David J. Halperin - Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Spiritual Phenomena)

Spiritual Phenomena

Tanya Marie Luhrmann and Ann Taves, EDITORS

Intimate Alien

THE HIDDEN STORY OF THE UFO

David J. Halperin

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

2020 David J. Halperin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Halperin, David J. (David Joel), author.

Title: Intimate alien : the hidden story of the UFO / David J. Halperin.

Other titles: Spiritual phenomena.

Description: Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Series: Spiritual phenomena | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033546 (print) | LCCN 2019033547 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503607088 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612129 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Halperin, David J. (David Joel) | Unidentified flying objectsMythology. | Unidentified flying objectsPsychological aspects. | Unidentified flying objectsSightings and encountersHistory. | Social psychologyUnited States. | UfologistsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC TL789 .H355 2020 (print) | LCC TL789 (ebook) | DDC 001.942092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033546

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033547

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover photo: iStock

Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 12/15 Bembo Std

To Rose

CONTENTS

FIGURES

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT UFOS. Most such books try to make a case for UFOs physical existence as visitors from other planets or possibly other dimensions. A much smaller but still substantial chunk of the literature will argue that theyre a sustained absurdity, a mishmash of honest human mistakes compounded by dishonest ones. Those are the two main currents of thought on the subject: that of the believers and that of the debunkers.

Im writing as someone with a particular investment in the topic. Back in the 1960s, I was a teenage UFOlogist. I grew up to be a professor of religious studies whose main research interests have been religious traditions of heavenly ascents and otherworldly journeys. Ive worked with the visions of the Biblical prophet Ezekiel, particularly the first and strangest of them: the vision of the living creatures and the wheels that sometimes rested on the ground, sometimes flew in the air. In other words, UFOs.

I dont believe, nor do I debunk. This book will advocate for a third way.

My starting point: UFOs are a myth. But in saying this, I dont mean what you might think I do.

A little over fifty years ago, two books appeared within a few years of each other bearing almost identical titlesand almost opposite messages. One was The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age, by astrophysicist Donald Menzel. The other was Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, by psychologist Carl Jung. Menzel, the most vocal and prominent UFO skeptic of the era, used myth as people often do, to mean bunk, nonsense, or at least something that isnt true. For Jung the word had nearly the opposite meaning: not falsehood, but the profoundest truth of all.

Jungs writings are notoriously dense and difficult. Flying Saucers, the last book he published before his death in 1961, is no exception. How valiantly I struggled through it as a budding UFOlogist, just past my thirteenth birthday! (It was one of three books on UFOs in our local library.) Of course I could make neither head nor tail of it. I hadnt a clue about the assumption on which it rests: that our ordinary awareness is an eggshell boat on the vast roiling sea of the unconscious, the deeper (collective) levels of which we share with all other humans.

These depths, accessed through individual dreams and the collective dreams called myths, arent always bright or benign. But theyre holy, or numinous, as Jung liked to say: uncanny, transcendent, timeless. When a myth takes visible form, when its projected into the sky as a flying disk (or mandala, as Jung would say), thats a major event, akin to what our ancestors might have called a vision of God.

All this is controversial, hardly less so than UFOs themselves. I find Jungs models just plausible enough that Im prepared to use them as tools if they make sense of the otherwise unintelligible. When other tools work, I also take them up gladly. The insights of twenty-first century cognitive psychologists into the evolutionary grounding of our disposition toward myth add depth and poignancy to our human inclination to trust what the Bible calls the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). The timeworn Freudian dictum that every memory returning from the forgotten past... puts forward an irresistible claim to be believed, against which all logical objections remain powerless turns out to shed unexpected light on some of the thornier riddles of the UFO. None of these approaches can be ignored.

In his emphasis on the gravity of myth, on the force of its claim to our attention and respect, Jung marks out the path Ive chosen to travel. As myth, UFOs arent nonsense. Theyre about the furthest thing from bunk that can be imagined. Theyre a creation of the space age and yet as real, as vital, as universal as any myth that has spoken from our unconscious since the dawn of prehistory. The central question that needs to be asked about them isnt, What are they? or Where do they come from? or, conversely, How can any sensible person believe such rubbish? The question is, What do they mean?

Should we care?

Grant that UFOs are a myth. Or even more: a full mythology, complex and ramified, stretching into areas of experience that seem far removed from objects in the sky, its true subject not space aliens but who we are as human beings. Yet theres a sharp difference between UFOlogy and the great mythical systems of the past, such as that of the Greeks. Those mythologies were the consensus beliefs of entire cultures. UFOs seem doomed to a shadow existence on the fringes of ours.

They may have conquered the world, as the title of a recent book on UFOs puts it, but its a hollow sort of conquest. More than seventy years after their emergence, they show no sign of going away, but neither do they show the smallest capacity to move into the mainstream. They remain the province of the eccentric, the discontented, and the deluded, if at times the wildly gifted. Can a mythology of losers and misfits be of any significance for the rest of us?

The following reply suggests itself: Who says the rest of us are nonmisfits, nonlosers? Fitting in this life is a painful, difficult, always inadequate process, and at the end each and every one of us loses that which our whole being strains most terribly to keep. We point a mocking finger at the losers, the kooks, the marginal. Beneath our laughter is an awareness that were not really so different. What we see in those losers is here in all of us.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls, Simon and Garfunkel sang a generation and a half ago. As a scholar of religion, Ive been well served by Freuds insight that its often the jumbled and bizarre, the disreputable and seemingly senseless thats the pathway into our deepest secrets. A mythology of the fringe is not to be presumed negligible, especially when its as plugged into the wider society as this one is. From the hinterlands, UFOs cast their shadows across our culture.