This post is reviewing Erich Goode’s book Paranormal Beliefs. Goode is a sociologist based at the University of Maryland, and proposes one of the few rigorous analyses of the social dimension of paranormal beliefs. This book does not provide any answer about the reality of paranormal phenomena, although it presents some of the key arguments for and against paranormal beliefs. This book raises a number of interesting questions about how paranormal beliefs emerge, why they remain present in spite of being constantly attacked by the scientific community (and the sceptics), and why science ignores paranormal knowledge in spite of being confronted with challenging evidence.
The full notice is:
Goode, Erich. (2000). Paranormal Beliefs: A sociological introduction. Long Grove: Waveland Press.
Moving forward without innovation?
Before analyzing what Goode has to say about beliefs in UFOs, and other paranormal phenomena, it is important to situate his book within the larger context of sociology and parasociology. Goode is very clear about the topic of his book: he is focusing on the sociological dimension of paranormal beliefs. Although he does not consider the actual reality of paranormal phenomena as completely irrelevant, he states that he does not pay much attention to such an issue. For him, the actual reality of paranormal phenomena is only relevant in contexts where solid scientific evidence about the paranormal are produced (according to the rules of science, and thus, should be accepted by science), but such evidence are either ignored or rejected without cause by the scientific community. Researches in parapsychology are a key example of such a situation. From that point view, Goode’s analysis is very much in line with “Newtonian” sociology, and although he may provide interesting analyses about an understudied topic, it cannot be considered as being innovative. He takes also, in my opinion, a very convenient position as he does not have to “get his feet wet” (i.e. without having to state his own position on the matter) by focusing solely of the belief dimension. However, because he does not dismiss off hand people who believe in the paranormal, like some other sociologists have done in the past, his book deserves some credits.
Goode is approaching paranormal beliefs in the way sociologists of scientific knowledge have studied scientific controversies. He is using the approach called symmetry, which implies that he puts on the same level paranormal beliefs and scientific beliefs (i.e. without granting any uncritical support to either side). As well, he recognizes that one side is dominant in Western societies (i.e. scientific belief) and has powerful social, political and economic bases while the other (i.e. paranormal beliefs) is the “deviant” one with limited support. As a sociologist, he is more interested in studying the dynamics at play, and tries to understand why in the context of scientific dominance there is still a very large portion of the population believing in the paranormal. Once again, his questioning is not based on “how can people be so irrational to believe in the paranormal”, but rather he implies that scientific beliefs may be dominant among the elites of Western societies, but not necessarily so among the rest of those societies. In other words, he sees this issue as one of knowledge power base divided along social and political class lines. I agree with this perspective. Various forms of knowledge will be considered as more or less valid in great part based on how much social and political power is behind them. For Goode, paranormal belief is therefore an alternate source of knowledge for those who are not powerful.
If Goode is right in stating that the validity of any knowledge is in great part dependent on its social and political power base, it is also important to understand that its validity is also based on how effective it is for people to relate with the world around them (i.e., any form of knowledge has also a pragmatic component). In other words, “deviant” forms of knowledge are not only maintained to assuage psychological needs not addressed by the dominant forms of knowledge (e.g. seeing aliens in replacement of religious forms of spirituality, see ghost because science ignores the spiritual, etc). The key issue that Goode does not address, because he is focusing solely on the social dimension of paranormal beliefs, is the fact that people believe in the paranormal because they are many who did objectively face situations that are incomprehensible to them and to the scientific community. Although I agree with him that if science would study such phenomena more extensively and find some serious and intellectually honest answers, then the belief in the paranormal would disappear because there would be no need to have an alternate form of knowledge to address what is ignored by science. This holds true for sociology too. If sociology is to provide useful answers, then it cannot ignore that there are some genuine and poorly understood dynamics at play behind paranormal phenomena. This reinforces my conviction that parasociology is a step ahead from “Newtonian” sociology by accepting and integrating, as a matter of principle, that paranormal phenomena have a degree of objectivity.
Beliefs in UFOs as alien spaceships
Goode pays a fair bit of attention to the UFO phenomenon. For him, UFOs are a paranormal belief when they are construed as being spaceships under extraterrestrial control (because it contradicts what science says about UFOs – particularly the improbability of interstellar travel). Then, he proposes an historical genesis of the belief by reviewing how in the early 1950s the ETH became firmly entrenched (p. 141). His analysis is very similar to the ones of Méheust (1978) and Spencer (1994), where he identifies that in the early 1950s, a few years before the beginning of the space race, technology was sufficiently advanced to create a “plausibility structure” where the notion of visiting spaceships was imaginable (p. 148).
Another important element of his analysis is that the ETH cannot be falsified. In theory, all UFO sightings, except one, could be proven wrong and that would be enough to prove the ETH is right. It would require disproving all sightings, without exception, to refute fully the ETH, which is an unrealistic task. So, the ETH can live on the hope that one sighting will be proven to be of ET origin. The fact that in over 60 years no objective evidence about the presumed ET origins of UFO has yet surfaced is for the ETH believer completely irrelevant. From that point of view, it is clearly a belief system (i.e. it is based on the hope that one day they will prove that the ETH is right). This certainly constitutes the fundamental sociological dynamics behind the ETH.
Goode proposes a similar analysis about the Roswell conspiracy. In spite of having no evidence, that there are at least six versions of the story, that there are seven photographs of the debris that matches the Mogul project description, that Cavitt (who accompanied Marcel) did not see anything unusual about the debris, the ETH ufologists are still pursuing that story in the hope that one day real evidence will emerge. For Goode, the fact that the Roswell story emerged and stuck in the late 1970s is not a coincidence. In the post-Watergate years, the plausibility structure was in place for such a story to get lots of supports (which did not succeed to do so in the past, e.g. Scully’s and Keyhoe’s books both discussed governmental conspiracy in the 1950s).
It is unfortunate that Goode’s book does not address in any length the notion that there is an irreducible minimum of reports that cannot be explained away by science, and that those reports are essentially ignored by the scientific community. Even if one excludes the ETH as an explanation, these very strange reports still remain unexplained. It is therefore a scientific belief to consider all UFO sightings as irrelevant without looking at the evidence. Sturrock’s book (1999) is one of the rare exceptions. This situation fuels, in my opinion, the retrenchment of ufologists into the ETH. Because the scientific community does not touch the field, then other non-ETH explanations are not explored. The more the scientific community ignores these reports, the more it creates room for the ETH to flourish.
The parapsychology and sociology
Goode is more sympathetic to the cause of parapsychology. Although it is considered a paranormal belief system because it is in opposition to some key scientific beliefs about the nature of reality, parapsychology was able to produce evidence using the scientific method. He quotes many meta-analyses of parapsychological research to show that psi effects occur and are clearly beyond chance. Goode is very clear in stating that “something is happening but no one knows for sure what it is” (pp. 130 & 132). In this case, it is the scientific beliefs in the nature of material reality that are challenged, and ignoring or even ridiculing parapsychology represents an easy way out to avoid dealing with inconvenient evidence.
It is unfortunate that Goode did not discuss an important issue in parapsychology that is very much relevant to the topic. One of the most interesting findings in parapsychology is that psi effects are more likely to occur when people believe in the possibility of the paranormal. In other words, plausibility structures are not only conditions to allow beliefs to emerge, but also conditions for paranormal effects to occur. Hence, plausibility structures are also enabling conditions. These parapsychological findings are at the root of any thinking about the possibility of social psi. Goode, here, missed a great opportunity to link some key elements together. He wrote that “sociologists are very interested in the social ‘glue’ that binds members of a society” (p. 84). If it is true that belief systems can be a form of social glue, then the objective elements at the core of the belief should also be considered as being part of the glue. In other words, if parapsychology has clearly shown that there is “something” going on, then that “something” should be part of the glue as well because sociologically shared plausibility structures are key enablers to psi effects. Goode’s book, by focusing solely on beliefs, failed to see that there is a need to establish a bridge between parapsychology and sociology, and I think that parasociology offers such a bridge. But it is clear that if sociology studies only paranormal belief systems, then sociologists will have only an incomplete approach to understand the paranormal.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Reading Notes – Gifts of the Gods?
This post is reviewing a book that provides several interesting ideas, which are quite similar to the ones developed for parasociology so far. John Spencer’s Gifts of the Gods? was published in 1994, at a time where the Roswell/Majestic hysteria was at its peak. From that point of view, it should be considered as a beacon of light in the middle of darkness, but unfortunately it appears that it remained largely noticed. Spencer was the head of the British UFO Research association (BUFORA) and was clearly fighting an uphill battle against the dominant and uncritical ETH ufology emerging mostly from the United States. The full bibliographical notice is:
Spencer, John. (1994). Gifts of the Gods? Are UFOs alien visitors or psychic phenomena? London: Virgin Books.
Mythmaking and psychosocial dynamics
Spencer introduced several sociological ideas in his book without referring to them directly by their scholarly names. One of them is that the extraterrestrial interpretation of UFO events is socially constructed. To demonstrate that, Spencer does what we would call an archaeology of a particular form of knowledge (to use a concept for which the philosopher Michel Foucault is famous). It is interesting to note that the press, in the very first newspaper articles about Ken Arnold sightings in 1947, was already speculating about the extraterrestrial nature of his sighting. The tone was set from day one and the popular press, as Spencer explains, always had a vested interest in presenting UFOs as alien spacecrafts in order to boost readership and sales. As well, “odd balls” like Adamski who claim to have had many contacts with ETs (so it not just seeing UFOs in the sky) are also by definition good stories for the popular press because they are fundamentally entertaining. In such a context, it is predictable that UFO and alien stories not only are the ones retained by the popular press, but also over time the story needed to be “spiced up” to keep the readership interested.
So, the progression from the gentile aliens of the contactees era to the ever complex abduction scenarios on one hand, and the sighting of flying saucers to a worldwide governmental conspiracy on the other hand, was built on natural slippery slope. All this occurred, of course, in a context where no one is able to offer a single piece of positive evidence open to objective analysis. In fact, it is the lack of evidence that allowed the story to evolve, because it was fundamentally communicated through the popular press: the UFO story was framed as an ongoing entertainment issue, not as a scientific research one. With the advent of the Internet, as one can notice by a simple search, a single UFO story can be echoed by thousands of web sites, but in the end there is only one source (usually unverified) for each story. So, the UFO ETH web dynamics remains essentially the same as the one found in the tabloid construct. Any substantial and verifiable empirical anchor into reality would simply kill the story. Ironically, it is in the vested interest of ETH ufologists to not find any positive evidence open to objective analysis, as it may very likely show that there speculations were completely wrong.
In this regard, Spencer proposes another interesting sociological analysis, comparing the Watergate scandal to the UFO conspiracy. The Watergate is the single most important conspiracy and scandal in recent US history. It was uncovered in two years by two journalists after what appeared to be a simple burglary in the Watergate building got their attention, leading ultimately to the resignation of President Nixon. How come hundreds of ufologists over several decades could not find any serious tangible evidence of a governmental UFO conspiracy? As Spencer notes, people talk and can provide serious tangible evidence, and any good journalist knows how to make that happen. In the case of UFO conspiracy, this would have involved many more people than the Watergate and a burning secret even more difficult to keep. Yet, nothing of substance can be found. As Spencer wrote, “The UFO conspiracy was knitted long before the ‘evidence’ ever surfaced it to support it. Real conspiracies work the other way around.” (p. 72). Once again, the narrative structure surrounding the UFO conspiracy story can only exist if it is actively maintained through the production of inconclusive evidence. Indeed, the UFO conspiracy is a business that can only survive by continuously embellishing a myth.
Spencer also proposed, like Méheust, that the emergence of science fiction as a popular genre was also a key factor in easing the almost automatic sliding from UFOs to alien spacecrafts. However, he does not mention Méheust, and he mostly focussed on post WWII sci fi. I think that what Méheust found was the basic collective unconscious conditions allowing the emergence of UFO-as-spaceships construct, while Spencer’s analysis explain how more recent sci fi maintained and reinforced such collective unconscious conditions.
Socialization and perception
One of the ideas defended by Spencer, based on presenting a number of cases he personally researched, is that people who have UFO close encounter experience have in fact a paranormal experience. What happen is that people interpret their own experience as an alien-and-spaceship one because of (a) their prior socialization from childhood through sci fi and other means, and (b) they were lead to such interpretation by ETH ufologists who collected their story. Beyond the pervasive influence of sci fi through mass media, Spencer provides a good description of what psychology and sociology say about how our perception of reality is very much influenced by what we know and what we believe, be it consciously or unconsciously. Similarly, Spencer explains quite well how repressed “memories” are actually very easy to lead towards one particular way after the fact. They do not constitute memories as much but as attempts to make sense of a particular event. From that point of view, hypnotic regression is much more useful to uncover how people make sense of very unusual events rather than as a method of finding factual reality.
It is in this context that he introduced the work done by Ken Philips and Alex Keul on the anamnesis project that focuses on better knowing the witnesses, while putting less emphasis on the actual details of the sightings. The key here is that by knowing better the witnesses it is easier to understand how they interpreted the very unusual event they lived. This was clearly a step in the right direction of removing the ETH noise out of close encounter reports. Unfortunately, because Alex Keul had to return to work in Austria, and Ken Philips passed away a few years later, the anamnesis project was never resurrected. The key findings were: “(1) Close-encounter witnesses have a high rate of self-reported ESP. (2) Close-encounter witnesses also have a high rate of self-reported UFO and ‘flying’ dreams. (3) Close-encounter witnesses tend to be status-inconsistent [i.e. consider themselves to be in a position at work or in life below their real potential]” (p. 167).
The issue of leading ufologists is a well known one. Not only they have a vested interest, consciously or not, to get a good alien story, but the very fact that a witness called an ufologist in the first place to share his/her story means that it was already interpreted within the context of the ETH. This pattern is common to all reporting of paranormal events. For instance, the children in Fatima reported seeing a lady, not the Virgin Mary. It was only after believers and Church investigator got involved that it became a Marian apparition, as noted by Fernandes and D’Armada (2005). It should be noted also that Michael Carroll (1985) found the exact same pattern with the Marian apparitions in LaSalette (in 1846) and Lourdes (in 1858). The dynamics found in people are calling “ghost hunters” and psychics for help are also illustrations of this pattern involving a pre-interpretation of highly unusual events.
But let’s be clear here. For Spencer (and myself), the fact that very unusual events are given a particular interpretation based on both psychological factors specific to the individual witnesses and sociological ones specific to the witnesses’ own culture and society does not mean that nothing happened. Instead, it means that people have incomprehensible experiences, and like any normal human beings they try to make sense of it with the frames of reference available to them.
Is there a need for ufology?
Spencer thinks that ufological and paranormal events are the outcome of a natural force or energy that we do not understand yet. He does not use the word psi, but he could have used it as well. Many paranormal experiences not interpreted as an aliens-in-spaceship narrative share many characteristics of with those that were interpreted within the ETH construct. Among them, there are increased in sexual assertiveness (p. 130), which can be linked to Herbert Marcuse’s concept of orthon energy. Heath (2005) also saw a possible connection between sexual assertiveness and PK. A general change in life outlook towards a more spiritual attitude is also noted (p. 134). An increase of other types of paranormal experiences such as out-of-body experiences, telepathy, premonition, as well as a number of unexplainable synchronistic events (for instance see Fowler 2004) are reported (pp. 142 and ff.). Finally, an increase in artistic and creative drive is noted (p. 230). These findings are certainly consistent with the notion that through a PEMIE event, the mystical part of the witnesses’ unconscious mind has been made more accessible, and thus leading to further psi events, creative drive, and overall more spiritual attitudes.
In this context, if the UFO experience is essentially a particular idiosyncratic version of a more general class of psychic events, then it begs the question as to why should there be a distinct approach or discipline called ufology? Spencer did not discuss this difficult question, probably because he was the head of BUFORA, an ufological organization, at the time of writing his book. But such implicit conclusion certainly reinforces the original position took for parasociology.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Spencer, John. (1994). Gifts of the Gods? Are UFOs alien visitors or psychic phenomena? London: Virgin Books.
Mythmaking and psychosocial dynamics
Spencer introduced several sociological ideas in his book without referring to them directly by their scholarly names. One of them is that the extraterrestrial interpretation of UFO events is socially constructed. To demonstrate that, Spencer does what we would call an archaeology of a particular form of knowledge (to use a concept for which the philosopher Michel Foucault is famous). It is interesting to note that the press, in the very first newspaper articles about Ken Arnold sightings in 1947, was already speculating about the extraterrestrial nature of his sighting. The tone was set from day one and the popular press, as Spencer explains, always had a vested interest in presenting UFOs as alien spacecrafts in order to boost readership and sales. As well, “odd balls” like Adamski who claim to have had many contacts with ETs (so it not just seeing UFOs in the sky) are also by definition good stories for the popular press because they are fundamentally entertaining. In such a context, it is predictable that UFO and alien stories not only are the ones retained by the popular press, but also over time the story needed to be “spiced up” to keep the readership interested.
So, the progression from the gentile aliens of the contactees era to the ever complex abduction scenarios on one hand, and the sighting of flying saucers to a worldwide governmental conspiracy on the other hand, was built on natural slippery slope. All this occurred, of course, in a context where no one is able to offer a single piece of positive evidence open to objective analysis. In fact, it is the lack of evidence that allowed the story to evolve, because it was fundamentally communicated through the popular press: the UFO story was framed as an ongoing entertainment issue, not as a scientific research one. With the advent of the Internet, as one can notice by a simple search, a single UFO story can be echoed by thousands of web sites, but in the end there is only one source (usually unverified) for each story. So, the UFO ETH web dynamics remains essentially the same as the one found in the tabloid construct. Any substantial and verifiable empirical anchor into reality would simply kill the story. Ironically, it is in the vested interest of ETH ufologists to not find any positive evidence open to objective analysis, as it may very likely show that there speculations were completely wrong.
In this regard, Spencer proposes another interesting sociological analysis, comparing the Watergate scandal to the UFO conspiracy. The Watergate is the single most important conspiracy and scandal in recent US history. It was uncovered in two years by two journalists after what appeared to be a simple burglary in the Watergate building got their attention, leading ultimately to the resignation of President Nixon. How come hundreds of ufologists over several decades could not find any serious tangible evidence of a governmental UFO conspiracy? As Spencer notes, people talk and can provide serious tangible evidence, and any good journalist knows how to make that happen. In the case of UFO conspiracy, this would have involved many more people than the Watergate and a burning secret even more difficult to keep. Yet, nothing of substance can be found. As Spencer wrote, “The UFO conspiracy was knitted long before the ‘evidence’ ever surfaced it to support it. Real conspiracies work the other way around.” (p. 72). Once again, the narrative structure surrounding the UFO conspiracy story can only exist if it is actively maintained through the production of inconclusive evidence. Indeed, the UFO conspiracy is a business that can only survive by continuously embellishing a myth.
Spencer also proposed, like Méheust, that the emergence of science fiction as a popular genre was also a key factor in easing the almost automatic sliding from UFOs to alien spacecrafts. However, he does not mention Méheust, and he mostly focussed on post WWII sci fi. I think that what Méheust found was the basic collective unconscious conditions allowing the emergence of UFO-as-spaceships construct, while Spencer’s analysis explain how more recent sci fi maintained and reinforced such collective unconscious conditions.
Socialization and perception
One of the ideas defended by Spencer, based on presenting a number of cases he personally researched, is that people who have UFO close encounter experience have in fact a paranormal experience. What happen is that people interpret their own experience as an alien-and-spaceship one because of (a) their prior socialization from childhood through sci fi and other means, and (b) they were lead to such interpretation by ETH ufologists who collected their story. Beyond the pervasive influence of sci fi through mass media, Spencer provides a good description of what psychology and sociology say about how our perception of reality is very much influenced by what we know and what we believe, be it consciously or unconsciously. Similarly, Spencer explains quite well how repressed “memories” are actually very easy to lead towards one particular way after the fact. They do not constitute memories as much but as attempts to make sense of a particular event. From that point of view, hypnotic regression is much more useful to uncover how people make sense of very unusual events rather than as a method of finding factual reality.
It is in this context that he introduced the work done by Ken Philips and Alex Keul on the anamnesis project that focuses on better knowing the witnesses, while putting less emphasis on the actual details of the sightings. The key here is that by knowing better the witnesses it is easier to understand how they interpreted the very unusual event they lived. This was clearly a step in the right direction of removing the ETH noise out of close encounter reports. Unfortunately, because Alex Keul had to return to work in Austria, and Ken Philips passed away a few years later, the anamnesis project was never resurrected. The key findings were: “(1) Close-encounter witnesses have a high rate of self-reported ESP. (2) Close-encounter witnesses also have a high rate of self-reported UFO and ‘flying’ dreams. (3) Close-encounter witnesses tend to be status-inconsistent [i.e. consider themselves to be in a position at work or in life below their real potential]” (p. 167).
The issue of leading ufologists is a well known one. Not only they have a vested interest, consciously or not, to get a good alien story, but the very fact that a witness called an ufologist in the first place to share his/her story means that it was already interpreted within the context of the ETH. This pattern is common to all reporting of paranormal events. For instance, the children in Fatima reported seeing a lady, not the Virgin Mary. It was only after believers and Church investigator got involved that it became a Marian apparition, as noted by Fernandes and D’Armada (2005). It should be noted also that Michael Carroll (1985) found the exact same pattern with the Marian apparitions in LaSalette (in 1846) and Lourdes (in 1858). The dynamics found in people are calling “ghost hunters” and psychics for help are also illustrations of this pattern involving a pre-interpretation of highly unusual events.
But let’s be clear here. For Spencer (and myself), the fact that very unusual events are given a particular interpretation based on both psychological factors specific to the individual witnesses and sociological ones specific to the witnesses’ own culture and society does not mean that nothing happened. Instead, it means that people have incomprehensible experiences, and like any normal human beings they try to make sense of it with the frames of reference available to them.
Is there a need for ufology?
Spencer thinks that ufological and paranormal events are the outcome of a natural force or energy that we do not understand yet. He does not use the word psi, but he could have used it as well. Many paranormal experiences not interpreted as an aliens-in-spaceship narrative share many characteristics of with those that were interpreted within the ETH construct. Among them, there are increased in sexual assertiveness (p. 130), which can be linked to Herbert Marcuse’s concept of orthon energy. Heath (2005) also saw a possible connection between sexual assertiveness and PK. A general change in life outlook towards a more spiritual attitude is also noted (p. 134). An increase of other types of paranormal experiences such as out-of-body experiences, telepathy, premonition, as well as a number of unexplainable synchronistic events (for instance see Fowler 2004) are reported (pp. 142 and ff.). Finally, an increase in artistic and creative drive is noted (p. 230). These findings are certainly consistent with the notion that through a PEMIE event, the mystical part of the witnesses’ unconscious mind has been made more accessible, and thus leading to further psi events, creative drive, and overall more spiritual attitudes.
In this context, if the UFO experience is essentially a particular idiosyncratic version of a more general class of psychic events, then it begs the question as to why should there be a distinct approach or discipline called ufology? Spencer did not discuss this difficult question, probably because he was the head of BUFORA, an ufological organization, at the time of writing his book. But such implicit conclusion certainly reinforces the original position took for parasociology.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Friday, April 24, 2009
The organic UFO wave
In the last two years, there is an interesting trend emerging in UFO reports: UFOs appear to have an “organic” shape. There are only a few reports I could find so far. These reports are presented below, quoted from sources accessible on the Internet. It is difficult to know if there are other similar reports outside the Internet, but there is enough of them to see the emergence of a trend, as the phenomenological similarities between these reports are striking. From a parasociological standpoint, this new material represents useful empirical evidence, even though the reports are very short and clearly investigated from an ETH perspective.
Jellyfishes, squids, and amoebas
The first report that I am aware of dates back to July 2003, where a man reported seeing two “jellyfish” shaped UFOs over the skies of Northamptonshire in the United Kingdom. This was reported in the Internet version of the local newspaper. Nothing particular came out of it.
Then, in November 2007, in Kent (again in the United Kingdom), several witnesses saw three objects having the shape of a jellyfish. The ufological website ufoinfo.com has a short report on this sighting. Although this sighting was recorded into an ufological website, ufologists did not appear to have pay much attention to it.
In January 2008, in the now famous Stephenville, Texas, a witness saw something looking like a jellyfish. This was recorded as part of the Stephenville UFO wave, but beyond that it does not appear that it attracted any special attention.
In October 2008, near the town of Empire in Ohio, a truck driver saw a very large UFO that he qualified of “organic”:
"When I saw it, I was trying to take everything in and that's immediately what I thought when I saw it – that it was organic. That's the feeling that I got. I didn't think it could be anything else. It just came across as something organic."
A few days later, in the town of Midvale, Ohio, another witness had a very similar sighting that was qualified this time as looking like a giant amoeba. The conjunction of these two sightings attracted the attention of a few ufologists, particularly Steve Hammons who reported on them on the Internet.
Once again in the United Kingdom, an octopus-shaped UFO was sighted in Lincolnshire in January 2009. According to the witness, the sighting started with a ball of light:
“John Harrison, a resident of nearby Saltfleetby, said he looked out of his window on Saturday night to see “a massive ball of light,” and “tentacles going right down to the ground” over the site. “It was huge” he said “At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles – it looked just like an octopus.”
This story acquired some momentum in the British and American press as the UFO was at first blamed for destroying a windmill turbine. However, it appears that if the witnesses saw the UFO in the same vicinity of the windmill turbine, they never saw the UFO touching the windmill turbine. This time, the organic UFOs “insisted” enough to be noticed.
Steve Hammons wrote another interesting article where he is asking if indeed there is a new trend emerging in the ufological scene, in a web article posted in February 2009.
Parasociological look at the organic trend
The limited interest shown so far by the ETH ufologists on this issue is not at all surprising. These UFOs sightings are challenging directly the technicist “nuts-and-bolts” fundamental assumption of ETH ufology. The mutation from flying saucers to other shapes, particularly the triangular one, could be accommodated by ETH ufologists, as we are still dealing with what appears to be manufactured crafts. But jellyfishes! This is more akin to crypto-exo-zoology! From a purely sociological perspective, it will be interesting to see how long they will continue to ignore them, and then how the ETH ufologists will integrate these sightings into their narrative (while protecting the “nuts-and-bolt” core storyline).
There is another sighting that needs to be mentioned here because it is likely to be ignored by ufologists, as it is most likely a fake. An octopus-shaped UFO was observed and filmed in Brazil in April 2009 . The fake nature of this sighting should not lead us to ignore it, quite to the contrary.
From a parasociological standpoint, this is significant because a fake is used to imitate the new trend in UFO shapes. As Batcheldor (1984) and other parapsychologists have found, real psi effects are oftentimes accompanied with trickery, to unconsciously boost the belief in their reality so that the phenomena can continue to occur. This is a common practice among shamans (Heath 2004), and a key feature of the Trickster archetypical dimension of the paranormal, brilliantly described by Hansen (2001). It is not to say that the individuals who orchestrated the fake were consciously thinking along those lines. Instead, one should see this event as an illustration of the collective unconscious in action (i.e. taking a sociological standpoint rather than a psychological one). The fact that someone, somewhere, felt compelled to use new shared knowledge about UFO and to make it into a fake sighting, highlights that such shared knowledge resonates at an unconscious level too. The verification of this hypothesis can be done by the emergence elsewhere of other fakes taking the biological form of the new trend (which will truly make these sighting as social facts, as defined by the founder of sociology Émile Durkheim).
This new trend is also fascinating because it represents a gradual shift from the “nuts-and-bolt” UFOs, rather than a radical mutation. If we are to follow Méheust’s (1978) approach to the UFO phenomenon, then we should look in the recent past to see if the biological trend in the Sci Fi literature was significant. There is an interesting blog on this issue, which considers that “Science fiction isn't just about rocket ships and ray guns. Many science fiction books, movies and TV shows are based on the biological sciences. This blog discusses cloning, genetic engineering, mutant monsters, longevity treatments and all the other biology behind the fiction.”
One can also think of Canadian David Cronenberg’s films on the theme of horror-biological sci fi that he produced since the early 1970s. As well, there has been a number of books published on this issue, like Leonard Issacs’ Darwin to double helix : the biological theme in science fiction, published in 1977 (London: Butterworths). Clearly, this is not a new issue, but how significant it is?
This is quite difficult to assess. Certainly, environmental issues are more prominent now than before, mostly because governments and large enterprises have now officially espoused the “green turn” in most Western countries. Is the “greening” of UFOs, by way of biological shapes, a sign of time? Are we entering a liminal zone where great advances in genetic engineering are now clearly on sight, but not yet a reality? And that the worries about their danger had time to “cook” since the early 1970s, thus translating into a hybrid high tech-organic shape, for which organic UFOs represent an ideal compromise? These are interesting questions and hypotheses to explore, but a more solid methodological framework to explore them is required.
Another issue to keep an eye on is whether the close encounter narrative will also mutate, as discussed in a previous post. Will the “aliens” coming from the organic UFOs be different from the “nuts-and-bolts” aliens? Historically, UFO sightings have preceded reports of close encounters by a few years. This appears logical as people and ETH ufologists’ unconscious need some time to process the information at a deep mystical level. For that to happen, however, I think that a full-fledge organic UFO wave (i.e. many sightings over a limited geographical area over a few days or weeks, duly reported and ridiculed by the mainstream press) will be first required to get the ETH ufologists engaged in “nurturing” this aspect of the phenomenon.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Jellyfishes, squids, and amoebas
The first report that I am aware of dates back to July 2003, where a man reported seeing two “jellyfish” shaped UFOs over the skies of Northamptonshire in the United Kingdom. This was reported in the Internet version of the local newspaper. Nothing particular came out of it.
Then, in November 2007, in Kent (again in the United Kingdom), several witnesses saw three objects having the shape of a jellyfish. The ufological website ufoinfo.com has a short report on this sighting. Although this sighting was recorded into an ufological website, ufologists did not appear to have pay much attention to it.
In January 2008, in the now famous Stephenville, Texas, a witness saw something looking like a jellyfish. This was recorded as part of the Stephenville UFO wave, but beyond that it does not appear that it attracted any special attention.
In October 2008, near the town of Empire in Ohio, a truck driver saw a very large UFO that he qualified of “organic”:
"When I saw it, I was trying to take everything in and that's immediately what I thought when I saw it – that it was organic. That's the feeling that I got. I didn't think it could be anything else. It just came across as something organic."
A few days later, in the town of Midvale, Ohio, another witness had a very similar sighting that was qualified this time as looking like a giant amoeba. The conjunction of these two sightings attracted the attention of a few ufologists, particularly Steve Hammons who reported on them on the Internet.
Once again in the United Kingdom, an octopus-shaped UFO was sighted in Lincolnshire in January 2009. According to the witness, the sighting started with a ball of light:
“John Harrison, a resident of nearby Saltfleetby, said he looked out of his window on Saturday night to see “a massive ball of light,” and “tentacles going right down to the ground” over the site. “It was huge” he said “At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles – it looked just like an octopus.”
This story acquired some momentum in the British and American press as the UFO was at first blamed for destroying a windmill turbine. However, it appears that if the witnesses saw the UFO in the same vicinity of the windmill turbine, they never saw the UFO touching the windmill turbine. This time, the organic UFOs “insisted” enough to be noticed.
Steve Hammons wrote another interesting article where he is asking if indeed there is a new trend emerging in the ufological scene, in a web article posted in February 2009.
Parasociological look at the organic trend
The limited interest shown so far by the ETH ufologists on this issue is not at all surprising. These UFOs sightings are challenging directly the technicist “nuts-and-bolts” fundamental assumption of ETH ufology. The mutation from flying saucers to other shapes, particularly the triangular one, could be accommodated by ETH ufologists, as we are still dealing with what appears to be manufactured crafts. But jellyfishes! This is more akin to crypto-exo-zoology! From a purely sociological perspective, it will be interesting to see how long they will continue to ignore them, and then how the ETH ufologists will integrate these sightings into their narrative (while protecting the “nuts-and-bolt” core storyline).
There is another sighting that needs to be mentioned here because it is likely to be ignored by ufologists, as it is most likely a fake. An octopus-shaped UFO was observed and filmed in Brazil in April 2009 . The fake nature of this sighting should not lead us to ignore it, quite to the contrary.
From a parasociological standpoint, this is significant because a fake is used to imitate the new trend in UFO shapes. As Batcheldor (1984) and other parapsychologists have found, real psi effects are oftentimes accompanied with trickery, to unconsciously boost the belief in their reality so that the phenomena can continue to occur. This is a common practice among shamans (Heath 2004), and a key feature of the Trickster archetypical dimension of the paranormal, brilliantly described by Hansen (2001). It is not to say that the individuals who orchestrated the fake were consciously thinking along those lines. Instead, one should see this event as an illustration of the collective unconscious in action (i.e. taking a sociological standpoint rather than a psychological one). The fact that someone, somewhere, felt compelled to use new shared knowledge about UFO and to make it into a fake sighting, highlights that such shared knowledge resonates at an unconscious level too. The verification of this hypothesis can be done by the emergence elsewhere of other fakes taking the biological form of the new trend (which will truly make these sighting as social facts, as defined by the founder of sociology Émile Durkheim).
This new trend is also fascinating because it represents a gradual shift from the “nuts-and-bolt” UFOs, rather than a radical mutation. If we are to follow Méheust’s (1978) approach to the UFO phenomenon, then we should look in the recent past to see if the biological trend in the Sci Fi literature was significant. There is an interesting blog on this issue, which considers that “Science fiction isn't just about rocket ships and ray guns. Many science fiction books, movies and TV shows are based on the biological sciences. This blog discusses cloning, genetic engineering, mutant monsters, longevity treatments and all the other biology behind the fiction.”
One can also think of Canadian David Cronenberg’s films on the theme of horror-biological sci fi that he produced since the early 1970s. As well, there has been a number of books published on this issue, like Leonard Issacs’ Darwin to double helix : the biological theme in science fiction, published in 1977 (London: Butterworths). Clearly, this is not a new issue, but how significant it is?
This is quite difficult to assess. Certainly, environmental issues are more prominent now than before, mostly because governments and large enterprises have now officially espoused the “green turn” in most Western countries. Is the “greening” of UFOs, by way of biological shapes, a sign of time? Are we entering a liminal zone where great advances in genetic engineering are now clearly on sight, but not yet a reality? And that the worries about their danger had time to “cook” since the early 1970s, thus translating into a hybrid high tech-organic shape, for which organic UFOs represent an ideal compromise? These are interesting questions and hypotheses to explore, but a more solid methodological framework to explore them is required.
Another issue to keep an eye on is whether the close encounter narrative will also mutate, as discussed in a previous post. Will the “aliens” coming from the organic UFOs be different from the “nuts-and-bolts” aliens? Historically, UFO sightings have preceded reports of close encounters by a few years. This appears logical as people and ETH ufologists’ unconscious need some time to process the information at a deep mystical level. For that to happen, however, I think that a full-fledge organic UFO wave (i.e. many sightings over a limited geographical area over a few days or weeks, duly reported and ridiculed by the mainstream press) will be first required to get the ETH ufologists engaged in “nurturing” this aspect of the phenomenon.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Reading Notes on Society and Psyche
I finally found an author who proposes a synthesis of key approaches about the social unconscious. This book has been written about 15 years ago, and has not made a big splash, but it contains a number of very interesting analyses that were thought provoking in the context of parasociology. The full citation is:
Leledakis, Kanakis. (1995). Society and Psyche: Social theory and the unconscious dimension of the social. Oxford: Berg.
Defining the social unconscious
Before discussing Leledakis book, I think it would be useful to introduce a definition of the social unconscious. The best one I have found so far is the one proposed by Haim Weinberg, a group psychoanalyst:
“The social unconscious is the co-constructed shared unconscious of members of a certain social system such as community, society, nation or culture. It includes shared anxieties, fantasies, defences, myths, and memories. Its building bricks are made of chosen traumas and chosen glories”.
(From Weinberg H., Nuttman-Shwartz O., & Gilmore, M. 2005. “Trauma Groups: an overview”. Group Analysis 38(2): 189-204.)
The social unconscious and the Marxist tradition
It is important to underline that social scientists and psychologists have a different perspective when they are discussing the notion of unconscious. Although social scientists are using the works of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung as a starting point, they clearly go beyond the original ideas. Yet, in many ways they also arrive to the same ultimate destination. Leladakis identifies one key source of inspiration for both the social sciences and psychoanalysis that actually predates the emergence of psychoanalysis: Karl Marx.
One of the important ideas in Marx’s social theory is that people who are in a socially inferior position (namely the factory workers of the 19th century) can only remain in such a situation if they have accepted it. Otherwise, as they constitute the majority of the population, they could rebel and overthrow their capitalist masters. It is in this context that Marx introduced the notion of “false consciousness,” where workers internalized their inferior status and become supporters of the very system that maintains them into an inferior position (i.e., capitalism). This notion of shared false consciousness can be clearly linked to the notion social unconscious. There is something hidden and repressed away from social consciousness that is operating.
Later on, in the 20th century, some scholars affiliated with the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” of thought, married this notion of false consciousness with the psychoanalytical theories of Freud about repressed drives. The best known scholars of this school of thought are Louis Althusser and Herbert Marcuse. For them, the true liberation of oppressed social classes could only come from liberating individuals from their socially shared unconscious chains.
Marxism and neo-Marxism are now not as fashionable as they use to be (although the excesses of unregulated capitalism leading to the sub-prime fiasco might reignite some of it), it is clear that the notion of helping others has permeated both psychoanalysis and Marxists approaches about the unconscious. However legitimate such approaches may be, it is also important to underline that they are also prescriptive in that they imply there is something wrong in the unconscious that needs to be liberated (either at the individual or social level). Such focus on what is wrong (like in any prescriptive approach) opens the door to neglecting what is “right”, “functional”, “useful”, etc. Hence, the best way to approach the question of the social unconscious for parasociology remains one that attempts to understand the deep underlying dynamics of the social unconscious, be they applied for the better or the worst.
The social unconscious and Cornelius Castoriadis
Leledakis considers that one of the most significant contributions to understanding of the social unconscious is the one of Cornelius Castoriadis, already introduced in a previous post. Castoriadis was very much interested in understanding how social change occurs, and why it was not something that can be predetermined. It is in this context that Castoriadis developed the concept of social imaginary significations, which can be described as having the characteristics of magma. What this means is that at the unconscious level, shared significations in a given society tend to mutate and evolved but in an unpredictable way, as it occurs at an unconscious level where imaginary and symbolic significations are permutated, recombined, and innovate according to a dynamic specific to symbolism (i.e., outside the realm of the rational). This situation explains why social change can occur as new meanings about society are created, and why it is so hard to predict the direction it will take.
Castoriadis also shares the notion that the individual and the social unconscious are closely related, but are reducible to another. Leledakis, in quoting Castoriadis emphasizes that “the constitution of the social individual does not and cannot abolish the psyche’s creativity, its perpetual alteration, the representative flux as the continuous emergence of other representations. Thus, while the social imaginary significations—and the social in general—are irreducible to their effects on the individual, the individual psyche is also irreducible to its social determination.” (p. 113).
It is also interesting to note that for Castoriadis, quoted in Lelekadis, “the tools and instruments of a society are significations; they are the ‘materialization’ of the imaginary significations of that society in the identitary and functional dimension. An assembly line is (and can only exist as) the ‘materialization’ of a host of imaginary significations central to capitalism” (p. 110). If one changes assembly line for UFOs, and capitalism for science fiction, and accepts the parapsychological notion of psi as something emerging from the unconscious but bypassing both the consciousness and the biological body to create an effect, then an interesting framework emerges. Furthermore, if one accepts that the social and the individual unconscious intersect, but cannot be reduced to one another, then the framework can also accommodate the notion that UFOs are the product of the social unconscious while the witnesses’ own individual unconscious dynamics may have only a limited role in the event. In other words, the UFO phenomenon can be construed as the social psi and individual psi intersecting while not being reducible to one another.
From that point of view, when François Favre states that UFO witnesses are psi subjects he is only partly right, while his critique of Méheust that only considers the social dimension is also only partly right. If this hypothesis is correct, then it can explain one of the core issue in ufology: there is both strong commonality in the UFO experience (from the social psi) while accompanied by an almost infinite number of variations found in UFO reports (individual psi), usually ascribed to the inherent problems of human perception.
Investigating the magma
I agree with Leledakis that Castoriadis made a very substantial contribution to integrating the notion social unconscious into social theory. But I agree also with Leledakis that we need to dig deeper into the key internal dynamics of the magma. One interesting contribution is the one of Jacques Lacan. Lacan introduced a distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary is the original and constitutive element of the unconscious, which exists also among animals. The imaginary is the part of the unconscious that can be described as the original “I” as distinct from the rest of the world by the way of imagery. It is deep intuition that there is a difference between me and the rest of the universe, because I can see images that are different from me. The symbolic, on the other hand, is something that is formed through the acquisition of language, and therefore it is built on learning and internalizing social norms, values, and rules. The symbolic, however, is not the language itself, but it is rather evoking symbols that are then translated into language. The symbolic is therefore a much more sophisticated part of the unconscious. The social unconscious resides there on the symbolic layer of the unconscious rather than on the imaginary layer. However, the symbolic layer draws from the imaginary layer primary images and distinctions which are translated into symbolic representations. As one can see, the link between the unconscious and consciousness is constituted by two series of translation, one entirely internal to the unconscious: (a) primary imagery from the imaginary into symbolic representations, and (b) symbolic representations into spoken or written language.
One thing that Lacan and Leledakis never touch upon is the locus of psi dynamics. Starting with Rhine, most parapsychologists consider that psi abilities are to be found in the unconscious processes of the human mind. But where? Some argue that it is in the most primitive part of the mind. One possibility is that psi abilities are to be found in a layer below the imaginary, where the mind does not make any distinction between the “I” and the rest of the universe. This third, deeper, layer could be called the mystical layer. This notion of “being one and everything in sameness” is at the core of the phenomenology of the mystical experience. As well, it is important to note that the mystical character of PK has been identified as a key characteristic of the PK experience by Heath (2005) (as discussed in a previous post). I think it is also what Jungian psychoanalysts mean by the notion of Absolute Knowledge in their study of synchronicity. Then, psi would occur through yet a translation process between the mystical layer and the imaginary one where somehow sameness is preserved while being applied to distinct images. Hence, psi could be further defined as an act of creation that survives its own contradiction between sameness and distinction. It must be postulated that psi can, yet, still survive through another translation process into symbolic representations, because in many instances psi is meaningful.
From this incremental translation process, it is possible to identify where there are different forms of psi. Micro psi effects that do not have symbolic representations because they can only found through statistical analysis (i.e. valid deviation from chance) are perhaps psi effects that occur only when there is only one translation process (from the mystical to the imaginary), while most macro effects have a symbolic dimension which implies that the second translation occurred (from the imaginary to the symbolic). Psi “on demand” (i.e. none spontaneous psi), which works very rarely, occurs when the third translation is effected (from the symbolic to realm of the language and consciousness). Clearly, the continuum micro psi, macro psi, and psi on demand are on a scale of declining frequency. This approach provides an explanation as to why we have this declining frequency curve, as each translation step represents a major hurdle to overcome.
The UFO phenomenon is in the middle category, macro psi, and thus the two first steps of the psi translation process should be sufficient to investigate UFOs. Yet, if science fiction is a key enabler to the UFO phenomenon, it is clear that the translation process is not a one-way process. The series “reading sci fi” (conscious level of the mind through language) to symbolic representations of spaceships and aliens, to saucer and “big head” imagery to sameness where materialization is no more impossible is thus required under this hypothesis. Then, the same series, in the reverse order needs to occur, but ending with a UFO report (instead of a sci fi novel). Once this circuit is established, the UFO reports can replace the sci fi novel to maintain the phenomenon active.
Leledakis discusses also the notion of translation between the unconscious in general and consciousness (p. 135 and ff.). Concretely, when one has an intuition, a gut feeling, or a new idea, this is translation between the unconscious and consciousness. The same can be said about dreaming. Yet, the unconscious can also bypass the consciousness and affect the body directly through compulsive behavior, psycho-somatic diseases, and automated actions such as walking or ride a bike. Psi, then, could also be considered as the unconscious bypassing both consciousness and the body to acquire information (ESP) or to alter matter (PK).
In the case of social psi, this process would still be present, but it can also occur in a disjointed way where many individual unconscious are sharing something that together bypasses their individual and collective consciousness and physical bodies without producing necessarily a direct retroaction towards them. Oftentimes in the case of social psi, someone else would experience the psi phenomenon, but adding their own individual “coloration” to the event.
Hence, it could be postulated that there are two distinct processes at play in social psi phenomena (such as UFOs). The first one is about the double loop of socially activating the mystical layer of the unconscious, and the second one is about the social unconscious bypassing consciousness and physical bodies to reach out what we call reality.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Leledakis, Kanakis. (1995). Society and Psyche: Social theory and the unconscious dimension of the social. Oxford: Berg.
Defining the social unconscious
Before discussing Leledakis book, I think it would be useful to introduce a definition of the social unconscious. The best one I have found so far is the one proposed by Haim Weinberg, a group psychoanalyst:
“The social unconscious is the co-constructed shared unconscious of members of a certain social system such as community, society, nation or culture. It includes shared anxieties, fantasies, defences, myths, and memories. Its building bricks are made of chosen traumas and chosen glories”.
(From Weinberg H., Nuttman-Shwartz O., & Gilmore, M. 2005. “Trauma Groups: an overview”. Group Analysis 38(2): 189-204.)
The social unconscious and the Marxist tradition
It is important to underline that social scientists and psychologists have a different perspective when they are discussing the notion of unconscious. Although social scientists are using the works of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung as a starting point, they clearly go beyond the original ideas. Yet, in many ways they also arrive to the same ultimate destination. Leladakis identifies one key source of inspiration for both the social sciences and psychoanalysis that actually predates the emergence of psychoanalysis: Karl Marx.
One of the important ideas in Marx’s social theory is that people who are in a socially inferior position (namely the factory workers of the 19th century) can only remain in such a situation if they have accepted it. Otherwise, as they constitute the majority of the population, they could rebel and overthrow their capitalist masters. It is in this context that Marx introduced the notion of “false consciousness,” where workers internalized their inferior status and become supporters of the very system that maintains them into an inferior position (i.e., capitalism). This notion of shared false consciousness can be clearly linked to the notion social unconscious. There is something hidden and repressed away from social consciousness that is operating.
Later on, in the 20th century, some scholars affiliated with the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” of thought, married this notion of false consciousness with the psychoanalytical theories of Freud about repressed drives. The best known scholars of this school of thought are Louis Althusser and Herbert Marcuse. For them, the true liberation of oppressed social classes could only come from liberating individuals from their socially shared unconscious chains.
Marxism and neo-Marxism are now not as fashionable as they use to be (although the excesses of unregulated capitalism leading to the sub-prime fiasco might reignite some of it), it is clear that the notion of helping others has permeated both psychoanalysis and Marxists approaches about the unconscious. However legitimate such approaches may be, it is also important to underline that they are also prescriptive in that they imply there is something wrong in the unconscious that needs to be liberated (either at the individual or social level). Such focus on what is wrong (like in any prescriptive approach) opens the door to neglecting what is “right”, “functional”, “useful”, etc. Hence, the best way to approach the question of the social unconscious for parasociology remains one that attempts to understand the deep underlying dynamics of the social unconscious, be they applied for the better or the worst.
The social unconscious and Cornelius Castoriadis
Leledakis considers that one of the most significant contributions to understanding of the social unconscious is the one of Cornelius Castoriadis, already introduced in a previous post. Castoriadis was very much interested in understanding how social change occurs, and why it was not something that can be predetermined. It is in this context that Castoriadis developed the concept of social imaginary significations, which can be described as having the characteristics of magma. What this means is that at the unconscious level, shared significations in a given society tend to mutate and evolved but in an unpredictable way, as it occurs at an unconscious level where imaginary and symbolic significations are permutated, recombined, and innovate according to a dynamic specific to symbolism (i.e., outside the realm of the rational). This situation explains why social change can occur as new meanings about society are created, and why it is so hard to predict the direction it will take.
Castoriadis also shares the notion that the individual and the social unconscious are closely related, but are reducible to another. Leledakis, in quoting Castoriadis emphasizes that “the constitution of the social individual does not and cannot abolish the psyche’s creativity, its perpetual alteration, the representative flux as the continuous emergence of other representations. Thus, while the social imaginary significations—and the social in general—are irreducible to their effects on the individual, the individual psyche is also irreducible to its social determination.” (p. 113).
It is also interesting to note that for Castoriadis, quoted in Lelekadis, “the tools and instruments of a society are significations; they are the ‘materialization’ of the imaginary significations of that society in the identitary and functional dimension. An assembly line is (and can only exist as) the ‘materialization’ of a host of imaginary significations central to capitalism” (p. 110). If one changes assembly line for UFOs, and capitalism for science fiction, and accepts the parapsychological notion of psi as something emerging from the unconscious but bypassing both the consciousness and the biological body to create an effect, then an interesting framework emerges. Furthermore, if one accepts that the social and the individual unconscious intersect, but cannot be reduced to one another, then the framework can also accommodate the notion that UFOs are the product of the social unconscious while the witnesses’ own individual unconscious dynamics may have only a limited role in the event. In other words, the UFO phenomenon can be construed as the social psi and individual psi intersecting while not being reducible to one another.
From that point of view, when François Favre states that UFO witnesses are psi subjects he is only partly right, while his critique of Méheust that only considers the social dimension is also only partly right. If this hypothesis is correct, then it can explain one of the core issue in ufology: there is both strong commonality in the UFO experience (from the social psi) while accompanied by an almost infinite number of variations found in UFO reports (individual psi), usually ascribed to the inherent problems of human perception.
Investigating the magma
I agree with Leledakis that Castoriadis made a very substantial contribution to integrating the notion social unconscious into social theory. But I agree also with Leledakis that we need to dig deeper into the key internal dynamics of the magma. One interesting contribution is the one of Jacques Lacan. Lacan introduced a distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary is the original and constitutive element of the unconscious, which exists also among animals. The imaginary is the part of the unconscious that can be described as the original “I” as distinct from the rest of the world by the way of imagery. It is deep intuition that there is a difference between me and the rest of the universe, because I can see images that are different from me. The symbolic, on the other hand, is something that is formed through the acquisition of language, and therefore it is built on learning and internalizing social norms, values, and rules. The symbolic, however, is not the language itself, but it is rather evoking symbols that are then translated into language. The symbolic is therefore a much more sophisticated part of the unconscious. The social unconscious resides there on the symbolic layer of the unconscious rather than on the imaginary layer. However, the symbolic layer draws from the imaginary layer primary images and distinctions which are translated into symbolic representations. As one can see, the link between the unconscious and consciousness is constituted by two series of translation, one entirely internal to the unconscious: (a) primary imagery from the imaginary into symbolic representations, and (b) symbolic representations into spoken or written language.
One thing that Lacan and Leledakis never touch upon is the locus of psi dynamics. Starting with Rhine, most parapsychologists consider that psi abilities are to be found in the unconscious processes of the human mind. But where? Some argue that it is in the most primitive part of the mind. One possibility is that psi abilities are to be found in a layer below the imaginary, where the mind does not make any distinction between the “I” and the rest of the universe. This third, deeper, layer could be called the mystical layer. This notion of “being one and everything in sameness” is at the core of the phenomenology of the mystical experience. As well, it is important to note that the mystical character of PK has been identified as a key characteristic of the PK experience by Heath (2005) (as discussed in a previous post). I think it is also what Jungian psychoanalysts mean by the notion of Absolute Knowledge in their study of synchronicity. Then, psi would occur through yet a translation process between the mystical layer and the imaginary one where somehow sameness is preserved while being applied to distinct images. Hence, psi could be further defined as an act of creation that survives its own contradiction between sameness and distinction. It must be postulated that psi can, yet, still survive through another translation process into symbolic representations, because in many instances psi is meaningful.
From this incremental translation process, it is possible to identify where there are different forms of psi. Micro psi effects that do not have symbolic representations because they can only found through statistical analysis (i.e. valid deviation from chance) are perhaps psi effects that occur only when there is only one translation process (from the mystical to the imaginary), while most macro effects have a symbolic dimension which implies that the second translation occurred (from the imaginary to the symbolic). Psi “on demand” (i.e. none spontaneous psi), which works very rarely, occurs when the third translation is effected (from the symbolic to realm of the language and consciousness). Clearly, the continuum micro psi, macro psi, and psi on demand are on a scale of declining frequency. This approach provides an explanation as to why we have this declining frequency curve, as each translation step represents a major hurdle to overcome.
The UFO phenomenon is in the middle category, macro psi, and thus the two first steps of the psi translation process should be sufficient to investigate UFOs. Yet, if science fiction is a key enabler to the UFO phenomenon, it is clear that the translation process is not a one-way process. The series “reading sci fi” (conscious level of the mind through language) to symbolic representations of spaceships and aliens, to saucer and “big head” imagery to sameness where materialization is no more impossible is thus required under this hypothesis. Then, the same series, in the reverse order needs to occur, but ending with a UFO report (instead of a sci fi novel). Once this circuit is established, the UFO reports can replace the sci fi novel to maintain the phenomenon active.
Leledakis discusses also the notion of translation between the unconscious in general and consciousness (p. 135 and ff.). Concretely, when one has an intuition, a gut feeling, or a new idea, this is translation between the unconscious and consciousness. The same can be said about dreaming. Yet, the unconscious can also bypass the consciousness and affect the body directly through compulsive behavior, psycho-somatic diseases, and automated actions such as walking or ride a bike. Psi, then, could also be considered as the unconscious bypassing both consciousness and the body to acquire information (ESP) or to alter matter (PK).
In the case of social psi, this process would still be present, but it can also occur in a disjointed way where many individual unconscious are sharing something that together bypasses their individual and collective consciousness and physical bodies without producing necessarily a direct retroaction towards them. Oftentimes in the case of social psi, someone else would experience the psi phenomenon, but adding their own individual “coloration” to the event.
Hence, it could be postulated that there are two distinct processes at play in social psi phenomena (such as UFOs). The first one is about the double loop of socially activating the mystical layer of the unconscious, and the second one is about the social unconscious bypassing consciousness and physical bodies to reach out what we call reality.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Monday, April 6, 2009
Reading Notes – Bertrand Méheust
This post is reviewing one of the classical books in French analyzing the sociological dimension of the UFO phenomenon, and how it relates to science fiction. The title would translate in English as “Science-Fiction and Flying Saucers”. Once again, it is a book written in the 1970s, and thus before the Roswell/Majestic hysterical period of ufology. The full notice is:
Méheust, Bertrand. (1978). Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes. Paris: Mercure de France.
The psycho-social hypothesis
Many websites, in French and English, categorize the French sociologist Méheust as belonging to the so-called psycho-social hypothesis (PSH) in ufology. This hypothesis essentially considers that the UFO phenomenon has no material basis beyond misperceiving human-made aerial objects or natural phenomena. It also considers that UFO witnesses simply project images and notions drawn from the 20th century technological culture into mundane phenomena. In some instances, there might be some external influences that make one hallucinate, but the content of those hallucinations are filled with those images and notions drawn from our culture. This approach has been seriously criticized for ignoring many irreducible physical traces. On the other hand, researchers following this approach clearly showed that the UFO phenomenon is “too human” in its narrative structure to be of extra-terrestrial origins.
Contrary to many of those web commentaries, Méheust does not agree with the PSH, simply because the physical traces cannot be ignored (pp. 20 and 39). In fact, he is considering that the UFO phenomenon shares many similarities with psi events (p. 17), and that there is no contradiction between the material and psychic dimensions of the UFO phenomenon (p. 39). Furthermore, he clearly states that he does not intend to close the UFO file like some people who support the PSH (p. 39), and ultimately provides a devastating critique of the PSH (pp. 211-219). Méheust does not espouse strongly any particular hypothesis, but it is clear that he favours the parapsychological approach with a sociological twist. In my view, he is a pioneer of parasociology.
Science-Fiction and UFOs
Méheust got the idea of comparing the narrative structure of UFO sightings and close encounter reports to older science fiction (SF) literature when he read about the 1896-97 airship wave in the United States. His first reaction was to see striking similarities with Jules Verne’s novel Robur le Conquérant, published in 1885. Yet, Méheust also understood that thousands of people saw the airships and that such a large collective hoax could not have been orchestrated at the end of the 19th century. Something else was going on. He then decided to do an extensive review of the SF literature mostly dating from 1880 to 1930. What he found is quite astonishing.
In the book he presents, on various topics, a few quotes some are from the SF and some are from real UFO reports. In each case it is impossible to know which ones are fiction (drawn from the 1880s to 1930s) and which ones are real reports (usually drawn from the 1960s or 1970s). It is also important to underline that the SF literature of before World War Two was already completely forgotten in the 1960s and 1970s, and most of that older SF literature was published in French while the UFO reports are coming from all over the world from non-French speaking countries. However, by 1930s, many American writers were inspired by the French SF and developed their own branch of it. Clearly, if there is a cause and effect relationship here, there is also a mediating element that goes across time and cultures. For him, the UFO phenomenon and SF have a common source in the creative power of the human imaginary (pp. 19-20) (and I would say in the collective unconscious).
Méheust provides a detailed analysis of the SF narrative content, and shows how key elements of the UFO phenomenon were also very common in the older SF literature. For instance, the SF identifies two key types of UFOs, the “hard ones” in the forms of saucers, spheres, eggs, cigars, and “soft ones” mostly in the form of light that can change shape at will (pp. 56-61). The machines were described as having no apparent doors, yet an opening full of light appears with strange beings in the middle of it (pp. 170-171). The interior tend to be furnished in a very minimal way with metallic walls (pp. 61-62). These machines are described as either silent or making a buzzing sound; they move in an erratic way, in zigzag, make 90 degrees turn, fall like a dead leaf, stop and start instantaneously at very high rates of speed (pp. 62-64). Rays of light and various strange lights are also very common in this SF literature (pp. 68-80). Balls of light and physical forms fusing with each other’s (pp. 81-83); materialisation and dematerialisation are also quite common (pp. 94-100).
Mental communication and induction from the people flying those machines was also a common theme (pp. 90-94). Mysterious healing and disease, temporary paralysis by strange rays of light are also found in that SF literature (pp. 102-110). Human machines and compass stopping to work and animals freaking out in the presence of those flying machines; aliens and human pilots immune to human weapons were also common story lines (pp. 110-116). Abduction by rays of light and levitation (pp. 160-164), and teleportation were also part of this literature (pp. 117-126), with the experimentation chambers (pp. 172-174). Again, we have to remember that many of these texts date back to before 1930, with a sizeable portion from before the First World War.
Science fiction and Aliens
If this was just not enough, the humanoids described in the older SF have also many striking similarities to close encounter reports emerging from the 1950s up to the 1970s (when the book was written). Aliens with big heads and short atrophied bodies were very common in the older SF literature, as well as human mad scientists who shared the same description. The notion of having a big head as a sign of being more intelligent is something unique to the Western culture (p. 130), and it is interesting to note that early observations of ETs outside the US were quite different from the usual “Greys”. For instance, when Vallée (1992) went to the USSR, the “aliens” were very tall and not looking like the “Greys”. This was at a time when Russia was not yet “contaminated” by Western ufological myths. In the SF, the theme of the mad scientist who was working with only a handful of servants was very common. Although Méheust did not notice it (probably because he wrote before the Roswell/Majic hysteria), but if one extends the theme of the lonely mad scientist to a collective of mad scientists, then you have a major conspiracy on the go. Of course, only the government would be able to have such a conspiracy able to go on... Once again, the narrative found in SF is very similar to the one found in ufology. Beyond the hairy beasts, the older SF focussed also on tall and beautiful aliens (pp. 136-138) (like the so-called Nordic race). Once again, this theme of beautiful “superhuman” is as old as the Ancient Greek mythology, and does not require much more explanations.
Deep patterns
Méheust was not only able to show that there are very deep similarities between SF and the UFO phenomenon, but also that they are so extensive that it cannot be a matter of coincidence. But he goes further in showing that there are clear patterns in all this: UFOs imitate with a delay of 10 to 20 years what has been described in the SF literature. Although there were a few UFO sightings before 1947, they were clearly a few years ahead of the technology of the time: Airship wave of 1896-97, “upgraded” airships of 1909, jet-like ghost planes of 1933, space rockets of 1946 (pp. 188-195). Then, we have the events of 1947 which were just a decade before the beginning of the space exploration era started with the launch of Sputnik in 1957; and this is precisely at this point that UFOs started to become spaceships from outer space. For Méheust, SF is an expression of the human imaginary that can anticipate in advance technical progress, and it is only limited by the capacity to imagine the future with what exists in the present. The UFO phenomenon occurred historically between the moments of something becomes imaginable in fiction but before it becomes an actual reality (p. 197). These periods could be described as liminal from the point of view of the collective imaginary.
Another important pattern is the dream-like nature of close encounters, already noticed by other authors like Vallée and Randles. The abduction scenario was also part of the older SF, and is imitated in the UFO reports. But the abduction scenario is a very old myth that goes back not only to the Middle Ages with fairies and elves, but also back to the Greek mythology. In such cases, people tend to have a mystical transformation because they visited some strange reality. The UFO is a modern version of what Méheust call a “reality exchanger” (pp. 179-185) where one goes from one reality to another, where they receive some message or acquire some strange (and usually useless) knowledge. Although he does not mention it, this makes me thinking of the narrative structure of the Greek hero who had to go through the underworld and come back to become a hero. The Greek civilization had probably a more positive attitude towards these “reality exchangers” than we do. As posted before, it is interesting to note that American Natives have also a quite different attitude towards dreams and “reality exchange” experience.
Parasociological explanation?
For Méheust the clear continuum between SF and the UFO phenomenon calls for a different approach to study it. He is referring on numerous occasions to Jung’s famous analysis in Flying Saucers. He agrees with Jung that the UFO phenomenon is something that needs to be understood as a shared myth, but disagrees with him when it comes to the issue of the materiality of the UFOs. So, Méheust also introduces parapsychology to explain the phenomenon, and does hesitate to underline that the issue of materialization and dematerialization should be at the heart of the analysis. But he is also careful in that he notices that parapsychological explanations tend to be centered on the individual, and implies that the individual has a large role to play in the production of any psi effects. In the case of UFOs, such assumptions are hard to maintain, especially when there are many unrelated witnesses involved. Without really saying it, he opens the door to approaching psi from a different angle; social psi created out of the collective unconscious (understood here in a much more flexible way than what Jung is proposing) that is witnessed by individuals. In other words, although we are dealing with a human phenomenon, it is created and experienced at different levels of reality (or ontology). Here, we can make an analogy between an economist who studies the present recession and someone who lost his/her job. They both witnessing the same reality, but their respective perspective or ontological standpoints are quite different. I think it is time for parapsychology to entertain the idea that psi is also something that has multiple ontological levels, and the individual one is just but one of them.
It is interesting to see that someone, before me, came to similar conclusions about the UFO phenomenon. On the other hand, it is also a bit discouraging as I have the impression of re-inventing the wheel. My saving grace is that Méheust does not explore in any depth the notions of social psi, and of collective unconscious (once again from a much flexible perspective than what Jung proposed).
The next wave?
Based on Méheust’s analysis of the older SF, it is possible to develop further an empirical model for parasociology. The collective unconscious gets a specific content out of the narrative stories of a society (arts and SF included). When such narrative stories as fiction push the limits of what is considered as possible and impossible (as in the case of SF), then new room is created for psi effects (based on my definition of psi developed in the post about Favre). This fiction then gets forgotten a few years later, mostly because as in the case of SF it is read by kids and teenagers; they become adults, they have responsibilities about the here and now. The imaginary additions to the collective unconscious through fictional literature have now time to “cook”, hence the delay of 10 to 20 years. When there is a “crisis” (for instance the danger of a nuclear war, (for the US in the 1950s) or the end of a great power status and outlook (for France in 1954), the collective unconscious releases some of its content, which may cause poltergeist-like phenomena on a social scale (such as a UFO wave). Once the phenomenon is out, if it is properly cultivated by naïve observers (i.e. ETH ufologists) then it can keep going on in a manner similar to a haunting (i.e., in a reduced and less ostentatious way), mostly affecting individuals rather than collectives. This is certainly a testable model for the next wave of social-level PEMIE (which may not be necessarily UFOs).
However, as we are now well into the post-modern era where there are a multitude of parallel and fragmented fictional narrative stories that push the limits of the possible, it is less certain that we will experience “highly concentrated” PEMIE on a social scale like UFO waves. In the last twenty years, the fantasy literature born with the “Dungeon and Dragon generation” may be the most common denominator. In this case, the imaginary is set in imaginary lands, contrary to the older SF which occurred mostly on contemporary Earth. This may weaken the imaginary power of such literature as it from the onset further estranged from the “real” world. The outcome of this, however, would be an increased number of people reporting being visiting other worlds without having a strong technological flavour (as in the case of UFOs). It is to be expected also that smaller crises rather than national ones will be the triggers. The present recession, which is having many local impacts, may be such a trigger. It is also possible to think that the CE4 scenario will mutate and fit better the fantasy literature narrative. The main narrative of the SF is that humans are both in awe and afraid of their own technology. The main narrative of the fantasy genre is the battle between good and evil where pure hearts and magic give an edge. The post-modern world being what it is, there is now a merger between the SF and fantasy genres. So the mutation of the CE4 narrative might be the best bet. This would translate into the abductees having to do something for the good in general. The experience would be less passive, but the something to do would be only meaningful during the PEMIE, and would appear absurd and meaningless once back in the mundane world. I expect it will be different from the “Space Brother” era and from Marian apparitions, where humans are asked to do something good in the mundane world (i.e., preach peace, pray, build churches, etc). The narrative of the new wave should involve doing something good within the PEMIE world. As well, if SF emerged at a time where technologies were fascinating people, the present-day era is marked by issue about collective identities and fundamental challenges to key metaphysical notions (i.e., clash of civilization, multiculturalism, globalization and culture uniformity, etc.). Hence, the stage is set to withdraw back into a culturally safer world, and the fantasy literary genre offers such a world, although it is likely to be mixed with other genres. In any events, this is a testable hypothesis but only time will tell. The key will be to ensure that these CE4 reports not conforming to the Grey ET scenario will not be excluded by investigators because they do not fit the ETH.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Méheust, Bertrand. (1978). Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes. Paris: Mercure de France.
The psycho-social hypothesis
Many websites, in French and English, categorize the French sociologist Méheust as belonging to the so-called psycho-social hypothesis (PSH) in ufology. This hypothesis essentially considers that the UFO phenomenon has no material basis beyond misperceiving human-made aerial objects or natural phenomena. It also considers that UFO witnesses simply project images and notions drawn from the 20th century technological culture into mundane phenomena. In some instances, there might be some external influences that make one hallucinate, but the content of those hallucinations are filled with those images and notions drawn from our culture. This approach has been seriously criticized for ignoring many irreducible physical traces. On the other hand, researchers following this approach clearly showed that the UFO phenomenon is “too human” in its narrative structure to be of extra-terrestrial origins.
Contrary to many of those web commentaries, Méheust does not agree with the PSH, simply because the physical traces cannot be ignored (pp. 20 and 39). In fact, he is considering that the UFO phenomenon shares many similarities with psi events (p. 17), and that there is no contradiction between the material and psychic dimensions of the UFO phenomenon (p. 39). Furthermore, he clearly states that he does not intend to close the UFO file like some people who support the PSH (p. 39), and ultimately provides a devastating critique of the PSH (pp. 211-219). Méheust does not espouse strongly any particular hypothesis, but it is clear that he favours the parapsychological approach with a sociological twist. In my view, he is a pioneer of parasociology.
Science-Fiction and UFOs
Méheust got the idea of comparing the narrative structure of UFO sightings and close encounter reports to older science fiction (SF) literature when he read about the 1896-97 airship wave in the United States. His first reaction was to see striking similarities with Jules Verne’s novel Robur le Conquérant, published in 1885. Yet, Méheust also understood that thousands of people saw the airships and that such a large collective hoax could not have been orchestrated at the end of the 19th century. Something else was going on. He then decided to do an extensive review of the SF literature mostly dating from 1880 to 1930. What he found is quite astonishing.
In the book he presents, on various topics, a few quotes some are from the SF and some are from real UFO reports. In each case it is impossible to know which ones are fiction (drawn from the 1880s to 1930s) and which ones are real reports (usually drawn from the 1960s or 1970s). It is also important to underline that the SF literature of before World War Two was already completely forgotten in the 1960s and 1970s, and most of that older SF literature was published in French while the UFO reports are coming from all over the world from non-French speaking countries. However, by 1930s, many American writers were inspired by the French SF and developed their own branch of it. Clearly, if there is a cause and effect relationship here, there is also a mediating element that goes across time and cultures. For him, the UFO phenomenon and SF have a common source in the creative power of the human imaginary (pp. 19-20) (and I would say in the collective unconscious).
Méheust provides a detailed analysis of the SF narrative content, and shows how key elements of the UFO phenomenon were also very common in the older SF literature. For instance, the SF identifies two key types of UFOs, the “hard ones” in the forms of saucers, spheres, eggs, cigars, and “soft ones” mostly in the form of light that can change shape at will (pp. 56-61). The machines were described as having no apparent doors, yet an opening full of light appears with strange beings in the middle of it (pp. 170-171). The interior tend to be furnished in a very minimal way with metallic walls (pp. 61-62). These machines are described as either silent or making a buzzing sound; they move in an erratic way, in zigzag, make 90 degrees turn, fall like a dead leaf, stop and start instantaneously at very high rates of speed (pp. 62-64). Rays of light and various strange lights are also very common in this SF literature (pp. 68-80). Balls of light and physical forms fusing with each other’s (pp. 81-83); materialisation and dematerialisation are also quite common (pp. 94-100).
Mental communication and induction from the people flying those machines was also a common theme (pp. 90-94). Mysterious healing and disease, temporary paralysis by strange rays of light are also found in that SF literature (pp. 102-110). Human machines and compass stopping to work and animals freaking out in the presence of those flying machines; aliens and human pilots immune to human weapons were also common story lines (pp. 110-116). Abduction by rays of light and levitation (pp. 160-164), and teleportation were also part of this literature (pp. 117-126), with the experimentation chambers (pp. 172-174). Again, we have to remember that many of these texts date back to before 1930, with a sizeable portion from before the First World War.
Science fiction and Aliens
If this was just not enough, the humanoids described in the older SF have also many striking similarities to close encounter reports emerging from the 1950s up to the 1970s (when the book was written). Aliens with big heads and short atrophied bodies were very common in the older SF literature, as well as human mad scientists who shared the same description. The notion of having a big head as a sign of being more intelligent is something unique to the Western culture (p. 130), and it is interesting to note that early observations of ETs outside the US were quite different from the usual “Greys”. For instance, when Vallée (1992) went to the USSR, the “aliens” were very tall and not looking like the “Greys”. This was at a time when Russia was not yet “contaminated” by Western ufological myths. In the SF, the theme of the mad scientist who was working with only a handful of servants was very common. Although Méheust did not notice it (probably because he wrote before the Roswell/Majic hysteria), but if one extends the theme of the lonely mad scientist to a collective of mad scientists, then you have a major conspiracy on the go. Of course, only the government would be able to have such a conspiracy able to go on... Once again, the narrative found in SF is very similar to the one found in ufology. Beyond the hairy beasts, the older SF focussed also on tall and beautiful aliens (pp. 136-138) (like the so-called Nordic race). Once again, this theme of beautiful “superhuman” is as old as the Ancient Greek mythology, and does not require much more explanations.
Deep patterns
Méheust was not only able to show that there are very deep similarities between SF and the UFO phenomenon, but also that they are so extensive that it cannot be a matter of coincidence. But he goes further in showing that there are clear patterns in all this: UFOs imitate with a delay of 10 to 20 years what has been described in the SF literature. Although there were a few UFO sightings before 1947, they were clearly a few years ahead of the technology of the time: Airship wave of 1896-97, “upgraded” airships of 1909, jet-like ghost planes of 1933, space rockets of 1946 (pp. 188-195). Then, we have the events of 1947 which were just a decade before the beginning of the space exploration era started with the launch of Sputnik in 1957; and this is precisely at this point that UFOs started to become spaceships from outer space. For Méheust, SF is an expression of the human imaginary that can anticipate in advance technical progress, and it is only limited by the capacity to imagine the future with what exists in the present. The UFO phenomenon occurred historically between the moments of something becomes imaginable in fiction but before it becomes an actual reality (p. 197). These periods could be described as liminal from the point of view of the collective imaginary.
Another important pattern is the dream-like nature of close encounters, already noticed by other authors like Vallée and Randles. The abduction scenario was also part of the older SF, and is imitated in the UFO reports. But the abduction scenario is a very old myth that goes back not only to the Middle Ages with fairies and elves, but also back to the Greek mythology. In such cases, people tend to have a mystical transformation because they visited some strange reality. The UFO is a modern version of what Méheust call a “reality exchanger” (pp. 179-185) where one goes from one reality to another, where they receive some message or acquire some strange (and usually useless) knowledge. Although he does not mention it, this makes me thinking of the narrative structure of the Greek hero who had to go through the underworld and come back to become a hero. The Greek civilization had probably a more positive attitude towards these “reality exchangers” than we do. As posted before, it is interesting to note that American Natives have also a quite different attitude towards dreams and “reality exchange” experience.
Parasociological explanation?
For Méheust the clear continuum between SF and the UFO phenomenon calls for a different approach to study it. He is referring on numerous occasions to Jung’s famous analysis in Flying Saucers. He agrees with Jung that the UFO phenomenon is something that needs to be understood as a shared myth, but disagrees with him when it comes to the issue of the materiality of the UFOs. So, Méheust also introduces parapsychology to explain the phenomenon, and does hesitate to underline that the issue of materialization and dematerialization should be at the heart of the analysis. But he is also careful in that he notices that parapsychological explanations tend to be centered on the individual, and implies that the individual has a large role to play in the production of any psi effects. In the case of UFOs, such assumptions are hard to maintain, especially when there are many unrelated witnesses involved. Without really saying it, he opens the door to approaching psi from a different angle; social psi created out of the collective unconscious (understood here in a much more flexible way than what Jung is proposing) that is witnessed by individuals. In other words, although we are dealing with a human phenomenon, it is created and experienced at different levels of reality (or ontology). Here, we can make an analogy between an economist who studies the present recession and someone who lost his/her job. They both witnessing the same reality, but their respective perspective or ontological standpoints are quite different. I think it is time for parapsychology to entertain the idea that psi is also something that has multiple ontological levels, and the individual one is just but one of them.
It is interesting to see that someone, before me, came to similar conclusions about the UFO phenomenon. On the other hand, it is also a bit discouraging as I have the impression of re-inventing the wheel. My saving grace is that Méheust does not explore in any depth the notions of social psi, and of collective unconscious (once again from a much flexible perspective than what Jung proposed).
The next wave?
Based on Méheust’s analysis of the older SF, it is possible to develop further an empirical model for parasociology. The collective unconscious gets a specific content out of the narrative stories of a society (arts and SF included). When such narrative stories as fiction push the limits of what is considered as possible and impossible (as in the case of SF), then new room is created for psi effects (based on my definition of psi developed in the post about Favre). This fiction then gets forgotten a few years later, mostly because as in the case of SF it is read by kids and teenagers; they become adults, they have responsibilities about the here and now. The imaginary additions to the collective unconscious through fictional literature have now time to “cook”, hence the delay of 10 to 20 years. When there is a “crisis” (for instance the danger of a nuclear war, (for the US in the 1950s) or the end of a great power status and outlook (for France in 1954), the collective unconscious releases some of its content, which may cause poltergeist-like phenomena on a social scale (such as a UFO wave). Once the phenomenon is out, if it is properly cultivated by naïve observers (i.e. ETH ufologists) then it can keep going on in a manner similar to a haunting (i.e., in a reduced and less ostentatious way), mostly affecting individuals rather than collectives. This is certainly a testable model for the next wave of social-level PEMIE (which may not be necessarily UFOs).
However, as we are now well into the post-modern era where there are a multitude of parallel and fragmented fictional narrative stories that push the limits of the possible, it is less certain that we will experience “highly concentrated” PEMIE on a social scale like UFO waves. In the last twenty years, the fantasy literature born with the “Dungeon and Dragon generation” may be the most common denominator. In this case, the imaginary is set in imaginary lands, contrary to the older SF which occurred mostly on contemporary Earth. This may weaken the imaginary power of such literature as it from the onset further estranged from the “real” world. The outcome of this, however, would be an increased number of people reporting being visiting other worlds without having a strong technological flavour (as in the case of UFOs). It is to be expected also that smaller crises rather than national ones will be the triggers. The present recession, which is having many local impacts, may be such a trigger. It is also possible to think that the CE4 scenario will mutate and fit better the fantasy literature narrative. The main narrative of the SF is that humans are both in awe and afraid of their own technology. The main narrative of the fantasy genre is the battle between good and evil where pure hearts and magic give an edge. The post-modern world being what it is, there is now a merger between the SF and fantasy genres. So the mutation of the CE4 narrative might be the best bet. This would translate into the abductees having to do something for the good in general. The experience would be less passive, but the something to do would be only meaningful during the PEMIE, and would appear absurd and meaningless once back in the mundane world. I expect it will be different from the “Space Brother” era and from Marian apparitions, where humans are asked to do something good in the mundane world (i.e., preach peace, pray, build churches, etc). The narrative of the new wave should involve doing something good within the PEMIE world. As well, if SF emerged at a time where technologies were fascinating people, the present-day era is marked by issue about collective identities and fundamental challenges to key metaphysical notions (i.e., clash of civilization, multiculturalism, globalization and culture uniformity, etc.). Hence, the stage is set to withdraw back into a culturally safer world, and the fantasy literary genre offers such a world, although it is likely to be mixed with other genres. In any events, this is a testable hypothesis but only time will tell. The key will be to ensure that these CE4 reports not conforming to the Grey ET scenario will not be excluded by investigators because they do not fit the ETH.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Monday, March 16, 2009
Reading Notes – On the Track of the Poltergeist
This post is reviewing Scott Rogo’s On the Track of the Poltergeist (San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2005), originally published in 1986. As discussed in a previous post, poltergeist phenomena share many similarities with the UFO experience, and there are a number of reasons to think that they may be different expressions of a common underlying dynamics. In this book, Rogo, explored different aspects of the poltergeist phenomenon. He built on previous research, particularly the work done by William Roll, but provides several cases he investigated himself to expand our understanding of poltergeists. Although it was written over 20 years ago, many of the findings remain relevant for parasociology.
The repressed hostility theory
The main thread along the book is a discussion about the validity of the “repressed hostility theory” to explain poltergeists. This theory states that a poltergeist phenomenon is produced by a human agent, oftentimes a teenager, who has a lot anger and hostility but he/she cannot express it in a normal way. Overtime, the unconscious finds ways to express such anger and hostility through psi means, and this becomes the poltergeist event.
Rogo took into consideration the critiques against the theory and particularly against the psychological tests on poltergeist witnesses proposed by Gauld & Cornell, and Taboas & Alvarado. Although Rogo agreed that those psychological tests are providing only a general sense of who are the people who take the test, he also underlined that in many cases the tests and other observations concord with the theory, and therefore it is still a valid theory. Hence, Rogo did not reject the repressed hostility theory, and he even considered it the main explanatory model (p. 146). However, it does not explain every cases, and therefore it must be used with caution, rather than becoming the blanket explanation for all RSPKs.
Beyond the individual – the social and cultural dynamics
What is interesting in this book is that Rogo looked beyond the normal realm of psychology, and attempted to include other levels of explanation. Family dynamics as a whole is clearly one step away from individual psychology, and it is an important part of the explanation. For instance, the Dell case was investigated by Rogo in 1978-1979, and it became clear for him that some poltergeist phenomenon can be difficult to distinguish from “regular” hauntings, which he termed “poltergeist hauntings”—a sort of composite mixture of several poltergeist agents which appears in it ostentatious form as a haunting. Hence, for Rogo “poltergeists tend to stem from individual personal problems while poltergeist hauntings sometimes stem from more subtle family problems. In some of the cases I’ve been able to investigate, it seems as though entire families were jointly projecting their poltergeists. For some reason these cases tend naturally to mimic true hauntings.” (p. 116) In this case, the repressed hostility theory appears to hold as “the Dells tended to lash out in the face of frustration by blaming others for his/her own problems. The Dells did not seem to internalize the hostility by blaming themselves, or by attempting to ignore it. [...] the use of repression to handle life stresses was very evident in the test results procured from both Mr. and Mrs. Dell.” (p. 129)
Based on a different case, Rogo even proposed that poltergeists and hauntings are two expressions of the same fundamental dynamics. According to him, “both hauntings and poltergeists result from the activity of a localized and focalized psychic vortex, which may become activated under a variety of different circumstances. [...] Perhaps these people actively served as psychic catalysts to the events they witnessed. Perhaps they somehow possess the ability to activate strange but latent forces already existing in the houses where they lived. If such were the case, we might say that a poltergeist haunting erupts when the psychic powers of the witness(es) interacts with a (usually) dormant force already present in the house ... but beyond the perception and reach of most of us.” (p. 113). Could it be possible that such latent force be emerging from the social realm, and therefore becomes somewhat independent from the witnesses? After all, there are some reasons to believe that hauntings are “nourished” by a community of believers surrounding a particular building, and such community can outlast the individual believer and thus allows a haunting to go on for a century or more. This is certainly an important hypothesis to test about hauntings: is there a community of believers supporting the belief? And when the community cease to exist, is the building still haunted when unaware new comers arrive? If one thinks about UFOs as an expression of some sort of social psi akin to RSPK, then Rogo’s findings about poltergeist hauntings are quite relevant. UFO, therefore, could possibly be construed as composite social constructions with a substratum of materiality. As well, the views and believes of the ufological community of believer must also be added to the equation.
Another case investigated by Rogo shows that family dynamics and belief may have provided the basis for the phenomenon. Rogo investigated a case in Tucson Arizona in 1983, where there was a stone-throwing poltergeist phenomenon. In this case, although there was clearly a teen at the centre, there was no apparent repressed hostility or dysfunctional family dynamics. The only factor the he identified was a possible neurological problem with the teen (p. 82). What is interesting with this case is that it stopped when someone was caught near the house after several weeks of harassment (although the individual was not captured). Rogo was convinced that such individual was a member of the sheriff’s team trying to find a human culprit. The clear effect, however, was that the family as a whole finally got the “confirmation” that it was a human prankster. The collective belief in something appears to be the key element in this case, as the family essentially conjured up the thing out of their own fears (p. 161). It is possible, however, that the very first event might have been caused by a vagrant person, but it took a life of its own afterward. For Rogo, it was a possible example of Batcheldor’s “artefact induction”, where faking PK at first may produce genuine PK afterward. (p. 161). Certainly UFO can be also subject to “artefact induction”, especially if one thinks about the famous 1947 phrase of Kenneth Arnold about the boomerang-shaped object wobbling like a flying saucer, and the saucer epidemic that ensued.
The role of belief once again appears to play a central role in these psi phenomena. Rogo also noted that “it isn’t surprising to find many poltergeist cases erupting within Brazilian families who were recently ‘cursed’ by a neighbour or enemy. It is, however, the fear of the curse that is probably causing the eruptions in these cases, not the curses or magical acts themselves. We are therefore faced with the curious paradox that, at least in some cultures, fear of poltergeist is a common way of conjuring one into existence!” (p. 158). The fact that flying saucers were mostly specific to the United States for several years (1947-1954) can only leave one to wonder about the critical cultural factors linked to the phenomenon. It appears that we are conjuring up what we have in mind.
Poltergeists mimicking UFOs?
Rogo provided a number of examples about the apparent behaviour of objects in poltergeist phenomenon that have many similarities with UFOs. He related some of the effects from the 1968-1969 Nickleheim case investigated by Hans Bender. Many incidents of teleportation occurred, as well as objects moving in an “unusual zigzag movement [...] Objects thrown by the poltergeist often do not follow normal trajectories. They will frequently move unusually slowly as though floating or being deliberately carried, will sometime make right-angle turns in midflight, and have been known to fly at incredible speeds and then just stop in midair and fall on the ground” (p. 12-13).
As well, Rogo investigated a case in 1978 in a factory in California where the RSPK agent was interfering with the electronic equipment of the factory, including the public address system. (pp. 55-64). It is interesting to see, once again that an individual can create the same type of electronic malfunctions that are often reported in UFO incidents. However, as Rogo noted, the factory had a piece of equipment that was emitting an important electromagnetic field, which appeared to be a key enabler in the case. (p. 64). This experience fits quite well the notion of PEMIE (Psi/Electro-Magnetic Induced Experience) discussed in the previous post.
It is clear that the study of poltergeist (or RSPK) is useful for the study of UFOs. It would probably be interesting also to reverse the exercise and look into the UFO experience to better understand poltergeist...
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
The repressed hostility theory
The main thread along the book is a discussion about the validity of the “repressed hostility theory” to explain poltergeists. This theory states that a poltergeist phenomenon is produced by a human agent, oftentimes a teenager, who has a lot anger and hostility but he/she cannot express it in a normal way. Overtime, the unconscious finds ways to express such anger and hostility through psi means, and this becomes the poltergeist event.
Rogo took into consideration the critiques against the theory and particularly against the psychological tests on poltergeist witnesses proposed by Gauld & Cornell, and Taboas & Alvarado. Although Rogo agreed that those psychological tests are providing only a general sense of who are the people who take the test, he also underlined that in many cases the tests and other observations concord with the theory, and therefore it is still a valid theory. Hence, Rogo did not reject the repressed hostility theory, and he even considered it the main explanatory model (p. 146). However, it does not explain every cases, and therefore it must be used with caution, rather than becoming the blanket explanation for all RSPKs.
Beyond the individual – the social and cultural dynamics
What is interesting in this book is that Rogo looked beyond the normal realm of psychology, and attempted to include other levels of explanation. Family dynamics as a whole is clearly one step away from individual psychology, and it is an important part of the explanation. For instance, the Dell case was investigated by Rogo in 1978-1979, and it became clear for him that some poltergeist phenomenon can be difficult to distinguish from “regular” hauntings, which he termed “poltergeist hauntings”—a sort of composite mixture of several poltergeist agents which appears in it ostentatious form as a haunting. Hence, for Rogo “poltergeists tend to stem from individual personal problems while poltergeist hauntings sometimes stem from more subtle family problems. In some of the cases I’ve been able to investigate, it seems as though entire families were jointly projecting their poltergeists. For some reason these cases tend naturally to mimic true hauntings.” (p. 116) In this case, the repressed hostility theory appears to hold as “the Dells tended to lash out in the face of frustration by blaming others for his/her own problems. The Dells did not seem to internalize the hostility by blaming themselves, or by attempting to ignore it. [...] the use of repression to handle life stresses was very evident in the test results procured from both Mr. and Mrs. Dell.” (p. 129)
Based on a different case, Rogo even proposed that poltergeists and hauntings are two expressions of the same fundamental dynamics. According to him, “both hauntings and poltergeists result from the activity of a localized and focalized psychic vortex, which may become activated under a variety of different circumstances. [...] Perhaps these people actively served as psychic catalysts to the events they witnessed. Perhaps they somehow possess the ability to activate strange but latent forces already existing in the houses where they lived. If such were the case, we might say that a poltergeist haunting erupts when the psychic powers of the witness(es) interacts with a (usually) dormant force already present in the house ... but beyond the perception and reach of most of us.” (p. 113). Could it be possible that such latent force be emerging from the social realm, and therefore becomes somewhat independent from the witnesses? After all, there are some reasons to believe that hauntings are “nourished” by a community of believers surrounding a particular building, and such community can outlast the individual believer and thus allows a haunting to go on for a century or more. This is certainly an important hypothesis to test about hauntings: is there a community of believers supporting the belief? And when the community cease to exist, is the building still haunted when unaware new comers arrive? If one thinks about UFOs as an expression of some sort of social psi akin to RSPK, then Rogo’s findings about poltergeist hauntings are quite relevant. UFO, therefore, could possibly be construed as composite social constructions with a substratum of materiality. As well, the views and believes of the ufological community of believer must also be added to the equation.
Another case investigated by Rogo shows that family dynamics and belief may have provided the basis for the phenomenon. Rogo investigated a case in Tucson Arizona in 1983, where there was a stone-throwing poltergeist phenomenon. In this case, although there was clearly a teen at the centre, there was no apparent repressed hostility or dysfunctional family dynamics. The only factor the he identified was a possible neurological problem with the teen (p. 82). What is interesting with this case is that it stopped when someone was caught near the house after several weeks of harassment (although the individual was not captured). Rogo was convinced that such individual was a member of the sheriff’s team trying to find a human culprit. The clear effect, however, was that the family as a whole finally got the “confirmation” that it was a human prankster. The collective belief in something appears to be the key element in this case, as the family essentially conjured up the thing out of their own fears (p. 161). It is possible, however, that the very first event might have been caused by a vagrant person, but it took a life of its own afterward. For Rogo, it was a possible example of Batcheldor’s “artefact induction”, where faking PK at first may produce genuine PK afterward. (p. 161). Certainly UFO can be also subject to “artefact induction”, especially if one thinks about the famous 1947 phrase of Kenneth Arnold about the boomerang-shaped object wobbling like a flying saucer, and the saucer epidemic that ensued.
The role of belief once again appears to play a central role in these psi phenomena. Rogo also noted that “it isn’t surprising to find many poltergeist cases erupting within Brazilian families who were recently ‘cursed’ by a neighbour or enemy. It is, however, the fear of the curse that is probably causing the eruptions in these cases, not the curses or magical acts themselves. We are therefore faced with the curious paradox that, at least in some cultures, fear of poltergeist is a common way of conjuring one into existence!” (p. 158). The fact that flying saucers were mostly specific to the United States for several years (1947-1954) can only leave one to wonder about the critical cultural factors linked to the phenomenon. It appears that we are conjuring up what we have in mind.
Poltergeists mimicking UFOs?
Rogo provided a number of examples about the apparent behaviour of objects in poltergeist phenomenon that have many similarities with UFOs. He related some of the effects from the 1968-1969 Nickleheim case investigated by Hans Bender. Many incidents of teleportation occurred, as well as objects moving in an “unusual zigzag movement [...] Objects thrown by the poltergeist often do not follow normal trajectories. They will frequently move unusually slowly as though floating or being deliberately carried, will sometime make right-angle turns in midflight, and have been known to fly at incredible speeds and then just stop in midair and fall on the ground” (p. 12-13).
As well, Rogo investigated a case in 1978 in a factory in California where the RSPK agent was interfering with the electronic equipment of the factory, including the public address system. (pp. 55-64). It is interesting to see, once again that an individual can create the same type of electronic malfunctions that are often reported in UFO incidents. However, as Rogo noted, the factory had a piece of equipment that was emitting an important electromagnetic field, which appeared to be a key enabler in the case. (p. 64). This experience fits quite well the notion of PEMIE (Psi/Electro-Magnetic Induced Experience) discussed in the previous post.
It is clear that the study of poltergeist (or RSPK) is useful for the study of UFOs. It would probably be interesting also to reverse the exercise and look into the UFO experience to better understand poltergeist...
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Call for Papers
52nd Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
6-9 August 2009
The Parapsychological Association published a Call for Paper for their Annual Convention 2009. Details on their website.
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
6-9 August 2009
The Parapsychological Association published a Call for Paper for their Annual Convention 2009. Details on their website.
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