UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

For a number of decades, people have claimed that they have been taken aboard unusual flying craft–often against their will–and examined in alien environments by strange beings.

Known to those who study unexplained aerial phenomena as UFO or alien abduction, the earliest UFO literature was essentially void of any references to such captures or kidnappings. However, beginning in the 1960s popular books on the subject, namely John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey, began to chronicle the claims of those like Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple who alleged they were taken aboard a flying saucer and examined by aliens while returning late one night from a vacation at Niagara Falls.

Other books that followed expanded on the narrative of abductions, producing similar reports to that of the Hills–some of which dated prior to their own 1961 encounter–and before long a shift in the focus of the UFO community at large was well apparent. Conferences that once showcased Air Force veterans like Major Donald Keyhoe, advocating the release of UFO information by the government, and civilian researchers and scientists like J. Allen Hynek seeking trace evidence of landed saucers, were replaced by those now taking up the case of the abductees: Harvard psychologist Dr. John Mack and artist-turned investigator/hypnotist Budd Hopkins, as well as those like Whitley Strieber, a successful novelist who eventually came forward with his own abduction experiences… both to fanfare, and attacks from critics.

Then, with the coming of the new millennium, the focus of the UFO community seemed to shift once again, this time moving gradually away from the abduction phenomenon, in favor of more “nuts and bolts” approaches to studying odd things in the skies.

What caused the shift? Has the widespread accessibility to information sources (and, perhaps more importantly, opposing viewpoints) led to fewer budding researchers following what could be deemed more credulous lines of thought, despite interest that persists in a UFO phenomenon? Could it also be that the once popular abduction literature–after decades of being sustained on even less physical evidence than that which exists in support of UFOs themselves–finally began to collapse inward, under the weight of broader scientific scrutiny?

Perhaps it’s a combination of factors that have caused the shift away from alien abductions that once held the hearts of so many in the UFO community. In a sense, UFO reporting in the last few decades has taken a postmodern approach, in the sense that old ideas once taken for granted are now more thoroughly questioned. Some of the better books on the UFO subject to arrive in recent years have focused almost exclusively on science, historical analysis, and sometimes just bare-bones journalism: Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record comes to mind, as well as my friend David Marler’s Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation and John B. Alexander Ph.D.’s UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities all come to mind in this regard. From the more skeptical side of the equation, Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking About UFO Claims by Robert Sheaffer takes a look at famous cases, and calls into question how and why caution should be employed by UFO advocates. Occasionally, groups from one camp may criticize the other (or hit back in defending their positions) although, in my opinion, perspectives from both sides of the fence are helpful, and necessary, in an effort toward looking at the phenomenon objectively.

Of course, one thing that the reader of any of the aforementioned books will notice is that there is very little (if any, in some cases) to be said about alleged alien abductions in such modern examples of UFO literature. We could speculate all day on the reasons for this “shift,” as I’ve called it, although a more interesting line of inquiry, in my opinion, has to do with its origins in the first place: where did the idea of alien abductions come from? Or at very least (and so as not to presuppose that all such claims are to be ruled out of hand, however unlikely they seem), are there cultural predecessors in myth and fiction that might give us an idea about some of the influences behind the strange rise, and sudden fall, of what became a fringe movement within an already controversial subject like UFOs?

As several researchers have outlined already over the years, the general features of the alien abduction motif are all common in much earlier literature, including fairy folklore of the British Isles, as well as other mythology from around the world (the works of Jacques Vallee come to mind here, as do those of Jerome Clarke, among others). Cultural groups since time immemorial have spoken of gods and spirit folk who occasionally carry humans away from the mortal realm, sometimes accompanied by periods of missing time–a trope that has been present in alien abductions as early as the Betty and Barney Hill encounter.

Shortly after UFOs assumed their place in the cultural landscape by the end of the 1940s, claims of encounters with “Space Brothers” and other friendly visitors from nearby planets that are now well-known to be uninhabited (or simply uninhabitable) began to appear. These alleged encounters are very different from the claims of the abductees, however: most of the “friendly” aliens of this period were suspiciously humanlike in appearance, and any earthling setting foot inside one of their flying saucers did so of his or her own volition.

Not so with the abductees, among whose claims we find such terrors as paralysis and levitation in the methods extraterrestrials employ to bring their human captives on board (as many modern chroniclers of the phenomenon will note, certain similarities exist here with the sensations experienced by sufferers of sleep paralysis, a phenomenon that was not as widely recognized by the general public only decades ago).

It is also noteworthy that the first known appearance of the alien abduction idea in a print publication occurred yearsbefore any allegedly “true” abduction reports had been publicized. One of the cover stories of the October 1953 issue of Man to Man, a men’s pulp magazine known for its adventure stories (and occasionally, speculative science articles) had been the sensational piece, “Are Flying Saucers Kidnapping Humans?” This was featured alongside the appetizing feature article, “WHY PEOPLE MUTILATE THEMSELVES” (all the sorts of pertinent things readers of adventure magazines in the 1950s wanted to know, I suppose).

See, I wasn’t kidding… and what’s the deal with the walrus?

Even the earliest alien abductions on record occurred after the publication of the aforementioned article; the strange case of Antonio Villas Boas, for instance, allegedly took place in 1957, but wasn’t written about until much later. And on a similar note, researcher Peter Rogerson has said that he feels the Vilas Boas case may raise a few red flags, since a story with details that were similar to Vilas Boas’s account had been printed in the November 1957 issue of the Brazilian periodical O Cruzeiro (this would have placed the publication date after the date Villas Boas would later allege that his encounter took place, although he didn’t publicly discuss it until well after the article was published. Hence, it is possible that if his story was a fabrication, the “later” article could nonetheless have been its inspiration).

Books like Ann Druffel and Scott Rogo’s The Tujunga Canyon Contacts actually did outline a series of alleged abductions said to have occurred in 1953; however, as with the Antonio Villas Boas affair, the account wasn’t written about until 1980 (I should note that Whitley Streiber’s book Communion also outlines experiences from his childhood, although these likely would have placed them between the late 1950s and early 1960s). Hence, it is reasonable to assume that the aforementioned article does, in fact, predate virtually all of the modern alien abduction claims.

Add to this the countless science fiction magazines from even earlier in the twentieth century that featured humans being captured, strapped down, and examined with scientific equipment from fictional alien worlds on their covers, and it becomes hard to avoid the fact that the alien abduction meme had already been firmly planted (or maybe we should say “implanted” in this case) in the public mind by the time stories of “real” abductions began to appear in books and magazines.

Alien beings are often (but not always) likened to insects in their behavior and appearance.

Although my general tone here may sound completely dismissive toward the alien abduction meme, it is not my intention to say that all people who claim to have had odd experiences–in particular, those with unusual aerial vehicles, or even their occupants–are liars, frauds, or simply wrong (and frankly, I maintain a certain disdain for those who do resort to ad hominem attacks and accusations fraud, hoaxes, or monetary incentives in order to get their points across in any case).

As I’ve noted before in the past, I have met Travis Walton on a number of occasions, and find him to be a delightful person in general (as anyone who has met him would attest). Walton is a kind, friendly person, and on many occasions when we’ve talked, the conversation has had to do with anything but UFOs or abductions. He often gives talks about his experience, where he notes the way its depiction in Hollywood was sensationalized.

He wrote a book about his experience, and in addition to selling it at events he attends, he is sometimes paid to give his lectures. Strangely, the fact that Travis profits in any way from his experiences have sometimes been used as a case against his claims, with doubtful types calling foul and complaining that “it’s all just a way of making money!” To the contrary, Walton is not a full time “UFO celebrity,” and has had to work for a living like anyone else over the years. Frankly, if I had experienced what Walton says happened to him back in November 1975, I would have written a book about it, too. In short, the complaints that people like Travis Walton do what they do “for the money” is an old–and inaccurate–stereotype, that is all-too-often launched against UFO advocates as a way of delegitimizing their claims (as an author of at least a few books on the more nuts and bolts side of the UFO equation, I can say I speak from a degree of experience in this regard, as there are far more profitable ways to make a living!).

Of course, I can’t prove or disprove what Travis Walton claims. All I can tell you personally is that he is a pleasant individual and that while I am often not convinced as far as many abduction claims go, there are a few elements to his experience that, to me, stand out from the rest. Despite having received plenty of critiques over the years, it remains one of the only multiple-witness UFO encounters of its kind; this alone sets it apart from a broad majority of more credulous abduction claims, let alone the fact that in Walton’s case, an individual (Walton) actually did go missing for several days. This is far more than could be said of the majority of similar incidents.

And as far as similar incidents go, there is really just one that comes to mind, although it is seldom discussed in the United States (or in general). The disappearance of Franck Fontaine near Pontoise, France in November 1979 is a case that bears a few similarities to the Travis Walton situation, and perhaps curiously so. To summarize the situation briefly, Fontaine and a pair of friends were planning a trip to the nearby market to sell clothing on the morning of Monday, November 26, 1979. Shortly after 4 AM, Franck and his friends observed a light that appeared to be larger than the moon passing behind the La Justice Mauve apartment complex where they lived. Franck went in the direction of the object to get a closer look, and when his friends pursued him minutes later, Franck’s truck was found sitting with its interior lights on, surrounded by a curious fog; the light zipped away into the sky, and Franck was nowhere to be seen.

Much like the Walton case, Franck Fontaine remained missing for several days, then purportedly reappeared at the apartment at 4:20 AM on December 3. A media frenzy ensued, during which police, reporters, and UFO investigative groups all became interested; ultimately the three would come forward and admit that the entire affair had been a hoax, and most left it at that, satisfied that the entire affair had been another waste of time, like most similar UFO-related claims.

A point worthy of mention here is that when elements arise during a UFO investigation that would seem to point to a hoax, skeptical investigators tend to rest their case, emphasizing only the facts that support such dismissal (in Walton’s case, the fact that questions remained about various lie detector tests he and the other witnesses had taken, as well as the involvement of the National Enquirer in a possible monetary reward for “proof” of alien contact, come to mind). This is logical, of course, since those making the extraordinary claims are the ones left with the burden of proof, not the skeptics (who are right to question what appear to be extraordinary claims). If a party in question is suspected of a possible hoax, and then they come forward later and admit to it, continuing to pursue the case would appear to make no sense.

Jacques Vallee wrote about the Fontaine case in his 1991 book, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, a book which presented what may be Vallee at his most skeptical. Colleagues of Vallee in the French UFO research community that had been in touch with Fontaine and his friends had noted inconsistencies in their narrative, albeit not with relevance to the incident so much as their claims that the entire affair had been a hoax. In essence, the group from La Justice Mauve finally claimed to a select few researchers that they were so harrassed by reporters, skeptics, and UFO advocates alike that they simply admitted it was a hoax so they could be left alone.

Vallee goes on to follow this line of inquiry, which leads to a meeting with a French government official who is not named in the book, but of whom Vallee says, “His full name is known to me.” This individual explains to Vallee that the entire affair had actually been orchestrated, as outlined in this exchange which Vallee paraphrases in Revelations (for sake of clarity, Vallee leads off the exchange below, with questions and answers from the unnamed official alternating thereafter):

“What happened to Fontaine?”

“We put him to sleep and he was kept under an altered state of high suggestibility.”

“Were the police and the gendarmerie aware that the operation was a hoax conducted by a higher-level agency?”

“Certainly not. Their behavior under these conditions was one of the things we wanted to observe.”

“What was your own role?”

“My interest in the affair is purely personal. It has no relationship to my position with the French Air Force.”

“Would it be correct to say that you deliberately created a major UFO event to find out if you could rely on the reactions and the investigative abilities of local law enforcement agencies?”

“That would be a fair way to describe it.”

As Vallee notes in Revelations, upon asking whether the official was concerned whether he would publish this exchange, the official told him that “anything you publish will simply be denied.” However, of greater importance here is the fact that Vallee notes the similarities between the Fontaine case and the Walton incident from a few years earlier. “I have met with Travis Walton and with the crew boss, Mike Rogers,” Vallee says, “who had seen the craft and the beam. I am satisfied they are telling the truth as they experienced it, although I am not ready to take the hypnotic data literally, for reasons I have explained in detail in previous works.” (In contrast to Vallee’s latter statement, Walton states on a “Questions and Answers” page on his website that, “I did not recall any experiences under hypnosis that I could not remember before. The hypnosis did help me verbalize my experience in greater detail, without being overwhelmed by anxiety, but did not help me regain any lost memories.”)

“I do not think Fontaine was abducted by extraterrestrials,” Vallee continues later in the chapter. “But I do not think he is lying either. The disappearance of Franck Fontaine is one of the most disturbing episodes in the whole history of UFOs. But it was not a hoax.”

Arguably, Vallee’s considerations in relation to the Fontaine case–and that of Travis Walton–are very similar to my own. The trouble with the aforementioned points of interest, of course, is that unique though they are, they still don’t provide the hard evidence we require in order to conclusively prove that there is a tangible element to such cases; they do, however, strongly imply that what could be occurring is far from being anything extraterrestrial in nature.

Of course, the same may be said of the broader UFO phenomenon, too: despite our best efforts over the decades, very little in the way of tangible, physical evidence has been supplied in support of such claims, let alone in a way that might be conducive to the advancement of new ideas. On the other hand, while we’re terribly lacking in physical proof, there is more than enough data that pertains to UFO eyewitness reports to suggest there is something going on here. In that sense, the case for rational inquiry has never been greater: if there is a phenomenon or other element at work here–as many have supposed for decades already–then obviously the most reliable methodologies at our disposal must be employed in order to assess what it is, and to see if there is an underlying purpose or intention behind it.

That much would seem evident, of course, in the event that UFOs represent a real and tangible phenomenon. Obviously, we still have a lot of questions left to be answered here.

If any readers would like to correspond with me on this, or similar related subjects, I can be reached via email here, or at my website here.

“In the beginning,” so it is written, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

Sometime after that, humans came along in this cosmological origin story too (although I would wager that this occurred more than just a few days later, despite what the text quoted above has to say about it). Thereafter, we spent ages bumbling around on our little mudball, during which the rise and fall of chiefdoms, city-states, and civilizations occurred, along with countless wars and conflicts over land disputes, material shortages, kidnappings, killings, and the like.

At some point, things seemed to have calmed down a little–agriculture certainly helped with this, as did the formation of laws and governance–and humans finally had time to rest, and perhaps more importantly, to think. After a few thousand years of contemplation along these lines, finally, within the last few hundred years or so somebody had the idea that we might not be the only ones the Big Guy upstairs took the time to bother to create… if you prescribe to that sort of thing.

Formation of the idea that there might be inhabited worlds beyond our own first required understanding that Earth is, in fact, a round planetary body in space, and that several others exist in our cosmic neighborhood, all encircling our sun (hat tips are in order here for Galileo, Kepler, Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and various others who contributed to such thought over the ages). In light of this, the idea of leaving Earth to visit nearby celestial bodies has actually been around for quite a while: mention of such things as travel to the moon had already been left to posterity as early as the second-century in Lucien’s satires, and a few centuries thereafter, philosophers were seriously debating the idea of whether other planets existed, and what kinds of “people” might reside there (“Cosmic Pluralism,” in other words).

By the 17th century, discussion of such likelihoods had become fairly commonplace. Eighteenth-century writers of no less esteem than Washington Irving and François-Marie Arouet (or Voltaire, as he’s better known, for those of you who slept through French Enlightenment history) had written stories where anthropomorphic “aliens” visited Earth.

There were a number of consistent themes in early science fiction writing about aliens. In particular, aliens were generally anthropomorphic (that is, they resembled humans), and were often even referred to as “people.” In fact, for some authors of alien fiction, these beings didn’t merely resemble us: visitors from other worlds actually were humans. This isn’t hard to imagine, given consideration that prior to the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species in November 1859, concepts like evolution would have been remote, to say the least. In times prior to Darwin’s influence, the notion that humans were literally “made in God’s image” was more widely accepted; hence our human shape and form had been divinely inspired, not as a result of adaptations to our environment over long stretches of time.

It only stood to reason, then, that if God made us in his image, and that we lived on a planet orbiting the sun, then perhaps there were other “people” made by God, who lived elsewhere in the universe on alien planets similar to ours. Thus, the theological concept of “aliens” still entailed beings that were essentially human. Authors whose written works followed Darwin’s widespread influence reflected themes of evolution and adaptation in relation to the alien concept, such as Camile Flammarion’s 1862 work, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds.

Decades later, H.G. Wells pointed us in a less anthropocentric direction with the octopoidal Martian invaders featured in his The War of the Worlds. The inclusion of tentacled antagonists set a new precedent for how alien life would look in the fiction of the years to come; however, rather than diversifying as Wells did, and allowing their aliens to take other unusual shapes and forms, many writers simply followed suit and incorporated tentacled, squid or octopus-like aliens into their own work (even H.P. Lovecraft, for all his imagination, appeared to strongly favor this motif). There are some notable exceptions, of course (insectoids, bodiless brains, symbiotes, robotic beings, etc), but the “tentacled alien” is a trend that nonetheless continues today, as seen in films like The Arrival and countless other stories.

Of particular interest in our brief look at the evolution of the “alien” idea is that concepts involving biological alien entities from other planets were in use for centuries before the word extraterrestrial ever came along. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word extraterrestrial is defined as follows:

extraterrestrial (adj) also extra-terrestrial, “occurring or originating outside the Earth,” 1812, from extra- + terrestrial. As a noun from 1956.

While OED gives us the correct definition, there are a few things to point out about the history given here; they provide a rather obscure, earlier date of 1812 for the origin of the term (without further context or reference to where this occurred), and later its appearance as a noun in 1956. As far as finding the earliest print appearances of this expression (and specifically in relation to alien life), once again we must return to Wells, who after giving us the first non-anthropomorphic aliens in popular fiction, also seems to have been the first popular writer to gift us with a new term for them. The passage below appeared in the third chapter of The War of the Worlds, entitled “On Horsell Common,” where we can see that Wells was using the word more than half a decade earlier:

‘It required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the gray scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue. “Extra-terrestrial” had no meaning for most of the onlookers.’

It is possible that the earliest use of a non-hyphenated, nominative variant of extraterrestrial didn’t appear in print until the 1950s, although L. Sprague de Camp also appears to have used the expression in 1939 in an article, “Design for Life (Part 1 of 2),” which was first published in the May 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction (this was actually one of two pieces de Camp published in that issue, although his other contribution, a short story called “Employment,” was published under a pseudonym due to the magazine’s policies against publication of more than one contribution by an individual within a single issue). It was also de Camp who first shortened Wells’ term into the popular acronym “E.T.” as seen today, and borrowed famously by Steven Speilberg for his famous film of the same name.

L. Sprague de Camp

So while it does appear that Wells was first to use the hyphenated form of the word in popular literature in 1898, there is one other noteworthy example of a similar concept that does come to mind. In the 1885 preface to his Beyond Good and Evil, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also uses the term “super-terrestrial,” although not in reference to the idea of biological alien life (I happened to notice Nietzsche’s use of this expression quite apart from any research for this article, and so admittedly I find it to be novel, albeit not particularly relevant to our search for the etymological origins of extraterrestrials in the English language. Also keep in mind that Nietzsche would have written the word in German, appearing as überirdischen, which directly translates to mean “unearthly,” or in the context in which he used it, might also be taken to have meant “supernatural.” In my estimation, the translation of this word into “super-terrestrial” had been a selective interpretation made by the translator, who in this case would likely have been Helen Zimmern, whose first English translation of the book appeared in 1906. Thus–spake Zarathustra?–we might even stretch a bit further to speculate that Zimmern could even have read Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and had come across his use of “Extra-terrestrial,” which for all we may know could have influenced her later translation of Nietzsche… so in essence, the point is still awarded to Wells for this one).

But why is there any need for a further distinction between “alien” and “extraterrestrial” in the first place? Actually, if we look back at Wells’ first use of the word, he wasn’t referring explicitly to a biological alien entity, per se: he had been using the term in relation to the description of “the gray scale of the Thing,” which “was no common oxide,” and also “the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder”. In other words, Wells described the appearance of the cylindrical vessel in which the invading Martians have arrived. Quite obviously, it had been later authors that would begin to use the term in relation to alien beings themselves.

And for such authors, another reason for the “shift” might be that the word alien, in modern usage, has a variety of different meanings and interpretations. In the strictly terrestrial sense, it has relevance to things that may be seen as foreign or different to a given person or group; this has led to some problems, since the use of alien as a noun, which entails “a foreigner, someone who isn’t a naturalized citizen“ has a hard time escaping associations with its adjective form, which generally means “distasteful or odd” (one can clearly see the reasons for controversy here over its use in relation to such things as immigration, particularly in North America and parts of Europe). On the other hand, there is nothing about the word extraterrestrial that can be misconstrued as pertaining to earthly affairs.

The evolution of the extraterrestrial idea, as we can see, moved at a slow creep across the ages. Looking back over time at the conceptual development of human attitudes toward alien life is fascinating in a number of ways, and of course, far more could be said of this subject than the brief overview presented here. If anything, the gradual revelation that other forms of life could exist somewhere “out there”–and perhaps more importantly, that such a thing as “out there” existed in the first place–did more than merely introduce the concept of alien life; it caused humans to think about ourselves, our origins, and ultimately, what it actually means to be human.

Perhaps with the innovation and discovery of the coming years, we will also begin to glean some idea about what it could mean to be “extraterrestrial,” if such life from other worlds is eventually proven, without question, to exist.