Narratives on Alien Abduction

In modern times, initiation into adult society comes less from traditions ritually imbued by family and culture and more through random encounters with the mass culture of films,music, and television. Witness the nearly apocalyptic rhetoric of media events such as the death of Princess Di or the final Seinfeld episode. Perhaps societies driven by such hypostases of personality, like the United States, evolve a multimyth marketplace that eventually replaces the monopolistic functioning of traditional religious myth with an ongoing array of popular avant-garde religions. In such a context, the AAN has fertile ground to readily take form and multiply. Furthermore, if AANs are more like an antimyth-in opposition to established science and religion-it raises a new possibility that resistance is growing to the desacralizing effect of science. I am reminded of Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous edict: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. And finally, AANs have raised issues of good and evil and thereby divide even AAN believers into denominations. In addition to some fundamentalist Christian attitudes toward AANs, an intense debate has arisen in the ufological community among those who give full credence to the claims of first contact and who yet differ about the intentions of the alleged sources of the phenomena. As a result, one faction fears alien invasion or human conspiracy or both (perhaps represented by Vallee, Jacobs, and Hopkins), another camp appears to welcome alien salvation (like Sprinkle and Boylan), and still a third stays on the fence (maybe Fowler and Strieber). Is this the beginning of first contact religion denominationalism? It appears that there is an unlimited number of possible explanations for the AAN phenomenon. Most of them are untestable, not scientifically useful, or employ tests that are internal to the explanation itself and not extendable to other systems. The Rorschach-like nature of the AAN derives from the many ways of approaching it with a specific set of concepts: physical, metaphysical, religious. This is a blind alley. Even allowing for the possibility of hoax and deception will not cause the phenomenon to go away. The field still calls for an approach that studies the narratives strictly in terms of known human experience,not in terms of speculative theories.

Aliens are not attempting to solve our spiritual problems. Investing even a hypothetical alien lifeform with intense interest in human religious behavior can only be properly characterized as an anthropomorphic conceit. The reality is that we are engaged in our own spiritual struggles, on both the individual and social levels, and our intuitive faculties produce images reflecting that struggle. Then our cognitive processes impose sequences of order and meaning upon these images, resulting in narratives. Narrators and the “researchers” who shepherd them are fundamentalists, each after their own fashion: Christian, meta-physical, or materialist. And each in their own fashion is attempting to understand the implications of their respective stories.

The Christian tradition says that “God is not a god of the dead but of the living.”Namely, our spiritual realm is not the realm of outer space or other dimensions but of the earth itself. We are led to other matters in our attempt to avoid the fears we feel as the result of our unwillingness to face ourselves and the consequences of our actions. The struggles embodied in AANs may come about because of a general failure to face reality. The eternal quality of the alien “presence” reflects the relevance of that presence only as a signal from ourselves to ourselves. When we are back about our own business as human beings, individually and collectively, the aliens will disappear. Well before the advent of the computer sciences, German philosopher Rudolf Steiner claimed to see the spiritual effects of what he described as the “hyper-materialization of the modern worldview.” This prophecy has an interesting connection to alien abduction narratives, for in the same essay where Steiner predicted that a “spidery network of automata covering the earth” would gradually attain its own consciousness, he also said that this development would bring about the arrival of “beings from the heavens” in response to an increasingly virtual (illusory) human existence.Whether AANs are a new reality or part of the illusion remains to be determined.