UFO theories

Those who've seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall (1990) will be familiar with the notion of implanted memories. Although Whitley's book antedates that movie, the Philip Dick story on which it was based, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," appeared in 1966, and his classic novel Time Out of Joint (1959) deploys essentially the same idea. And what a convenience that idea is for any UFO abductee who might find himself mired in provable untruths. This, even more than his equation of abduction with the frissons of sadomasochism, has been Strieber's greatest legacy to the traditions of UFOlogy: nothing one has said or written can be used in evidence against one's obviously heartfelt testimony, for the past is infinitely elastic.

In our present, imperfectly postmodern world, where most information still takes the potentially embarrassing form of printed matter lurking in archives, liars still must position themselves so that the historical record may not easily gainsay them. In that regard, UFOs have the advantage of goblins and ghosts, entities known to be capricious, elusive, unverifiable in their very nature, whose existence is strictly a function of our willingness to credit the testimony of those who choose to tell such tales.

There are two regions that liars head for by preference: periods of convenient isolation and the remote past. Strieber was abducted from the bedroom of a rustic cabin in the Catskills, and other abductees have usually been similarly circumstanced. Another, grander kind of liar rewrites history on a cosmic scale, telling lies not about himself but about the entire planet from literally the day of creation. The great-granddaddy of such liars was Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), a man whose once-flourishing fame has withered to the size of a few footnotes in out-of-the-way scholarly texts. Donnelly wrote three SF novels, one of which, Caesar's Column (1889), was a best-seller in its day (and will be considered in Chapter 9, as a prototype of the Star Wars techno-thriller), but his true talent, his genius, was for hoaxing. He imposed on the credulity of the public on three separate occasions, and all three inventions, in mutated form, are still in circulation.

His first and most imitated fabrication was a work of pseudo-archaelogy, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), in which he argued "that the description of this island given by Plato is not, as has been long supposed, fable, but veritable history," that it was "the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization, ... from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civlized nations." In short, all recorded history is in error, except for Plato and the the Book of Genesis. (Even in 1882, Donnelly knew that the best way to pitch a flaky theory is to connect it with a tenet of fundamentalist faith. If you can believe in Noah's ark, why not Atlantis?)

Already in the nineteenth century, for a hoax to succeed, there had to be some semblance of "science" in the mix, and Donnelly cited evidence from the then infant science of archaeology: "Among the Romans, the Chinese, the Abyssinians, and the Indians of Canada the singular custom prevails of lifting the bride over the door-step of her husband's home." How to account for this? The only explanation must be these cultures' common source in the customs of Atlantis. For linguistic evidence there's this: "How can we, without Atlantis, explain the presence of the Basques in Europe, who have no lingual affinities with any other race on the continent of Europe, but whose language is similar to the languages of America?" The book is one great pinata of such specious correspondences between the alphabets, mythologies, folkways, and architectural artifacts of all civilizations. Whatever had glintingly caught Donnelly's magpie attention became another proof of our Atlantean origins.

From Donnelly's Atlantis has sprung a vast progeny of SF-flavored pseudohistories, the most popular of which has been Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? (1968). Von Daniken would have it that

dim, as yet undefinable ages ago an unknown spaceship discovered our planet. The crew of the spaceship soon found out that the earth had all the prerequisites for intelligent life to develop .... The spacemen artificially fertilized some female members of this species, put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Thousands of years later the space travelers returned and found scattered specimens of the genus homo sapiens. They repeated their breeding experiment several times until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it. The people of that age were still barbaric. Because there was a danger that they might retrogress and mate with animals again, the space travelers destroyed the unsuccessful specimens or took them with them to settle them on other continents. The first communities and the first skills came into being; rock faces and cave walls were painted, pottery was discovered, and the first attempts at architecture were made.
With this unsavory amalgam of Darwin, the Old Testament, and the eugenic fantasies of the Third Reich, von Daniken scored a huge publishing success. "Over 4,000,000 copies in print" brags the cover of the thirty-fifth paperback printing from 1978. Although Donnelly lived before the age of UFO mythology and paperbacks, there is nothing in Chariots that cannot be found already fully developed in Atlantis and in Donnelly's successor hoax, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), which explains how a long-ago comet had almost collided with the Earth, sinking Atlantis and wreaking assorted other havocs. This rather modest astronomical fantasy, which does for Newton what Donnelly had already done for Darwin, prefigures the work of Immanuel Velikovsky (e.g., Worlds in Collision), another redneck archaeologist who also offers the litter of ancient civilizations as proof of his ditzy theory that the solar system is like a game of croquet played by vengeful gods.

No doubt many of the readers of Strieber, von Daniken, and Velikovsky approach their books in the same playful spirit they would bring to an SF story, asking only to be amused. Their books offer larger servings of the campy pleasures available in supermarket tabloids that show photos of Clinton shaking hands with an alien. For such readers, "Far out!" "Weird!" and "What next?" are expressions of appreciation, and belief is not really at issue. Even most of the great mass of those who tell pollsters they believe in UFOs can best be understood to be "entertaining" that belief, partly because aliens are a nifty idea, as long as they never directly impinge on one's life, and partly because to profess such belief has become a way of giving the finger to know-it-all intellectual snobs.

A certain class of reader values bizarre and paranoid theories precisely because they are bizarre and paranoid. In the lates '70s the SF writer Robert Anton Wilson brought out a series of books under the umbrella title of Illuminatus! that aspired to be a Summa of all conspiracy, occult, and UFO theories. Some of the books were offered as fiction, some as nonfiction. For Wilson and his fans, veridity was never an issue. I saw him once, after a book signing in Los Angeles, gravely romancing a would-be true believer, throwing out dark hints, then lapsing into winks and giggles. Did he experience cognitive dissonance? I wondered at the time. Does Oliver Stone when he films egregious distortions of the historical record as though he were recreating actual events? To both questions the answer is: probably not. They must see themselves not as liars, or even romancers, but as poets, in the sense that Sir Philip Sidney intended when he wrote in his "Defense of Poetry" of 1595, "Only the poet... lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were."

The license that "poets" assume in rewriting ancient history to suit their own fancy and sense of cosmic justice is not always without unhappy consequences in the real world. Witness the effect that such fabulation has had on school and university programs throughout the country, where "African-American Baseline Essays" has been used as a text to teach students that ancient Egyptians (who were black) developed the theory of evolution long before Darwin, understood quantum mechanics, flew gliders, could predict auspicious days by astrology, and could foresee the future by their psychic powers. This information is passed off as science. Martin Bernal, the author of Black Athena (1987), would have us believe that Greek civilization was either borrowed or stolen from Egypt. Other Afrocentrists claim that Aristotle stole his philosophy from books in the Library at Alexandria (a city that did not exist in his lifetime); that Socrates and Cleopatra were black (a fact of which their many detractors made no mention). Commenting on these matters in the New York Review of Books, Jasper Griffin says: "These assertions and the persistence with which they are made in the face of refutation form a fascinating study in morbid collective psychology.... But the implications are worrying. Some academics now say, and others think, that it does not matter whether these assertions are based on evidence or not, or whether they do or do not stand up to dispassionate scrutiny."

To put it another way, Afrocentric mythologizers have the right to lie. Not only that but to controvert or ridicule their spurious scholarship is an act of racism. Ten years ago it was Tawana Brawley's self-serving charges of being raped that were at issue; now it is Western civilization tout court. Those who are inclined to shrug must suppose that no one is harmed by such fantasies, which may serve, after all, as a valuable source of self-esteem for black students. Real harm is done by such charlatanry, however. Those bamboozled into believing palpable untruths that are recognized as such by the larger community are likely in time to develop an attitude of truculent resentment and outright paranoia rather than self-esteem. James Wolcott, reviewing a recent tome of UFO lore in the New Yorker, describes his own close encounters with "abductees":

They bugged me. I came to feel that I was dealing with a quasi-cult of deluded cranks. The abductees I interviewed, far from being people plucked out of the ordinary workday, had browsed the entire New Age boutique of reincarnation, channeling, auras, and healing crystals .... For them the aliens were agents of spiritual growth [but beneath that] was a pinched righteousness; the ones I met tended to be classic pills of passive aggression. Anger and distrust brooded beneath the surface.
Not all the aggression of UFO believers can be counted on to be passive, however. On June 14, 1996, three men on Long Island--one the president of the Long Island UFO Network, and the other two members of the organization--were arrested for plotting to assassinate Suffolk County officials and seize control of county government. What had spurred them to this act was the refusal of those officials to recognize the clear and present danger posed by the UFOs that had set brush fires on Long Island the previous summer.

The potential for such fanaticism is always present when people insist that their self-delusions, dreams, and lies must be taken at face value by the world at large. The world, alas, often refuses. The gentlemen on Long Island certainly made the wrong move in trying to resolve the tension inherent in that situation. Had they been wiser, and a little more patient, they would have done what other gifted liars have done, sometimes with wonderful success: they would have started their own religion.

Or, if they lacked that degree of grandiosity, they could have followed the career path blazed for them by American's first SF writer and one of our most accomplished liars, Edgar Allan Poe