Introducing Kepler College -- Not your Typical State-Approved DL School

Hey Jugador... this is really gonna piss you off, but I think that the belief in UFOs needs more scholarly attention than it's getting too.

Just as I don't believe in the truth of astrology, I don't believe in UFOs either. Or more accurately, I don't believe that UFOs are spaceships. (Unidentified flying objects obviously exist because not every flying object is identified.)

Whats fascinating about UFOs is the fact that so many people do believe in them, and have woven such elaborate mythologies aound them so quickly.

I call it "the flying saucer faith". It's one of the most interesting manifestations of contemporary folk-religion, the leading edge perhaps. And I really hate to see religious studies ignore the most imaginative parts of popular religiosity because they are too new and too unlike the old forms to be easily recognizable. That's precisely what's most interesting about them.

It moves fast. In the 1950's, the UFOs were imagined to be full of super-science saviors, representatives of federations of advanced planets (just like the UN), come to save us from nuclear self-annihilation. Put another way, they were angels, redrawn in contemporary secular scientistic form.

But in the 70's we started seeing stories of cattle mutilations and alien abductions. The aliens inexplicably developed a fascination for human women's genitals and we started hearing about alien-human halfbreeds. Clearly, for some reason the angels were being recast as demons. Perhaps it was the 60's and Vietnam making themselves felt.

And it seems to me that more recent UFOlogy has tranmuted once again, becoming more of an expression of political alienation. There's less interest in the aliens these days than in imagined government conspiracies to cover them up or to collaborate with them or something.

What UFO believers seem to me to be doing is taking many of the staples of historic folk-religion and recasting them into "scientific" form that's more in tune with contemporary sensibilities. We still have the heavenly apparitions, but now they are spaceships, machines, not the virgin Mary. We still have our familiar angels and demons, but now they are exobiological space-aliens.

But whatever they are, they still provide their believers with access to a "reality" that's somehow more significant and more emotionally evocative than this one. The visions still reveal the "true" secrets of how things are really run from behind the false curtain of humdrum everyday life.

 

Now that's just spooky! A wise (and fictional) FBI agent once said:

• This whole phenomena is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a government agenda.
• They say when you talk to God it's prayer. But when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia.
• Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven't yet figured out how to ask.

You know what they say, the truth is out there.

 

Actually, the fictitious agent (was it Moulder or Scully?) was quoting the brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Szasz.

The actual Szasz quote is "If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."