As the emotional charge of the debunkers and Creationists diminishes the impact. of their position. so the paucity of samples reduces the vitality of more coherent man-centered arguments.
The truth is that we do not and cannot know the actual condition of life elsewhere in the universe because we are presently too ignorant of conditions outside our own immediate solar neighborhood. However, judging from the amount of evidence available, it may be possible to expand our knowledge simply by taking the flying disk and abductee phenomena seriously.
We may or may not find visitors, but we would certainly find a body of data so compelling and multidimensional in its complexity that merely stating useful hypotheses about it is going to be a major challenge not only to the physical and behavioral sciences but also to the science and art of language.
This matter is a garden of luminous weed through which only a fool would dash yelling any doctrine at all, whether it be that of the Creationist and debunker or that of the UFO true believer. Even to approach the idea of the visitors, it is necessary to study a whole history of tall stories, bizarre tales, and — just possibly —truths.
It is our American habit to assume that there is something irrelevant-even a little silly-about the past. Our relationship to former times is expressed as nostalgia, not history.
When our government first started studying "flying saucers" in the late forties, it never even occurred to anybody official to consider having a look at the past.
Here are two stories:
In the little town of Merkel, Texas, on April 26, 1897, a group of people going home from church at night allegedly saw a heavy object dragging along the ground. They followed it until it bounce across a railroad track and caught on one of the rails. It was an anchor, tied to a rope. When they looked up, they saw an "airship" with lighted windows and a headlight on the front brighter than the light of a locomotive. Ten minutes passed, and soon a man was seen coming down the rope. He was small, and wearing a blue sailor suit. When he saw the people he cut the rope and the ship sailed off into the night, leaving the anchor behind.
The small beings I first saw were dressed in dark blue coveralls. This is not a unique description of the visitors' garb; perhaps it is a sort of night uniform. But then there are the kobolds, dwarfs who stalked the mines of medieval Germany and gave their name to the mineral cobalt . . . and cobalt blue. Why? They wore dark blue coveralls, too.
One Sunday in the borough of Cloera in Ireland the parishioners of the Church of St. Kinarius heard a noise on the roof. They went outside and saw an anchor embedded in the eaves. The anchor line rose up into the sky where there floated a ship on the air. A man leaped overboard and "swam" down to the anchor. After an altercation with the parishioners, he cut the rope and managed to return to the ship, which sailed away. The anchor remained in the church, but has since been lost, since this incident took place not in 1897, but around A.D. 1211.
What do these stories mean?
When people in the present time find themselves face to face with the visitors, they often think that they are among the first to see them. They do not remember what happened to St. Anthony of Alexandria, the founder of the Monastic movement, in A.D. 300. He was walking through an isolated canyon when he came upon a small figure, "a manikin with hooded snout, horned forehead and extremities like goat's feet." There was a brief exchange of words between this small creature and the saint, who ended the conversation by pounding his cane on the ground and announcing, "Woe to thee Alexandria, who instead of God worshippest monsters! Woe to thee, harlot city, into which have flowed together the demons of the whole world!" Needless to say, the creature fled.
During the reign of Pepin in the early Middle Ages, the French were bothered by apparitions that were seen marching through the sky, camped out in tents on the reaches of heaven, and sometimes in "wonderfully constructed aerial ships" that flew past in veritable squadrons. People were annoyed at the presence of all this unquenchable grandeur and happiness, and both Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Debonair, imposed penalties on the "Tyrants of the Air." As counterpropaganda, the sylphs kidnapped people and took them to their airy abode, showing them their world. But when the people were sent home, they were all burned at the stake without a second's hesitation. Presumably they had just enough time to scream out their stories before being engulfed in the flames.
It is not surprising to me that Marius Dewilde, a resident of Quaroble, a French village near Belgium, was so secretive after he encountered two dark alien figures standing near some railroad tracks in the middle of the night in September 1954. Mr. Dewilde, according to Jacques Vallee in his book Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Refinery, 1969), gave the French Air Police some calcinated rock from the site of the event, and it was handed over to an agency so secret that its name could not be mentioned by the Ministry of Defense.
Perhaps the keepers of these secrets across the world ought to reflect on the ageless nature of this experience. I wonder if St. Anthony's manikin and the medieval French Air Tyrants should join the calcinated rock in deep classification.
Perhaps this would be superfluous, as one "abductee" gave the calcinated earth from her backyard to Budd Hopkins, who has no access to classification procedures. Laboratory analysis of the dirt indicated that it had been subjected to intense heat. Dirt from the same garden had to be burned for eight hours at 800 degrees to achieve a similar effect, and there was no site evidence at all of a lightning strike or even of storm activity on the night the calcination occurred.
As the ages roll along, it could be that what changes is not our visitors but our way of installing them in the culture. Maybe they did not come here in 1946, 1897, 1235, or even A.D. 300. I have reported that the being I have become familiar with looks like Ishtar. Maybe she is: She said she was old.
My point is that there may be far more to this than science or government or even religion can separately address. It would seem that our civilization is not paying attention to what mad be the central archetypal and mythological experience of the ale. If so, then this is the first time that man has simply refused to respond to the ghosts and the gods. Is that why they have become so physical, so real, dragging people out of bed like rapists in the night — because they must have our notice in order to somehow be confirmed in their own truth?
This may be primarily a matter of visions and chimeras battering at the door of physical reality. They are not simply flickering effects of the mind. Something is out there, and it wants in.
There are many instances of the surprising and subtle relationship between the visitor phenomenon and the hidden life of the mind. Understand, I am not presenting a hypothesis that denies that the visitors may be real beings from another planet and/or reality. All I am suggesting is that we do no know what they are, only that they are — and our relationship with them is very strange indeed.
During the great northeastern power blackout of 1965, actor Stuart. Whitman saw an object and heard a strange whistling sound outside his twelfth-story window. He then heard a message to the effect that the disaster was "a warning to the world."
The first instance of an unidentified flying object causing a blackout was seen in a play, Twilight Bar, written by Arthur Koestler in 1933. In the play an enormous meteor flies over a town with a whistling sound and all the lights go out. In the play, the meteor is "a warning to the world." But this does not disprove the reality of the phenomenon: On the contrary, it suggests that something very real may have communicated an actual warning to Stuart Whitman — something that was simultaneously true to his inner life and to the world around us all.