Closer Encounters

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.