Grainy B&W image of supposed UFO, Passaic, New Jersey. July 30, 1952. Source: www.cia.gov via Wikimedia Commons

Close Encounters

UFOs in American History

09.21.18

The national Sunspot Solar Observatory was mysteriously shut down on Sept. 6. Located near Almagordo, New Mexico, local law enforcement reported that the FBI was behind the closure that lasted approximately one week. However, the FBI would neither confirm nor deny the reports.

The shutdown sparked numerous rumors across the internet with many believing that alien activity was involved. So, on this week’s episode, Nathan, Brian and Ed discuss things in the sky we can’t explain – unidentified flying objects. What the heck are they? And what do they say about American history?

mystery; space; unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Segments

Flying Saucers

Historian Jeffrey Kripal describes Ken Arnold’s 1947 encounter, and how ‘flying saucer’ entered the cultural zeitgeist.

unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Ed Ayers: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia and the Robert and Joseph Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan C.: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains a history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: Each week, Nathan, Ed, our colleague Joanne Freeman and I, all historians, take a topic from the news and we try to see how we got here.

Nathan C.: And we’re going to start off today in 1947, playing over Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Brian Balogh: And was it rough here, Nathan?

Ed Ayers: And who is playing this thing?

Nathan C.: It’s all right, all right. We’re in a plane of a businessman named Ken Arnold and we’re actually out here helping with a recovery mission.

Jeffrey Kripal: A military plane went down somewhere in the mountains in Washington State and a call went out to private pilots to go look for this plane.

Nathan C.: This is historian Jeffrey Kripal.

Jeffrey Kripal: Ken Arnold was one of these pilots that was flying around Washington State looking for a downed military plane.

Nathan C.: While Ken Arnold was in the air, he came upon something peculiar.

Jeffrey Kripal: Nine objects flying in perfect formation whizzing around the sky at speeds that he knew as a pilot were not possible for any ordinary plane.

Nathan C.: Since this happened in the early days of the Cold War, Arnold assumed they were enemy aircraft.

Jeffrey Kripal: The assumption was if the Soviets were going to bomb us, they were going to come from the Northwest, so he radioed in like a good patriot and reported exactly what he saw.

Nathan C.: But based on what he was seeing, Arnold wasn’t so sure they were even aircraft at all.

Jeffrey Kripal: They were round and they had a kind of manta ray-like tail behind them.

Nathan C.: He said they flew at speeds no human pilot could survive and moved erratically like fish or the tail of a kite. Word of Arnold’s encounter spread throughout the aviation community and eventually to reporters who were eager to hear the details.

Jeffrey Kripal: One of them was a guy named Bill Bequette, and when Arnold described what these objects looked like and how they were flying, he said they skipped like a saucer or a teacup across the water. In other words, they didn’t fly. They kind of skipped across the sky and Bequette picked that up and it was Bequette actually that coined the phrase flying saucer.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, I could live with those flying saucers if I wasn’t worried that they being driven by alien invaders.

Nathan C.: Well, now, this is the Cold War and there were certainly ideas and fears of invasion of various kinds especially in the late 1940s.

Jeffrey Kripal: This is went people are building bomb shelters in their backyard and this is shortly after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so there’s tremendous fear around nuclear warfare and tremendous fear around the Cold War and so the idea of an extraterrestrial invasion I think was a very powerful way of expressing all of these anxieties and these fears.

Nathan C.: But Ken Arnold who actually saw these things drew other conclusions.

Jeffrey Kripal: Arnold did not believe that what he saw were mechanical. He didn’t think they were flying machines. He thought that they were alive and that they had emerged from some other world or some other dimension and he even thought that they were emerging from some other world that was related to the place where we go when we die, so he had a kind of spiritual reading of what he witnessed.

Nathan C.: Kripal says this spiritual reading is often lost in a world that demands scientific proof.

Jeffrey Kripal: We’ve lost the ability to think about things in spiritual or religious terms and we can only understand things in scientistic or technological ways and so you get these mythologies.

Nathan C.: So today on the show, we’re talking about things in the sky that we can’t explain, unidentified flying objects.

Stephen Finley: He claimed to have been taken into what he calls the mother wheel and those are his words.

Benjamin Z.: Their bodies would rise from the dead. A UFO would come down and hoover and pick them up with a tractor beam.

Jeffrey Kripal: Sometimes it’s machine-like, sometimes it’s plasma-like or a ball of light and completely changes how they think of the world.

Thomas Bullard: And even though these objects are unidentified, they can still tell us a lot about ourselves and about American History.

Stephen Finley: We’ll talk about why many African Americans view UFOs as friendly.

Jeffrey Kripal: Why a group of Americans believe a spacecraft would take them to heaven and why some people believe that a scientific framework may not be the best way to understand the UFO phenomena.

Airships

Folklorist Thomas Bullard tells Nathan about how a wave of “airship” sightings in the 1890s were likely based on technological hopes.

unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Nathan C.: But first, we’ll go back far before the Cold War began to November 18, 1896. On that day, there was an unusual news item in the Sacramento Bee.

Ed Ayers: Last evening, between the hours of 6:00 and 7:00 in the year of our Lord 1896, a more startling exhibition was seen in the sky in this city of Sacramento. People standing on the sidewalk, saw it coming through the sky over the housetops what appeared to them to be merely an electrical arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force.

Thomas Bullard: People saw a big light in the sky.

Nathan C.: This is folklorist Thomas Bullard.

Thomas Bullard: And as it got closer, some people said they could see a dark form behind the light, the form like something that had wings.

Ed Ayers: It came out of the east and sailed unevenly toward the Southwest dropping now near to the Earth and now suddenly rising into the air as if the force that was whirling it through space was sensible of the dangers of collision with objects upon the Earth.

Thomas Bullard: A few people even said they could hear voices coming down from the sky. Someone on the ship was supposed to have said, “Lift her up. We’re going to crash into that stipple,” and the ship lifted up and went on.

Nathan C.: Most spectators didn’t hear that particular exchange but hundreds of people did see the strange sight. The people of Sacramento tried to make sense of what they saw. In the meantime, the airship as it became known seemed to move on to other parts of the country. With each sighting, the winged airship took on a more defined form.

Thomas Bullard: Kind of a cigar-shaped gas bag usually with a basket underneath where the passengers were and then there was always a big headlight in front of the thing and maybe several other lights attached to it.

Nathan C.: By May 1897 Bullard says there were several thousand reports of mysterious airships.

Thomas Bullard: It got to the point where everybody wanted to see an airship. Any town that didn’t see an airship, it was just not up to date. Literally, every town tried to have one apparently and somebody would have to come forward and say they saw an airship.

Nathan C.: So to be considered a modern town, you had to have a sighting that became part of like having fresh drinking water and paved streets. Having a sighting also showed that you were on the cusp of the modern era.

Thomas Bullard: Exactly.

Nathan C.: In terms of what people can document at least, the only thing that we know for sure that was happening in multiple sites at multiple times, sometimes on the same day, was the creation of these stories about the airships themselves. How would you describe the media’s role in disseminating these stories about airships and their sightings?

Thomas Bullard: Well, the media had a tremendous influence, and within a week of the first reports in California, the newspapers in New York were publishing fanciful pictures of what thing supposedly looked like.

Nathan C.: And they never looked like flying saucers in the way we imagine from 1950s era movies I suspect.

Thomas Bullard: No, not in the least. These were very much products of their time and the 19th Century was the time of remarkable inventions that just kept popping up all the time, marvels like steamships, railroad engines, telegraph, light bulb, phonograph, motion pictures, telephone, but the one thing that didn’t appear was the thing that they expected which was the successful machine that would navigate the air.

Nathan C.: And I’m still waiting for my flying cars by the way which we thought we were going to get at the 21st Century.

Thomas Bullard: That’s right. This is disappointing, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Nathan C.: Fair enough.

Thomas Bullard: People were always inventing flying machines and the newspapers would report so and so, a local boy has a flying machine in his barn and he’s going to try it out someday soon, which of course always just crashed or just sat on the ground, but there was some progress being made like by the mid-1850s there were cigar-shaped balloons with some kind of propellers driving it and it could go a short distance if there was no wind resisting it, but it wasn’t really a successful flying machine. What they were seeing or thought they were seeing in 1896-1897 was based on these models.

Nathan C.: So I have to know, where there ever any actual airships found or how do you even explain this wave of stories? Was there evidence of these airships being real?

Thomas Bullard: Well, my opinion of this is that there was not any sort of real genuine UFO or any even a real flying machine. Most of these things were the planet Venus or Mars. It’s pretty demonstrable in many cases. Newspapers who were not believers in it would point out that there were a bunch of people standing on the street pointing at the planet Venus and saying, “Hey, look at that airship.”

Nathan C.: How?

Thomas Bullard: If you get a little bit of thin clouds moving across the face of Venus, it could look like it is moving. It’s like the raising moon effect, sometimes clouds passing across the face of the moon.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: If your perspective is just right, then you will see the clouds are standing still and the moon moving, but then there were a lot of stories that were hoaxes, like in a lot of towns where people just wanted to have an airship, somebody would come and say, “Hey, I saw the airship.”

Nathan C.: That’s all it took.

Thomas Bullard: Yeah, that’s all it needed, and then in other cases, there would be these really elaborate stories like Alexander Hamilton, a farmer in Kansas, who said an airship came down one night. It was 300-feet long and there were these strange creatures apparently from another planet shining a searchlight around and they lassoed one of his cows, carried it up in the air and went out of sight, and the next day, somebody found the skin of a dead calf in a dusty field, but there were no footprints around it. It turns out that Hamilton was a member of a local liars club.

Nathan C.: That’s actually a club for people who don’t tell the truth.

Thomas Bullard: Yeah, yeah. Right. It’s consisted of the most distinguished people in the area. Hamilton had been a state legislator at one point and the more elaborate stories tended to be the fakes.

Nathan C.: Right, right. [inaudible 00:13:13] pointing out that journalism itself does not have a set of industry standards for verifying a lot of these stories, right? As a field, journalism at the same is figuring out its own editorial standards, I’m guessing.

Thomas Bullard: Right. The standards were if it sells it’s good. Now there were some newspapers that had more integrity than that, but the ones that were more likely to promote the airship where ones that were more interested in attracting readers and fake stories were common place in those days. They were taken for granted. They were a form of entertainment.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: Tall tales were just very popular on those old newspapers, so if you got airships to work with, go with the airships.

Nathan C.: So Thomas, it sounds like there’s a pattern, both in terms of the way that newspapers are describing some of these sightings in the ways in which people are talking about them with each other. What do we know about how people in America observe unexplainable objects in the sky? How do they tend to talk about them? What would be the common grammar that people use to describe these objects?

Thomas Bullard: Well, these 1890s sightings are dependent in part on the conditions in America. People have always had some notion of unusual flying objects or flying, not necessarily flying machines but something unusual that would be in the air. In the very early days, people use the religious framework were you have like Increase Mather who wrote a book called An Essay for Recording of Illustrious Providences and it included strange sights in the sky, but they were always interpreted in a religious rite and then you’d come to the 18th Century, early 19th Century, it was all some kind of anomalous natural phenomenon.

Nathan C.: The Northern Lights as one example.

Nathan C.: Thomas Bullard Right, yeah. As you get into the later 19th Century, then technology becomes the dominant template for understanding. In the 1890s, the belief system is that there is a flying machine that has just been invented. It’s the fulfillment of that wish, that desire, a realization of that expectation.

Nathan C.: Right.

Thomas Bullard: It was optimism.

Nathan C.: Thomas Bullard is the author of The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. Okay, everyone. There’s another news item from the Sacramento Bee I want to share with you.

Roswell

Nathan fills Ed and Brian in about the Roswell incident, and how the “UFO” was a major military interest in the 1950s and 60s.

Music:

Wall by Jahzzar

unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Brian Balogh: Hey, Nathan, do you read anything except the Sacramento Bee?

Nathan C.: It’s a fine paper, Brian. This is a quote from article that was published in July 1947. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence Officer of the 309th Atomic Bomb Group of 8th Air Force was fortunate to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.” This is actually a quote from Lieutenant Warren Haught who was the Public Information Officer at the nearby Roswell Air Force Base. That’s right Roswell. This is Roswell, New Mexico.

Ed Ayers: Okay. The plot thickens.

Brian Balogh: And I see why you use the past tense, was a Public Relations Officer, Nathan.

Ed Ayers: So Nathan, do we know what they actually found there?

Nathan C.: Well, according to the military the very next day, they released a contrary report that they found a weather balloon instead of a flying saucer. There were later reports that came out about a project called Project Mogul that where the military was using the official line on this that it was a balloon used in nuclear testing, but the cat was already out of the bag in terms of the rumor mill that had been stoked by the initial report and then the retraction because it’s the retraction that caused many to believe that this was the beginning of a government cover up, and for decades after this finding, there would be concern that the military’s principal relationship to UFOs was to conceal their existence and conceal the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Brian Balogh: Well, Nathan. What makes your story even more dramatic is you talking about perhaps the high point of American faith in government. We just won World War II. We developed this super weapon, the atomic bomb, that was done by a $2 billion government project, but here’s the thing, that government project, The Manhattan Project, was top secret, even the Vice President didn’t know about it while it was happening, so the government which did have a lot of credibility with the people was kind of setting itself up for a big fall just because it had to keep so much secret, so why not this?

Ed Ayers: Do we think that all of that stuff about atomic bomb and stuff might have made people more willing to believe that there is all kinds of stuff about space and science?

Brian Balogh: Who knew that you could incapacitate an entire city with one bomb before that atomic bomb was revealed? All of a sudden, the idea that anything was possible was very much on the table.

Nathan C.: But here’s the thing, Brian, I, like a good historian, like to fashion myself as an appropriate cynic when it comes to not just conspiracy theories but general information. However, the military itself begins to take concerns about UFOs quite seriously. In 1947 at the end of the year, they opened up a new project where community members begin to report formally that flying saucers are indeed real. There’s actually cases that are open by the army, in the air force that get opened and then closed when findings don’t actually advance the notion that this is simply a conspiracy, so there’s a conflict among military officials about whether or not UFOs are indeed a real thing.

Nathan C.: Fast forward into and through 1948, a series of sightings not by ranchers or farmers but by Air Force pilots who are seeing unidentified flying objects. Again that term entering the kind of formal [parlant 00:20:17] at this time.

Brian Balogh: [inaudible 00:20:20] there’s not an acronym for that.

Nathan C.: Right, they’re seeing UFOs over Fort Knox in Kentucky. They’re seeing it in Montgomery, Alabama, over Fargo, North Dakota and there are even multiple sightings over Washington, DC itself. All these to say that by the time you get to the early 1950s and into the 1960s, there’s a formal investigation called Project Blue Book that’s initiated to make sure that they are documenting and keeping track of all of these various sightings coming from everyday citizens but also from military officials themselves.

Brian Balogh: Well, Nathan. There are a lot of Americans who do believe this stuff. That’s not to say that the military believes there are UFOs. They simply are doing their due diligence and carrying out their committee work to demonstrate that UFOs are not real.

Nathan C.: Well, the problem with that –

Ed Ayers: This is some tough debate going on here, I’ll tell you.

Nathan C.: Well, the problem with that theory is that the military, not only has to go out of its way to police its own officials and try to create a story that it believes will be considered credible by the broader population, it’s that you have to have. By the late 1960s, an entirely new report written by another committee to simply settle this debate. Believe it or not, a 650-page report at least in 1968 by a group called The Condon Committee which is led by a physicist named Edward Condon.

Ed Ayers: You know him well.

Nathan C.: And this is the critical passage that I think leaves it both settled and completely unsettled on the question of UFOs. “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that had added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Brian Balogh: Oh, Nathan, my earthling friend. You have just put your finger on the problem of proving a negative which is going to play an incredibly important role in ensuing debates between the public and science about the safety of all kinds of things about whether the SST, the plane broke the sound barrier, is going to fly without creating sonic booms, about whether pesticides can be used and about proper amounts of radiation that might leak out of nuclear power plants. It’s called Doubt Science and I will give you this. I never knew that the origins of Doubt Science lay in the military in the whole UFO story. I know that’s not what you wanted to teach me, but I am impressed.

Ed Ayers: So, it’s kind of like the origin of climate denial?

Brian Balogh: Exactly.

Ed Ayers: Wow!

Brian Balogh: Or tobacco being harmful or not. This is all of these people trying to prove that something might not be dangerous. For instance, all of their arguments turn on, “Well, some form of you can’t prove a negative.”

Ed Ayers: So there’s no evidence that listening to podcast actually increases your IQ?

Brian Balogh: That’s the one exception, Ed, although the podcast you listen to needs to be BackStory.

Nathan C.: Ed, Brian, citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to claim the pyramids, partying on the mother ship.

Ed Ayers: Party on, Nathan.

Brian Balogh: Thank you.

Mothership Connection

Aside from Barney Hill, most African-Americans describe close encounters in overwhelmingly positive terms. Historian Stephen C. Finley tells Nathan about a wholly separate and unique UFO tradition.

Music:

Endeavor by Jahzzar

afrofuturism; unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Nathan C.: Those are actually the lyrics from 1975 Parliament Concept Album, Mothership Connection, and according to our next guest, it had some heavenly inspiration.

Stephen Finley: George Clinton said that he and Bootsy Collins were on the way from a concert when they encountered what he describes as a UFO.

Nathan C.: This is Louisiana State University scholar, Stephen Finley.

Stephen Finley: When they were brought back to themselves, it was several hours later and their watches weren’t working. They were stuck a few hours early and knowing that he and Bootsy Collins are musicians, George Clinton is really clear to note that they were not drinking and they were not under the influence of substances and he’s really clear about that because he’s serious about this and he wants to be taken seriously.

Nathan C.: Clinton isn’t the only famous Black musician to describe this kind of experience, Charlamagne Tha God, Prodigy and poet and jazz musician Sun Ra claim to have had close encounters as well.

Stephen Finley: Sun Ra also claims to have made sort of a trip, to have been taken somewhere with for him was near Saturn. For Sun Ra, Black people are part of this angel race which is cosmic. As with many of these groups, blackness sort of is the originary state of the universe.

Nathan C.: Finley says this idea of cosmic blackness is not just found in celebrity narratives. Texas-based twin sisters, Earlene and Shurlene Wallace, described being taken in the 1990s by friendly aliens called Galactics.

Stephen Finley: But when you get them to describe the Galactics, they say that the Galactics appeared to them as beautiful Black women.

Nathan C.: He says these stories collectively form a distinct and separate African American UFO experience, one that’s often left out of mainstream ufology or the study of UFOs. Now, most of the narratives share similarities. They’re often tied to religion and spirituality. The aliens are usually Black and evoke Africa or symbolic homeland.

Stephen Finley: There are certain things that I see that show up in the narratives of African Americans who have claimed to have had UFO experiences or what others might call abductions including not using terms like abduction. That’s not an African American UFO tradition term for example.

Nathan C.: What are some of the component parts of those narratives if they’re not talking about abductions for instance? What are some of the words that they are using?

Stephen Finely: So for Earlene and Shurlene, i.e. The UFO Twins, they used the term trip and they mean that in a positive way because in the African American UFO tradition, these accounts are not seen as adversarial or terrifying. In fact, they’re almost universally described as friendly and that’s one of the primary differences between the African American accounts and the White ones which are always, almost always terrifying. Scenes of abduction and –

Nathan C.: Experimentation.

Stephen Finley: Experimentation, sexual surgeries, all of those kinds of things you don’t find those in the Black accounts.

Nathan C.: Now I have to ask this, is that perhaps because the African American tradition also includes actual abductions, mass abductions, experimentations, certainly violations of one sexual anatomy by way of the middle passage and the slave trades? Is your sense on these narratives about unidentified flying objects are in a way a departure from what’s already a set of dominant things with African American history?

Stephen Finley: You’re making the same connection that some scholars including myself make. Think about Africa during the slave trade, and all of a sudden, here come these beings from these ships who have come across the ocean and all of a sudden they capture you and wisp you away to a new land where you become the alien of, so it could that that’s one of the reasons why these narratives get described the way they do, but the other reason is because these UFO traditions are also closely related to Black supernatural traditions. For African Americans generally, the supernatural isn’t spooky. Ancestors hang around. They help us. They participate and break into this reality in sort of a regular way.

Nathan C.: So it’s possible then that what you have are a set of ideas about paranormal activity that African Americans, that African descendent people, certainly different people on the continent itself already have a language for describing and that by the time you get to the 20th Century, the language about UFO becomes part of that tradition. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Stephen Finley: Well, yeah. That’s part of what I’m suggesting. I mean this is how traditionally African Americans and Africans engage the world. I mean the supernatural isn’t something so holy other and spooky. It’s a part of the sort of natural metaphysics. I mean it is part of the real world. There’s not this again to use the term holy other that the supernatural is this realm that is so distinctly different from this one. It’s all part of the world in which we live.

Nathan C.: Well, give me an example of an early account of an African American encounter with the UFO.

Stephen Finley: Well, what I’ll give you is what I think is the most famous one. So the Nation of Islam starts around 1930. It’s unclear that they’re talking about UFOs that early. About the early 1950s, they clearly are. One of the ways in UFO show up in one of the present iterations of the Nation of Islam under Administer Louis Farrakhan is that on September 17, 1985, he claims to have been taken into what he calls the Mother Wheel, an unidentified flying object and those are his words. This vehicle came down and there were three lights from it and took him into that particular vehicle where he says he encountered his former leader Elijah Muhammad inside the craft.

Stephen Finley: That account is really important for the Nation of Islam. One cannot properly understand the Nation of Islam without given serious theoretical attention to the role that UFOs play in the religion.

Nathan C.: And part of the power of these narratives is that they’re actually based in religious texts and holy texts. It’s not just about science fiction literature or even Cold War era, science fiction television, but that there is actually a biblical basis for many of these narratives that African Americans are sharing.

Stephen Finley: There is but I also think it’s all of that. I also do think it’s science, it’s science fiction, it’s biblical text and I would say that they’re either used to sort of inaugurate what I call a sense of transcendent blackness or to deconstruct notions of race.

Nathan C.: Right, right. Now this is really an important point because so much of what in the mainstream society gives blackness meaning is of course people of African descents encounter with the institution of slavery with Jim Crow with different forms of racism, that there is a relationship between the way that African Americans form their identifies as human beings and as communities and the realities of discrimination and by using the phrase transcendent blackness, you’re actually talking about a kind of blackness that derives its meaning outside of the parameters of White racism. Is that correct?

Stephen Finley: You got it. I mean I don’t even have to explain. You’ve clearly said it. It seems to me that part of why they’re so significant is because the world is seen as completely and almost totalizingly anti-Black, that the structures here cannot support anything but anti-blackness and so what do they do? They look out into the heavens to give them a sense of meaning in the concrete world, in a way that allows them to re-envision who they are, to empower themselves in a world that they see as against them, as negating, as anti-Black and so on. It’s all about this world, but the other world and the imagination and the narratives and the symbols gives them the strength and power to live in this world.

Nathan C.: Stephen C. Finley is a religious scholar in African and African American studies at Louisiana State University. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that most people won’t accept the existence of UFOs without physical proof.

Closer Encounters

Jeffrey Kripal returns to explain how people describe close encounters, and what UFOs say about how we perceive the world.

Music:

Without you by Ketsa

unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

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Ed Ayers: You got that right, Nathan.

Nathan C.: But to many people who study these phenomena, looking for scientific evidence of UFOs is kind of beside the point.

Jeffrey Kripal: I think science is our pneumatology and new authority about what is real and what isn’t.

Nathan C.: This is Jeffrey Kripal, the historian of religion whom we heard earlier in the show.

Jeffrey Kripal: And of course the problem is not everything can be fit into that paradigm either. Other things slip out of it and I think the UFO phenomena is one of the things that slips of that paradigm.

Nathan C.: Kripal has studied close encounters throughout history and considers them intensely spiritual experiences.

Jeffrey Kripal: They are not all the same. There are very, very different, and contrary to what people think, they’re seen all over the world. They’re not just seen by uneducated or simple people. They’re also seen by world-class scientist and military people. They’re not rare. They’re extremely common and they –

Nathan C.: And by groups of people, not just individuals.

Jeffrey Kripal: And they’re often seen in groups and in broad daylight. As a historian in religions which is what I am and do, what you see in history is people encountering some kind of ball of light or energy or some presence and getting them zapped or beamed by that light and having some kind of profound transformation happen. The general phenomenology is something bizarre, even absurd comes from the sky. Sometimes it’s machine-like, sometimes it’s plasma-like or a ball of light and it interacts with particular human beings and completely changes how they think of the world and then those individuals become prophets or mystics or saints or what have you.

Jeffrey Kripal: I mean that’s the general pattern, but these are really extreme events often and I really want to emphasize they are not just going on in the heads of people. Nate, we’re not talking about chairs or cannonballs here that everyone can agree on what they look like and what they are. We’re talking about some kind of weird real-unreal event that when it interacts with human brains and bodies appears differently to different brains and bodies. We’re talking about some kind of energetic presence that is interacting with this primate biology of ours and essentially tripping it in different ways.

Nathan C.: Got it.

Jeffrey Kripal: If you got it, you’re a better man than I am.

Nathan C.: Give me a sense, you mentioned that some of these accounts were considered absurd. What were some of the examples of that?

Jeffrey Kripal: Well, I think the unbelievability or absurdity of these experiences are often the reasons people don’t report them. Simple things like the object moving at speeds and turning at angles that would kill any human occupant if it was a craft for example or the craft disappears instantly or emerges into three different craft and then fuses back together. Those are all impossible things for a machine or in terms of the encounters, being given pancakes to eat or something to drink or given bizarre answers like, “I’ll be in Kansas yesterday,” or “I’m from everywhere.”

Nathan C.: Right.

Jeffrey Kripal: We have accounts actually in the 19th Century of ships in the sky who let down anchors. They become completely unbelievable for us at that point.

Nathan C.: Right. So it sounds as if what we’re talking about when we are thinking through Americans grappling with UFOs is really as grappling with ambiguity, as grappling with certain kinds of phenomena that might not be measurable by science or might not be verifiable in some even in military report necessarily. I guess my question would be in your sense, why does ambiguity relative to UFOs veer toward considering people to be crackpots or veer toward the taboo, whereas we’re much more comfortable with ambiguity in realms of religion formally in terms of the Judaic religions or even in terms of science and in terms of things we do not yet know that we’re comfortable not yet knowing and simply asking more questions?

Jeffrey Kripal: Well, I think people are generally really bad at ambiguity, Nate, including in religion. I mean fundamentalism is essentially a complete inability to deal with ambiguity in a religious realm.

Nate C.: Right, touche.

Jeffrey Kripal: I don’t think we’ve solved that one. I think the UFO problem makes the eyes roll for two reasons. One is there’s a confusion between the actual phenomenon and then the mythology that gets wrapped around it. I’m completely convinced the phenomenon is real. I don’t believe for a second the mythology that gets wrapped around it. I think people are generally unable to draw that distinction. If I can give an example here, I mean you do get this reading in popular culture that all of these ancient religious events were really just ancient astronauts that were being misperceived by primitive ancients. That is not what I’m saying because that’s just assuming the mythology of the present and pushing it back into the past.

Nathan C.: Right, right.

Jeffrey Kripal: It doesn’t work anymore that taking the religious mythology in the past and pushing it forward into the present. What I am saying is, it’s all mythology and that these real events are being framed in whatever mythology happens to be enforced at the moment, but in some sense, we’re all wrong.

Nathan C.: Are we still looking at these phenomena with the same frame we developed in the 1950s basically?

Jeffrey Kripal: I think we are unfortunately and I think that’s why the eyes roll is because it reminds people of the bad science fiction movie of the 1950s and I also think that those science fiction movies actually in form and shape help people experience the encounters.

Nathan C.: Right.

Jeffrey Kripal: I think it’s a loop. One of the smartest people I know around this is [Willie Strubbe 00:41:13] and he said something to a group of us once that has really stuck with me. He said, “Look, I know that my experiences that I have written about where are all in form by the bad science fiction movies that I saw as a kid in the ’50s.” He said, “But I also know that something was real there,” and so he says, “What we need to do now is make better science fiction movies.”

Nathan C.: And we’re trying.

Jeffrey Kripal: But just think about that. That’s really profound. That’s a kind of loop that we’re sort of writing ourselves over the decades and I think at the moment certainly with the UFO thing, we are not writing ourselves very well. We got to rethink this one and that leads in really to the other thing I do want to say that I haven’t is that I don’t take off the table that these presences of energy and light and force are us on some other level or some other dimension. I think they probably are actually. When you and I dream every night, essentially what we’re doing is we’re splitting in two and we’re telling ourselves a story, but I wake up and I’m like, “Who the hell was that? What was that about?”

Jeffrey Kripal: That felt entirely other but it was actually me telling a story to me and I think a lot of these encounters and abduction are really, really profound dreams like that that we’re abducting ourselves and we’re telling ourselves stories and we’re trying to wake and we can’t seem to wake up.

Nathan C.: Jeffrey Kripal is a professor of religion at Rice University. He is the author of Authors of The Impossible: The Paranormal and The Sacred.

Heaven’s Gate

Nathan speaks to historian Benjamin Zeller about the intentional deaths of Heaven’s Gate, a religious group that believed their souls would be transported to heaven by a UFO.

Music:

Beautiful Rain (stripped down remix)

religious movements; unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian Balogh: We’ve heard a bit about how UFOs and spiritually intersects, but there are a few examples more notorious than the movement known as Heaven’s Gate. In 1997, 39 members of the group committed suicide. They believe that once they kill themselves, a UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet would transport their souls to a very literal heaven in outer space.

Ed Ayers: The incident made headlines around the world and almost as quickly became a late night punch line. The members who supported matching tracksuits and sneakers had recorded messages explaining their beliefs that they would be starting new lives aboard an alien spacecraft, but when the movement began, their message had resonated strongly with other Americans.

Benjamin Z.: They would go and put up posters. They had posters that would say, “Find out about UFOs,” and they would hold these meetings –

Nathan C.: The headline grabber basically.

Benjamin Z.: It is, giant, giant big font.

Nathan C.: That’s religious scholar Benjamin Zeller. He says that when the group first emerged in the 1970s, those posters worked. Heaven’s Gate’s message that UFOs would bring spiritual salvation attracted hundreds of members. At its peak, it’s estimated that around a thousand people were part of the movement. Zeller says that’s not surprising in an era when Americans were experimenting with all sorts of spiritual practices from yoga and healing crystals to new interpretations of Christianity and Buddhism, but over the next two decades, the group’s message of alien salvation gradually changed and so did the way their fellow Americans thought about the group and about UFOs.

Benjamin Z.: Heaven’s Gate began in the ’70s as a group trying to figure out the nature of the soul and the nature of the self and as that related to what they call the next level which is outer space and UFOs and space aliens. When it became, it was two people, Marshall Heriff Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles, The Two as they call themselves and they went traveling all through the West Coast holding these meetings, trying to get people to convert and they would talk and they would tell you they’re from outer space ultimately and they came from outer space to give us this message about how people can be saved, how people can live forever and can leave our planet and go into outer space and they say if you want to join them, then meet up at a camp ground in a couple of weeks. They’d give you an address and then they’ll go to the next town and do the same thing and lo and behold they got a couple dozen, a couple hundred people to show up.

Nathan C.: Ben, there’s a way that Americans are thinking about UFOs coming out of the ’50s and into the 1960s. Just give me a sense of what the conversation is in the 1970s as the Heaven’s Gate Movement is emerging. What are Americans thinking or reading or believing about UFOs at that time?

Benjamin Z.: There are a couple of different strands in UFO thought or ufology in the 1970s. People forget that the government was still have having active study of whether UFOs were real phenomenon, so this was not sort of pseudoscience. One of the leading and emerging ones at the time is the idea of ancient astronauts of alien visitors who visited humanity a thousand of years ago and humans were unable to understand the science or technology of it, so they recorded it using the only language that primitive human which is just really language. This idea is best expressed in Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, a book that tries to document everything from the Incans of Peru to ancient people in China and India and the Middle East.

Nathan C.: Don’t forget the pyramids.

Benjamin Z.: And the pyramids of Egypt. At the time of the ’70s people took this really seriously. In the 1990s or 2000s or today, we look at this and we say, “It looks like Star Gate.” If our listeners haven’t watched the Star Gate movie, there was a television series spinoff as well, it’s about this idea that the Egyptian gods are basically a misunderstanding of ancient astronauts and that if you look at the pyramids you can figure out the history of this.

Nathan C.: So Heaven’s Gate has some connection to the Bible and set of beliefs that are coming out of the Book of Revelations, what would you say the beliefs are of the organization at its founding relative to holy texts?

Benjamin Z.: At its founding, the two founders believe that they were the two witnesses described in the Book of Revelation Chapter 11, and if you don’t happen to have your Bible in front of you, I’ll tell you what it says. Chapter 11 describes how these two witnesses are destined to preach publicly and then they’re going to be assassinated on the street and then they’re going to become resurrected and they’re going to rise from the grave or from the street and they are going to ascend to Heaven and members of Heaven’s Gate believe that their founders were these two witnesses.

Benjamin Z.: Their bodies would rise from the dead. A UFO would come down and hoover and pick them up with a tractor beam and they call this The Demonstration. It was The Demonstration of two things, one that extraterrestrials are real and they have the technology to do this and two that we can transcend the human body and the human life and the human earthly existence.

Nathan C.: Right.

Benjamin Z.: What’s really important to understand them is they said they didn’t believe in this classic image of Heaven with clouds and angels with fluffy wings and harps and things like that. They thought that was all sort of nonsense that that was all sort of this spiritual stuff. They believe Heaven was real. If you had a powerful enough telescope, you could see it.

Nathan C.: Like an actual place.

Benjamin Z.: In these, UFOs therefore weren’t just vehicles here for some sort of mundane purpose. They were here for religious or spiritual purposes. They were here to bring knowledge or to ferry beings from our planet into outer space into Heaven. They were the gate to Heaven, hence the name Heaven’s Gate.

Nathan C.: There is a whole range of absurd phenomenon that people are trying to explain with the frameworks of their moment, whether it would be religious, whether they think about in terms of science. How do they reconcile a set of religious beliefs with the way in which people are told and taught that you can only believe in what you can see, touch and measure? Like this actually seems as though it’s trying to reconcile these two competing strains.

Benjamin Z.: When I look at Heaven’s Gate, I see people who really wanted to be empiricist but also wanted to believe in the soul.

Nathan C.: How do you get [that right? 00:49:47]

Benjamin Z: That was exactly their problem. They wanted to get to outer space. At first they thought, we’re going to physically get onboard a spaceship and we’re going to fly there. The spaceship is going to hoover them us in atmosphere and pick us up in tractor beams and we’re going to physically go to the next level and our bodies are going to physically transform, they used the words biologically and chemically, our bodies are going to be biologically and chemically transformed into this perfected next level creatures. That’s what they said initially.

Benjamin Z: What happens is that in June 1985 Bonnie Lou Nettles, the co-founder of the group dies and when she dies, no UFO comes to pick her up and there’s no physical proof that anything happens to her and her body is right there and they had to have it cremated, so they come to the conclusion that her spirit, her soul, her consciousness has uploaded back to her next level body. They still claimed that it was scientific even though ideas about soul transfer and consciousness upload don’t sound that scientific. For them they were. They wanted to keep that idea. It was really important for them that their beliefs were scientific, rational, modern.

Nathan C.: And you mentioned that at the founding of the Heaven’s Gate Movement it had possibly upwards of a thousand members, but those numbers were not sustained by the time you get to the 1990s. What happened?

Benjamin Z.: They were really a group which emerged on the 1970s and by the ’80s and ’90s, they have a real hard time trying to do outreach. They feel as if they’re just not reaching people anymore and that’s part of the end. That’s one of the reasons that the group ultimately decided to end on its terms is they thought that they harvested as many souls as they could as there was almost no one left out there who was really listening to them and was willing to take the stuff and try to overcome their humanity and that’s because people in the ’90s thought that humanity was pretty good.

Benjamin Z.: As you said, the economy was going well. The country was at peace. It’s a different sort of time and by the 1990s UFOs and space aliens were part of late-night television. They were part of the running joke. They were the alien autopsy videos. They were part of the X-Files. It moved from the heart of culture to a subculture and to popular culture. That’s part of the problem for them.

Nathan C.: What drove members of the group to commit suicide in 1997?

Benjamin Z.: At the end of the group in 1997, first of all, they had become completely frustrated with trying to reach out and gain converts or even gain a fair hearing that they became a joke. They also at the same time became increasingly interested in conspiracy theories. In the 1990s they latched out conspiracy theories because members of Heaven’s Gate believed that UFOs were real and they believed there was a government conspiracy to hide the existence of UFOs and they became deeply invested in this idea that behind the Hale-Bopp comet there was a trailing UFO and NASA was covering it up. They believed it.

Nathan C.: Wow! When they got to the point when members of Heaven’s Gate were ready to commit suicide, what was the theological or scientific explanation for that?

Benjamin Z.: Members of Heaven’s Gate like people in many religions believe that the body ultimately was less important than the soul, the spirit or the mind. They believe that by killing their human vehicles, they were freeing their souls to evolve into gaining extraterrestrial vehicles which were frankly superior in their minds. They thought that extraterrestrial vehicles didn’t age, they didn’t die, they didn’t need to eat. This was perfection for them. They were becoming extraterrestrial angels. If you really believe that, it makes sense to them. I’m not saying I want to do it. I’m not saying anyone should do it. I’m just saying it made sense to them.

Nathan C.: What about the Heaven’s Gate movement and about the larger history of UFOs? What do we learn about the limits of rationality and things beyond what we can explain from this moment in history?

Benjamin Z.: Heaven’s Gate was in some ways speaking only to its moment but in some other ways it’s speaking to a longstanding wish that human beings have had to make meaning and to look to the stars for meaning. We see this in culture. We’ve seen it for thousands of years. Heaven’s Gate is just one more example of that.

Nathan C.: Benjamin Zeller is a professor of religion at Lake Forest College and author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion.

Unidentified Flying Outro

Nathan, Brian, and Ed talk about how science and technology may not be the only way to analyze the UFO phenomenon.

unidentified flying objects (UFOs)

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: You know somebody who knows about UFOs mainly through old science fiction movies that I watched saying in front of the TV on Saturday afternoon when it was raining, I have to admit that I learned a lot from this show. I always thought it was just really about science and the Cold War, but I’ve seen a lot of other perspectives as well.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, Ed. One of those classic skeptics that just buys into that scientific framework hoo-ha and throw in a heavy dose of secrecy and Cold War America and what else is there to explain except I was very taken by the racial perspective on UFOs. I mean always thought UFOs some kind of invasion from out there can’t end up in anything good, but that interview that Nathan did really taught me that if you take a racial perspective, if you frame this along racial lines, actually the reactions of African American musicians have given a very, very different spin to UFOs. It’s very different than that science-technology secrecy framework.

Nathan C.: Well, that’s the thing about even the African American reference. It’s really much about community as anything and it really connects in a powerful way to a spiritual frame or weighing which people imagined objects in the sky to be extensions of communities on the ground. I mean there are references in the Bible that people have long pointed to as being the existence of something beyond the human experience. We call the miracles in one era, UFOs in the next or even John Winthrop, the famous Puritan lawyer, writes in his journal in 1639 about seeing objects in the sky that we would basically call a UFO experience from colonial America, so it not surprised us that people are bringing a lens that is religious and spiritual and by its very nature a kind of communitarian vision to this idea of UFOs, the paranormal or possibly even folks from outer space.

Brian Balogh: To go back to your beloved Sacramento Bee, I mean you’re talking about all of these small towns, communities, the beginning of the 20th Century that kind of sense they’re no longer really mainstream America and a very eager to become a part of mainstream America.

Nathan C.: But what I love also about that story of even small town America is that people are also thinking about secrecy, they’re thinking about possibility in the future. I mean in that case it’s about folks who might be secretly inventing the next wave of technological innovation. It’s not government secrets, but the secret of that dentist down the road with that big barn and you don’t know what he’s building in there. I mean there’s a sense of mystery.

Brian Balogh: Did you say building or billing?

Ed Ayers: Something else that really struck me in those interviews was the convergence of spirituality and technology, things that we often think may be diametrically opposed actually seemed to be merging quite often in these interviews.

Brian Balogh: And two of those things merged in the century you’re so familiar with, Ed, the 19th Century. It wasn’t long after the invasion of the telegraph, with all of these words invisibly flying over the wires, that people began to connect that with a real spirituality quite literally getting in touch with spirits who had passed beyond, people who had died.

Ed Ayers: And you know Brian in our time that manifestation of that blurring between the spiritual and technological and extraterrestrial are in some of the most popular movies of a few decades ago, E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In both of those, there’s a sort of an odd sense of worlds beyond our own that maybe have a spiritual dimension.

Nathan C.: I have to agree with you, Ed, that the first thing that comes to mind when I and most people tend to think about UFOs is science fiction, it’s a popular culture and one of the consequences of that is that almost by default we then frame anything that falls into that category as being fantastical or there one say fictitious, but I think it’s also very clear that regardless if our reference is pop culture or if it’s the history of UFOs by way of reading the Sacramento Bee, that UFOs have a history whether you believe in them or not and I think that fact really is a powerful reminder of one, that people constantly have frames at themselves and have limitations in whatever era that they live and that maybe perhaps our current frames in spite of all its science and certainty, certainly certainty that comes from a position of faith, may not be able to account for everything that exists out there or even between us.

Speaker 2: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan C.: This episode of BackStory was produced by Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our Technical Director. Diana Williams is our Digital Editor and Joey Thompson is our Researcher. Additional help came from Robin Blue, Angelique Bishash, Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Greg, Courtney Spagna and Aaron Thelie. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jahzzar. Special thanks this week to Andrew Parsons, Brandon Wolfe and as always the John Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Ed Ayers: Major supporter is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost office at the University of Virginia, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 2: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Humanities.