In response to Cal Roeker’s comments on the last blog:
A couple in New Hampshire around 1960 – the Hills, if I remember correctly – became famous after they went to a psychiatrist for mutually disturbing anxieties. Something traumatic had happened near that mountain in New Hampshire, but they simply could not remember. After being regressed with hypnosis, both told the same tale of abduction, differing only when they were separated in the alien space craft. They were “talked to” telepathically and experimented upon, and then set free, left to struggle with their hazy memories. They did not want to have had this happen; they were not doing this to make money or to grandstand. They were both terrified beyond anything that had happened to them before.
A little more than 10 years later, in 1973 (a year that was, I recently discovered, filled with UFO sightings) my girlfriend of the time told me a disturbing tale of her own: driving back in farm country after a visit to a hospital in the late evening, a light came from behind her car that was disturbingly aggressive. Slowing down to let it pass, the light slowed down with her, then hovered above the car, then appeared in front of her. The car engine died. Tapping sounds came on the windshield and car body, but after a while, the light left and the car started again. In telling me this, she was terrified. I thought it was cool and told her I envied her the experience, but she did not agree. She was afraid to tell anyone else because they would think she was crazy, and the experience had been clearly traumatic. A month afterwards, she still trembled when she told the story. She decidedly wished it had never happened.
Other strange events happened to her and her family, as well as to our rural neighborhood at large during that year, but I mention it here to clearly state that one does not see UFO’s because one wants to believe, or even because one is open for belief. These things simply happen. It is one’s willingness to accept such occurrences as “high strangeness” as UFO investigator and astronomer Allen Hyneck called it, or not, that depends on one’s mental set, not one’s sighting. In other words, as Hyneck explained, some phenomena were (are) currently beyond explanation. People or organizations like the US Air Force did not want to believe, and so accepted conventional explanations that did not fit the situations, but that did or does not make such occurrences any less real – or dependent on one’s psychological profile. In the X Files, Mulder had a poster in his cramped little office that read “I want to believe,” but in real life, most people who experience UFO’s do not want to believe. But what happened, happened, and from then on they have to wrestle with it for the rest of their lives.
UFO’s and spiritual beliefs do come together on this front. Spontaneous healings have long been well known among the faithful, for instance. Lourdes and Fatima have not gained their reputations for nothing, and many other miracles have taken place there and elsewhere. The Vatican does not really like miracles, and it really doesn’t like to be hoodwinked, and so they investigate those that supposedly occur to Catholics very, very well. What has come from these investigations is this: now and then, real miracles do occur. Cures happen, and as is with the recent investigations of Sister Faustina, very specific prophesies do come real. People float in the air, they suddenly have stigmata (bleeding from the “wounds of Christ” such as Padre Pio), and they tell the future accurately. They also see God or Jesus or Angels (or Krishna – this is world- wide) and often speak to them. These might be called simply subjective, but sometimes things happen afterwards that defy current scientific explanations. The apparitions that do not produce physical affects will always be shadowed with doubt, but for those that do, it is obvious that something very strange, and perhaps very important, is going on.
And there’s the point of this little essay – something is going on. The Church might say it was the Holy Spirit; pagans might say it was the spirit of the forest; and UFO people might say it was aliens come down from a hyper dimension (or something), but something is going on, or really, many things are happening around and within us that we cannot understand with the modern empirical paradigm.
Seeing Jesus and seeing UFO little gray men are probably not the same – although they could be, given our internal attempts to explain to ourselves the unusual. But both are often accompanied by very real phenomena that defy explanations. Such events should prove to us that we really don’t know more than a smidgen of reality, or really, of ourselves, but still, we fight this truth; really, I think we all do to some extent. Being lost in the sea of reality is not the way we want to perceive our existence. Our little self doesn’t like this, as it takes away its authority. It makes it obvious that it is small, ineffective, and fragile in the face of the ALL, which is true, but we really can’t handle the truth. Look at the Hills; look at my old girlfriend; look at those who scoff at “miracles” without any decent inquiry into them; and look at how they scoffed at Hyneck as well, and anyone else who believed or believes that what happened really happened.
Should I wish for Cal Roeker to have a UFO experience? Sure, why not. But he probably won’t like it. And, who knows, just like the hero in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he might end up endlessly making mountains out of mud and mash potatoes, obsessed with a new knowledge that he cannot understand. May the force be with you and Godspeed, Cal. FK
A couple in New Hampshire around 1960 – the Hills, if I remember correctly – became famous after they went to a psychiatrist for mutually disturbing anxieties. Something traumatic had happened near that mountain in New Hampshire, but they simply could not remember. After being regressed with hypnosis, both told the same tale of abduction, differing only when they were separated in the alien space craft. They were “talked to” telepathically and experimented upon, and then set free, left to struggle with their hazy memories. They did not want to have had this happen; they were not doing this to make money or to grandstand. They were both terrified beyond anything that had happened to them before.
A little more than 10 years later, in 1973 (a year that was, I recently discovered, filled with UFO sightings) my girlfriend of the time told me a disturbing tale of her own: driving back in farm country after a visit to a hospital in the late evening, a light came from behind her car that was disturbingly aggressive. Slowing down to let it pass, the light slowed down with her, then hovered above the car, then appeared in front of her. The car engine died. Tapping sounds came on the windshield and car body, but after a while, the light left and the car started again. In telling me this, she was terrified. I thought it was cool and told her I envied her the experience, but she did not agree. She was afraid to tell anyone else because they would think she was crazy, and the experience had been clearly traumatic. A month afterwards, she still trembled when she told the story. She decidedly wished it had never happened.
Other strange events happened to her and her family, as well as to our rural neighborhood at large during that year, but I mention it here to clearly state that one does not see UFO’s because one wants to believe, or even because one is open for belief. These things simply happen. It is one’s willingness to accept such occurrences as “high strangeness” as UFO investigator and astronomer Allen Hyneck called it, or not, that depends on one’s mental set, not one’s sighting. In other words, as Hyneck explained, some phenomena were (are) currently beyond explanation. People or organizations like the US Air Force did not want to believe, and so accepted conventional explanations that did not fit the situations, but that did or does not make such occurrences any less real – or dependent on one’s psychological profile. In the X Files, Mulder had a poster in his cramped little office that read “I want to believe,” but in real life, most people who experience UFO’s do not want to believe. But what happened, happened, and from then on they have to wrestle with it for the rest of their lives.
UFO’s and spiritual beliefs do come together on this front. Spontaneous healings have long been well known among the faithful, for instance. Lourdes and Fatima have not gained their reputations for nothing, and many other miracles have taken place there and elsewhere. The Vatican does not really like miracles, and it really doesn’t like to be hoodwinked, and so they investigate those that supposedly occur to Catholics very, very well. What has come from these investigations is this: now and then, real miracles do occur. Cures happen, and as is with the recent investigations of Sister Faustina, very specific prophesies do come real. People float in the air, they suddenly have stigmata (bleeding from the “wounds of Christ” such as Padre Pio), and they tell the future accurately. They also see God or Jesus or Angels (or Krishna – this is world- wide) and often speak to them. These might be called simply subjective, but sometimes things happen afterwards that defy current scientific explanations. The apparitions that do not produce physical affects will always be shadowed with doubt, but for those that do, it is obvious that something very strange, and perhaps very important, is going on.
And there’s the point of this little essay – something is going on. The Church might say it was the Holy Spirit; pagans might say it was the spirit of the forest; and UFO people might say it was aliens come down from a hyper dimension (or something), but something is going on, or really, many things are happening around and within us that we cannot understand with the modern empirical paradigm.
Seeing Jesus and seeing UFO little gray men are probably not the same – although they could be, given our internal attempts to explain to ourselves the unusual. But both are often accompanied by very real phenomena that defy explanations. Such events should prove to us that we really don’t know more than a smidgen of reality, or really, of ourselves, but still, we fight this truth; really, I think we all do to some extent. Being lost in the sea of reality is not the way we want to perceive our existence. Our little self doesn’t like this, as it takes away its authority. It makes it obvious that it is small, ineffective, and fragile in the face of the ALL, which is true, but we really can’t handle the truth. Look at the Hills; look at my old girlfriend; look at those who scoff at “miracles” without any decent inquiry into them; and look at how they scoffed at Hyneck as well, and anyone else who believed or believes that what happened really happened.
Should I wish for Cal Roeker to have a UFO experience? Sure, why not. But he probably won’t like it. And, who knows, just like the hero in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he might end up endlessly making mountains out of mud and mash potatoes, obsessed with a new knowledge that he cannot understand. May the force be with you and Godspeed, Cal. FK
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