Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (53 page)

In this haunting reading, the Virgin, or the energy spike that produced her, at least, actually killed little Jacinta. To support such an interpretation, Persinger points out that the Fátima area is well known as a tectonic strain hotspot, and that the strongest earthquake on record was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Fátima is about eighty-six miles north of the city). Fernandes and D'Armada make the same point, citing an earthquake that measured an astonishing 9.0 on the Richter scale that once ripped through Fátima itself.
²⁷
The seismic activity could have created immense geomagnetic fields, which would then collect and discharge on tall structures, like the tree on which the apparition appeared. As for the regular periodic nature of the six monthly events, Persinger relates these to a lunar phase, that is, another supermagnetic phenomenon with a strong, predictable, periodic nature. The same magnetic discharges, he speculates, would have powerfully stimulated the children's temporal lobes, resulting in the visions.

The specifics and, of course, the later interpretation of the apparitions were shaped “by their obsession with religious themes, their lack of education [all three children were illiterate], and their behavior at the time of the experience . . . If they had grown up in a world of
Star Wars
, they would have seen and heard some variant of Luke Skywalker.”
²⁸
Not that the visions were entirely consonant with the children's Catholicism. As we have seen, they were not. Francisco, for example, did not hear the little lady speak and remembered seeing a haze that he interpreted as a headless angel!

There is more than a little justification for such a literally radioactive reading. Numerous individuals reported intense heat and the almost instant drying of both their clothes and the previously soaked soil during “the Miracle of the Sun,” features entirely consistent with immense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. The “buzzing” noises can be fit in here as well, as individuals exposed to microwave radiation between 200 and 3,000 MHz commonly experience buzzing noises inside their heads. Raul Berenguel goes even further, pointing out that hearing voices in the interior of the cranium and the phenomenon of buzzing “is
identical
to what is felt by individuals subjected to mind control technologies that use
microwaves.”
²⁹
We are back to an eerie and potentially troubling scene reminiscent of Vallee's alien-control hypothesis.

Fernandes and D'Armada add one more truly fascinating suggestion that seems particularly impossible. Curiously, the shape of a rosary laid flat on a table (a circle with a line and a cross jutting out) forms the astrological sign of the planet Venus (which is also known as the Morning Star, a common epithet of the Virgin), the goddess Venus, and now the female chromosome.
³⁰
They speculate that we are dealing here with an ancient pagan symbolism rendered Christian by local context and elaborate processes of interpretation, devotion, and official spinning spread out over centuries. The cultural context of rural Catholic Portugal, of course, more or less guaranteed the traditional Marian reading. By the sixth visitation in October, everyone “knew” who the little lady was. Who else
could
she be? Certainly not Venus, the pagan goddess of sex and love. She was “Our Lady,” the Catholic Virgin. In this way, “[t]he paranormal became the supernatural, and the supernatural became the religious.”
³¹

A Venus-Virgin with a knee-high skirt, alien insectoid buzzing, and spinning metallic disks in the sky above Fátima. In effect, a Marialien. Now
that
would have changed how I prayed my rosary. I might even still be praying it.

Required
Reading (That Is Never Read)

A SELECT ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the midst of all the nonsense and excessive silliness proclaimed in the name of psychic phenomena, the misinformed use of the term “parapsychology” by self-proclaimed “paranormal investigators,” the perennial laughingstock of magicians and conjurers . . . this is for real?

The short answer is, Yes.

—DEAN RADIN
,
The Conscious Universe

Most discussions of psychical and paranormal phenomena take place in a near total ignorance of the nature, extent, and quality of the ethnographic and empirical data collected over the last two centuries. I am reminded here of something Major General Edmund R. Thompson, the U.S. Army assistant chief of staff for intelligence between 1977 and 1981, once said about the occasional stunning efficacy of the remote-viewing programs that he oversaw and sponsored: “I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you
hadn't
done your homework.”
¹
The same is true, I fear, of the paranormal and the modern study of religion. We simply have not done our homework.

The same conclusion can be drawn from more mundane methods. In 1977, Stanford astrophysicist Peter Sturrock performed a poll of over one thousand members of the American Astronomical Society about UFOs. He discovered that the more they had read, the more likely they were to think that the subject deserved more attention, and, conversely, that the less they had read about the subject, the less they thought about it. Such a conclusion is not rocket science, even with rocket scientists.
²

It is in this academic context of near total ignorance that I list below, in rough chronological order, what I consider to be some of the most important studies that need to be read if one is truly serious about inquiring into these matters. I, of course, have not read all of this material either.

Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore,
Phantasms of the Living
, 2 vols. (London, 1886). Treating 702 cases, this work constitutes the first major publication of the S.P.R. and stands to this day as one of the most impressive works of psychical research ever published. Read before and alongside Myers's
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
, these four volumes constitute a single masterwork composed by many lives and, more to the point, many deaths. A searchable online version of all four volumes can be found at:
http://www.esalenctr.org
.

George Devereux, ed.,
Psycho-analysis and the Occult
(New York: International Universities Press, 1953). A marvelous collection of essays by seventeen authors, including six by Freud himself, published at the high watermark of psychoanalytic interest in these topics at midcentury. The authors show through a blitz of case studies that, because psychical effects are often mediated by unconscious processes (repression, distortion, displacement, symbolization, and so on), observers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic methods often miss the presence of such phenomena altogether, whereas those trained in the psychoanalytic hermeneutic recognize them as important dimensions of dreams, intuitions, and the “parapsychology of everyday life.” Far from being a materialist bludgeon, then, psychoanalysis becomes a method of interpretation that reveals
more
psychical connections and communications.

C. D. Broad,
Lectures on Psychical Research: Incorporating the Perrott Lectures Given in Cambridge University in 1959 and 1960
, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method, ed. A. J. Ayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). A series of lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge University, over a two-year
period,
this book is one of the finest examples that we have of a trained philosopher engaging the data fairly and thoroughly.

Jule Eisenbud,
The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind
(New York: William & Morrow Company, 1967). Eisenbud was a prominent Denver psychiatrist, Serios a struggling alcoholic who could barely stay off the street but who could also imprint detailed images on camera film with his mind under carefully controlled conditions. Eisenbud generally interprets these images as dreamlike projections from the psyche of Serios. They often included buildings in the real world or, in one really eerie case, Russian Vostok rockets, “apparently in space,” Eisenbud calmly notes (226). My favorite section is chapter 14, “The Anatomy of Resistance,” in which Eisenbud uses the history of religions and psychoanalysis to explain the dissonance between the data and the denials. The anatomy of resistance boils down for him to an attempt to keep in check “a demonic side of man of almost limitless potency” (324). Not for the metaphysically timid.

Thomas E. Bullard,
UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery
, vol. 1,
Comparative Study of Abduction Reports
; and vol. 2,
Catalogue of Cases
(Mount Ranier, Maryland: Fund for UFO Research, 1987). A folklorist by training (Ph.D., University of Indiana), Bullard is widely cited in the ufological literature as one of the most respected and gifted writers, and for good reason. This is an absolutely massive comparative study of abduction reports by a trained intellectual, who comes to the careful conclusion that whereas many such experiences are probably psychological in origin, some also contain objective, physical evidence whose overall coherency suggests that they cannot be reduced either to the individual psyche or to the oral traditions of folklore. In my own terms, Bullard is an author of the impossible who is comfortable in that “place of hesitation” that defines the fantastic. Bullard has recently published a summary of his life-work on these materials as
The Myth and Mystery of UFOs
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

Ian Stevenson,
Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects
(Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997). Twenty-three hundred pages of mind-blowing data from around the world speculatively linking odd birthmarks to a previous life's violent death by gunshot, knife wound, and so on. Because such violent deaths are often surrounded by both traumatic memories on the part of the families and excessive paperwork and field investigations by law officers, Stevenson's studies are often unusually rich (and grisly) in empirical detail. In the end, Stevenson resists identifying the
causal
or acausal mechanisms of such phenomena, choosing instead to concentrate on documenting the impossible evidence.

Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada,
Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon
; Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada,
Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident
; and Fernando Fernandes, Joaquim Fernandes, and Raul Berenguel,
Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science
(San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2005, 2006, 2008). Although highly uneven in places, this trilogy—based on over one hundred firsthand testimonies and the original records of the children's interrogations held at the Sanctuary of Fátima—constitutes the premiere ufological reading of the events of Fátima, Portugal, from May 13 to October 13, 1917. The second volume is particularly insightful, devastating really, in its exploration of the way the church manipulated the paranormal events for its own pious control of the people through the famous “three secrets” and its institutional support of the right-wing, dictator-style politics in Portugal from 1926 to 1974. “Without Fátima, Salazar would not be possible,” as one brave Belgian priest put it (199–201).

Salvador Freixedo,
Visionaries, Mystics and Contactees
, trans. Scott Corrales (Avondale Estates, Georgia: IllumiNet Press, 1992). This is another radical attempt to come to terms with ufology and parapsychology from a dissident Roman Catholic perspective. Although again uneven, this text sparkles with a certain comparative courage and ends with the striking (and strikingly gnostic) conclusion that the history of religions is a long series of false prophets, pseudoen-lightenments, and manmade scriptures controlled by occult forces that pose as divine but are no such thing. We now “realize that whoever dictates the messages, whoever gives the demurrage [demiurge] his power, whoever breaks the natural laws, is not God but energy entities, intelligent and evolved to a greater or lesser degree, who interfere with human lives. . . . They have appeared and demanded to be worshipped as God. But they are not God. None of them is the Creator-God, the First Cause of the Universe” (151).

Dean Radin,
The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena
(New York: HarperEdge, 1997);
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality
(New York: Paraview, 2006). As a historian of religions who works with texts, symbols, and myths, I have consciously steered away from the extensive literature on the laboratory and statistical evidence for psychical phenomena. This does not mean, in any way, that I think this data is inconsequential.
My
favorite author here is Dean Radin. Besides effectively summarizing a vast evidential literature (and being very, very funny), Radin also happens to understand that “quantum theory says nothing about higher-level concepts such as
meaning
and
purpose
, yet real-world ‘raw' psi phenomena seem to be intimately related to these concepts” (
Conscious Universe
, 287). The present book can be read as one long commentary on that single line.

Mark Fox,
Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). This very recent work, based on almost four hundred contemporary accounts, comes out of the Religious Experience Research Centre founded by Sir Alister Hardy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Now numbering up to six thousand case studies, this archive represents one of our richest, and virtually untapped, sources of real-world data on mystical experience. Fox demonstrates any number of strong comparative patterns that go directly against the present contextualist dogmas of the field, namely, that paranormal encounters with lightforms are cross-cultural, transhistorical, and manifest a certain “core” phenomenology around their crisis-timing, their benign or loving aspects, and their creative impact on the visionary.