Fairies, Aliens and Folklore: A Response to CJ’s ‘What Are UFOs?

A few days ago the mighty CJ put up a piece on his website asking the question ‘What Are UFOs?’, in which he took aim at elements of the psycho-social interpretation of the phenomenon. CJ’s a long-term member of ASSAP, one of Britain’s leading paranormal research organisations. Unlike the Society for Psychical Research, which concentrates on laboratory research, ASSAP was set up to investigate paranormal phenomena in the field, whether they be ghosts, fairies, crop circles, time slips or flying saucers. CJ’s been investigating such phenomena since the 1980s, following very strict scientific protocols, and has a wealth of practical experience.

At the heart of his essay are two questions. One of these is on the nature of folklore itself. What is it? Does it include popular superstitions like not putting your shoes on the table or crossing on the stairs? Where does folklore begin and literary, composed culture end? For example, when football fans start singing Beatles’ songs on the terraces, does it become a piece of folklore? What are the authentic features of traditional fairy encounters, and, indeed, is there are a single class of being that comprises the fairies?

In fact, these are questions folklorists themselves have been discussing for a very long time. Books on folklore, such as Linda Degh’s Legends, often begin with that very question. And what counts as folklore is very wide. Folklore can be thought of as any popular custom. The folklorists of the 19^th century viewed it in terms of an ancient, timeless popular culture arising from a particular ethnic group, preserved in the rural customs of agricultural communities. There was supposed to be a distinction between this timeless, popular culture, the authors of which were unknown, and literary culture produced by the educated upper classes.

This distinction between elite, educated culture and that of the masses has more or less collapsed. The more you examine folksong and folk literature, the less it seems to be the timeless remnant of ancient beliefs and practises. The Marshfield mumming play, in which the hero fights an enemy, is killed, but restored with a pill from a doctor, has been one of those folk customs whose origins have been claimed to lie back with the dying and rising gods of pagan antiquity. Research back in the 90s by contrast claimed that similar plays dated no earlier than the 18^th century, and were commonly performed at local fairs. Similarly, songs and dances travelled across Europe, taken from one country to another by itinerant musicians from quite an early date. A 16^th century writer, for example, remarked on English musicians going to fairs to hear the latest tunes and catches from other performers in Germany. Instead of autochthonic expressions of the essential soul or spirit of a particular ethnic group or locality, people were swapping tunes and songs across countries and continents. Musicologists have suggested, for example, that there are African elements in western sea shanties. As for their connection to particular areas, that was frequently just where folksong collectors like Cecil Sharpe happened to pick them up. While he marked them down as coming from Suffolk, Yorkshire, Somerset or wherever, this didn’t mean that the songs were exclusive to those areas.

Nor is folklore restricted to rural communities. The focus on them by the early researchers no doubt was part of the reaction of some parts of educated society to the rise of science and the machine age in the 19^th century. This was felt by some intellectuals as a threat to traditional western culture and its metaphysical assumptions. And so scholars investigated the ancient traditions and stories of rural communities, collecting stories of witches, ghosts, giants and fairies as well as rustic tunes to preserve this popular, pre-industrial culture and its basis in the supernatural against the new, scientific materialism.

At the same time, other scholars questioned this focus on the countryside and asked whether towns didn’t have their folklore as well. Yes, they did, and there was a burgeoning interest in what became known as urban legend in the ‘90s, following the publication years earlier of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on phantom hitch-hikers and so on. And the actual subject matter of folklore can be more or less anything that has entered popular culture. One book on folkloristics covers subjects as diverse as Navajo Indian pottery figures for tourists, American barn types, and jokes and humour in American gay culture. These latter have a deeper social purpose than just amusement. They were often told to subtly find out whether the person being talked to was gay or not. Some jokes would be only understood by other gays. If the person told the joke smiled and laughed, it could be assumed they were a fellow member of the community. And new forms of urban folklore were emerging all the time. One example of this was the photocopylore that turned up in offices and workplaces, in which someone had photocopied or faxed a particularly remarkable or humorous piece and pasted it up in the office. Several of these, I remember, were jokes at the expense of American football players on scholarships at universities, as well as the general drudgery of office life.

And this is where UFOs come in. The second question of CJ’s critique is whether fairies really can be identified with today’s UFOs and aliens. This is based on the books of Fortean writer John Keel and the American-French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee. They noted in their books – UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse by Keel, Passport to Magonia by Vallee- that UFO encounters often followed the same motifs as fairy lore. UFOs and their occupants. They suggested that UFOs and their alien pilots are the 20^th century successors to traditional fairy beliefs. But the imps and goblins of previous centuries have had to change with the times. In modern, technological society people no longer believe as they did in fairies. These have therefore been replaced by the imagery of Science Fiction and space travel.

Some of the motifs of traditional fairy lore do indeed seem to fit the UFO phenomenon. Evans-Wentz in his classic The Fairy Faith in Western Europe, quotes ‘an old Irish mystic’ as saying that the fairies are an older race, who come from the stars. Some of the UFO aliens reported from Scandinavia and also from Italy certainly resemble the short gnomes and goblins of western European fairy tales. And some of their activities also resemble those of past supernatural entities. The abduction phenomenon, in which people are forcibly taken aboard alien craft and raped to produce half-human hybrids, is very similar indeed to medieval tales of demons having sex with sleeping mortals, and even jinn in the Islamic world. One Arab story has three maidens made pregnant by a jinn, who enters their house through a gap into elsewhere opening in their bedroom wall. He is accompanied by a number of lights. And just like the aliens, who take their progeny away from those who bore them, so this jinn takes back into his world his children by the girls.

There are several problems with the identification of today’s aliens with fairies. One of these is with the collection and recording of such traditional narratives, that CJ identifies as a problem. He states in his article that European fairy lore is very much a literary phenomenon, influenced and shaped by writers like Shakespeare, and that we have difficulty knowing what ordinary people really believed about them. This is a fair point. Jeffrey Burton Russell in his history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages discusses fairies and their origins as it affects the later development of witch beliefs. Roman civilisation had a number of supernatural beings below the gods and their messengers, the daimones. These included tree spirits, the dryads, and lamias, part-women, part snakes. Belief in such beings persisted after the fall of the Empire into the 7^th century in Spain until they were somehow replaced by the fairies. He identifies the latter’s origins in the Latin fatare, ‘to enchant’, and states that there seems to be little difference between supernatural fairies and witches when they first appear on the continent.

It is suggested that fairies are ultimately based on the three fates that are believed in Greek folklore to appear at a child’s birth to cast its destiny. Other historians have suggested that there was an international fairy cult stretching over Europe and the Middle East, whose remains have sometimes survived to the present as in Romania. In the west under pressure from the witch hunters the fairy cult’s central beliefs were distorted. In the original fairy belief, young women left their bodies to meet the Queen of the Fairies and enjoy a round of singing, dancing and the company of the young men they fancied. Under the pressure of the witch-hunters’ interrogation, however, this became the witches’ sabbat, in which they flew to meet the Devil and instead of a pleasant feast, ate foul food among other lurid horrors.  In this manner, the elite concerns of the witch hunters served to transform traditional folk beliefs.

Western fairy lore has been the source and subject of literary romance since the Middle Ages. Medieval authors wrote and sang tales of the quests of heroic knights, assisted by benevolent fairies like Oberon, and these tales remained popular after the end of the Middle Ages. By the 17^th century authors started writing their own fairy stories as conscious literary inventions, and this has carried on down the centuries with much-loved tales like Peter Pan and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales. These have shaped to a greater or lesser extent the popular image of fairies. It was Shakespeare, apparently, who added the gossamer wings. As for their size, Oberon is described as about the size of a child of three or older. He’s small, but not tiny. And sometimes glimpses of popular beliefs about the fairies can be seen. For example, church records from 12^th century Exeter record the local bishop forbidding the local people from putting small objects, including bows and arrows, in their barns for the elves to play with.

CJ also talks about the differences between various kinds of fairy creature, such as barguests and other spectral entities. Are they of the same type as brownies, goblins and so on? These creatures may be very different from each other, and so it is reasonable to ask whether they refer to the same types of supernatural entity.

Keel and Vallee, however, did not argue that there was a simple equivalence between fold fashioned fairies and UFOs. To begin with, fairies were not the only supernatural creatures modern UFOnauts resembled. Vallee in one of his later books discusses the similarity between UFOs and their pilots and the pagan gods of the Ancient Near East. Keel also discusses medieval demonology. While demons are supernatural, they were also generally considered a separate set of beings than the fairies, although sometimes the two were identified with each other. Keel and Vallee also didn’t think that UFO aliens were literally fairies either. Rather, the phenomenon that took the form of fairies, demons, angels and other supernatural beings in the past now took the form of spacecraft and aliens in the UFO mythology. They saw them therefore as ‘Ultraterrestrials’ – beings from beyond our reality. Vallee considers that they come from parallel universes, a view that he has incorporated in his SF novels such as Fastwalker.

The investigation of the links between fairy beliefs and UFO lore does not end with the views of Keel and Vallee, however. Their books provided the foundations for the Psycho-Social Hypothesis, which goes further than this. It maintains that there is little or no objective reality to UFO encounters. They are primarily internal, psychological experiences that take their imagery from contemporary culture. In the past this was the myths about gods, demons and fairies. Today the content and imagery are taken from Science Fiction. These experiences may be sparked by a real phenomenon, such as a misidentified sighting of Venus or aircraft and the content generated by poorly understood psychological or neurological phenomena, such as sleep paralysis. Back in the ‘90s there was considerable interest in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as the source of such illusory encounters, and it does seem that it can explain some. Those suffering from it may experience hallucinations that do draw on contemporary culture and folkore. One poor fellow who had it used to see a witch, complete with cauldron, in his kitchen during attacks. But this explanation seems to have fallen from favour in recent years, possibly because there is no single explanation for UFO encounters.

But although the imagery is that of aliens and space travel, behind them lies traditional fairy motifs. Thus, Joe Simonton’s encounter with small aliens while out prospecting in the Rockies also follows one convention of traditional fairy lore. In fairy tradition, precious fairy objects taken from their owners by the heroes become, in the light of day, perfectly ordinary and worthless. Fairy gold, for example, becomes a pile of leaves. Simonton found the aliens cooking pancakes. He was offered one, and took it back to be analysed. It was then found to contain nothing more exotic than flour and salt. Back in the 90s the lawyer and TV host Clive Anderson had a pair of ufologists on his late night show, Clive Anderson Talks Back. These two blokes described their encounters with aliens. As proof these were genuine, the aliens had given one of guys a rock, which he duly produced. Cue audience laughter. A rock could provide convincing proof of the reality of the phenomenon, if it was made of some exotic material from one of the planets, say regolith from the Moon or Montmarillonite from Mars. But this, however, was just an ordinary stone.

There is a wider point about the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As it rejects a supernatural or paranormal basis for the experience, it does not matter whether the material generating the experience is based in authentic folklore or not. The fairy literature behind encounters with aliens resembling fairies may be literary, such as the small, winged aliens who asked a British housewife baking Christmas cakes back in the 70s if they could have one, but this does not affect the nature of the experience itself. Not all ufologists, whose views have been influenced by the PSH go so far as to deny that there is a paranormal element to the UFO experience. Jenny Randles stated in one edition of her small press UFO magazine, Northern UFO News, that there was a paranormal element to the experience which was using the motifs of traditional fairy lore and SF. Kevin McClure, another long term writer and researcher of the world of the strange and paranormal, came to a similar view. There was a genuine paranormal phenomenon behind the experiences, which was using traditional supernatural tales and SF to communicate with us. This was the basis for his extremely short-lived magazine, Alien Scripture, with its subtitle ‘Who is talking to us and why?’

CJ states that theGareth essay is just one of a projected series in which he will discuss what UFOs are. In part 2 he intends to examine other features of the phenomenon. This should be interesting. Although the Psycho-Social Hypothesis has established itself as a major alternative explanation to the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis for UFO experiences, there are definitely questions to be asked about it. One is that sometimes paranormal encounters do not resemble established folklore or literary tropes. Gareth Medway argued this in article published by Magonia back in the ‘90s. I think Gareth’s a priest or leading member of one of the new pagan religions in Britain. He was also the author of The Lure of the Sinister, a book that cast a very sceptical eye on the various Satanism scares that have occurred over time and that were causing hysteria and distress then with rubbish stories of the terrible abuse of children in Satanic orgies. In his article, he discussed a paranormal vision a man experienced out riding one evening. This fellow reported seeing something like a fist rising up from the ground. He had no explanation for the vision and was genuinely confused by the experience. The next evening, just as he was out riding again, he experienced the same vision. Gareth argued from this that if such encounters were based on folklore and popular culture, then the vision should have conformed to the contemporary imagery of the time. But it didn’t. And I’ve no doubt that there may be other problems with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis and other explanations for the UFO phenomenon waiting to be investigated.

I look forward to what CJ says in part two.

For further information, go to:https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/what-are-ufos/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3VCjJDO6tTcifznYHpDoUhHXVnYjQBpMeFnIJ4RLeGnxPDmefDSqsdsa4_aem_AYHr2BLRWzM6VP4g4Sb2M1eQvTF1mH6xUlD3z77kKpYv3RzWOrKnNgEtXrRJu121Y_Fi291mnyBHGQ194PTYrRv4

Poul Anderson and Ideas about Terraforming Venus Before Carl Sagan

This might appeal to readers of this blog, who aren’t fans of the late astronomer, Sceptic and presenter of the blockbusting TV science series, Cosmos. I put up a drawing I’d done of Sagan a week or so ago along with a piece explaining why I thought he was a great TV personality. While Sagan was a brilliant astronomer and space scientist, some of the readers of this blog were less impressed by his attitude towards the UFO crowd. Sagan was a fervent rationalist, who saw it as his mission to attack ideas he thought were irrational, and particularly the paranormal. He was one of the founders of the Sceptical organisation, CSICOP, or the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, along with the stage magician James Randi and the mathematician Martin Gardner. One of Sagan’s last works was The Demon-Haunted World in which he worried about the tide of irrationality creeping over America and the world and foresaw a time in which the New Age would have taken over completely, leading to a new Dark Age and people earnestly consulting their horoscopes each morning.

Some commenters remembered how Sagan had been wheeled on TV in the 1960s to debunk UFO encounters. They didn’t like his superior and condescending attitude towards the experiencers. Now I’ll admit that I don’t regard UFOs as nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. Much of the imagery and the basic plot of UFO encounters seems to come from science fiction and supernatural encounters with gods, demons and fairies before then. One of the alternative views of the UFO phenomenon is the psycho-social hypothesis, which sees it as an internal psychological experience which uses the imagery of contemporary culture. In previous centuries this was of fairies. Now, as belief in the supernatural has declined in the West, the imagery is from science fiction. But both the imagery of fairies and alien spacecraft represent the same theme of encounter with a cosmic other. Some UFO writers and researchers like John Keel and Jacques Vallee believe that there is a genuine paranormal phenomenon at work, and that the force that was previously responsible for encounters with fairies and so on has simply now changed to using that of space craft as society has changed. See Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, for example. Many UFO encounters can be explained as misidentification, hoaxes, and sightings of top secret military aircraft. I’m also convinced that some are due to the intelligence community deliberately messing with people for their own purposes. In one of his books, Vallee suggests that the Cergy-Pontoise abduction in France may have been faked by French intelligence as an experiment to see how people would react to a real alien encounter. And then there’s the case of Paul Bennewitz, a defence contractor in the US who was driven out of his mind by a pair of intelligence agents at a nearby USAF base. Bennewitz thought he had got in touch with an alien held captive at the base. The pair claimed to be whistleblowers and fed Bennewitz a whole load of spurious documents apparently confirming it, and then told him that it was all fake. It’s a tactic apparently known as the ‘double-bubble’ used by the intelligence services to destabilise their enemies. It worked on Bennewitz, who I think was driven to a nervous breakdown.

Even with the hoaxers, the top secret aircraft and the misidentified objects, there are still some UFO encounters that are very difficult to explain. I think the best explanations are probably the paranormal and psycho-social rather than the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any the less puzzling nor that genuine people, who have had a truly inexplicable experience, should be sneered or condescended to.

But back to Sagan. One of Sagan’s achievements was to suggest a way Venus could be terraformed. This involved planting genetically-engineered bacteria in the Venusian atmosphere. These would consume the carbon dioxide and exhale breathable oxygen. But Sagan wasn’t the first person to suggest ways of terraforming the planet, and he didn’t invent the concept of terraforming. You can find the idea, but not the name, in the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which the Martians have built giant machines to replenish the atmosphere on their dying world. The great SF writer Poul Anderson wrote a story in which a similar technology is used to terraform the Venusian atmosphere.

This is mentioned by Mike Ashley, the editor of the anthology of classic SF stories about the worlds of the solar system, Born of the Sun, published by the British Library. In the introduction to the story about Venus, Ashley writes

‘The 1950s saw some authors taking note of recent research which suggested Venus was far from a watery world. Leading the way was Poul Anderson. In ‘The Big Rain’ (1954) he describes a harsh, sweltering Venus that, when it does rain, rains formaldehyde. The story considers how Venus might be terraformed, using the formaldehyde locked in Venus’ clouds. Airmaker machines, spread all over Venus, accelerate a reaction with the formaldehyde, ammonia and methane to produce hydrocarbons and oxygen, whilst bombs reinvigorate volcanos so that in time it starts to rain – and rains for over a hundred years, by which time Venus starts to be more Earth–like’. (p. 93).

To me, this is an example of one the instances where informed Science Fiction, even if wrong in the details, has advanced scientific thinking. And there are plenty of other examples in some of the other stories Ashley discusses in some of the other books in the same series.

Sagan, for all his faults, was a brilliant scientist and he did much to make people aware of the environmental crisis and opposed the threat of nuclear war and the New Cold War Reagan and Thatcher started ramping up in the 1980s. But in this case, while his ideas about terraforming Venus are most likely to be correct, he wasn’t the first to invent the idea.

Sometimes SF writers get there first.

Black Earthling Boy Meets White Alien in New John Lewis Christmas Ad

John Lewis have just launched their Christmas. This follows their failed advert for insurance, in which a White boy in makeup dances around the family home wrecking it and spraying glitter and paint everywhere. That was widely criticised for promoting the trans ideology amongst children and for false advertising, as apparently the insurance policy being sold didn’t cover deliberate damage. In the new advert, a cute Black little boy sees an alien spacecraft fall out of the sky. He follows the contrail into the woods, where he sees a crashed alien spaceship and its humanoid pilot. The alien is White with white hair and rather feminine. The lad offers her some mince pies. The alien accepts them, and the two becomes friends. While fixing her craft the alien sets the electrics working so that the Christmas lights on a neighbour’s house suddenly come on, much to the neighbour’s annoyance. Having repaired her spacecraft, the alien gives the lad a peck on the cheek in farewell and flies off. The lad goes home to join his family for a festive meal, while looking into the sky. The sound track for the ad is a cover version of Phil Oakey’s ‘Electric Dreams’. I found this video of it put up on YouTube by the Guardian.

Alex Belfield has already posted a rant about it. He rightly points out that it doesn’t contain much in the way of Christmas imagery. There’s no Santa Claus, although it’s possibly a pine forest so there might be Christmas trees. There also isn’t much in the way of specifically Christian imagery either. I might be wrong, but there’s no nativity scene. It’s a very secular interpretation of Christmas. A decade ago there was controversy over what the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers and organisations described as a ‘war on Christmas’. They were angry because some local councils appeared to be deliberately omitting or playing down any mention of Christmas because they were somehow afraid it would offend non-Christian minorities. Birmingham council was particularly attacked for its reinterpretation of the festive season as ‘Winterval’. I’ve heard instead that, rather than replace Christmas, ‘Winterval’ was dreamed up as a marketing initiative by Brum’s council to create an inclusive festive season that would also cover the festivals of other faiths near Christmas, like Hanukka and Diwali. Also, from what I saw, most if not all of the calls for the removal of any public celebration of Christmas came not from the members of non-Christian religions, but from atheists and secularists like the National Humanist Society. The framed their arguments on behalf of religious minorities, while I think they were far more motivated by the rise of a much more militant atheism following the publication of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I also think that the advert is secular simply from the sheer mechanism of capitalism, although John Lewis is organised as a partnership with its workers more like a cooperative. Capitalism and private industry exist to maximise profits. One way of doing this is seeking out new markets to you can sell your product to more people. About 15 per cent of the British population is Black and Asian, and many of the latter are non-Christians, like Hindus, Muslims and so on. Christians are now a minority in the general population. Hence John Lewis and many of the other firms advertising play down Christmas as a religious festival in order to appeal to a broader section of customers.

But Belfield also criticised the advert because he thinks that the alien in it is ‘ambivilacious’, his term for anything that is gay, non-binary, trans or generally sexually ambiguous. I can see what he means, though it seems to me that the alien is more like a pre-adolescent girl rather than anything more exotic and controversial. I might be reading it wrong, but it seems more like a tale of Earth boy meets alien girl in an innocent Christmastide romance.

Behind all this, I think the advert’s been strongly influenced by a number of pop songs and seasonal films. It reminds me more than a little of the Chris de Burgh song about a visiting spaceman at Christmas, which really is a Christian metaphor. ET with its friendship between a human child, Elliot, and a cute extraterrestrial, is another one, although it also has its differences. The most significant of which is, in my opinion, ET was definitely nonhuman and alien, while the alien in this very humanoid except for her suit and the colouring of her hair. It also reminds me of the seasonal children’s film, A Christmas Martian, a Canadian film that the Beeb screened one festive season over here when I was a sprog. Mercifully, the advert doesn’t seem to have been inspired by the truly dreadful Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was screened over here one Christmas in the early ’80s as part of Michael Medved’s season of terrible movies, The Worst of Hollywood, on Channel 4. But if the alien is sexually ambiguous, I suspect it might be due more to the influence of David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust than the trans movement.

Or it might come from certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon itself. Among the various aliens supposedly visiting Earth and abducting people are the ‘Nordics’. These are tall, blonde aliens, like Nordic White Europeans, hence the name. They are also sometimes described as having long hair and a feminine appearance. One of the early UFO contactees, Frank E. Strange, provides a picture of one in his book A Stranger in the Pentagon. Strange claimed that the US government has made a treaty with aliens from Venus. These aliens could provide us with a method of producing cheap, clean energy, but had been prevented from doing so by ‘certain interests’. If nothing else, this shows that people were looking for alternative energy as long ago as the ’50s and ’60s, and the ‘certain interests’ sounds very much like a veiled reference to the oil industry. The ‘alien’ in the photo to me simply looks like a blonde, glamorous woman and not like anyone who arrived here from Venus, or anywhere else. The veteran Fortean, John Keel, author of the books The Mothman Prophecies, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and Disneyland of the Gods, stated that the Nordics were so feminine in appearance he wondered if they were gay. You can certainly wonder what was going on in Buck Nelson’s encounter with the Nordics on his farm. He was going out to his barn one morning when a group of four of them, all with long hair, came out of his barn, stark naked. They told him they from Venus, and explained the nudity by saying that they wore no clothes in order to show him that they were as human as he was. Well, they might have been Venusians, but it seems to me they may also have been a group of ordinary men. They may have been gay, and looking for a quiet place for their activities because of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in America at the time. Or they may have been pranksters playing a joke.

It also reminds me of a supposedly true UFO encounter that happened in the 1970s at Christmas. A woman was in her kitchen baking cakes when a groups of small, winged aliens came in. They greeted her and asked for some of the cakes, which she gave to them. They made a few more remarks before finally departing. This is one of the stranger UFO cases which makes me definitely wonder if the UFO phenomenon isn’t a more modern version of the ancient fairy phenomenon rather than anything genuinely extraterrestrial. This does not, however, mean that it isn’t still paranormal, as Keel and Jacques Vallee have argued in their books.

Back to the advert, it looks innocuous enough. While I can’t say that I like it’s secularism, this seems to be a response to the changes in British society rather than an ideologically motivated attempt to foster such changes. And the values it embraces seem wholesome enough. Black and White people come together across the gulfs of space and the Black lad is shown at home enjoying a family meal. This is, in my view, definitely good, as the breakdown in the British and western family has done immense harm to both Whites and Blacks.

If I have a criticism, it’s about the background music. The original song ‘Electric Dreams’ is a jolly, upbeat piece. It was, I believe, used in the 1980s SF film, Weird Science, about two teenage boys who create their idea of the perfect woman on their computer, who then materialises before them. Sort of like Beavis and Butthead meet Tron. And the perfect woman, clad only in bra and panties, says to them ‘What would you little maniacs like to do next?’ The version used here turns it instead into a plaintive ballad until the final few bars, more an expression of sorrow and loss than joy. But it seems to follow a general trend of reinterpretations of classic tracks. At the Commonwealth Games held in Scotland a few years ago the opening ceremony included a version of the Proclaimers’ ‘I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles’. This song is another upbeat hit in something very much like classic march time. But instead it was performed as another plaintive, soulful wail. I’m probably showing my age here, but is contemporary youth so depressed that they can only listen to depressing versions of great old songs? Or is it that the middle aged producers of adverts like John Lewis’ are so depressed, that they can only listen to depressing versions of upbeat hits and so are unintentional contributing to the psychological and spiritual anguish of the rising generation. A generation that has enough problems of its own.

Anyway, even if the advert is intended to sell people stuff rather than anything deeper, it’s a fun piece of trash culture with a bit of kinship to some genuine Ufological high strangeness. And that’s always good for a festive tale of the paranormal.

And here’s the trailer for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which I found on the DTFFmaryville channel on YouTube. In its way, truly a cinematic classic!

Sci-Show Explains the Psychology of Alien Abductions

A week or so ago I put up a post stating that when it comes to alien abductions and entity encounters, I subscribe to the ‘psycho-social hypothesis’. Roughly stated, this considers that they are internal, psychological events which draw on the imagery of space and science fiction for their content.

This video from Sci-Show on YouTube uses the same explanation for the phenomenon. The presenter argues that it probably arises from some strange, apparently inexplicable experience. There are many of these, but one favourite of psychologists and researchers is sleep paralysis. This when someone wakes up from sleeping, but elements of the dream and sleep state still persist. They find themselves paralysed, often with feelings of dread and the sense that there is an invader in the room. Sometimes there are feelings of bliss. Looking back, they may misremember elements of the experience, drawing on others they’ve had. The presenter here takes care to state that those who claim to have abduction experiences are no less sane and able to cope with normal life than anybody else.

But they are more prone to misremember things. He goes on to argue this using an experiment in which two groups, one of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and another, which wasn’t, were shown lists of words. They were shown lists of words and asked to remember them. Then they were shown another list of words. They were then asked to remember the words in the first list. The individuals, who believed they’d been abducted by aliens were significantly worse at remembering the words from the original list, confusing them with those in the second. It’s called a source attribution error. Psychologists believe that this is the same mechanism that explains alien abductions. People have a psychological experience, and then mix it up with things they have seen elsewhere, like a monster they saw in a movie. The presenter makes it very clear that this study is not definitive, as it’s very difficult to find groups of people, who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, who are willing to take part in psychological experiments.

This experiment is one of a number, which shows how fallible human memory is, particularly in the case of eyewitness accounts and especially if the witness is asked leading question. The presenter concludes with the statement that abduction experiences don’t have much to say about life out in space, but they do say much about life down here, in the human skull: consciousness.

Part of the problem with the abduction phenomenon is that many of the researchers do use untrustworthy techniques to try to recover what they believe is hidden or lost memories. One of these is regression hypnosis. This has been used by Bud Hopkins, Leo Sprinkle and a number of others. It was first used by Dr. Walter Benjamin on Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple, whose experience is the archetypal alien abduction. They were travelling back from a holiday in Canada, when they found themselves shadowed by a strange light, which then landed in a field. They got out to look, and then Barney screamed when he saw strange creatures in the craft. They then had an experience of missing time, getting home much later than they’d anticipated. Over the next few days they suffered from various strange psychological problems and sought help from Dr. Benjamin. Benjamin hypnotically regressed them, during which experience they remembered being taken aboard and medically examined by the aliens. Betty was shown a star map by the aliens, which supposedly showed the location of their home world. This was identified by a friend of Betty’s as Zeta Reticuli. Hence the belief in the abduction mythology that the hated and feared Greys come from this star.

With respect to the couple, sceptics have argued that this is likely to be a false memory. The aliens they described under hypnosis were very similar to an alien creature that had featured on an science fiction show a night or so before. Hypnotic regression is also certainly not a sure way to recover lost or suppressed memories. The FBI investigated the use of hypnosis back in the 1950s as a way of recovering useful details from witnesses. They abandoned it as far too unreliable. Hypnotic subjects were prone to confabulating – inventing details and memories – in response to questions from the hypnotist. Parts of the ufology milieu in 1990s, like the Magonians, were horrified at some of the tales of sadistic aliens and general hopelessness related and felt by abductees after they had been hypnotically regressed. They therefore banned its use. The Magonians went further, and savagely attacked the whole mythology of alien abductions and the culture that had grown up around it, and demanded it’s immediate stop. And with very good reason. But it seems that some UFO groups and abduction researchers are still using it.

I’m not saying the psycho-social hypothesis is a complete or the final explanation for alien encounters. There may be some accounts that are genuine experiences of encounters with paranormal entities. John Keel and Jacques Vallee in their books UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and Passport to Magonia – showed how UFO encounter narratives were similar to traditional fairy lore. They weren’t UFO sceptics, however, but believed that the same phenomenon that had created fairies in the Middle Ages was now responsible for UFO experiences. It may be that UFO encounters, or some of them, are based on real encounters with such Ultraterrestrials, as Vallee calls them. But I believe that the psycho-social theory provides a sound explanation for the majority of alien encounter and abduction experiences.