Michael Prescott's Blog

I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.

What strikes me most strongly about the subject are the many similarities between UFO encounters and certain paranormal phenomena, such as mediumship and channeling, automatic writing, premonitions and prophecy, and even PK and ESP. There seems to be too big an overlap to be merely coincidental. Here are some of the parallels: 

1. There is often a baffling “personal” connection between UFO sightings and the people who report them. The same individual may report multiple UFO sightings over a period of years. Some people have reported that when they stopped to look at a distant UFO, it quickly approached them. Drivers who flash their headlights at a UFO sometimes see the UFO flash its lights back. Just as poltergeist phenomena are typically associated with a certain individual, or religious manifestations like the Fatima appearances of the Virgin Mary are associated with a core group of people, some UFO cases seem to revolve around a particular person or group.
2. People often report being in a state of altered consciousness during a UFO encounter, and sometimes even prior to it. They report a trancelike state, or numbness and paralysis, or sudden intense emotions like euphoria, peace and love, or crippling fear. Altered consciousness is, of course, a feature of many paranormal experiences, including trance mediumship, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and crisis apparitions.
3. Some people have premonitions about UFOs. They dream about the encounter one or two nights before it takes place. Or they find themselves unaccountably moved to venture outside and look up at the sky, where they discover a UFO hovering there as if waiting for them.
4. Some people feel they are in communication with the occupants of UFOs. In certain cases they believe that vast knowledge has been transmitted to them in some telepathic fashion, sometimes while they were transfixed by a beam of light from the hovering vessel. In other cases they take up automatic writing or trancelike communicating in order to convey messages from the aliens. This phenomenon has obvious similarities to trance mediumship and “spirit-directed” automatic writing, as well as to reports of a download of universal knowledge during an NDE (often when transfixed by "the Light"). Another parallel is that the content of these communications is often disappointingly trite or nonsensical. Although the recipient of this knowledge believes he has been gifted with deep wisdom about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the future, the actual communications are often extremely unconvincing and even absurd, as is often (though not always) the case with other channeled messages and with some NDE prophecies. 
5. There is a dreamlike quality to many UFO accounts, which is at least superficially similar to the dreamlike narratives often recounted by people who’ve experienced OBEs and NDEs — a magical, fairytale-like quality where events unfold with the baffling logic of a dream. Many of Robert Monroe’s OBEs are of this type.
6. As with most paranormal phenomena, UFO phenomena have proven frustratingly elusive, impossible to nail down. UFOs typically register only dimly and fleetingly on radar, and in some cases they show up very faintly even in time-exposed photos, though witnesses reported the UFO’s lights as very bright. The memories of observers can be vague or contradictory, and are sometimes lost altogether and recovered only under hypnosis – a methodology that may very well introduce false memories. The physical evidence of landings is never conclusive. Critical items of evidence have been known to inexplicably disappear. There is a tricksterish quality to many of the investigations. Even those who accept the validity of many UFO reports are split on the question of whether the observed phenomena are physically real objects or occupy some other category such as thought-forms or holographic projections.
7. One fairly consistent feature of UFO sightings is that they are introduced by a humming, buzzing noise or sensation that has been compared to a swarm of bees. Humming, buzzing, and other vibrations are typically reported at the onset of OBEs and are associated with other changes of consciousness. The whole idea of “raising vibrations” is central to the terminology of spiritualism and mysticism.
8. Finally, UFO sightings tend to come in waves or “flaps.” There is a period of excitement, with many reports coming in from various areas; then the excitement dies down; sometime later, it starts up again. The same pattern is detectable in the progress of the spiritualist movement, which quickly attained astonishing popularity in the mid-19th century, with thousands of people engaged in table-tipping and automatic writing, only to die down for a while and then periodically flare up. This up-and-down trend continued through the 1920s. (Today, spiritualism has largely morphed into other forms like the channeled “higher entities” popular in the 1970s and the fascination with near-death experiences and ghost-hunting today.) The patterns of near hysteria seen in both UFO and spiritualist movements are suggestive of “social manias,” as described by Charles Mackay in his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. That’s not to say there is no reality underlying either UFOs or spiritualism. Instead, what I’m getting at is that the excitement tends to come and go in repetitive fashion. At key moments, it’s as if a match has been struck to dry tinder, causing a sudden flareup of public interest and high emotion; then the flames are doused and interest subsides. 

It’s hard to account for all these similarities. A skeptic would say that the same psychological aberrations – whether individual or communal – responsible for paranormal and spiritualist beliefs are also responsible for UFO sightings, and therefore the similarities are to be expected. This, of course, discounts all evidence for the reality of both categories of phenomena. Still, there may be some truth in it.

Perhaps there’s a deep well of irrationalism, a collective unconscious, that can be tapped at certain times, and which communicates through confusing symbols: what F.W.H. Myers called “the subliminal self,” which constitutes not only the subconscious but also the superconscious mind – a higher mind to which we are ordinarily denied access.

Suppose certain persons have the ability (usually without realizing it) to focus on or manifest the contents of this subliminal self. Suppose most such manifestations require the energy of many people, just as materializations in a séance room are said to require the combined “ectoplasm” of all the sitters, as well as the medium. I’m not saying there is such a thing as ectoplasm, only that there may be some kind of power or agency that can access the subconscious/superconscious mind and reify part of its contents, at least temporarily.

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down. It’s been reported that when Uri Geller came on the scene with his spoon-bending displays, ordinary people who watched him on television suddenly discovered that they, too, could bend spoons. Jack Houck, who for years has hosted “PK parties” where people bring their own cutlery and learn to manipulate it via PK, has said that the energy of a group is needed to, in effect, raise the vibrations in the room, and that the group’s initial skepticism and doubt must be broken down before dramatic effects will take place. Similarly, the spread of spiritualism in the 19th century seems due, in part, to the fact that people really were getting inexplicable results – and the more results people reported, the more likely other people were to get results. As barriers to belief were broken down, the phenomena snowballed.

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

None of this addresses the actual nature of UFOs and their occupants. Are they, in fact, thought-forms generated by the collective unconscious and manifested as temporary, quasi-real entities that come and go with the speed of thought? If so, it might explain why these sightings seem to keep pace, more or less, with the cultural and technological features of the societies observing them. A raft of UFO sightings in 1897 pretty consistently involved a vessel described in terms of a rigid airship. The first actual rigid airships were not manufactured by the Zeppelin company until 1900, but in 1897 the idea was already  "in the air," so to speak, having been patented and publicized. 

Since 1947, sightings have usually involved spinning saucers, vast triangular craft, and other futuristic machines. The saucer imagery appears to have originated in a misinterpretation: a pilot said the ten unidentified objects he'd seen moved "like a saucer if you skip it across the water." He did not actually say they were saucer-shaped, but the idea caught on, and suddenly people everywhere were seeing "flying saucers." The triangular craft and other shapes seem to owe much to science-fiction illustrations and movies. 

The (relative) regularity in the physical characteristics described any given wave of UFO sightings is perhaps attributable to their common source in the collective unconscious. When rigid airships are the coming thing, people see rigid-airship UFOs. When the saucer imagery has entered the public imagination, people see saucer-shaped UFOs. 

The subliminal self might also shed light on the bizarre, irrational, dreamlike nature of many encounters and the often nonsensical behavior and statements of the “saucer people” themselves. The pseudoscientific ramblings attributed to these purportedly super-advanced spacefarers do not inspire confidence in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But nonsense, paradox, and nightmarish or dreamlike qualities are characteristic of the unconscious mind.

And then there are the reports of hapless humans coerced into having sex with aliens – or the well-known and often lampooned accounts of abductees forced to submit to rectal probing. Suppressed sexual desires and anxieties (penetration, whether desired or feared) are a generally acknowledged feature of the unconscious mind. If UFO experiences originate in the individual or collective unconscious, it would not be surprising to find sexual overtones in them. Certainly, Freud would have expected no less.

Perhaps the subliminal self has far greater capabilities than we commonly suppose, notably the ability to get in touch with other realities or even to manifest pseudo-realities. Perhaps it takes a certain key individual, who is in some way a generator or facilitator of the phenomena, to get the ball rolling. Then, if other individuals happen to perceive the results, their own belief systems are knocked askew and they are able to contribute to the phenomenon and keep it going or even cause it to escalate. After a while, emotions die down, the mechanism (whatever it might be) is worn out, and the sightings subside – until such time as another portal to the subliminal self, another of "the doors  of perception" (to use Aldous Huxley's phrase) is opened, and another series of sightings is inaugurated.

Is this hypothesis correct? I don't know. The problem is that it attributes so much power to the collective unconscious as to call into question any sort of facts or knowledge we might claim to have. It’s much like the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes vast creative abilities to the unconscious mind, capable of weaving a convincing illusion of contact with the dead, among other things.

Like the super-psi argument, the collective-unconsciousness idea feels like a bit of a copout – an attempt to explain these phenomena by saying they all emerge from an inexhaustible, infinitely powerful, yet unknown recess of the mind. Still, it could be true.

An alternative is that UFOs and their occupants are real, independent existents that are invisible to us under ordinary circumstances, but which become perceptible when we activate our seldom-used ability to perceive other planes of reality.

Or perhaps there is no contradiction between these two possibilities. If we could see things from a higher perspective, like a Flatlander lifted off his sheet of paper and looking down at his world from above, we might see that the same phenomenon can be both a subjective, symbolic thought-form and a real, independent entity in its own right.

Actually, I suspect something like this is probably true. I also suspect that my regular mind, as opposed to my higher-dimensional subliminal self, cannot possibly make sense of it.