Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: audio for full exposure listen with headphones. In November of
Speaker 1: last year, I spoke to David Halpern, who taught in
Speaker 1: the Religious Studies department at the University of North Carolina
Speaker 1: until he retired in two thousand. We talked about his
Speaker 1: book The Intimate Alien, which pushes aside the believer skeptic
Speaker 1: dichotomy to propose a new framework from which to view
Speaker 1: the UFO question. The question is not what are they
Speaker 1: or where did they come from? The question is what
Speaker 1: do they mean? My name is David J. Halper Right.
Speaker 1: I was a teenage UFO investigator back in the nineties sixties,
Speaker 1: and I grew up to become a professor of religious studies.
Speaker 1: For twenty four years, I taught judaic studies in the
Speaker 1: Department of Religious Studies that the University of North Carolina
Speaker 1: at Chapel Hill. My areas of special interest were religious
Speaker 1: traditions of heavenly ascensions and other worldly journeys, which I
Speaker 1: think I realized even while I was studying them were
Speaker 1: my teenage uphology. In a more respectable guise that, as
Speaker 1: I describe in my book Intimate Alien The Hidden Story
Speaker 1: of the UFO. At the age of twelve going on thirteen,
Speaker 1: I became utterly convinced that UFOs were real and that
Speaker 1: it was my destiny to solve the mystery of what
Speaker 1: they were and what they what they meant for us.
Speaker 1: And gradually, as I went off to college, I let
Speaker 1: go of the belief but the UFO. If I let
Speaker 1: go of the UFOs, they never let go of me,
Speaker 1: and I remained. Really I was quite aware of this,
Speaker 1: captivated by what I would now call the UFO mythology
Speaker 1: and it's intersections with certain more ancient traditional mythologies. And eventually,
Speaker 1: in the course of my academic career, I published lots
Speaker 1: of articles and five books on Jewish Messianism and mysticism,
Speaker 1: and I also published a coming of age novel, Journal
Speaker 1: of a UFO Investigator, and in Intimate Alien, I turn
Speaker 1: around and look at what the UFOs meant to me,
Speaker 1: how they've been a leading thread through my own mental life,
Speaker 1: and it worked out moved out from there to what
Speaker 1: they mean for our culture, for the people who believe
Speaker 1: in them, and for the people who disbelieve in them
Speaker 1: but often seem just as emotionally engaged with them as
Speaker 1: the believers. What's the thesis of your book. You can
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit. Yeah, let's put let's
Speaker 1: put it in a nutshell. UFOs are a myth. But
Speaker 1: when I say that, I don't mean what many of
Speaker 1: your listeners may think. I mean. Nowadays we use myth
Speaker 1: often to mean bunk or nonsense or something that's not true,
Speaker 1: which is not how I use the word at all.
Speaker 1: I use it in a much more Youngian sense as
Speaker 1: a kind of collective dream of our culture and perhaps
Speaker 1: even of our species that come that that comes bearing
Speaker 1: meanings and a truth for us that needs to be recognized.
Speaker 1: So when I say UFOs are a myth, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: saying the very opposite of calling them bunk. I'm saying
Speaker 1: they're vitally important. Attention must be paid. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about Young and what his sort of
Speaker 1: take on the UFO phenomenon was. Yes, which is interesting
Speaker 1: because he was never quite clear what his take was.
Speaker 1: He The last book he published before his death, which
Speaker 1: came out in German Inn and then in English in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, was called in the English translation, Flying Saucers,
Speaker 1: a modern myth of things seen in the skies, and
Speaker 1: I would reiterate that when Young said this is a
Speaker 1: modern myth, it doesn't mean oh, it's nothing, you just
Speaker 1: forget about it. It is Wow, we got to pay attention.
Speaker 1: We've got a myth growing among us, ladies and gentlemen. Now,
Speaker 1: in that book he discussed the meanings that the UFOs
Speaker 1: have for people, so there were chapters on UFOs in art,
Speaker 1: UFOs in dreams. He was actually much more interested in
Speaker 1: that than in nuts and both sightings, because he wanted
Speaker 1: to know what the UFO as a projection of what's
Speaker 1: going on inside us means to us. But he finally
Speaker 1: he had to confront the question is it possible that,
Speaker 1: in addition to being psychic projections, which he said, that's definite,
Speaker 1: that they might be physical realities because it's not too
Speaker 1: clear how psychic projections would appear on radar or how
Speaker 1: there could be photographs taken of them. So in the
Speaker 1: last chapter of his book he waffled back and forth,
Speaker 1: and throughout the late fifties he continued to waffle. Charles Lindbergh,
Speaker 1: the Aviator, told a story of going to visit Young
Speaker 1: in Switzerland and expecting to have all sorts of fascinating
Speaker 1: conversations about the psychological meanings of UFOs. And you just said, no,
Speaker 1: they're really up there. And then Lindbergh said, you know what,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I I talked to General Spats. He said, Slim,
Speaker 1: don't you think that if there was something flying around
Speaker 1: up there, we know about it by now. And Young said,
Speaker 1: there are many things in heaven and Earth that you,
Speaker 1: in general Spats don't know about. So so I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, we don't have Young's version of that encounter.
Speaker 1: We just have Lindbergh's. But he came away completely non
Speaker 1: plus that he was he was talking to her a
Speaker 1: real uf HO believer, and yet at other times Young
Speaker 1: seems to have denied it. So we don't really know
Speaker 1: where he stood all that question, but where he stood
Speaker 1: on what UFOs can mean to us that he didn't waffle.
Speaker 1: The circular shape of the UFO, he said, was the
Speaker 1: Mandola an archetype. And I suppose we have to talk
Speaker 1: about what an archetype is that conveys wholeness, the unification
Speaker 1: of opposites, That it appears in all different cultures, all
Speaker 1: different religions, It appears spontaneously in people's dreams. And here's
Speaker 1: something I would say that Young did not say that
Speaker 1: it's not too easy to see why a flying disc
Speaker 1: is an aerodynamically workable kind of craft. So if you
Speaker 1: want to imagine the UFO is a real space vehicle
Speaker 1: that gets a little bit hard, but as a mandola
Speaker 1: that comes from inside us and that we project into
Speaker 1: the sky, it makes perfect sense. Now I use the
Speaker 1: word archetype, and I have to clarify that for Young,
Speaker 1: we are hardwired to organize our thoughts as human beings
Speaker 1: in certain universal patterns, which is what he called archetypes.
Speaker 1: And these will crop up spontaneously in one culture after
Speaker 1: another and go through the whole list I gave before
Speaker 1: one religion after another. People will come to the analysts
Speaker 1: having dreamed of their archetypes and so forth. So that
Speaker 1: that was Young's approach, and I have to tell you
Speaker 1: I first read it what I was twelve years old,
Speaker 1: and of course I didn't have the slightest idea what
Speaker 1: it was about. There were three books on flying saucers
Speaker 1: in our library. One of them was Young's, another one
Speaker 1: was Grave Markers. They knew too much about flying saucers,
Speaker 1: which I hope you will ask me about. The third
Speaker 1: was Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, which we may
Speaker 1: want to touch on also. And I read all three
Speaker 1: of them and I couldn't make head or tail out
Speaker 1: of out of Young Generally, I don't suppose most twelve
Speaker 1: year olds could, but it would have helped if I'd
Speaker 1: had somebody to plain to me that when Young spoke
Speaker 1: of a modern myth, he wasn't putting UFOs down. So
Speaker 1: why don't you talk about Gray Barker Gray Barker. Okay,
Speaker 1: let us talk not about Gray Barker at first, but
Speaker 1: about Dave Alberin twelve years old. He's working on an
Speaker 1: extra credit science paper which I don't think I ever wrote,
Speaker 1: and it was going to be on life on other Planets,
Speaker 1: and I figured, well, why not talk a bit about
Speaker 1: flying have a chapter on flying saucers. So I went
Speaker 1: to the Public Library of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and I uh looked,
Speaker 1: looked in what some of your listeners will remember, others
Speaker 1: won't know what I'm talking about, a card catalog, and
Speaker 1: found the three books that I've early ever mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: took them out, went home and started reading Gray Barker,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon I wanted to hide under the bed.
Speaker 1: I was so scared. Barker's book. We'll talk a bit
Speaker 1: more about who Barker was, but his book was published
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six. It starts out with the Flatwoods Monster,
Speaker 1: which some of your listeners may recall, is the entity
Speaker 1: seven ft tall with a glowing green face that landed
Speaker 1: on September twelfth, nineteen fifty two, on a hilltop in
Speaker 1: West Virginia, was said to have looked worse than Frankenstein
Speaker 1: as long as I lived, at one of the witnesses,
Speaker 1: I wish I'd never seen it. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: pretty spooked out by That goes on to talk about
Speaker 1: the Shaver mystery, which we might might want to talk about,
Speaker 1: but the the focus of the book is an incident
Speaker 1: in Autumn three in which a Bridgeport, Connecticut UFO researcher
Speaker 1: named Albert K. Bender is visited by three men in
Speaker 1: black suits who terrorized him into stopping his UFO researchers.
Speaker 1: That is the germ of the I don't know whether
Speaker 1: to call it a myth or a legend. I was
Speaker 1: sort of waiver there of the men in black which
Speaker 1: forty years after Barker's book came out, made it to
Speaker 1: Hollywood in the form of the movie Men in Black,
Speaker 1: which we can talk about also. I read this book,
Speaker 1: I was frightened. I was also energized because the book
Speaker 1: challenged the reader to do what Bender did that somehow
Speaker 1: or another, Bender was able two solve the riddle of
Speaker 1: the Flying Saucers on the basis of the data available
Speaker 1: to it. And you or I, says Barker, might do
Speaker 1: that too. Let's work together. Send me your ideas, and
Speaker 1: we'll see if we can discover what the Flying Saucers
Speaker 1: are and who the Men in Black are. Now Here
Speaker 1: I come to, I think a crucial point, because you
Speaker 1: and your listen ners may wonder why, even at the
Speaker 1: age of twelve, did I believe such fantastic stories. And
Speaker 1: the answer is that I knew they were not fantastic.
Speaker 1: I had personal experience with the Men in Black. I
Speaker 1: knew them at firsthand. In my house, there was a
Speaker 1: terrible secret, and that was that my mother was not
Speaker 1: merely a semi invalid with a hard condition, as we
Speaker 1: thought of her, or at least I thought of her.
Speaker 1: I think my father knew better, but that she was
Speaker 1: slowly dying. I didn't know this, but I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I knew it, and it could not be talked about.
Speaker 1: So I had personal acquaintance with a secret too terrible
Speaker 1: to be revealed, and the inhibiting forces that kept it
Speaker 1: from being revealed. Barker spoke in the language of myth.
Speaker 1: He spoke the truth that I knew. It was only
Speaker 1: many years later that I knew that Barker was also
Speaker 1: speaking the truth that he knew. Barker was gay, and
Speaker 1: the life of a gay man in nineteen fifties West
Speaker 1: Virginia would have to have been a continued exercise in concealment,
Speaker 1: in not letting out the secret that could destroy his
Speaker 1: world if it was known. What I am saying is
Speaker 1: that Barker, using the language of myth, using age old
Speaker 1: images like the Man in Black and we can talk
Speaker 1: more about that, conveyed the truth of what was happening
Speaker 1: with him with an authenticity that spoke to what was
Speaker 1: happening in me. The Bible says deep calleth unto deep,
Speaker 1: And as I envision it looking back, Barker's deep unconscious
Speaker 1: called to my deep unconscious, and I could not doubt.
Speaker 1: I therefore believed in the men in black and because
Speaker 1: their existence in terms of the myth would make no
Speaker 1: sense unless the flying saucers were real. I believed in
Speaker 1: flying saucers. He said, maybe we could talk more about
Speaker 1: the men in black and in the movie. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I think let me let me first say who who?
Speaker 1: Who I thought the men in black were, because I
Speaker 1: believe Bender was actually was visited by three men. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting is Bender didn't say or they wore black.
Speaker 1: He said they wore black hats and dark suits. Barker
Speaker 1: changed that ever so slightly, two black suits. And here
Speaker 1: I will say that Barker the curator of the Barker
Speaker 1: Collection in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is a wonderful place
Speaker 1: to visit. The data's name is David houch In. He
Speaker 1: said at one point that Gray Barker has written one
Speaker 1: of the Gospels. And I think he's absolutely right. And
Speaker 1: because I mean, in my my my studies of the Gospels,
Speaker 1: which I've done as a religious studies professor, I've seen
Speaker 1: how the gospel writers took earlier traditions, reshaped them, slightly
Speaker 1: changed emphasis, interpreted them through juxtaposition with one another, and
Speaker 1: came out with something new. And Barker did precisely that.
Speaker 1: I mean, as a twelve year old, if someone had
Speaker 1: come to me and said, you know, how do you
Speaker 1: know any of this crap is true? How do you
Speaker 1: know Barker didn't make it up? Well, by the time
Speaker 1: I was, I was in my twenties, I knew very
Speaker 1: well that he hadn't made hard to any of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Flatwoods Monster, you know that that that
Speaker 1: incident really happened. I mean, I think probably what happened
Speaker 1: was there was a barn owl flying out of the darkness,
Speaker 1: said a group of jittery witnesses were just seen an
Speaker 1: unusually bright meteor which they thought was a was a UFO.
Speaker 1: But but Barker didn't make it up at all. He
Speaker 1: he he gave the results of what even his critics
Speaker 1: have admitted was an excellent investigation of it. And when
Speaker 1: he said that Albert Bender was visited by three men,
Speaker 1: or that he quoted Bender as describing that, I think
Speaker 1: he was absolutely right, and I think we have to
Speaker 1: make sense of it in terms of the historical context.
Speaker 1: This was nineteen fifty three. UH Senator Joseph McCarthy was
Speaker 1: at the height of his power and influence. UH J
Speaker 1: Edgar Hoover's FBI was almost single mindedly devoted of ferreting
Speaker 1: out the communists, those masters of deceit who wore a
Speaker 1: thousand disguises, And they got ahold of a business card.
Speaker 1: I'm not making this up. This is from Barker's book,
Speaker 1: A Business Card for vendors organization which was the I
Speaker 1: F s B, the International Flying Saucer Bureau. And they
Speaker 1: saw the word international, and the alarm bells started ringing
Speaker 1: that this was a communist front organization and they needed
Speaker 1: to shut it down, which they succeeded in doing. But
Speaker 1: in the course of that created or gave a new
Speaker 1: incarnation to an age old myth of sinister figures in black,
Speaker 1: who I think, at bottom our embodiments of death. Barker
Speaker 1: entertained a number of hypotheses about who the men in
Speaker 1: black might be, and our Reiterator's book came out in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties six, and he considered the possibility that the
Speaker 1: men in black might be government agents, and if that
Speaker 1: was the case, that put him in a somewhat ambiguous
Speaker 1: situation which is hard to envision. Now we have to
Speaker 1: go back to nineteen fifty six, in which, according to polls,
Speaker 1: an overwhelming majority of the American public trusted the government
Speaker 1: two always or usually do what was right. So if
Speaker 1: the men in Black were the villains suppressing the truth
Speaker 1: about the UFOs, and the men in Black were government agents,
Speaker 1: you would expect the next step to be to villainize
Speaker 1: the government. But Barker refused to do that. He said,
Speaker 1: surely the government would know better than a sorcery researchers
Speaker 1: what was the good of the country. And at one
Speaker 1: point Bender reports that he was told by his visitors,
Speaker 1: you're on your honor as an American not to say anything.
Speaker 1: And Barker and everyone else who was concerned, of all
Speaker 1: the other people from the I F. S B who
Speaker 1: desperately wanted to know what had happened with Bender, they
Speaker 1: all took for granted that that is a binding commitment
Speaker 1: that if you're on your oath as an American, you
Speaker 1: better keep what you promised. So that was the situation
Speaker 1: in fifty six. Then came Vietnam, then came to gain
Speaker 1: and now I think it's something like of the public
Speaker 1: trust the government to do what's right, and so the
Speaker 1: men in Black are woven into a nefarious government conspiracy
Speaker 1: to suppress the truth. And then to the movie, which
Speaker 1: I was quite honestly looking forward to it a little
Speaker 1: disappointed when I saw the form that it came out in,
Speaker 1: which how does that fit into all this? The movie
Speaker 1: is very interesting because in a way it's an answer
Speaker 1: to the most popular are one of the most popular
Speaker 1: TV series at the time, which is The X Files.
Speaker 1: In The X Files, Molder and Scully fight and sort
Speaker 1: of an eternal battle, neither side can gain total victory
Speaker 1: against the forces of secrecy and suppression. They don't wear
Speaker 1: black because when you think about it, you know, so
Speaker 1: if you know the motto of the X Files is
Speaker 1: don't trust anybody, And if the sinister suppressors of the
Speaker 1: Truth where uniforms identifying saying hey, we're sinister suppressors of
Speaker 1: the truth, then you know you are. You automatically know
Speaker 1: who you're dealing with. So there's no place for it there.
Speaker 1: But the essential point is that there is there. There
Speaker 1: are these shadowy agencies that fill the role of the
Speaker 1: Men in Black, and they are the villains, the investigators
Speaker 1: of the heroes. Now you go to the Men in
Speaker 1: Black movies and it flips the evaluation around. I've got
Speaker 1: the credit Professor Barnar Donovan, an expert on film and communications,
Speaker 1: for making that point. The men in Black, they may
Speaker 1: use unpleasant tactics, but they're doing it all for our good.
Speaker 1: Where is it We may seem imposing, but believe me,
Speaker 1: if we appear in your section, believe me, it's for
Speaker 1: your protection. And they not only suppress us from knowing
Speaker 1: the truth, but also they prevent us from remembering it.
Speaker 1: What is it? Uh? Well, what was that? What? What's
Speaker 1: their machine called the neuralizer or something like that. Vivid,
Speaker 1: vivid memories become fantasies. And here there's the influence of
Speaker 1: another stream of tradition, the alien abduction tradition, which depends
Speaker 1: on the suppression of memory. So here we've got a
Speaker 1: spinoff from Barker, but looking at it from the point
Speaker 1: of view of what if the men in Black are
Speaker 1: the heroes? I mean, after old Barker himself said the
Speaker 1: government would know better what's for our good? And the
Speaker 1: men in black no better? What's for our good? Can
Speaker 1: you talk about alien abductions? Since you since you brought
Speaker 1: it up. That was the focus of the first season
Speaker 1: of Strange Arrival, starting with Betty and Barney Hill and
Speaker 1: focusing on them, but eventually getting to you know, the whole.
Speaker 1: Bud Hopkins, Dave Jacobs, John mac Weirdness starting with Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney Hill is our watchword, right because that's where
Speaker 1: the abduction tradition begins, or it begins in its modern form.
Speaker 1: Because one of the things I stressed in my book
Speaker 1: is that all these mythic themes have both a history
Speaker 1: and a prehistory. The history of abduction starts in February
Speaker 1: on Bay Street Road in the Bay State Road in Boston,
Speaker 1: in the office of a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon, where
Speaker 1: an interracial couple Betty and Barney Hill, have come to
Speaker 1: explore what seems to be something that they can't quite
Speaker 1: remember about their encounter with a UFO in the White
Speaker 1: Mountains of New Hampshire about two and a half years
Speaker 1: earlier September. Simon puts them under hypnosis. He is an
Speaker 1: expert in therapeutic hypnosis, and unlike many of his successor
Speaker 1: hypnotist he could not care less about UFOs. He doesn't
Speaker 1: believe in them, he's not interested in them. All he's
Speaker 1: interested in is dealing with what are really some fairly
Speaker 1: dangerous symptoms in Barney Hill, he has high blood pressure,
Speaker 1: he as ulcers. He also has one that's not particularly
Speaker 1: dangerous but is very weird, a ring of warts that
Speaker 1: have appeared in a perfect circle around his groin. And
Speaker 1: from the almost the first time Barney, who has put
Speaker 1: under hypnosis, he remembers being to him and Betty being
Speaker 1: taken aboard this alien ship, laid on tables and subjected
Speaker 1: to all sorts of bizarre examinations and ordeals, which include,
Speaker 1: for Barney, a cup being put over his groin. The
Speaker 1: cup's traces turn out to be the warts. Now, what's
Speaker 1: happened here? One thing? Most of your listeners will probably
Speaker 1: know this, but we are. But Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: were an interracial couple. Betty was white, Barney was black.
Speaker 1: And you know, granted, this is New Hampshire and not
Speaker 1: Mississippi where six years earlier Emmett till Was was lynched
Speaker 1: for supposedly making suggestive remarks to a white woman. They
Speaker 1: are both plenty nervous, particularly Barney, about how they're being
Speaker 1: together is going to be accepted in their travels. Now,
Speaker 1: whatever is coming up in Barney terrifies him beyond measure
Speaker 1: that saw Himan later said that I was afraid he
Speaker 1: was going to throw himself out the window to escape
Speaker 1: whatever he was experiencing. And for me, I am I
Speaker 1: have to deal with what what to me are two
Speaker 1: contradictory facts. One is that they never encountered the UFO.
Speaker 1: The light that supposedly followed them through the mountains has
Speaker 1: been identified, I think convincingly as a light in an
Speaker 1: observation tower on top of one of the mountains, which
Speaker 1: seemed to move as there against the sky as their
Speaker 1: car moved. That's datum number one and datam number two.
Speaker 1: Something authentic and powerful was emerging from within Barney that
Speaker 1: had been triggered by that experience it and this, I
Speaker 1: would have to say, I consider the most controversial part
Speaker 1: of my book. I think that what was emerging was
Speaker 1: a collective memory of being abducted in Africa into slavery,
Speaker 1: being abducted in the middle of the night, taken to
Speaker 1: an alien ship, and subjected two strange examinations. And I
Speaker 1: think this is what shaped the abduction tradition in this country.
Speaker 1: That the story of Betty and Barney Hill, which received
Speaker 1: great circulation in nineteen six six with the publication of
Speaker 1: Two Look magazine articles on it that it planted seed
Speaker 1: in the collective psyche of our nation, and then in
Speaker 1: the late eighties the nineties it bore that seed, bore
Speaker 1: fantastic bloom. And that's when we deal with amateur hypnotists
Speaker 1: like Bud Hopkins, whose goal is not therapeutic but investigative.
Speaker 1: So how do you take a look at that era
Speaker 1: of abduction research, because you know, but but Hopkins, you know,
Speaker 1: he clearly wasn't concerned with this collective memory of of
Speaker 1: of um, of slavery or anything like that. I talk
Speaker 1: a little bit in in season one of the podcasts
Speaker 1: about you know, being a humanist and seeing through the
Speaker 1: technology encroachment and as potentially a threat to a person
Speaker 1: who's a modern artist and and lives a sort of
Speaker 1: bohemian lifestyle. And that what he comes up with in
Speaker 1: his interviews and his writings and stuff is this very
Speaker 1: sort of cold, technocratic invader that doesn't have seemingly any
Speaker 1: kind of culture to them. Right, It's just like this
Speaker 1: very sterile lab doing these sort of inscrutable and sort
Speaker 1: of violating experiments on them where you don't really you
Speaker 1: know that you have no control over it. But I'm
Speaker 1: interested in what in how you kind of take a
Speaker 1: look at this well, I mean, the first thing that
Speaker 1: comes to mind is that must have been how the
Speaker 1: abductees in eighteenth century Africa felt being scrutinized there. And
Speaker 1: by the way, Betty Betty Hill remembers that the space
Speaker 1: ali the UFO beings are very puzzled that her teeth
Speaker 1: don't come out whereas barneys do, which seems rather absurd
Speaker 1: for space aliens. But it is no longer quite as
Speaker 1: absurd when we remember that slave traders were advised listen,
Speaker 1: you have to be sure to check people's their potential
Speaker 1: purchases teeth, that is a that way you can know
Speaker 1: for sure how old they are. Yes, so I think
Speaker 1: that that is part of what was injected by the
Speaker 1: Hills experience. But it seems to me that each of
Speaker 1: the uphologious slash therapists, they's hypnotists, had their own theology
Speaker 1: I would even call call it to defend, which they
Speaker 1: did through I think implanting some ideas, not all of
Speaker 1: them in the people they hypnotized. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know, are you referring to your interview with Carol
Speaker 1: Carol Rainey, Yeah, that that was a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: I did other research, but I thought it was Did
Speaker 1: you listen to that? Yeah, I listened to that. I
Speaker 1: was quite fascinated because I'd never known that Hopkins was
Speaker 1: an atheist, and here we find it's the same thing
Speaker 1: that I wrote in my book about Richard Shaver, that
Speaker 1: he was an atheist who created this incredible baroque mythology
Speaker 1: of uncanny beings of near infinite powers, as if there's
Speaker 1: a demon god who rules the universe. I would wonder
Speaker 1: what there was in but Bud Hopkins which led him
Speaker 1: in that direction. Now, his colleague John Mac went in
Speaker 1: a very different direction. For Mac, when he could, he
Speaker 1: would say, yes, they It's true the abductors used rather
Speaker 1: rough methods, but their aim is to redeem us. And
Speaker 1: in Mac's case, I think what we are dealing with
Speaker 1: here is a resurgence of his hunger for spirituality after
Speaker 1: having grown up in an aggressively anti religious household, and
Speaker 1: he will see the Ufo beings as leading us two
Speaker 1: a better future in which the mandola Ufo brings together.
Speaker 1: I think of the linemen Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that your
Speaker 1: magic binds together. What custom has strictly divided, and that's
Speaker 1: what the UFO will do, and that's what his uf
Speaker 1: his UFO of doctors do, So I think that way,
Speaker 1: I think we can see the individual idiosyncrasies of these
Speaker 1: uh ufologists playing it out. And by the way, we've
Speaker 1: not mentioned a key name here, which is Whitley, Strieber
Speaker 1: and we Hana. And perhaps at some point we are
Speaker 1: to talk about Streeber's Communion and what his best seller
Speaker 1: Communion and what that contributed. But I need to say
Speaker 1: here that the spread of the abduction tradition reflects broader
Speaker 1: trends in our culture. That it's a form of uphology
Speaker 1: that was ideal for the culture that came into being
Speaker 1: really in the eighties, in which the therapist's office, which
Speaker 1: had once been regarded as faintly ridiculous, just think of Peanuts,
Speaker 1: Lucy with her psychiatric help five cents lemonades stand the
Speaker 1: the therapist office was a place where you came to
Speaker 1: know the truth, and the truth set you free. You
Speaker 1: can detect, though, somewhat before the riseing wave and then
Speaker 1: it's fall of the alien abduction beliefs, a similar rise
Speaker 1: and fall of another related set of beliefs and that
Speaker 1: is the belief in repressed memories of sexual abuse, which
Speaker 1: are recoverable as UFO abductions are through hypnosis. Now, remember
Speaker 1: Carol Rainey mentioned satanic abuse, which I think is also
Speaker 1: part of this complex. But the idea what I called
Speaker 1: in my book the unremembered, that there is something crucial
Speaker 1: that is forgotten is not a strong enough word for it.
Speaker 1: It is the unremembered, and then retrieving the unremembered is
Speaker 1: the way you recover the essential truth about yourself. Memories
Speaker 1: of sexual abuse had their vogue, then they fell from
Speaker 1: favor very rapidly, and I would say in some measure unjustly,
Speaker 1: because I think there was a lot more truth in
Speaker 1: the belief of repressed memories of abuse then most people
Speaker 1: are willing to credit. Now m and there they're discrediting.
Speaker 1: Helped bring the alien abduction tradition into discredit, which is
Speaker 1: why by the end of the nineteen nineties we hear
Speaker 1: very little about it. Well, let's let's go back just
Speaker 1: a little bit. When you mentioned with Lee strieber Um,
Speaker 1: who is not somebody I know very much about. What's
Speaker 1: interesting about him, Well, he's an extraordinary man. To begin with,
Speaker 1: I mean is extremely creative. I have met him. He
Speaker 1: impressed me as as as deeply sincere and also extremely intelligent.
Speaker 1: Let's start with his book Communion, which was published at
Speaker 1: in January of seven. It's you. You've seen the book,
Speaker 1: or have you? And you know the cover? Yes, the book.
Speaker 1: The book. I often when I read it, I cannot
Speaker 1: remember much from it. After I've read it. The cover
Speaker 1: is unforgettable. This is the face that we all know
Speaker 1: by now, the face of the UFO alien, or, if
Speaker 1: you want to be more strict about it, the gray
Speaker 1: which totally pervades our culture. It's hard to realize that
Speaker 1: before we had no conscious knowledge of that phase. It
Speaker 1: erupted into our awareness with the publication of Streeper's book,
Speaker 1: and with that, Streaber's book erupted into best sellered them.
Speaker 1: It was on the New York Times best seller list
Speaker 1: for some fantastic period of time, I think at least
Speaker 1: six months. The book focuses on an episode in the
Speaker 1: December and which Streaber was abducted from his bedroom by
Speaker 1: a group of strange beings like the one depicted on
Speaker 1: the cover, whom he sees as went essentially feminine. There
Speaker 1: is a very strong erotic overtone in Streber's experiences, which
Speaker 1: comes to characterize the nineties abduction story. At first, Streaber
Speaker 1: couldn't remember what had happened to him, Then spontaneously the
Speaker 1: memories recurred to him. Then he underwent hypnosis by an
Speaker 1: acknowledged psychiatric expert in therapeutic hypnosis, doctor Donald Klein, who
Speaker 1: produced more detail. But I don't, in my opinion, not
Speaker 1: a great deal of clarity. But what is really extraordinary
Speaker 1: about the book was what I call the recognition response.
Speaker 1: That people looked at that cover and they said, I
Speaker 1: recognize this phase. I've seen it before, and I'd forgotten
Speaker 1: I saw it, but now I remember. Streeber claims to
Speaker 1: have received tens of thousands of letters describing such experiences.
Speaker 1: I do not question that assertion. The letters are now
Speaker 1: archived at Rice University. I have not seen them myself. Way,
Speaker 1: if whenever we get beyond COVID, I may decide to
Speaker 1: take a trip out to Houston to take a to
Speaker 1: take a look at them. Because what this suggests to
Speaker 1: me is, and here we're coming back to our old
Speaker 1: friend Dr Jung that that face that was painted by
Speaker 1: an artist named Ted Jacobs at Strieber's direction was something
Speaker 1: archetypal that, as I put it in my book, when
Speaker 1: the human mind looks into the darkness, this is the
Speaker 1: face that sees staring back. And I will tell you
Speaker 1: one more thing, one more story of recognition. I gave
Speaker 1: a lecture at U n C Greensborough, Uh, and I
Speaker 1: think I think it was about UFOs and I showed
Speaker 1: a power point slide of that phase. About two years later,
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, an old friend who teaches at
Speaker 1: U n C gree g wrote to me saying, didn't
Speaker 1: you show an alien face two years ago? Well, I
Speaker 1: came across something very similar in Maria gam Buddhas's book
Speaker 1: on the Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, and wow,
Speaker 1: he was absolutely right. This is a sculpture of a
Speaker 1: of a masked individual dating back to something like four
Speaker 1: thousand BC, which looks not identical with the cover of Communion,
Speaker 1: but very similar to it. So here's where we get
Speaker 1: into that supplementing of the history of a mythic theme
Speaker 1: with its prehistory, in this case genuine prehistory going back
Speaker 1: to Kossovo, where that sculpture was found in something like
Speaker 1: six thousand years ago. Yeah, the picture in the book
Speaker 1: is striking. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Um So I definitely
Speaker 1: wanted to get to talk about Roswell because that's that's
Speaker 1: how this this season begins. Um. And you that that's
Speaker 1: how you that's sort of the closing section for the
Speaker 1: most part of your book. Um, so maybe you can
Speaker 1: talk about that and your your understanding of that. Okay, welcome.
Speaker 1: First of all, I will state the negative. I do
Speaker 1: not believe a spaceship crashed. I do not believe there
Speaker 1: was any government cover up of the reality of the
Speaker 1: crash spaceship. I do believe the Roswell myth is of
Speaker 1: pivotal importance, precisely because once it began to circulate in Now,
Speaker 1: the event of Roswell was for but until no one
Speaker 1: ever mentioned the bodies of aliens being found in connection
Speaker 1: with it. It was in that got started, and that
Speaker 1: has become the most familiar of all the UFO stories.
Speaker 1: I mean, practically everyone you ask in this culture has
Speaker 1: at least has heard of Roswell. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I thought you used an extremely good criterion for the
Speaker 1: prevalence of something in the culture, which is if are
Speaker 1: jokes about it comprehensible and jokes about Roswell are comprehensible.
Speaker 1: I can give examples if that would take too much time.
Speaker 1: And essence of Roswell to me is death, and that,
Speaker 1: to me is the most essential element of the Ufo myth.
Speaker 1: There's no question the mandola that unifies opposites is important.
Speaker 1: All sorts of unconscious themes, I would say, archetypal themes
Speaker 1: are fused in the image of the UFO. But at bottom,
Speaker 1: I think the UFO is death, which is the most
Speaker 1: alien thing we can conceive. We really can't conceive that,
Speaker 1: the most alien thing we can fail to conceive, and
Speaker 1: also the most intimate born with us, bone of our
Speaker 1: bone and flesh of our flesh all the days of
Speaker 1: our life. And this is of course why I call
Speaker 1: my book intimate Alien. Now I can give details, I
Speaker 1: don't know whether you want them about about Roswell. I
Speaker 1: thought particularly talking about the red haired officer and his
Speaker 1: you know, his black companion, I thought was super interesting.
Speaker 1: This is something that it's really that that that we
Speaker 1: need to recognize about UFOs, that there's the mythology about
Speaker 1: them is not limited to the sky. It's really most
Speaker 1: interesting when it's on earth and there are all sorts
Speaker 1: of features of the Roswell myth which makes sense thematically
Speaker 1: in terms of the myth, and one of them is
Speaker 1: that witnesses to the crashed object and it's dead occupants
Speaker 1: are threatened and harassed by a team consisting of a
Speaker 1: red hair officer and a black sergeant, who I think
Speaker 1: our mythological figures this i'd rather speculatively, I will admit
Speaker 1: I saw the red haired officer is going back to
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptian demon god Seth. Not that there's a
Speaker 1: living tradition of Sethian belief, but that's Seth and the
Speaker 1: red haired officers spring from the same unconscious sources. And similarly,
Speaker 1: a number of stories about Roswell have a team of
Speaker 1: archaeologists at the sight of the crash, and so the
Speaker 1: witness they remember that they're the They were probably for
Speaker 1: some eastern university, probably the University of Pennsylvania. You know
Speaker 1: it sound which sounds very very very mundane, very verifiable,
Speaker 1: except nobody's ever been able to find any archaeologists from
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania anywhere else who had anything to do
Speaker 1: with a UFO crash. But when you ask what does
Speaker 1: an archaeologist do, he or she gives voice to the
Speaker 1: silent dead, and I think that's the symbolic function of
Speaker 1: the archaeologists in the roswell Man read the story as
Speaker 1: a myth, and you really want to put it on
Speaker 1: the shelf beside the great mythologies of the world. Is
Speaker 1: there something that we haven't talked about that you think
Speaker 1: is is especially important for people to know. UFOs are
Speaker 1: such a rich subject and such a powerful subject. But
Speaker 1: I think I don't think there's anything that I would
Speaker 1: give vital that we haven't talked about. What would I
Speaker 1: would What would I end up with? I'll end up
Speaker 1: with two quotations. One is from Thomas E. Bullard M
Speaker 1: Well uphologists referred to regularly as Eddie Bullard, who emailed
Speaker 1: me once that if there are indeed extraterrestrial vehicles flying
Speaker 1: around our skies, they are for the most part innocent
Speaker 1: bystanders to our inner psychic conflicts. So that's one watchword
Speaker 1: I would use for understanding the UFO. And the other
Speaker 1: is the old Master Gray Barker, who died died prematurely
Speaker 1: in Gray Barker told a an audience that if you
Speaker 1: go out into the night and you look at the sky,
Speaker 1: and you do not see a UFO, then look inside yourself.
Speaker 1: You will surely see one that's interesting. That's interesting. Well,
Speaker 1: I I really appreciate you taking the time. It's certainly
Speaker 1: a much different way of looking at it that I
Speaker 1: think people are used to, and I hope it encourages
Speaker 1: them too to pick up your book and explore further.
Speaker 1: It's say it same to you, Toby, I'm very grateful
Speaker 1: to you for the opportunity to talk. Strange Arrivals is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart three D Audio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and
Speaker 1: hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and
Speaker 1: Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and
Speaker 1: Aaron Mankie. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mile dot com, and find more podcasts for my
Speaker 1: heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.