Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff

[Steve Roby]

There were books in the 1970s debunking the Bermuda Triangle, von Daniken, etc, but I didn't want to read them. Instead, as I read more of the woowoo, I started noticing contradictions and other silliness and started thinking, hey, wait a minute. As I recall, von Daniken's fourth (?) book seemed to almost completely contradict his earlier books, going from aliens did it to God did it. A book on the Bermuda Triangle -- which was supposed to be a strange and unique regional phenomenon -- claimed that actually there were a lot of places where ships and planes disappeared. I assume the author was going for an "oh wow it's bigger than I thought" reaction but I had an "oh stuff happens everywhere, so there's nothing special about this area after all" reaction. The same author, running out of material, also added chapters about ghost stories in the region as more proof of the weirdness of the Bermuda Triangle, and I did not believe in ghosts at all, so that didn't help my willing suspension of disbelief. Then there was the time I bought a UFO magazine. The cover story was a typical "I was taken aboard their ship" story. To prove how strange and alien it was, the author mentioned that the alien controls were labelled in what was clearly an alien language, with words like NXPTQ and FLRGN. It didn't occur to him that an alien language wouldn't use an alphabet from Earth. And then there was the whole pyramid power thing that was just too damn stupid for words (if you keep your razor blade in a pyramid-shaped box, the blade will stay sharp forever!). The Alan Parsons Project even made a concept album about pyramid power.

Between all these things, my suspension of disbelief started fading pretty rapidly. At least science fiction writers tried to make their stories logically consistent.

 

[Christopher]

Then there was the time I bought a UFO magazine. The cover story was a typical "I was taken aboard their ship" story. To prove how strange and alien it was, the author mentioned that the alien controls were labelled in what was clearly an alien language, with words like NXPTQ and FLRGN. It didn't occur to him that an alien language wouldn't use an alphabet from Earth. And then there was the whole pyramid power thing that was just too damn stupid for words (if you keep your razor blade in a pyramid-shaped box, the blade will stay sharp forever!).

The thing that stood out to me as particularly inane (to the point that I called it out in my Analog story "Abductive Reasoning," where a real alien encounters a UFO cultist and is nothing like he expects) was how some UFO believers used footage of a mystery light in the night sky jerking around wildly in the frame as evidence that UFOs could make wild maneuvers unbound by inertia -- even though the footage was taken from an aircraft in flight by a handheld camera, so obviously it was the camera jerking around, not the light (which was probably just Venus or something).

 

[Set Harth]

And then there was the whole pyramid power thing that was just too damn stupid for words (if you keep your razor blade in a pyramid-shaped box, the blade will stay sharp forever!). The Alan Parsons Project even made a concept album about pyramid power.

One time this guy I knew moved his bed over to show me that he had pyramids on the floor under the bed shooting pyramid energy into him while he was sleeping.

 

[Daddy Todd]

The Alan Parsons Project even made a concept album about pyramid power.

And the Prog/Pop band Ambrosia's second album, Somewhere I've Never Travelled, actually included a fold-up pyramid as part of the front cover. In spite of this, it's definitely one of my favorite albums of 1976.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was produced by a pre-Project Alan Parsons.

 

[publiusr]

Clive Revill passed away yesterday. He was in the adaptation of Richard Matheson's 'Hell House'. Much like 'Ghostbusters', Richard Matheson tried to offer a scientific explanation for the hauntings/paranormal events in Hell House, with Clive Revill's character leading the team tasked with discovering the proof of an afterlife.

That is a favorite of mine.

Two wonderful haunted house films of recent years are THE NIGHT HOUSE and CAVEAT.

I think one of the ships from SPACE:1999 made it into Project UFO.

PROJECT: U.F.O. (1978)

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing now. Are the...

space1970.blogspot.com

Speaking of SPACE:1999, one episode showed the ghost of someone who hadn’t died yet…a recent pseudo documentary had a young lady encounter her own ghost. (Lake Mungo).

 

[Starkers]

That is a favorite of mine.

Two wonderful haunted house films of recent years are THE NIGHT HOUSE and CAVEAT.

I think one of the ships from SPACE:1999 made it into Project UFO.

PROJECT: U.F.O. (1978)

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing now. Are the...

space1970.blogspot.com

Speaking of SPACE:1999, one episode showed the ghost of someone who hadn’t died yet…a recent pseudo documentary had a young lady encounter her own ghost. (Lake Mungo).

Have you seen Oddity? Same director as Caveat and it's really good.

 

[Starkers]

That is a favorite of mine.

Two wonderful haunted house films of recent years are THE NIGHT HOUSE and CAVEAT.

I think one of the ships from SPACE:1999 made it into Project UFO.

PROJECT: U.F.O. (1978)

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing now. Are the...

space1970.blogspot.com

Speaking of SPACE:1999, one episode showed the ghost of someone who hadn’t died yet…a recent pseudo documentary had a young lady encounter her own ghost. (Lake Mungo).

I meant to say, The Night House is great and Lake Mungo is simply wonderful

 

[publiusr]

I missed Oddity

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Okay, you may be right. I had basically the same experience, but I was 5 years younger than you at the time, so my memory is probably worse.

I do remember Hynek being a big name in UFO circles, and I understood that to be the reason Spielberg drew on his ideas as a foundation for the movie, but it's possible he was more of a niche figure before the movie raised his profile.

Ahh, the Bermuda Triangle. It was such a big deal when I was a kid that I assumed the lore had been around for centuries, and the fiction about it tended to assert as much. So I was surprised to learn a few years back that the name "Bermuda Triangle" was coined only 4 years before I was born. (The Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series erroneously asserted that the Bermuda Triangle had been known by that name during World War II.) It was hyped like crazy for a decade or so, and then kind of faded out. I guess it got eclipsed by the Roswell nonsense when that started to emerge in pop culture around 1980. The original 1947 weather-balloon crash was just one incident in a flurry of UFO hysteria at the time and was quickly debunked and forgotten, until a researcher dredged it up in the late '70s and wrote a book about it. That's why there's never any mention of Roswell in Close Encounters or Project U.F.O. or the like -- it just wasn't part of the lore back then. (The movie Hangar 18 is often misremembered as being about Roswell, but it's about a fictitious present-day UFO crash. However, it was released around the same time as the first book about Roswell, so it probably contributed to the spread of the myth in the culture.)

It's funny you say that though, this post made me think of my rewatch of Dark Skies and that covered Roswell and other stuff. I liked their twist on an alternate history even when it got too over the top

 

[FredH]

I think one of the ships from SPACE:1999 made it into Project UFO.

PROJECT: U.F.O. (1978)

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing now. Are the...

space1970.blogspot.com

Tangentially speaking of Ezekiel, the angels he sees are weird enough that I could buy it as an account of meeting higher-dimensional aliens. (Not that I actually think that; I don’t.)

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I assume psychotropic substances were available to consume in the ancient Middle East.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Tangentially speaking of Ezekiel, the angels he sees are weird enough that I could buy it as an account of meeting higher-dimensional aliens. (Not that I actually think that; I don’t.)

I could buy the story in Ezekiel as a proper encounter with a UFO, an actual craft that came down from the sky.

It is one of the weirdest stories in there.

 

[Starkers]

I missed Oddity

It sounds like we may have similar tastes and if so I would really recommend it, my favourite horror film of last year.

 

[Set Harth]

I assume psychotropic substances were available to consume in the ancient Middle East.

One theory is that it was mold in the grain.

 

[Christopher]

It's funny you say that though, this post made me think of my rewatch of Dark Skies and that covered Roswell and other stuff.

Yeah, that was a 1996-7 show, three years after The X-Files began, so it would've been from around the time that the Roswell myth became annoyingly super-trendy in pop culture. Deep Space Nine's Roswell episode was 1995, and Futurama's was 2001. The Roswell High book series started in 1998, and the Roswell TV series based on it started in '99. The 1998 Seven Days claimed its time travel technology was salvaged from the Roswell crash.

It was all over the place back then, to the point that people started to believe Roswell had been a continuous part of UFO lore since 1947, when in fact it was completely forgotten until around 1979-80, because it had just been one of many sightings in the wave of UFO hysteria in the weeks following Kenneth Arnold's "flying disc" sighting. It was only two years after WWII, and Americans had been conditioned for years to constantly watch the skies for enemy aircraft, and that free-floating hypervigilance needed a new target to latch onto, so as soon as the idea was publicized, people started seeing mysterious flying saucers everywhere they looked. (Although it was a few years before the idea that they were alien spaceships outcompeted all other possible explanations in the public mind.)

I could buy the story in Ezekiel as a proper encounter with a UFO, an actual craft that came down from the sky.

It is one of the weirdest stories in there.

Dreams and hallucinations can be plenty weird. It's significant how many supposed religious visions are seen by people who are exhausted and dehydrated from desert pilgrimages or have worked themselves into an ecstatic mental state. The whole reason the scientific method demands repeatability of results in independent tests is because subjective perceptions are intrinsically unreliable.

Skimming the text, though, the imagery doesn't look much different from the way supernatural beings are described in a lot of world religions, with multiple heads and body parts or pieces of different animals and people grafted together. It was probably just part of the culture back then -- you wanted to tell a story about a divine being, you'd make it weird and inhuman by saying ooh, it had twelve faces and wings coming out of its stomach and was 50% cow and 50% eagle and 50% scorpion or whatever. (But mostly all 100% Labrador retreiver.)

Or maybe there was a more specific meaning to it. People back then didn't tell stories to report literal events, but to convey abstract ideas through metaphor and symbolism. It's possible that elements of the Ezekiel text like wheels or the number four or specific types of animal had symbolic or metaphorical meanings in that culture that are forgotten today. It sounds weird to us because we don't know the code that would make the metaphor clear. Like, would someone unfamiliar with our culture's metaphors understand an editorial about hawks calling for war or soldiers being uses as guinea pigs?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Oh I don't know I'm torn about the Roswell story, if there was really nothing to it why is it something no one official will acknowledge one way or the other, if it really is nothing?

 

[Christopher]

Oh I don't know I'm torn about the Roswell story, if there was really nothing to it why is it something no one official will acknowledge one way or the other, if it really is nothing?

There's nothing to "acknowledge." Like I said, in 1947, the term "flying saucer" or "flying disc" hadn't yet taken on the connotation of "alien spacecraft." It just meant "unidentified round thing in the sky." So when the investigators called it a flying saucer and then reported a day or two later that it had just been a weather balloon, that wasn't a retraction or a coverup, just a clarification. "We didn't know what the round thing was, and now we know it was a weather balloon." That was the end of it, and life went on. But decades later, when a researcher dredged up the forgotten story (which, again, was merely one of dozens of alleged sightings in the weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting started a nationwide hysteria), he back-projected his own assumptions about the meaning of the phrase "flying saucer" and misinterpreted it as an admission of finding an alien ship followed by a coverup. Everything else was manufactured from that misconception. The people he interviewed about a long-forgotten event from decades before were probably influenced by his leading questions, or played along for the publicity.

I recommend watching the 1997 Scientific American Frontiers episode “Beyond Science?”, the video and transcript of which are available at http://www.chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season8.html. It contains the most definitive debunking of the Roswell myth I’ve ever seen.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

There's nothing to "acknowledge." Like I said, in 1947, the term "flying saucer" or "flying disc" hadn't yet taken on the connotation of "alien spacecraft." It just meant "unidentified round thing in the sky." So when the investigators called it a flying saucer and then reported a day or two later that it had just been a weather balloon, that wasn't a retraction or a coverup, just a clarification. "We didn't know what the round thing was, and now we know it was a weather balloon." That was the end of it, and life went on. But decades later, when a researcher dredged up the forgotten story (which, again, was merely one of dozens of alleged sightings in the weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting started a nationwide hysteria), he back-projected his own assumptions about the meaning of the phrase "flying saucer" and misinterpreted it as an admission of finding an alien ship followed by a coverup. Everything else was manufactured from that misconception. The people he interviewed about a long-forgotten event from decades before were probably influenced by his leading questions, or played along for the publicity.

I recommend watching the 1997 Scientific American Frontiers episode “Beyond Science?”, the video and transcript of which are available at http://www.chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season8.html. It contains the most definitive debunking of the Roswell myth I’ve ever seen.

I might just do that. Thanks.


I mean one day though It would be nice to find actual evidence of otherworldly life.... Just to be optimistic about it.

 

[Christopher]

I mean one day though It would be nice to find actual evidence of otherworldly life.... Just to be optimistic about it.

If we do, it will most likely be through telescopic observation of other worlds, detecting biosignatures or technosignatures in their atmospheric spectra or surface details, or through SETI detecting interstellar broadcasts signals. UFO beliefs have nothing to do with the scientific search for alien life; they're just ancient beliefs in demons and ghoulies and fairy folk dressed up with the surface trappings of the space age. Over the decades, "eyewitness" descriptions of supposed "close encounters" have tended to conform to whatever alien images were dominant in the science fiction of the day -- little green men in the late '40s and early '50s, big scary monsters in the '50s when monster B-movies were the rage, idealized humans in the early '60s when TV aliens were just actors in weird costumes, etc. The "Grey" image started as a prediction of future human evolution that showed up many times over the decades, as far back as H.G. Wells's day. Once pop culture embraced UFO lore, it started to feed back on itself, with the "Grey" image getting popularized by Close Encounters and later The X-Files, until it became the default perception of what UFO aliens looked like. As with Roswell, the feedback loop between pop culture and UFO lore amplified it until it displaced everything else.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

If we do, it will most likely be through telescopic observation of other worlds, detecting biosignatures or technosignatures in their atmospheric spectra or surface details, or through SETI detecting interstellar broadcasts signals. UFO beliefs have nothing to do with the scientific search for alien life; they're just ancient beliefs in demons and ghoulies and fairy folk dressed up with the surface trappings of the space age. Over the decades, "eyewitness" descriptions of supposed "close encounters" have tended to conform to whatever alien images were dominant in the science fiction of the day -- little green men in the late '40s and early '50s, big scary monsters in the '50s when monster B-movies were the rage, idealized humans in the early '60s when TV aliens were just actors in weird costumes, etc. The "Grey" image started as a prediction of future human evolution that showed up many times over the decades, as far back as H.G. Wells's day. Once pop culture embraced UFO lore, it started to feed back on itself, with the "Grey" image getting popularized by Close Encounters and later The X-Files, until it became the default perception of what UFO aliens looked like. As with Roswell, the feedback loop between pop culture and UFO lore amplified it until it displaced everything else.

Well I wasn't referring to the UFO lore but I mean if we find it via scientific observation