Ten Things You Might Not Know About UFOs

Medieval rendering of UFO

Over the past 60 years an entire mythology has built up around the subject of UFOs in America.

A mythology is a cycle of important, interconnecting stories that we come to believe or at least value because they tell us something important about ourselves and our place in the world.

Often, people who have seen a UFO or who are invested in UFOs and believe something important is going get angry when anyone talks about 'UFO mythology'. That's because mythology is devalued in modern culture, and is often understood as 'a bunch of untrue stories made up to explain something'.

That is not the definition of mythology I accept. In a sense, a mythic cycle is made up of stories that are more real than simple physical reality. UFOs can be physically real, and we can still attach a mythology to them, and in fact, we have.

Here are a few things you might not know about UFOs, because they are not part of the cultural mythology attached to them:

1. UFO means 'unidentified flying object', not 'spaceship from another planet'. In fact, some researchers would like the axe the term 'UFO' altogether and use 'UAP' instead. 
2. 'UAP' stands for 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' and is preferable in a sense because we don't really know for sure if unidentified sky sightings are objects.
3. UFOs can be found in ancient, medieval, and modern art.
4. Small 'eye idols' resembling gray aliens were common in Sumeria, the oldest known civilization in the Middle East, and were associated with the Goddess.
5. Roswell is not even mentioned in the earliest UFO investigations (i.e. Project Blue Book, etc.) and did not become a topic of popular interest until the publication of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore in 1980.
6. Bigfoot and other cryptids have been sighted in conjunction with UFOs. 
7. Jacques Vallee and other ufologists have suggested that Marian apparitions (such as at Fatima and Medjugorge) are consistent with UFO close encounters.
8. US intelligence agencies routinely use UFO groups as training grounds for new agents, purposely providing disinformation and setting one faction against another.
9. The US is the only nation with a modern air industry and/or military that publicly claims to have no interest in investigating UFOs.
10. In 1999 France published The COMETA Report, officially titled UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare for? The opening statement includes the following quote: 

“The accumulation of well-documented sightings made by credible witnesses forces us to consider from now on all of the hypotheses regarding the origin of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis, in particular.”

I would summarize these 10 points this way: UFOs are not easy to understand (hence the term unidentified), they have been around for thousands of years, if not longer, there is broad agreement among nations that they are a serious concern, and last, but by no means least, the US is a bad player in terms of coming to an understanding of what is going on.

The Significance of Time in UFO Sightings and Alien Abduction Experiences

Time distortions play an important role in many UFO sightings and in nearly all alien abduction experiences. For example:

• Abductees report episodes of 'missing' time and time distortion most of the time. Sometimes they find themselves unable to account for several hours on a routine trip. Sometimes abductees report feeling like days have passed during the experience when the actual amount of time that passed was hours or minutes.
• UFO sightings are also sometimes accompanied by time distortions. One especially fascinating distortion (which is by no means universal) involves the stoppage of time. Watches, car ignitions, and digital displays shut down in the presence of a UFO, but often time itself also seems to have stopped. When the vehicle clock is checked again, the sighting seems to have occurred outside of time, as if time itself had stopped, not just the watch.
• When UFOs at a distance are sighted by pilots and others, the motion of the UFO is often described as jerky or "like a stone skipping on water." In other words, the UFO does not always move in a straight fluid line. Instead it seems to appear one place, then another, then another, with gaps in between, in much the same way that film appears when the reel is slowed way down. Kevin Arnold, who is often credited with the having seen the first UFO (I think this is not correct but it is a standard description) explained the movement of the objects he saw as jerky in this way. Some observers describe it as the UFO 'blinking in and out.'
• When veteran ufologist John Keel first reported the Men In Black phenomena, he noted that the way these 'men' dressed and spoke, as well as the cars they tended to drive, were 'off' in terms of time. That is, the clothing was from the 40s or 50s, the cars were from that era also, and the slang used was dated to the point of being sometimes comical.
• One of the most frequently used non-explanations of UFO sightings and alien abductions is temporal lobe epilepsy. The temporal lobe is the part of the brain that processes incoming verbal information and memory, and also, our sense of time.

It seems to me that this might be a clue to what is going on with at least some the more unusual sightings, the ones that can't be explained in other ways. I'm not sure the answer is as simple as 'time travel'. But I do think that in many of the stranger examples, distortions of time are important.

Theoretical physics has already discovered that time is more than a sequence of causal events arranged like a line through space.

Human beings perceive time this way, but that isn't how physicists necessarily understand it. We have to be careful about taking complex ideas and reducing them to New Age blather, but then again, it seems that something genuine is going on here. We just don't know what it is.

Yet.

I'd like to go on, but I'm not a physicist and I don't have... um, time.

But it's something to consider, no? 

Charles Fort: A Man Ahead of his Fortean Times

Fortean Times is a classic British magazine about the paranormal and other odd ephemera.

Founded in 1973 to provide "...news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents," Fortean Times is based on the work of the little-known but fascinating philosopher Charles Fort, who lived from 1874 to 1932.

Fort spent a good part of his brief time on earth researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library.

Charles Fort did not leave a huge body of written work, but what he did write packed quite a punch. He annoyed big people, but also found a few fast friends in the world of publishing--friends who respected the uniqueness of his mind, his wit, and his vision. His most famous works, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932), all concern themselves with what Fort felt was a serious flaw in scientific explanations of what constitutes 'reality'.

Fort argued that science, when rigorously examined, looks a lot more like a belief system than a methodology, and that its conclusions can only stand if anomalous data and experiences are systematically excluded, suppressed, or explained away. Fort blasted the reductionism embraced by mainstream science and its tendency to isolate, separate, and objectify phenomena. He saw science as a force that actually distorts understanding by denigrating mystery in an effort to maintain control.

Fort thought that everything in the known world was in a constant state of flux, always becoming one thing or another, and that the interconnectedness of all things was an obvious given. Like Lovelock (only earlier), he speculated that the universe itself might be more akin to a living organism than to a infinite expanse of inert matter.

Fort was one of the first to wonder publicly whether UFO phenomena might well be craft from outer space, and to this day Fortean Times is one of the first and most willing to publish new UFO findings, theories, and sightings.

Fortean Times has a weird, tabloid sort of vibe that earns it derision by logically minded persons and scientists, but this absurdist quality is grounded in a carefully constructed and always entertaining philosophy that goes back nearly a century. The mocking tone is part of the point.

Fort was notoriously critical even of his own theories, contradicting the oft-made charge that ufologists and lovers of weirdness are unthinking zealots in the process constructing a new religion. Although sometimes this charge rings true, it is by no means true across the board, and the kneejerk need by science to make it true often feels like defensiveness... perhaps because it is.

Fort famously said of science, UFO speculations, and his own work that:

"I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."

That's a perspective that, true or false, leaves room for the creative expansion of the human mind and heart.