In 1952 Barker wrote his first magazine article, an account of the so-called Flatwoods Monster, a UFO encounter that occurred in West Virginia. It was published in Fate magazine. That year he joined the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), headed by Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and became one of its most active members. Barker wrote frequently for Space Review, the publication of the IFSB.

In late 1953 Albert Bender closed down the IFSB, allegedly due to a threat he received from three men dressed in black (this was the origin of the so-called men-in-black, or MIB, phenomenon).

Gray Barker’s book about the Bender incident, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, was published in 1956.When the IFSB dissolved, Barker started his own magazine, The Saucerian. It became one of the most popular UFO magazines, with a circulation of 1,500. Barker considered himself an entertainer and folklorist rather than a factual reporter and was a gifted writer with a gentle, understated sense of humor.

One of Barker’s best friends was James W.

Moseley, publisher of a rival magazine, Saucer News. Moseley and Barker pretended to be feuding and sniped at each other in the pages of their magazines. Together, Barker and Moseley were responsible for one of the most notorious hoaxes of the 1950s. They obtained a piece of State Department stationery and wrote a letter to contactee George Adamski, signing it “R. E. Straith.”

The letter stated that the State Department had on file a great deal of evidence confirming Adamski’s claims and encouraged his work. After receiving this letter, Adamski sent a registered letter addressed to Straith at the State Department. When the return receipt indicated that the letter had been accepted, it was assumed that Straith was real. The Straith letter was announced in an article in the March/April 1958 issue of Flying Saucer Review. Adamski partisans around the world celebrated this validation of his work. The Straith letter created Barker and Moseley’s desired effect of throwing long-term confusion into the UFO field.

In 1959 Barker entered the book-publishing field.His first offering was Howard Menger’s From Outer Space to You. In 1962 he published Albert K.

Bender’s Flying Saucers and the Three Men. This was a wild story that told of Bender being abducted by monstrous aliens and taken to the South Pole. Barker also published several paperback compilations, such as The Strange Case of Dr.M. K.Jessup and Gray Barker’s Book of Saucers. The last issue of Barker’s magazine, which had changed its name to Saucerian Bulletin in 1956, appeared in 1962. Barker sold the magazine to James Moseley, who incorporated it into Saucer News. In 1970 Barker wrote and published The Silver Bridge, a fictionalized account of UFO-related events. Barker published a tabloid, Gray Barker’sNewsletter, in the 1970s. In 1981 he compiled and published A UFO Guide to “Fate” Magazine. Gray Barker died on December 6, 1984. Following Barker’s death, Moseley confessed to writing the Straith letter with Barker.

For the Greek philosopher, the story of Atlantis was primarily a morality tale: In many ways parallel to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, Plato’s narrative of Atlantis describes a kind of earthly paradise that was destroyed by the gods after its rulers became puffed up and greedy.Thus, as with many other versions of the flood myth that is told worldwide, the Atlantean deluge was explained as a form of divine punishment.

However, it should also be noted that the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis was not just confined to the island nation; it devastated other areas of the world as well. In particular, in Critias, Plato indicates that the Athenian army that threw back the Atlantean invaders was destroyed in the same cataclysm:“But afterward there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared, and was sunk beneath the sea.” Thus, the Atlantean cataclysm was presumably also a universal cataclysm that had an impact on the entire world, or at least that with which Plato was familiar, namely, the Eastern Mediterranean.

Several contemporary scholars have proposed alternate sites for the legendary isle. Most compelling is the theory, originally advanced early in the twentieth century, that Plato’s story of Atlantis actually describes the destruction of Cretan civilization by a volcanic explosion in 1470 B.C.E. An alternative argument, put forward by Eberhard Zangger in The Flood from Heaven (1992), is that the myth refers to the Achaean destruction of Troy in the fourteenth century B.C.E.

There has been some interest in Atlantis over the centuries, but the Christian civilization of traditional Europe tended to discourage such speculation. After the Americas were encountered by Europeans, several writers penned works arguing that the newly discovered continents were Plato’s Atlantis. Subsequently, interest in the ancient tale of a sunken isle waned. In terms of belief in the existence of an antediluvian world, Atlantis is more of a modern than a traditional myth-a myth that did not achieve widespread currency until the late nineteenth century, more than two millennia after Plato’s time.

Contemporary interest in the legend began with Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), in which he proposed that the human race and human civilization had begun on that island and had initially spread elsewhere by colonization, then by refugees when the island was destroyed by a natural cataclysm. Donnelly’s ideas were adopted as an integral element of theosophy in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. The most important author who spread interest in Atlantis was, however, Lewis Spence (1874-1955), a Scottish occult scholar who wrote five books on Atlantis between 1924 and 1943.

From these sources, the focus on Atlantis passed to Edgar Cayce, who used it as a parable, much as Plato had, in his readings. After Cayce’s death, two compilations of such material were released by the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Atlantis: Fact or Fiction, and Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. These two paperbacks were the source for most beliefs about Atlantis within the New Age movement.Cayce predicted that evidence for the historical existence of Atlantis would be found offshore from North America in the 1960s. To date, however, the most that has been discovered is a roadway-like series of stones on the ocean floor-stones that might be a natural phenomenon rather than an artifact of human design. In the early 1980s, Frank Alper, in Exploring Atlantis, extensively discussed the material he claimed to have channeled on how the Atlanteans used crystals to power their civilization. Discussions such as Alper’s further served to secure a place for the Atlantis legend in New Age thinking. For many contemporary metaphysical writers, Atlantis was a highly technological society that destroyed itself through misuse of its technology-perhaps even through misuse of its crystal technology.

In the late 1990s, however, these views underwent modification as the result of a new school of Atlantology, which champions the view that Antarctica was the site of the ancient nation. The assumption at work here, which is based on the geological theories of the late Charles Hapgood, is that the earth’s crust has been displaced in such a way that Antarctica was shifted from a temperate climate zone to its current location at the South Pole.

This perspective has been popularized by the relatively recent Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), which argues for the existence of a technologically advanced civilization-Atlantis-in the period preceding the earliest known citied societies. To support his point, author Graham Hancock examines the many artifacts and architectural monuments that are difficult to account for within the limits of our currently accepted scheme of history. Like Donnelly before them, for Hancock and other Atlantologists the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesoamerica were either Atlantean colonies or areas where survivors fled after the sinking of Atlantis.

The advantage of this new site for Atlantis is that it avoids the problem of the nonpresence of ancient ruins in the beds of the Atlantic Ocean:

Whatever remains of Atlantis is hidden beneath the southern polar ice cap. Given the inaccessibility of this new site for the antediluvian world, the legend of Atlantis is likely to continue to provide fuel for the human imagination well into the current millennium.

For roughly the same reasons, Antarctica is an ideal location for imaginatively placing a “secret” UFO base. One of the more well-known proponents of this notion was Albert Bender, who claimed to have visited a large extraterrestrial installation hidden beneath the ice of the southernmost continent. Antarctica was also supposedly the site of a portal through which UFOs passed, according to certain hollow-earth enthusiasts. If it has not already been asserted, it is only a matter of time before someone comes up with the idea that UFO bases existing at the South Pole represent the residue of Atlantean civilization.

Despite the widespread presence of astrology in contemporary society, most people are familiar with only a tiny portion of this subject, namely, the 12 signs of the Zodiac as they relate to the person ality of individuals and the use of astrology for divinatory purposes. The Zodiac (literally: “circle of animals”) is the belt constituted by the 12 signs-Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

The assumption of the Zodiac is ancient, with sources in the early citied Mesopotamian cultures. The first 12-sign Zodiacs were taken from the name the gods from those cultures. The Greeks astrology is adopted from Babylonians, and then the Romans adopted the astrology from Greeks. These peoples change the name of the terms of the Mesopotamian Zodiac, which is why the renowned Zodiac of the West have the names out of Mediterranean gods.

From a historical view, symbolism of zodiac can be found anywhere, and expressions on zodiac are used in English linguistic (e.g.,“bull-headed,”for to Taurus;“crab,” an for Cancer; and so on). The popularity sign astrology of the Sun (often found in daily newspaper) has allowed these symbols to exist in modern community, so that even such things as car took an astrological name (e.g., the Ford Taurus).

Astrological symbolism has also been associated with several UFO abduction experiences. In one case, a Southern California woman claimed that during her abduction her back had been marked with a symbol resembling the astrological glyph for Jupiter. In certain other cases, hypnotized abductees recall seeing the symbol for the planet Saturn.

When Samuel Eaton Thompson met a group of Venusians in 1950, they revealed to him that the reason for the earth’s problems is that earthlings are all born under different astrological signs. On other planets, all the people are of the same astrological sign-that of the planet. It seemed that earthlings had lived lives on other planets before being exiled to the earth. Thompson learned that all people who fulfill their mission in life return to the planet of their sign when they die.

At Yakima, he told his story to pilots who remarked that the craft were bound to have been guided missiles from Moses Lake, Washington. Arnold recalled that “I felt satisfied that that’s probably what they were. However, I had never heard of a missile base at Moses Lake.” When he landed at Pendleton,Arnold learned that his story had arrived ahead of him. The Yakima pilots had telephoned Pendleton to notify them of Arnold’s arrival and had related his adventure. (Contrary to what has often been written in UFO books, there were no reporters among these people). After discussing this with them and reaching the conclusion that these missiles were something out of the ordinary,Arnold-

“armed”with his maps and calculations so as to give “the best description I could”-repaired to the local FBI office.He found the office shut. Not having any luck with the FBI, Arnold decided to look up the journalists from the East Oregonian. One consideration in particular seems to have pushed him.As he explained to them, he had met, probably at the Hotel Pendleton where he was staying, a man from Ukiah, Oregon, who had said that he had seen a similar formation of craft there. Before leaving Pendleton, then, he went to the offices of the East Oregonian. He told Nolan Skiff and Bill Bequette about his adventure. Arnold described them as moving “like a saucer if you skipped it across the water.” Skiff, skeptical to begin with, was rapidly convinced of Arnold’s honesty. So was Bequette. The latter sent off, as he always did with local news, an Associated Press dispatch. The text of this dispatch, which was to have so many repercussions,was as follows:

PENDLETON,Ore., June 25 (AP)-Nine brightsaucer-like objects flying at “incredible” speed at 10,000 feet altitude were reported here today by Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot who said he could not hazard a guess as to what they were. Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee engaged in searching for a missing plane, said he sighted the mysterious objects yesterday at 3 p.m. They were flying between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, in Washington State, he said, and appeared to weave in and out formation.Arnold said he clocked and estimated their speed at 1,200 miles an hour.

Inquiries at Yakima last night brought only blank stares, he said, but he added he talked today with an unidentified man from Utah, south of here, who said he had seen similar objects over the mountains near Ukiah yesterday.

“It seems impossible,”Arnold said,“but there it is.”

It was as a direct consequence of this dispatch (in which the description of the movement of the objects became the description of their shape-“saucer-like”) that the story was to be taken up and widely commented on by the press. From this moment on, Kenneth Arnold found himself under siege from reporters who, without ever having heard his story in detail,would,he claimed, extract a few details from him that were rushed immediately into print. As soon as Arnold’s story became known, sightings of flying disks proliferated.As we have seen, the first AP dispatch was dated June 25 (toward the end of the morning). Starting from June 26 and over the days following, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of newspaper articles devoted to flying disks.

Most of the time saucers were explained away by scientists and military experts who asserted that “the observers just imagined they saw something, or there is some meteorological explanation for the phenomenon.” Statements quoted in these stories are filled with expressions like “mass hypnosis” and “foolish things.”Saucers were compared to the Loch Ness Monster.

Following the initial reports of sightings in July, an ongoing newspaper debate about the phenomenon emerged. Everywhere actors were voicing their opinion-and the media were orchestrating the meetings. Reporters sought out actors, reported their observations, and brought them together. It was the readers at the other end of the process who had to draw their own conclusions from the debate.We do not know much about what readers thought. The saucers certainly became a popular topic. A Gallup poll taken on August 19, 1947, revealed that while only one out of two Americans had heard of the Marshall Plan, nine out of 10 had heard about the saucers. The saucer craze created such a turmoil that the U.S. Army Air Force began an investigation in the early days of July.At the request of the Air Materiel Command, Arnold produced a written report detailing his sighting that he sent to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

A few days later, Arnold received a visit from two members of the military, Lieutenant Frank M. Brown and Captain William Davidson, who came from Hamilton Field in California. Brown and Davidson’s aim was to bring back an account from-as well as an opinion about-Arnold. To this end, the enquirers, upon returning to their base, composed a report on what they had gathered. This report consists primarily of the details of the sightings and their impressions of the personalities of the witnesses. In 1948 Arnold’s report landed on J. A. Hynek’s desk. Hynek was an astronomer the Air Force had asked to study the reports so as to avoid any possible confusion with astronomical phenomena. Hynek’s conclusion was that Arnold had seen some kind of aircraft. But Arnold heard nothing back about the eventual whereabouts of his report. He had to try other strategies to find a solution to his sighting. To this end, he accepted an invitation from a Chicago editor named Ray Palmer to go to Tacoma, Washington, and investigated another sighting. Ray Palmer was the editor of a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. The case Arnold investigated turned out to be a crude hoax, at least from the point of view of the FBI investigators. Arnold called in the two military investigators who had interviewed him earlier (they asked him to contact them if he heard anything interesting). Afterward, Brown and Davidson died in an airplane crash.

From then on, the saucer story followed different paths. In January 1948 the newly formed U.S. Air Force launched Project Sign to investigate the sightings. This project, located in the Technical Intelligence Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was classified as secret, and the public had access only to the press reports.

But other actors entered the scene. For example, in the spring of 1948, Ray Palmer, while still concerned with the editing of Amazing Stories, founded with the aid of Curtis Fuller (editor in chief of the magazine Flying) a review completely devoted to the occult: Fate. What interests us is that the first issue featured flying saucers. And the article that followed the editorial was a reproduction of the report that Kenneth Arnold had given the U.S.Army a little more than a year prior. In the 1950s, amateur investigators began to challenge official explanations and launched fanzines and groups. Arnold kept up a strong interest in the subject.

The Kenneth Arnold affair is a challenge for social history and sociology. Unfortunately, it has been only randomly studied by historians. Ted Bloecher’s pioneering work on the UFO wave of 1947 was not read outside UFO circles. Most historiographical works on UFOs, even if they are more sophisticated, have been conducted by amateurs who are not connected with the academic world. This is unfortunate, because when we read the historiographic studies published thus far on the UFO wave of 1947 we can see that the consequences of Arnold’s story go beyond the simple historiography of UFOs. There is a strong possibility that it may open new perspectives on the sociology of contemporary scientific culture, in the following ways.

First, flying saucers are not just popular culture. Historians like Michel de Certeau have long criticized the tendency to see a clear-cut division between high culture and popular culture when historians study the alleged popular literature of the past centuries.And instead of taking this division for granted, historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Roger Chartier have shown that we should describe how similar cultural elements are used in different ways. Thus, the divide between popular and elite culture is a result of the actors’ actions, not the basis of their actions. Flying saucers are not a priori different from other cultural objects such as, for example, scientific facts. They become different in the course of controversy. Why should we describe flying saucers in a different way than we describe the “popular” culture of the sixteenth century?

In this perspective, the Arnold case has the same kind of importance for the social history of parasciences that the Menocchio case studied by historian Carlo Ginzburg has for the social history of the popular cosmologies of the sixteenth Century. Arnold provides us with the possibility of studying what is too quickly dismissed as “popular belief ” with the same tools we use to study scientific knowledge. Moreover, in the same way Carlo Ginzburg identified the existence of a legitimate form of knowledge that was constructed and transmitted by actors like Menocchio, in Arnold we can identify a particular way of constructing the saucerian reality. Instead of taking categories like popular culture for granted, we should ask ourselves to describe the difference between the way we see saucers and the way we see scientific facts. Describing how Arnold saw the saucers and discussed their reality, and describing the way scientists describe scientific facts, helps us to identify a mode of seeing that is common to different social and cultural worlds.

Second, as a result of this methodological discussion, flying saucers should no longer be considered as secondary by-products of the Cold War. While historians explain how the actions of historical figures like Harry Truman and George Kennan played an important role in the birth of the Cold War era, they simply discard flying saucers as a byproduct of this climate, and witnesses like Kenneth Arnold are merely victims of the cultural influence of the Cold War. Whereas the first are actors who create a context, UFO witnesses are reduced to cultural sponges responding to their environment. This asymmetrical sociological scenario, which proposes that some actors are constructing reality while others are under its influence, is clearly limited. On the contrary, witnesses such as Arnold are, like other actors (for example, the military or diplomats like George Kennan), constructing the same menace by different means.

Whereas Kennan and Truman constructed their image of the Soviet world thanks to a complex network of diplomatic and military relations, witnesses like Arnold construct it from sightings and readings. The way the first category sees the Red Menace is not necessarily better or less “popular” than the way Arnold sees it. If, for example, we turn away from Truman and Kennan and examine Air Force military experts, we find both strategies in the same milieu:While military experts build networks of intelligence agents who collect documents and construct the Soviet Red Plan in their office, Air Force pilots search the skies of Alaska for a Soviet presence. There is no great divide between the way in which Arnold and the Washington experts see the world; there are only many minor differences between the direction they look and the tools they use.

Until the early 1980s, it was possible to drive up to the Groom dry lake bed, look across, and view the Air Force base in the distance. In the mid-1980s, the Air Force took jurisdiction over the Groom Mountains to keep Soviet spies from looking down on the base. At that point the base became officially nonexistent. It disappeared from U.S. Geological Survey maps, and the government has refused to refer to the base in any way. The rumors about this area have developed far beyond what is usual even for UFO phenomena. There have been many claims that the technology that powers some of the test craft has been derived from investigations of crashed UFOs, and Area 51 is alleged to be the location of the flying saucer that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, on July 2, 1947. This bit of UFO folklore was incorporated into the film Independence Day. One person claiming knowledge of Area 51 secrets is Robert Scott Lazar. Lazar says that there is an even more highly secured facility located about 15 miles south of Area 51 called S-4. It is situated at the base of the Papoose Mountains next to the Papoose dry lake bed. According to Lazar, the installation is built into the mountain, and the nine hangar doors are angled at about 60 degrees. The doors are covered with a sand-textured coating to blend in with the side of the mountain and the desert floor.

Lazar claims to have worked at S-4 in the 1980s on disk-shaped flying craft that were based on a technology received from extraterrestrial beings, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Lazar says he personally worked on one of several fully operational flying disks at the facility. Lazar’s disk was 16 feet tall and 40 feet in diameter.The center level of the disk housed control consoles and seats, both of which were too small and too low to the floor to be functional for adult human beings. Lazar claims to have been shown official briefing documents stating that the beings from whom the flying-saucer secrets came were from the Zeta Reticuli system. The beings were described as three to four feet tall,with grayish skin, large heads, and almond-shaped, wrap-around eyes. Lazar claims that these beings had been visiting earth for a long time, evidently around 10,000 years. According to Lazar, security at Area 51 was tight.

He says they worked on the buddy system, in which two individuals were assigned to be buddies and were allowed to converse with no one else. Staff members were followed by security even into the bathroom. Lazar claims that security monitored his telephone, and when they learned that he was having marital problems, they decided he was a security risk and canceled his clearance. It was after this that Lazar went public with his story. Work with alien spacecraft technology supposedly accounts for the extremely high level of security at Area 51. Black Hawk helicopters patrol the public lands surrounding the base. Electronic sensors along the approaching roads detect the presence of vehicles. The surrounding public lands are monitored by armed men in camouflage fatigues who are the employees of the private security firm Wackenhut Corporation.

On Wackenhut’s board of directors are former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, two former CIA deputy directors, Frank Carlucci and Bobby Ray Inman, former Defense Intelligence Agency Director General Joseph Carroll, and former Secret Service Director James J.Rowley. Wackenhut Corporation has about 30,000 armed employees. There have been reports of Wackenhut guards harassing and detaining citizens on public roads near Area 51 and confiscating cameras at gunpoint. Area 51 itself is posted with notices stating “Deadly Force Authorized.” In addition to surveillance cameras, Area 51 has motion detectors in the ground and detectors that can sense the ammonia in human skin. In 1995 the Air Force obtained an additional 4,000 acres around Area 51, primarily the high points and mountains from which the curious had been watching for UFOs.

Robert Lazar’s background has been checked, and there is evidence to discredit his story. Officials of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and EG&G, the firm where Lazar claims to have been interviewed by the Office of Naval Intelligence for his S-4 job, say that they have never heard of him. Lazar was effectively silenced when his critics were able to associate him with a Nevada brothel. Since 1989 hundreds of persons have flocked to Rachel, Nevada, a tiny community near Area 51, after hearing stories that the U.S. government was experimenting with flying saucers there. Norio Hayakawa, former regional director of a California-based group called Civilian Intelligence Network, has organized many trips to the area surrounding Groom Lake. The degree of security at the area has convinced Hayakawa that the government is test-flying several state-of-the-art aircraft that resemble flying saucers. He also believes that several diamond-shaped aircraft that use some sort of pulse-detonation propulsion system are being tested in the area.

Gary Schultz, director of Secret Saucer Base Expeditions, claims that on February 28, 1990, he saw a metallic, disk-shaped object suddenly appear over the Jumbled Hills south of Area 51 and fly toward the Groom dry lake bed. Schultz believes that U.S. pilots are regularly being given instruction in maneuvering disk-shaped craft in the area.

Aviation Week and Space Technology reports that there have been many sightings of triangularshaped, quiet aircraft seen with flights of Lockheed F-117A Stealth Fighters. On April 20, 1992, the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw broadcast videotape made near Area 51 of a test flight of a new U.S. aerial craft that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Abductees claim to have been taken to places described as underground facilities. Some abductees have seen what appeared to be U.S. military people involved, leading to rumors that they were taken to Area 51. There have also been more radical rumors, such as that Area 51 scientists are working with living aliens as part of a secret agreement between certain agencies of the U.S. government and extraterrestrials. The most bizarre of these rumors merge into implausible conspiracy theories rather like those of survivalists, neo-Nazis, and other anti-Semitic groups.

A common mistake is to imagine the archetypes as being specific images or symbols. Archetypes are, however, more like invisible magnetic fields that cause iron filings to arrange themselves according to certain patterns. To take an example relevant to our concerns in these pages, Jung postulated the existence of a Self archetype that constitutes the unconscious basis for our ego-our conscious self-image or self-concept. This Self can be represented in a variety of ways, often in the form of four of almost anything (according to Jung, four is the number of wholeness and hence a symbol of the Self), a pattern Jung referred to as a “quaternity.” The Self can, however, also be represented by alternate symbols, such as a circle or mandala.

These concrete manifestations of elusive archetypes are known as archetypal images or, when they appear in dreams, as archetypal dream images. Dreams are not the only arena in which archetypes can emerge. Jung also asserted that much of world mythology and folklore represented manifestations of the collective unconscious (the archetypal level of the human mind). He based this assertion on his discovery that the dreams of his clients frequently contained images with which they were completely unfamiliar but that seemed to reflect symbols that could be found somewhere in the mythological systems of world culture. Because much popular UFO literature can (and has) been characterized as modern folklore, we would expect it to embody archetypal images-implying that the circular pattern of the classic flying saucer embodies the Self archetype in its mandala expression.

Apparitions, which are not seen by everyone, usually involve noises, unusual smells, extreme cold, and the displacement of objects. Visual images, tactile sensations, voices, and the apparent psychokinetic movement of objects may also be included. Apparitions move through solid matter, appear and disappear abruptly, can cast shadows and be reflected in mirrors, seem corporeal or luminous and transparent, and can be lifelike or have limited movements.

Traditionally, apparitions manifest for a particular reason-to communicate a crisis or death, provide warning, comfort the grieving, convey needed information-and appear in places where emotional events have occurred. It has been shown that there are few differences between the characteristics of apparitions of the living and those of the dead. Apparition experiences can be of various types. They can be crisis apparitions, which typically appear to individuals who are emotionally very close to the agent, or apparitions of the dead, which usually occur within a short time after death. Sometimes apparitions are collective, occurring simultaneously to multiple witnesses, or they can be reciprocal, when both agent and percipient, who are separated by distance, experience each other simultaneously.

Numerous theories have tried to explain all types of apparitions, from the assertion that they are mental hallucinations to the notion of telepathy. Other theories refer to astral or etheric bodies, an amalgam of personality patterns, recording or imprints of vibrations, projections of the human unconscious or will and concentration, spirits of the dead, and localized phenomena with their own physicality, directed by an intelligence or personality. Again, any and all of these speculative theories could be applied to the UFO phenomenon.

The first work to be formally called an apocalypse is the Apocalypse of John, more familiarly known as the Book of Revelation. Although the name comes from a Christian composition, the genre is much older, with Jewish apocalyptic literature appearing by at least the third century B.C.E. The earliest apocalyptic work was probably Zoroastrian.

Early Jewish apocalypses can be roughly divided into two principal groups. The first subgenre is what might be called “historical” apocalypses. These compositions, the most familiar of which is the Book of Daniel (the only apocalypse to be incorporated into the canonical scriptures),were extended prophecies presented in the form of allegorical visions (the Book of Revelation is clearly in this tradition). The other subgenre is narratives of otherworldly journeys, focused especially an ascent through a series of heavens, culminating in a vision of the throne of god.

In the contemporary period, the approach of the year 2000 on the Western calendar led to a heightened interest in popular belief about the possible end of the world, and most portrayals of the Endtime pictured an apocalyptic scenario. On the one hand, while there has been a steady production of predictions that the world is coming to an end over the last several centuries, their number slowly increased as the world reached the end of the second Christian millennium. There may or may not be a waning of such eschatological expectancy after the year 2001.

Much apocalyptic thought is tied to the Christian New Testament idea of a millennium, the predicted period of 1,000 years during which Satan would be chained and not allowed to pursue his evil work on earth. The arrival of the millennium has been a major theme in American Christian thought, the principal debate being whether the millennium would be brought in by a sudden act of God in the near future (prepremillennialism), emerge gradually as society became more Christian (postmillennialism), or not be a literal historical period (amillennialism).

Apocalypticism appears in every era and every culture but has become a uniquely vital theme in American religious life, especially since the rise of the Millerite movement in the 1830s. The failure of William Miller’s predictions in the 1840s led directly to the Bible Students movement, built around the predictions of Charles Taze Russell, in turn succeeded by the prophetic proclamation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.Within the emerging fundamentalist movement of the late nineteenth century, prophecy conferences provided hope for the eventual triumph of beleaguered evangelicals locked in a losing confrontation with modernists for control of American Protestant churches.As evangelicalism prospered in the twentieth century, it produced literally thousands of books advocating an expectancy of the near end of the world as we know it. Given the emphasis on this theme in American culture, it is no coincidence that a wide variety of American UFO prophets have received messages predicting an apocalyptic future. A closely related twist on this motif is represented in the frequent warnings about nuclear destruction that the Space Brothers communicated to humankind through contactees. This theme is also reflected in various ways in many films about contact with-or invasion by-extraterrestrial visitors.

Since the 1950s an entirely different concern has arisen to supplant the redemptive theme in ufological literature, namely, the abduction theme. Beginning rather modestly, stories by individuals who claimed to have been abducted by aliens grew steadily until the publication ofWhitney Strieber’s Communion in 1987. This fantastic, novelized account of abduction by aliens caused interest in the phenomenon to explode. At the time of this writing, more books on the abduction phenomenon are being published than books on all other ufological topics combined. These narratives almost always feature emotionless aliens subjecting abductees to some kind of painful operation, often sexual in nature. In these stories, extraterrestrials play the role of demons-that is, as fallen angels. Thus, if the earlier Space Brothers were technological angels, the kidnapping type of more recent decades are technological demons. The sexual or quasi-sexual themes in particular link modern extraterrestrials with the iccubi and succubi of the medieval period.

Another persistent topic in ufological literature has been the theme that the human race is the end product of genetic experimentation by aliens millennia ago with an earlier race of humanoid monkeys. This ancient-astronaut view sometimes includes a sexual theme, namely, that the aliens sexually abused our ancestors, or even that the extraterrestrials mated with human females to produce a superior race. As evidence for this peculiar view, advocates sometimes cite the Genesis verses about the Nephilim.

These sons of God, according to this line of interpretation, are the aliens that-by means of genetic manipulation or sexual insemination-produced the Nephilim, a superior terrestrial race. Interestingly enough, one of the traditional means of dealing with these verses was to say that the sons of God were fallen angels. This theme was particularly developed in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which recounts how a group of angels desired mortal females, left heaven to mate with them, and fell from grace to become demons as a result. The offspring of this union were the Nephilim. Thus, in the genetic-manipulation-of-humanity theme of the ancient-astronaut theory, the Space Brothers once again play a role traditionally assigned to angels.

On July 23, 1952, Angelucci experienced a dulling of consciousness followed by the sensation of being in flight. He was in a spherical object when the window opened and he saw the earth from space. He underwent a mystical experience and then returned to earth. Angelucci went public and spread the gospel through lectures and interviews.

As a result he was ridiculed and alienated from family and friends. He was among the speakers at an August 1953 flying-saucer convention in Los Angeles. In 1955 he published his book, The Secret of the Saucers.

Psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung considered that Angelucci’s experiences were visions rather than concrete happenings or conscious inventions. Angelucci lapsed into obscurity after the 1950s and is believed to have died in Los Angeles sometime in the 1980s.