The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Saganism

Carl Sagan was a hero to most of us who in one way or another like to watch the skies. The mellifluous-voiced, turtleneck-and-corduroy-wearing astronomer inspired my generation to care about space, about our planet, and about our future as a spacefaring civilization. He was not only a fashion plate but also a prophet of what I call the “scientific sublime”—a vision of the Cosmos and our own almost spiritual connection to it, the “spirit” being not God but our very own capacity for curiosity and awe. Sagan was able to do what few scientists have ever been capable of: make science something close to a secular religion.

Among the things to be awed by, Sagan always emphasized, was the overwhelming likelihood that we share the cosmos with countless other civilizations. Although the expression for which he is most famous, “billions and billions,” was actually spoken by Johnny Carson in parody of him, Sagan did love to stagger the imagination with large numbers, and large numbers were the basis of his faith that we are not alone. In 1962, Sagan gave a lecture at the American Rocket Society in Los Angeles, in which he dazzled his audience with the Drake equation, which divides the 100 billion stars in our galaxy by the number of main-sequence stars like our own, divided by an estimate of the number of life-conducive planets, divided by an estimate of the probability of life arising on them, and so on, arriving at a figure of more or less 1 million technological civilizations in our galaxy. Some of these are bound to be millions or, yes, even billions of years in advance of us.

Nevertheless, Sagan remains an ambivalent figure for ufology. Throughout his career he was publicly outspoken against belief that UFO sightings were connected to any of those million technological civilizations that statistics predicted. On the subject, he again and again said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—and he asserted that the latter just did not exist for the UFO phenomenon. Sightings of craft were explainable as misidentified meteorological phenomena; abduction stories reflected superstitious and religious beliefs and the “madness of crowds.” In the search for extraterrestrial intelligences, Sagan’s money was solely on the SETI program—scanning the heavens for radio signals.

Yet Sagan did not deny that those civilizations broadcasting their existence in radio would also be spacefaring, and that they would have even come here, probably many times in our history:

Let’s say that each of these civilizations sends out one interstellar expedition per year,” he said. “That means that every star, such as our sun, would be visited at least once every million years. In some systems where these beings found life, they would make more frequent visits. There’s a strong probability, then, that they have visited earth every few thousand years. It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist or even that some kind of base is maintained, possibly automatically, within the solar system, to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of earth it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the earth’s surface. The moon seems one reasonable alternative. Forthcoming photographic reconnaissance of the moon from space vehicles—particularly of the back—might bear these possibilities in mind.

One would think that Sagan, who even thought it possible that there could be alien bases on the moon, wouldn’t be so hostile to the idea that maybe an alien technological presence could be behind some UFO sightings.

It has been suggested that Sagan’s dismissals of UFOs were only for public consumption and that his true beliefs on the matter were different. Paola Leopizzi-Harris, an Italian writer who worked with famous UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek in the early 80s, recently related the following in an interview: “My recollection is that Hynek said it was backstage of one of the many Johnny Carson Tonight shows Sagan did. He basically said (to Hynek) in 1984, ‘I know UFOs are real, but I would not risk my research (College) funding, as you do, to talk openly about them in public.’ ”

I’m not particularly trustful of this single account of a nearly 30-year-old conversation backstage at the Tonight Show. But I do think that, if not money, something besides the claimed “lack of evidence” (he must have been exposed to the voluminous evidence by people like Hynek) deflected the astronomer’s interest away from UFOs. I think that “something” was probably nothing else than the sublime faith he preached. “Once every few thousand years” is mysterious and awe inspiring. So is an ancient alien base on the moon. UFOs buzzing around our planet here and now isn’t—there’s something even cheap about it. It’s a radically different perspective.

This difference in perspective is important, because embedded in either state of affairs (they are far away, they are here) is an implicit ethics, a map for how humanity should behave going forward.

If there is any single monument to and symbol of Sagan’s viewpoint on the character of our non-aloneness, and of the ethics embedded in his sublime view, it is Voyager I. That probe, launched in 1977, yielded the most astonishing information to date of the gas giant worlds that dominate our solar system, and the most astonishing close-up pictures, but its symbolic role transcended its scientific function. For one thing, Voyager I bore a gold record containing greetings in numerous earth languages, as well as hundreds of photographs of our planet and our species. Sagan chaired the committee that assembled this material.

Certainly Sagan knew the likelihood that extraterrestrial audiophiles would happen upon that lp a million years down the road and sit down for a listen on their hi-fis was slim to none. That greeting to space was really a message to humans: that we are not alone and that our destiny as a species is to be part of the galactic community, to join ETs as players on the galactic stage.

Voyager renewed its symbolic role, in a slightly more profound way, when it completed its mission and headed toward the edge of the solar system in 1990. At Sagan’s request, NASA swiveled the probe’s cameras back for a last photograph of Earth, from a distance of nearly 4 billion miles. Its “pale blue dot” photograph of a 1-pixel earth against the black backdrop of space served Sagan (and later Al Gore) as a powerful metaphor for how precious and vulnerable our world is. If we don’t set aside our differences, put childhood away as a species, and fix things, we might not survive. (Sagan’s favorite refrain was the qualification he attached to every promise of our interstellar future: “If we do not destroy ourselves…”)

The thing is, implicit in these paradoxical symbols of puniness and heroic striving is the fact that we, and only we, can achieve these things: save ourselves, save our planet, and evolve to the next stage in our social and technological evolution. A sense that our neighbors are distant in space and time motivates us to take responsibility for the human journey. Stick a little flying saucer or two into that picture, next to that dot, inspires a return to childhood. Although I am pretty convinced that (for better or worse), ETs are here (and have always been here), we can’t think of them as our parents.

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Hoaxed?

Much as I was eager to believe in the authenticity of the recent series of very convincing videos of a UFO over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (previous posts), the growing feeling in the UFO blogosphere is that they’re probably fake, and the arguments are persuasive.

To the untrained eye, the videos look very real, but they are evidently well within the capabilities of anyone with even off-the-shelf special effects software. HOAXKiller1, who clearly knows his way around that stuff, has posted a series of videos on YouTube showing how even the subtle convincing details in the videos could easily have been achieved in Adobe AfterEffects, and showing some telltale signs that some of the videos probably were indeed made that way.

The possibility remains that only some of the videos are hoaxed–and according to Micah Hanks at the Gralien Report, there is at least one separate eyewitness account reported in an Israeli newspaper. But until more witnesses come forward, one eyewitness is not enough to tip the scales.

But again, stay tuned. More details are certain to emerge.

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And a Fifth…

Rick Phillips (UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock) has found a fifth, intriguing video of the “Jerusalem UFO”:

Unlike the other videos, I’m slightly suspicious of this one on first viewing: It reminds me a bit of Cloverfield — people pretending to act totally real and spontaneous for a hand-held camera, but ever so slightly overdoing it. Of course, I can’t understand what the kids are saying, so that doesn’t help.

Are these videos real? Are they fake? Are some of them real and some of them technically adept copycats made for fun or to discredit the real ones?

If the whole thing is a hoax, it’s a brilliant (and very elaborate) one.

Ufology can be maddening sometimes!

[edit 2/5/11: Micah Hanks, at Mysterious Universe, discusses the viral marketing speculation surrounding these Jerusalem videos, with particular reference to this one. He mentions the videos “surfacing” on the web in advance of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield, for example.]

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Fourth Jerusalem UFO Video

[edit 2/5/11: The original version of this video had an audio track (voices, expressions of surprise, etc.), which has now been removed, and new added text explains that that audio track was fake and had been added to the footage as part of a UFO coverup plot somehow, to discredit it. I’m not sure what is going on. As these videos have gone viral, there is increasing debate about their authenticity/inauthenticity, etc. Someone named HOAXKiller1 has been showing how these videos could have been created using Adobe AfterEffects, and deconstructs this video with his own ‘instructional how-to.’]

Now a fourth video of Sunday’s Jerusalem UFO has surfaced. If the videos are authentic and not digitally manipulated, it is an unprecedented event because of the quality and number of videos that captured the object from different vantage points. Caution needs to be exerted — there are increasingly sophisticated hoaxed videos out there. But if this is part of a viral marketing campaign, it’s very, very elaborate. I’m no expert at video analysis, but I’m inclined at this point to agree with Rick Phillips over at UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock that this could be the real deal, in which case it would be very exciting indeed.

Again, stay tuned!

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UFO over Jerusalem

If it isn’t an elaborate hoax, there was an astonishing UFO event in the Middle East this weekend that is generating a buzz on the UFO forums. At 1 am on January 28, a bright white orb was filmed by three witnesses directly over the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. After hovering high in the air, it descends slowly to just over the dome, hovers there for a while, then gives off two bright flashes and shoots rapidly upward.

Two witnesses filmed this scene from what looks like about a mile away. The clearest is this one:

The cell-phone video taken by the man visible in the first video is next. Overall the video is not in as sharp focus as the first.

In both of the above videos, a group of red lights are seen moving overhead after the white orb has disappeared.

A video then surfaced of the same event, filmed by tourists from a much closer vantage point:

It looks very convincing — and again, if it’s not an elaborate hoax, it’s pretty incredible. However the location of the event — over one of the most sacred places to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and hotly contested by all three — gives some cause for suspicion that the videos could be part of a viral marketing campaign. Stay tuned.

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UFO Coverup Primer

In our busy world, who has the time to read a thick tome covering the evidence about UFOs? Historian Richard Dolan has written three of them (the latest, After Disclosure, in collaboration with Bryce Zabel) that amount to over 1,300 pages. It’s a stunning volume of documentation. Well, here’s the answer to your problems: A ten-minute summary of the some of the most compelling evidence for the U.S. coverup of the phenomenon:

(My only minor complaint is that his dismissal of Project Blue Book comes off as bare assertion because he skips over the evidence in that case — namely the experience of project member Allen Hynek, who came to realize the phenomenon was real and the group’s purpose was really to cover it up, not investigate. And I’m still not convinced we know what happened at Roswell. But … you can’t have everything in ten minutes!)

Watch it!

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JFK, Marilyn, and UFOs

“Webb,” [Bill Clinton] had said, “if I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.” Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting. (Webster Hubbell, Friends in High Places)

The 10-year-old part of me that loves UFOs and Bigfoot and conspiracy theories is constantly at war with the “respectable” and adult part of me that tries to appear normal and sensible and that resists seeing patterns in everything. Maybe it’s because my parents were psychologists, but I’m deeply fearful of being labeled a paranoid. But besides UFOs, there’s no bigger and more persistent conspiracy theory than that of “who killed JFK?” And thanks (or no thanks) to one of my favorite UFO scholars, Richard Dolan, I find it at least plausible that the latter whacky paranoid conspiracy is not unrelated to the former whacky paranoid conspiracy.

The idea held in certain not unrespectable corners of ufology is that Kennedy, sworn in on this day 50 years ago, might have been killed because of what he knew or was planning to reveal about extraterrestrials. He was apparently briefed on the subject by the CIA, and rumors hint at more extensive knowledge or involvement. See Dolan’s new post about JFK.

Now, there’s no smoking gun connecting UFOs to JFK’s assassination–just interesting speculation. But oddly enough, there does seem to be a smoking gun linking UFOs to Marilyn Monroe’s “suicide.” Dolan writes:

Then there is the controversial Marilyn Monroe UFO document, which came to light in 1992. This is a single page memo from the CIA dated August 3, 1962, one day before she died, almost certainly because she was murdered. The information on the document came from two monitored telephone conversations: one between the journalist Dorothy Killgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, and another between Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s brother, the Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

The Killgallen-Rothberg conversation revolved around the fact that Monroe was telling secrets to select Hollywood insiders regarding her liaisons with the President, one of which was “a visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space.” The conversation between Monroe and RFK focused on her anger at the Kennedys, the sensitive information she had in her journals, and her willingness to give a “tell all” press conference. The document bears the signature of James Jesus Angleton, head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.

I wish I could ignore all this and just be respectable. But dammit, there’s something stranger here, and especially in Marilyn Monroe’s death, than meets the eye. Wouldn’t it be terrible (and awesome) if the assassination of both Norma Jean and JFK had to do with UFOs? I’m of divided mind about this, because I don’t want to go too far down that path of wishful paranoia, but there is some suggestive stuff out there. (The CIA memo is reproduced in various places online–do a Google search if you’re interested.)

[1/29 Edit: Dolan’s collaborator Bryce Zabel produced a series in 1996 called Dark Skies, about a direct link between the UFO conspiracy and JFK’s assassination. At that point it was pure speculation, but will it be proved fact?]

Read it here.

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A Clear Signal From Outer Space

For half a century we have been searching the sky for extraterrestrial intelligence, using radio telescopes. This is on the assumption (debatable) that advanced ETs would still be communicating in the radio band. But what if they are trying to communicate with us in some other way? And what if their message to us isn’t one of cosmic brotherhood?

This gas “cloud” near the Eta Carina nebula seems to answer both questions. An extraterrestrial civilization does exist. It is sending us a very clear message using, not radio, but hand gestures. And the message isn’t what we were hoping for.

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Wikileaks: Soviet UFO Investigations

The rumors about upcoming Wikileaks concerning UFOs seem to be true: In a newly released cable published in a Norwegian newspaper, the chairman of the intelligence service of the former Soviet Republic of Belarus revealed that during the time of the Soviet Union, there were extensive funds for investigating the UFO phenomenon.

Read the story here.

But this only confirms what was already known: That the Soviet government and military were as interested in UFOs as those of the U.S. And Russia continues to investigate the subject. Read Philip Mantle and Paul Stonehill’s research on UFOs behind the Iron Curtain.

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“Tell me how you really feel about your flying saucer”

“Along with his freely and evenly hovering attention which enables the analyst to listen simultaneously on many levels, he needs a freely roused emotional sensibility so as to perceive and follow closely his patient’s emotional movements and unconscious fantasies.” Paula Heimann

When I first came across this quote about a psychoanalyst’s “freely and evenly hovering attention” (reproduced in Christopher Bollas’s book The Shadow of the Object), my mind immediately supplied an image of the doctor as a flying saucer, floating silently over a patient on a couch. I’m sure that’s not the metaphor the author had in mind, but it seems apt, and it seems like the metaphor could flow in both directions.

Jacques Vallee calls UFOs a control system, a thermostat regulating our psyches. Jung called them a material symbol of individuation that fascinates us at a time of high collective anxiety. The underlying idea is that UFOs, whatever else they are, may serve a therapeutic function, helping us in our process of evolution as individuals and as a species, and helping us move past our inner and outer conflicts.

Freud discovered that the key to curing people of their neuroses was the process he called “transference.” By saying very little—often maddeningly little—the doctor turns himself into a silent projection screen for the patient’s unconscious fantasies, and a stand-in for the earliest love objects in the patient’s life. The process of cure is getting the patient to recognize these fantasies and identify the object his present confusions and conflicts are really directed toward. As fits the stereotype, the “object” referred to by psychoanalysts, particularly those of the object-relations school, is generally the mother.

Transferrence is sometimes called “transference love” because the patient not only substitutes the doctor for the real love object but also expects or hopes for that love to be returned. The patient unconsciously hopes and believes the doctor secretly loves him back, and even “seduces” the doctor through his symptoms. The typical patient wishes to have the most interesting symptoms, to be the doctor’s most fascinating case.

A commonly expressed notion is that ETs are visiting us because they find humans particularly remarkable and unique, our civilization and our planet particularly rich and exciting. This goes right along with the Close Encounters fantasy: Their silence and elusiveness are really a big tease and preparation for the final big show of their love, where they will reveal at last the truths about ourselves and our special place in the universe that they have been keeping secret until we were ready to join them as equals. Along with this fantasy is the notion that, once they have disclosed themselves to us, we will put aside our childish squabbles and conflicts and set aside our petty materialistic strivings, and finally become a mature, rational, humane species.

Intellectually I think the notion that “they” have any particular love for us is naïve. I suspect theirs is no more than a professional concern, and that humanity is just one of their countless patients. But I confess that I can’t help but harboring in the back of my mind that same hope for a final disclosure—not from “the government” but from the ETs themselves—and the belief that these hovering, attentive doctors hold all the answers about us and could alleviate all our pains and help us resolve our conflicts.

Debunkers of the paranormal often recite the idea that people believe in things like UFOs because they crave some meaning in their lives. I think this is true. Who doesn’t crave some meaning in their lives? Who doesn’t want to believe? Even the attachment to science is, at bottom, an all-too-human faith in a solid foundation of meaning. When we have a crisis of faith, as we often do at a crossroads, we may swallow our pride and visit a doctor. Just because we go to the doctor to help us fill a hole in our lives doesn’t mean the doctor doesn’t exist. It’s just that our crisis has made us start to pay attention.

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