Michael Prescott's Blog

Dogfight over a dogfight

In some comments recently, I've recommended Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Pilots, Generals and Government Officials Go On the Record. But admittedly I don't know very much about the UFO phenomenon, so it occurred to me that I ought to try to check the book's presentation against the efforts of skeptical debunkers. The case I chose to look into was the one that impressed me the most, the so-called "dogfight over Tehran" that took place in 1976. What follows is a series of excerpts from Kean's book interspersed with excerpts from the best debunking effort I could find online, along with my comments.

Chapter 9 of Kean's book is devoted to the incident. It was written by General Parviz Jafari (Ret.), formerly of the Iranian Air Force under the Shah. Presumably Jafari's account was translated into English and perhaps cleaned up a little, but it stands as the most thorough first-person report of the incident that I've seen.

For the debunking account, I chose "The Tehran 1976 UFO," by Brian Dunning, posted on the website Skeptoid. This article appears to be the primary source for Wikipedia's entry on the subject.

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Jafari: At about 11:00 PM on the evening of September 18, 1976, citizens were frightened by the circling of an unknown object over Tehran at a low altitude. It looked similar to a star, but bigger and brighter. Some called the air traffic control tower at Mehrebad Airport, where Houssain Pirouzi was the night supervisor in charge. After receiving four calls, he went outside and looked through his binoculars in the direction people had reported. He saw it, too – a bright object flashing colored lights, and changing positions at about 6000 feet up. It also appeared to be changing shapes.

Pirouzi knew there were no planes or helicopters in the vicinity that night. At around 12:30 AM, he alerted the Air Force command post. Deputy General Yousefi , who was in charge at the time, walked outside, and he also saw the object. He decided to scramble an Air Force Phantom F4 II jet …

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Skeptoid: The story goes that sometime before midnight on September 19, four Tehran residents began telephoning the local Mehrabad airport stating that they saw a bright light in the sky. Mehrabad's radar was under repair and was not operational, so General Yousefi phoned Shahrokhi Air Force Base at Hamadan, 275 kilometers west southwest of Tehran. They showed nothing on radar. Yousefi went outside and saw the bright light for himself. He then ordered a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighter plane, piloted by Lt. Yaddi Nazeri plus a backseat weapons officer, to have a look.

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MP: The Skeptoid story makes no mention of flashing colored lights, changing positions or changing shapes, or "circling ... at a low altitude." It also omits the role of the night supervisor, Pirouzi, skipping up to chain of command to a deputy general.

But what was this bright light that resulted in calls to the Air Force base, and got the attention of the night supervisor and the deputy general, to the point where a fighter plane had to be scrambled?

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Skeptoid: [As for] that persistent light in the sky that prompted the phone calls, aroused Yousefi's curiosity, and led the pilots on their merry chase across the skies ... journalist Philip Klass suggested that it was the planet Jupiter, an explanation echoed by aerospace researcher James Oberg.... The F-4s ... saw the light just where Jupiter would have been.... Yousefi and the telephone witnesses all described the light as similar to a star but much brighter. Considering the fact that Jupiter was in the sky, my own conclusion is that it's almost certain that Jupiter was responsible for some percentage of what was reported that night, though not necessarily everything.

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MP: It should be pointed out that "journalist Philip Klass" and "aerospace researcher James Oberg" are both well-known as hard-core skeptical debunkers of UFOs. This doesn't mean we should ignore their opinions, but it might have been helpful if Skeptoid had pointed this out, rather than characterizing them in neutral terms.

In any event, I find it hard to believe that experienced pilots, ground personnel, and the deputy general would all mistake Jupiter for a possible enemy aircraft. But I suppose such things have happened.

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Jafari: When [the first flight crew] came within a closer distance to [the UFO], all of their instrumentation went out, the radio was garbled, and they lost communication. After the F-4 moved away again, it regained all the instruments and could resume communications.

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Skeptoid: [According to Klass, a] Westinghouse tech at Shahrokhi confirmed that only the second F-4 was reported to have experienced any electrical problems during the flight; the first F-4 was never sent in for maintenance.

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MP: Skeptoid, per Klass, says the first F-4 did not suffer a loss of instrumentation. Jafari says it did. 

At any rate, Jafari and his "backseater," Lieutenant Jalal Damirian, took off at about 1:30 AM.

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Jafari: When we took off, the object looked just like what had been reported. It was so brilliant, flying at a low altitude over the city, and then it started climbing.… It was flashing with intense red, green, orange, and blue lights so bright that I was not able to see its body. The lights formed a diamond shape – just brilliant lights, no solid structure could be seen through or around them. The sequence of flashes was extremely fast, like a strobe light.

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Skeptoid: Jafari reported that its lights consisted of alternating strobes of blue, green, red, and orange, so fast that all four were visible at once.

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MP: Skeptoid's summary agrees with Jafari's up to a point, but Skeptoid never addresses the reported appearance of the UFO. The strobing varicolored lights are mentioned in this one sentence and never again. There is no mention at all of the intense brightness of the lights, which surely exceeds anything one would see from a normal celestial object. The diamond shape, which Jafari mentions more than once, also goes unmentioned in the Skeptoid piece. 

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Jafari: All of a sudden, it jumped about 10 degrees to the right. In an instant! Ten degrees … And then again it jumped 10 degrees, and then again … I had to turn 98 degrees to the right from my heading of 70 degrees.…

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MP: There's nothing to quote from Skeptoid regarding this detail, which isn't mentioned, even though it appears to have impressed Jafari  as much as any other aspect of his experience.

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Jafari: All of a sudden my backseater, Lieutenant Damirian, said, “Sir, I have it on radar.” I looked on the radar screen and saw the marker. I said, “Okay, brake lock and repaint it.” This was to make sure it wasn’t a ground effect or a mountain that we were picking up on radar. We now had a good return on the screen, and it was a 27 miles, 30 degrees left; our closing speed was 150 knots and in a climb.

We kept it locked on with radar. The size on the radar scope was comparable to that of a 707 tanker.

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Skeptoid: The compelling radar lock obtained by Jafari's backseat weapons officer [has been interpreted to mean] there had to be something up there. Maybe there was; most of what these pilots did was to intercept enemy MiG-25 fighters on surveillance missions, whether Jupiter was in the sky or not. But there were also two other possibilities. Note that Jafari's radar was known to be defective, or at least in need of adjustment. [A] McDonnell Douglas supervisor [at Shahrokhi] noted that the weapons officer "could have been in manual track or something like that and not really realized it." Whichever of the three possibilities was true, it's not necessarily a fact that a radar lock meant something was there. Maybe there was; maybe there wasn't....

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MP:  Since I'm far from being an expert on radar, I don't know how plausible the alternate explanations are. I doubt that a MiG-25 would be anything close to the size of a 707 tanker, though. Later in his account, Jafari elaborates, "The radar was locked on the object and we could determine its size, because we practice refueling 707 tankers, and the return of the UFO on radar indicated they were about the same size." 

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Jafari: At this moment, I thought this was my chance to fire at it. But when it – whatever it was – was close to me, my weapons jammed and my radio communications were garbled. We got closer, to 25 miles at our twelve o’clock position. All of a sudden it jumped back to 27 miles in an instant. I wondered what it was. I was still seeing that giant, brilliant diamond shape with pulsating, colored lights.

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Skeptoid: The McDonnell Douglas tech at Shahrokhi noted that the second F-4 had a long history of intermittent electrical outages that the IIAF had never been able to fix. He was personally called in to adjust that F-4's radar about a month after the event. Both techs stated that the Shahrokhi base was notorious for low quality work and poor record keeping.

So we have reason to expect that Jafari's F-4 would have had electrical problems regardless of whether he was under attack by a UFO or not....

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MP: Anything is possible, but what makes the equipment outages significant in this case is that they seemed to occur only when Jafari was getting ready to fire on the UFO, as we will see. It's the timing of the outages (assuming Jafari's  account is accurate) that makes them so interesting. Skeptoid does not really address this issue. In fact, the debunking article does not even mention this first instance of Jafari's systems going out. The lines I just quoted address the second such instance, described below. 

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Jafari: Then I was startled by a round object which came out of the primary object and started coming straight toward me at a high rate of speed, almost as if it were a missile. Imagine a brightly lit moon coming out over the horizon – that’s what it looked like.…

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Skeptoid: Twice a year, the Earth's orbit takes us through the debris trail left by Halley's Comet, causing meteor showers. We also pass through various other clouds and trails at the same time each year.... On September 19, we are at or near the maximums of two minor annual showers, the Gamma Piscids (PIE-sids) and Southern Piscids, and at the tail end of a third shower, the Eta Draconids. There was more than enough expected meteor activity to account for all of the reports of falling lights and rapidly moving bright objects.

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MP:  So the "round object which came out of the primary object and started coming straight toward me at a high rate of speed," looking like "a brightly lit moon," was a meteor. This could be true only if Jafari is a remarkably poor observer. 

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Jafari: I attempted to fire, and looked at the panel to confirm my selection of the missile. Suddenly, nothing was working. The weapons control panel was out, and I lost all the instruments, and the radio. The indicator dials were spinning around randomly, and the instruments were fluctuating.

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MP: Skeptoid presents this as the first time Jafari's systems went on the blink, when according to him it was the second time. Again, it's the coincidence of the systems failing whenever the plane poses a potential threat to the UFO that's most interesting.

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Jafari: I looked back at seven o’clock and there it was. I once again saw the main thing up there, too, and then the smaller objects flew gently underneath it and rejoined the primary one.

This all happened quickly, and I didn’t know what to think. But in a few seconds, another one came out! It started circling around us. Once again, all the instruments went out and the radio was garbled. Then, when it moved away, everything became operational again, and all the equipment look worked fine. This one, too, looked sort of like the moon – a round, bright light.

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MP: Skeptoid's meteorite explanation seems less persuasive when these details are considered. This third outage of Jafari's instruments isn't mentioned.

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Jafari: We started to head towards the military air base, and then I noticed that one of these objects was following us on our left side during the descent. I reported this to the base. As I made a turn for the final approach, I saw another object right ahead of me. I called the tower and asked, “I have traffic ahead of me, what is it?” He said, “We have no traffic.” I said, “I am looking at it right now; it’s at my twelve o’clock position at a low altitude.” He still insisted that I didn’t have any traffic, but there it was, looking like a thin rectangle with a light at each end and one in the middle.… My backseater kept watching and said, “As you were turning, I could see a round dome over it with a dim light inside of it.”...

I looked to my left side and saw the primary, diamond-shaped thing up there, and another bright object came out of it and headed directly toward the ground. I thought I would see a huge explosion any moment when it hit, but that did not happen. It seemed to slow down and land gently on the ground, radiating a bright light, so bright that I could see the sands on the ground from that far, about 15 miles.

I reported it to the tower and they said that they saw it, too…. As soon as I got about four or five miles from it, once again the radio was garbled and the panel went out; it was the exact same it was the same exact thing all over again.

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Skeptoid: Moments later another bright object came out and went straight down into the ground, leaving a bright trail, and lighting up a large 2-3 kilometer wide area....

Jafari prepared to land at Mehrabad rather than return to Shahrokhi, and during approach experienced further intermittent communications and navigation failures.

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MP:  The first sentence quoted above apparently refers to the soft landing witnessed by Jafari, though it seems to be placed too early in the chronology. The claim that the object slowed down and landed gently (behavior hardly characteristic of a meteorite) is not mentioned. Later, Skeptoid describes this object as "the one that descended to the ground with a flash." A "flash" does not seem to match Jafari's description of "radiating a bright light," which I would take to mean a sustained output of light. 

The second sentence is Skeptoid's entire summary of Jafari's return flight. There is no mention of the object ahead of Jafari, or on his left side, or of Lieutenant Damirian's observation, or of the control tower's verification of the soft landing.

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Jafari: We could hear emergency squawk coming from the location where the object had landed on the ground. A squawk sounds like the beeping from an ambulance or a police car, and its purpose is to help find people when they have ejected from an airplane, or if there is a crash landing. It’s a locator tone that says “I’m here.” In this case, the squawking from the UFO was reported by some civil airliners nearby.

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Skeptoid: [US Air Force Lt. Col. Olin] Mooy noted that the beeping transponder appeared to be from an American C-141. These large transport aircraft carried such transponders designed to be released in the event of a crash, but they'd been having problems with the beepers being ejected simply by turbulence over the mountains just north of Tehran.

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MP: In itself, this sounds reasonable enough, although again, the coincidence in timing is curious.

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Jafari: After landing, I went to the command post, and then we went to check in with the tower. They said the main thing in the sky had just disappeared, suddenly, in an instant.

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MP:  This isn't mentioned in the Skeptoid article. 

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Jafari: [A] document, dated October 12, 1976, by Major Colonel Roland Evans, provided an assessment of the case for the DIA. It said that “This case is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon.”

To make that point, Evans listed some important facts in his DIA document: There were multiple highly credible witnesses to the objects from different locations; the objects were confirmed on radar; the loss of all instruments happened on three separate aircraft – a commercial jet as well as our 2F fours; and “an inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs.” The evaluation form said that the reality without reliability of the information was “confirmed by other sources” and the value of the information was “high.”

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MP: Evans' report isn't mentioned by Skeptoid. I should point out that "Major Colonel" is not a rank in the US military, as far as I know. Other sources list Evans sometimes as a major, sometimes as a colonel. The report clearly exists, regardless of any confusion about the author's rank. 

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Jafari: I can’t doubt what happened. It wasn’t only me. The pilot in my backseat, the two pilots in the first aircraft, the men in the tower, people from headquarters, General Yousefi who was on duty in the Air Force command post – they all saw it. Many people were concerned about us on the ground. And we also captured it on radar from our cockpit. Nobody can say I imagined it.

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Skeptoid: Once we look at all the story's elements without the presumption of an alien spaceship, the only thing unusual about the Tehran 1976 UFO case is that planes were chasing celestial objects and had equipment failures. There have been many cases where planes had equipment failures, and there have been many cases where planes misidentified celestial objects. Once in a while, both will happen on the same flight....

What was the Tehran 1976 UFO? I don't know, but there's insufficient evidence to convince me to get excited about it.

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MP: I'm not sure that Skeptoid has actually looked at "all the story's elements." Essentially, the skeptical position is that the pilots and some observers on the ground mistook Jupiter for an aircraft, and that Jafari and his weapons officer mistook meteorites for probes or weapons launched by an aircraft. The radar lock was probably some kind of technical malfunction. The repeated equipment failures that occurred whenever Jafari tried to fire on the UFO were another mechanical problem. The first plane that went up may not have suffered any equipment failures, even though Jafari reports that it did. Details such as the diamond-like appearance of the craft, or the soft landing of a very bright object ejected by the craft, or the strobing lights in different colors that were blindingly bright, are apparently not important enough to consider.

Skeptoid does make some good points. For instance, we're told, "Klass learned from the American technicians ... that the Shahrokhi pilots never flew at night [and] these two night sorties chasing the UFO were the only known night flights during the whole time the technicians were stationed there." A lack of nocturnal flying experience could call the pilots' observations into question. 

Overall, though, Skeptoid's explanation strikes me as about as far-fetched as anything the most uncritical UFO enthusiasts might dream up. It's not quite on the level of Men in Black's famous "swamp gas from a weather balloon ... trapped in a thermal pocket [that] reflected the light from Venus," but ... it's getting there. 

Bleed-throughs

Matt Rouge's thought-provoking guest post has stimulated a lot of discussion, and it got me thinking, as well. Lying in bed last night around 2 AM, I couldn't help noodling on the whole question of UFOs and some related matters. The idea I kept coming back to was "bleed-throughs."

According to Wiktionary,  the three main definitions of "bleed-through" are:

1. The seepage of ink from one side of a printed page to the other
2. The discolouration of a wood veneer due to seepage of glue
3. A weak imprint of magnetic information transferred to adjacent layers of audiotape, resulting in an unwanted echo.

I remember reading a passage in the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts in which Seth tells us that reality consists of many parallel dimensions or timelines, only one of which we occupy. There can be intrusions from other dimensions or timelines, resulting in anomalous phenomena. This is essentially what I mean by "bleed-through."

The third definition quoted above is the one closest to my meaning. "An imprint of information transferred to an adjacent layer of the information storage medium" could be a valid explanation – or at least the beginning of an explanation – for UFOs and a variety of other seemingly inexplicable phenomena.

As readers of this blog know, I'm partial to the idea that information is fundamental to our reality. In other words, the physical reality that we perceive with our senses can be likened to the virtual reality rendered in a headset by a computer program. In both cases, the seemingly real world of three-dimensional objects reduces to an unseen realm of data and data-processing algorithms.

If each stream of reality in Seth's multi-dimensional scenario is ultimately a stream of information, then perhaps some of this information can be transferred from one stream to another, either intentionally or by chance. The resulting bleed-through would yield artifacts in our reality that seemingly don't belong here – weird intrusions from other timelines. 

UFOs seem to have much in common with apparitions, which may be another form of bleed-through. Apparitions vary in their degree of corporeality; some seem wispy and insubstantial, while others are reported to be quite tangible and solid. In cases where an apparition has been observed by several people at once, it appears that it is seen from various perspectives, like any other physical thing; the person facing the apparition will see it head on, while the person standing to the side will see it in profile. Apparitions also have been seen reflected in mirrors, and they can match the light-and-shadow conditions of their environment. In some cases, apparitions seem to have been caught on film, videotape, or other recording media, while the field of electronic voice phenomena offers many examples (admittedly often disputed) of voices captured from the ether.

In short, apparitions can, in some cases, seemingly have the physical characteristics we associate with ordinary physical objects. And yet they are certainly not ordinary physical objects, because they walk through walls, appear and vanish unpredictably, and sometimes are seen by only certain observers while remaining invisible to others in the vicinity.

All of these characteristics can be ascribed to UFOs, as well. Do they sometimes show up on radar? Yes. Are they sometimes captured on film or video? Yes. Do they appear and vanish unpredictably? Yes. Are they sometimes seen by certain observers but not others who are equally well situated? Yes.

We can extend the argument by looking at other paranormal or anomalous phenomena such as poltergeists, deathbed visions, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, after-death communications, and episodes of cosmic consciousness. Any of these could be seen as a bleed-through, sometimes accidental, sometimes intentional. This presumes, of course, that one (or more) of the parallel timelines can be characterized as "the afterlife," and that the "spirits" occupying this zone can cross "through the veil" from one timeline to another.

In many of these phenomena, an altered state of consciousness is involved, so we may be talking about a combination of the bleed-through of information and an adjustment of the "frequency" of consciousness to perceive it. As a rough analogy, imagine listening to the radio and hearing a faint signal from another radio station; if you adjust the dial, you can tune in the other station more clearly. The bleed-through itself may be only half the equation, with the fine-tuning of consciousness as the other half. Either factor, alone, can result in some degree of perception of an anomalous phenomenon, but when both factors are in play, the perception will be more vivid.

This notion might go some way toward explaining why both UFOs and apparitions vary in their degree of physical reality. Some UFOs do not show up on radar. Some do not appear on film or video even when the camera operator is certain he got the image in frame. Perhaps the correct combination of informational bleed-through and perceptual fine-tuning is needed to get fully "real" results.

The same line of thinking may also explain why UFO sightings sometimes come in waves. An initial sighting may trigger a subconscious adjustment of perception in other people's minds, making them more likely to perceive UFOs. It is said that when Uri Geller performed his spoon-bending act on television, many people – especially children – started bending spoons spontaneously, something they had never done before. Seeing Geller do it was enough to alter their consciousness so they could do it too, at least temporarily. The same thing  has been known to happen in the "PK parties" hosted by Jack Houck; it can take a while for anyone to start bending spoons, but once one or two people have done it, the rest of the crowd will find it much easier to follow suit. A small adjustment of consciousness, perhaps merely a lowering of inhibitions, seems to help bring the phenomena into being.

Consider also the recurrent waves of excitement about spiritualism from the mid-19th century through the early 20th  century, which can be compared to a social mania. The positive results obtained by some amateur experimenters – hearing raps or getting messages via planchette – would stimulate other people to obtain similar results. Simply seeing or hearing about the phenomena may be enough to alter consciousness just a bit and make it more susceptible to picking up bleed-throughs. 

Returning to our list of anomalous phenomena, we can consider how each one might relate to bleed-throughs.

• Poltergeists — a persistent bleed-through of a particular spiritual entity, often associated with the consciousness of a particular person (typically an adolescent or young adult who is emotionally disturbed or high-strung, perhaps exhibiting traits of altered consciousness).
• Deathbed visions — the bleed-through of the afterlife timeline into our own, as perceived by the altered consciousness of the dying person and sometimes by people nearby.
• Out-of-body experiences — possibly a way of projecting our own awareness into another timeline; in effect, a reverse bleed-through. Are poltergeists in our world simply entities that are having out-of-body experiences in their world?
• Near-death experiences — essentially a combination of deathbed visions and out-of-body experiences, with the altered consciousness that attends the dying process tuning in to information from a nearby dimension and then projecting itself into that timeline.
• After-death communications — intentional bleed-throughs on the part of people who are no longer alive in our timeline, but who have a strong emotional connection to somebody here. These are most common, I think, when the living person is dealing with the emotional shock and disorientation of grief and loss – in other words, when the percipient is experiencing an altered state of consciousness.
• Episodes of cosmic consciousness — "cosmic consciousness," a term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in his book of the same name, is an epiphany in which a person has a sudden, profound sense of the meaning of life and the ultimate nature of reality. Again, this could be understood as a combination of a shift in consciousness and a bleed-through of information that is normally masked from our perception.

Other phenomena, such as the Mothman, Bigfoot, visions of the Virgin Mary or other iconic figures, alien abductions, and even levitation and miraculous healing may also be connected with the idea of information transfer and consciousness fine-tuning. 

The “ideal ineptitude” of supposed ETs in UFO and alien abduction phenomena

This is a guest post by Matt Rouge, who has previously contributed posts on capital-S Skepticism, the Western myth, and "the burden of Mystery." And now, here's Matt! 

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Thank you, Michael, for the opportunity to contribute to your blog again!

I was very happy to see Michael’s three excellent posts on UFOs recently. I had been wanting to discuss the relationship between UFO phenomena and Afterlife phenomena, as well as make the argument I’m going to make in this post.

Phenomena are separate from their interpretations. That is, it’s possible to acknowledge UFO sightings and alien abduction experiences as genuine phenomena (i.e., not wholly due to the Skeptical go-to trifecta of fraud, hallucination, and error) without signing onto any particular explanation.

I don’t believe UFOs are actual “nuts and bolts” spacecraft, nor do I believe that the entities experienced in so-called alien abductions are actual physical beings like us. I want to make it clear, however, that I am not a Skeptic with respect to the phenomena themselves. I think that at least the best cases are paranormal in origin and cannot be explained under the current scientific paradigm.

Today I’d like to take a look at a short paper from 1990 by Jacque Vallée: Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Object. Vallée is perhaps the most prominent opponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, or ETH,¹ and Michael has discussed his work in the above-mentioned posts. I’m going to paraphrase his arguments, comment on them briefly, and then lay out a new argument that I think adds something to the overall argument against the ETH.

Valée’s five arguments

1. There are so many UFO sightings that earth would have to be ETs’ Grand Central Station.

This, I think, is Vallée’s most devastating argument. Even if we counted only the most solid cases, earth would be overrun with ETs coming and going to a degree that is truly unrealistic.

2.It’s too big a coincidence that ETs are humanoid, can breathe our air, etc.

This is the only argument out of the five that I really don’t buy. I think it’s possible that convergent evolution could result in many species being bipedal and humanoid, and it may be that oxygen is the gas that supports life on most planets. Further, there are reports of ETs, such as Mantis ETs, that don’t look very human at all.

3. The ETs in alien abduction reports are using really bad and primitive science.

This is another killer argument in my view. Abducting people is a supremely inefficient way to get DNA and other biological samples.

4. UFOs are an old phenomenon in a modern guise.

Michael talked about this argument in this post. I find it pretty compelling.

5. UFOs do not behave like normal physical objects.

And Michael talked about this argument in this post. Again, compelling.

Arguments #1 and #3 tie into the argument I will make, which is this:

The ETs in UFO and alien abduction reports are “ideally inept”: they give themselves away just enough to tease us with their presence yet never collectively convince us of it.

Let’s take a look at both phenomena, and I’ll explain what I mean further.

 

A saucer lands on the DC mall in 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still

 

UFO phenomena

ETs are supposedly advanced, with technology thousands if not millions of years ahead of our own. Combined with the discipline required, one would think, to explore the stars, this technology should allow them to be seen only to the degree they wish to be seen.

Thus, the idea that they are just—whoops—accidentally being seen strains credulity.

One perhaps may object that ETs don’t actually care about being seen from afar. But where does their caring begin and end? If they didn’t care at all, then they would be landing anywhere and everywhere and being photographed and videoed all the time. OK, maybe they don’t mind being seen from afar but do mind being seen up close.

In that case, we are still left needing to explain such coincidentally perfect fine-tuning. Do all the ETs who are nonchalant about being seen from a distance have a program in place to prevent all of the thousands (per Vallée’s #1 argument above) of spacecraft visiting Earth each year from being photographed, videoed, captured on radar, etc., to an excessive degree?

Vallée points out in his paper that it would be easier for ETs to send probes to get their work done. Further, Ray Kurzweil observes: “A computational-based superintelligence of the late twenty-first century here on earth will be microscopic in size. Thus an intelligent delegation from another planet is not likely to use a spaceship of the size that is common in today’s science fiction, as there would be no reason to transport such large organisms and equipment.”²

OK, but maybe the ETs are sending probes to earth, which they intend to be seen by humans to such a fine-tuned degree. They are not sending microscopic probes but instead large objects that make lights in the sky,³ are visible sometimes on radar, and are from time to time seen up close by people. But they never make the proverbial landing on the White House lawn, and they never, say, descend into Manhattan and get seen and videoed by thousands of people all at the same time. In other words, plausible deniability is always maintained.

Alien abductions

In his paper, Valée observes, “The means of permanently erasing the memory of the victims through the use of appropriate drugs are also available in the current pharmacopeia.”

True. As a medical interpreter helping Japanese people, I’ve observed patients coming out of sedation/anesthesia perhaps around 50 times. Today’s anesthesiologists and their technology are very good. The doctors always use a drug that induces amnesia—and it works. People wake up and are usually surprised that the procedure or surgery is over already, and they certainly don’t remember anything about what happened during it.

Again, it strains credulity to suppose that the ETs intend for abductees not to remember their experiences and have technology in place to induce amnesia, but—whoops—quite a large number of people end up remembering anyway.

Plausible deniability is an issue here too. ETs that abduct humans are clearly ethically challenged—so why don’t they just kill their catches or keep them for experimentation over the long term? If we suppose that only a fraction of abductees remember their experiences (i.e., when ET amnesia technology fails), and if we consider that thousands of people have reported abduction experiences, then it stands to reason that the actual number of abductees is quite large indeed, perhaps numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. If only a small fraction of this total were never to be returned, then that would entail a substantial number of disappearances requiring explanation. Yet this problem does not seem to exist.

Fair enough. Perhaps the ETs don’t disappear humans. But they seem to be taking care not to get “caught” in many other ways as well. While abductees do report physical traces of their ordeals, such as small wounds and scars and small metal implants, and perhaps these are indeed genuine phenomena in their own right, to my knowledge there have been no reports of limbs amputated, organs removed, or surgeries performed that leave major scars, sutures, etc. That is, there is nothing to compel us to believe that someone with medical skill and technology was involved in the abductee’s ordeal. Further, to my knowledge, no recovered implants have ever consisted of undeniable extraterrestrial technology. Plausible deniability is always maintained.

 

In Forbidden Planet (1956), humans are piloting the saucer

 

Plausible deniability—or simple inability?

Thus, in their “ideal ineptitude,” the supposed ETs give us glimpses of themselves that are always just this side of the line of plausible deniability. Many different species are reportedly involved, and the circumstances of their appearance can vary considerably, but they always maintain iron discipline in order to, well, just tease us.

By “plausible deniability,” I do not mean that the phenomena themselves can or should be denied. In our Skeptical age, however, they mostly are denied—or at least swept under the rug by the media and other elites.⁴ Rather, the phenomena are not strong enough to instantly compel consideration by the global populace, as would happen with a landing on the White House lawn or something similar. Nor are the phenomena distinct (e.g., detailed video of ETs walking out of a landed craft) or permanent (e.g., artifacts left behind) enough as to give a prima facie indication of their physical origin.⁵

Thus, I think we are left with two possibilities: either the ETs continually screw up just so, which is not plausible,⁶ or the two phenomena of UFOs and alien abduction have a cause (and not necessarily the same cause) that prevents anything more from happening than what actually does. In other words, they or it are unable to do more.

I think the latter possibility is the truth. In a future guest post, I would like to explore what I think may actually be the cause of the phenomena in question.

———

¹On the other side of the debate, one of the major proponents of the ETH today is Richard Dolan, who has a great YouTube channel. Although I don’t ultimately agree with his conclusions, he is an immensely knowledgeable, intelligent, and entertaining speaker, so I encourage you to check out his videos.

²Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Viking Press, 1999.

³Just as we do not put big honking lights on our warplanes just for fun, there is no technologically plausible reason for ETs to have craft that light up like Christmas trees in the night sky.

⁴By “elites” I do not mean anything particularly conspiratorial. I merely mean that those with the power to shape our worldview, such as prominent members of the media, scientists, teachers, public intellectuals, etc., collectively prefer not to examine the phenomena and incorporate them into a revised worldview. I don’t think it is much different than the reaction of elites in the 17th century to heliocentrism. Needless to say, such elites are equally in denial about the psi and Afterlife phenomena that Michael regularly discusses on this blog.

⁵I’m well aware of claims that the government is in possession of crashed spacecraft, ET bodies, and so on. I will certainly believe if I can see the evidence. (Contrary to Skeptics, I am willing to change my views when I see proof.)

⁶“Screwing up” (i.e., committing errors or causing accidents) is by definition a lack of control on the part of the entity screwing up. Just as it would be implausible to suggest that, say, losing control on the freeway could cause damage to the vehicle but never a serious injury or fatality, it is likewise implausible to suggest that UFOs could accidentally be seen in the sky but never be captured at close range on video, or that alien abductions could result in undesired memory recall but never any extreme physical evidence.

The God copout

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a powerful collective unconscious that might somehow manifest phenomena such as UFOs. But I also said I thought this was kind of a copout. Having thought a little more about it, I wanted to explain why feel that way.

In the prescientific era, people had a ready explanation for any phenomenon they didn't understand: "God did it." (Or "the gods did it.") Thunder during a storm? It was the growling rage of a deity. A rainbow after a storm? God put it there as a sign. Crop failures, pestilence, plague? God was punishing sinners or teaching a painful lesson.

From a certain perspective, this makes sense. God is presumed to have infinite powers; he can accomplish anything; and he is the ultimate creative power behind everything that exists. Therefore it's perfectly logical to credit him (or blame him) for anything that happens that we don't understand.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't get us very far. We never actually learn what causes thunder, rainbows, crop failures, pestilence, and plague. The only way to get real answers is to look for a clearly understandable mechanism – discharges of static electricity; the prismatic effects of water vapor in the air; boll weevils and other parasites; viruses and bacteria; unsanitary conditions, etc. As long as we are content to attribute everything that happens to the inscrutable will of an infinitely powerful and impossibly remote abstraction, we're not going to make much practical progress. The scientific era took off when people stopped being satisfied with the explanation "God did it."

The thing that worries me is that the collective unconscious is quite a bit like God. It is amorphous, hard to define, impossible to see, not amenable to proof, and credited with pretty much any kind of power necessary to accomplish anything we wish to attribute to it. UFOs? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Mediumistic communications, automatic writing, ectoplasmic materializations, poltergeist activity, apparitions, you name it … Manifestations of the collective unconscious.

It's a catchall explanation that actually explains nothing. Moreover, it assumes the existence of a collective unconscious that has powers far beyond anything we ordinarily observe in our own lives. For all the talk about manifesting success in love or finance by mastering the subconscious mind, most people still find love and money the old-fashioned way – by  taking concrete steps to obtain it.

The collective unconscious, much like God, is so ineffable, so all-encompassing, so unapproachable, that no possible mechanism can be imagined by which its actions are carried out. Nobody asks, "Just how exactly did God do it?" The assumption is he can do anything he wants, simply by willing it to be so. Much the same assumption seems to be made about the collective unconscious – that it can shape and mold the world however it wishes.

This requires the world to be pretty malleable, which is not at all how we experience it. In our ordinary experience, the world seems frustratingly solid. We can bang our head against the wall, but the wall stubbornly refuses to dissolve. We can strive to materialize fresh water in the desert, but unless we find an oasis, we'll continue dying of thirst. We can wish for a miracle, but miracles are rare.

We're told, through mediums, that the next plane of existence offers an environment that is considerably more malleable than our present one. Summerland is supposed to be a realm in which mental action largely replaces physical labor, a place where just imagining something is enough to make it so. Maybe so. But the point of this teaching is precisely that Summerland is significantly different from our current experience. It is not just a continuation of what we already know; it's a new kind of experience. If our world were easily remade by pure mental action, whether individual or collective, it would probably be a lot more like Summerland and a lot less like the mess that it is.

So even though the hypothesis of a collective unconscious that manifests UFO phenomena in symbolic and sometimes absurd, dreamlike terms is intriguing, I'm inclined to reject it. I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere. Of course, I'm not sure what other hypothesis works, either. As Yul Brynner might say, "It's a puzzlement."

Opening the door

I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.

What strikes me most strongly about the subject are the many similarities between UFO encounters and certain paranormal phenomena, such as mediumship and channeling, automatic writing, premonitions and prophecy, and even PK and ESP. There seems to be too big an overlap to be merely coincidental. Here are some of the parallels: 

1. There is often a baffling “personal” connection between UFO sightings and the people who report them. The same individual may report multiple UFO sightings over a period of years. Some people have reported that when they stopped to look at a distant UFO, it quickly approached them. Drivers who flash their headlights at a UFO sometimes see the UFO flash its lights back. Just as poltergeist phenomena are typically associated with a certain individual, or religious manifestations like the Fatima appearances of the Virgin Mary are associated with a core group of people, some UFO cases seem to revolve around a particular person or group.
2. People often report being in a state of altered consciousness during a UFO encounter, and sometimes even prior to it. They report a trancelike state, or numbness and paralysis, or sudden intense emotions like euphoria, peace and love, or crippling fear. Altered consciousness is, of course, a feature of many paranormal experiences, including trance mediumship, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and crisis apparitions.
3. Some people have premonitions about UFOs. They dream about the encounter one or two nights before it takes place. Or they find themselves unaccountably moved to venture outside and look up at the sky, where they discover a UFO hovering there as if waiting for them.
4. Some people feel they are in communication with the occupants of UFOs. In certain cases they believe that vast knowledge has been transmitted to them in some telepathic fashion, sometimes while they were transfixed by a beam of light from the hovering vessel. In other cases they take up automatic writing or trancelike communicating in order to convey messages from the aliens. This phenomenon has obvious similarities to trance mediumship and “spirit-directed” automatic writing, as well as to reports of a download of universal knowledge during an NDE (often when transfixed by "the Light"). Another parallel is that the content of these communications is often disappointingly trite or nonsensical. Although the recipient of this knowledge believes he has been gifted with deep wisdom about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the future, the actual communications are often extremely unconvincing and even absurd, as is often (though not always) the case with other channeled messages and with some NDE prophecies. 
5. There is a dreamlike quality to many UFO accounts, which is at least superficially similar to the dreamlike narratives often recounted by people who’ve experienced OBEs and NDEs — a magical, fairytale-like quality where events unfold with the baffling logic of a dream. Many of Robert Monroe’s OBEs are of this type.
6. As with most paranormal phenomena, UFO phenomena have proven frustratingly elusive, impossible to nail down. UFOs typically register only dimly and fleetingly on radar, and in some cases they show up very faintly even in time-exposed photos, though witnesses reported the UFO’s lights as very bright. The memories of observers can be vague or contradictory, and are sometimes lost altogether and recovered only under hypnosis – a methodology that may very well introduce false memories. The physical evidence of landings is never conclusive. Critical items of evidence have been known to inexplicably disappear. There is a tricksterish quality to many of the investigations. Even those who accept the validity of many UFO reports are split on the question of whether the observed phenomena are physically real objects or occupy some other category such as thought-forms or holographic projections.
7. One fairly consistent feature of UFO sightings is that they are introduced by a humming, buzzing noise or sensation that has been compared to a swarm of bees. Humming, buzzing, and other vibrations are typically reported at the onset of OBEs and are associated with other changes of consciousness. The whole idea of “raising vibrations” is central to the terminology of spiritualism and mysticism.
8. Finally, UFO sightings tend to come in waves or “flaps.” There is a period of excitement, with many reports coming in from various areas; then the excitement dies down; sometime later, it starts up again. The same pattern is detectable in the progress of the spiritualist movement, which quickly attained astonishing popularity in the mid-19th century, with thousands of people engaged in table-tipping and automatic writing, only to die down for a while and then periodically flare up. This up-and-down trend continued through the 1920s. (Today, spiritualism has largely morphed into other forms like the channeled “higher entities” popular in the 1970s and the fascination with near-death experiences and ghost-hunting today.) The patterns of near hysteria seen in both UFO and spiritualist movements are suggestive of “social manias,” as described by Charles Mackay in his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. That’s not to say there is no reality underlying either UFOs or spiritualism. Instead, what I’m getting at is that the excitement tends to come and go in repetitive fashion. At key moments, it’s as if a match has been struck to dry tinder, causing a sudden flareup of public interest and high emotion; then the flames are doused and interest subsides. 

It’s hard to account for all these similarities. A skeptic would say that the same psychological aberrations – whether individual or communal – responsible for paranormal and spiritualist beliefs are also responsible for UFO sightings, and therefore the similarities are to be expected. This, of course, discounts all evidence for the reality of both categories of phenomena. Still, there may be some truth in it.

Perhaps there’s a deep well of irrationalism, a collective unconscious, that can be tapped at certain times, and which communicates through confusing symbols: what F.W.H. Myers called “the subliminal self,” which constitutes not only the subconscious but also the superconscious mind – a higher mind to which we are ordinarily denied access.

Suppose certain persons have the ability (usually without realizing it) to focus on or manifest the contents of this subliminal self. Suppose most such manifestations require the energy of many people, just as materializations in a séance room are said to require the combined “ectoplasm” of all the sitters, as well as the medium. I’m not saying there is such a thing as ectoplasm, only that there may be some kind of power or agency that can access the subconscious/superconscious mind and reify part of its contents, at least temporarily.

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down. It’s been reported that when Uri Geller came on the scene with his spoon-bending displays, ordinary people who watched him on television suddenly discovered that they, too, could bend spoons. Jack Houck, who for years has hosted “PK parties” where people bring their own cutlery and learn to manipulate it via PK, has said that the energy of a group is needed to, in effect, raise the vibrations in the room, and that the group’s initial skepticism and doubt must be broken down before dramatic effects will take place. Similarly, the spread of spiritualism in the 19th century seems due, in part, to the fact that people really were getting inexplicable results – and the more results people reported, the more likely other people were to get results. As barriers to belief were broken down, the phenomena snowballed.

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

None of this addresses the actual nature of UFOs and their occupants. Are they, in fact, thought-forms generated by the collective unconscious and manifested as temporary, quasi-real entities that come and go with the speed of thought? If so, it might explain why these sightings seem to keep pace, more or less, with the cultural and technological features of the societies observing them. A raft of UFO sightings in 1897 pretty consistently involved a vessel described in terms of a rigid airship. The first actual rigid airships were not manufactured by the Zeppelin company until 1900, but in 1897 the idea was already  "in the air," so to speak, having been patented and publicized. 

Since 1947, sightings have usually involved spinning saucers, vast triangular craft, and other futuristic machines. The saucer imagery appears to have originated in a misinterpretation: a pilot said the ten unidentified objects he'd seen moved "like a saucer if you skip it across the water." He did not actually say they were saucer-shaped, but the idea caught on, and suddenly people everywhere were seeing "flying saucers." The triangular craft and other shapes seem to owe much to science-fiction illustrations and movies. 

The (relative) regularity in the physical characteristics described any given wave of UFO sightings is perhaps attributable to their common source in the collective unconscious. When rigid airships are the coming thing, people see rigid-airship UFOs. When the saucer imagery has entered the public imagination, people see saucer-shaped UFOs. 

The subliminal self might also shed light on the bizarre, irrational, dreamlike nature of many encounters and the often nonsensical behavior and statements of the “saucer people” themselves. The pseudoscientific ramblings attributed to these purportedly super-advanced spacefarers do not inspire confidence in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But nonsense, paradox, and nightmarish or dreamlike qualities are characteristic of the unconscious mind.

And then there are the reports of hapless humans coerced into having sex with aliens – or the well-known and often lampooned accounts of abductees forced to submit to rectal probing. Suppressed sexual desires and anxieties (penetration, whether desired or feared) are a generally acknowledged feature of the unconscious mind. If UFO experiences originate in the individual or collective unconscious, it would not be surprising to find sexual overtones in them. Certainly, Freud would have expected no less.

Perhaps the subliminal self has far greater capabilities than we commonly suppose, notably the ability to get in touch with other realities or even to manifest pseudo-realities. Perhaps it takes a certain key individual, who is in some way a generator or facilitator of the phenomena, to get the ball rolling. Then, if other individuals happen to perceive the results, their own belief systems are knocked askew and they are able to contribute to the phenomenon and keep it going or even cause it to escalate. After a while, emotions die down, the mechanism (whatever it might be) is worn out, and the sightings subside – until such time as another portal to the subliminal self, another of "the doors  of perception" (to use Aldous Huxley's phrase) is opened, and another series of sightings is inaugurated.

Is this hypothesis correct? I don't know. The problem is that it attributes so much power to the collective unconscious as to call into question any sort of facts or knowledge we might claim to have. It’s much like the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes vast creative abilities to the unconscious mind, capable of weaving a convincing illusion of contact with the dead, among other things.

Like the super-psi argument, the collective-unconsciousness idea feels like a bit of a copout – an attempt to explain these phenomena by saying they all emerge from an inexhaustible, infinitely powerful, yet unknown recess of the mind. Still, it could be true.

An alternative is that UFOs and their occupants are real, independent existents that are invisible to us under ordinary circumstances, but which become perceptible when we activate our seldom-used ability to perceive other planes of reality.

Or perhaps there is no contradiction between these two possibilities. If we could see things from a higher perspective, like a Flatlander lifted off his sheet of paper and looking down at his world from above, we might see that the same phenomenon can be both a subjective, symbolic thought-form and a real, independent entity in its own right.

Actually, I suspect something like this is probably true. I also suspect that my regular mind, as opposed to my higher-dimensional subliminal self, cannot possibly make sense of it.

Flying high

This will probably not be a very well thought-out post. I'd like to present a few ideas and send then see if there's a way of stitching them together. I'm not sure if it will work.

My inspiration for this train of thought is Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee,  a well-known UFO researcher who served as the model for the character played by Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The book, originally published in 1969, was initially unpopular with both skeptics and "ufologists" alike. In it, Vallee tries to associate modern-day reports of flying saucers and their occupants with much older reports of fairy folk, elves, leprechauns, angels, giants, and other "tall tales." (The subtitle, from Folklore to Flying Saucers, makes this point clear.) He sees all of these various accounts as part of a single phenomenon. As he puts it:

The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleon-like character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected.

Vallee is clearly dubious of the assumption that flying saucers are actual physical craft that have arrived from another planet, and seems to lean toward a different hypothesis, but though he allows himself a few conjectures, he does not commit to any of them.  After recounting an event that supposedly took place near Tripoli, Libya, on October 23, 1954 at three in the morning — a farmer saw a flying craft shaped like an egg land near him, saw six men in coveralls and gas masks inside, and was hit by an electric shock when he touched the vehicle – Vallee writes:

If it were possible to make three-dimensional holograms with mass, and to project them through time, I would say this is what the farmer saw. And with that theory we could explain many of the apparitions: in numerous UFO cases and in some religious miracles, the beings appeared as three-dimensional images whose feet did not actually touch the ground. But what about the other physical actions, such as the electric shocks?

I'm not sure electric shocks are an insuperable impediment to the hypothesis; who knows what sort of capabilities a time-traveling interdimensional hologram might possess?

Later, Vallee indulges in a different conjecture:

There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols. The theory … also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

He does not endorse this conjecture either; he simply mentions it among several other possibilities. It strikes me as reminiscent of the super-psi hypothesis sometimes used to explain mediumship and apparitions.

The most interesting – I might even say disturbing – aspect of the book is the similarity of some of the older reports to the more contemporary UFO sightings. People in past eras reported contact with visitors, sometimes described as dwarfs or "little men," and reported seeing celestial chariots that behave very much like today's "flying saucers."  The sheer strangeness of many of these encounters from earlier centuries is matched by distinctly strange elements of some modern UFO accounts, such as one in which the occupants of a UFO baked a biscuit for their human visitor and let him eat it, or another incident in which a hapless human was brought aboard a UFO and encouraged to have conjugal relations with a not-quite-human female.

Naturally, the more outlandish stories, both past and present, can be dismissed as the products of aberrant psychology, false memories, hoaxes, or urban legends and their premodern equivalents. But perhaps it is a little too easy to simply wave away the strangest stories without further consideration. When dealing with a phenomenon that is not understood, are we really in the position to know which reports are too strange to be believed? Maybe a high degree of strangeness is exactly what we ought to expect.

In any event, Vallee  makes a compelling case that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may consist of, is not new. The idea of UFOs as products of advanced extraterrestrial technology may be new, and the visitors today may resemble science-fiction aliens rather than leprechauns or fairies, but the basic ingredients of the standard UFO sighting can be found in much earlier reports.

So that's one thing to consider. Now here's something else.

Mediumistic communications over the past century or more have pretty consistently said that departed persons will find themselves in an earthlike environment at least for a time. The nicer neighborhoods are sometimes called Summerland, and they consist of the kind of scenery the person knew on earth, shorn of its imperfections. The explanation usually given is that Summerland is the product of the collective unconscious of the spirits inhabiting it. The scenery is taken from the earthly memories of the inhabitants. The deceased F.W.H. Myers, purportedly speaking through Geraldine Cummins, called Summerland the "Land of the Lotus Eaters," meaning a place in which people were lost in a blissful fantasy. He also called it "the realm of illusion" and said that as the spirit progressed to higher planes, the essential falseness of Summerland would become apparent.

In short, Summerland is a consensus reality created by common elements in the unconscious minds of the deceased. This is why people of different backgrounds and life experiences end up in different environments. Apache warriors of a hundred years ago don't share the same world as NASA astronauts. The Apaches have one set of earthly reminiscences to draw on, while the astronauts have a very different set. With few overlapping values, the two environments are separate and distinct. We might visualize the many different planes as a vast Venn diagram, with many different circles overlapping at different points, but no two circles sharing precisely the same space. At least in the initial phases of afterlife existence (which also includes the less desirable neighborhoods, the so-called hellish worlds that are also products of unconscious thoughts made into thought-forms), the environment is a function of material residing in the unconscious.

On earth, we like to think that there is a clear line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective, and that the world we inhabit is objective even if our experience of it is, by definition, subjective. But this line of demarcation blurs when we examine it closely. Since all experience is and must be subjective, and since we cannot know anything except by experience (either our own direct experience or our experience of learning about it from some other source), it's tempting to say that our reality is purely subjective. And yet there needs to be some distinction between the kind of subjectivity that's classified as hallucinations, madness, or simply imagination and fantasy, and the "normal" experience of everyday life. As a rule of thumb, we tend to assume that if the same experience is shared by multiple people, then it has a high degree of objectivity, while if the experience is purely personal and nobody else is able to access it, then it falls into the realm of subjectivity.

But if so — if what we call objectivity consists essentially of shared experiences — then our "objective reality" becomes something more like a "consensus reality." And in that case, it starts to look more like Summerland, which is also a consensus reality. The difference between our experience and the experience of the Summerlanders would then be only one of degree, not of kind. Their environment would be, in some way, more immediately malleable, more open to the influences of mental action, than our own. We might imagine a succession of planes of reality – perhaps "planes of experience" would be a better term – rising from the earthly level, in which there appears to be a fairly clear distinction between mind and environment, to higher levels, in which that distinction becomes increasingly ambiguous, and perhaps finally to the really rarefied levels, in which there is no such distinction, and consciousness simply is everything there is.

Now, with this in mind, we can look again at Vallee's remarks. He notes that "the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected." He likens the UFOs and their occupants to hypothetical "three-dimensional holograms with mass, [projected] through time." And he wonders if "there is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated." All of this seems directly relevant to the idea of a consensus reality in which our experience is bounded by parameters set by the contents of the collective unconscious mind.

This notion might be a little clearer if we consider my favorite analogy, the experience of playing a virtual-reality game. Suppose you're playing a game set in the Middle Ages. You are fully immersed in a computer-generated environment that is constructed out of a data set of possibilities. These possibilities include typically medieval features like castles, armored knights, longbows and battle axes, cowled monks and hooded wizards. But because it is a medieval game, the data set does not include such elements as 747 jumbo jets, skyscrapers, cell phones, sunglasses, or machine guns. These options are not part of the package of information that is used to construct this particular reality.

By analogy, the data set of the game corresponds to the collective consciousness of people in any particular era and culture. The game environment itself corresponds to the consensus reality of those people.

Now let's say that a different person is playing a completely different game that is linked in some way to the same computer. This other game takes place in the 21st century. Its data set includes all the things that were not included in the medieval data set (jumbo jets, skyscrapers, etc.).  Ordinarily the person playing this game would be unaware of you and your game, but suppose the other guy has sufficient computer skills to to hack his way into your game as  an uninvited visitor. He will then be able to operate in your medieval environment by projecting an avatar into it (just as you operate in the game world through your avatar).

But what kind of avatar will he project? If he's using the data set of the medieval game, he won't be able to "materialize" in any distinctly 21st-century form. In his own game he might be a pilot flying a Cessna, wearing Ray-Bans and a flight suit, and carrying a semiautomatic pistol. But when projecting himself as an avatar into the Middle Ages environment, he must construct (or have constructed for him) a "physical" appearance out of the available options. There are no Cessnas in the medieval data set, but perhaps the nearest equivalent would be a nautical vessel. There are no Ray-Bans, but there are cowls. There are no flight suits, but there is armor. There are no pistols, but there are magicians' wands.

And so your visitor, appearing in the medieval game, might seem to be a mysterious figure indeed – a cowled man in a suit of shining armor, wielding a magician's wand of great power, and operating a magical sailing ship that flies through the air!  

In short, the intruder could become part of your world only by manifesting himself in terms of the options available – the data set underlying the game, or the  shared contents of the collective consciousness, depending on how you want to look at it. 

As I said, the idea is not really developed. But it's something to think about. 

Lost in the bardo

Let’s consider a series of items, and then look at where they may take us. 

 

Item: During a near-death experience, a man found himself being tormented by demons. Terrified, he reached back into his childhood to the only faith he had ever been taught and prayed to Jesus for salvation. Instantly he found himself lifted out of the experience into a higher plane.

 

Item: A deeply religious Christian, undergoing a near-death experience, found himself in a stereotypical Christian heaven, complete with "pearlescent gates," streets of gold, and choirs of angels. He came back convinced that he had been to heaven, though he remained skeptical of other NDEs that encompassed different, nonbiblical experiences. 

 

Item: A survey of Hindus in India who underwent NDEs found that many of them reported being taken to the afterlife by angelic messengers known as yamdoots, whose role is to escort the deceased to the next life. In many Hindu NDEs, the experiencer's death was attributable to a bureaucratic error, which was promptly corrected by returning them to life.

 

Item: Spiritualist literature abounds in descriptions of Summerland, a paradisal environment enjoyed by most people after death, which bears a striking resemblance to earthly life. Gardens, cottages, and other homely delights are recounted in detail. People are sometimes said to engage in sex, create artworks, plant flowers, or hold regular jobs.

 

Item: Accounts of postmortem existence often feature puzzling omissions and elements of vagueness that cannot be resolved even after repeated follow-up questions. Exactly how the spirits spend their time, whether there are alterations of day and night, whether people need to sleep, and other details either vary unpredictably or are never satisfactorily addressed.

 

Item: Oliver Lodge's book Raymond recounts purportedly postmortem communications with his son. Among other details, Raymond says that some people in the afterlife smoke cigars and drink liquor. Lodge was ridiculed for believing such far-fetched claims. And yet his book contains much veridical material produced by mediums – statements they had no way of knowing, which were later verified, and at least one startlingly accurate prediction.

 

Item: In some channeled literature and séances, communicators claim that Shakespeare and other great poets are continuing to write. Yet no convincing snippet of original Shakespearean poetry ever comes through. On the rare occasions when original poetry is proffered, it is no better than doggerel.

 

Item: Communicators disagree with each other on such fundamental questions as whether or not reincarnation is real, and whether or not there is a God. 

 

Item: In The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, the alleged spirit of F.W.H. Myers, as transcribed by Geraldine Cummins, warns that Summerland is a plane of illusion which he compares to the land of the Lotus Eaters in Greek mythology. The Lotus Eaters kept themselves perpetually intoxicated and existed in a hallucinatory state. Myers insists that however attractive Summerland may be to its inhabitants, it is not ultimately real, and when an individual spirit recognizes this fact, he will immediately be elevated to a higher plane.

 

Item: Longtime OBE researcher Robert Monroe reported bizarre experiences on other planes of existence that often had an illogical dreamlike or nightmarish quality.Still, his experiences are hard to dismiss as nothing more than dreams, because of their occasional veridical content. 

 

Item: So-called alien abductions have much in common with out-of-body experiences. In both cases, the experiencer typically reports being drowsy or asleep, then feeling his body start to vibrate before he rises horizontally from bed and floats through the air, often passing through a wall or window. Other than the science-fiction aspects (little green men, flying saucers, lab experiments), the only significant difference between abductions and OBEs is that the OBEs are understood to be nonphysical; the person looks down and sees his physical body lying prostrate and temporarily abandoned. By contrast, abduction experiences are assumed to be physical, probably because the person is simply unfamiliar with being out of the body.

 

Item: Hypnotic regression to an alleged between-lives experience, in which the patient remembers an intermediate experience after one earthly incarnation and prior to the next, typically discloses an afterlife environment markedly different from that described in NDEs and mediumship. In between-lives accounts, the spirits typically do not take human form but exist as blobs of light in an abstract landscape. Unlike the residents of Summerland, they remember all their past lives and the other members of their soul group. And they participate in planning their next incarnation, during which they will necessarily sublimate their higher consciousness and all knowledge of their life-plan.

 

Item: Sometime between the 8th and 14th centuries, Tibetan monks authored a document known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It delineates various stages of postmortem existence, stages known as bardos. As is often the case with religious writings, the book is highly formalized, with successive stages neatly ordered in groups of seven and said to last for a specific number of days. Leaving aside these elaborations, the essence of the narrative is that dying persons experience “luminosity" or "the clear light of being." If they recognize this light as their own higher self, they will merge with it and avoid subsequent incarnations. Most people, insufficiently spiritually advanced to do this, proceed to a series of visions, both positive and negative, which are generated by their own minds but perceived as objectively real. They find themselves fully immersed in these thought-forms, which reflect their deepest expectations, fears, and hopes, all the while cut off from the higher self. If plagued by frightening images, they are advised to appeal to a personal deity in order to rid themselves of troubling thoughts. At a late stage in the process, they are brought before the Lord of Death and subjected to judgment by looking into the mirror of karma. As before, they are advised to realize that the scene is nothing more than a mental projection; most people, however, cannot manage it. Eventually they are shuttled back to earth in a new incarnation, still caught in the wheel of rebirth. 

 

Okay. Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all of the above items are factually correct as far as they go. Can they be reconciled? I think so ... and it's not really even that hard.

 

Upon death, a person sees "the clear light,” which near-death experiencers know as "the being of light," sometimes perceived as literally the light at the end of a tunnel. As some near-death researchers, notably Kenneth Ring, have speculated, this being of light is, in reality, one's higher self. Most people, however, will misinterpret it as God, i.e. something outside of and distinct from themselves, a basic error which prevents them from uniting with the light. Then, just as the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests, they move into a realm of illusions produced by their subconscious minds. People with a background in Christianity or Hinduism will see environments consistent with Christian or Hindu imagery. People who are subconsciously troubled may find themselves in a hellish environment, which they can escape by focusing on a personal deity - just as one NDEr escaped from the "demons" tormenting him by appealing to Jesus. 

 

Most people in our secular age find themselves immersed in a virtual-reality environment similar to the earthly world they have left – an environment conjured up by the collective unconscious of many like-minded souls. This is what spiritualists call Summerland, the Lotus Flower paradise discussed by Myers. As a plane of illusion, Summerland can incorporate any ideas in the inventory of the subconscious, including cigars, whiskey, sex, gardening, meeting William Shakespeare, and whatever else may seem pleasurable or interesting. But since Summerland residents are not actually meeting William Shakespeare, they are unable to produce any satisfactory examples of his new work. And because they are Lotus Eaters, they will be hard-pressed to explain exactly how they spend their time or even what time is. They are in a hallucinatory state which they mistake for a higher reality.

 

The "life review" common to many NDEs and some channeled accounts, and described in Buddist terms as peering into the mirror of karma, is another illusory, self-generated experience - which may account for the fact that a person typically sees what he needs to see and feels that he is being judged only by himself. 

 

At this stage of consciousness, the individual is not aware of his higher self, his soulmates, or his previous and upcoming incarnations. He may or may not believe in reincarnation or in God. His knowledge is partial and conjectural. He still sees as through a glass darkly. The higher self, temporarily cut off from the ego-persona, enjoys a different experience, as remembered by hypnotically regressed patients who report between-lives memories.

 

Even without having a near-death experience, people can encounter other planes of existence generated by their own thoughts and possessing a kind of quasi-reality. This is the case with many out-of-body experiences, and it accounts for their dreamlike qualities. It is also the case with so-called alien abductions - nonphysical experiences generated (presumably) by imagery gleaned from popular science fiction. In previous eras, the same types of "abductions" were interpreted as the work of demons, angels, faerie folk;- the popular mythology of the time.

 

Skeptics of near-death experiences, mediumship, and channeled literature are right to point out the discrepancies, illogicalities, lacunae, and cultural biases that crop up in these cases. But they are wrong in assuming that the cases can thereby be explained away in materialistic terms. The best accounts contain too much veridical material. The actual explanation is that the experiences are real but hallucinatory - actual adventures in nonphysical realms, but adventures realized in terms of thought-forms and cultural constructs dictated by the experiencer's own mind. 

 

These sojourns in what the Tibetans call the chonyid bardo and sidpa bardo take place below the evolutionary level of the higher self, on a lower plane where postmortem existence is largely dictated by the biases, assumptions, and limitations of the subconscious mind. Such existence is a virtual-reality simulation, real enough to be fully immersive and widely shared, but not real enough to withstand the direct apprehension that yields liberation. Most NDErs who report visiting the afterlife remember this kind of experience. Most mediumistic communicators exist at this level also. Communications from higher-level entities are rarer and more difficult to evaluate or verify, since they typically lack evidential content.

 

This way of looking at things may help bring some order to the disparate collection of case histories reported as NDEs, mediumship, OBES, hypnotic regressions, and transcendental experiences, which have many commonalities but also many discrepancies. 

Miscellaneous meandering musings of middling merit

Roger Knights informs me that The Witch of Napili, Michael Schmicker's fictionalized account of Eusapia Palladino's mediumship, is now available for free as a Kindle ebook. 

~~~

Stephen E. Braude has published a follow-up report on the Felix physical mediumship circle. The credibility of medium "Kai" (a pseudonym) took a hard hit when it was revealed that he had cheated in some earlier sessions. Braude discusses the cheating in detail, but also explains his reasons for thinking that Kai was still worth studying. Unfortunately the new investigation was inconclusive, and the hoped-for infrared video of table levitations was not obtained. Braude's balanced, scrupulously fair report is well worth reading (as is everything he writes). 

Update: Actually I meant to say that clear, unambiguous IR video of a table levitation was not obtained. There was video of a purported levitation, but it was not the iron-clad evidence the researchers were hoping for. 

~~~

A pair of neuroscientists tried to see if contemporary approaches to understanding the brain would allow them to successfully interpret a simple computer program — in this case, the vintage Donkey Kong game. They found that they were unable to learn much at all about the program, calling into question the efficacy of the current computer-based model for studying brain functions. 

~~~

Some years ago I used to argue with a Skeptic on the comments threads of this blog about the evidence for life after death. One point he liked to make was that evidence for UFOs was at least as good as evidence for an afterlife, so why would I believe in one but not the other? At the time I could only say that I hadn't studied UFOs and had no opinion on the subject, an answer he found unsatisfactory.

I still haven't studied UFOs in any depth, but I've read a little on the subject. My tentative conclusion now is that, while many of the reports are hoaxes or errors, some are probably valid. It doesn't follow that UFOs are physical spaceships that have crossed lightyears to visit us. Scott Rogo in his book The Haunted Universe makes the point that there are often close connections between psychic phenomena (premonitions, etc.) and UFO sightings; his suggestion is that UFOs are in some sense a psychic phenomenon in their own right. Carl Jung and Jacques Vallee seem to have had a similar notion. My best guess is that legitimate sightings of "flying saucers" could involve a glitch in the system, a sort of information leakage from one plane of reality to another, perhaps triggered by, or at least accompanied by changes in consciousness on the part of witnesses. This is vague, but it's the best I can do. They are "real," but maybe not physical, or only transiently physical. This would account for the known tendency of UFOs to behave unlike physical objects— to wink in and out of existence, for example. 

As for alien abductions, I would see them as out-of-b0dy experiences misinterpreted as events in the physical world. Many "abduction" experiences start out with a sense that the body is vibrating uncontrollably; then the body levitates off the bed and floats through the wall. This is identical to descriptions of OBEs. The only difference is that OBErs look down and see their physical body left behind, while "abductees" apparently do not. Both experiences also have much in common with shamanic vision quests and with drug-induced experiences involving ketamine and DMT. 

Incidentally, I don't think it's actually true that evidence for UFOs is as good as evidence for life after death. The advantage of afterlife studies is that some can be performed under controlled conditions (e.g., scientific tests of mediums) and others can be performed prospectively (e.g., hospital and hospice studies of deathbed visions and NDEs). UFOs can be studied only in the field and only after the fact, on the basis of eyewitness reports and occasional technological evidence such as videos or radar readings. 

Haunted

Recently I read a 1977 book by D. Scott Rogo called The Haunted Universe. Rogo, a longtime paranormal writer and researcher, is normally pretty cautious in his assessment of paranormal claims. But in The Haunted Universe he eschews his usual wariness to explore a range of purported phenomena that fall outside the purview of parapsychology. The book covers religious miracles (healings, bleeding statues, Marian apparitions), UFOs, and Forteana - unexplained and bizarre news items, like rains of frogs and monster sightings.

His purpose is to advance a theory, or at least a conjecture, that might tie this ragtag collection of subjects together. Rogo's idea is that many of these phenomena can be explained as psychic projections of the subconscious mind.

Rogo goes to considerable lengths to show that some notable UFO sightings have a "psychic" component. He notes that certain individuals seem prone to seeing UFOs, and that their repeated sightings (in the presence of witnesses) happen far more frequently than chance would allow. Many UFO observers have a premonition immediately before the event; they sometimes go outdoors or turn their eyes to the sky, without knowing why, just before a UFO appears. One celebrated UFO observer had a history of problems with electrical equipment; the man was unable to wear a wristwatch because every watch he ever put on would soon fail. Interference with electrical equipment can be associated with psi.

The Haunted Universe shows many parallels between apparitions of the Virgin Mary and other religious figures on the one hand, and appearances of UFOs on the other. The implication is that, in both cases, witnesses are observing a psychic projection, one that matches their cultural and psychological expectations. A highly religious community is prone to seeing religious imagery, while today's more secular and technologically minded public is more likely to see a spacecraft.

Rogo himself admits that his conjecture cannot cover all the data and that other explanations are possible. But clearly he thinks the hypothesis of psychic projection can potentially explain a great many of these mysteries in a more-or-less scientific fashion.

He may be right. But what struck me while reading the book was an assumption that Rogo makes almost automatically, but which, as far as I know, has never been substantiated. The assumption is that psychic projection from the subconscious mind is the actual mechanism behind phenomena traditionally ascribed to "spirits."

On this view, the impressive feats credited to physical mediums - such as the levitation of a table or of the medium himself, or the playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, or the materialization of spirit forms - are best understood in terms of psychokinesis. The medium is actually producing all these effects himself, by means of psychic power that he himself generates, perhaps with the unwitting assistance of those around him, whose own latent powers can be tapped to provide additional energy.

On this basis Rogo argues that a person or a crowd may generate enough psychic energy to unconsciously project an image into the sky - an image real enough to be photographed. This psychic projection may seem to have a lofty spiritual meaning, as in the case of the Virgin Mary, but it is actually only a figment of the unconscious mind temporarily assuming physical or quasi-physical form thanks to some little-understood psychic mechanism.

I have a couple of problems with this idea. First, it seems unlikely that an individual with the kind of psychic power required to project, say, a UFO into the sky could be entirely unaware of his own abilities. Most physical mediums (the genuine ones, not the numerous frauds) have built up their powers over a long period of training, often sitting in spiritualist circles on an almost daily basis for years. Phenomena associated with physical mediums usually start out on a small scale and become more dramatic only with practice. And to the extent that macro-PK effects manifest spontaneously, they seem to occur under conditions of unusual emotional stress. Most of the UFO observers cited by Rogo do not seem to have been under any particular stress at the time.

Moreover, people who produce macroscopic PK effects usually do so over and over again; it's not just a one-time event or even an event limited to two or three instances over the course of a lifetime. And someone using PK is ordinarily aware of it, although contrary evidence - such as poltergeist phenomena - could be cited.

The issue of poltergeists brings me to my second objection to Rogo's idea. He assumes, in line with his general approach, that poltergeists are manifestations of the subconscious mind - psychic projections. They are not, in his view, real spirits. And as we have seen, he does not credit real spirits with the physical phenomena of the séance room, either. To his way of thinking, spirits - if they exist at all - have nothing to do with physical mediumship or with poltergeists, and presumably are not involved in ghostly apparitions and similar things.

No doubt this approach sounds at least slightly more "scientific" than belief in a spirit world. It is probably the viewpoint adopted by the majority of parapsychologists in recent decades. But is there any actual evidence to support it?

Parapsychologists argue that poltergeists are projections of the unconscious mind because the phenomena often center on an emotionally overwrought teenager, and because the poltergeist activity frequently follows this person from one location to another. But how does this prove that the teenager is generating the phenomena? Couldn't we argue with equal plausibility that a malicious spirit is obsessing this teenager, a spirit that has latched on to this victim and is following him or her around? Could the turmoil of the teenager's emotions serve as a magnet to draw in an unwanted spiritual entity, somewhat in the same way that the Ouija board is said to attract low-level spirits?

As for physical mediums, virtually all of them insist that spirits are working through them to produce the effects. Perhaps they are all mistaken, but one would think that the testimony of the people who actually exhibit these powers might be worth at least as much as the speculation of "experts" who have no such abilities. Ever since the decline of belief in spirits and the rise of the macro-PK explanation, there has been a significant drop-off in physical mediumship around the world. Possibly this is because the spiritualist explanation is a necessary psychological defense mechanism to protect the medium from being intimidated by his own "wild talents." But another possibility is that the spiritualist explanation is actually correct, and that when people lose contact with the spirit world, they are less likely to manifest these phenomena.

Circling back to Rogo's thesis, I think there is undoubtedly a link between the psychic world and many of the bizarre phenomena he discusses. But I'm not so sure that these phenomena are generated entirely or even primarily by the subconscious minds of observers. Perhaps in some cases they are. But in other cases - possibly the large majority of cases - the observer may be no more than a doorway through which the psychic energy of a spiritual entity is projected into our universe. In fact, in his next-to-last chapter, "The Cosmic Invaders," Rogo himself seems to pull back from his own hypothesis and to speculate that unknown spiritual entities may be involved, after all.

The bottom line is that there does seem to be a connection between psychic phenomena and the apparitions, UFOs, and other cases Rogo describes. But the exact nature of this relationship remains mysterious. Maybe the agency responsible for these phenomena does lie within the individual human being, or maybe it lies outside any living person - indeed, outside the space-time universe itself.

I really don't know. Anybody care to offer an opinion?

Out of this world

How common are out-of-body experiences? Are there other experiences we don't normally think of as OBEs that nevertheless might fit into the same general category?

What got me thinking along these lines was the book Abduction by John Mack, the controversial study of people who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials. Right off the bat, I should say that I'm no expert on this subject; in fact, I know very little about it. So far I haven't even read all of Mack's book, just the opening and closing sections.

I should also say that I'm not convinced that Dr. Mack, though he was undoubtedly well-meaning, was entirely able to separate his duties as a psychological therapist from his duties as a scientist. As George Hansen notes in an article on a famous, but badly flawed, abduction case:

The outside critic who is not directly involved in such activities almost never recognizes how difficult it is to serve as both a therapist and as a scientist. Those persons trying to help abductees emotionally need to provide warmth, acceptance, and trust. The scientist, however, needs to be critically open minded and somewhat detached and analytical. The two functions are not altogether compatible.

Even so, as Hansen notes in the same article, it seems apparent that there is something to many of these claims, even if they are not necessarily evidence of contact between human beings and space-traveling ETs. But if they are not events of this kind, then what are they?

What I found interesting, and rather unexpected, about Mack's book was how closely the so-called "abduction experiences" resemble OBEs, at least in many important respects. Mack's patients reported that their experiences often began with a humming or buzzing sensation; they then found themselves floating out of bed and through the house while perceiving strange new sources of light around them. If they tried to rouse the person sleeping in bed with them, they would find the person unresponsive. Often they would float through a solid wall in order to get outside. Frequently they reported heightened senses, the feeling that the experience was more real than ordinary reality. When they encountered the so-called aliens, they perceived some of them as luminous beings, creatures of light. Their communication with these "aliens" was telepathic. In some cases they reported becoming aware of a lifelong relationship with an alien who had served the kind of role ordinarily assigned, in a more overtly spiritual context, to a "spirit guide." Moreover, some of these "abductees" remembered seeing flashes of past lives during their experience, while others felt they were being given a glimpse of omniscient knowledge. Some of them reported seeing Earth from space, or having visions of impending global catastrophe, usually of an ecological kind.

All of this strongly reminds me of a mixture of astral projection and an intense mystical experience -- the sort of events reported by Sylvan Muldoon, Robert Monroe, and other accomplished OBErs. To me, the "abduction experience" does not sound like a physical event at all. It sounds as if the person's astral body left the physical body, moved around on the physical plane for a while, and then (maybe) entered what Monroe calls Locale II -- essentially a realm of alternate universes or parallel realities. Perhaps it was in Locale II that the experiencers entered "spaceships," were subjected to invasive surgery, learned about human-alien hybrid breeding experiments, and encountered reptilian creatures and small gray aliens with bulbous heads. It all sounds pretty crazy, but if Monroe's reports are accurate, some of the stuff going on in Locale II is a lot stranger than that.

Or perhaps it would be more reasonable to assume that some of the more exotic details of the experience were the product of misinterpretation or fantasy. Throughout history there have been stories of people who were abducted and carried away to a secret realm of fairies, sprites, pixies, elves, leprechauns, etc, where they were subjected to various indignities before their release or escape. Could these stories have their origin in OBEs in which the experiencer encountered another plane of reality, which he was able to interpret only in terms of folklore familiar to him? Extraterrestrials and spaceships, after all, are part of our modern folklore, just as forest nymphs and flying chariots were part of the folklore of an earlier age. It is interesting to note that so many of these folkloric figures are small, even miniature, and that the most commonly reported "aliens" today are the "grays," which are said to be small in stature.

I admit that other elements of the "abduction experience" are less suggestive of OBEs. Mack's patients sometimes claimed that there was physical evidence of their experience, such as bits of metal inserted under the skin, or strange lesions or nodes on their bodies, or marks on the ground indicating where the UFO landed. And there have been reports of so-called "abductees" going missing during the time when their experience was taking place, and of UFO sightings that were reported around the same time by people who were not "abducted."

Trouble is, I don't know how reliable such reports are. Many of them seem to depend on the investigative work of Budd Hopkins. George Hansen, in collaboration with Joseph Stefula and Richard Butler, has written an entertaining account of an "abduction" that Hopkins looked into; it's the same article I quoted earlier. To put it mildly, the account does not show Hopkins in a favorable light, and I urge all interested readers to take a look at it. The three authors raise serious questions about Hopkins' investigative skills and even his basic contact with reality. (The fact that Mack relied pretty heavily on Hopkins as an authority is another reason to approach Abduction with caution.)

So how good is the physical evidence for abductions? In the Hansen article we are told that well-known NDE researcher Kenneth Ring and his colleague Christopher Rosing carried out a study of "abduction experiences" from the standpoint that something non-objective (in terms of ordinary physical reality) was going on. The article drew an angry response from history professor David Jacobs, an associate of Budd Hopkins. "Jacobs was bitterly critical of Ring and Rosing, saying that they ignored 'cases of witnesses seeing others being abducted while not being abducted themselves.' Surprisingly, Jacobs gave no citations for any of these cases. Hansen wrote to Jacobs requesting such citations but received no reply." Jacobs' apparent inability to substantiate his claims does little to encourage confidence in the "objective" nature of these events.

Indeed, while accepting that "abduction" is typically a genuine subjective experience and not a hoax, Hansen et al conclude:

Because the argument for the "objective reality of UFO abductions" relies heavily on [Budd] Hopkins’ work, our findings call into question this entire theoretical perspective.

In other words, the experience is subjectively real and worth investigating, but there may not be much, if any, reliable evidence to support its objective reality.

If for the moment we discount the purported physical evidence, what we are left with seems to be very much consistent with OBEs. Remember that the "abductees" often said their experience began with a humming or buzzing sensation. Many people have reported that an OBE begins just this way.

Quite a few "abductees" reported a strange glowing light that suffused their environment from the moment they started floating through the air. This reminds me of a case I once read about, though unfortunately I've forgotten the details and cannot cite the source. In this case, a person felt strongly that he was experiencing an OBE; he moved about his house at night and clearly perceived the objects around him, making particular note of the fact that some of them were illuminated by moonlight. However, upon waking, he discovered that there was no moon. Accordingly, he chalked up the whole thing to a vivid dream.

Maybe it was. But if there are sources of illumination apparent to us in an OBE that are not normally apparent in our waking state, then possibly what the person perceived as moonlight was actually some other form of luminescence.

Indeed, many people who have enjoyed intense mystical experiences say they suddenly perceived the world as bathed in a strange new light. And of course people who report near-death experiences frequently talk about a bright light. So perhaps it would not be unusual, during an OBE, to perceive some light that isn't there in any ordinary sense. The "abductee" accounts might shed some light, so to speak, on this aspect of the OBE phenomenon.

Obviously, the "abductee" reports of floating through the air and passing through solid walls are strongly reminiscent of OBEs. Even the fruitless attempts of "abductees" to rouse sleeping persons in their beds have some parallels in OBEs and NDEs. A report of an NDE published in 1917 contains a description of the frustrated NDEr trying to communicate with her sleeping fiancé. Robert Monroe also reported unsuccessful efforts to make people aware of his presence while he was out of body.

Heightened perception and telepathic communication, two other features of "abductee" accounts, are also frequently reported by OBErs and NDErs. Contact with a "being of light" is, of course, a very common feature of NDEs, as is the sense of a deep personal connection with the "being" in question. Scattered memories of previous lifetimes and/or a sense of being immersed in total knowledge of the universe are also reported by some NDErs; a sense or glimpse of all-encompassing knowledge is also frequently reported by people who have undergone transcendent mystical experiences or achieved "unity consciousness." Occasionally NDErs will report seeing Earth from space (see Carl Jung's NDE), and not infrequently they will remember apocalyptic visions (see Damian Brinkley's NDE).

In some cases, two or more individuals claimed to be "abducted" together. Could these be cases of shared OBEs? Robert Monroe would teach his students to meet up while out of the body and then compare notes upon their return; if his research is to be trusted, shared OBEs are not only possible, but rather easy to arrange.

The bottom line is that the OBE phenomenon may be considerably more complex and multifaceted than we might assume at first glance. It may take in not only "ordinary" OBEs, but "alien abductions," as well, and perhaps even the curiously persistent legends of "little folk" of various kinds who have a penchant for carrying off unwary mortals.

Who knows? As I said at the outset, I know very little about "alien abduction" and am certainly not qualified to speak authoritatively on the subject. All I can do is toss out a few speculative ideas. But I doubt that the many similarities between "abduction experiences" and out-of-body experiences are entirely coincidental.