3. Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 2 - Strange Creatures
This is the third article in the series From Particles to Angels. If you are interested in this article you should read the previous articles in the series in order, beginning with the first (On Happiness).
In the previous article (Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 1 - Deus Absconditus) we speculated on why evidence of God and an afterlife might be hidden from us. To be religious requires us to believe not only in a God and an afterlife, but also in a vast cosmic conspiracy to keep such facts, if not entirely hidden, at least of a reality of permanently questionable status. Religion is therefore the ultimate conspiracy theory, and is therefore lumped together with all the other great conspiracy theories, like the hollow Earth, UFOs and bigfoot.
What would constitute evidence of religion? One thing would be contact with god or other supernatural beings. These kinds of encounters are those recorded in the various religious texts. The Old Testament prophets of Judaism heard the voice of god and/or saw visions, and various people are said to have met angels. The disciples of the New Testament personally knew a man called Jesus who claimed to be of divine origin and performed miracles. The apostle Paul never met Jesus in the flesh, but had a vision of him after the crucifixion. The prophet Mohammed was visited by the archangel Gabriel in 600 AD, and so began Islam. Sometime around the fifth century BC a Nepalese prince called Siddhartha Gautama has a revelatory insight while meditating and founds Buddhism. Various other encounters and experiences of the kind give rise to other religions, as well as sects within religions. Ordinary people sometimes claim to have had religious visions or insights. I will say no more about this here, but the interested reader can find a wealth of material.
Another kind of evidence is what are called "near death experiences" where those who have died briefly and then successfully resuscitated, return with similar stories of strange experiences. A doctor called Raymond Moody has written some books on it, or see Clint Eastwood's movie "Hereafter". A related matter are known as "out of body experiences". A well known author, researcher and practitioner is Robert Monroe. For a time, during the Cold War, the American military became interested in psychic phenomena (see for instance "Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies" by Jim Schnabel), but ultimately gave it away as too unreliable (and embarrassing). Psychic phenomena include things like telepathy and telekinesis, spiritists and mediums, ghosts and poltergeists. There is a large literature on these things.
Colin Wilson is an English writer who made his fortune with a book called "The Outsider". He later became interested in the supernatural, writing several books on the subject. I'll let him sum up his overall impression.
"By the time Lombroso dies, in 1909, psychical research was marking time. Spiritualism continued to flourish; but as scientific investigation, it had come to a halt. The reason can be seen by anyone who reads Owen's 'Footfall on the Boundary of Another World' and then turns to Lombroso's 'After Death - What?' The books were published fifty years apart; yet they might both have been written at exactly the same time. Lombroso offers some 'scientific evidence', by way of a few experiments in telepathy; otherwise, he presents just the same kind of evidence that Robert Dale Owen had presented. There was plenty of evidence for ghosts, for poltergeists, for telepathy, for precognition, for 'out of the body experiences', and a dozen other varieties of 'paranormal' experience. But the evidence seemed to lead nowhere."
"This rag-bag of assorted visions and apparitions underlines the enormous variety of cases investigated by the SPR [Society for Psychical Research] in the first century of its existence. None of them are, in themselves, more impressive than cases cited by Jung-Stilling or Catherine Crowe or Robert Dale Owen. But they are more convincing because honest invetigators have obiously done their best to confirm that they are genuine. And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the 'Proceedings' of the SPR (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further scepticism is a waste of time. Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume. It is easy to understand the irritatiopn of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in 'Life after Death':
"'I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to aruge with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.'
Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point."
Anonther popular writer on the supernatural is Lyall Watson.
"I have given up wondering about the mechanism and no longer itch to get Claudia attached to an instrument of measuring microwave emission or the electrical reistance of the skin. I have learned anyway, from research on the growing band who bend metal and move pendulums in apparently paranormal ways, that it is seldom possible to establish very much more than that these things do happen, sometimes, usually when you least expect them, but seldom in a way that will carry sufficient authority to convince anyone who reqiures very rigid mechanical demonstrations of reality.
"It is impossible to prove, in the normal scientific way, that such things do or don't happen. One is force to take uncomfortable refuge in the notion there are other realities, some of them far too delicate and mysterious for totally objective common sense. These systems have a way of transcending ordinary logic and language, which never seem to go quite far enough."
Jesus says: "seek and you will find" (Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9). Seeking seems to lead to finding enough evidence to satisfy yourself of the reality of these things, but not enough to convince someone else who is a sceptic. Anyone who does not wish to find the supernatural, usually only has to not seek, and they will find it easy to avoid. That is, if you want to find, you must seek. Knock "and the door will be opened to you", but if you do not knock, the door remains silent. This is not necessarily to say that only people who seek the supernatural find it, since sometimes it seems to find them, but as a general rule, this seems to be the case.
Demons, demonic possession, and armageddon appeal to the popular consciousness. These too appear to be turned to the purpose of maintaining the ambivalent credibility of the supernatural. One may be struck by the fact that supernatural beings would spend their time moving around furniture while you are not looking, and making creepy knocking sounds, and that the combined might of all the demons in hell does not seem to amount to as much havok as a drunken redneck with a broken bottle on a Friday night. In the movie "The Exorcism of Emily Rose", said to be based on a true story, Emily says the following (spoiler alert).
"I asked the Blessed Mother, 'Why do I suffer like this? Why did the demons not leave me tonight?' She said, 'I am sorry, Emily. The demons are going to stay where they are.' Then she said, 'You can come with me in peace free of your bodily form or you can choose to continue this. You will suffer greatly. But through you, many will come to see that the realm of the spirit is real. The choice is yours.'"
The New Living Translation Version (NLT) version of Luke 11:9 has "keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for." So as a society we should take care what we ask for. See the movie "The Conjuring 2" for a good illustration of how supernatural events can be carefully orchestrated to allow believers to go believing and sceptics to go on being sceptical while investigating the same phenomenon.
"For weeks before that people had been seeing unidentified objects in the sky and keeping the matter to themselves. An important result of Arnold's report was to elicit from these earlier witnesses their accounts of those previously unreported observations."
("Report on the UFO Wave of 1947" by Ted Bloecher, (1967))
Reports continue to this day, but we do not hear so much about it any more since interest has faded, probably largely because "the evidence seemed to lead nowhere". The same unsatisfying reports just appeared over and over again, but never definitive proof. The reports having largely disappeared from the mainstream media, continue in specialised media and an associated subculture. Reports of abductions have become more prominent, but these, like reports of satanic ritual abuse (see for instance the movie "Regression" (2015)), depend heavily on hypnotic regression. Visions of aliens and their spacecraft therefore fit with the model of supernatural events, with the intriguing difference that angels do not show up on radar. Again, there is a vast literature on the subject. I will mention just a few. The UFO phenomenon is also an interesting illustration of how human society responds to supernatural events when it does not want to believe in them.
J. Alan Hynek (1910 – 1986) was the scientific advisor on the American government's official investigation into the UFO phenomenon. The American Air Force carried out this investigation, based at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio: beginning in 1947 as "Project Sign", renamed as "Project Grudge" in 1949, and renamed again as "Project Blue Book" in 1951, the name it retained until the project was terminated in 1960. Steven Spielberg made a movie: "Close encounters of the Third Kind". The classification of encounters with UFOs into close encounters of the First Kind (the UFO is seen at close range), Second Kind (the UFO is at close range and has a physical effect, such as burned or crushed vegetation, broken tree branches, fleeing wildlife or disabled electrical equipment) and Third Kind (alien occupants are reported in or around the UFO) was devised by J. Alan Hynek who was an advisor on the movie.
"Before I began my association with the air force, I had joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw at the 'psychological postwar craze' for flying saucers that seemed to be sweeping the country and at the naivete and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being taken in by such obvious 'nonsense'. It was thus almost in a sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a look at the flying saucer reports - they were called 'flying saucers' then. I also had a feeling that I might be doing a service by helping to clear away 'nonscience'. After all, wasn't this a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public how the scientific method works, how the application of impersonal and unbiased logic of the scientific method (I conveniently forgot my own bias for the moment) could be used to show that flying saucers were figments of the imagination? Although many of my colleagues at the university looked askance at my association with such 'unsicentific' activity, I felt secure. I had ample 'files protection'; as an astronomer I had been invited to examine the subject."
1947 was at the beginning of the Cold War, and at first the military was concerned that public reports of "flying saucers" may represent a new technology developed by a foreign power.
"And thus 'Project Sign' ... was born. Its staff went to work to examine critically the first series of reports, and very shortly thereafter I was asked to check on how many of the reports probably had an astronomical basis.
"But the reported actions of the 'flying saucers' did not fit the expected pattern of advanced technological military devices, and only a fraction could with certainty be ascribed to astronomical objects or events. Opinion in Project Sign soon became markedly divided: was it foreign technology or really foreign technology? Craft from outer space? A public psychosis? a fad spawned by postware nerves?
"The division grew greater as it became increasngly clear that the 'ordinary' foreign technology explanation was untenable. An 'explanation gap' had arisen. Either the whole phenomenon had to be 'psychological' (an expression that was often used for want of a cogent explanation), or there was something behind the pheonmen that no one wanted to admit. When the mind is suddenly confronted with 'facts' that are decidely uncomfortable, that refuse to fit into the standard recongized world picture, a frantic effort is made to bridge that gap emotionally rather than intellectually (which would require an honest admission of the inadequacy of our knowledge). Frenetic efforts are made either to contrive an ad hoc explanation to 'save the phonemoenon' or to discredit the data. When we are faced with a situation that is well above our 'threshold of acceptability', there seems to be a built in mental censor that tends to block or to sidestep a phenomenon that is 'too strange' and to take refuge in the familiar."
"The Pentagon's official attitude was largely dictated by the scientific fraternity. After all, not even a major general wishes to be laughed at by highly placed members in the scientific hierarchy."
"The change to Project Grudge [1949] signaled the adoption of the strict brush-off attitude to the UFO problem. Now the public relations statements on specific UFO cases bore little resemblance to the facts of the case. If a case contained some of the elements possibly attributable to aircraft, a balloon, etc., it automatically became that object in the press release."
In 1952 the CIA recommended a review of Project Blue Book, leading to the creation of a scientific committee called the "Robertson Panel" that made the following recommendations.
"That the continued emphasis on the reporting of [UFOs] does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.... That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.... We suggest that these aims may be achieved by an integrated program designed to reassure the public of the total lack of evidence of inimical forces behind the phenomenon"
Edward J. Ruppelt (1923 – 1960) was the US Air Force Captain who was director of Project Grudge from late 1951 until it became Project Blue Book in early 1952. He remained director of Blue Book until late 1953, requesting reassignment shortly after the Robertson Panel issued its conclusions. Rupelt had coined the term "unidentified flying object" to replace the term "flying saucer". He wrote his own book on the experience.
"The report has been difficult to write because it involves something that doesn't officially exist. It is well known that ever since the first flying saucer was reported in June 1947 the Air Force has officially said that there is no proof that such a thing as an interplanetary spaceship exists. But what is not well known is that this conclusion is far from being unanimous among the military and their scientific advisers because of the one word, _proof_; so the
UFO investigations continue.
"The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?"
("The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" by Edward J. Ruppelt (1955))
The American Air Force's Project Blue Book was terminated on the recommendation of "The Condon Report", issued by the government "UFO Project" directed by Edward U. Condon to evaluate Project Blue Book. Hynek includes as an appendix to his book, "The UFO Experience", the letter of resignation of Mary Louise Armstrong, the Administrative Assistant for the project.
"I think there is an almost unanimous 'lack of confidence' in [Bob] as the project coordinator and in his exercise of the power of that position.... Bob's attitude from the beginning has been one of negativism.... To me, too much of his time has been spent in worrying about what kinds of 'langauage' should be used in the final report so as to most cleverly avoid having to say anything definitive about the UFO problem. Very little time, on the other hand, has been spent in reviewing the data on which he might base his conclusions.... I do not believe that he could have justified the writing of his thoughts as conclusions for the final report when, not only is it not his report and he is not the director, but he did not consult the people who have essentially done all the work with the data. Why is it that Craig, Saunders, Levine, Wadsworth, Ahrens and others have all arrived at such radically different consclusions from Bob's?... I think that there is a fairly good consensus among the team members that there is enough data in the UFO question to warrant further study.... The very fact that Bob has discussed so freely the UFO study with people ... makes me wonder why, especially recently, some of us have suffered from the accusation that we did not have the right to talk to McDonald, Hynek, Hall, the Lorenzens, etc., in the same way.... I do not think it is an unfair conclusion on our part to say that Bob is misrepresenting us.... I quote Dave Saunders when I say that Bob's suggestion that we could use footnotes for any minority opinions evoked Dave's response, 'What do we do? Footnote the title?'... Dave and Norm were told that what they did was inexcusable, that they should not have communicated written information to someone outside the project. For this they were fired.... I think it is understandable that Dave and Norm felt an allegiance to something more than the UFO project as it existed."
The United States government apparently ended its study of UFOs after that. The Condon report was published as a paperback in 1969 ("Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects"). But flying saucers are the tip of an iceberg of "strange phenomena", a variation for the technological age of an age-old phenomenon.
In 2002 Richard Gere starred in a movie called "The Mothman Prophecies" based on a book of the same name by John Keel, a writer on the supernatural. Keel also wrote a book called "Strange Creatures From Time and Space" which is a kind of catalogue of bizaar reports. In the movie, one of the characters is a retired paranormal investigator called Albert Leek (i.e., "Keel" spelled backwards), who has the following exchange with the main character John (Richard Gere).
LEEK: Oh, you'll never understand their messages. You'll misinterpret them. I did. It almost destroyed me. In the end, it all came down to just one simple question. Which was more important -- having proof ... or being alive? Trust me. I turned away years ago ... and I've never looked back.
JOHN: Didn't you need to know?
LEEK: We're not allowed to know.
At one time, an encounter with a creature like Mothman would have led to its incorporation into the pantheon of the local religion. Point Pleasant, West Virginia erected a statue of it for tourists. Religion and the supernatural are a magnet for freaks, and also the dishonest, which further serves to discredit reports and muddies the waters, tainting anyone who goes near the subject. Supernatural events are also intrinsically freaky, conspicuously strange and inconsistent, and at times seem to lapse into a kind of dream logic, lending further support to the idea that they are products of the imagination. If the supernatural is real, it is specifically designed to be elusive and to make fools of anyone associated with it, in a divine act of cosmic censorship. There is something cruel and unusual in the suggestion that people will be punished for not believing in something that is being intentionally hidden by the one making the demand. But it should be remembered that the statement: "The one who believes in me [i.e., Jesus] will live, even though they die" (John 11:25) does not imply the converse: "The one who does not believe in me will die." Even if it is so that: "No one comes to the Father except through me [i.e., Jesus]" (John 14:6), this can be believed when seen, by those not blessed as ones "who have not seen and yet have believed".
In relation to potential government cover-up, occasionally alluded to is what has become known simply as "The Brookings Report". Shortly after NASA came into being it commissioned the Brookings Institution to compile a report to suggest areas of research on the implications of space exploration. Among the suggestions was the following in relation to the potential discovery of evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.... Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?"
("Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs",
The report also makes the following interesting comment in relation to who may be most disturbed by evidence of extra-human intelligence.
"It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of man."
("Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs",
On the other hand, against the probability of a vast government conspiracy is the following observation.
"There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
(C.J. Cregg, West Wing (Season 2, Episode 19, "Bad Moon Rising"))
While there has been some suppression of the facts about UFOs by government, this appears not to be from a desire to suppress some shocking truth, but instead simply that those making the decisions just do not believe any of it, and do not want the government in the business of perpetuating the nonsense. There is no need of a government conspiracy when it comes to the supernatural, because the supernatural is self-censoring. The decision has been made higher up.
If you know in advance that, were you to adopt a certain point of view on a matter, you would be the object of scorn and ridicule, this serves as a disincentive to learn one way or the other on the matter, to avoid the risk altogether of being convinced, or of being seen to inquire into it. If the subject ever comes up, the only way to demonstrate non-allegiance to the idea is to ridicule those who have such allegiance. Anyone unfortunate enough to be actually exposed to an event judged to be non-existent by such an uninformed consensus, is required to keep silent.
If you want to read more, the next article in this series is: The Origin of Religion.
Any comments welcome.
In the previous article (Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 1 - Deus Absconditus) we speculated on why evidence of God and an afterlife might be hidden from us. To be religious requires us to believe not only in a God and an afterlife, but also in a vast cosmic conspiracy to keep such facts, if not entirely hidden, at least of a reality of permanently questionable status. Religion is therefore the ultimate conspiracy theory, and is therefore lumped together with all the other great conspiracy theories, like the hollow Earth, UFOs and bigfoot.
What would constitute evidence of religion? One thing would be contact with god or other supernatural beings. These kinds of encounters are those recorded in the various religious texts. The Old Testament prophets of Judaism heard the voice of god and/or saw visions, and various people are said to have met angels. The disciples of the New Testament personally knew a man called Jesus who claimed to be of divine origin and performed miracles. The apostle Paul never met Jesus in the flesh, but had a vision of him after the crucifixion. The prophet Mohammed was visited by the archangel Gabriel in 600 AD, and so began Islam. Sometime around the fifth century BC a Nepalese prince called Siddhartha Gautama has a revelatory insight while meditating and founds Buddhism. Various other encounters and experiences of the kind give rise to other religions, as well as sects within religions. Ordinary people sometimes claim to have had religious visions or insights. I will say no more about this here, but the interested reader can find a wealth of material.
Another kind of evidence is what are called "near death experiences" where those who have died briefly and then successfully resuscitated, return with similar stories of strange experiences. A doctor called Raymond Moody has written some books on it, or see Clint Eastwood's movie "Hereafter". A related matter are known as "out of body experiences". A well known author, researcher and practitioner is Robert Monroe. For a time, during the Cold War, the American military became interested in psychic phenomena (see for instance "Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies" by Jim Schnabel), but ultimately gave it away as too unreliable (and embarrassing). Psychic phenomena include things like telepathy and telekinesis, spiritists and mediums, ghosts and poltergeists. There is a large literature on these things.
Colin Wilson is an English writer who made his fortune with a book called "The Outsider". He later became interested in the supernatural, writing several books on the subject. I'll let him sum up his overall impression.
"By the time Lombroso dies, in 1909, psychical research was marking time. Spiritualism continued to flourish; but as scientific investigation, it had come to a halt. The reason can be seen by anyone who reads Owen's 'Footfall on the Boundary of Another World' and then turns to Lombroso's 'After Death - What?' The books were published fifty years apart; yet they might both have been written at exactly the same time. Lombroso offers some 'scientific evidence', by way of a few experiments in telepathy; otherwise, he presents just the same kind of evidence that Robert Dale Owen had presented. There was plenty of evidence for ghosts, for poltergeists, for telepathy, for precognition, for 'out of the body experiences', and a dozen other varieties of 'paranormal' experience. But the evidence seemed to lead nowhere."
("The Giant Book of the Supernatural", by Colin Wilson, page 222.)
"This rag-bag of assorted visions and apparitions underlines the enormous variety of cases investigated by the SPR [Society for Psychical Research] in the first century of its existence. None of them are, in themselves, more impressive than cases cited by Jung-Stilling or Catherine Crowe or Robert Dale Owen. But they are more convincing because honest invetigators have obiously done their best to confirm that they are genuine. And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the 'Proceedings' of the SPR (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further scepticism is a waste of time. Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume. It is easy to understand the irritatiopn of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in 'Life after Death':
"'I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to aruge with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.'
Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point."
("The Giant Book of the Supernatural", by Colin Wilson, page 168.)
Anonther popular writer on the supernatural is Lyall Watson.
"I have given up wondering about the mechanism and no longer itch to get Claudia attached to an instrument of measuring microwave emission or the electrical reistance of the skin. I have learned anyway, from research on the growing band who bend metal and move pendulums in apparently paranormal ways, that it is seldom possible to establish very much more than that these things do happen, sometimes, usually when you least expect them, but seldom in a way that will carry sufficient authority to convince anyone who reqiures very rigid mechanical demonstrations of reality.
"It is impossible to prove, in the normal scientific way, that such things do or don't happen. One is force to take uncomfortable refuge in the notion there are other realities, some of them far too delicate and mysterious for totally objective common sense. These systems have a way of transcending ordinary logic and language, which never seem to go quite far enough."
("Lifetide", by Lyall Watson, page 22.)
Jesus says: "seek and you will find" (Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9). Seeking seems to lead to finding enough evidence to satisfy yourself of the reality of these things, but not enough to convince someone else who is a sceptic. Anyone who does not wish to find the supernatural, usually only has to not seek, and they will find it easy to avoid. That is, if you want to find, you must seek. Knock "and the door will be opened to you", but if you do not knock, the door remains silent. This is not necessarily to say that only people who seek the supernatural find it, since sometimes it seems to find them, but as a general rule, this seems to be the case.
Demons, demonic possession, and armageddon appeal to the popular consciousness. These too appear to be turned to the purpose of maintaining the ambivalent credibility of the supernatural. One may be struck by the fact that supernatural beings would spend their time moving around furniture while you are not looking, and making creepy knocking sounds, and that the combined might of all the demons in hell does not seem to amount to as much havok as a drunken redneck with a broken bottle on a Friday night. In the movie "The Exorcism of Emily Rose", said to be based on a true story, Emily says the following (spoiler alert).
"I asked the Blessed Mother, 'Why do I suffer like this? Why did the demons not leave me tonight?' She said, 'I am sorry, Emily. The demons are going to stay where they are.' Then she said, 'You can come with me in peace free of your bodily form or you can choose to continue this. You will suffer greatly. But through you, many will come to see that the realm of the spirit is real. The choice is yours.'"
("The Exorcism of Emily Rose" (2005))
The New Living Translation Version (NLT) version of Luke 11:9 has "keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for." So as a society we should take care what we ask for. See the movie "The Conjuring 2" for a good illustration of how supernatural events can be carefully orchestrated to allow believers to go believing and sceptics to go on being sceptical while investigating the same phenomenon.
UFOs and Strange Creatures from Time and Space
Sometimes supernatural events are not specifically religious but simply alien. But these too tend to bear many similarities to supernatural events of a religious nature, and have a tendency to shade into religion. After World War II, in the height of the Cold War, sightings of UFOs ("Unidentified Flying Objects") became a kind of craze. It began in 1947 when a report by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold became front page news across the United States, and set off a plethora of similar reports."For weeks before that people had been seeing unidentified objects in the sky and keeping the matter to themselves. An important result of Arnold's report was to elicit from these earlier witnesses their accounts of those previously unreported observations."
("Report on the UFO Wave of 1947" by Ted Bloecher, (1967))
Reports continue to this day, but we do not hear so much about it any more since interest has faded, probably largely because "the evidence seemed to lead nowhere". The same unsatisfying reports just appeared over and over again, but never definitive proof. The reports having largely disappeared from the mainstream media, continue in specialised media and an associated subculture. Reports of abductions have become more prominent, but these, like reports of satanic ritual abuse (see for instance the movie "Regression" (2015)), depend heavily on hypnotic regression. Visions of aliens and their spacecraft therefore fit with the model of supernatural events, with the intriguing difference that angels do not show up on radar. Again, there is a vast literature on the subject. I will mention just a few. The UFO phenomenon is also an interesting illustration of how human society responds to supernatural events when it does not want to believe in them.
J. Alan Hynek (1910 – 1986) was the scientific advisor on the American government's official investigation into the UFO phenomenon. The American Air Force carried out this investigation, based at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio: beginning in 1947 as "Project Sign", renamed as "Project Grudge" in 1949, and renamed again as "Project Blue Book" in 1951, the name it retained until the project was terminated in 1960. Steven Spielberg made a movie: "Close encounters of the Third Kind". The classification of encounters with UFOs into close encounters of the First Kind (the UFO is seen at close range), Second Kind (the UFO is at close range and has a physical effect, such as burned or crushed vegetation, broken tree branches, fleeing wildlife or disabled electrical equipment) and Third Kind (alien occupants are reported in or around the UFO) was devised by J. Alan Hynek who was an advisor on the movie.
"Before I began my association with the air force, I had joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw at the 'psychological postwar craze' for flying saucers that seemed to be sweeping the country and at the naivete and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being taken in by such obvious 'nonsense'. It was thus almost in a sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a look at the flying saucer reports - they were called 'flying saucers' then. I also had a feeling that I might be doing a service by helping to clear away 'nonscience'. After all, wasn't this a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the public how the scientific method works, how the application of impersonal and unbiased logic of the scientific method (I conveniently forgot my own bias for the moment) could be used to show that flying saucers were figments of the imagination? Although many of my colleagues at the university looked askance at my association with such 'unsicentific' activity, I felt secure. I had ample 'files protection'; as an astronomer I had been invited to examine the subject."
("The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" by J. Allen Hynek, page 16.)
1947 was at the beginning of the Cold War, and at first the military was concerned that public reports of "flying saucers" may represent a new technology developed by a foreign power.
"And thus 'Project Sign' ... was born. Its staff went to work to examine critically the first series of reports, and very shortly thereafter I was asked to check on how many of the reports probably had an astronomical basis.
"But the reported actions of the 'flying saucers' did not fit the expected pattern of advanced technological military devices, and only a fraction could with certainty be ascribed to astronomical objects or events. Opinion in Project Sign soon became markedly divided: was it foreign technology or really foreign technology? Craft from outer space? A public psychosis? a fad spawned by postware nerves?
"The division grew greater as it became increasngly clear that the 'ordinary' foreign technology explanation was untenable. An 'explanation gap' had arisen. Either the whole phenomenon had to be 'psychological' (an expression that was often used for want of a cogent explanation), or there was something behind the pheonmen that no one wanted to admit. When the mind is suddenly confronted with 'facts' that are decidely uncomfortable, that refuse to fit into the standard recongized world picture, a frantic effort is made to bridge that gap emotionally rather than intellectually (which would require an honest admission of the inadequacy of our knowledge). Frenetic efforts are made either to contrive an ad hoc explanation to 'save the phonemoenon' or to discredit the data. When we are faced with a situation that is well above our 'threshold of acceptability', there seems to be a built in mental censor that tends to block or to sidestep a phenomenon that is 'too strange' and to take refuge in the familiar."
("The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" by J. Allen Hynek, page 212.)
"The Pentagon's official attitude was largely dictated by the scientific fraternity. After all, not even a major general wishes to be laughed at by highly placed members in the scientific hierarchy."
("The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" by J. Allen Hynek, page 214.)
"The change to Project Grudge [1949] signaled the adoption of the strict brush-off attitude to the UFO problem. Now the public relations statements on specific UFO cases bore little resemblance to the facts of the case. If a case contained some of the elements possibly attributable to aircraft, a balloon, etc., it automatically became that object in the press release."
("The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" by J. Allen Hynek, page 218.)
In 1952 the CIA recommended a review of Project Blue Book, leading to the creation of a scientific committee called the "Robertson Panel" that made the following recommendations.
"That the continued emphasis on the reporting of [UFOs] does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.... That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.... We suggest that these aims may be achieved by an integrated program designed to reassure the public of the total lack of evidence of inimical forces behind the phenomenon"
(Memorandum for the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence from F C Durant, ‘Report of Meetings of the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects' (the Durant Report), 1953.)
Edward J. Ruppelt (1923 – 1960) was the US Air Force Captain who was director of Project Grudge from late 1951 until it became Project Blue Book in early 1952. He remained director of Blue Book until late 1953, requesting reassignment shortly after the Robertson Panel issued its conclusions. Rupelt had coined the term "unidentified flying object" to replace the term "flying saucer". He wrote his own book on the experience.
"The report has been difficult to write because it involves something that doesn't officially exist. It is well known that ever since the first flying saucer was reported in June 1947 the Air Force has officially said that there is no proof that such a thing as an interplanetary spaceship exists. But what is not well known is that this conclusion is far from being unanimous among the military and their scientific advisers because of the one word, _proof_; so the
UFO investigations continue.
"The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?"
("The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" by Edward J. Ruppelt (1955))
The American Air Force's Project Blue Book was terminated on the recommendation of "The Condon Report", issued by the government "UFO Project" directed by Edward U. Condon to evaluate Project Blue Book. Hynek includes as an appendix to his book, "The UFO Experience", the letter of resignation of Mary Louise Armstrong, the Administrative Assistant for the project.
"I think there is an almost unanimous 'lack of confidence' in [Bob] as the project coordinator and in his exercise of the power of that position.... Bob's attitude from the beginning has been one of negativism.... To me, too much of his time has been spent in worrying about what kinds of 'langauage' should be used in the final report so as to most cleverly avoid having to say anything definitive about the UFO problem. Very little time, on the other hand, has been spent in reviewing the data on which he might base his conclusions.... I do not believe that he could have justified the writing of his thoughts as conclusions for the final report when, not only is it not his report and he is not the director, but he did not consult the people who have essentially done all the work with the data. Why is it that Craig, Saunders, Levine, Wadsworth, Ahrens and others have all arrived at such radically different consclusions from Bob's?... I think that there is a fairly good consensus among the team members that there is enough data in the UFO question to warrant further study.... The very fact that Bob has discussed so freely the UFO study with people ... makes me wonder why, especially recently, some of us have suffered from the accusation that we did not have the right to talk to McDonald, Hynek, Hall, the Lorenzens, etc., in the same way.... I do not think it is an unfair conclusion on our part to say that Bob is misrepresenting us.... I quote Dave Saunders when I say that Bob's suggestion that we could use footnotes for any minority opinions evoked Dave's response, 'What do we do? Footnote the title?'... Dave and Norm were told that what they did was inexcusable, that they should not have communicated written information to someone outside the project. For this they were fired.... I think it is understandable that Dave and Norm felt an allegiance to something more than the UFO project as it existed."
("The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" by J. Allen Hynek, pages 299-305.)
The United States government apparently ended its study of UFOs after that. The Condon report was published as a paperback in 1969 ("Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects"). But flying saucers are the tip of an iceberg of "strange phenomena", a variation for the technological age of an age-old phenomenon.
In 2002 Richard Gere starred in a movie called "The Mothman Prophecies" based on a book of the same name by John Keel, a writer on the supernatural. Keel also wrote a book called "Strange Creatures From Time and Space" which is a kind of catalogue of bizaar reports. In the movie, one of the characters is a retired paranormal investigator called Albert Leek (i.e., "Keel" spelled backwards), who has the following exchange with the main character John (Richard Gere).
LEEK: Oh, you'll never understand their messages. You'll misinterpret them. I did. It almost destroyed me. In the end, it all came down to just one simple question. Which was more important -- having proof ... or being alive? Trust me. I turned away years ago ... and I've never looked back.
JOHN: Didn't you need to know?
LEEK: We're not allowed to know.
At one time, an encounter with a creature like Mothman would have led to its incorporation into the pantheon of the local religion. Point Pleasant, West Virginia erected a statue of it for tourists. Religion and the supernatural are a magnet for freaks, and also the dishonest, which further serves to discredit reports and muddies the waters, tainting anyone who goes near the subject. Supernatural events are also intrinsically freaky, conspicuously strange and inconsistent, and at times seem to lapse into a kind of dream logic, lending further support to the idea that they are products of the imagination. If the supernatural is real, it is specifically designed to be elusive and to make fools of anyone associated with it, in a divine act of cosmic censorship. There is something cruel and unusual in the suggestion that people will be punished for not believing in something that is being intentionally hidden by the one making the demand. But it should be remembered that the statement: "The one who believes in me [i.e., Jesus] will live, even though they die" (John 11:25) does not imply the converse: "The one who does not believe in me will die." Even if it is so that: "No one comes to the Father except through me [i.e., Jesus]" (John 14:6), this can be believed when seen, by those not blessed as ones "who have not seen and yet have believed".
In relation to potential government cover-up, occasionally alluded to is what has become known simply as "The Brookings Report". Shortly after NASA came into being it commissioned the Brookings Institution to compile a report to suggest areas of research on the implications of space exploration. Among the suggestions was the following in relation to the potential discovery of evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.... Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?"
("Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs",
pp.183-184 (1960))
The report also makes the following interesting comment in relation to who may be most disturbed by evidence of extra-human intelligence.
"It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of man."
("Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs",
Chapter 9, Footnote 34 (1960))
On the other hand, against the probability of a vast government conspiracy is the following observation.
"There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
(C.J. Cregg, West Wing (Season 2, Episode 19, "Bad Moon Rising"))
While there has been some suppression of the facts about UFOs by government, this appears not to be from a desire to suppress some shocking truth, but instead simply that those making the decisions just do not believe any of it, and do not want the government in the business of perpetuating the nonsense. There is no need of a government conspiracy when it comes to the supernatural, because the supernatural is self-censoring. The decision has been made higher up.
If you know in advance that, were you to adopt a certain point of view on a matter, you would be the object of scorn and ridicule, this serves as a disincentive to learn one way or the other on the matter, to avoid the risk altogether of being convinced, or of being seen to inquire into it. If the subject ever comes up, the only way to demonstrate non-allegiance to the idea is to ridicule those who have such allegiance. Anyone unfortunate enough to be actually exposed to an event judged to be non-existent by such an uninformed consensus, is required to keep silent.
If you want to read more, the next article in this series is: The Origin of Religion.
Any comments welcome.
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