Mothership Connection

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.