Posthuman Blues

From Budd Hopkins' article about Susan Clancy:

Equally damning of Clancy's religious explanation is the fact that the UFO reports of many abductees in more primitive cultures describe exactly the same details as do abductees in more advanced cultures, and yet these more primitive people work assiduously to make their UFO experiences fit into the schema of their traditional religions. Thus, in a well-known Zimbabwe incident, the natives who described small, white-skinned aliens in shiny one-piece jumpsuits insisted that they were the ghosts of their ancestors, who can now, apparently, fly around in wingless metal discs.

I'd argue that Hopkins' insistence that the small, white-skinned entities are literal "aliens" is as lamentably simple-minded as Clancy's own wholesale ignorance of the abduction enigma. "Aliens in jumpsuits" may simply be how the modern Western mind reacts to a "reality-transforming" stimulus.

In a similar manner, explaining the beings as ancestral ghosts could be equally valid. In each case, the mind accesses a comprehensible psychic vocabulary to describe an event that may defy empirical analysis.

This isn't to say Hopkins is wrong; perhaps we really are dealing with more-or-less comprehensible biped aliens with white skin and a penchant for shiny jumpsuits. Maybe the witnesses in Zimbabwe simply weren't versed enough to make an accurate identification.

But the UFO encounter evidence has roots that go far deeper than the contemporary infatuation with "abductions." When the phenomenon is examined historically, it seems more likely that the "aliens" insinuate themselves into a given cultural matrix by appealing to ready-made mythological constructs -- thus the near-endless procession of elves, dwarves, fairies, and saucer-pilots that haunt our attempts to discern the "other."

I think someone is here. But to ascribe nonhuman visitation to Hopkins' meddling intruders is to play into a long-standing perceptual trap . . . and the toll might not be merely intellectual.

Jacques Vallee:

"There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers -- even if I have to go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find. Perhaps a superhuman monstrosity the very contemplation of which would make a man insane? Perhaps a solemn gathering of wise men? Or the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork?"