Prometheus Unbound

Karma cleanser:

Feel better now?

I didn’t know about this place. Interesting.

People who try to suggest that UFOs are in some way responsible, over the millenia, for the direction of human cultural and religious evolution, sometimes appeal to curious images such as this one as potential “evidence.”

The above painting is titled, “The Baptism of Christ”, and was created by the Dutch painter Aert De Gelder in 1710. The painting belongs to the Fitzwilliam Museum collection, Cambridge, UK. Modern viewers cannot help but be struck, especially in a low resolution reproduction (as above), by the apparent presence of a UFO in the painting. But if you look closely, it is evident that the circle in the sky is actually a clearing for the artist’s portrayal of the dove of the Holy Spirit. It is thus the dove, and not an alien spacecraft, that is the source of divine light in the painting.

Now it could be argued (I suppose) that the artist had a UFO encounter and incorporated his experience into the painting. But to echo and paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a circle in the sky is just a circle in the sky—and not a spacecraft from another world. Still, I think that there is something telling here. UFO sightings, with their spectral qualities and mysterious beams of light that sometimes cast themselves down upon common mortals, do tap into some very deep parts of the human religious psyche. It’s hardly surprising that UFO sightings should be experienced in ways similar to religious epiphanies, and that religious art should have curious affinities with UFO sightings and abductions.

Here, for example, is a depiction of St. Augustine (from the Altarpiece of the Church Fathers, Munich, 1483) having a rather dramatic alien encounter of the Christian variety. The painting, of course, doesn’t mean that the artist secretly had an alien encounter and was depicting that alien as the devil in his painting. Rather, the human imagination is already chock full of alien projections. Long before there were space aliens, there was the alien and the alienist (one who doctors the ill mind).

And below is Christ depicted as an alienist. It comes from the School of Milan and is in carved ivory (tenth century). It depicts Jesus driving an unclean spirit from a man, probably the Gadarene demoniac. (And no, that’s not a UFO hovering alongside Christ’s left ear.)

And June Crane says she had a high level clearance for her job. At the age of 72, she decided to break her silence. Her testimony, from a History Channel UFO Files  segment, starts at 2:20 in this clip:

What are we to make of such testimony? Is she a liar, a lunatic—or is she telling the truth as she knows it (even as she is, nevertheless, mistaken)?

Or maybe, just maybe, as we speak, there really are aliens at Wright Patterson, hovering in silent vats of yellow formaldehyde, dead eyes wide open in their cool and clean cryogenic vaults.

Boo!

M51 Galaxy:

Photograph: NASA

I think it’s fair to say that “old school” atheists of previous generations, like Baron d’Holbach and Albert Camus, share a number of beliefs with the New Atheists of the 21st century. For example, “old school” atheists would agree with the New Atheists that:

• There’s one world, not two
• All phenomena can be reduced to matter
• Death is extinction

Okay, fine. But what makes them different? In an essay for a new anthology of apologetic writings, Contending with Christianity’s Critics  (B&H Academic 2009), philosopher Victor Reppert suggests it has to do with the way that New Atheists now promote their atheism:

[T]here is a difference in the way the New Atheists advocate for atheism. Aggressive advocates for atheism, they maintain that religious belief is not only false but also held in an irrational way by adherents and is morally pernicious. They feel no obligation to respect the religious beliefs of others; rather, their stated goal is to usher in the end of religious belief, especially belief in the existence of God. One of the the central claims they make is there is no evidence whatsoever for belief in the existence of God. All of the evidence lies firmly on the side of unbelief, not on the side of belief. Persons who believe in God do so for irrational motives, not because there are any good reasons to believe in God. To be rational is to form beliefs in accordance with the methods of natural science; natural science leads us in the direction of atheism; therefore all reasonable people should be atheists and not theists.

Is this characterization of New Atheists a straw man? I think, perhaps, in part, but only in part. In a sense, there really is no new thing under the sun. An old school atheist like Baron d’Holbach, for example, could never be accused of going light on religion, as Voltaire clearly perceived and Wikipedia notes:

In 1761 Christianisme dévoilé (“Christianity Unveiled”) appeared, in which he attacked Christianity and religion in general as an impediment to the moral advancement of humanity. The deistic Voltaire, denying authorship of the work, made known his aversion to d’Holbach’s philosophy, writing that “[the work] is entirely opposed to my principles. This book leads to an atheistic philosophy that I detest.”^[7]

Voltaire, it might be said, was among the first intellectuals to take an “accomodationist” stance towards religion. And d’Holbach clearly did not. This strikes me as an exact parallel to the dividing lines among secular people today. Though essentially secular himself, Voltaire nevertheless was reluctant to dismiss religion in its entirety, or reject outright its social usefulness. Likewise, Albert Camus, though not a deist but an atheist, when he spoke to a gathering of Dominican Friars in 1948, said:

I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or any message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.

I think that, in this sense, Victor Reppert has captured accurately the New Atheism. Post 9/11 atheists have become more strident. Camus’s ecumenical language would not be welcome among them. New Atheists may not be all that much different from many of the old atheists (atheism has always had its “militant” factions), but there was a time (in the mid-20th century) when it looked like religion was going gentle into that good night, and intellectuals like Camus could set a conciliatory tone with religion (as one might set a conciliatory tone with a dying uncle you’ve always disagreed with). Clearly a post-9/11 New Atheist like Richard Dawkins sounds markedly different from a post-WWII atheist like Albert Camus. Religion, afterall, seemed to have little to do with any of the horrors of WWII. It was post-Christian Europe that tore itself apart, and intellectuals after the war were trying to account for that. (And it still needs accounting for.)

But after 9/11 I think that religion had itself to be accounted for again, and this is where atheists came forward, and did so pissed off. 9/11 signaled that religion, in even its most primitive and destructive forms, was not ceding the stage of history to science and reason, and would not die peacefully in its sleep. In short, the fight was on again. And with the Internet, and a few bestsellers, the strong atheist voice has returned to combat. It will not go dormant again until religion wanes into 1950s and 60s quietude, and this means that New Atheist voices are going to be very vocal for a very long time. They’re not going away anytime soon. Nor should they.

Even though I’m an agnostic and have tried to keep my head about me with regard to religion (even in the face of a resurgent fundamentalism), I understand the atheist reaction. I just think that it needs, at some point, to mature, and to learn nuance, temperance, qualification, and patience with human frailty. But really, sanity and calm need to return to both sides. Religionists provoke atheists and atheists provoke religionists.

I’m with Spinoza:

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.

But I realize, after horrors like WWII and 9/11, it’s hard to be detached about the large forces that seem to underlie them, and it’s hard to resist taking broad rhetorical swipes at them. But here’s Spinoza’s quote again, and in a fuller context:

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena, though inconvenient, are yet necessary, and have fixed causes, by means of which we endeavour to understand their nature, and the mind has just as much pleasure in viewing them aright, as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.

If there’s something “new” about the New Atheism it’s this: After 9/11, atheism has become a passion again. It’s not that beliefs have changed. Atheists, in the main, have always held religion, to some degree, in contempt, but now they’re much more vocal about it. And atheism is no longer something that intellectuals and secular people simply take for granted as the inevitable (if slow) direction of human history. Instead, atheism is something once again in contention. It is something that secular people once again feel passionately about (both for and against). Atheism divides secular people over the nature and value of:

• pluralism;
• civility;
• cruelty; and
• rationality

Thus, insofar as the New Atheism provokes discussion about these very important subjects, it’s a damn good thing to have around. Spinoza, I think, would understand, and I know which side an “old school” atheist like d’Holbach would be on. I also know which side I’m on.

I’m with Camus.

I wouldn’t mind the atheist tag—if that is what I was. Atheism has a more than respectable intellectual pedigree and it has brought enormous levels of freedom and intellectual intelligence into the world. I wouldn’t want to be in a world without atheists. I feel the same way about theists. But, alas, I am still not an atheist or a theist. I am an agnostic.

I would offer an analogy. I am agnostic about bacterial life on Mars. I know that there are people who are highly confident about this question, but I am not certain bacteria on Mars exists, and I’m not certain it does not exist. I simply don’t have sufficient information to know for sure. I feel the same way about God belief. Agnosticism leads me, obviously, not to engage in specific religious practices, but it also leads me to critique overconfident atheist arguments.

From my vantage, the great question of existence is this:

Does mind precede matter or does matter precede mind?

I don’t have a clue what the ultimate answer to this question is. And I’ve never heard an answer to this question that does not end in question begging. So why decide? Why not be Socrates and keep an open mind till we know more?

Is it true that, as atheist biologist Jerry Coyne recently put it at his blog, “[T]here is no evidence for any divine being . . .”

I don’t think so.

God belief, like atheist belief, is an inference that people make when they look at the universe whole. In other words, the universe, taken as a whole, is the evidence from which an induction is made. Both the theist and the atheist have a reaction to existence and surmise to themselves: “There must be a God!” or “There must not be a God!” And if you are an agnostic like me, you look at the universe as a whole and say: “I genuinely can’t decide. I see serious problems with both the theist leap and the atheist leap. I don’t know if mind precedes matter or matter precedes mind.”

Below is a quote that I believe provides an example of what I mean. In 1984, at the age of 78, and thirteen years prior to his death (he died at the age of 91), Nobel Prize winning Harvard biologist, George Wald, made this confession before a meeting of the Quantum Biology Symposium:

“It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself.”

Dr. Wald was a lifelong skeptic who, late in life, came to infer the existence of mind prior to matter. Science, for Dr. Wald, was not in the service of atheism, nor of theism. Science just returned answers to questions he asked of nature, and he thought about those answers and drew inferences.

Until God, like a UFO, lands on the White House lawn and says “I’m here!”, or science returns non-question begging material solutions to the riddles of the universe’s and life’s origins (as well as the origins of information, mind, free will, and the laws of physics) there’s plenty of room for atheistic and theistic inferences. At least there is for an agnostic like me. I simply don’t see any smoking guns presented by either side, and I see a lot of holes in both theist and atheist attempts to account for all that we actually observe in the universe.

I wonder, for example, what it is that makes Jerry Coyne a confident atheist. What is that “smoking gun piece of evidence” for Coyne that makes him say, ”Atheism is true”?

Illustra Media is the outfit that produced the two Intelligent Design DVDs: Unlocking the Mystery of Life  and The Privileged Planet. As an agnostic who is open minded with regards to Intelligent Design arguments, I found both of these documentaries stimulating. And now, as a kind of completion of a trilogy, Illustra Media is about to release its documentary on the Cambrian Explosion titled Darwin’s Dilemma. Here’s the trailer:

The trailer is a bit on the melodramatic side, but the subject is inherently interesting, and perhaps the film itself will be good.

Science is driven by naturalism. It’s a tool for discovering material causes for material events. You can’t use the tool for any other purpose. But here’s why science is not, therefore, a tool for atheism:

• Both the atheist scientist and the theist scientist who might look to science for hints on the existence of God (or God’s non-existence) are necessarily sharing the same project: to push material explanation to its limit.

Let me say that again: If you want to know how reasonable God belief is, then push material explanation to its limit and see what you’ve got left. Science is the tool for doing that.

Example: 150 years ago scientists thought the first cell was simple and could be generated rather easily. But by having a close, rigorously sustained, and systematic look, and pressing reductive material questions against the cell, now we know otherwise. The simplest cell is perhaps more complex, informationally, than a stealth bomber. By pushing material explanation to its limit, scientists discover the impasses of material explanation. The cell is, presently, one of those impasses. In the future, it may not be. The contemporary theist scientist and the atheist scientist must, necessarily, have the same project with regard to the cell: keep pushing material explanation ad infinitum. The cell’s material “origin safe” may never crack. But the project is the same (try to crack it).

Atheism and theism will always be competing INFERENCES derived from looking, in the present, at the universe as a whole (as science currently discloses it to us). Science tries to narrow the range of inference, but neither serves atheism nor theism. Science will probably always discover new perplexities for both.

Like lawyers say, “Don’t ask a question of a witness if you don’t know exactly how she’ll answer.” Science is the opposite. Scientists don’t know what pushing material explanation to its limits will lead to. So how, if science doesn’t know in advance the answers that will be returned, can it be in the service of atheism?

If science is atheism’s prosecuting attorney, it is doing a really shitty job. It keeps asking questions of the universe that return difficulties and new perplexities for materialist explanation. Likewise, if science is theism’s defense attorney, it’s doing an equally crap job, for it likewise asks questions of the universe that return difficulties and new perplexities for theists. Science is like the grass. It just is, and it is up to us to make ultimate sense of the answers it returns. As the poet Carl Sandberg said:

I am the grass / let me do my work.

Harvard biologist George Wald died in 1997, but I can’t help but wonder what he would have made of the vanguard biologists (Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and PZ Myers) who make up the post 9-11 new “confidence atheists” or “faitheists.”

Dr. Wald had a very particular way of speaking and listening to nature, and in his 1967 Nobel Prize lecture he said:

I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

One only has to listen. And what did Dr. Wald believe that nature had told him over a lifetime of study? In 1984, at the age of 78, and thirteen years prior to his death (he died at the age of 91), Wald made an extraordinary confession before a meeting of the Quantum Biology Symposium:

It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself.

Dr. Wald was a lifelong skeptic who, late in life, came to infer the existence of mind prior to nature. Science, for Dr. Wald, was not in the service of atheism, nor of theism. Science just returned answers from nature, and he thought about those answers and drew inferences.

There’s so much beauty in the world, isn’t there?

Do you think the universe was made, or did it simply happen? Why do so many tiny, mundane parts seem to add up to something larger? It’s as if each moment is a line of poetry, and each image jump is a line break. Do you suppose the universe might be a poem?

Just asking.

A researcher into UFOs that I respect (Richard Dolan) thinks that there might be something to this curious 1991 UFO incident video recorded by Space Shuttle Mission STS-48:

I suspect the two flashes that initiate the video sequence are the shuttle engines, and consequently we’re looking at ice crystals. As human beings, we’re narrating animals. We see an object reverse itself with apparent intentionality, and then we see a zip of light, and we put the two together and we’ve got an alien spaceship dodging a Star Wars laser! Still, why would the shuttle not shift its position on the horizon from the brief rocket thrusts? Dolan briefly discusses STS-48 at around the 14 minute mark of this Paratopia podcast (episode 32 here).

In my ongoing quest, the past few weeks, to discover what I think of UFOs and the UFO-believing community, I purchased a copy of UFO Magazine  (Issue #150) at my local Barnes & Noble and found something that surprised me. There are factions within the UFO community that are at each others’s rhetorical throats. Most specifically, there are the UFO researchers who regard themselves as serious, evidence-based inquirers into the truth regarding UFO phenomenon, and then there are the far-out true believers who casually talk about galactic federations and “Reptilians from the fourth density.” Here, for example, is Jeremy Vaeni, an apparently regular columnist for the magazine, sassing “exopolitics” (“exopolitics” is behind the UFO Discovery Project and organizes those regular National Press Club meetings at which pilots and ex-military people have shared their UFO sighting testimonies):

Based on the evidence, I no longer think exopolitics is a joke. I think it’s a cult. I think it is a religious movement for those who have no imagination. Steve Bassett often says he’s a left-brain-only kind of thinker. Everything has to be rational for it to compute. But exopolitics, which is the thrust of his life’s work, is not rational. . . . Could you imagine if CNN, MSNBC, FOX or any of ‘em actually looked into the background of exopolitics? You think they laugh at us now?

I don’t know who Steve Bassett is, or the background of exopolitics, so I don’t know the references to which Jeremy Vaeni is alluding to. But it’s clear that Jeremy Vaeni’s attack has to do with the circularity of reasoning within exopolitics, and thus its closed nature. He tells exopoliticians:

You’re creating a parameter around the unknown and arguing from within it. As long as the arguments and discussions remain in your safe zone, you’ll suffer fools. Anything outside that phony belief system does not compute. . . . You automatically believe unverifiable military sources. You don’t trust the government or the military until an alleged whistleblower steps forward, and then you’re all over that! You automatically believe in unverifiable remote-viewer testimony. So long as it conforms to the story you want to hear, it’s gospel.

Jeremy Vaeni then lays out (effectively, I think) how a contemporary cult can be hatched:

• Seemingly credible eyewitnesses start offering bizarre testimony concerning a phenomenon, but their experiences cannot be independently verified, nor is there any physical evidence supporting the testimony
• Form a coalition of these testifiers
• “[W]rite articles and publish books citing each other’s articles and books . . .”
• “[R]oll separate bits of lore into a singular mega-story”
• “Lo and behold, a new truism is born”

And what is that truism in the case of exopolitics? Jeremy Vaeni characterizes it this way:

There’s a galactic federation waiting for the government to disclose what it knows so that we can reconcile with Maritians and join the federation. . . . And then your group decides, ‘Well, hey! Since that’s true, we’d better force the government to disclose everything it knows about this and have a policy ready to go when open contact is made.’ And you write up that policy. And you’re rational. And you’re mature. And Steven Greer contacts aliens from inside his meditation brain with strong flashlights at night. No, kids: You’re a delusional cult.

I must confess I like Jeremy Vaeni’s column far more than anything else I read in UFO Magazine. And it’s not just because he shows critical thinking. He’s also a really tart, energetic writer, and funny. And I discover that he also has a podcast that looks interesting.

As for Jeremy Vaeni’s take-down of exopolitics, I thought he brilliantly connected the dots between how weird and unverifiable eyewitness testimony can evolve into a cultic eschatological social movement. Of course, Western cultural history is not exactly unfamiliar with such a phenomenon, is it?

That is, the New York Times says so.

And he died a Christian:

Mr. Kennedy spent his last hours in prayer, Father Tarrant told a Boston television station, WCVB-TV. Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short. “When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’ ”

I don’t think so. In fact, I see very little evidence of New Atheists having much of a sense of humor at all. New Atheists are very good at making fun of religion. But in terms of laughing at themselves, or seeing the absurdity of their own positions, and the ironies inherent in them, such self-directed humor appears to be almost wholly lacking. And for me, I find it very hard to think of someone as funny who cannot (or will not) turn his cutting wit regularly upon himself.

In other words, when New Atheists are not dour and pissed off, they seem to use their humor (such as it is) in the manner of Rush Limbaugh: as just another form of rhetorical bludgeon. Yes, it’s “humor,” but it’s all really serious, and marked by an undercurrent of bitterness and resentment, just like Limbaugh’s humor. And I don’t think that Limbaugh is funny, do you?

For atheist humor, I prefer the “old school” atheists like Woody Allen. As an agnostic myself, I go to Allen’s films as a source of comfort. I love the way that he plays up our absurdest position in relation to an apparently indifferent, blind, and mechanistic universe. And yet I’ve dialogued with New Atheists who—to my utter shock—have told me in no uncertain terms that they absolutely hate Allen and his films, and wouldn’t be caught dead sitting through one.

They don’t think he’s funny. Not. One. Bit.

This response bewildered me. How can an atheist not like Woody Allen? But in retrospect, this makes sense. The New Atheist movement is akin to movement conservatism. PZ Myers is the kissing cousin of Rush Limbaugh. Everybody is to be held in the highest disdain and hilarity except, well, PZ Myers and Rush Limbaugh. Perhaps someone could direct me to counter examples. I’d love to be corrected about this. For example, YouTube is huge, and I may have missed something. Can anybody direct me to a New Atheist making fun of New Atheism? Or are New Atheists in earnest agreement with Ayn Rand that it is evil to laugh at yourself? I see New Atheists circulating Jesus and Mo cartoons, but where is the New Atheist cartoonist doing Richard and Sam?

Off the top of my head, I’ll make up a New Atheist joke right now, and see if any New Atheists think it’s funny. Here goes:

CHRISTIAN: If you don’t believe in God, what is it, exactly, that you do believe?

ATHEIST: I believe that we live in a closed and determinate universe consisting solely of atoms and the void. All causes are material causes.

CHRISTIAN: And what do you do for a living?

ATHEIST: I teach rhetoric at UCLA.

In case you got lost on the punchline, to be a rhetorician would suggest that you believe that all causes are not material causes, and that mental properties can affect the world, and free will actually exists. The universe is not all just determinate atoms and the void. My punchline, by the way, would work with any non-determinist discipline or profession that presumes that strategies of persuasion and the exercise of free will are not simply illusions. I could, for example, have given this as the punchline: “I teach law at UCLA.” Or how about this:

I’m an author of New Atheist books.

Now somebody could say: “Oh, you’ve distorted the New Atheist position on free will. In fact, it’s a straw man because atheism needn’t lead to a rejection of free will. It’s true that a lot of New Atheists might be strict determinists, but you obviously haven’t read New Atheist Daniel Dennett’s defense of free will—and so the joke fails.”

Yeah, but was it funny?

This segment of the UFO documentary, Out of the Blue , features in its first half the UFO testimony of Professor Robert Jacobs. Jacobs, in the 1960s, was in the military and he recounts an amazing UFO event that changed his perspective on life. The second half of this segment discusses a UFO that appears to have disabled a cluster of siloed ICBMs. I think that both of these stories are fascinating, and worth pondering:

And here’s Jacobs telling his story to Larry King:

I mean no disrespect of abductees or eyewitnesses who have had vivid and life-disrupting UFO encounters, and know  things that a UFO nonexperiencer (like myself) does not, but as I’ve thought about UFOs in a serious fashion these past few weeks, and for the first time in my life, I’m seeing real links between UFOs and witchcraft.

No, I don’t mean that aliens are warlocks and witches stealing the souls of abductees in night raids. I mean that the social psychology surrounding UFO belief has striking parallels with witchcraft belief, and as a consequence, could, in the near future, take similarly hysterical and tragic turns.

Let me offer some parallels:

• Like tales of witchcraft from, say, 17th century Europe and America, UFO incidents are characteristically spooky nightime phenomena, often away from civilization, and in the depths of forests or deserts.
• The spectral nature of UFOs is akin to the spectral nature of witches. Most people never actually see a UFO or meet a witch, but they hear stories of people who say that they have.
• Some within the UFO movement talk about alien hybrids in a way that is strikingly similar to the way that people once spoke of witches.  Alien hybrids are, supposedly, indistinguishable from other humans, but they’re nevertheless on their way to being inserted into the human population among us. The science fiction series, The X Files, which I’ve never watched until this past week, plays with this idea, and some UFO believers take it seriously. Needless to say, it’s an enormously dangerous idea to entertain psychologically, because it breeds paranoia. I think it is incumbent on believers in UFOs to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic witchcraft tale, “Young Goodman Brown”, as a cautionary reflection on what can happen to a life devoted to believing that people are not what they appear to be.
• Like witchcraft initiation rites, abductees have characteristic things that happen to them (aliens levitate them into their spaceship, have an unusual concern with abductees reproductive organs, “speak” to the abductees telepathically etc.).
• Like tales of witchcraft covens, there is a decidedly sexual component to many abductee stories, and whenever sex is involved in something, you know that you are entering potentially dangerous realms of the psyche.

What do I think is most troubling about all this? Most obviously, ideas akin to those swirling around the UFO movement have, in the past, led to the demonization of others. If there are, for example, some people among us who, by all appearances look like us, but are not us, then what do we do with them? I think history has many tragic examples of what we do with them (think of the Nazis’s treatment of the Jewish “other” or the Salem witch trials).

Now I recognize that the UFO community is small, and it is not capable of mass atrocities, but individual cult events are certainly not out of the range of possibility (a small group or an individual kills somebody that they think is an alien ”hybrid”). And because the UFO community is a minority within a much larger monotheistic culture, it is not at all out of the range of possibility that the larger monotheistic culture, in a time of high stress, could turn hysterical towards outgroups (including those who embrace UFO beliefs) and conclude that the devil is somehow involved with them. Given past history, I think it is naive to say that such mass psychological panics can’t happen.

Whatever reality is behind UFO phenomena, one thing is certain: It is playing with deep, and often dark, parts of the human psyche. UFO believers who are not already doing so should make a real effort to think about human psychology, including human social psychology, in relation to what they believe, and might encourage others to believe, about UFOs and aliens.

Well, no. But probably not alien spacecraft caught in passing either. What’s likely being imaged in these NASA photos are probably human-generated debris orbiting from previous space missions, but they certainly look otherworldly, don’t they? NASA has removed these pictures from its site.

How come?