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6
THE HUMAN RECEIVER
Matter, Information, Energy . . . Contact
All family members present were willing to discuss what happened with me, all acknowledged hearing an external voice urging them to look at the UFO, and all of them felt in some way profoundly affected by their UFO encounter. This is one example from dozens of cases, which I have personally investigated in the Canadian province of Ontario, that demonstrates to a certain degree of what is known in UFO studies as “high strangeness.”
—SUSAN DEMETER-ST. CLAIR 1
“WHILE DRIVING HOME FROM MY parents’ home I spoke to God for the first time. I looked up at the stars and said to both God and the Entities with which I was interacting, ‘I congratulate you—you have managed to completely transform a total atheist into someone who now believes in God, the spirit world, and life after death, more than any Catholic priest in Miami.’ ” Thus spoke Rey Hernandez, while driving in his car one day.
What had happened to Rey?
A UFO sighting or event often has the effect of completely changing the direction of one’s life, much like a religious conversion experience. This was the case with Rey, a lawyer and self-described rationalist and atheist.
After a series of sightings and related paranormal experiences, Rey, together with Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Rudy Schild, and Australian researcher Mary Rodwell, cofounded the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters or FREE.
It is the first global, multilingual study of people who claim to have had UFO-related contact with nonhuman intelligence and related paranormal experiences. Rey reminded me that, when I refer to his work, I should mention that he is just one of many qualified researchers “who have put in hundreds, even thousands of hours” in support of the organization.2 As Jacques Vallee discovered, there are two types of UFO reports. There are those that are reported to “authorities” and those that are revealed to sympathetic listeners (who are sometimes also authorities). The fear of ridicule keeps many UFO testimonies subterranean, submerged within subcultures that nevertheless grow each year. This chapter explores the experience of Rey Hernandez and his wife, Dulce, and documents the unexpected twists and turns it took once he publicized it.
The Hernandezes’ experiences are instructive for several reasons. First, each saw something extraordinary, yet they interpreted it differently. Dulce is a devout Catholic and interpreted her experience as divine and within the framework of Catholic theology. Rey, who was an atheist prior to his experience, is still interpreting it. In his work Rey delves into the testimonies of UFO contact. In its secular form, testimony is a form of evidence. To give testimony in a court of law is to provide information that is supposed to be true and to correspond to real-life matters. If one provides false testimony, it is called perjury. Within the history of religions, testimony is also a type of evidence. Many religious traditions are built upon the testimonies of believers. Believers report extraordinary things and events, such as miracles or sightings of supernatural beings. This testimony is often accompanied by information about the credentials of those who testify. In both religious cultures and UFO cultures, the “credible witness” is an important feature that helps lend credibility, if not to the actual reality of extraordinary claims, at least to the fact that credible people experience extraordinary events.
Many of the scientist-believers I interviewed think that the phenomenon functions like a technology, and that the human is a receiver and transmitter of information. Rey and his cadre of colleagues—twelve retired physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and scientists—employ various methods, including quantum physics, to explain the relationship between consciousness and contact with nonhuman intelligence. For them, this interaction defies a dualist construction of spirit and matter and bridges the rift between two camps of researchers in ufology: the “nuts and bolts” materialists and the subjectivists, those who focus on the testimonies of experiencers. According to Rey, the scientists associated with FREE are working on theories that will provide an explanation of how these experiences are both physical and subjective: “This new holographic theory challenges us to deconstruct the artificial wall of separation erected between events that occur only in consciousness, and those that can manifest on a physical scale.”3 The key is in the code, and Edgar explains how this is so.
THE SERIES OF EVENTS THAT CHANGED REY
It was very early on a Sunday morning in March of 2012. Rey and Dulce’s beloved Niña, a Jack Russell terrier who had been a member of their family for sixteen years, had become paralyzed the night before. Rey had contacted a veterinarian friend, who said that Niña had most probably suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The friend offered to open his office the following day, Sunday, to euthanize Niña. Deeply saddened, Dulce turned to her faith.
She prayed to God that he would send his angels to cure Niña. That morning, her prayers were answered, in a way that would shatter Rey’s atheism and confirm Dulce’s faith.
Rey, in an interview, relates the first of a series of extraordinary experiences, and figure 6.1 is a depiction of what Rey saw. Rey’s wife saw something like figure 6.2. My wife woke up and [checked on] the dog to see if she had regained her mobility. Our pet was not able to move at all except just from the neck up. My wife then carried her down the stairs, and when she got down there she saw an object that was floating four feet off the ground, one foot [away from] the wall, and it was metallic in shape—approximately like an upside-down-U.
. . . It had these two ring lights in the center. My wife, being the good hardcore Catholic from Mexico that she is, she knelt down and started praying . . . basically [saying,] “If you’re a bad spirit, leave. But if you are a good spirit or an angel or the Virgin Mary [stay].” Mexicans always see the Virgin Mary everywhere [Rey laughs]. And she said, “Please stay and don’t let my dog suffer. My poor Niña.” Niña is her name, which means “little girl” in Spanish.
Then all of a sudden these green lights started blinking and started flashing on her—like scanning her. At that point she freaked out and she started yelling for me. She started screaming my name. It was six in the morning, and I thought she had seen a cockroach or a little mouse on the floor [Rey laughs]. I just totally ignored her. After 10 or 15 minutes of screaming for me to come downstairs, she went upstairs and literally hauled me out of bed. When I got downstairs, what I saw was not the object that she had seen. . . . What I saw was, I guess could be described as a plasma-object. This was not just an object; I call it a plasma-being, a light being, because it did control my mind. It was . . . approximately two-to-three-feet in width, one and a half to two feet in height, cylindrical in shape, but it didn’t have any external outer edges because it was pure energy plasma. Multi-colored, translucent, and when I looked at it I did not have any peripheral vision . . . just straight ahead at that object. I could not see to my right or to the left or up and down. . . . I was just focused only on that object. What I did was quite irrational—I stared at it, I waved my hand at it, and then I said, “Ah B.S.” . . . Then I turned around, I walked upstairs, I went to my bed, I folded my hands on my belly, and I looked straight up at the ceiling. So for 15 minutes I was in this hypnotic state with nothing entering my brain/my consciousness. After 15 minutes, it was [as] if the hypnotist said, “OK Kid, wake up, we’re finished with your wife and your pet.” And all of a sudden I woke up and I said, “Oh my god, what in the world just happened?” I ran downstairs and there was my wife jumping up and down, saying “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The angels cured her! The angels cured her!” She was running around the living room dancing, and the dog was running up and down with the energy of a little puppy. Right there my whole worldview was totally shattered [Rey laughs]. That was the first event.4 FIGURE 6.1. Rey Hernandez’s depiction of what he saw, the “red energy being.” FIGURE 6.2. Dulce Hernandez’s depiction of what she saw, “the energy craft.”
Dulce said that she had not seen what Rey reported seeing. He insisted that he had been asleep for forty-five minutes after he left the living room.
He pointed at the clock to demonstrate that forty-five minutes had indeed elapsed. Dulce insisted that she never left the living room and that Rey had never gone back upstairs. According to her, she had walked downstairs with Rey behind, looked down, saw Niña running around, and then started to celebrate. Then she saw Rey. Their recollections of the event were completely different. Later, Rey would incorporate the idea that “missing time” must have been a factor in the event, and that the nonhuman beings had taken his wife and dog, healed them, and then returned them. My wife does not want to speak much about the incident and acts like nothing of consequence happened—to her this entity was merely an Angel that had answered her prayers. Maybe she is correct. Our living room corner wall is on the northwestern corner of our house. At 6 am that corner is dark because light does not enter that corner. We have closed drapes on the western window as well and that part was dark because the sun was just rising on the southeastern side.
We also have a wall dividing the windows from the sun rising in the east from this western corner. We know what we saw was not an optical illusion.
This event shattered Rey’s view of reality. At the time, he said, he was a “pure rationalist”:
I went to Catholic mass but just to comfort my wife. I had never read any UFO, ancient alien, paranormal or “new age” books. I believed that all the new age “metaphysics” literature was pure BS from ex-hippies even though I considered myself an ex-hippie while living in Berkeley, CA, from 1981 to 1988 while attending a PhD Program in City and Regional Planning. I was a total skeptic. I was a pure rationalist and any “metaphysic” or UFO related themes were pure BS. On that day, my world view came crashing down.5
After this experience, Rey did what most experiencers do: he sought out materials to help him understand what had happened to him. He had never had any type of paranormal experience and certainly never encountered an “energy plasma being.” He wasn’t Catholic like his wife, so he wasn’t sure it was an angel, although he wasn’t ruling out that possibility either. He thought that he could find answers in the UFO and paranormal literature.
Perhaps what they had encountered was some type of nonhuman intelligence. He looked for answers on the internet and ordered “tons” of books about the topic. His intensive “book encounter” was interrupted, however, by more strange and anomalous events.
THE NEXT EVENT
The next event occurred in May of 2012, when Dulce reportedly saw a huge, blimp-sized UFO outside their house with “stained glass windows just like our church” all around the craft. When Dulce later visited Mexico, she claimed to have had a series of additional UFO sightings, some with her family, and saw three eight-foot-tall human-looking beings dressed in white monks’ robes floating in front of her.
Rey had his own sightings. The next event provided Rey with more information about the phenomenon and further changed his life and its direction. It was also witnessed by his daughter, he said, and three of his friends. By this time, his wife was having regular sightings of giant UFOs. For her, these were angels and evidence of sacred contacts. She did not tell Rey about these encounters at the time, because she was becoming concerned about his increasingly obsessive interest in UFOs and literature about them.
On August 25, 2012, a few months after the appearance of the “plasma energy being,” a friend of the family came by for help with some traffic tickets. Rey decided to wait for him outside. It was around 9:30 p.m. The sky was dark and cloudy and completely devoid of stars. Rey had been learning about UFOs and knew that some people attempt to “call them down.” Rey thought, I am going to try this, so he did. Fifteen minutes went by and there were no results. Rey thought to himself, I am freaking losing it; I am going nuts, and he stopped. Just at that moment, he saw an enormous object over his neighbor’s roof and backyard.
Rey describes the object as huge, approximately two to three city blocks in length. It was hovering about five feet above his neighbor’s house. He saw hundreds of swirling white lights all around it. Then he heard the voice of his daughter, even though she was not present. The voice said, “Daddy, next time you see a UFO please let me know. You and mommy have seen a UFO and I want to see one too.” After this, Rey called for his daughter, who was in the house. His daughter, who had just turned ten years old, ran out to see the object, and stared in amazement.
Rey and his daughter gazed at the object for about fifteen minutes, he said, and then his friend drove up with his wife and seventeen-year-old daughter. These people are conservative Catholics and college educated.
Like Rey’s wife, they attend Sunday Mass and are involved in many different ministries. They weren’t interested in anything that had to do with the paranormal, or with UFOs. When they arrived on the scene, Ray says, they were flabbergasted.
“What is that?” his friend asked, alarmed.
According to Rey, they asked repeatedly, “Please tell us what that is.” Finally Rey spoke to them in Spanish: “You know perfectly well what that is.” His friends spent a few minutes discussing what it could be. They thought perhaps it could be strange atmospheric conditions, lights from the cars on the street, or lightning. Rey was not going to tell them that he “called down” this craft. He knew his limits, apparently. As the speculations of his friends became more elaborate, he decided to try to communicate with the beings, mentally. He told them, “You better come up with something better than this because they don’t believe you.” Instantaneously, he said, the light patterns of the craft changed.
The craft burst into a spectacular display of hundreds of stars, ten times the size of Venus, that flickered on and off.
Like Carl Jung’s friend who reported witnessing, with many others, a UFO in South America and never thought to take a picture of it, the same happened with Rey. He comments on this incomprehensible aspect of the experience:
After about fifteen minutes of watching this light show of stars bursting all over the place inside the craft, my friends said they had things to take care of and they drove off. Looking back at it I did not even question them leaving. Here they were in the middle of an “event of a lifetime” and in the middle of this they decided to leave and I did not even question this. This was not rational.
It was the odd reactions of the other experiencers that most struck Rey as unbelievable:
During our UFO contact encounter, I was fully cognizant and “awake” for almost everything except the realization that we were actually looking and interacting with a UFO craft and its beings. We all had cell phones and yet no one even bothered to take a picture, especially the teenager who always has a cell phone glued to her hands. I also did not notify my neighbor to inform them what was above their house. They were aware of us looking at them because they had turned the light on in their living room and they saw us staring at their house. I also did not run inside to get my video camera or tell my wife. After my daughter told me that there were no mosquitoes outside, I “woke up” and realized that I was under some type of “mind control.” I could not understand why I had walked away from a scenario that should have been the front page story of Time magazine and every media outlet around the world if I had captured it on video. I quickly got my camera and camcorder and ran outside with both but the huge UFO craft was gone.
Here again is the problem Jung noted long ago. Some UFOs are not photogenic.
Determined not to let such an event go unrecorded again, Rey took the route taken by Alison Kruse. He purchased high-end photographic equipment so he could prove what he had seen: I had purchased a large telescope, a night vision CCTV camera with adapters to attach this camera to the telescope, an old used SONY camcorder with the old night vision technology and a digital camera with high-powered zoom for night shots. I said to myself, “The next time my wife or I see these objects we will be prepared to capture them on video and on camera so no one will doubt us.” We know what we saw and they were real. “Next time we are going to prove it.”
None of this helped one bit. The phenomenon resisted being photographed by Rey. Yet, it made a lasting impression on him. He has turned inward to assess what it means to be human, a human who lives within an immense universe, and who has a relationship with something like God.
REY’S “DIRECTED” BOOK ENCOUNTER AND THE ENSUING SYNCHRONICITIES
The day after his close contact experience with the huge UFO craft, Rey saw a YouTube video on near-death experiences that discussed the quantum physics of consciousness. He immediately stopped searching the internet and purchasing books about UFOs. Instead, he began to order books on near-death experiences (NDEs) and consciousness studies. Over the next four months he devoured more than two hundred such books, sometimes reading for eighteen hours per day. He was obsessed. He neglected his job and his family, and did not go outside or watch television or use the internet. Instead, until December 21, 2012, he spent all of his time reading.
Dulce became concerned. She doesn’t use the internet, she is not interested in UFOs or NDEs or consciousness literature, and she rarely discusses her experiences except to say that they are “her angels.” She was concerned by the obsessive nature of Rey’s interests.
Significantly, Rey felt as if this intensive book encounter was being orchestrated by the nonhuman intelligence that had been interacting with his family. After four months, he felt that he was being taken to the next level of his education. After his immersion in studies of consciousness and the literature of NDEs, he experienced a powerful set of synchronicities.
The synchronicities involved meeting people who had experienced NDEs, and also hearing, for the first time, about his father’s NDE. Rey was struck by the timing. What were the odds, he wondered, of meeting people who had experienced NDEs just after he had learned about them for the first time? And what did these have to do with the UFO experiences? After these events, Dulce told Rey that he needed to believe in God. She said that she knew that people in their church believed in God, but her belief was different from theirs. She said she could feel God and her angels.
“I can feel God. I feel these spirits in my hands when I pray and I can feel the energy of God and these spirits in my body.” Rey didn’t accept his wife’s Catholic interpretation of these strange events, but he did not reject it.
At this point, Rey was utterly and truly confused. He continued to read, and to be confused by what he read. Then he experienced yet another unusual event. It came in the form of an out-of-body experience that combined visual information and a direct message. After the experience, Rey believed that he had been given a special project—a mission. The mission was to present to humanity the relationship between the nonhuman intelligences that were interacting with him, the spirit world, and the physics of consciousness.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DR. EDGAR MITCHELL FREE FOUNDATION
After these events, Rey believes that he was given a mandate by the beings who had been interacting with him.
As he was driving through rush-hour traffic one morning, he had an experience that he describes as a download experience, or an extraterrestrial telegram. He said that he felt like he was inside a large spinning wheel with many spokes. Each of the spokes represented a particular anomalous experience, such as an NDE, a UFO contact, or an out-of-body experience.
He later called these “contact modalities,” as, he explained, each of them was a way that nonhuman intelligence interacts with humans.
He described how he then received a telepathic message, not via a voice, but via information:
You need to inform humanity of the relationship between us (the nonhuman intelligence), the spirit world (the reality we transition to after our death), and consciousness (the physical structure of our cosmology). You will need help. There are two criteria for this help: this is not about making money and there has to be minimal ego.
After this he experienced another series of powerful synchronicities. He relates that after his first experience he had sent emails to ten well-known researchers in the field, one of whom was Mary Rodwell. Mary is a researcher who claims to have supported over three hundred thousand experiencers, and she has written a number of books about her work. Mary didn’t respond to Rey’s email until after his rush-hour experience. To Rey, it was a very meaningful communication that occurred directly after he was charged with the mission to found an organization.
Mary introduced Rey to Dr. Rudy Schild, who was interested in UFO contactees, consciousness studies, and quantum physics. Rudy is an emeritus professor of astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a retired tenured professor of astrophysics at Harvard University, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology. Rey was impressed that Rudy was interested in his experiences, and gladly recounted them in a phone call.
I informed him of my “adventures” including the OBE event that had occurred the day before where I was given information about consciousness and the contact modalities. He was fascinated. He informed me that in fact, the information I received on what I now call the “contact modalities” can all be explained through the quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness (QHTC), a theory developed by the late Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
Rudy suggested that Rey form an organization, and offered to serve as its science adviser. He also provided Rey with the number for Edgar Mitchell, the former astronaut and Rudy’s mentor. Rey phoned Edgar and found that they lived very close to one another, so they decided to meet. The meeting proved to be very important for Rey and influenced the creation of the organization that would become FREE.
When I arrived at Dr. Mitchell’s house, we exchanged stories. He told me about his “awakening” in space and his early years growing up in Roswell, New Mexico, the site of the world famous Roswell UFO crash. He told me that he worked at a local airport when he was a young teen and he was paid via flying lessons. Edgar’s parents owned two farm supply stores in the Roswell area and he knew most of the ranchers and workers in the area because they were always in his parents’ stores. He told me that after he came back from the moon he was not only a national hero but a hero to the folks in Roswell. When he returned to Roswell, many of the old timers and their children began to pull him aside and told him very intimate stories of the ship that crashed in Roswell. Edgar informed me that based on the information he was given by very reliable individuals, individuals he had known most of his life, that the Roswell crash was real.
He then told me about his work as a test pilot for the Navy. He also told me that many of these test pilots were admitted into the NASA program as Astronauts. He even told me of some of the “Experiences” of the astronauts, including Russian Cosmonauts, in space that were similar to his involving a series of paranormal experiences. His stories went on and on for hours. Like Rudy, Edgar offered to assist Rey in the formation of an organization. Rey replied that he was confused about what the organization would do, but Edgar told him that the answer would come to him, adding, “It always does.” After his meeting with Edgar, he spoke to Mary. He asked her if she would help him found the organization with the help of Rudy and Edgar. After a few days of considering the idea, she agreed to help Rey and she came up with the acronym FREE, for the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters. Rey relates, “Thus, FREE was started over a three-day period under the guidance of some unknown non-human intelligence.” According to Rey, there had never been an in-depth academic study of the topic of UFO-related events. Rey proposed that FREE undertake the first comprehensive, multilanguage, quantitative and qualitative data-driven research study of the topic. In my discussions with him about FREE, he was careful to note that FREE is not an organization devoted to ufology. He said, “This paradigm has revealed very little about this phenomenon over the last sixty years. A new paradigm is needed and this is the Consciousness Paradigm.”6 He explained that FREE’s mission was to understand the relationship between the science of consciousness and contact with nonhuman intelligence via what he termed “contact modalities.” He said that Edgar firmly believed that a study that focused on the experiencer was important, so FREE’s motto became “Disclosure from the Bottom Up.” Disclosure is a term used by ufologists that means that UFOs have revealed themselves, or that there is a public awareness of their presence.
ESOTERIC COSMONAUT EDGAR MITCHELL: THE FRINGE OF THE FUTURE
Through his association with Rudy and Edgar, Rey forged headlong into the study of quantum physics. Within my growing research circles, which included invisibles and visibles such as my academic colleagues, the field of quantum physics was the go-to explanatory framework for impossible skills like remote viewing, information downloads, and the strange physical aspects of UFO events, such as their ability to appear and disappear. Even my atheist colleagues entertained quantum theories as possible explanations for the extraordinary abilities that certain saints were reported to have possessed. A colleague who scoffed at my interest in UFO cultures was nonetheless fascinated by my work on the cases of saints like Teresa of Avila, who was reported to levitate, and other saints who were said to have been in two places at the same time—bilocation. After one such discussion he sent me a note in which he theorized, off the record, about bilocation. He linked it to his own studies of quantum physics.
“The idea of saints being in two places at once is intriguing,” he wrote.
“Physical laws seem to suggest the impossibility of being in two places at once, but the idea of ‘superposition,’ in quantum mechanics suggests that atoms and electrons can be in two places at once. Not only that, but these two things seem to remain connected to one another on some level in that they can influence one another. Of course, larger objects have not been observed (scientifically at least) to be in two places at once. And, I thought it interesting, that in the cases of saints, bilocation is chiefly associated with acts of charity.” “Charity?” I asked. That jogged a memory I had of both Rey and Tyler saying that the idea of humility (not ego) seems to be important to their “beings.” “Can you say more about your idea of charity?” I asked.
“Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas views acts of charity as divinely infused/inspired. This would place the saint both in the world and not.” I was mostly a bystander in the discussions of quantum theory and mechanics, but I was intrigued that so many of the scientist-believers used this relatively new branch of physics to explain the phenomenon. This included Edgar, one of six humans to have walked on the moon on the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission. Edgar earned a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), which is dedicated to the study of consciousness, and Quantrek, an institute populated by physicists and scientists who study energy and consciousness.
He founded these institutions after a remarkable, transcendent experience he had while on his way home from the moon, floating in space, and looking at Earth. The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cock-pit window, every two minutes, I saw the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens . . . and that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the space craft, and the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness, it wasn’t them and us, it was “that’s me,” it’s all of it, it’s one thing. And, it was accompanied by an ecstasy. A sense, “Oh my God, wow, yes!” An insight. An epiphany.
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This experience was so profound that it changed the direction of his life.
Upon his return to Earth, he went on an extended book encounter, voraciously reading as much as he could on the topic of consciousness.
Edgar had been raised as a Southern Baptist and he was a trained scientist, yet he finally found reports of a similar experience within the literature of Hinduism:
The experience in space was so powerful that when I got back to Earth I started digging into various literatures to try to understand what had happened. I found nothing in science literature but eventually discovered it in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The descriptions of samadhi, Savikalpa samadhi, were exactly what I felt: it is described as seeing things in their separateness, but experiencing them viscerally as a unity, as oneness, accompanied by ecstasy.
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The transition back to Earth was difficult for Edgar, a feeling that Tyler had expressed as well, after each of his launches of satellites and shuttles into space. Tyler said, “It’s an intense experience to launch such a big thing into space; the whole crew, the astronauts, the engineers, those in mission control, have to be working together as one unit. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can go wrong. Then, it’s such a high when the launch succeeds.
Afterward we celebrate. But then, how does a person go back to their normal life? How do we just go to the gym? It’s surreal in way that is a complete and total let-down. I would call it a form of grief.” I met Edgar on two occasions. I knew that he believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials, so I asked him to meet the small group of researchers that I had organized in California. He would attend our session via Skype.
Beforehand I found out everything I could about him and was surprised to learn that, just like the other brilliant scientists I had interviewed, he had been involved with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He was also a practitioner of remote viewing. What was more surprising to me was that he had conducted remote viewing experiments in space during the Apollo lunar mission. These experiments were not sanctioned by NASA, and Edgar said that they were “secret.” Edgar Mitchell, like Tyler D., was part of the hidden and unofficial history of the American space program that I had been discovering—the cosmonauts and rocket scientists, like Jack Parsons, who believed in extraterrestrial or nonhuman beings that interacted with humans with the goal of helping them achieve space travel and, in Edgar’s case, peace on Earth. (He believes this is a prerequisite for deep space travel.) In a sense, there was a hidden history of esoteric cosmonauts. Edgar certainly fit the bill.
Edgar believed that extraterrestrials or nonhuman intelligences intervened in space launches. Before our Skype session I asked each of the other conference attendees, who were all physically present at the conference, to frame a question to ask Edgar. We would each have time to ask our question and we would all listen to his answers. When it came time to ask the questions, I was the only one who asked Edgar about extraterrestrials, even though that was the theme of the conference.
Apparently, the silencing mechanisms Jacques had identified had been strongly internalized by my academic colleagues. Here was an opportunity to quiz an astronaut, a scientist-believer in UFOs, yet most of the questions had to do with whether or not humans would be able to live together peaceably on Earth. This is an important question, but it was not the question I would have thought of in these circumstances. And indeed, why would he know the answer to that question? He was an astronaut, not a deity!
When my turn came, I thanked him for being a part of our session, and asked my question. “Edgar, I know that you believe in extraterrestrials, and I also know that you believe they have been interfering with our satellites and some of the rockets we launch into space. Can you describe how you came to this knowledge and if you might know why they would be doing this?” Because of his connections, Edgar said, he was privileged to know that extraterrestrials had dismantled several weapons that the United States had launched into space. He said that they did this because our weapons, particularly nuclear weapons, not only damaged humans and our environment but also somehow damaged their environment. He said that there were different species of aliens, and that there were good ones and bad ones. The ones who intervened in our space explorations were good ones.
I asked him to elaborate, if he would, on the nature of the good and bad extraterrestrials. He appeared happy that I had asked this question. He explained that there are some people on Earth who are in contact with the good extraterrestrials, and that they have missions to accomplish, sometimes in secret. He believed (like Tyler and James) that some extraterrestrials had left advanced technologies that certain scientists can unlock and use for the good of humans and the world. He said that we have already benefited from this technology.
At the end of the interview, which lasted about an hour and a half, I came away with several observations. Edgar used language that I had heard used by many of the invisibles. Certain words and phrases were repeated often enough to form somewhat of a lexicon, or a language group. It reminded me of academics who communicate in their own discipline’s jargon, and unfortunately other people cannot understand what they are talking about. I wasn’t sure what this meant, other than that there was a group of people who shared a common set of phrases and words and who also shared similar beliefs about extraterrestrials, the US space program, and technology.
Also, Edgar believed that networks of human–extraterrestrial contact already exist. Organizations like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, were not the preferred contact centers, apparently. Tyler had mentioned this too. He thought humans, with their DNA and cellular receptors that worked like mini satellites, were the best receivers of contact information from nonhuman intelligences.
According to several of the scientist-believers, including Edgar, quantum physics provides a framework for understanding the paranormal and supernatural events and abilities, including remote viewing, miracles, and contact with nonhuman intelligence. Rey and Edgar each called this the contact modalities. Edgar’s theories are elaborated in several of his books, and in his idea of the quantum hologram theory of physics and consciousness. According to this theory, Edgar says, information consists of patterns of energy. Information–energy packets are given off by matter. On some level, all bodies of matter contain information.
Edgar and his associate Rudy Schild helped Rey understand this theory, and Rey published articles arguing that it provides a framework for his contact with nonhuman intelligences. Significantly, he also argued that it retires the conundrum of the subjective versus materialist approaches that has plagued research of UFO events. “I now approach the so-called ‘ET contact phenomenon’ from a non-traditional perspective, one that embraces both spiritual/psychic and paranormal aspects, as well as decisively physical manifestations.”9 This theory is able bridge this gap because it posits a reality that is made up of patterns of energy. Edgar’s theory is elaborated in his idea of the “dyadic model” of consciousness. This model, according to Edgar, explains how remote viewing, telepathy, and even extraordinary mystical experiences, such as his experience of Samadhi while traveling back from the moon, are possible:
Several factors emerge immediately from considering the mystical experience from the dyadic point of view. The first is that mystical insights are just information that requires interpretation, not absolute and literal realities, that can stand alone. The flaw in cultural interpretation of mystical interpretation is precisely that of interpreting metaphor literally. However, a valid information function is taking place nevertheless. Consider the experience of the nirvikalpa samadhi which is described similarly in different traditions. In this experience the sense of Self merges with the cosmos and reality is experienced as unity of Self with All-That-Is. The experience is accompanied by intense ecstasy, a sense of eternity and a complete loss of fear.
The cultural interpretations are generally that the experience represents union with the godhead, or the ground of being. It is the experience of the “peace that passes all understanding.” The dyadic model interpretation is that the body/brain is experiencing its “ground state” or resonance with the zero point field. The awareness is the undifferentiated awareness of the primordial field, as the sense of Self is merged totally into the field. The question immediately arises as to why an intense ecstasy plus a sense of security and eternity accompany this state. It is only within the larger question of why nature provided feelings at all that this question may be answered. The internal feeling sense accesses the state of wellbeing of the organism. In addition, the subconscious brain functions integrate information from external senses and from non-local sources to provide a “feeling” of alarm or security as to the state of the environment. The feeling sense also provides reward or punishment for behavior influencing survival: gratification of thirst, hunger, sex drive, and discomfort or pain for dangerous behaviors, etc.
According to Edgar, the feeling of ecstasy indicates that this experience should be repeated. In this way, he integrates an evolutionary component into his model. He explains how this model helps us understand how skills like remote viewing and telepathy are possible:
Although non-local effects have been observed and studied for over a century by parapsychologists, in the absence of a compelling theory the results have been ignored or disparaged and certainly misrepresented by mainstream science. Non-locality in quantum physics now provides a physical basis for these effects. A large number of investigators for several decades have demonstrated that brain waves can be synchronized and information transferred between individuals across Faraday cage barriers. The results do not obey the inverse square rule of electromagnetic propagation, nor are they time dependent, suggesting the phenomenon is a macro-scale version of quantum non-locality, but with more degrees of freedom than simple particles undergoing a double split experiment.10 Edgar worked to establish several organizations devoted to the study of consciousness. He also helped fund and establish the Disclosure Movement, which is a movement initiated by the citizens of various countries to force their governments to declassify documents related to UFOs. Through his connections to astronauts and the US space program, he was able to motivate people who worked for these institutions to testify in front of Congress about UFOs. He is a pioneer who supported scientists who wanted to study consciousness and physics. This is now seen as a legitimate field of study, but when Edgar started out it was not. He has joked that when he began his work on consciousness studies he was called a “space cadet” by some of his colleagues, while others said he had been “lost in space.” I place Edgar within a lineage of esoteric cosmonauts and rocket scientists, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, John (Jack) Parsons, Tyler D., and many others—people whose ideas and beliefs might appear to be on the fringe, and are. They may be on the fringe of our future.
Edgar had returned from space with the confidence of one who has been where only twelve humans have ever gone. Several months after my colleagues and I spoke with Edgar, he passed away on the eve of the anniversary of his landing on the moon.
REY REPORTS HIS EXPERIENCE TO THE MUTUAL UFO NETWORK
When individuals with no prior experience of UFOs believe they have had an extraordinary sighting of one, they look for information associated with UFOs to make sense of the event. One of the first things experiencers do after an anomalous sighting is to perform a Google search. They use keywords like “shining object” or “UFO,” and inevitably the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) appears among the search results. MUFON is an organization with the goal of researching UFO-related events scientifically.
The organization was founded in 1969 in the midwestern United States and eventually expanded into a national network of units. It is a nonprofit organization that trains “field investigators,” that is, people who go on-site to study anomalous reports. The organization and its chapters also host conferences that focus on UFO studies and research. MUFON has been criticized for using “pseudoscientific” methods for investigating sightings, reports, and experiencers, and it has been criticized by experiencers who have input their own reports into its extensive and public database of UFO reports.11 I know the North Carolina state director of MUFON and several field investigators. My associations with them have been friendly and professional. Their research methods, on my observation, are completely rational and objective, and err on the side of skepticism. However, individuals associated with MUFON are not necessarily representative.
Experiencers I’ve interviewed say their experiences with the larger organization have not gone well. Several have reported that their experiences have been made public in a completely altered form. When a person reports an experience to MUFON, it goes into a national database of reports, and these reports become the property of MUFON. They can do what they want with them—like sell them to television production companies.
One day Rey received an email from a friend who said that he had seen Rey’s family’s experience portrayed on the television program Hangar 1, produced by the History Channel. Rey was horrified to find that an entire episode was based on his family’s experience, but that the events as represented on the show didn’t resemble their experience. Disturbingly, the message it conveyed was the opposite of his own and his family’s experience. What for them had been a positive encounter was morphed into a terrifying home invasion by extraterrestrials.
Rey saw his own handwriting displayed on the screen. “All the handwriting you saw on the video’s pictures was my handwriting; it even had my attorney letterhead blacked out—that is why I know it was my report to MUFON.” Rey was understandably upset that his experience, which had changed the direction of his life and which his wife believed was an “angelic” encounter, was portrayed as just the opposite. The miraculous healing of the dog Niña was left out of the episode, as was the fact that Dulce had been praying all night for the healing of her dog. The title of the episode was “UFO Home Invasion.” Rey felt betrayed by the larger organization, but he was generous in stating that the volunteers and field workers associated with MUFON were not at fault. “Many of my dear friends are members of MUFON—all are very nice individuals and I deeply respect them. All of them are volunteers and doing very important and excellent work. My issue is not with MUFON volunteers but with the MUFON Hangar 1 production. Somehow my field report was not translated to the video because not only were there inaccuracies but there were actual fabrications. I just want to make it clear that the folks that I know that work with MUFON are good friends, highly credible, have done outstanding work, and I fully support them. MUFON is not the issue—the issue is my shock to find out that my story was sold and the fabrications of the MUFON Hangar 1 production.” Rey asks, “Why the numerous fabrications? I understand it is Hollywood, but why a total fabrication?” At the time the episode aired, Rey had already begun to receive the first round of data compiled by his organization. His dataset included over three thousand reports from people who claimed to have had UFO-related experiences. Overwhelmingly, these experiencers reported positive interactions with nonhuman intelligence.
I have described the mechanisms of belief, which present UFO events as real events that correspond to the truth. The use of a genre associated with truth, the documentary, produced by a company ostensibly related to veridical, historical accounts (in Rey’s case the History Channel), supports a central claim of this book—that what one sees on television, in the movies, and on the internet does not necessarily convey the actual stories of those who experience the events. Yet the mechanisms provide a convincing viewing framework. As viewers are entertained by the productions, they are also forming opinions, biases, even memories that help them interpret and form meanings associated with UFOs.
The description of the series as posted on the Hanger I History Channel website is painful to read for those who have experienced a UFO event or have knowledge of one:
There is a place where the truth about UFOs exists; a vast archive of over 70,000 files gathered over nearly half a century. The place is called Hangar 1. Now, it is finally open for investigation.
MUFON, an independent organization dedicated to investigating UFOs, has worked diligently to compile, research and store these files. The HISTORY series Hangar 1 will delve deep into these archives to look for connections, clues and evidence; because only by investigating the files of Hangar 1 can we find the truth about UFOs.12
The database that forms the basis for Hangar 1’s “based on real events” is filled with the honest reports of thousands of people who have seen, many for the first time, an anomalous aerial object. With good intentions, they report these to MUFON. Where does this data go? In the case of Rey and several other experiencers I have met, they become the basis for consumer products, for entertainment. But the data is also being used by other researchers and organizations. The problem is that a lot of researchers who use it are not the original on-site field researchers. If they were, they could have vetted the original reports. For example, the state director for MUFON in North Carolina rules out all possible explanations. Once she gets a report, she checks with local police and military to ascertain whether there were military exercises or other scheduled aerial events in the area. She also scrutinizes any photographs and physical evidence with the help of trained videographers. If other explanations are ruled out, she grants the report the status of “UFO,” that is, “unidentified.” Problems arise when researchers who are not local and who are not trained field researchers take the data and extrapolate to make general statements about the presence of UFOs. Often, aerial phenomena like blimps, drones, and lightning are misidentified as UFOs. These go into the database, along with other reports. Several researchers I have met have blindly taken all of the reports and lumped them under the category of “UFO” sightings. This gives the impression that there are more sightings of truly unknown phenomena than is actually the case. This “big data” approach skews the data.13 The truth is potentially “out there,” but it’s unlikely to be found in media productions. 7
REAL AND IMAGINARY
Tyler D.’s Spiritual Conversion in Rome
The sky is a neighborhood.
—DAVID GROHL, Foo Fighters
THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH a journey, and it ends with a journey, a plane trip to Rome where I visited the Vatican Secret Archives and the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, one of the oldest established observatories in the Western world. For centuries, monks, nuns, and priests peered through telescopes at the starry skies here, nestled next to a volcano and overlooking a startlingly blue volcanic lake.
I was a guest at the observatory and, astonishingly, I was given the keys to their archive, which housed, among many other things, works of Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus, revolutionary thinkers who bravely forged the early paths of our current cosmologies. Like Tyler and James, Copernicus was a radical thinker, a person who observed the inexplicable and tried to make sense of it. At one time, the works of Copernicus were banned by the church. Ironically, his books are now prominently displayed in the archive. At the observatory, I felt as if I was in the quiet presence of the hub of unorthodox science, a place where, finally, religion and science did not compete. I was there with Tyler D.
Almost two years had passed since Tyler had taken me and James, blindfolded, to ground zero of the UFO myth in New Mexico. Now, as the culmination of our work together, I took Tyler to Rome, to ground zero of the Catholic faith. Here he experienced a profound religious conversion, right before my eyes. This was perhaps the most miraculous and strange event of my eventful six years of research. I have made the case that belief in extraterrestrials and UFOs constitutes a new form of religion. Media and popular culture have successfully delivered a UFO mythos to audiences through television series, music and music videos, video games, cartoons, hoaxes, websites, and immersive and mixed reality environments. New research in digital–human interfaces reveals that it doesn’t matter what a person might consciously believe, as data delivered through screens shoots straight into memory, which then constructs models of events. On a personal level, many individuals now interpret their own traditional religions through the lens of the UFO hermeneutic.
This chapter will explore a more complicated interpretation of the social effects of contact, where the perceived contact with a nonhuman intelligent, divine being is simultaneously imagined and real. I am not making an ontological claim, that extraterrestrials are real in the sense that couches are real, although they could be. I am arguing that perceived contact has very real effects with powerful social implications.
While in Rome I became reacquainted with a historical figure whom I came to view as a meta-experiencer. Sister Maria of Agreda was a cloistered Spanish nun who lived in the seventeenth century. She was a mystic who wrote books about the Virgin Mary that were very popular in her era and are still widely read. Her earliest works, later burned by nuns of her convent, were cosmographies. They contained descriptions of her astral journeys through space and over the earth, which she recorded as topographies of other countries, cultures, and space. As a young nun, she claimed to bilocate to colonial New Mexico, where she said she met indigenous Americans, taught them about the Catholic faith, and prepared them to be baptized by Franciscan missionaries. The Catholic Church recognizes bilocation as a rare “charism,” or sacred skill. A person who bilocates is said to appear to be in two places simultaneously. Maria’s story became very popular in the seventeenth century and is even mentioned in textbooks as part of the history of the western United States, where I first encountered it as a student in high school. As I progressed in my research at the Vatican and then in the observatory archive, I was struck by Maria’s similarity to Tyler.
THE REASON FOR THE TRIP I was in Rome to do two things, apparently unrelated. I had agreed to go to the Vatican to help with research on the canonization accounts of a saint and a potential saint. While I was there, I would take the opportunity to assess the historical records of the search for extraterrestrial life—which I assumed I would find in the observatory’s archive. The organization that funded my research trip to Rome had asked me to analyze the canonization trial records of St. Joseph of Cupertino and Sister Maria of Agreda. Why was St. Joseph canonized, they wondered, and not Sister Maria? Their stories were somewhat similar and they lived in the same era. Joseph was a seventeenth-century Italian priest who was said to have levitated so frequently that the priests responsible for the case for his canonization stopped counting the number of people who presented themselves as witnesses. There are copious records of the testimonies of his flights, levitations, and even soaring to the ceiling of a cathedral—on at least one occasion taking another person with him. The large number suggests that they were probably not making these stories up. They may have been, but seemingly something had happened. Sister Maria of Agreda, however, was never canonized, although her cause has been proposed to the church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints many times. Her biographers have said that while her body levitated surrounded by a blinding white light in her small cell in the convent, she experienced herself soaring on the wings of angels across the ocean and in space to what Spain called “the New World.” I had never had occasion to think of levitation as a reality, but Tyler had —although not with respect to Catholic saints. Within the UFO literature, levitation was a common theme. People reported that during a UFO contact event they had been levitated out of their beds into crafts, through windows, and so forth. Tyler proposed to come with me to Rome. The plan he suggested was that I would translate the documents and he would offer his analysis based on his work in aeronautics. Strangely, there was precedent for such collaboration. A number of individuals from aeronautic agencies had contacted me about my historical work on levitating saints. A colleague whose work focuses on Joseph of Cupertino had also been contacted by someone with similar space-related affiliations. Apparently, at least some members of the space industry believed in the possibility of levitation.
Tyler and Maria were, in a sense, inadvertent colonists in their respective eras, who made imagined “first contact.” Maria allegedly bilocated to New Mexico, and the stories of her experiences helped Spanish missionaries obtain funding to convert indigenous Americans. Tyler was at the forefront of human efforts to colonize space. Just as Maria’s voyages through space and to New Mexico preceded and accompanied Spanish missionaries, Tyler’s mental landscapes—which included the creation of alien-based technologies—were supported by a massive media infrastructure of UFO content, a fertile context for efforts to colonize and populate space. Maria’s case is similar to Tyler’s in that she seeded the cultural imagination with supernatural support for the missionaries’ work.
TYLER’S SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE: NOTES FROM THE FIELD
It is one thing to describe how people utilize a UFO–biblical or religious– UFO framework for understanding how their religious traditions are linked to the new UFO mythos. It is another thing entirely to see it taking place.
Being witness to the transformation of an individual’s religious belief and practice is a powerful experience. I have witnessed this transformation more than once. Christopher Bledsoe, a Baptist from North Carolina, had been a pilot and owned a successful construction business. He had a profound UFO sighting that he interpreted as an extension of his own religious tradition. His congregation rejected his interpretation and called the experience demonic. For Bledsoe, this was an agonizing process that alienated him from his community and changed his life. Bledsoe struggled for several years, although he now seems at peace with his conversion.
Tyler’s experience was an accelerated version that happened dramatically during his visit to the Vatican and the observatory at Castel Gandolfo.
I began to suspect that this would not be an ordinary experience as I observed how Tyler was admitted to the Vatican Secret Archives. Gaining entrance to the archives is not easy, and I had started the process a year before my trip. The archives extend underground, and there are approximately fifty-three miles of shelving. One cannot just “request” a manuscript, because the archivists must find out where the manuscript is housed and then retrieve it, which is often a lengthy process. I provided the archivists as much information as I could prior to my visit. One needs particular credentials to enter the archives, which are called “secret,” from a Latin word that should more accurately be translated as “private.” I had the requisite credentials: I have a PhD and am a tenured professor in religious studies, specializing in Catholic culture. There was a question about whether Tyler would be admitted. He is a respected scientist with over forty patents to his name, but he did not have a PhD, nor was he in any way associated with religious history.
Tyler arrived in Rome a day before me. I was in transit when he began sending me a series of texts. He was at the archives, but he was not allowed to enter. He had hired a translator who was dickering with the security personnel and explaining that I had given him permission and needed his help. The archivists knew I would be arriving shortly but said that Tyler did not have the proper credentials and would not be admitted. There were three stations of security through which one had to pass before obtaining a badge of entry. He was being held at the first station. Tyler had credentials as an adjunct instructor at several research universities and letters from the deans of those universities. He had a letter from me vouching that he was an analyst necessary for the project. None of this seemed to matter, and I sensed Tyler’s resignation. There was nothing I could do, as I was on a plane thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean.
Tyler texted, “Should I tell them who I am?” I considered his question carefully. Why would it mean anything to them? And if it did, that might make things worse for us. I cautioned him against doing it, as I thought it wouldn’t help and would possibly flag us as suspicious. We were there to view centuries-old documents about levitating saints. As a scholar of religion, I wouldn’t raise any red flags of suspicion whatsoever. But Tyler’s work in aeronautics certainly would. I said “no.” But eventually it was apparent that he would not be admitted at all. At that point, after almost two hours of Tyler’s translator haggling with security, I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I said, “Okay, go ahead.” The next text I received said, “I’m in. My archive badge is good for six months.” Six months is the longest time for which one can have a badge. Tyler became, at that point, visible, at least to those at the Vatican Secret Archives. And his visibility provided access.
Apparently, Tyler was known to members of the Vatican.
Things were still not easy. Tyler, now in the Vatican Secret Archives, was lost, and I was still in transit. He didn’t know what he was looking at, or for.
I had given him directions, but he doesn’t speak Italian, and he was nervous and lost. Then he heard an American accent and saw a tall black-robed priest speaking in Italian with one of the archivists. He walked up to the priest and asked for help. The priest, Father McDonnell, could see that Tyler was lost and in need of help. He asked him to come outside into the courtyard. There Tyler explained what he needed to do. Impressed, Father McDonnell vowed to help. It turned out that Father McDonnell was a special person, known by seemingly everyone at the Vatican, and had access to its every nook and cranny. By the time I arrived in Rome, Father McDonnell and Tyler were fast friends. Father McDonnell had given Tyler rosary rings and Catholic prayer cards and asked him to pray. Tyler was a Baptist, so I had to explain to him what these objects were and what they meant. They were sacred objects for Catholics, beads and rings that helped them remember the reality of the sacred. Tyler told me later how, in the courtyard of the Vatican, with the sun streaming down on them, Father McDonnell had blessed our project. I was dumbfounded. Why? I wondered, as I watched Tyler try on the ring.
As it turned out, Tyler’s unexpected access helped me too. Because of my association with him, I was able to look at documents and speak to key postulators (functionaries who present a case for an individual’s canonization or beatification). This would not have happened had I been there alone. This point was further driven home by my interactions with the cadre of young archivists who manned the desks. Intimidating in their black robes, they spoke to Tyler instead of me, referring to me as “the lady doctor.” Father McDonnell was not like the Vatican archivists. He was funny and easy-going, and spoke to me directly. He was fascinated by our research and curious too, as I didn’t tell him exactly what I was studying.
The study of the UFO phenomenon, from any angle whatsoever, is controversial, even if one is just approaching it as cultural history. I wasn’t going to tell him that I was assessing accounts of levitation and bilocation with my space engineer colleague. At some point he figured it out, but it didn’t affect his relationship with us, as he invited us to attend a Mass in St.
Peter’s Basilica.
The Vatican has traditionally been protected by the Swiss Guards, mercenaries who are trained by the Swiss Armed Forces. In their colorful attire, outfitted with swords, they are placed in strategic positions around the Vatican. They don’t appear to provide any type of security. Their presence seems to be more for the benefit of the constant lines of tourists who circle the Vatican and stop for photographs. The real guards wore camouflage uniforms and carried very big guns, which looked like automatic weapons. The guns matched the gravity of their grim faces. They were everywhere. Against my counsel, Tyler asked one if he would like to have a cafe latte, to which the guard replied with a steely “no.” To enter the Vatican grounds, we needed to pass by these formidable armed men.
Fortunately, Father McDonnell, with his black robe and breezy demeanor, parted the guards like Moses parting the Red Sea, and as long as we were close behind him, we could go seemingly anywhere.
The second day of my visit to Rome I was in St. Peter’s Basilica hearing Mass with Father McDonnell, Tyler, and six nuns. The Mass was celebrated in Latin, near the incorruptible body of Pope John XXIII, which certainly enhanced the surreal quality of my experience. We had passed by the grimfaced guards and into the sacristy, a chamber that seemed off-limits to all non-Vatican insiders. The priests were robing for the service. I carefully avoided direct eye contact with them. I could see that Tyler and I were conspicuous, judging by the many faces that turned in our direction.
When Father McDonnell was robed, we went back into the basilica, and the Mass began. I tried to help Tyler understand was what happening. I saw by the way he looked around at the frescos on the cavernous ceilings and the sunlight shining through the stained glass that he was in another world. I pointed out that before us was the incorruptible body of a saint, and he nodded in recognition. Later I found out that he didn’t know what I had said and was astonished that we had been so close to a dead body. He had never heard of the tradition of incorruptible saints, according to which certain people’s bodies do not decay after death and are pronounced “incorruptible” by the church. Most often these persons are considered by Catholics to be saints. Their bodies are often placed in glass cases, to be viewed by the faithful. Tyler and I talked about this on the day after his mother’s funeral, two weeks after we had returned from Rome. The fact that we had been so close to John XXIII’s preserved body was comforting to him.
After Mass, Father McDonnell invited us to follow him on rounds at the local hospital where he was celebrating another Mass, at a small hospital chapel, and administering last rites to dying patients, as well as anointing the sick. The last rites provide absolution for sins, preparing the dying person’s soul for death. The anointing of the sick is one of the seven sacraments of the church, in which a priest blesses a person through the administration of blessed oil. I thought that Tyler’s experience with helping terminally ill children would have prepared him for this. Before Mass, Father McDonnell and I recited several traditional Catholic prayers. Tyler, not knowing the prayers, sat in silent contemplation, looking around at the very small chapel, which contained a relic (a fragment of a bone) of St.
Teresa of Avila. After Mass we went around the hospital with Father McDonnell. He respectfully announced his presence to the patients, and those who wanted his services welcomed him. I was to accompany him to the bedsides of women, and Tyler was to do so when it was a man who was dying. Father McDonnell and I entered the room of a woman who seemed near death. Her daughter sat beside the bed and held her mother’s hand.
Father McDonnell’s eyes shone with mercy and love as he tenderly crossed the mother’s forehead with blessed oil, and he asked God to bless her. The old woman’s eyes sparkled and she smiled. I felt my throat constrict, and choked back tears. As we left the room, Father McDonnell and I looked at each other. He was clearly touched. He said, “Now you see. I get more from them than I give to them. In there, was beauty. It was God.” Tyler went with Father McDonnell into the room of a young man in his late twenties or early thirties. I had seen this young man earlier, at Mass. He had struggled slowly with a walker to attend the service. He seemed like a proud, strong young man who was humbled by the approach of death. I could see that Tyler felt an immediate kinship with him. Fifteen minutes went by, and then Tyler and Father McDonnell came out. Tyler could not look at me. His head was bowed. I did not try to speak with him, because I understood. His heart was broken.
This experience prepared Tyler for his conversion. As if following a script, events happened one after another that instigated a profound shift in Tyler’s understanding of his life and his future and of the reality of the beings. I was the witness to these events, and to his transformation.
The day after the hospital experience we played tourist. I thought that perhaps some sightseeing would lighten the intensely religious mood that seemed to have gripped Tyler since his first day in Rome. I was wrong. We took a tour of Rome on a golf cart, which turned out to be a bad idea. The streets of Rome are not smooth, and we jostled violently about as the tour guide steered our cart in and out of throngs of speeding trucks and vans. At one point, we were pulled over by the police. The guide and the police haggled for twenty minutes. We waited patiently and were finally brought to the beautiful church of Santa Sabina, which is the oldest remaining Roman basilica and sits atop the Aventine Hill. The church is named for a noble Roman woman who was converted to Christianity by her servant Seraphia. Both were executed by the Roman government and later declared saints. The church was built on what is said to have been the site of Sabina’s home, which was near a temple of the goddess Juno. The place was steeped in Roman and Roman Catholic history.
Tyler and I made our way around the church as the guide described the history of the location and its significance to Italians. We happened to arrive just as a wedding party was making its preparations. A small group of classical musicians was playing as we toured the church. Tyler found his way to a small side chapel. Was he kneeling? I couldn’t tell, as a crowd of worshippers obstructed my view. At that moment, the guide happened to meet a friend, a historian of that church who had just finished giving a tour.
The historian led me outside of the church and showed me its large wooden door. On the door was carved one of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion of Christ. He is pictured as if standing calmly with outstretched arms, between the two thieves, whose arms are also outstretched. They looked expectant, not crushed or tortured. But this was not all that was on the door. I also saw images of levitation. I was struck by these images and asked the historian about what they depicted, and she seemed confused.
“I suppose, yes, these are of levitations,” she said.
The ascension of Christ is depicted in two panels, and then a third shows Christ ascended. Beneath him is a mysterious object that looks like a globe or disc—scholars are not sure what it represents. Later, as I researched the mystery object, I found several websites that associated it with a UFO.
Another panel represents the prophet Elijah ascending into the heavens on a cloud, and in yet another panel the prophet Habakkuk is either ascending to heaven or being lifted up by an angel. Overall, the door showed numerous examples of bodies ascending to the heavens.
I was excited to share my discovery with Tyler, but when I searched for him in the church, he was nowhere to be found. I found our guide and asked her if she had seen him. She looked at me oddly and pointed toward the small chapel. There was Tyler on his knees, praying. The wedding guests were starting to arrive; we needed to leave. I looked at Tyler and realized that he was not in a normal frame of mind. I touched him and whispered that we needed to leave. The music was playing. The arriving guests were impeccably dressed, and several looked at us as if we were intruders. It was time to leave, yet Tyler was crying. Our guide, now very confused, explained that there was one more destination on our tour. We got back into the golf cart and left the church of Santa Sabina.
After the tour was over we found a quiet restaurant and ate a light meal.
Tyler was quiet.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“No. Nothing’s okay.” “What’s wrong?” I asked, but I think I knew already.
“Diana, I have to go back and help people directly. I feel like I am a complete failure.” I was surprised, because Tyler is far from a failure. But now he felt like one.
“Will you help me?” he asked. “Will you introduce me to priests or nuns who can help me serve like this? I want to help anyone who is hungry or in need of help. I don’t care if I ever work at my day job again.” “I will,” I said.
I knew that Tyler was having a spiritual conversion, and that its effects in his life would be completely different from what he expected. I had a feeling that he would learn more about what the future held for him when we went to the observatory archive in Castel Gandolfo.
I was feeling very uneasy. To me the Vatican looked like a medieval feudal palace. The constant presence of the elite guards put me on edge. I understood that I was lucky that Tyler had met Father McDonnell and that we were then invited to attend several important meetings, but this was only because of Tyler’s access. None of this would have happened had I been there alone.
As it turned out, our time at the Vatican Observatory couldn’t have been more different from our experience at the Vatican. Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the observatory, is a well-known astronomer who specializes in meteorites and asteroids. He is an American Jesuit with degrees from MIT and the University of Arizona. After we drove up to the observatory and parked, Brother Guy greeted us warmly. He gave us a brief tour of the premises, carefully showing us which doors we could enter and which were off-limits. After the tour, Brother Guy presented me with the keys to their archive. I have spent half of my life looking through archives —and this was unprecedented. Archivists are usually very protective of their holdings, and we were going to be looking at the works of Johannes Kepler and other great scientists of Western cosmology. When Tyler saw the list of books we would be viewing, his face lit up. He had spent his entire life exploring space, and now he would get to see the original works that had paved the way for his present vocation.
The archive itself is beautiful. On exhibit are old technologies of space exploration: the first telescopes developed to scour the galaxy. Brother Guy had lined the walls with old photographs of nuns who had worked at the observatory and helped to chart star patterns. He was correcting the historical record by including those who had been left out of it. I felt like I was home, and Tyler did too.
Every morning, around 10 a.m., the brothers and priests would gather for cappuccino and cafe latte in a room near the archive. As anyone who has been to Italy can attest, Italian coffee may be the best in the world. Tyler, who used to avoid coffee as part of his healthy living protocol, had cast aside restraint and was now addicted. We stood in a small room with about ten Jesuits with various types of PhDs, all connected to space in some way —astrophysics, astronomy, and related disciplines.
“What are you looking for in our archive?” one of the brothers asked.
I wasn’t going to say that I was writing a book about the topic of UFOs.
That could have immediately alienated us from these amazing scholars. I told the truth but without using the word “UFO.” “We are looking for instances of aerial phenomena.” “Aerial phenomena?” Several of the others stood and stared at us.
“Yes.” I waited a few seconds, and then I laughed. To my relief, they laughed too. That was the end of the conversation.
To set the record straight, the Jesuits at the Vatican Observatory are not actively searching for UFOs, nor are they engaged in anything related to ufology. Brother Guy has a wonderful sense of humor and some of his jokes and comments, taken out of context, have fed into conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church. What these scientists are doing is revealing that science is compatible with religion. And they are doing it so effectively that, after hearing Brother Guy speak about his vocation, my Baptist scientist colleague chose to become a Catholic.
TYLER’S TRANSFORMATION AND HIS REVISED UNDERSTANDING On our first morning in the archive, Brother Guy stuck his head in the door and peeked in at us. We were busy identifying books we wanted to read that day. Brother Guy told us that he was heading up to the actual observatory where the telescopes were housed and asked if we wanted to come to a talk he was giving to a group of young scientists from the European Space Agency. Of course we did. I’d heard Brother Guy speak several times and I knew that his insights, which were always delivered with humor, could be profound and transformative. I had a feeling that this talk would influence Tyler, who was on fire to change his life. We jumped up from our desks and helped Brother Guy get organized for the talk. Soon we were in a car driving through the gardens of the estate and up to the top of the small mountain, which overlooked a crystal-blue volcanic lake. The first thing I noticed, besides the breathtaking scenery, was a fleet of sleek cars lined up in a row, gleaming in the morning sun. It was an impressive sight.
The young scientists were eager to see the historical hub of their own space program and to meet the Jesuit who directed this enchanting observatory. They were welcoming to Tyler and me when Brother Guy introduced us. I was introduced as a professor from the University of North Carolina; when Tyler was introduced, along with his affiliations, the youthful crowd burst into cheers and applause. I was proud that, at least among these smart young Europeans, Tyler, whom I considered an American hero, was not invisible.
As I predicted, Brother Guy’s talk was funny, informative, and profound.
He made the young scientists laugh and cry. He addressed the conspiracy theories about what he and the other scientists do at the observatory by showing images from popular culture, such as scenes from popular movies and books that paint Castel Gandolfo as a hub of mystery and intrigue, and then the reality, which turned out to be pictures of the priests and brothers sitting together discussing the composition of meteorites. The pictures conveyed the mundane daily lives of the observatory scientists, even if they did have Italian lattes. The popular depictions of Castel Gandolfo were so far removed from the reality that the whole group erupted in laughter.
Brother Guy talked about how, after he received his PhD, he felt a call to help people in need and had joined the Peace Corp. Stationed in a very poor country, he helped to feed the people of the small town where he was posted and helped them obtain clean water. At night the villagers would gather together and implore him to take out his telescope so they could look up at the night sky. They asked him about the meaning of what they saw. It was then, he said, that something within him clicked. He realized that he had a vocation, and that was to help people realize that there is more to life than just what to eat for lunch. The wonder of the cosmos and the questions that arise from it were part of the human condition. It was as important as the bread we eat, as it fed the soul. It was literally spiritual food. He realized that he was in a unique position to help foster this wonder.
Brother Guy’s words sent an electric charge through the audience. When he finished, everyone rose and filed into the observatory for a demonstration of the telescope. Tyler was introspective. I could tell that Brother Guy’s talk had affected him the way I thought it would. Not only did Tyler have a desire to help people in a meaningful way, like Brother Guy, but also he had similar training and also worked in space-related research. He was touched by the wonder of the cosmos, and his life was a testament to a type of vocation not recognized by secular institutions. Here, at Castel Gandolfo, he saw that there were scientists who lived a life of vocation, or calling. They wedded their spiritual lives to their work lives.
They didn’t compartmentalize religion into attendance at a religious service one day a week. Their faith, spirituality, and religion permeated everything they did. And they were scientists.
That night Tyler and I were in the archive, looking at the first of the books by Kepler. I had noticed that the observatory’s neighbor was a convent and the home of cloistered nuns, and my own room was adjacent to theirs. As I sat in the archive of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, staring at Johannes Kepler’s analysis of Copernicus’s cosmology, I was struck by the thought that Sister Maria of Agreda, whose records I had seen, had claimed to have bilocated to New Mexico, the part of the world where Tyler had taken James and me to visit the supposed UFO crash site. I looked up quickly. Tyler looked at me, surprised by the suddenness of my move.
“I was blindfolded on the trip to New Mexico,” I said, “so I don’t know exactly where I was. But we just read about Sister Maria and she describes where she went. Is this the same place where she imagined she went?” Tyler’s face appeared to freeze and he looked back down at his book. He wasn’t going to answer me. The small archive suddenly felt large to me, not in any spatial way, but in a way that fused it with my memories of New Mexico. SISTER MARIA OF AGREDA’S EPISODES OF BILOCATION
In the early 1600s, as Spain was exploring and colonizing western North America, the youthful Maria claimed that with the help of angels she flew through space and over the ocean to New Mexico. Her sister nuns said they witnessed Maria during her alleged bilocations and that she rose a few feet off the floor and was surrounded by brilliant light.
The veracity of Maria’s account of her experiences was bolstered by reported encounters between Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico and members of a native tribe, the Jumanos, who presented themselves as eager to be baptized. Allegedly, the Jumanos said that they had been visited by a “lady in blue” who spoke to them about the Catholic faith.1 This story traveled back to Spain with Alonso de Benavides, the first commissioner of the Inquisition in New Mexico. He met with Maria and questioned her closely about what she saw and with whom she spoke.
Benavides was impressed by her account, which included details of things of which he thought she could not have been aware, and he made a report to the king of Spain, Philip IV.
Maria’s “journeys” were strategically politicized by Benavides. He and others used them to justify their continued funding and efforts to expand the Spanish empire. The missionaries wanted to believe, and most likely did believe, that Sister Maria actually appeared, in physical form, to the people who lived there. Benavides and others used this miraculous story as proof that God wanted this area under Spanish rule.
As I revisited this historiography, I thought about what was erased in its telling. Sitting in the archive, it was hard not to remember Sister Maria’s early work on cosmography and her recognition of some of the “heretical” scientific discoveries of her own era. Those works, her first, were burned, and only a few copies remain. She wrote that she saw the earth from space, and it was a spinning sphere. She is best known as the author of the Mystical City of God, a biography of the Virgin Mary, and her earlier work on science and cosmography is largely ignored.2 I could not help but draw a correlation with Tyler and his own imaginings of how humans will eventually explore and live in space. Was Tyler a contemporary Maria, existing in a sort of cloister of invisibility? Maria imagined herself traveling to what was for her a new world and making contact with its inhabitants, and this imaginary/real voyage paved the way for real missionaries. Tyler’s visions are supported by television and media and we accept, on an “imaginary” level, Tyler’s version of space travel. Maria’s visions were spread through rumors, stories, and circulated letters. Today, visions of UFOs and space travel are fueled by a vast media industry.
Just as in Tyler’s case, there were inexplicable realist aspects to Maria’s imaginings. Had Maria been alive today, perhaps she would have been a remote viewer with the Stanford Research Institute, as she seems to have possessed the qualifications and skills. There is a history of psychic cosmonauts within religious traditions, people who claim to fly through space with the help of angels or beings of light. Even if Maria in some sense creatively imagined a place to which she had never been, but had perhaps read about, it would not discredit the very real history of how her reported travels helped legitimize continued Spanish expansion. As Jeff Kripal suggests, instead of positing an either/or scenario that negates the inexplicable and anomalous and reduces Maria’s claims to purely imaginings and nothing more, why not consider the story within a framework of both/and? This would allow both the possibility that Maria really had some experiences that cannot be easily explained away or reduced to political machinations and that these experiences helped pave the way for Spanish colonization in a world that was new to them, a place where people had already existed for thousands of years.
Maria articulated her own version of the events and their inexplicable nature. She even criticized Benavides for being too “literal” in his interpretation of her bilocations. At the same time, she insisted that they really did happen. She wrote:
God showed me those things by means of abstract images of the kingdoms and what was going on there, or perhaps they were shown to me there. Neither then nor now was, or am, I capable of knowing the way it happened. . . . Whether or not I really and truly went in my body is something about which I cannot be certain. And it is not surprising I have questions in my mind, for Saint Paul understood things better than I and yet tells us that he was carried up to the third heaven but does not know whether it was in the body or out of it. What I can assure you beyond any doubt is that the case did in fact happen, and that as far as I know, it had nothing to do with the devil or wrong desires.3
Significantly, Maria notes that her travels would not have happened without the assistance of angels, or angelic beings. Angelic beings show up, again and again, in the discourse of the psychic cosmonauts. Of course, Tyler believes in beings that help him develop technologies. Empirical or not, Maria’s imaginings helped Spain colonize part of America. As a woman living in the seventeenth century who dared to write, she inspired suspicion and had to answer to the Inquisition. She later claimed that she was pressured to answer to Benavides in ways that he desired. Some of her writings were burned. Later, she recanted her recantations and rewrote many of her former works from memory. Colonial expansion was forged through the energy, money, and desires of the Spanish elite. Maria’s voyages and “first contact” were put in service to this end.
Across the table in the silent archive, Tyler was diligently searching through the pages of an eighteenth-century book about electromagnetism. I considered that his own special skills were used to serve an industry that sought colonization and expansion of space. It was also an endeavor undertaken by the elite. The heads of the private space industries are billionaires, and ufology and the study of anomalous aerial phenomena, as observed by my colleague Brenda Denzler, are “overwhelmingly white and male” and over 90 percent Anglo-American.4 To make it even more difficult to attain any kind of real knowledge about the topic, Tyler’s work is invisible, as is most of James’s. The historians of ufology, with few exceptions, ignore the history of African American and indigenous traditions of the UFO, which predate the standard assumption that the UFO mythos was born in the year 1947. The founders of the Nation of Islam were articulating a UFO narrative by the 1930s, and according to Elijah Muhammad, the religion’s early leader, Wallace Fard Muhammad, had spoken of UFOs in the 1920s.
That night, Tyler admitted that his understanding of the “beings” was being transformed by his experiences. His encounter with Sister Maria and her alleged bilocations, the idea that they may have happened within a hub of modern UFO activity, and information about the levitations of other saints and even apparitions of the Virgin Mary had significantly affected his new understanding. This information, coupled with what he had felt while making hospital rounds with Father McDonnell, and then the insights he gathered from the other scientists at the Vatican and the Vatican Observatory, shifted his interpretive structure with respect to what he thought might be extraterrestrials. He felt more in touch with them than ever and that somehow his connection had been “supercharged” by the environment in Rome and in Castel Gandolfo, but he also felt that he knew less about what they were, who they were, and their intentions. Later that night we were sitting alone in the archive. Tyler was quietly looking through a manuscript. He received a text message. He told me, as he slumped in his chair, that his mother had just been admitted to hospice.
Every night, the brothers and priests at the observatory celebrate Mass in a small chapel. We were always invited to attend. I now suggested to Tyler that we go, and he readily agreed. When we arrived at the chapel I asked the priest if he would offer the Mass for Tyler’s mother. Tyler was touched. He asked the priest to bless some rosaries that he had bought in the Vatican.
During the last conversation he had with his mother after he returned home, he gave her a blessed rosary. She took it and put it around her neck and then held Tyler’s hand. Later, before her funeral, he asked his Baptist siblings if they would allow their mother to be buried with the rosary.
Seeing how moved she was to have received the gift, and knowing that the brothers and priests at the Vatican had prayed for her, they readily agreed.
Later Tyler learned that, while the Mass was being celebrated in the observatory chapel, his mother, who had been uncommunicative for months, roused to consciousness for several hours with perfect memory and conversed with her family. This was reported to Tyler by his sister. She did not know that Tyler, and the observatory community, had been praying fervently for their mother during that time.
THE ENDING AND THE BEGINNING
Tyler’s life has been unusual by any standard, but it had not been overtly religious. He believed that he was in contact with beings of some sort, and that this contact was spiritual. However, he never theorized about what the beings were, other than that they were related to spirituality and space. This trip motivated him to begin thinking about who the beings might be. He now felt a kinship to Sister Maria of Agreda, and he vowed to devote his life to a new ministry. He believed that these beings were, or were similar to, the beings spoken of by Sister Maria, the angels that had transported her to what is now the southwestern United States. Like Rey Hernandez, a confirmed atheist whose experiences transformed him into an agnostic, Tyler’s understanding of his relationship to the beings shifted completely.
Months after we returned to the United States, Tyler was invited to return to Rome. He would make his first communion as a Catholic at a small Mass with Pope Francis, at none other than the church of Santa Sabina where he had first felt, in his words, the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Mass took place on St. Valentine’s Day, which, in a rare occurrence, was also Ash Wednesday this year. I never anticipated that this story would end like this, with Tyler’s conversion to Catholicism. For Tyler, it was not an end, but the very beginning. CONCLUSION
The Artifact
Credo quia absurdum, eh, Diana?
—JACQUES VALLEE
IT TURNS OUT THAT ABSURDITY seems to have been written into the fabric of the artifact—that is, the artifact I had found with James and Tyler, or that was perhaps planted for me to find. It was analyzed by research scientists, who concluded that it was so anomalous as to be incomprehensible.
According to these scientists, I was told, it could not have been generated or created on Earth. One scientist explained it to me in this way: “It could not have been made in this universe.” This does not mean that the scientists believed it was created by extraterrestrials. They just did not know how, or by whom, it was made. They seemed comfortable, if amazed, with this degree of ambiguity. I recall something James told me about his research methods. He said that when his graduate students found data that did not appear to fit the hypothesis, they often ignored the data. He said that he would redirect them toward the anomaly. The anomaly, he explained, was there for a reason, and it was their job to understand why it was there, and then to possibly change their hypothesis. James and the other scientists had been presented with an anomaly. John Mack, during his own research with experiencers, had approached Thomas Kuhn, who had convincingly argued that scientific revolutions came about through attention to anomalies.
Kuhn’s advice for Mack was to focus on the raw data and to persist in collecting it, even if it did not fit into any preconceived or conventional frameworks of knowledge. This was precisely how the scientists were proceeding with their research.
To make matters more interesting, just before the holidays in December 2017, the New York Times published an article featuring the testimony of Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s Aerospace Advanced Threat Identification Program, who alleged that the United States ran a secret program to study UFOs.1 This article set off a firestorm of “disclosure” or “unofficial disclosure,” which prompted public demands under the Freedom of Information Act that the US government provide any debris or “alloys” they might be keeping. Suddenly colleagues, including some who had scoffed at my interest in UFOs and the phenomenon, were now interested in the topic. The article promoted the “realism” that is one of the mechanisms of belief I elaborated on in this book.
As an object of mystery, the artifact functioned in religious ways, much like the relics of Catholic devotionalism or other religious traditions. The Shroud of Turin, which bears what appears to be the image of a man who had been tortured and crucified, is an example of a sacred artifact. The shroud is considered by millions of Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus. As such, it is an object of devotion within the Catholic religion, although the owner of the shroud, the Catholic Church itself, has not pronounced it authentic. How the image originally got on the linen cloth is mysterious, and scientists and artists have tried to recreate medieval artistic and scientific techniques in hopes of showing that it could have been produced during that era, rather than at the time of Christ. None of the theories as to the origin of the image are conclusive. It remains a mystery. It is also an artifact of faith, devotion, and belief. It has its own history of being discovered and doubted, and it continues to leave a trail of miracles associated with it. Sacred artifacts are objects of power. Part of their power lies in their mystery.
Within the field of religious studies there are multiple definitions of religion, some of which consider the category of the mysterious. The term “religion” is common, but it is a slippery concept that has its own history and functions. When I explain religion to first- and second-year undergraduates, I explain that traditional religions usually have two main components. They contain functional aspects, such as places of worship like churches and synagogues, sacred texts, and oral traditions. These aspects of religion can be studied quite easily. There is also another aspect to religion —the “sacred” element. The sacred element is not easily studied, as it might involve a sacred event, or a being. It is the object of belief, but it is usually mysterious and cannot be studied, itself, objectively. One cannot put an angel under a microscope. It is this aspect, the mysterious sacred, that distinguishes religion from other organized practices like sports or fandoms. In religions, one finds the inexplicable, sacred event, or a mysterious artifact.
Tyler told me an anecdote that demonstrates the artifact’s sacred significance to him and to many of the scientist-believers. Tyler had put the part in a backpack and had then stopped in to see a friend. He and his friend visited and dined, and then Tyler left to continue his travels. The next day he received a message from his friend.
“I had a dream about the contents of your backpack. I dreamt that there was a separate universe that you carried in it. A universe that was created within this universe that who knows where this universe was created. Had very much the essence of turtles all the way down . . . ha!” Tyler asked me what I thought of his friend’s dream. It was indeed an interesting dream considering what was in the backpack. I asked Tyler what he thought.
“Remember what Whitley [Strieber] told us? That the artifacts we studied also studied us? That is what I think is happening here,” he said.
“There is some sort of symbiotic relationship between the artifact and those in its proximity. It generates information. Some people are able to pick up on that information. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t.” For Tyler and the scientist-believers, the artifact’s mystery is not only impenetrable but also compels their reverence and belief. It inspires them.
In the words of Tyler D., it was “elegant beyond comprehension.” At the end of my research, I am an outsider to the community of scientists who are also believers. I can’t solve the mystery of the artifact, but I have seen how its reality has inspired belief and, as Jung notes, rumors that spin mythologies.
The artifact and its influence on the scientists were disconcerting to me. I wasn’t sure of its implications. I tended to think in terms of literal answers to its mysteries, for example, that it might be technology that belonged to another country. When I suggested this, the scientists looked at me incredulously. Apparently, they saw this line of speculation as among the least helpful of those that could lead to possible answers.
Even more disconcerting to me than the mystery of the anomalous artifact was the level of belief produced by media representations of UFOs.
I saw media professionals use the mechanisms of belief to push a story that was at times very far removed from the event that inspired it, and yet it was believed by millions. It was this that was most concerning, as I came to understand the extent of the influence, and thus power, wielded by the media in regard to belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials.
Toward the end of my research for this book, as I sat in the Vatican Observatory archive, I had come across astronomer Carl Sagan’s book Intelligent Life in the Universe. His coauthor was Soviet astronomer Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky. As I opened the book, I was struck by Shklovsky’s words: “The prey runs to the predator.” This referred to the search for extraterrestrial life, of course. It suggested that if humans actually did meet such life, it might not be friendly. I came to understand these words in a different way. I related them to our relationship to media and technology and the unreflective embrace of both. As philosopher Martin Heidegger had predicted years earlier, technology would bring about a new era, an era as much dominated by technology as the medieval era had been dominated by God. Technology and its effects would be misunderstood. In this misunderstanding, Heidegger argued, humans would face a great and potentially very destructive crisis. In Heidegger’s last interview, the German magazine Der Spiegel asked if philosophy could prevent such a negative outcome. Heidegger answered: “Only a God can save us now.” At Heidegger’s request, the interview was only published posthumously.