, since the UFOs never landed—on the “mother ship” and each of the three “satellites.”