Wonders in the Sky (2 page)

Imagine that we have been transported back in time to Hamburg, Germany, on the 15
^th
day of December in the year of the Lord 1547. Historian Simon Goulart, in his
Trésors Admirables et Mémorables de notre Temps
(1600) writes that on that day the sailors who were aboard ships in the harbor of Hamburg saw in the air, at midnight, a glistening globe as fiery as the Sun. It rolled towards the north, emitting so much heat that people could not remain inside the ships, but were forced to take cover, thinking the vessels were about to burn up.

A meteor? The behavior of this aerial phenomenon is not typical of meteors, which are too high in the atmosphere for their heat to be felt on the ground. In any case a meteor would have passed overhead in seconds, never giving people aboard the ships time to run away from the heat. Globular lightning? Unlikely in the absence of thunder or stormy conditions. Lacking more information, we have to classify the incident as an unidentified flying object.

Thousands of such incidents have been recorded in the last 60 years or so, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. Influenced by books and movies, most people have jumped to hasty conclusions: they believe that unidentified flying objects are spaceships from another planetary civilization that became aware of us when we exploded the first atom bombs at the end of World War Two. Understandably concerned about the irresponsible antics of our young species, the theory goes, these aliens decided to come over and take a closer look. According to this interpretation, some of the spaceships even crashed on the earth and their technology has been hidden away and secretly studied by concerned governments.

As the above incident in Hamburg shows, however, the extraterrestrial theory is not quite complete: The phenomenon did not begin in the 1940s, or even in the nineteenth century. It is much older than that. Further, it has some definite physical features – such as the heat felt and reported by witnesses – that have not changed much over the centuries.

The evening of September 3, 1965, two law enforcement officers, Sheriff McCoy and Robert Goode, were patrolling the highways around Angleton, Texas, when they observed a huge object, estimated at 70 meters long and 15 meters high with a bright violet light at one end and a pale blue light at the other. It flew within 30 meters of them, and cast a large shadow when it intercepted the moonlight. They felt a heat wave that scared them, prompting them to hastily drive away. Just like the sailors of Hamburg in 1547.

A robust phenomenon

Such similarities between ancient sightings and modern reports are the rule rather than the exception. In this book we will examine 500 selected reports of sightings from antiquity to the year 1879, when the industrial revolution deeply changed the nature of human society.

We selected the cutoff date of 1880 for our study because it marked a turning point in the technical and social history of the advanced nations. We wanted to analyze aerial phenomena during a period that was entirely free of those modern complications represented by airplanes, dirigibles, rockets and the often-mentioned opportunities for misinterpretation represented by military prototypes. There may have been a few balloons in the sky towards the end of our period, but the first dirigible able to return to its starting point was not demonstrated until the celebrated flight of French Captains Renard and Krebs on August 9, 1884, and the first airplane (equipped with a steam engine) would not fly until Clément Ader's feat at Satory on October 14, 1897.

Even more important than technical achievement were the social changes that marked the end point of our study. It is in 1879 that the world's first telephone exchange is established in London and the first electric tram exhibited by Siemens in Berlin. The following year, both Edison and Swan devise the first practical electric lights, Carnegie develops the first large steel furnace, and New York streets are first lit by electricity. Any study of unidentified flying objects after that date has to adopt the standards of a world where communications, social interaction, travel patterns, and the attitudes of people in everyday life have been deeply altered by the impact of technical progress.

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion, and on the models the world humanity has formed since it has evolved a culture that includes writing, science, and the preservation of historical records in stone, clay, parchment, paper, or electronic media.

So why hasn't science taken notice? Given the robust nature of the phenomenon, and the enormous interest it elicits among the public, you would think that interdisciplinary teams of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and physical scientists would rush to study it.

The answer lies in the arrogance of academic knowledge and in the fact that our best and brightest scientists have never bothered to inform themselves about the extent and reliability of the sightings. In a recent interview (for www.ted.com, April 2008) the celebrated astrophysicist Stephen Hawking flatly stated he didn't believe in flying saucer stories: “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” were his exact words.

He later asserted that we were the only form of technologically evolved life in a 200 light-year radius, thus out of reach of interplanetary travelers.

 

Unfortunate and ill-informed as they are, these statements by one of the brightest scientists of our time reflect the general view of academic researchers. Back in 1969 the U.S. Academy of Sciences put its stamp of approval on a report by a commission headed up by physicist Edward Condon, stating that science had nothing to gain by a study of unidentified flying objects, even though fully one third of all the cases studied by the commission had remained unexplained after investigation! Clearly, we are dealing with a belief system here, not with rational science.

There are two obvious problems with Stephen Hawking's statement: first, as we will show, most of our 500 cases come from known witnesses who represent a cross-section of human society, including numerous astronomers, physical scientists, military officers and even emperors– hardly the motley crew of cranks and weirdos rashly hypothesized by Hawking. Second, even if the witnesses were of unknown background, the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

Consider the following incident, which transports us to the year 438. An earthquake has destroyed Constantinople; famine and pestilence are spreading. The cataclysm has leveled the walls and the fifty-seven towers. Now comes a new tremor, even stronger than all the previous ones. Nicephorus, the historian, reports that in their fright the inhabitants of Byzantium, abandoning their city, gathered in the countryside, “They kept praying to beg that the city be spared total destruction: they were in no lesser danger themselves, because of the movements of the earth that nearly engulfed them, when a miracle quite unexpected and going beyond all credence, filled them with admiration.”

In the midst of the entire crowd, a child was suddenly taken up by a strong force, so high into the air that they lost sight of him. After this he came down as he had gone up, and told Patriarch Proclus, the Emperor himself, and the assembled multitude that he had just attended a great concert of the Angels hailing the Lord in their sacred canticles.

Angels or Aliens? Many contemporary reports of abductions involve ordinary humans caught up by a strange force that alters their reality in drastic ways and causes them to report contact with other forms of consciousness, or even with a totally alien world.

Acacius, bishop of Constantinople, states, “The population of the whole city saw it with their eyes.” And Baronius, commenting upon this report, adds the following words:

“Such a great event deserved to be transmitted to the most remote posterity and to be forever recorded in human memory through its mention every year in the ecclesiastical annals. For this reason the Greeks, after inscribing it with the greatest respect into their ancient Menologe, read it publicly every year in their churches.”

Over the centuries many extraordinary events have taken place and chroniclers have transmitted them to “the most remote posterity.”

We are that posterity.

It is our responsibility to assess the data they have transmitted to us. Upon their authority and their accuracy rest our concept of history and our vision of the world.

Four major conclusions

The authors of the present book have performed such a study. While we make no claim that any of the events we have uncovered “proves” anything about flying objects from alien worlds, or influence by non-human intelligences, we have emerged with four major observations:

Whether we like it or not, history and culture are often determined by exceptional
incidents
. Stories about strange beings and extraordinary events have always influenced us in an unpredictable fashion. Our vision of the world is a function of the old myths with which we have grown familiar, and of new myths we pick up along the way.

The importance and antiquity of myths was noted by anthropologist of religion Mircea Eliade in
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities
:

Yet the lessons from the past are often forgotten. An examination of contemporary cults centered on the belief in extraterrestrial visitations shows that the modern public is still willing to jump to conclusions every time a UFO incident is reported, anxious as people are to follow instructions that appear to come from above. Even in these early years of the 21
^st
century, we observe a continuing process through which the myths of humankind become implemented as social and political realities. We are the witnesses and the victims of that process.

Alien contact: mankind's oldest story

Most “experts” in the study of UFOs in the context of popular culture, state that visitations by “flying saucers” started after World War II. It is traditional for UFO books and television documentaries to begin with the statement that the
Flying Saucer Era
began on June 24, 1947, when an American businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported a series of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier, in the State of Washington. Even some well informed researchers have posed as an axiom (without citing any evidence) that the UFO phenomenon is a recent historical occurrence—“apparently no more than two centuries old” in the words of one American writer. This late date is consistent with the idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft bent on studying or inspecting the Earth, perhaps as a result of the atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In contrast, if the phenomenon has existed in fairly constant form for a very long time, it becomes harder to hold to a simplistic “ET visitation” scenario to explain it.

 

Indeed, many documents point to the very ancient nature of the observations. In a recent book on abductions a Canadian researcher, Dr. Persinger, has observed that “for thousands of years and within every known human culture, normal individuals have reported brief and often repeated ‘visitations' by humanoid phenomena whose presence produced permanent changes within the psychological organization of the experient. When these phenomena were labeled as deities the “messages” were employed to initiate religious movements that changed the social fabric of society.”

Historical scholarship reinforces the latter view. In a book entitled
Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein
(Boston: Shambhala, 1991) Professor Couliano, editor in chief of the journal
Incognita
and professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, has made it clear that the observation of UFOs and abductions by beings from beyond the Earth is mankind's oldest story. Couliano asserts on the basis of ethnosemiotics that “human beings had beliefs concerning other worlds long before they could write” and that “the most ancient documents of humankind and the study of its most ‘primitive' cultures…both show that visits to other worlds were top priorities.” He defines the basic question in terms similar to those used by modern abductionists: “Where did those people who pretended to travel to another world actually go?”

It is impossible to catalogue the information accumulated by Couliano, who cautions us that he barely scratched the surface: “To collect all historical documents referring to otherworldly journeys is a gigantic task, a task that has never been undertaken before.” Clear examples of this material cover every culture, from eastern Melanesia (where living people had access to a netherworld called Panoi, either in body or in spirit) to Mesopotamia, the source of abundant material about otherworldly journeys. In a typical example Etana, king of Kish, makes an ascent to the sky in order to bring down a plant that cures childlessness—that reference to the theme of reproduction again. “Along with Etana we move from heaven to heaven and see the land underneath becoming smaller and smaller, and the wide sea like a tub,” a classic abductee statement.