WEBVTT - INTERVIEW 3: David J. Halperin 0:00:02.640 --> 0:00:05.120 Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D 0:00:05.240 --> 0:00:14.960 audio for full exposure listen with headphones. In November of 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:18.720 last year, I spoke to David Halpern, who taught in 0:00:18.760 --> 0:00:22.279 the Religious Studies department at the University of North Carolina 0:00:22.640 --> 0:00:26.400 until he retired in two thousand. We talked about his 0:00:26.440 --> 0:00:30.960 book The Intimate Alien, which pushes aside the believer skeptic 0:00:31.000 --> 0:00:34.800 dichotomy to propose a new framework from which to view 0:00:34.840 --> 0:00:39.240 the UFO question. The question is not what are they 0:00:39.440 --> 0:00:42.599 or where did they come from? The question is what 0:00:42.640 --> 0:00:50.519 do they mean? My name is David J. Halper Right. 0:00:51.640 --> 0:00:59.680 I was a teenage UFO investigator back in the nineties sixties, 0:01:00.840 --> 0:01:06.199 and I grew up to become a professor of religious studies. 0:01:06.880 --> 0:01:12.080 For twenty four years, I taught judaic studies in the 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:17.600 Department of Religious Studies that the University of North Carolina 0:01:17.920 --> 0:01:25.640 at Chapel Hill. My areas of special interest were religious 0:01:25.760 --> 0:01:32.680 traditions of heavenly ascensions and other worldly journeys, which I 0:01:32.720 --> 0:01:36.319 think I realized even while I was studying them were 0:01:36.400 --> 0:01:43.279 my teenage uphology. In a more respectable guise that, as 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:48.160 I describe in my book Intimate Alien The Hidden Story 0:01:48.280 --> 0:01:53.400 of the UFO. At the age of twelve going on thirteen, 0:01:54.320 --> 0:02:01.240 I became utterly convinced that UFOs were real and that 0:02:01.320 --> 0:02:06.200 it was my destiny to solve the mystery of what 0:02:06.280 --> 0:02:09.600 they were and what they what they meant for us. 0:02:10.840 --> 0:02:15.239 And gradually, as I went off to college, I let 0:02:15.280 --> 0:02:19.200 go of the belief but the UFO. If I let 0:02:19.200 --> 0:02:22.360 go of the UFOs, they never let go of me, 0:02:24.120 --> 0:02:29.839 and I remained. Really I was quite aware of this, 0:02:30.480 --> 0:02:36.320 captivated by what I would now call the UFO mythology 0:02:38.000 --> 0:02:50.040 and it's intersections with certain more ancient traditional mythologies. And eventually, 0:02:50.320 --> 0:02:54.480 in the course of my academic career, I published lots 0:02:54.520 --> 0:03:03.560 of articles and five books on Jewish Messianism and mysticism, 0:03:03.600 --> 0:03:07.320 and I also published a coming of age novel, Journal 0:03:07.360 --> 0:03:15.080 of a UFO Investigator, and in Intimate Alien, I turn 0:03:15.160 --> 0:03:21.160 around and look at what the UFOs meant to me, 0:03:22.440 --> 0:03:31.760 how they've been a leading thread through my own mental life, 0:03:33.800 --> 0:03:38.520 and it worked out moved out from there to what 0:03:38.640 --> 0:03:44.000 they mean for our culture, for the people who believe 0:03:44.080 --> 0:03:48.880 in them, and for the people who disbelieve in them 0:03:49.640 --> 0:03:54.680 but often seem just as emotionally engaged with them as 0:03:54.760 --> 0:04:00.440 the believers. What's the thesis of your book. You can 0:04:00.480 --> 0:04:03.920 talk about that a little bit. Yeah, let's put let's 0:04:03.920 --> 0:04:08.520 put it in a nutshell. UFOs are a myth. But 0:04:08.680 --> 0:04:14.080 when I say that, I don't mean what many of 0:04:14.200 --> 0:04:21.559 your listeners may think. I mean. Nowadays we use myth 0:04:22.720 --> 0:04:30.320 often to mean bunk or nonsense or something that's not true, 0:04:31.279 --> 0:04:35.240 which is not how I use the word at all. 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:43.360 I use it in a much more Youngian sense as 0:04:43.360 --> 0:04:50.080 a kind of collective dream of our culture and perhaps 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:57.760 even of our species that come that that comes bearing 0:04:58.040 --> 0:05:04.760 meanings and a truth for us that needs to be recognized. 0:05:06.200 --> 0:05:12.159 So when I say UFOs are a myth, I'm I'm 0:05:12.200 --> 0:05:17.800 saying the very opposite of calling them bunk. I'm saying 0:05:18.400 --> 0:05:25.360 they're vitally important. Attention must be paid. Can you talk 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:28.240 a little bit about Young and what his sort of 0:05:28.240 --> 0:05:32.440 take on the UFO phenomenon was. Yes, which is interesting 0:05:32.480 --> 0:05:35.800 because he was never quite clear what his take was. 0:05:37.120 --> 0:05:41.400 He The last book he published before his death, which 0:05:41.440 --> 0:05:45.240 came out in German Inn and then in English in 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:51.600 nineteen fifty nine, was called in the English translation, Flying Saucers, 0:05:51.640 --> 0:05:56.680 a modern myth of things seen in the skies, and 0:05:56.760 --> 0:05:59.480 I would reiterate that when Young said this is a 0:05:59.640 --> 0:06:02.680 modern myth, it doesn't mean oh, it's nothing, you just 0:06:02.720 --> 0:06:06.120 forget about it. It is Wow, we got to pay attention. 0:06:06.800 --> 0:06:13.400 We've got a myth growing among us, ladies and gentlemen. Now, 0:06:13.560 --> 0:06:22.400 in that book he discussed the meanings that the UFOs 0:06:22.520 --> 0:06:29.320 have for people, so there were chapters on UFOs in art, 0:06:30.560 --> 0:06:36.360 UFOs in dreams. He was actually much more interested in 0:06:36.400 --> 0:06:41.120 that than in nuts and both sightings, because he wanted 0:06:41.160 --> 0:06:46.800 to know what the UFO as a projection of what's 0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:52.160 going on inside us means to us. But he finally 0:06:52.200 --> 0:06:57.279 he had to confront the question is it possible that, 0:06:57.480 --> 0:07:03.720 in addition to being psychic projections, which he said, that's definite, 0:07:04.080 --> 0:07:08.200 that they might be physical realities because it's not too 0:07:08.240 --> 0:07:14.000 clear how psychic projections would appear on radar or how 0:07:14.040 --> 0:07:18.080 there could be photographs taken of them. So in the 0:07:18.160 --> 0:07:22.080 last chapter of his book he waffled back and forth, 0:07:22.600 --> 0:07:29.480 and throughout the late fifties he continued to waffle. Charles Lindbergh, 0:07:29.560 --> 0:07:33.360 the Aviator, told a story of going to visit Young 0:07:33.440 --> 0:07:37.680 in Switzerland and expecting to have all sorts of fascinating 0:07:38.160 --> 0:07:43.440 conversations about the psychological meanings of UFOs. And you just said, no, 0:07:44.160 --> 0:07:47.000 they're really up there. And then Lindbergh said, you know what, 0:07:47.000 --> 0:07:50.240 wait a minute, I I talked to General Spats. He said, Slim, 0:07:50.320 --> 0:07:52.520 don't you think that if there was something flying around 0:07:52.640 --> 0:07:56.600 up there, we know about it by now. And Young said, 0:07:57.120 --> 0:08:01.880 there are many things in heaven and Earth that you, 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:10.520 in general Spats don't know about. So so I mean, 0:08:11.840 --> 0:08:14.320 I mean, we don't have Young's version of that encounter. 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:17.800 We just have Lindbergh's. But he came away completely non 0:08:17.880 --> 0:08:21.560 plus that he was he was talking to her a 0:08:21.680 --> 0:08:25.040 real uf HO believer, and yet at other times Young 0:08:25.080 --> 0:08:28.120 seems to have denied it. So we don't really know 0:08:28.160 --> 0:08:31.520 where he stood all that question, but where he stood 0:08:31.560 --> 0:08:38.160 on what UFOs can mean to us that he didn't waffle. 0:08:38.679 --> 0:08:42.400 The circular shape of the UFO, he said, was the 0:08:42.559 --> 0:08:46.960 Mandola an archetype. And I suppose we have to talk 0:08:47.000 --> 0:08:54.520 about what an archetype is that conveys wholeness, the unification 0:08:54.640 --> 0:09:00.360 of opposites, That it appears in all different cultures, all 0:09:00.520 --> 0:09:07.920 different religions, It appears spontaneously in people's dreams. And here's 0:09:07.960 --> 0:09:10.880 something I would say that Young did not say that 0:09:11.280 --> 0:09:14.800 it's not too easy to see why a flying disc 0:09:15.600 --> 0:09:21.280 is an aerodynamically workable kind of craft. So if you 0:09:21.320 --> 0:09:24.440 want to imagine the UFO is a real space vehicle 0:09:24.520 --> 0:09:28.360 that gets a little bit hard, but as a mandola 0:09:28.720 --> 0:09:31.720 that comes from inside us and that we project into 0:09:31.760 --> 0:09:38.200 the sky, it makes perfect sense. Now I use the 0:09:38.200 --> 0:09:42.160 word archetype, and I have to clarify that for Young, 0:09:42.679 --> 0:09:48.240 we are hardwired to organize our thoughts as human beings 0:09:48.640 --> 0:09:54.319 in certain universal patterns, which is what he called archetypes. 0:09:55.240 --> 0:10:01.520 And these will crop up spontaneously in one culture after 0:10:01.679 --> 0:10:05.240 another and go through the whole list I gave before 0:10:05.880 --> 0:10:10.920 one religion after another. People will come to the analysts 0:10:11.280 --> 0:10:16.040 having dreamed of their archetypes and so forth. So that 0:10:16.040 --> 0:10:18.280 that was Young's approach, and I have to tell you 0:10:18.320 --> 0:10:20.960 I first read it what I was twelve years old, 0:10:21.800 --> 0:10:23.720 and of course I didn't have the slightest idea what 0:10:23.800 --> 0:10:27.120 it was about. There were three books on flying saucers 0:10:27.120 --> 0:10:30.719 in our library. One of them was Young's, another one 0:10:30.840 --> 0:10:34.920 was Grave Markers. They knew too much about flying saucers, 0:10:35.000 --> 0:10:38.600 which I hope you will ask me about. The third 0:10:38.720 --> 0:10:42.600 was Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, which we may 0:10:42.640 --> 0:10:45.640 want to touch on also. And I read all three 0:10:45.679 --> 0:10:50.320 of them and I couldn't make head or tail out 0:10:50.360 --> 0:10:54.360 of out of Young Generally, I don't suppose most twelve 0:10:54.440 --> 0:10:58.320 year olds could, but it would have helped if I'd 0:10:58.320 --> 0:11:02.520 had somebody to plain to me that when Young spoke 0:11:02.600 --> 0:11:07.880 of a modern myth, he wasn't putting UFOs down. So 0:11:08.400 --> 0:11:12.320 why don't you talk about Gray Barker Gray Barker. Okay, 0:11:12.440 --> 0:11:15.000 let us talk not about Gray Barker at first, but 0:11:15.160 --> 0:11:22.000 about Dave Alberin twelve years old. He's working on an 0:11:22.040 --> 0:11:27.920 extra credit science paper which I don't think I ever wrote, 0:11:29.120 --> 0:11:32.119 and it was going to be on life on other Planets, 0:11:32.120 --> 0:11:35.240 and I figured, well, why not talk a bit about 0:11:35.280 --> 0:11:39.120 flying have a chapter on flying saucers. So I went 0:11:39.200 --> 0:11:45.760 to the Public Library of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and I uh looked, 0:11:46.880 --> 0:11:50.640 looked in what some of your listeners will remember, others 0:11:50.679 --> 0:11:54.480 won't know what I'm talking about, a card catalog, and 0:11:56.280 --> 0:12:00.000 found the three books that I've early ever mentioned, uh, 0:12:00.200 --> 0:12:03.679 took them out, went home and started reading Gray Barker, 0:12:04.280 --> 0:12:07.760 and pretty soon I wanted to hide under the bed. 0:12:07.840 --> 0:12:12.880 I was so scared. Barker's book. We'll talk a bit 0:12:12.880 --> 0:12:16.240 more about who Barker was, but his book was published 0:12:16.240 --> 0:12:23.080 in nineteen fifty six. It starts out with the Flatwoods Monster, 0:12:24.000 --> 0:12:31.959 which some of your listeners may recall, is the entity 0:12:32.240 --> 0:12:37.040 seven ft tall with a glowing green face that landed 0:12:37.600 --> 0:12:42.040 on September twelfth, nineteen fifty two, on a hilltop in 0:12:42.080 --> 0:12:47.000 West Virginia, was said to have looked worse than Frankenstein 0:12:47.720 --> 0:12:50.319 as long as I lived, at one of the witnesses, 0:12:50.840 --> 0:12:53.720 I wish I'd never seen it. I mean, I was 0:12:53.760 --> 0:12:57.520 pretty spooked out by That goes on to talk about 0:12:57.559 --> 0:13:00.600 the Shaver mystery, which we might might want to talk about, 0:13:01.320 --> 0:13:07.360 but the the focus of the book is an incident 0:13:08.320 --> 0:13:16.800 in Autumn three in which a Bridgeport, Connecticut UFO researcher 0:13:17.400 --> 0:13:23.520 named Albert K. Bender is visited by three men in 0:13:23.840 --> 0:13:33.640 black suits who terrorized him into stopping his UFO researchers. 0:13:35.679 --> 0:13:42.680 That is the germ of the I don't know whether 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:44.880 to call it a myth or a legend. I was 0:13:44.920 --> 0:13:50.080 sort of waiver there of the men in black which 0:13:50.440 --> 0:13:56.320 forty years after Barker's book came out, made it to 0:13:56.480 --> 0:14:01.240 Hollywood in the form of the movie Men in Black, 0:14:01.320 --> 0:14:05.240 which we can talk about also. I read this book, 0:14:06.760 --> 0:14:12.360 I was frightened. I was also energized because the book 0:14:12.559 --> 0:14:18.760 challenged the reader to do what Bender did that somehow 0:14:18.920 --> 0:14:26.520 or another, Bender was able two solve the riddle of 0:14:26.560 --> 0:14:31.680 the Flying Saucers on the basis of the data available 0:14:31.760 --> 0:14:37.720 to it. And you or I, says Barker, might do 0:14:37.920 --> 0:14:43.760 that too. Let's work together. Send me your ideas, and 0:14:43.800 --> 0:14:48.360 we'll see if we can discover what the Flying Saucers 0:14:48.400 --> 0:14:55.160 are and who the Men in Black are. Now Here 0:14:55.200 --> 0:14:59.080 I come to, I think a crucial point, because you 0:14:59.160 --> 0:15:03.080 and your listen ners may wonder why, even at the 0:15:03.160 --> 0:15:09.840 age of twelve, did I believe such fantastic stories. And 0:15:09.920 --> 0:15:13.640 the answer is that I knew they were not fantastic. 0:15:14.640 --> 0:15:21.040 I had personal experience with the Men in Black. I 0:15:21.160 --> 0:15:26.960 knew them at firsthand. In my house, there was a 0:15:27.080 --> 0:15:32.200 terrible secret, and that was that my mother was not 0:15:32.480 --> 0:15:36.880 merely a semi invalid with a hard condition, as we 0:15:36.960 --> 0:15:39.720 thought of her, or at least I thought of her. 0:15:39.760 --> 0:15:43.040 I think my father knew better, but that she was 0:15:43.240 --> 0:15:50.240 slowly dying. I didn't know this, but I didn't know. 0:15:51.320 --> 0:15:55.480 I knew it, and it could not be talked about. 0:15:56.400 --> 0:16:03.480 So I had personal acquaintance with a secret too terrible 0:16:03.680 --> 0:16:10.480 to be revealed, and the inhibiting forces that kept it 0:16:10.640 --> 0:16:18.440 from being revealed. Barker spoke in the language of myth. 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:26.400 He spoke the truth that I knew. It was only 0:16:26.600 --> 0:16:31.440 many years later that I knew that Barker was also 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:39.640 speaking the truth that he knew. Barker was gay, and 0:16:39.840 --> 0:16:45.280 the life of a gay man in nineteen fifties West 0:16:45.400 --> 0:16:54.640 Virginia would have to have been a continued exercise in concealment, 0:16:56.880 --> 0:17:02.600 in not letting out the secret that could destroy his 0:17:02.800 --> 0:17:09.720 world if it was known. What I am saying is 0:17:09.800 --> 0:17:16.960 that Barker, using the language of myth, using age old 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:21.240 images like the Man in Black and we can talk 0:17:21.400 --> 0:17:28.560 more about that, conveyed the truth of what was happening 0:17:29.359 --> 0:17:36.720 with him with an authenticity that spoke to what was 0:17:36.840 --> 0:17:44.960 happening in me. The Bible says deep calleth unto deep, 0:17:46.640 --> 0:17:55.200 And as I envision it looking back, Barker's deep unconscious 0:17:55.440 --> 0:18:02.040 called to my deep unconscious, and I could not doubt. 0:18:02.760 --> 0:18:07.240 I therefore believed in the men in black and because 0:18:08.440 --> 0:18:12.400 their existence in terms of the myth would make no 0:18:12.480 --> 0:18:18.639 sense unless the flying saucers were real. I believed in 0:18:18.840 --> 0:18:22.600 flying saucers. He said, maybe we could talk more about 0:18:22.640 --> 0:18:27.560 the men in black and in the movie. Yeah, okay, 0:18:27.600 --> 0:18:30.560 I think let me let me first say who who? 0:18:30.680 --> 0:18:32.919 Who I thought the men in black were, because I 0:18:32.960 --> 0:18:37.560 believe Bender was actually was visited by three men. And 0:18:37.640 --> 0:18:40.639 what's interesting is Bender didn't say or they wore black. 0:18:41.000 --> 0:18:45.640 He said they wore black hats and dark suits. Barker 0:18:45.800 --> 0:18:50.359 changed that ever so slightly, two black suits. And here 0:18:50.400 --> 0:18:53.280 I will say that Barker the curator of the Barker 0:18:53.359 --> 0:18:57.600 Collection in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is a wonderful place 0:18:57.680 --> 0:19:00.600 to visit. The data's name is David houch In. He 0:19:01.000 --> 0:19:04.200 said at one point that Gray Barker has written one 0:19:04.200 --> 0:19:09.359 of the Gospels. And I think he's absolutely right. And 0:19:09.440 --> 0:19:12.480 because I mean, in my my my studies of the Gospels, 0:19:12.640 --> 0:19:16.760 which I've done as a religious studies professor, I've seen 0:19:16.840 --> 0:19:24.119 how the gospel writers took earlier traditions, reshaped them, slightly 0:19:24.280 --> 0:19:31.920 changed emphasis, interpreted them through juxtaposition with one another, and 0:19:32.119 --> 0:19:36.920 came out with something new. And Barker did precisely that. 0:19:38.040 --> 0:19:40.200 I mean, as a twelve year old, if someone had 0:19:40.200 --> 0:19:42.399 come to me and said, you know, how do you 0:19:42.440 --> 0:19:45.480 know any of this crap is true? How do you 0:19:45.520 --> 0:19:48.560 know Barker didn't make it up? Well, by the time 0:19:48.600 --> 0:19:52.600 I was, I was in my twenties, I knew very 0:19:52.640 --> 0:19:54.439 well that he hadn't made hard to any of it. 0:19:55.119 --> 0:19:58.359 I mean, the Flatwoods Monster, you know that that that 0:19:58.520 --> 0:20:02.960 incident really happened. I mean, I think probably what happened 0:20:03.000 --> 0:20:06.440 was there was a barn owl flying out of the darkness, 0:20:06.480 --> 0:20:10.679 said a group of jittery witnesses were just seen an 0:20:10.720 --> 0:20:14.920 unusually bright meteor which they thought was a was a UFO. 0:20:15.080 --> 0:20:18.600 But but Barker didn't make it up at all. He 0:20:18.600 --> 0:20:21.840 he he gave the results of what even his critics 0:20:21.880 --> 0:20:25.880 have admitted was an excellent investigation of it. And when 0:20:25.920 --> 0:20:29.440 he said that Albert Bender was visited by three men, 0:20:29.560 --> 0:20:33.640 or that he quoted Bender as describing that, I think 0:20:33.680 --> 0:20:37.720 he was absolutely right, and I think we have to 0:20:38.359 --> 0:20:41.720 make sense of it in terms of the historical context. 0:20:42.400 --> 0:20:49.359 This was nineteen fifty three. UH Senator Joseph McCarthy was 0:20:49.400 --> 0:20:53.760 at the height of his power and influence. UH J 0:20:54.000 --> 0:21:00.720 Edgar Hoover's FBI was almost single mindedly devoted of ferreting 0:21:00.720 --> 0:21:05.479 out the communists, those masters of deceit who wore a 0:21:05.520 --> 0:21:09.879 thousand disguises, And they got ahold of a business card. 0:21:09.960 --> 0:21:13.520 I'm not making this up. This is from Barker's book, 0:21:13.760 --> 0:21:17.520 A Business Card for vendors organization which was the I 0:21:17.920 --> 0:21:24.240 F s B, the International Flying Saucer Bureau. And they 0:21:24.280 --> 0:21:29.560 saw the word international, and the alarm bells started ringing 0:21:30.520 --> 0:21:35.680 that this was a communist front organization and they needed 0:21:36.240 --> 0:21:40.679 to shut it down, which they succeeded in doing. But 0:21:40.880 --> 0:21:47.320 in the course of that created or gave a new 0:21:47.400 --> 0:21:54.240 incarnation to an age old myth of sinister figures in black, 0:21:54.880 --> 0:21:59.760 who I think, at bottom our embodiments of death. Barker 0:22:00.280 --> 0:22:05.919 entertained a number of hypotheses about who the men in 0:22:06.040 --> 0:22:09.800 black might be, and our Reiterator's book came out in 0:22:09.920 --> 0:22:18.240 nineteen fifties six, and he considered the possibility that the 0:22:18.280 --> 0:22:22.640 men in black might be government agents, and if that 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:26.240 was the case, that put him in a somewhat ambiguous 0:22:26.280 --> 0:22:31.520 situation which is hard to envision. Now we have to 0:22:31.560 --> 0:22:37.000 go back to nineteen fifty six, in which, according to polls, 0:22:37.160 --> 0:22:42.560 an overwhelming majority of the American public trusted the government 0:22:43.240 --> 0:22:50.720 two always or usually do what was right. So if 0:22:50.760 --> 0:22:55.320 the men in Black were the villains suppressing the truth 0:22:55.400 --> 0:23:00.639 about the UFOs, and the men in Black were government agents, 0:23:01.680 --> 0:23:05.320 you would expect the next step to be to villainize 0:23:05.359 --> 0:23:09.879 the government. But Barker refused to do that. He said, 0:23:10.040 --> 0:23:15.280 surely the government would know better than a sorcery researchers 0:23:15.440 --> 0:23:19.360 what was the good of the country. And at one 0:23:19.400 --> 0:23:23.960 point Bender reports that he was told by his visitors, 0:23:24.080 --> 0:23:28.080 you're on your honor as an American not to say anything. 0:23:28.520 --> 0:23:33.840 And Barker and everyone else who was concerned, of all 0:23:33.880 --> 0:23:37.040 the other people from the I F. S B who 0:23:37.160 --> 0:23:40.200 desperately wanted to know what had happened with Bender, they 0:23:40.320 --> 0:23:45.440 all took for granted that that is a binding commitment 0:23:45.920 --> 0:23:49.000 that if you're on your oath as an American, you 0:23:49.160 --> 0:23:54.720 better keep what you promised. So that was the situation 0:23:54.880 --> 0:24:00.520 in fifty six. Then came Vietnam, then came to gain 0:24:02.480 --> 0:24:06.600 and now I think it's something like of the public 0:24:07.000 --> 0:24:12.240 trust the government to do what's right, and so the 0:24:12.400 --> 0:24:21.040 men in Black are woven into a nefarious government conspiracy 0:24:21.200 --> 0:24:25.960 to suppress the truth. And then to the movie, which 0:24:26.200 --> 0:24:29.080 I was quite honestly looking forward to it a little 0:24:29.080 --> 0:24:32.960 disappointed when I saw the form that it came out in, 0:24:33.359 --> 0:24:37.200 which how does that fit into all this? The movie 0:24:37.280 --> 0:24:40.800 is very interesting because in a way it's an answer 0:24:41.400 --> 0:24:44.640 to the most popular are one of the most popular 0:24:44.760 --> 0:24:48.400 TV series at the time, which is The X Files. 0:24:48.440 --> 0:24:53.320 In The X Files, Molder and Scully fight and sort 0:24:53.359 --> 0:24:58.720 of an eternal battle, neither side can gain total victory 0:24:58.880 --> 0:25:03.000 against the forces of secrecy and suppression. They don't wear 0:25:03.080 --> 0:25:05.879 black because when you think about it, you know, so 0:25:06.040 --> 0:25:09.040 if you know the motto of the X Files is 0:25:09.080 --> 0:25:13.800 don't trust anybody, And if the sinister suppressors of the 0:25:13.840 --> 0:25:18.040 Truth where uniforms identifying saying hey, we're sinister suppressors of 0:25:18.119 --> 0:25:21.800 the truth, then you know you are. You automatically know 0:25:21.840 --> 0:25:24.880 who you're dealing with. So there's no place for it there. 0:25:25.119 --> 0:25:27.800 But the essential point is that there is there. There 0:25:27.840 --> 0:25:32.679 are these shadowy agencies that fill the role of the 0:25:32.760 --> 0:25:36.280 Men in Black, and they are the villains, the investigators 0:25:36.280 --> 0:25:38.919 of the heroes. Now you go to the Men in 0:25:39.000 --> 0:25:44.880 Black movies and it flips the evaluation around. I've got 0:25:44.920 --> 0:25:50.760 the credit Professor Barnar Donovan, an expert on film and communications, 0:25:50.800 --> 0:25:55.120 for making that point. The men in Black, they may 0:25:55.400 --> 0:26:02.960 use unpleasant tactics, but they're doing it all for our good. 0:26:04.440 --> 0:26:08.359 Where is it We may seem imposing, but believe me, 0:26:08.520 --> 0:26:12.080 if we appear in your section, believe me, it's for 0:26:12.240 --> 0:26:17.320 your protection. And they not only suppress us from knowing 0:26:17.400 --> 0:26:21.920 the truth, but also they prevent us from remembering it. 0:26:22.800 --> 0:26:25.840 What is it? Uh? Well, what was that? What? What's 0:26:25.880 --> 0:26:31.919 their machine called the neuralizer or something like that. Vivid, 0:26:32.800 --> 0:26:39.439 vivid memories become fantasies. And here there's the influence of 0:26:39.520 --> 0:26:46.560 another stream of tradition, the alien abduction tradition, which depends 0:26:46.640 --> 0:26:52.040 on the suppression of memory. So here we've got a 0:26:52.280 --> 0:26:56.760 spinoff from Barker, but looking at it from the point 0:26:56.760 --> 0:27:01.360 of view of what if the men in Black are 0:27:01.480 --> 0:27:05.080 the heroes? I mean, after old Barker himself said the 0:27:05.200 --> 0:27:09.280 government would know better what's for our good? And the 0:27:09.359 --> 0:27:32.440 men in black no better? What's for our good? Can 0:27:32.480 --> 0:27:35.520 you talk about alien abductions? Since you since you brought 0:27:35.520 --> 0:27:38.320 it up. That was the focus of the first season 0:27:38.359 --> 0:27:40.520 of Strange Arrival, starting with Betty and Barney Hill and 0:27:40.800 --> 0:27:44.480 focusing on them, but eventually getting to you know, the whole. 0:27:44.520 --> 0:27:49.600 Bud Hopkins, Dave Jacobs, John mac Weirdness starting with Betty 0:27:49.680 --> 0:27:52.920 and Barney Hill is our watchword, right because that's where 0:27:52.960 --> 0:27:59.520 the abduction tradition begins, or it begins in its modern form. 0:27:59.720 --> 0:28:02.160 Because one of the things I stressed in my book 0:28:03.359 --> 0:28:08.320 is that all these mythic themes have both a history 0:28:08.400 --> 0:28:16.399 and a prehistory. The history of abduction starts in February 0:28:16.920 --> 0:28:21.159 on Bay Street Road in the Bay State Road in Boston, 0:28:22.000 --> 0:28:26.800 in the office of a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon, where 0:28:26.920 --> 0:28:32.320 an interracial couple Betty and Barney Hill, have come to 0:28:32.560 --> 0:28:40.760 explore what seems to be something that they can't quite 0:28:40.800 --> 0:28:47.480 remember about their encounter with a UFO in the White 0:28:47.520 --> 0:28:51.160 Mountains of New Hampshire about two and a half years 0:28:51.160 --> 0:28:58.520 earlier September. Simon puts them under hypnosis. He is an 0:28:58.520 --> 0:29:05.080 expert in therapeutic hypnosis, and unlike many of his successor 0:29:05.160 --> 0:29:10.640 hypnotist he could not care less about UFOs. He doesn't 0:29:10.680 --> 0:29:14.280 believe in them, he's not interested in them. All he's 0:29:14.320 --> 0:29:20.080 interested in is dealing with what are really some fairly 0:29:20.160 --> 0:29:24.240 dangerous symptoms in Barney Hill, he has high blood pressure, 0:29:24.240 --> 0:29:27.360 he as ulcers. He also has one that's not particularly 0:29:27.520 --> 0:29:31.160 dangerous but is very weird, a ring of warts that 0:29:31.200 --> 0:29:36.160 have appeared in a perfect circle around his groin. And 0:29:37.440 --> 0:29:41.320 from the almost the first time Barney, who has put 0:29:41.440 --> 0:29:48.719 under hypnosis, he remembers being to him and Betty being 0:29:48.920 --> 0:29:55.240 taken aboard this alien ship, laid on tables and subjected 0:29:55.320 --> 0:30:02.720 to all sorts of bizarre examinations and ordeals, which include, 0:30:02.760 --> 0:30:07.480 for Barney, a cup being put over his groin. The 0:30:07.520 --> 0:30:11.880 cup's traces turn out to be the warts. Now, what's 0:30:12.160 --> 0:30:15.720 happened here? One thing? Most of your listeners will probably 0:30:15.800 --> 0:30:18.880 know this, but we are. But Betty and Barney Hill 0:30:19.240 --> 0:30:24.040 were an interracial couple. Betty was white, Barney was black. 0:30:24.840 --> 0:30:28.320 And you know, granted, this is New Hampshire and not 0:30:28.520 --> 0:30:33.840 Mississippi where six years earlier Emmett till Was was lynched 0:30:34.520 --> 0:30:40.560 for supposedly making suggestive remarks to a white woman. They 0:30:40.680 --> 0:30:46.480 are both plenty nervous, particularly Barney, about how they're being 0:30:46.560 --> 0:30:52.720 together is going to be accepted in their travels. Now, 0:30:52.840 --> 0:30:58.080 whatever is coming up in Barney terrifies him beyond measure 0:30:59.040 --> 0:31:03.320 that saw Himan later said that I was afraid he 0:31:03.400 --> 0:31:08.360 was going to throw himself out the window to escape 0:31:08.440 --> 0:31:15.680 whatever he was experiencing. And for me, I am I 0:31:16.280 --> 0:31:20.840 have to deal with what what to me are two 0:31:21.960 --> 0:31:27.280 contradictory facts. One is that they never encountered the UFO. 0:31:28.960 --> 0:31:32.160 The light that supposedly followed them through the mountains has 0:31:32.200 --> 0:31:37.520 been identified, I think convincingly as a light in an 0:31:37.560 --> 0:31:40.600 observation tower on top of one of the mountains, which 0:31:41.000 --> 0:31:44.280 seemed to move as there against the sky as their 0:31:44.320 --> 0:31:49.920 car moved. That's datum number one and datam number two. 0:31:50.600 --> 0:31:56.720 Something authentic and powerful was emerging from within Barney that 0:31:56.800 --> 0:32:02.240 had been triggered by that experience it and this, I 0:32:02.240 --> 0:32:05.720 would have to say, I consider the most controversial part 0:32:05.760 --> 0:32:09.400 of my book. I think that what was emerging was 0:32:09.560 --> 0:32:16.280 a collective memory of being abducted in Africa into slavery, 0:32:17.640 --> 0:32:23.520 being abducted in the middle of the night, taken to 0:32:23.720 --> 0:32:34.720 an alien ship, and subjected two strange examinations. And I 0:32:34.800 --> 0:32:43.360 think this is what shaped the abduction tradition in this country. 0:32:43.400 --> 0:32:48.640 That the story of Betty and Barney Hill, which received 0:32:48.720 --> 0:32:54.600 great circulation in nineteen six six with the publication of 0:32:54.720 --> 0:33:00.520 Two Look magazine articles on it that it planted seed 0:33:02.040 --> 0:33:06.280 in the collective psyche of our nation, and then in 0:33:06.360 --> 0:33:12.680 the late eighties the nineties it bore that seed, bore 0:33:12.880 --> 0:33:19.720 fantastic bloom. And that's when we deal with amateur hypnotists 0:33:19.960 --> 0:33:27.560 like Bud Hopkins, whose goal is not therapeutic but investigative. 0:33:29.320 --> 0:33:33.000 So how do you take a look at that era 0:33:33.640 --> 0:33:40.080 of abduction research, because you know, but but Hopkins, you know, 0:33:40.400 --> 0:33:45.520 he clearly wasn't concerned with this collective memory of of 0:33:45.520 --> 0:33:51.240 of um, of slavery or anything like that. I talk 0:33:51.280 --> 0:33:54.160 a little bit in in season one of the podcasts 0:33:54.160 --> 0:34:00.120 about you know, being a humanist and seeing through the 0:34:00.160 --> 0:34:05.720 technology encroachment and as potentially a threat to a person 0:34:05.760 --> 0:34:08.560 who's a modern artist and and lives a sort of 0:34:08.680 --> 0:34:12.680 bohemian lifestyle. And that what he comes up with in 0:34:12.760 --> 0:34:15.480 his interviews and his writings and stuff is this very 0:34:15.520 --> 0:34:22.200 sort of cold, technocratic invader that doesn't have seemingly any 0:34:22.280 --> 0:34:24.640 kind of culture to them. Right, It's just like this 0:34:24.800 --> 0:34:30.919 very sterile lab doing these sort of inscrutable and sort 0:34:30.960 --> 0:34:34.920 of violating experiments on them where you don't really you 0:34:34.960 --> 0:34:37.480 know that you have no control over it. But I'm 0:34:37.520 --> 0:34:41.680 interested in what in how you kind of take a 0:34:41.680 --> 0:34:44.560 look at this well, I mean, the first thing that 0:34:44.640 --> 0:34:47.120 comes to mind is that must have been how the 0:34:47.200 --> 0:34:54.160 abductees in eighteenth century Africa felt being scrutinized there. And 0:34:54.200 --> 0:34:59.520 by the way, Betty Betty Hill remembers that the space 0:34:59.560 --> 0:35:04.480