Area : META_UFO
Date : Nov 22 '95, 17:58
From : Ben La Count 1:106/9657
To : All
Subj : More on Abductees
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
By: David Bloomberg
To: All
Re: Entirely Unpredisposed
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I am in regular contact with Mr. Kottmeyer. If anybody has any intelligent
questions they would like to pose to him, I will forward them. He has already
indicated that he would answer questions according to whatever time he has
available.
Anybody who wishes the full file can FReq it from 2430/2112 as UNPREDIS.ZIP
===========================================================================
Entirely Unpredisposed
The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports
copyright (c) 1990 by Martin S. Kottmeyer
[Reprinted from "Magonia" Magazine, Jan. 1990, by
permission of the author]
Culture is an admixture of repetition and variation, convention
and creativity, signals and noise. It is ever new and forever old
as humanity relives old dreams and nightmares or forgets and
forges new ones. Part of the delight of history is the
recognition that however new a given event appears, traces of the
past can generally be discerned.
If the UFO phenomenon is an artifact of culture one would
reasonably expect that cultural antecedents could be recognized
for the major features it presents. Extraterrestrials, however,
should be independent of culture and if they are newly arrived
their characteristics should represent a discontinuity with the
past. Abduction phenomenon students have recently offered some
provocative claims that such discontinuities exist. Implicitly
they are claims for the weakness of the sociopsychological
paradigm and the converse power of the ETH.
David Jacobs argues that the imagery of the UFO phenomenon sprang
up _ex nihilo_ in 1947. Budd Hopkins states that the complex,
controlling, physically frail beings of abduction reports bear no
similarity to "traditional sci-fi gods and devils". Thomas E.
Bullard makes the rather more modest claim that the keystone of
the abduction mystery, the interrupted journey of Betty and
Barney Hill, had no cultural sources from which to derive the
experience they reported. They were, to quote him, "entirely
unpredisposed" since they were the first. These are forceful
challenges to the proponent of the cultural origin of UFO
phenomena. They have "Falsify me, I dare you" plastered on them.
Can it be demonstrated that culture predisposed people to have
these experiences?
The boldest claim is the one by UFO historian David Jacobs.
Jacobs states "there was no precedent for the appearance or the
configuration of the objects in 1947" in popular science fiction
films, popular science fiction or popular culture in general.
They did not resemble the fanciful rocketships or earthly space
travel contraptions in the SF literature. [1]
There is a trivial sense in which this is simply wrong. Disc-
shaped spaceships have a number of precedents in popular
culture. They appear in Buck Rogers as far back as 1930. [2]
They appear in a Flash Gordon comic strip in 1934.[3] The
science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul was drawing
saucer-like craft as early as 1931 and did so repeatedly.[4]
Other SF illustrators also utilized the disc form long before
1947.[5] But these are inevitable coincidences in a large body
of artistic creativity. The saucer form was not the dominant
shape of spaceships in the culture; it was the rocket. In this
larger sense Jacobs is correct that one would expect an outbreak
of ghost rockets over America if the images of SF were the
determinant of what people should be imagining. They weren't.
The cultural source of the UFO lies in a journalistic error.
Kenneth Arnold's report of mysterious supersonic objects flying
near Mount Rainier was a sensation that made front-page news
across the nation. The speed was far beyond that of the planes of
the era and no one publicized the flight in advance. It was an
exciting puzzle.
The shape of the objects Arnold saw is hard to describe in a word
or two. It wasn't like a plane or rocket, or even a disc. When
the newsman Bill Bequette wrote the story up for the news
services he recalled Arnold's describing the motion of the
objects as like a saucer if you skip it across the water.
Jumbling the metaphorical intent of the description, Bequette
labeled the objects "flying* saucers", Arnold said the term
arose from "a great deal of misunderstanding". The public,
however, did not know that. No drawing accompanied the story.
People started looking for flying saucers and that is exactly
what they found. They reported flat, circular objects that look
like flying saucers sound like they should look like. Equally
important: no one reported objects like the drawing in Arnold's
report to the Air Force.[6] The implications of this journalistic
error are staggering in the extreme. Not only does it unambigu-
ously point to a cultural origin of the whole flying saucer
phenomenon, it erects a first-order paradox into any attempt to
interpret the phenomenon in extraterrestrial terms: Why
would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to
Bequette's error?
This paradox is especially bad news for abduction reports. By
Bullard's tally 82% of craft descriptions fit the flying saucer
stereotype.[7] This is far in excess of the approximately one-
third portion saucers and discs make up in a more general
population of UFO reports.[8] If imagination and cultural
expectations play a larger role in abductions than in more
reality-constrained misinterpretations of mundane stimuli, then
this fact makes sense. The flying saucer mythos perfectly
predisposes us to include flying saucers in our fantasies and
nightmares about extraterrestrials.
This takes care of the craft, but what of the entities? Budd
Hopkins emphasizes that they are complex, controlling, physically
frail beings who are forced by survival needs to search out and
abduct earthlings. This is quite unlike the godly aliens of
_Close Encounters of the Third Kind_, the kindly, spiritual alien
of _The Day The Earth Stood Still_, or the aliens of _War of The
Worlds_ who "mindlessly devour and conquer us", as Hopkins sees
it. Nothing by his abductees "in any way suggests traditional
sci-fi gods and devils", he wants us to know.[9]
Hopkins's descriptions leave something to be desired. The godly
aliens of CE3K trash the home of the little boy Barry and they
terrorize his mother as they abduct him. The disrupt the life and
mind of Neary. Kindly and spiritual Klaatu happens to have a
robot with him who is all business. His offer to leave a police
force is eminently pragmatic. The comparison is frivolous in
either case since any UFO aliens matching these descriptions go
into the contactee file. Hopkins professes it is instructive that
his abductees are not devoured like in War of the Worlds, but how
would a myth devour a person?
That Hopkins is ignorant of science fiction would be apparent to
any fan by the fact that he used the repellent phrase "sci-fi' -
a sure sign of an outsider to the genre.[10] War of the Worlds is
one of the recognized masterpieces, yet it is grossly evident
Hopkins never read it or he would be co-opting Wells as an
unconscious abductee. Far from "mindlessly" devouring us, Wells
endowed his aliens with "intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic.
The did not devour people but took the fresh and living blood of
other creatures and injected it into their own bodies. His aliens
had "no extensive muscular mechanism". The invaders also brought
along for provisions bipeds with flimsy siliceous skeletons and
feeble musculature.[11]
There are multiple similarities to other abduction narratives -
an immense pair of dark eyes possessing an extraordinary
intensity, a mouth without lips, greyish colour of skin, the skin
glistening like wet leather, telepathy. They are also "absolutely
without sex". Add to this that the alien craft was circular, made
a peculiar humming sound, and when they flew the sky would be
alive with their lights. In fact Wells's aliens more resemble
Hopkins's abducting aliens than most abduction reports,
Hopkins further errs in thinking the Wells aliens are mere
"satanic monsters".[12] Their motivation is survival. Their world
is dying and Earth is their only escape. Ironically, just a
couple of pages before Hopkins mangles War of the Worlds he
quotes the impressions of an abductee that the aliens are from a
society millions of years old that is dying. They desperately
need to survive. This places UFO aliens squarely in the main
tradition of aliens in SF films.
Dying worlds are commonplace in alien invasion movies. It leads
the aliens in "This Island Earth" to borrow Earth scientists for
their expertise in atomic energy. It motivates the aliens in "The
27th Day" to give Earth people the means of destroying human
life. It motivates the "Killers from Space" to operate on a man,
extract information from his mind, and compel him to become a spy
saboteur. It leads the "Devil Girl from Mars" to abduct healthy
males. It similarly motivates the aliens in "I Married a Monster
from Outer Space", "The Mysterians", and "Mars Needs Women" to
procure females for breeding stock. An astronomer in "Invaders
from Mars" theorises the secret operations aliens engage in are
motivated by the fact that Mars is a dying world. The aliens in
the popular TV series "The Invaders" were also escaping a dying
world.[13]
The fact is most film aliens have some implicit motivation to
their activities. One of the few exceptions I could find was the
"so thin - so fragile" aliens of "Target Earth!" and even they
don't seem particularly satanic or monstrous.[14] It seems more
sensible to flip Hopkins's allegation around. He says nothing
about the aliens of UFO abductions resembling "sci-fi". I ask, is
there anything about UFO aliens that does not resemble science
fiction?
An abductee in the 1954 movie "Killers from Space" has a strange
scar and a missing memory of the alien encounter that caused it.
The mysterious impregnation of women, including virgins, and the
subsequent birth of intelligent hybrid children is the theme of
the 1960 film "Village of the Damned". Brain implants are
featured in the 1953 movie "Invaders from Mars"[15]
Take a look at the creatures of the 1957 movie "Invasion of The
Saucer Men". The bald, bulgy-brained, googly-eyed, no-nosed
invaders match the stereotype of UFO aliens delineated by Bullard
to an uncanny extent. It prompts worries that abductees are not
only plagiarists, but have bad taste as well.[16]
"Earth versus the Flying Saucers" (1956) also precedes UFO lore
in featuring an abduction in which thoughts are taken. Saucerians
abduct a general, make his head transparent, and suck out the
knowledge to store it in an Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank.
Though the frequency of the motif in abduction narratives can be
laid to psychological factors in the personalities of abductees,
one cannot rule out the movie enculturating the association.
Years from now we may have an epidemic of implanted parasites,
potential chest-bursters, due to the influence of the movie
"Alien" starting such an association. Presently such a report
would be too suspect, but eventually some puzzling medical oddity
might be associated with such a delusion and the UFO lore would
evolve in new directions. It could just as easily never happen
because of the vagaries of social factors.
In a more esoteric vein even abduction narrative structure has
science fiction predecessors. Thomas Bullard has discovered a
consistent structural order to events within abduction reports.
There are eight types of events and they are preferentially
ordered in this manner: (i) capture, (ii) examination, (iii)
conference, (iv) tour, (v) otherworldly journey, (vi) theophany,
(vii) return, (viii) aftermath.
No abduction has every event, but events avoid appearing out of
this sequence. Abductees aren't generally given a tour of the
ship before examination or conference and so forth. Bullard
considers the arrangement occasionally arbitrary from a rational
standpoint. The fidelity of reports to this arrangement seems, to
Bullard, to indicate these are real experiences. He would expect
the elements of the story to get jumbled if they were
subjective.[17]
What, then, are we to make of the 1930 comic strip story "Tiger
Men of Mars" in the series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"?
It adheres to Bullard's structure most excellently. Wilma
experiences:
(i) capture by a giant clamp leading into a spherical alien
spaceship,
(ii) examination while lying on a table in an electro-
hypnotic trance,
(iii)conference with a subordinate and then a leader,
(vi) theophany while gazing at the Earth from an off-world
vantage point,
(vii)return,
In the aftermath there is an instance of what Bullard calls
"networking" in the aliens abducting Wilma's sister, Sally.
There is also an apocalyptic finale in which the Martian moon
Phobos crashes on Mars.[18]
Some idea of the structural impressiveness of this narrative can
be gained from observing that only one abduction in the UFO
literature has a greater number of these elements in the correct
-!- WILDMAIL!/WC v4.12
! Origin: -=The Wastelands=- Madera, Ca. (209) 662-1706 (1:205/600.0)
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* Origin: The Wooden Shoe Seabrook, Tx. 713-474-9657 (1:106/9657)
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