jasoncolavito | A complicating factor that Lewis-Williams’s work creates for the UTH is
the fact that shamanic ASC and historical “abduction” experiences, cited
by Vallée and other UTH speculators, do not conform to the full
narrative of the modern UFO phenomenon, as developed after the Betty and
Barney Hill abduction claim (Fuller 1966) and J. Allen Hynek’s (1972)
classification of three types of UFO encounters, culminating with
contact. Prior to this, strange lights in the sky were not generally
found in conjunction with other staples of the narrative, such as
abduction, sexual experimentation, and cattle mutilation, a fact even
the credulous Vallée (2009) himself seemed to concede in cataloguing the
“best” evidence for prehistoric UFOs and finding no unambiguous
evidence for a complete UFO narrative prior to the modern era, only
fragments that paralleled portions of the modern narrative. This might
mean that the trans-dimensional beings first emerged into our dimension
only in 1947, 1961, or some other date, but this would not explain those
partial parallels.
I have previously traced the Hill abduction to alien encounter and
medical experimentation motifs derived from three consecutive episodes
of The Outer Limits (1964) airing over the three weeks
prior to Barney Hill’s first hypnosis session, including the
slanted-eyed aliens and their distinctive clothing, the invasive
probing, the backwoods setting, and even an interracial narrative
paralleling the Hills’ own romance (Colavito 2012).
It is noteworthy that the Hills originally only reported to Project
Bluebook seeing a flying saucer until they were placed in an altered
state of consciousness three years later and began recalling abduction
imagery exactly paralleling Outer Limits episodes
in both plot and aesthetics from the weeks before hypnosis. This origin
point for the classic abduction narrative strongly favors the PCH over
the UTH if this order of events is correct. Given that high profile
abduction cases that followed, including the Travis Walton incident, can
be shown to reproduce ideas and imagery appearing originally with the
Hill case, this again favors PCH over UTH.
Since Mizrach cited Sherlock Holmes about acceptance of the
improbable, it is only fair to mention Occam’s Razor in defense of the
idea that the hypothesis with fewer assumptions is more likely to be
correct; in this case, the proposal of an unseen and unattested
alternative dimension of reality, populated by multiple beings of
near-supernatural intelligence, who are capable of interacting with this
dimension in fixed ways across time and space is vastly more
complicated than the alternatives. The only serious support for this
claim is the contention that the UFO phenomenon encompasses physical
phenomena—such as UFOs that can be tracked on radar—that preclude a
purely mental explanation. Indeed, this is Mizrach’s primary objection
to PCH. This leads to my final question: Is the UFO phenomenon singular?
The modern UFO phenomenon is composed (roughly) of four parts: UFO
sightings, crop circles, cattle mutilation, and alien abduction.
Ufologists disagree on whether crop circles and cattle mutilation should
be considered part of the phenomenon, and alternative explanations
exist even among believers. Cattle mutilation, for example, was
traditionally ascribed down to the twentieth century to the evil power
of the goatsucker (nightjar), a (real) bird whose mythology was
reapplied to the Chupacabra, whose name (literally: goat sucker) belies
its origins (see my chapter on the Chupacabra
in Colavito 2013) and provides an equally incredible explanation for
something science recognizes as natural decay. Similarly, prior to the
modern UFO myth, lights in the sky were treated as a distinct class of
“prodigy” from nocturnal visitation by strange visitors such as incubi
and succubae, whom Vallée and Bullard both see as analogous to UFO
denizens. These visitations, however, were not associated with
spaceships or intense light, just kinky sex. Additionally, the first
reported alien encounters—those from before the Hills like George
Adamski’s—were wildly diverse, including civilized diplomatic meetings
with Nordic-looking aliens from Venus, like those of Golden Age science
fiction, as filtered through Theosophy. It is only after the 1960s that
these threads come together in the modern UFO myth.
Because we find the various elements of the UFO myth in isolation
throughout history, the logical conclusion is that the four facets of
the myth were originally separate and brought together because of
the UFO myth and the UFO phenomenon is not the cause the four facets.
In this an instructive parallel can be found in the ancient Greek myth
of giants who (a) built the massive Mycenaean ruins, (b) left behind
their gigantic bones, and (c) performed magic from their underground
tombs and rose to communicate with those who sacrificed to them. The
myth emerged from mistakes (about the origin of ruins and about the
giant bones, really those of extinct Pleistocene mammals—see Mayor
[2000]) and religious ideology, but it seemed supported by facts which
were forever after linked to the myth. In the same way, the modern UFO
myth is leading researchers down the path of proposing elaborate
explanations for a phenomenon that cannot yet be proved to require a
singular explanation.
If treating sightings, abductions, mutilations, and crop circles as
distinct events yields productive explanations for each (as skeptics
contend), then the UFO phenomenon as a whole may be considered as a
modern myth and the UTH can be discarded as redundant, though as with
phlogiston and unicorns, it cannot be conclusively proven wrong, only
unnecessary. This then frees the researcher to examine multiple causes
for various phenomena, from ASC for most abduction cases to a wide range
of events that yield lights in the sky. By discarding the strictures of
forcing all of the factors of contemporary UFO mythology to conform to a
single hypothesis, the truth may in fact emerge more fully and
brilliantly than ufologists suspect.
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