BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#13)

 

Chapter 12

Invasion of the Saucermen

 

The literature (I use the term guardedly) of UFO/Paranormal phenomena, thanks to the explosive growth of e-publishing, is piling up at a heretofore unheard of pace. Too, I’m not sure why I continue to separate “UFO” from “paranormal,” as these are aspects of a chaotic continuum tunneling through mundane existence since time immemorial.

 

This, of course, is anathema to believers in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis–one of which I am not whom (or, in the priceless wit of Winston Churchill: “Include me out.”). While I lack the sort of ego required to absolutely refuse the idea of physical beings coming here from Otherwhere, I cannot locate irrefutable evidence for this–it might be happening. I don’t know. Many others do, and they are welcome to their comforting belief. Denying them is akin to declaring: “Fuck what you people different from me think–you have no right!”

 

The day I sink that low may the ink in my uni-ball Vision boil. Regarding the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, consider me an agnostic.

 

After reading what follows, you might very well think otherwise, but I urge you to leaven your thoughts with heaps of hope and a dash of doubt–considering at once the messy chaos of everyday survival threatening to burst your living-room TV with plasma of a different order: the horror of blood.

 

If I gather “reality” only from media, I must believe the only reason I’m sitting here in relative calm, trees hissing in windy dark, is because someone has let me live. Is this the genuine state of affairs? Like anything, I cannot know. We are not driven by jobs, science, and logic, but by imagination, desire, and fantasy. Stressful existence opens a vacuum behind our lives that must be filled–as true for us as it was for ancient ancestors formulating law, control, and the algebra of religion. Given rare access to suppressed art and sculpture of those times, one would witness the craving for other worlds, often filled–if not sated–by sexual congress and other indulgence, akin to our own lacerating anguish for escape.

 

We don’t know what we are, where we came from, or where we’re going. Presently we have no way of magically–or even mechanically–detaching ourselves from the assumed curse of “everydayness.” But something fills–or is attempting to fill–that vacuum of misery.

 

Hence the not-too-subtle invasion of the nameless.

 

Written accounts of anomalous phenomena have changed since the late 1950s to 1960s, shockingly ignored my modern anthropology and psychologists of all stripes. After 1968 or thereabouts, reports of gnome-like, diminutive entities fizzled. The ’70s into the ’80s gave us terror and gloom-filled tales of “Grays.” Such reports did not exist until books written by certain authors were published–and then exploded into global culture. True, Grays were spoken of–however rarely–in some early occult works. But the period of especially the 1950s is rich with bizarre, surreal encounters. Thousands of sighting-, and landing-reports, in France and Italy. I cite incidents (a small sampling) over several days.

 

“20 OCTOBER 1954: PARRAVICINO d’ERBA, ITALY.

Renzo Pugina, 37, had just put his car in the garage when he saw a strange being covered with a “scaly” luminous suit, about [3 feet] tall, standing near a tree. The creature aimed the beam from a sort of flashlight at him, and he felt paralyzed, until a motion he made when clenching his fist on the garage keys seemed to free him. He attacked the intruder, who rose and fled with a soft whirring sound. An oily spot was found at the site.”

 

“23 OCTOBER 1954: SAINT-HILAIRE-des-LOGES, FRANCE.

Mrs. Boeuf was coming out of her farmhouse when she saw a luminous disk in the sky and called her family. When everyone saw the object come closer, they locked all doors and spent a sleepless night. They did not observe the object’s departure.”

 

“24 OCTOBER 1954: LES EGOTS, FRANCE.

Near Sainte Catherine, a child saw a man emerge from a strange craft. He was ‘dressed in red, his clothes looked like iron. He walked with his legs stiff, had long hair and a hairy face. His eyes were large, like those of the cows.'”

 

“26 OCTOBER 1954: LA MADIERE, FRANCE.

Aime Boussard, 47, a farmer, was suddenly confronted with an individual of normal height…wearing a sort of diving suit with a pale-green light on either side of the helmet. The individual aimed at the witness the beam of two blue lights, and he was thrown backward. No craft was observed.”

 

To present-day readers such accounts sound absurd, even ridiculous. Consider, though, that these reports come from rural areas whose residents were unfamiliar with UFOs, but not with natural phenomena. As noted, most prominently, by Jacques Vallee (who provided these reports), the UFO occupants behave in America like science-fictional monsters (i.e. Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, Hopkinsville, Kentucky “goblins,” the Grays, etc.). European accounts give us entities more mischievous and surreal, while the South American reports are often violent and terrifying (resulting, apparently, in more than a few deaths by boxy, refrigerator-like craft attacking hunters with pulsed microwave beams causing laser-like wounds and lingering effects of sleeplessness, extreme thirst, followed by complete failure of major organs).

 

The phenomenon does appear to assume aspects already present in the collective unconscious of whatever region it invades, rendering the so-called Extraterrestrial Hypothesis unlikely.

 

Whatever the UFO phenomenon represents, it is stranger far, and more complex by many levels, than any simple expedient involving beings from “another world.”

 

Reading the above ought to tell anyone that the phenomenon is escalating in violence, however scattered and seemingly isolated. I could be wrong, of course, but I do not think any arm of military or corporate intelligence possesses the secret of anti-gravity and stealth. I hope I am correct in this assumption. Better the devil we know.

 

The biggest problem is how most “investigators” treat their findings, unable (or unwilling) to see the unknown as anything but extraterrestrial. Humankind is the result of literally millions of evolutionary steps–unlikely to occur in exactly the same order anywhere else in the universe. Outside entities would not have two legs, two arms, nor breathe our air and (occasionally) speak our language. When they do, in nearly all accounts on record, their utterances are uniformly absurd, merely poetic, or deceptive–akin to “spirit” voices. Again and again, though present at these seemingly miraculous manifestations, we learn nothing beyond the “reality” that whatever we are, we are not alone.