In a recent television interview with
president Obama there was mention of some recent UFO sightings that had made
news. Obama gave one of his most winning smiles and made a dismissive joke
about it. It was effective - the subject was dropped. I wondered why people in
authority were so nervous about discussing UFOs, and I thought it must be fear
of being thought some kind of nut, that only weirdos and eccentrics take UFOs seriously.
To be thus tagged can be gravely damaging.
In 1994 the Harvard Medical School appointed a committee to investigate
professor of psychiatry John E. Mack. It was the first time in Harvard's
history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation. His
crime: writing a book on ‘alien abduction’. The committee's draft report found
“that it is professionally irresponsible for any academic, scholar or
practicing psychiatrist to give any credence whatsoever to any … direct
personal contact between a human being and an Extraterrestrial being…” After 14
months of deliberation, the Dean finally "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic
freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without
impediment."
Why all the fuss? What is it about this
subject that so rattles the establishment? It would have been OK if Dr. Mack
had found a psychiatric category for his abductees; but he didn’t. He treated
their experiences as they themselves did – as something that really happened to
them.
The question then arises: how do you
prove what they experienced was real. And this brings me to the central point I
want to make. There are ways of knowing that are outside the western
materialist obsession with ‘proof’. As one skeptical scientist said: ‘If I
can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. This effectively rules out 99% of ordinary
reality as we understand it. We can’t possibly live without taking our ordinary
experience for granted. But if you are forced to accept something that contradicts
your established world-view, it is a profound psychological shock – like, per
example, suddenly seeing your dead grandfather drinking a cup of coffee at the
kitchen table !
It’s bad enough to suggest that UFOs
come from outer space, bearing in mind the unimaginable distances involved, but
to suggest that flying saucers come from a parallel universe that involves no
distance at all, is quite troubling. To suggest further that they carry
extraterrestrials who abduct people into their craft for some nefarious purpose
is just too much. The whole notion contradicts our world-view too drastically.
These difficulties can be overcome by
expanding our conception of what is possible. But there is another difficulty
that undermines our world-view more seriously. UFO vehicles and their occupants
seem to have a double aspect. They can be tangibly physical. They can be
tracked on radar, they leave physical traces where they have landed, like burn
marks and radioactive soil. In the famous Fendlesham Forest encounter, US and
RAF personnel came into physical contact with a saucer that had landed in
obvious difficulties. One of them “plucked up enough courage to touch it. It made him think of smooth opaque black
glass”. He touched certain symbols on its surface. “The skin of the craft was
smooth to touch” he said. “Almost like running your hand over glass. Void of
seams, until I ran my hand over the unknown symbols on the side of the craft.
The symbols were nothing like the rest of the skin, they were rough, like
running my hand over sandpaper. So, the UFO was undoubtedly a solid material
object.” 1
But there is a double aspect to UFOs;
something we can only call a psychic component. Abductees report being bodily
conveyed through the walls of their bedroom and to be in telepathic communication
with the beings. Also the UFOs can appear and disappear in an instant; and they
can alter people’s perception of time.
We tend to think that UFOs are either
physical or psychic manifestations, products of the real world or only our
imagination; but they aren’t just
physical or mental – they are both. And
it is this that really confounds our sense of reality. There is no way our
existing world-view can accommodate such nonsense. Since the birth of science
in the 17th century we have separated soul, spirit etc. from the
material world. The spirit is one thing and the physical world is a different
order of being. The body is one thing, the mind is another. This is fundamental
to our western common sense; and it is a completely artificial distinction. It
leads to all kinds of problems, making science too easy and the psychic to
hard.
Mack says that his people almost
uniformly come out of their first abduction experience in a state of
ontological shock.2 They are
forced to believe in other realms of reality. They are absolutely certain that
what they experienced really happened to them; they can’t deny it, and yet it
contradicts everything they previously believed. For most abductees it
eventually changes their view of life, enlarges it completely.
I’m sure this is why the UFO phenomena
makes the established mind-set of western culture nervous. You will notice that
skeptics don’t just doubt, they have a passionate need to disbelieve. They have
a huge emotional investment in the paired down material view of life. They have
the same reaction to alternative medicine, or to the I Ching; but UFO phenomena
are particularly threatening. Because of their physical intrusions into real
space they cannot be so easily dismissed as imagination.
The challenge that UFOs pose for us is
about changing our ways of looking at things. We have to overcome this
ingrained idea that things are either real or
imagined, either matter or spirit. The
indigenous people of the Amazonian rain forest and other shamanic cultures have
a very different way of relating to the world. Reality is not split as ours is;
they have a certain trust in an instinctive, holistic way of knowing. 3
I have had to learn this instinctive
way of knowing in person-centred therapy. I know, for example, when someone is
telling the truth. Well, perhaps not so much telling the truth as being
truthful. It is unmistakable when a person is being real. It has nothing to do
with diagnosis or case histories. It has to do with directly tuning in to
someone reality, just as the shaman tunes into the reality of the rainforest.
The barriers are down and one doesn’t just imagine or reason about the other – one knows.
1 Pope, Nick, John Burroughs USAF (Ret), Jim
Penniston USAF (Ret). Encounter in
Rendesham Forrest. Thomas Dunne Books, NY, 2014
2 Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing
with the nature of being or what is ultimately real.
3
Shamanism: the animistic religion of certain indigenous
peoples in which mediation between the visible and spirit worlds is effected by
shamans.
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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