Most Americans who take an interest in Unidentified Flying Objects date the phenomena from the 1947 Roswell “crash”. A few are knowledgeable of the private pilot flying in the Pacific Northwest who earlier had radioed that he was observing multiple “saucer shaped” crafts. Indeed, the subject became so quickly known worldwide that the Italian car maker, Alfa Romeo knick named one of their models the Disco Volante, or Flying Saucer.
World wide interest, however, had a more serious side. Anthropologists, art historians, and some Egyptologists began noting widely dispersed and very ancient artistic renderings of what could be construed as UFOs. Prolific multi-disciplinary specialists, such as Zecharia Sitchin (the Earth Chronicles), began a publishing genre that remains stable today, despite declining interest in books.
But all the drawings, bas-reliefs, inscriptions, and insertions into paintings do nothing more than present an object; they do not address how it got here. This issue is critical, so long as we remain fixated with Newtonian concepts of the cosmos. Our understanding of the galactic neighborhood in which we live, albeit only a very tiny fraction of what is now considered the universe, mandates that the laws of physics, as we commonly know them, make travel among the possibly life supporting star systems a practical impossibility.
That, however, is the “old physics”. The new world of Theoretical Physics and Quantum Mechanics, growing since the 1920’s, challenges us to understand that we certainly seem to inhabit a set paradigm of dimensions within what is best described as a co-existent multi-verse; there is perhaps an infinity of dimensions we do not perceive, just as there are much broader band widths than those available to our naked eyes and unstopped ears.
Even this understanding is not new. In the nineteenth century, Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland, a book in which he described life in a world of only two dimensions. A sphere descending on this world would be imperceptible; only the slowly expanding and then contracting ring of its passing through Flatland would be perceptible.
How might this comport with “UFO” sightings? Imagine yourself by a small, still pond. You carefully throw a flat stone across the pond, watching it impact the surface, bounce up, and impact the surface until it finally comes to rest on the far shore. From your perspective, you saw the stone in all of its career. Now, put yourself in the pond and limit your vision such that the “surface” you gaze up at is not a surface, but the limit of all there is. Suddenly, a saucer shaped object appears “out of nowhere”, traveling at high speed, disappears into nowhere, and reappears somewhere else until it is finally out of your line of view. How would you report this to your neighbors? Care to go on Flatland television for an interview?
In fairness, anthropologists such as Marcel Griaule, in his Conversations with Ogotemmeli, documented cultural lore – in this case among the Dogon of Mali, which precisely described astrophysical knowledge which the West did not attain until decades later. The knowledge has always been out there, obscured to us by our myopic perspectives that assure us that “primitives” cannot know anything but wildly imagined myths. Yet one does not have to read only the French originals of such ethnographies. We have a rich tapestry of material which has always been available to us, and with which we may long ago have grown complacent.
Numerous recent authors have investigated or described “alien abduction” events. Again, bookstores do not seem critical where there is money to be made from sales. But do we not already have a world literature that is rich with reports which, once deciphered through the culturally explanatory filters of the donor culture, conform very nicely with what we now know of co-existent multi-dimensionality, the likely cultural interpretations of intrusion phenomena, and the scenarios our current quantum mechanics lets us now envision?
Of course we do. And the most prolific and insightful author in this arena is Jacques Vallee. A French astrophysicist, folklorist, and writer, Vallee has written numerous books convincingly outlining his position that stories such as the Isle of Avalon, Ezekiel’s Chariot, Jacob’s Ladder, Rip Van Winkle, and numerous others throughout world literature and time, telling of abductions of humans by non-human humanoids are in fact accurate descriptions of such elements as “lost time”, disparate aging (or lack thereof) in relation to one’s human society, and other phenomena only now coming to be understood in the quantum “weird physics”. He concludes that UFO phenomena are not from “out there”; they are here, and they have always been here. It is only our perception, increasingly narrowed by our cultural construct of “scientific progress” which blocks our view.
Vallee’s books, including Forbidden Science: Journals, 1957-1969; Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact; Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact; and, Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults, are readily available. Unfortunately, his signature book, Passport to Magonia is so rare as to command many hundreds of dollars should one even find a copy.
In sum, the evidence (which even drove Hitler’s Reich to search for the entrances to the “Hollow Earth”) is here and has been all along. Certainly any thoughtful adult can recall a childhood story which seemed a passing amusement at the time but is now much richer with meaning. In contrast to the oft heard cop out of the religious clerics, “It will all be revealed after you die”, let’s hope we can open our eyes and minds to the world around us.
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We have a rich tapestry of material which has always been available to us, and with which we may long ago have grown complacent.
