Humming
05-05-2006, 07:46 AM
So.... Disinfo has printed two chapters from Daniel's new book. Here they are. This will give you a taste of what it's about. Enjoy!
http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle16103.html
Daniel Pinchbeck has kindly agreed for Disinformation to reprint the first two chapters from his new book 2012: The Return Of Quetzalcoatl (Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006). Chapter 1 talks about cosmological motifs that include the Arecibo Response on extraterrestrial communication, UFO subcultures, the Rosewell incident, Whitley Streiber and John Mack's views on UFO abductee experiences, and an enigmatic dreamscape from Kassel, Germany in 2002. Welcome to Chapel Perilous if you dare!
"Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin."
Franz Kafka
Chapter One
In the popular culture of our secular age, the gods, demigods, fairies, and gnomes of the old mythic realm have returned as extraterrestrials. Our mingled longing for and dread of contact with some unknown consciousness or superior alien race has been reflected in a century’s worth of books, films, television, and radio plays. I grew up on Star Trek, The Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, ET, and 2001, on Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Stanislaw Lem—as an adolescent, I loved the Silver Surfer and Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. The pleasure of these artifacts was in the possibilities they threw out, like so many sparks. They returned the cosmos to a capacious state of “what-if?” that our mechanistic science seemed to deny. The exploration of fictional worlds is a kind of dreaming while awake; the complex ecosystem of the cultural imagination may also have a protective function. Through such stories, we absorb ideas in sidereal fashion, perhaps readying ourselves, on some subliminal level, for future shock of various stripes, before it arrives.
After I finished my article on the crop circles, the images, and their implicit intent, continued to linger in my mind. I was perplexed by the rectangular Arecibo Response formation, dismissed by current SETI astronomer Seth Shostak as a “nice example of grain graffiti,” unworthy of further investigation. I was equally confounded by the “Face” that had appeared in halftones on the date of my daughter’s birth. Whether accident or synchronicity, this correspondence seemed like a personal invitation to visit what the writer Robert Anton Wilson dubbed “Chapel Perilous,” that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.
Considering the scientific evidence, gathered by Eltjo Haselhof and others, suggesting the phenomenon had some mysterious legitimacy, as well as the many personal accounts I absorbed while doing my research, SETI’s blithe dismissal of the Arecibo Response glyph, a direct response to a message beamed into space by SETI in 1974, seemed flat and unreflective. Shostak insisted that an alien civilization would not communicate in such a manner when they could simply leave an Encyclopedia Galactica on our doorstep. But how could we determine the means that an alien civilization might use to communicate? He was perhaps recalling the Fermi Paradox, which noted that any technologically evolved civilization on a nearby star system should have emitted radio waves during its development that our sensors would have picked up. The physicist Enrico Fermi asked, in the absence of these signals, “Where are they?” But the answer might lie beyond the limits of our present knowledge.
The SETI astronomer pointed out that the original Arecibo greeting was sent out to the M13 star cluster, over twenty thousand light-years away, and it therefore made no sense that it could have been answered already. It seemed equally logical to theorize that whoever—whatever—had crafted the reply knew about the original message as soon as it was sent, that they might have observed activities on our planet for a very long time. But even if one could imagine an advanced species watching the Earth, awaiting the proper moment to reveal itself to us, the Arecibo Response still made little sense. Who was meant to receive the transmission? And what were they—or we—supposed to do with it?
Small, big-headed figures with silicon added to their makeup and an extra strand of DNA, as depicted in the Arecibo Response, suggested the peculiar narrative, or evolving postmodern myth, of the Gray aliens. Over the last decades, the Grays infiltrated the global subconscious, through best-selling books such as Whitley Streiber’s 1987 Communion, the TV miniseries Taken, and T-shirts, plastic figurines, cartoons, and other mass-cult detritus based on accounts of abduction. I had never paid more than a glancing attention to the UFO phenomenon or to alien abduction accounts—it seemed like some hysterical symptom of our cultural malaise, adolescent and turgid, overliteral, and deeply disreputable. The notion that three-and-a-half-foot-tall cardboard-colored aliens made nightly invasions of middle-class bedrooms across the United States and the world to insert rectal probes and take sperm samples did not seem plausible, or the type of behavior one would anticipate from a futuristic civilization.
And yet, much like the surprisingly tangible evidence on crop circles, the accumulated data on UFO sightings and alien abductions reveals jarring levels of complexity and downright weirdness that do not allow for a blanket rejection of the phenomenon. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of T. E. Lawrence, dedicated the last decades of his life to studying the psychological phenomenon of adbuction by “the visitors,” as Whitley Streiber called them. Considering the data gathered by a 1991 Roper poll, Mack thought it conceivable that as many as three million Americans had undergone an abduction experience. His study of abductees led him to conclude that the phenomenon had validity beyond any psychological mechanism: “There have been numerous psychological studies of these individuals; none has discovered any psychopathology in great degree that could account for the experience.” In many cases, abductees “have been witnessed by their relatives to not be present during that time. They are physically gone, and families become very distressed. . . . One of the things most difficult to accept is that this can actually have a literal factual basis. . . . Abductees may wake up with unexplained cuts, scoop marks, or bleeding noses.” Mack optimistically proposed that these experiences had some sort of therapeutic value.
The narrative of contact between modern culture and the UFOs has developed over a long period, beginning with mass sightings of mysterious “air ships,” like souped-up blimps, in the late nineteenth century. After World War II, accounts of flying saucers became rampant. “Between 1947 and the dawn of the age of abductees in the 1970s, there were at least six major UFO sighting waves,” writes Brenda Denzler in The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. Each wave produced thousands of eyewitness accounts. Sometimes picked up by radar, the UFOs would execute impossible aeronautical feats, hovering, plunging, zigzagging, skipping across water, suddenly disappearing.
On July 8, 1947, the Air Force intelligence office on Roswell Army Base in Roswell, New Mexico, announced the recovery of a crashed “flying disc” in a press release published in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday,” the release began. The military retracted the information on the following day, explaining that the disc recovered by two intelligence agents turned out to be, upon further inspection, a weather balloon. Since that time, an entire industry of conspiracy theories has developed—books and films propounding government cover-ups, secret deals made with the aliens, issuing from that peculiar incident, and a few others like it.
During the 1950s, witnesses reported seeing saucers that had landed or crashed, with small, silver-suited humanoids standing around or working on them. Sometimes, these humanoid “aliens” would wave at the bystanders. Abduction accounts began to surface in the 1960s. The first famous report—that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial New Hampshire couple, whose abduction memories were recovered through hypnosis and published in Look magazine in 1966—established the template followed by the vast body of the tens of thousands of accounts logged since then. The “salient features,” according to Denzler, include “missing time, physical examination while on board the UFO, a tour of the ship, conversation with the aliens, and the use of hypnotic regression to recover lost memories.”
UFOlogist Jacques Vallee links alien abductions to ancient folktales in which humans trespassed or were cajoled into the realm of the fairy folk. Putting the episodes in the same category as Patrick Harpur’s “daimonic reality,” he sees them belonging to “the domain of the in-between, the unproven, and the unprovable, . . . the country of paradoxes, strangely furnished with material ‘proofs,’ sometimes seemingly unimpeachable, but always ultimately insufficient. . . . This absolutely confusing (and manifestly misleading) aspect . . . may well be the phenomenon’s most basic characteristic.” The visitors usually appear at night when the abductee is sleeping, often paralyzing them and then floating them out of their bed and onto a ship, where rapid, confusing, painful, and often repugnant events transpire.
Once selected, abductees tend to be picked up and tormented by the Grays again and again—and hypnosis often reveals that these contacts go back to early childhood. The visitors communicate telepathically, their tiny mouth slits and large black eyes never moving. They seem lacking in affect—although some abductees find them afraid or sad or amused at certain moments—and are puzzled yet fascinated by human emotional reactions. Their behavior is consistently bizarre and unpleasant, as if their actions represent a kind of mangled syntax, their true intentions concealed or distorted in some way. To take one of many examples, at the end of an abduction, the visitors exhorted one abductee, over and over again, to “eat only cow things.” In another account, a male Gray paraded in front of its victim wearing her high-heeled shoes. Another abductee described a group of “small Grays” (they come in different sizes) gathered around a Christmas gift they had found in her car, opening and clumsily rewrapping it. Their hectic movements and the seemingly senseless operations they perform give the visitors an odd, fugitive quality, somehow out of sync, like figures from an old silent movie.
For the abductees, the most prevalent emotional response is one of extreme terror and violation—although some abductees, in what might be an extradimensional version of Stockholm Syndrome, come to believe in and trust their visitors, overcoming their initial reactions of horror. They convince themselves they are in league with the visitors—or were (or are) Grays in another life. They accept the claims sometimes made by the visitors, that they are here to salvage humanity and the planet from our destructive mania. Abductees often report rapes and procedures where small BB-sized implants are painfully deposited under their skin, deep up their nose or their rectum. In some cases, these implants have been retrieved and analyzed in laboratories—but they are of indeterminate origin and inconclusive proof of anything otherworldly.
In 1981, the abductions were declared an “invisible epidemic” by researcher Budd Hopkins, author of Missing Time. In the 1980s, Hopkins and other researchers noted the prevalence of reports describing the removal of eggs or sperm, and the compiled accounts began to suggest that the Grays were engaged in a massive “hybrid” human-alien breeding program. In dozens of reports, women are abducted, gynecological procedures performed, and then, back in their normal lives, they test positive for pregnancy. A few weeks later, their mysterious pregnancy disappears. Under hypnosis, they would recollect an intervening abduction and the removal of a tiny fetus. In future abductions—as revealed under hypnosis—the women would be shown developing fetuses, babies, or children and told that these were their hybrid offspring. A sordid ambience of accusation and guilt clings to these memories. In several accounts, abductees trying to escape from the tortures or experiments the Grays had designed for them were told by their captors: “Don’t you remember? You agreed to this.” As his captors inserted a needle into his brain, Streiber shouted, “You have no right to do this.” The visitors answered calmly, “We do have a right.”
The abductions have the ambience of intensely lucid nightmares, and some researchers suspect they are hypnagogic, chaotic, or nonlinear events that the experiencers reorganize into a more logical narrative afterward. To a certain extent, hypnotherapists may help shape the abduction narratives through subtle cues. Yet the similarity of encounters reported on different continents, the identical details picked up again and again, in thousands of reports from credible and often reluctant subjects around the world, suggest, at the very least, that something is happening that cannot be reduced to current categories of psychology, or fit into accepted frameworks of meaning. As John Mack noted, “What characterizes the abduction experience is that it is physically real and it enters the physical world, but it is also transpersonal and subjective. It crosses that barrier between the hard-edged physical world and the spirit/transpersonal world.”
Although perfectly willing to concede his experiences could represent something other than alien contact, Whitley Streiber wrote: “If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: This ‘something else’ is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it.”
In Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (1995), an intelligent and honestly astonished account of the abduction phenomenon, New Yorker contributor C. D. B. Bryan crafted a physical portrait of the visitors, exploring their many anomalies. “The aliens’ bodies are flat, paunchless. Their chests are not bifurcated; they have no nipples. Nor does the chest swell or diminish with breathing,” he wrote. Culling from reports and his own research, he found, “The lower part of their anatomy does not contain any stomach pouch or genitals; it just comes to an end. . . . The Small Gray’s body appears frail, with thin limbs and no musculature or bone structure.” Some researchers assume they are less like biological organisms than machines, powered in some way we cannot comprehend, as they do not seem to eat, drink, or excrete. Nor do they have a slot for inserting batteries. Incongruous details abound: In Britain, the Grays are associated with the odor of cinnamon; in the United States, their smell is of ammonia, almonds, and lemon.
Bryan’s book offered no coherent thesis to explain the phenomenon. More alarming and pointed in his conclusions than Bryan was David Jacobs in The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda (1999). A hypnotherapist and professor of history at Temple University, Jacobs believes that he has, after years of work, distilled a completely logical and entirely horrifying picture of what the Grays are doing and planning—and he is disconsolate over it. He describes the breeding program, including haunting details from abductee accounts.
Captured humans are often brought to play with the children of the visitors, who are described as melancholy and lethargic. The Gray children play with blocks, similar to the blocks used by human children. But the alien blocks do not have letters or numbers on them—instead, they emit different emotions when they are turned. Since they seem to be telepathic, the visitors have no need to learn spelling or counting. The toys seem to indicate, instead, that they are trying to learn how to feel. Could it be that this yearning for affect is one reason the visitors seek human contact? Does it indicate something of their intent?
“I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening,” Streiber wrote in Communion. “Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.” Even the difficulties of retrieving memories of these experiences could be part of a process in which the visitors are slowly acclimatizing us to their existence, Streiber speculates.
During the encounters uncovered in Jacobs’s hypnotherapy sessions, abductees are often shown images, like propaganda films, of an apocalyptic event—nuclear war or sudden climate change—followed by clips of hybrid human-aliens walking arm in arm across a transformed earth, the sun shining down on them peacefully. The Grays state that their breeding program will repopulate the earth after the approaching cataclysm that makes the planet uninhabitable for our type of life. The alien agenda, Jacobs believes, has three stages—“gradual, accelerated, and sudden.” We are currently in the accelerated phase. Under hypnosis, abductees report being trained to operate the Grays’ saucers, and to help herd masses of people, like frightened sheep, into them, when the moment is right for the “sudden” phase.
Jacobs hypothesizes that the visitors’ frequently nonsensical and bizarre behavior is a way of covering their direct intent. Like cunning cartoon villains, the visitors have used our own propensity for disbelief to render us defenseless to their agenda: the incipient takeover of the earth. One abductee reports, “After The Change, there will be only one form of government: The insectile aliens will be in complete control. There will be no necessity to continue national governments. There will be ‘one system’ and ‘one goal.’” Jacobs ends on a note of dread: “We now know the alarming dimensions of the alien agenda and its goals. . . . I do not think about the future with much hope. When I was a child, I had a future with much hope. . . . Now I fear for the future of my own children.”
I found something wearying—not just foggy but almost smutty—about studying the abduction accounts. Almost from the first moment of pursuing it, it was as if a veil was falling down over my mind and my senses. Whether projections of our own mind or literal entities or both, the Grays call to us from a feverish twilit world of shades of grayness without clear definition. The path to understanding what may or may not be known about them by the government leads to an opaque barrier of reports of unverifiable authenticity, military and CIA panels with names like “Project Grudge,” “The Robertson Panel,” “Project Blue Book,” and “Majestic 12,” a plausible yet unreal history of covert operations, secret underground bases, cattle mutilations, alien crashes, possibly paranoiac accounts of former military personnel, and disinformation campaigns. The endless mass-market books on the subject include, inevitably, black-and-white photographs of disc-shaped objects and blurry streaks that look entirely unconvincing and somehow antiquated—a kind of 1930s idea of what a futuristic technology might look like.
But what if there was a literal truth to David Jacobs’s narrative? Was it possible that the Grays, as horrible as they sounded—as disreputable, somehow, as the entire enterprise seemed—were actually orchestrating an imminent evolutionary shift for the hapless human species?
Reading scores of abduction accounts, I felt a pitiful sense of helplessness against this telepathic, sorcerous, affectless enemy—“the bugs,” as many abductees call them. I thought about my disappointment with the human race, seemingly hurtling toward ecological collapse and nuclear disaster, unable to control our worst impulses. Was this all part of a process, to create the forced conditions for a transformation that would, indeed, be apocalyptic at a very deep level? And if this might be the case, then what would be our best response to “The Threat,” as Jacobs called it? Should we try to resist the visitors? Should we surrender to their morbid mastery? But then, why was there something so laboriously theatrical, tacky, and fraudulent about all of it?
In June 2002, I went with my partner and our baby to the opening of the Documenta11 exhibition, in the West German town of Kassel. As a journalist writing about art, I had always hoped to visit this exhibit, which takes place every five years. I associated Documenta with the hard-core cool of the conceptual art of the early 1970s, with the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, known for his neo-shamanic self-mythologizing and iconic displays of iron plates, felt, and fat. Unfortunately, by the time I finally managed to attend, my mind was filled with other, stranger matters.
We stayed at a hotel in the Wilhelmshöhe Bergpark, across the road from the city’s baroque castle. The castle had beautiful gardens, old gnarled trees, and a towering stone monument of Hercules clad in a lion skin at the end of a long reflective pool and fountain. The Brothers Grimm had lived near the park, and their house was a local attraction. During the day, we toured the exhibition halls spread across the city, in old factory buildings, breweries, and railway stations. Organized by Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian curator, the exhibit was starkly political. It featured numerous Third World artists, and minority artists from the West. Many works addressed the destructive excesses of globalization, allegorically or directly. One film documented the bleak, monotonous lives of South African diamond miners, in bunkers and tunnels deep under the Earth. Sculptures mocked the modernist visions of utopia, parodied colonialism’s slave-driven delusions of grandeur. The exhibit was angry, inspiring—a post-Marxist assault on global imperialism.
In the hypersophisticated ambience of Documenta11’s numerous receptions and parties, standing amidst espresso-drinking aesthetes and stylish art dealers chattering in various Romance languages about museum shows and beach resorts and the latest art world gossip, I found myself thinking incessantly about the abduction saga, the postmodern myth of the visitors. Were these glamorous and well-heeled aesthetes soon to be fodder for an orchestrated alien takeover, doomed to explain Neo-Conceptualism and Post-Pop to short, affectless, hyperdimensional invaders?
One night, after a long day of art-going under the pouring rain in Kassel, I had a vivid dream about the visitors. In the dream, I went with two friends to meet one of the “Gray Alien” commanders in an Upper West Side lobby. The alien resembled a Chinese woman. She wore a red silk dress, had large almond-shaped eyes, and four fingers on each hand. She spoke as if we were going to make some kind of deal.
“It’s going to be great for you when we take over your planet,” she told me. “We can’t wait to help you. We want to show you around the galaxy.” She called for her assistants. They were hunchbacks with bulbous features, resembling medieval trolls. They put my two friends on their backs and gave them piggyback rides. The alien commander pointed upward, where cheap tinsel stars and planets were stuck on the lobby’s domed ceiling. She acted as if this were an impressive sight, and my friends did seem impressed. I was disappointed: Was this all they had to show us?
Confused, I left the lobby and went, alone, to a crowded, seedy nightclub where a long-haired weirdo came up to me with his girlfriend. They were “hybrid” human-aliens. The man laughed and put one of his four fingers deep into my mouth. Immediately, in the dream, I turned around and put my finger just as far into his girlfriend’s mouth. Then we all laughed about this almost obscene exchange.
I awoke from the dream and recalled the details before reaching for my notebook—over the last years, while exploring shamanism, I had developed disciplined habits of dream recollection. Wide awake, I reflected on the dream’s particular seamy, swampy ambience. Before I started to write it down, my partner, in deep sleep, suddenly sat up and leaned toward me. She opened my mouth with one hand. She brought her other hand to my face, and put one of her fingers into my mouth.
Startled, I woke her immediately. But she remembered nothing of it—or what she had been dreaming.
Later, I learned that the area around Kassel—an ancient area similar in some ways to the stone-circle-studded landscape of Wessex in England—is the center of German crop circle activity. Several new formations appeared in local fields on the weekend that we were there.
The doors of Chapel Perilous swung open to welcome me inside.
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http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle16104.html
Daniel Pinchbeck has kindly agreed for Disinformation to reprint the first two chapters from his new book 2012: The Return Of Quetzalcoatl (Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006). Chapter 2 talks about cosmological motifs that include the Grays in UFO subcultures, the fragmentation of myth and modernity, Whitley Streiber's visitation experience, the deep narratives of William Irwin Thompson and Rudolph Steiner, the possible evolutionary messages of the Grays and cyanobacteria, and what this upheaval has to do with Mayan prophecies about 2012.
Chapter Two
Only if we grant power to something can it have power over us. It becomes a serving and sustaining potency when we again are able to place it into the realm where it belongs, instead of submitting to it.
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin noted that modernity was causing an emptying-out of experience, as well as destroying the aura that had previously belonged to precious artworks and natural objects, giving them their unique presence. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed,” he wrote in his essay “The Storyteller.” “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”
Modernity unleashed a succession of shock effects, changing the nature of perception, as well as the individual’s relationship to their own personal history. “Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.” The old culture of contemplation gave way to the mass absorption in distractions. The wise counsel embodied in the storyteller’s art was supplanted by the endless parade of statistics and information in the daily newspaper. To enter the modern world, we forfeited our capacity for intimate exchanges requiring slowness and reciprocity and the play of the imagination. “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return,” Benjamin wrote. The value of perception and the meaning of personal history were degraded and denigrated to institute a mass society focused on abstractions, impelled by a “sense of the universal equality in all things.”
The loss of the art of storytelling corresponds to a change in our experience of time. “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time,” Benjamin wrote. “A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” He compared stories to those “seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day.” Information, on the other hand, is always accompanied by explanation—“no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” It is almost our tragic fate as modern people to long for meaning and receive only explanation.
The earliest form of the story is the fairy tale, “the first tutor of mankind,” according to Benjamin. “Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairytale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairytale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest.” In the fairy tale, we learn to overcome our terror of the unknown, to trust in natural powers and the instinct of animals, to have faith in the secret workings of destiny. “The wisest thing—so the fairytale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.” In the fairy tale, we discover the power of names—how fear is dispelled, how the “other” loses its power over us, when we learn the secret name of what frightens us, as in the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
One classic form of the fairy tale, Benjamin tells us, is “the man who sets out to learn what fear is.” Whitley Streiber’s abduction memoir, Communion: A True Story, provides the postmodern inverse of this archaic quest for knowledge—a much uglier tale, but one that also suggests a moral: If you do not go out to find fear, fear finds you—or, what might be worse, it does not.
Communion was a best-seller—one of those endless amusements absorbed without reflection by the distracted masses—and it imparts the basic form of the abduction narrative, a story with an essential lack or aporia at its center—not a story at all, in fact, but a bundle of clues and fragments that lead nowhere, that do not cohere. “The visitors marched into the middle of the life of an indifferent skeptic without a moment’s hesitation,” notes Streiber, a writer of “imaginative thrillers.” He was home at his secluded cabin in upstate New York one night, when the abduction occurred—although he doesn’t remember the events until days later. Persistent pain—the physical traces left by the traumatic events—finally awakens his dulled recall. “I believe that the combination of the infected finger, the rectal pain, and the aching head were what finally brought my memories into focus.”
Indifference and skepticism are two potent forces in the modern mentality. We have elevated them to the status of values. They are part of the way we have learned to inure ourselves from shock—what Benjamin calls “the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock.” They furnish us with a certain shabby level of comfort. Franz Kafka wrote: “There is an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.” To be an “indifferent skeptic” is to have reached the end of a certain evolutionary line—for a passionate skeptic, or even an indifferent believer, there might still be hope. For an indifferent skeptic, all that remains is the piling up of fact and statistic, to be sorted into categories of explanation. Streiber’s memoir is a document of alienation, as well as aliens. Like the technological “enframing” defined by Martin Heidegger, the trauma inflicted upon him by the visitors is one that has already afflicted him in his essence.
What he begins to recollect is an experience—the last in a series of experiences—of such paralytic impotence and violation that his mind, heart, and will recoil from accepting it. Against his powers, the aliens remove him from his house and float him up to a spaceship, into a “messy round room,” “actually dirty” as well as stuffy, dry, and confining, where “some clothing was thrown on the floor.” Unable to move, he finds himself “in a mental state that separated myself from myself so completely that I had no way to filter my emotions or most immediate reactions. . . . My mind had become a prison.” He is shown an “extremely shiny, hair-thin needle mounted on a black surface,” and told that the visitors intend to insert this into his brain. The operation is performed with “a bang and a flash.” Almost weeping, he sinks down “into a cradle of tiny arms.”
There is a female among the visitors with whom Streiber feels a slight kinship. “She was as small as the others, and appeared almost bored or indifferent.” In the spaceship, he asks her if he can smell one of the visitors. “Oh OK, I can do that,” says one of the males absently, holding his hand to Streiber’s nose. “There was a slight scent of cardboard to it, as if the sleeve of the coverall that was partly pressed against my face were made of some substance like paper,” he recalls. “The hand itself had a faint but distinctly organic sourness to it, but it was unmistakably the smell of something alive. There was a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.”
He next finds himself in “a small operating theater. I was in the center of it on a table, and three tiers of benches were populated with a few huddled figures, some with round, as opposed to slanted, eyes.” He is passed along to another room, his fear increasing whenever they touch him. “Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects.” He is shown a foot-long mechanical device, “gray and scaly, with a network of wires on the end.” This instrument is inserted into his rectum. “Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the same time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.” An incision is made on his forefinger. He is returned to his bed, awakening with no immediate recollection of the episode, but a deepening malaise.
Hypnotherapy restores the full dimensions of these events to his awareness—and it also introduces him to a suppressed pattern of past experiences of lost time and alien encounters, hours and days and weeks, stretching back through his entire life. He recalls one night, a few months before the abduction, when a light passed his window, and a small, hooded figure appeared in his room, “something totally unknown to me, glaring at me from right beside my bed in the dead of night. . . . I relived fear so raw, profound, and large that I would not have thought it possible that such an emotion could exist.” The visitor takes a silver ruler and touches Streiber’s forehead. He is shown pictures of the world blowing up. “It’s a picture of like a whole big blast, and there’s a dark red fire in the middle of it and there’s white smoke all around.” The visitor tells him, “That’s your home. That’s your home. You know why this will happen.” He finds corroboration for this account from friends at his house, who also recall a light and other disturbances.
This recollection leads him back to earlier ones, from childhood, from a period in 1968 when he had dropped out of college and experienced “four to six weeks” of missing time, associated “with a perfectly terrible memory of eating what I have always thought was a rotten pomegranate, which was so bitter that it almost split my head apart.” He spits up this substance in this encounter, but in later abductions, the visitors find ways to make him swallow what they are forcing on him. He is disturbed by the “structural coherence of the thing. First I am fed and it comes back up. Then I am fed again and this time drops are used to prevent the material from returning. . . . In short, my hallucinatory friends seem to have learned something about getting me to digest whatever it is they are trying to feed me.” Streiber wonders if he has the capacity to live with the notion “that my whole life might have proceeded according to a hidden agenda.” In one abduction, he was told, “You are our chosen one,” but this declaration was accompanied by a sterile humor on the part of his captors, who did not seem to take it seriously.
“The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange that we might expect,” Streiber writes. “Whatever may be surfacing, it wants far more than that. It seems to me that it seeks the very depths of the soul; it seeks communion.” The title of his book was given to him as a directive. He was planning to call it Body Terror until his wife talked in her sleep one night. Suddenly speaking in a “strange basso profundo voice” that was not her own, she said, “The book must not frighten people. You should call it Communion, because that’s what it’s about.”
In Streiber’s memoir and other abduction accounts, it is as if the whole inhuman mythical world, banished beyond the margins of the thinkable by the modern consciousness, returns to stare at us with detached longing and assault us with implacable fury. It is as if the muteness of created things, denied their aura and their place, demands recognition and redemption. Refused this hope of redemption, the mythic forces tell us quite clearly that they will happily assist in the extinction of our world. So similar, yet different, from the old fairy tales of fairies and gnomes, lurking on the archaic borderlands of our reality, the manifestation of the visitors seems to be something bodied forth by our throttled imaginative powers. With their mood of guilt and accusation, with their infernal and enigmatic and explicitly sexual punishments, with their peculiarly bureaucratic and murky quality, the abduction accounts suggest the particular fabulistic territory defined by Franz Kafka, known as the Kafkaesque.
The closest literary parallel to the abduction experience is found in Kafka’s fables—in “The Metamorphosis,” the story of the man who awakens as a bug one morning; in the inescapable accusation and existential guilt that permeates The Trial; in the infernal contraption that inscribes the condemned man’s sentence over and over into his flesh in “The Penal Colony”; in the jaunty, dispossessed figures of the assistants and guardians who multiply in his tales, and whom Benjamin connects with the gandharvas from Indian mythology, “celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state.” The horror of the visitors is matched by the horrific passivity of modern man, trapped in technological encumbrances and bureaucratic systems designed by modern man to keep himself distracted, comfortable, and asleep. Streiber undergoes a battery of psychological tests and learns he is “sane,” but what does that mean? Like the accusers in Kafka, his visitors do not seek to redeem or reform or change him in any way—they just are, like the somber reality of a crime scene.
Ransacking his mind and library for possible explanations, Streiber wonders if “we were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past.” He conjectures the intruders might represent a more primitive species that had attained a form of hive intelligence in a different manner from us. “What if intelligence was not the culmination of evolution but something that could emerge from the evolutionary matrix at many different points, just as wings and claws and eyes do.” He considers that humanity might be a larval form, transmuting into something entirely other after death, and the visitors were the dead returning in unknown form. “Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.” He reiterates theories of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and P. D. Ouspensky, rehearses ideas from Navajo, Greek, and Egyptian myth, from Zen, quantum physics, and Hinduism. None of these provide satisfaction or consolation. Accumulation of explanations is like the accumulation of things, turning increasingly cold and desolate, punishing us for our lack of presence, our insufficiency, our stubborn refusal to meet reality on its own terms. “Warmth is ebbing from things. The objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances . . . that they put in our way, we have an immense labor to perform,” Benjamin noted.
The weight of the dead upon the living is a common theme in Kafka, linked to the draining and dehumanizing pressure exerted by all authorities. In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin wrote: “Uncleanness is so much the attributes of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites. . . . In the same way the fathers in Kafka’s strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons’ right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.”
This original sin, for Friedrich Nietzsche, was ressentiment, bad conscience, which developed due to our amputation from our original condition as warriors, hunters, and “beasts of prey,” in civilization. Civilization domesticated humanity, made us docile, “a household pet,” although our inner nature continues to rebel against this deformation. “Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness—this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of ‘bad conscience.’” Modern nihilism revealed “man’s sickness of man, of himself,” but this “forcible breach from his animal past” suggested, and pressed toward, new conditions of existence, “as though something were being announced through him, were being prepared, as though man were not an end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise. . . .”
Streiber seems to represent a particular type of modern man who has recalled the need to seek for a soul—he notes that he worked for fifteen years at the Gurdjieff Foundation—yet in whom that desire, in itself, has somehow been blandified, routinized, losing its savor. It has backfired or sputtered out. The search for a soul becomes another detached pursuit—like the search for a new sensation or new possession one cannot quite identify. The quest stops short of the radical otherness of enlightenment or illumination, which robs the ego of its most precious possession: its ego-hood. As the Hindu guru Sri Ramana Maharshi put it, “Liberation exists—and you will never be liberated.” The “coming of the self” described by Edward Edinger is an apocalypse for the ego, the “you” that wants to hang along for the ride. It may be that the only way to survive the Apocalypse is to undergo it, first, within your own being.
Streiber’s memoir warns us that explanations are meaningless if we lack the inner resources—the cunning and high spirits—necessary to meet the forces of the mythical world, as they well up within us. “The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man,” Benjamin tells us. It is through the continuing activity of self-liberation that we escape the parasites that would prey upon us, overthrowing, at the same time, our delusory burden of original sin.
Goblins are clever: Our fairy tales tell us this. These entities—“unfinished,” half-created, or soulless—set age-old traps for humanity. The Grays or the visitors are perhaps best understood as an updated form of goblin or gnome. According to the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner, an extraordinary cartographer of the supersensible worlds, what gnomes and goblins are made of is “entirely sense, and it is a sense which is at the same time intellect.” Lower creatures such as these “have no bony skeleton, no bony support; the gnomes bind everything that exists by way of gravity and fashion their bodies from this volatile, invisible force, bodies which are, moreover, in constant danger of disintegrating, of losing their substance,” he taught, in Harmony of the Creative Word: The Human Being and the Elemental, Animal, Plant and Mineral Kingdoms, a series of lectures given in Germany in 1923. Despite its interstellar pretensions, nothing about the visitor narrative suggests an extraterrestrial origin. The Grays seem to possess no inner life, no history, nothing beyond their vindictive and macabre relationship to the human species. Researchers of UFOs have noted that many, if not most, observations seem to occur along earthquake fault lines, and the caverns that abductees sometimes describe being taken to seem to be deep underground. The “flying saucer myth” seems a construct of these entities, a theatrical staging, to compel our belief in them. They do not come down from empyrean reaches, but out of the mythological depths of the Earth—from a lower dimensional reality, perhaps, that is saturated with ancient gloom and dark yearnings.
According to Steiner, gnomes constantly move along veins of minerals and metals underground, and they “laugh us to scorn on account of our groping, struggling intellect with which we manage to grasp one thing or another, whereas they have no need at all to think things out.” These “root spirits” are also connected to the waste processes of the Earth, to toads and amphibians. Working beneath the surface of the planet, in the Earth’s mineral layers, the gnomes take a similar role in our dream lives. We are terrestrial beings, and therefore the gnomes are also at work “beneath the Earth” of our psychic life, in our subconscious depths. “Anyone who gets to the stage of experiencing his dreams in full consciousness on falling asleep is well acquainted with the gnomes,” Steiner noted. For somebody unprepared, the experience would be an alarming one: “at the moment of falling asleep, he would behold a whole host of goblins coming towards him. . . . The form in which they would appear would actually be reflections, images of all the qualities in the individual concerned that work as forces of destruction. He would perceive all the destructive forces within him, all that continually destroys.” If we were able to remain conscious as we dreamed, what we would perceive would be “a kind of entombment by gnomes” in the astral world.
One of the few modern intellectuals to appreciate Steiner’s work, William Irwin Thompson characterizes the “Steinerian vision” as one that “looks at the human as so completely embedded in the animal, vegetal, and mineral evolution of the solar system that it becomes nonsense to separate a fictive ‘matter’ from mind, and a mere three dimensions from ten. . . . All of the seemingly mystical perceptions of Steiner have a biological relevance that fits a new kind of science, and a new kind of culture.” For Steiner, the universe is a harmonic orchestration in which our minds are embedded, not as alienated organs, but as integrated aspects of the whole. Within this whole, other forms of mind also exist, a vast ecology of consciousness, that can be registered by us, if we work to attain what he called “supersensible perception.” Throughout his innumerable lectures and books, Steiner describes “lower creatures” such as the goblins and other “root spirits,” as well as great cosmic entities, angelic hierarchies, and higher spiritual beings.
In earlier phases of development, humanity had a deep affinity, an unconscious attunement, to the Earth and the cosmos. This affinity is reflected in our oldest stories and mythologies, which reveal cosmological secrets about the movements of the planets and the stars, as well as evolutionary processes in the history of the Earth. Thompson considers fairy tales and myths to be “forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.” He proposes that the ancient saga telling of fairies defeating goblins and banishing them beneath the Earth is a representation, as myth, of the original “pollution crisis,” more than 500 million years ago, when cyanobacteria developed photosynthesis, creating an oxygen-rich environment that was poisonous for other life forms, radically transforming the biosphere to make it sustainable for larger mammals. Translating from myth to biology, Thompson proposes that “the goblins are the anaerobic bacteria who live on and in our wastes and garbage, and the fairies, those airy creatures of light, are the cyanobacteria that were the first to invent photosynthesis to feed on light to give off the oxygen that would become the new atmosphere of an illuminated world.” Anaerobic cells contain no nucleus—like the Grays, whose bodies are undifferentiated and without internal organs.
In the saga of the visitors, we are witnessing a return of the repressed, the mythic world, surging into the postmodern consciousness in a form that strangely fits our fixation on technology, our space fantasies and genetic obsessions and dingy bureaucracies, and our terror of the unknown. The Grays exist on the boundary of the sensible, seeking entry into our realm. According to mythic thought, time is not linear but cyclical, or, more accurately, it turns in a spiral. It appears that we are experiencing a reenactment of the ancient narrative described by Thompson—of the battle between forces of light and darkness, or of degradation and evolution—but taking place on a different level, a higher octave of being and knowing. Burrowing away at the gaps in our subconscious and fragmented knowledge systems, gnawing on our bad conscience, the visitors have worked like industrious ants to create certain conditions, and to imprint a particular narrative into our popular culture, absorbed by the masses in a state of distraction. They force-feed their abductees, over decades, until they learn to swallow what they want them to eat.
The Grays are analogous to bacteria, but operating on the level of the psyche. Earthly bacteria derive energy from breaking down complex organic compounds that they take in from the environment. The visitors seem to be entities that sustain themselves from the negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety, emanated by the human nervous system and energy body. Just as earthly bacteria play a crucial role in the global ecosystem, we may eventually understand that our infraterrestrial intruders occupy a necessary niche in the ecosystem of consciousness, as it develops or decays.
Are the visitors “real” or “imaginary”? They are both, and they are neither. Like quantum phenomena, they do not exist or not exist, they also do not exist and not exist, nor do they both not exist and not not exist. According to Dzogchen, a tradition of teachings and practices linked to Tibetan Buddhism, ultimately there are no entities. Any entity only possesses relative reality, including ourselves. Overcoming dualism is essential to Dzogchen, as Chogyal Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State:
Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
Entities who manifest in other forms of consciousness, such as the Grays, are, at the same time, separate from us and aspects of our psyche. We are the ground for their manifestation, and it is only by attaining a nondual perspective that we can understand them.
Reality, according to Eastern mysticism, is maya, illusion—a tonal tapestry or spectrum of vibrations called, in the Mayan tradition, tlalticpac, the dream-world of Earth. There is, according to Dzogchen, neither being, nor nonbeing. However, there may be an infinite number of relatively real entities, possessing varying forms of consciousness. Overcoming dualism, we can recognize such beings as fractal shards or autonomous archetypes of our own psyche, as well as self-directed entities undergoing their own forms of evolution.
From such a nondualistic perspective, it makes sense that some encounters with the Grays are neutral or even positive. Betty Andreasson, a woman whose accounts of abduction were published in the 1960s, described a classic mystical vision in which the Grays showed her a giant golden phoenix that was consumed by a flame. In her descriptions, and many others, the intruders reveal an ambivalent polarity. Monsters produced by “the sleep of reason,” they have a necessary part to play in the evolution of human consciousness—the process of psychic transmutation that alchemists called the “Great Work.”
Connected to our technological development, the Grays embody a malignant, supersensible element lurking beneath our fascination with mechanization, revealing the irrational basis of our constricted rationality. They also have lessons to teach us. As the critic Lewis Mumford noted, “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests on our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.” Like transhumanist zombies, the Grays embody the reductive perspective that sees everything—matter, genes, human souls—as resources to be used for purposes of control and domination. In this way, the visitors serve as a warning, as well as an innoculation against a nightmarish fate we can recognize, and reject, in the time that remains to us.
As Prospero says of Caliban in The Tempest: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” According to occult tradition, humanity has a responsibility to all of the elemental beings, those other forms of consciousness that express themselves through the natural world. We are supposed to learn to work with the elementals and, also, alleviate their suffering—it is clear from the abduction accounts that the visitors are suffering. Like dusty insects attracted to flame, the Grays yearn for our qualities of soul-warmth; despite their cunning and technological acumen, these qualities remain beyond them. They are intelligent and sentient, hence aware of their exiled status. Unable to escape their de-souled condition, they desire to draw humans into their lower world, sustaining their half-lives on our subtle energies. They appear to be utilizing their dream-world technologies in a serious and desperate attempt to find a way out of their cul-de-sac.
The incomprehensible murkiness of the phenomenon suggests that it is occurring, for the most part, at a different plane of consciousness, not the daylight awareness of the waking state—the only form of consciousness that the modern mind believes real—but in a twilight or dream-like subliminal state. This quantum indeterminacy extends to manifestations that would appear to be purely material—such as the Roswell incident of the crashed “flying disc,” or the various government reports and semiofficial statements that reveal nothing, and perhaps conceal nothing as well. On books and Internet sites, there appear testimonies of former officials in the military or government who step forward, admitting to taking part in an organized cover-up of alien activity, without offering convincing evidence. Could high-level political and military figures be colluding with the visitors, even to the point of signing Faustian pacts, yet themselves flickering in and out of awareness of what they are doing? The conspiratorial route descends into deep levels of tabloid darkness, generating waves of fear and paranoia. The obsession with finding the literal truth of the abduction phenomenon may be, in itself, a red herring, obscuring the significance of the visitors as psychic archetype.
In one of Carlos Castaneda’s books—which are of appropriately sketchy provenance—Castaneda starts to encounter his “double” in dreams. At first, he assumes he is dreaming the double. Eventually, the sorcerer Don Juan tells him he is wrong: “The double is dreaming you.” Perhaps we are the dream of the visitors, as they are our nightmare. With their invasive probings and technological acumen and genetic obsessions, the visitors seem to be a kind of field effect or echo of our fixation on materialist technologies and hierarchies of dominance. While not the Other we would hope to encounter, the Grays may be, at this stage, the other we deserve.
In Mayan and Aztec traditions, the calendrical end date, or birth date, in 2012 “signified an open door to the cosmic center, in a sense the arrival of the cosmic source into local space-time, or, in other words, a renewal by returning into the central fire,” the independent Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins wrote in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. “The local and Galactic planes would then be aligned, opening the way, as the Aztecs said about the end of the Fifth Sun, for the tzittzimime (celestial demons) to pour down out of the sky to devour mankind.” The visitors appear to be the tzittzimime, an archetype from Aztec myth taking postmodern form as we approach the completion of this cycle. Now that they have colonized our movies and dreams, a literal manifestation of them cannot be ruled out. Against the wishes of the conscious mind, the psyche appears to be unleashing tremendous forces of creative destruction to attain self-knowledge and noospheric activation—to force its own evolution.
Or—or perhaps and—it is all just a fairy tale.
http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle16103.html
Daniel Pinchbeck has kindly agreed for Disinformation to reprint the first two chapters from his new book 2012: The Return Of Quetzalcoatl (Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006). Chapter 1 talks about cosmological motifs that include the Arecibo Response on extraterrestrial communication, UFO subcultures, the Rosewell incident, Whitley Streiber and John Mack's views on UFO abductee experiences, and an enigmatic dreamscape from Kassel, Germany in 2002. Welcome to Chapel Perilous if you dare!
"Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin."
Franz Kafka
Chapter One
In the popular culture of our secular age, the gods, demigods, fairies, and gnomes of the old mythic realm have returned as extraterrestrials. Our mingled longing for and dread of contact with some unknown consciousness or superior alien race has been reflected in a century’s worth of books, films, television, and radio plays. I grew up on Star Trek, The Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, ET, and 2001, on Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Stanislaw Lem—as an adolescent, I loved the Silver Surfer and Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. The pleasure of these artifacts was in the possibilities they threw out, like so many sparks. They returned the cosmos to a capacious state of “what-if?” that our mechanistic science seemed to deny. The exploration of fictional worlds is a kind of dreaming while awake; the complex ecosystem of the cultural imagination may also have a protective function. Through such stories, we absorb ideas in sidereal fashion, perhaps readying ourselves, on some subliminal level, for future shock of various stripes, before it arrives.
After I finished my article on the crop circles, the images, and their implicit intent, continued to linger in my mind. I was perplexed by the rectangular Arecibo Response formation, dismissed by current SETI astronomer Seth Shostak as a “nice example of grain graffiti,” unworthy of further investigation. I was equally confounded by the “Face” that had appeared in halftones on the date of my daughter’s birth. Whether accident or synchronicity, this correspondence seemed like a personal invitation to visit what the writer Robert Anton Wilson dubbed “Chapel Perilous,” that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.
Considering the scientific evidence, gathered by Eltjo Haselhof and others, suggesting the phenomenon had some mysterious legitimacy, as well as the many personal accounts I absorbed while doing my research, SETI’s blithe dismissal of the Arecibo Response glyph, a direct response to a message beamed into space by SETI in 1974, seemed flat and unreflective. Shostak insisted that an alien civilization would not communicate in such a manner when they could simply leave an Encyclopedia Galactica on our doorstep. But how could we determine the means that an alien civilization might use to communicate? He was perhaps recalling the Fermi Paradox, which noted that any technologically evolved civilization on a nearby star system should have emitted radio waves during its development that our sensors would have picked up. The physicist Enrico Fermi asked, in the absence of these signals, “Where are they?” But the answer might lie beyond the limits of our present knowledge.
The SETI astronomer pointed out that the original Arecibo greeting was sent out to the M13 star cluster, over twenty thousand light-years away, and it therefore made no sense that it could have been answered already. It seemed equally logical to theorize that whoever—whatever—had crafted the reply knew about the original message as soon as it was sent, that they might have observed activities on our planet for a very long time. But even if one could imagine an advanced species watching the Earth, awaiting the proper moment to reveal itself to us, the Arecibo Response still made little sense. Who was meant to receive the transmission? And what were they—or we—supposed to do with it?
Small, big-headed figures with silicon added to their makeup and an extra strand of DNA, as depicted in the Arecibo Response, suggested the peculiar narrative, or evolving postmodern myth, of the Gray aliens. Over the last decades, the Grays infiltrated the global subconscious, through best-selling books such as Whitley Streiber’s 1987 Communion, the TV miniseries Taken, and T-shirts, plastic figurines, cartoons, and other mass-cult detritus based on accounts of abduction. I had never paid more than a glancing attention to the UFO phenomenon or to alien abduction accounts—it seemed like some hysterical symptom of our cultural malaise, adolescent and turgid, overliteral, and deeply disreputable. The notion that three-and-a-half-foot-tall cardboard-colored aliens made nightly invasions of middle-class bedrooms across the United States and the world to insert rectal probes and take sperm samples did not seem plausible, or the type of behavior one would anticipate from a futuristic civilization.
And yet, much like the surprisingly tangible evidence on crop circles, the accumulated data on UFO sightings and alien abductions reveals jarring levels of complexity and downright weirdness that do not allow for a blanket rejection of the phenomenon. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of T. E. Lawrence, dedicated the last decades of his life to studying the psychological phenomenon of adbuction by “the visitors,” as Whitley Streiber called them. Considering the data gathered by a 1991 Roper poll, Mack thought it conceivable that as many as three million Americans had undergone an abduction experience. His study of abductees led him to conclude that the phenomenon had validity beyond any psychological mechanism: “There have been numerous psychological studies of these individuals; none has discovered any psychopathology in great degree that could account for the experience.” In many cases, abductees “have been witnessed by their relatives to not be present during that time. They are physically gone, and families become very distressed. . . . One of the things most difficult to accept is that this can actually have a literal factual basis. . . . Abductees may wake up with unexplained cuts, scoop marks, or bleeding noses.” Mack optimistically proposed that these experiences had some sort of therapeutic value.
The narrative of contact between modern culture and the UFOs has developed over a long period, beginning with mass sightings of mysterious “air ships,” like souped-up blimps, in the late nineteenth century. After World War II, accounts of flying saucers became rampant. “Between 1947 and the dawn of the age of abductees in the 1970s, there were at least six major UFO sighting waves,” writes Brenda Denzler in The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. Each wave produced thousands of eyewitness accounts. Sometimes picked up by radar, the UFOs would execute impossible aeronautical feats, hovering, plunging, zigzagging, skipping across water, suddenly disappearing.
On July 8, 1947, the Air Force intelligence office on Roswell Army Base in Roswell, New Mexico, announced the recovery of a crashed “flying disc” in a press release published in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday,” the release began. The military retracted the information on the following day, explaining that the disc recovered by two intelligence agents turned out to be, upon further inspection, a weather balloon. Since that time, an entire industry of conspiracy theories has developed—books and films propounding government cover-ups, secret deals made with the aliens, issuing from that peculiar incident, and a few others like it.
During the 1950s, witnesses reported seeing saucers that had landed or crashed, with small, silver-suited humanoids standing around or working on them. Sometimes, these humanoid “aliens” would wave at the bystanders. Abduction accounts began to surface in the 1960s. The first famous report—that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial New Hampshire couple, whose abduction memories were recovered through hypnosis and published in Look magazine in 1966—established the template followed by the vast body of the tens of thousands of accounts logged since then. The “salient features,” according to Denzler, include “missing time, physical examination while on board the UFO, a tour of the ship, conversation with the aliens, and the use of hypnotic regression to recover lost memories.”
UFOlogist Jacques Vallee links alien abductions to ancient folktales in which humans trespassed or were cajoled into the realm of the fairy folk. Putting the episodes in the same category as Patrick Harpur’s “daimonic reality,” he sees them belonging to “the domain of the in-between, the unproven, and the unprovable, . . . the country of paradoxes, strangely furnished with material ‘proofs,’ sometimes seemingly unimpeachable, but always ultimately insufficient. . . . This absolutely confusing (and manifestly misleading) aspect . . . may well be the phenomenon’s most basic characteristic.” The visitors usually appear at night when the abductee is sleeping, often paralyzing them and then floating them out of their bed and onto a ship, where rapid, confusing, painful, and often repugnant events transpire.
Once selected, abductees tend to be picked up and tormented by the Grays again and again—and hypnosis often reveals that these contacts go back to early childhood. The visitors communicate telepathically, their tiny mouth slits and large black eyes never moving. They seem lacking in affect—although some abductees find them afraid or sad or amused at certain moments—and are puzzled yet fascinated by human emotional reactions. Their behavior is consistently bizarre and unpleasant, as if their actions represent a kind of mangled syntax, their true intentions concealed or distorted in some way. To take one of many examples, at the end of an abduction, the visitors exhorted one abductee, over and over again, to “eat only cow things.” In another account, a male Gray paraded in front of its victim wearing her high-heeled shoes. Another abductee described a group of “small Grays” (they come in different sizes) gathered around a Christmas gift they had found in her car, opening and clumsily rewrapping it. Their hectic movements and the seemingly senseless operations they perform give the visitors an odd, fugitive quality, somehow out of sync, like figures from an old silent movie.
For the abductees, the most prevalent emotional response is one of extreme terror and violation—although some abductees, in what might be an extradimensional version of Stockholm Syndrome, come to believe in and trust their visitors, overcoming their initial reactions of horror. They convince themselves they are in league with the visitors—or were (or are) Grays in another life. They accept the claims sometimes made by the visitors, that they are here to salvage humanity and the planet from our destructive mania. Abductees often report rapes and procedures where small BB-sized implants are painfully deposited under their skin, deep up their nose or their rectum. In some cases, these implants have been retrieved and analyzed in laboratories—but they are of indeterminate origin and inconclusive proof of anything otherworldly.
In 1981, the abductions were declared an “invisible epidemic” by researcher Budd Hopkins, author of Missing Time. In the 1980s, Hopkins and other researchers noted the prevalence of reports describing the removal of eggs or sperm, and the compiled accounts began to suggest that the Grays were engaged in a massive “hybrid” human-alien breeding program. In dozens of reports, women are abducted, gynecological procedures performed, and then, back in their normal lives, they test positive for pregnancy. A few weeks later, their mysterious pregnancy disappears. Under hypnosis, they would recollect an intervening abduction and the removal of a tiny fetus. In future abductions—as revealed under hypnosis—the women would be shown developing fetuses, babies, or children and told that these were their hybrid offspring. A sordid ambience of accusation and guilt clings to these memories. In several accounts, abductees trying to escape from the tortures or experiments the Grays had designed for them were told by their captors: “Don’t you remember? You agreed to this.” As his captors inserted a needle into his brain, Streiber shouted, “You have no right to do this.” The visitors answered calmly, “We do have a right.”
The abductions have the ambience of intensely lucid nightmares, and some researchers suspect they are hypnagogic, chaotic, or nonlinear events that the experiencers reorganize into a more logical narrative afterward. To a certain extent, hypnotherapists may help shape the abduction narratives through subtle cues. Yet the similarity of encounters reported on different continents, the identical details picked up again and again, in thousands of reports from credible and often reluctant subjects around the world, suggest, at the very least, that something is happening that cannot be reduced to current categories of psychology, or fit into accepted frameworks of meaning. As John Mack noted, “What characterizes the abduction experience is that it is physically real and it enters the physical world, but it is also transpersonal and subjective. It crosses that barrier between the hard-edged physical world and the spirit/transpersonal world.”
Although perfectly willing to concede his experiences could represent something other than alien contact, Whitley Streiber wrote: “If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: This ‘something else’ is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it.”
In Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (1995), an intelligent and honestly astonished account of the abduction phenomenon, New Yorker contributor C. D. B. Bryan crafted a physical portrait of the visitors, exploring their many anomalies. “The aliens’ bodies are flat, paunchless. Their chests are not bifurcated; they have no nipples. Nor does the chest swell or diminish with breathing,” he wrote. Culling from reports and his own research, he found, “The lower part of their anatomy does not contain any stomach pouch or genitals; it just comes to an end. . . . The Small Gray’s body appears frail, with thin limbs and no musculature or bone structure.” Some researchers assume they are less like biological organisms than machines, powered in some way we cannot comprehend, as they do not seem to eat, drink, or excrete. Nor do they have a slot for inserting batteries. Incongruous details abound: In Britain, the Grays are associated with the odor of cinnamon; in the United States, their smell is of ammonia, almonds, and lemon.
Bryan’s book offered no coherent thesis to explain the phenomenon. More alarming and pointed in his conclusions than Bryan was David Jacobs in The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda (1999). A hypnotherapist and professor of history at Temple University, Jacobs believes that he has, after years of work, distilled a completely logical and entirely horrifying picture of what the Grays are doing and planning—and he is disconsolate over it. He describes the breeding program, including haunting details from abductee accounts.
Captured humans are often brought to play with the children of the visitors, who are described as melancholy and lethargic. The Gray children play with blocks, similar to the blocks used by human children. But the alien blocks do not have letters or numbers on them—instead, they emit different emotions when they are turned. Since they seem to be telepathic, the visitors have no need to learn spelling or counting. The toys seem to indicate, instead, that they are trying to learn how to feel. Could it be that this yearning for affect is one reason the visitors seek human contact? Does it indicate something of their intent?
“I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening,” Streiber wrote in Communion. “Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.” Even the difficulties of retrieving memories of these experiences could be part of a process in which the visitors are slowly acclimatizing us to their existence, Streiber speculates.
During the encounters uncovered in Jacobs’s hypnotherapy sessions, abductees are often shown images, like propaganda films, of an apocalyptic event—nuclear war or sudden climate change—followed by clips of hybrid human-aliens walking arm in arm across a transformed earth, the sun shining down on them peacefully. The Grays state that their breeding program will repopulate the earth after the approaching cataclysm that makes the planet uninhabitable for our type of life. The alien agenda, Jacobs believes, has three stages—“gradual, accelerated, and sudden.” We are currently in the accelerated phase. Under hypnosis, abductees report being trained to operate the Grays’ saucers, and to help herd masses of people, like frightened sheep, into them, when the moment is right for the “sudden” phase.
Jacobs hypothesizes that the visitors’ frequently nonsensical and bizarre behavior is a way of covering their direct intent. Like cunning cartoon villains, the visitors have used our own propensity for disbelief to render us defenseless to their agenda: the incipient takeover of the earth. One abductee reports, “After The Change, there will be only one form of government: The insectile aliens will be in complete control. There will be no necessity to continue national governments. There will be ‘one system’ and ‘one goal.’” Jacobs ends on a note of dread: “We now know the alarming dimensions of the alien agenda and its goals. . . . I do not think about the future with much hope. When I was a child, I had a future with much hope. . . . Now I fear for the future of my own children.”
I found something wearying—not just foggy but almost smutty—about studying the abduction accounts. Almost from the first moment of pursuing it, it was as if a veil was falling down over my mind and my senses. Whether projections of our own mind or literal entities or both, the Grays call to us from a feverish twilit world of shades of grayness without clear definition. The path to understanding what may or may not be known about them by the government leads to an opaque barrier of reports of unverifiable authenticity, military and CIA panels with names like “Project Grudge,” “The Robertson Panel,” “Project Blue Book,” and “Majestic 12,” a plausible yet unreal history of covert operations, secret underground bases, cattle mutilations, alien crashes, possibly paranoiac accounts of former military personnel, and disinformation campaigns. The endless mass-market books on the subject include, inevitably, black-and-white photographs of disc-shaped objects and blurry streaks that look entirely unconvincing and somehow antiquated—a kind of 1930s idea of what a futuristic technology might look like.
But what if there was a literal truth to David Jacobs’s narrative? Was it possible that the Grays, as horrible as they sounded—as disreputable, somehow, as the entire enterprise seemed—were actually orchestrating an imminent evolutionary shift for the hapless human species?
Reading scores of abduction accounts, I felt a pitiful sense of helplessness against this telepathic, sorcerous, affectless enemy—“the bugs,” as many abductees call them. I thought about my disappointment with the human race, seemingly hurtling toward ecological collapse and nuclear disaster, unable to control our worst impulses. Was this all part of a process, to create the forced conditions for a transformation that would, indeed, be apocalyptic at a very deep level? And if this might be the case, then what would be our best response to “The Threat,” as Jacobs called it? Should we try to resist the visitors? Should we surrender to their morbid mastery? But then, why was there something so laboriously theatrical, tacky, and fraudulent about all of it?
In June 2002, I went with my partner and our baby to the opening of the Documenta11 exhibition, in the West German town of Kassel. As a journalist writing about art, I had always hoped to visit this exhibit, which takes place every five years. I associated Documenta with the hard-core cool of the conceptual art of the early 1970s, with the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, known for his neo-shamanic self-mythologizing and iconic displays of iron plates, felt, and fat. Unfortunately, by the time I finally managed to attend, my mind was filled with other, stranger matters.
We stayed at a hotel in the Wilhelmshöhe Bergpark, across the road from the city’s baroque castle. The castle had beautiful gardens, old gnarled trees, and a towering stone monument of Hercules clad in a lion skin at the end of a long reflective pool and fountain. The Brothers Grimm had lived near the park, and their house was a local attraction. During the day, we toured the exhibition halls spread across the city, in old factory buildings, breweries, and railway stations. Organized by Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian curator, the exhibit was starkly political. It featured numerous Third World artists, and minority artists from the West. Many works addressed the destructive excesses of globalization, allegorically or directly. One film documented the bleak, monotonous lives of South African diamond miners, in bunkers and tunnels deep under the Earth. Sculptures mocked the modernist visions of utopia, parodied colonialism’s slave-driven delusions of grandeur. The exhibit was angry, inspiring—a post-Marxist assault on global imperialism.
In the hypersophisticated ambience of Documenta11’s numerous receptions and parties, standing amidst espresso-drinking aesthetes and stylish art dealers chattering in various Romance languages about museum shows and beach resorts and the latest art world gossip, I found myself thinking incessantly about the abduction saga, the postmodern myth of the visitors. Were these glamorous and well-heeled aesthetes soon to be fodder for an orchestrated alien takeover, doomed to explain Neo-Conceptualism and Post-Pop to short, affectless, hyperdimensional invaders?
One night, after a long day of art-going under the pouring rain in Kassel, I had a vivid dream about the visitors. In the dream, I went with two friends to meet one of the “Gray Alien” commanders in an Upper West Side lobby. The alien resembled a Chinese woman. She wore a red silk dress, had large almond-shaped eyes, and four fingers on each hand. She spoke as if we were going to make some kind of deal.
“It’s going to be great for you when we take over your planet,” she told me. “We can’t wait to help you. We want to show you around the galaxy.” She called for her assistants. They were hunchbacks with bulbous features, resembling medieval trolls. They put my two friends on their backs and gave them piggyback rides. The alien commander pointed upward, where cheap tinsel stars and planets were stuck on the lobby’s domed ceiling. She acted as if this were an impressive sight, and my friends did seem impressed. I was disappointed: Was this all they had to show us?
Confused, I left the lobby and went, alone, to a crowded, seedy nightclub where a long-haired weirdo came up to me with his girlfriend. They were “hybrid” human-aliens. The man laughed and put one of his four fingers deep into my mouth. Immediately, in the dream, I turned around and put my finger just as far into his girlfriend’s mouth. Then we all laughed about this almost obscene exchange.
I awoke from the dream and recalled the details before reaching for my notebook—over the last years, while exploring shamanism, I had developed disciplined habits of dream recollection. Wide awake, I reflected on the dream’s particular seamy, swampy ambience. Before I started to write it down, my partner, in deep sleep, suddenly sat up and leaned toward me. She opened my mouth with one hand. She brought her other hand to my face, and put one of her fingers into my mouth.
Startled, I woke her immediately. But she remembered nothing of it—or what she had been dreaming.
Later, I learned that the area around Kassel—an ancient area similar in some ways to the stone-circle-studded landscape of Wessex in England—is the center of German crop circle activity. Several new formations appeared in local fields on the weekend that we were there.
The doors of Chapel Perilous swung open to welcome me inside.
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http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle16104.html
Daniel Pinchbeck has kindly agreed for Disinformation to reprint the first two chapters from his new book 2012: The Return Of Quetzalcoatl (Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 2006). Chapter 2 talks about cosmological motifs that include the Grays in UFO subcultures, the fragmentation of myth and modernity, Whitley Streiber's visitation experience, the deep narratives of William Irwin Thompson and Rudolph Steiner, the possible evolutionary messages of the Grays and cyanobacteria, and what this upheaval has to do with Mayan prophecies about 2012.
Chapter Two
Only if we grant power to something can it have power over us. It becomes a serving and sustaining potency when we again are able to place it into the realm where it belongs, instead of submitting to it.
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin noted that modernity was causing an emptying-out of experience, as well as destroying the aura that had previously belonged to precious artworks and natural objects, giving them their unique presence. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed,” he wrote in his essay “The Storyteller.” “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”
Modernity unleashed a succession of shock effects, changing the nature of perception, as well as the individual’s relationship to their own personal history. “Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.” The old culture of contemplation gave way to the mass absorption in distractions. The wise counsel embodied in the storyteller’s art was supplanted by the endless parade of statistics and information in the daily newspaper. To enter the modern world, we forfeited our capacity for intimate exchanges requiring slowness and reciprocity and the play of the imagination. “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return,” Benjamin wrote. The value of perception and the meaning of personal history were degraded and denigrated to institute a mass society focused on abstractions, impelled by a “sense of the universal equality in all things.”
The loss of the art of storytelling corresponds to a change in our experience of time. “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time,” Benjamin wrote. “A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” He compared stories to those “seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day.” Information, on the other hand, is always accompanied by explanation—“no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” It is almost our tragic fate as modern people to long for meaning and receive only explanation.
The earliest form of the story is the fairy tale, “the first tutor of mankind,” according to Benjamin. “Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairytale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairytale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest.” In the fairy tale, we learn to overcome our terror of the unknown, to trust in natural powers and the instinct of animals, to have faith in the secret workings of destiny. “The wisest thing—so the fairytale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.” In the fairy tale, we discover the power of names—how fear is dispelled, how the “other” loses its power over us, when we learn the secret name of what frightens us, as in the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
One classic form of the fairy tale, Benjamin tells us, is “the man who sets out to learn what fear is.” Whitley Streiber’s abduction memoir, Communion: A True Story, provides the postmodern inverse of this archaic quest for knowledge—a much uglier tale, but one that also suggests a moral: If you do not go out to find fear, fear finds you—or, what might be worse, it does not.
Communion was a best-seller—one of those endless amusements absorbed without reflection by the distracted masses—and it imparts the basic form of the abduction narrative, a story with an essential lack or aporia at its center—not a story at all, in fact, but a bundle of clues and fragments that lead nowhere, that do not cohere. “The visitors marched into the middle of the life of an indifferent skeptic without a moment’s hesitation,” notes Streiber, a writer of “imaginative thrillers.” He was home at his secluded cabin in upstate New York one night, when the abduction occurred—although he doesn’t remember the events until days later. Persistent pain—the physical traces left by the traumatic events—finally awakens his dulled recall. “I believe that the combination of the infected finger, the rectal pain, and the aching head were what finally brought my memories into focus.”
Indifference and skepticism are two potent forces in the modern mentality. We have elevated them to the status of values. They are part of the way we have learned to inure ourselves from shock—what Benjamin calls “the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock.” They furnish us with a certain shabby level of comfort. Franz Kafka wrote: “There is an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.” To be an “indifferent skeptic” is to have reached the end of a certain evolutionary line—for a passionate skeptic, or even an indifferent believer, there might still be hope. For an indifferent skeptic, all that remains is the piling up of fact and statistic, to be sorted into categories of explanation. Streiber’s memoir is a document of alienation, as well as aliens. Like the technological “enframing” defined by Martin Heidegger, the trauma inflicted upon him by the visitors is one that has already afflicted him in his essence.
What he begins to recollect is an experience—the last in a series of experiences—of such paralytic impotence and violation that his mind, heart, and will recoil from accepting it. Against his powers, the aliens remove him from his house and float him up to a spaceship, into a “messy round room,” “actually dirty” as well as stuffy, dry, and confining, where “some clothing was thrown on the floor.” Unable to move, he finds himself “in a mental state that separated myself from myself so completely that I had no way to filter my emotions or most immediate reactions. . . . My mind had become a prison.” He is shown an “extremely shiny, hair-thin needle mounted on a black surface,” and told that the visitors intend to insert this into his brain. The operation is performed with “a bang and a flash.” Almost weeping, he sinks down “into a cradle of tiny arms.”
There is a female among the visitors with whom Streiber feels a slight kinship. “She was as small as the others, and appeared almost bored or indifferent.” In the spaceship, he asks her if he can smell one of the visitors. “Oh OK, I can do that,” says one of the males absently, holding his hand to Streiber’s nose. “There was a slight scent of cardboard to it, as if the sleeve of the coverall that was partly pressed against my face were made of some substance like paper,” he recalls. “The hand itself had a faint but distinctly organic sourness to it, but it was unmistakably the smell of something alive. There was a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.”
He next finds himself in “a small operating theater. I was in the center of it on a table, and three tiers of benches were populated with a few huddled figures, some with round, as opposed to slanted, eyes.” He is passed along to another room, his fear increasing whenever they touch him. “Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects.” He is shown a foot-long mechanical device, “gray and scaly, with a network of wires on the end.” This instrument is inserted into his rectum. “Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the same time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.” An incision is made on his forefinger. He is returned to his bed, awakening with no immediate recollection of the episode, but a deepening malaise.
Hypnotherapy restores the full dimensions of these events to his awareness—and it also introduces him to a suppressed pattern of past experiences of lost time and alien encounters, hours and days and weeks, stretching back through his entire life. He recalls one night, a few months before the abduction, when a light passed his window, and a small, hooded figure appeared in his room, “something totally unknown to me, glaring at me from right beside my bed in the dead of night. . . . I relived fear so raw, profound, and large that I would not have thought it possible that such an emotion could exist.” The visitor takes a silver ruler and touches Streiber’s forehead. He is shown pictures of the world blowing up. “It’s a picture of like a whole big blast, and there’s a dark red fire in the middle of it and there’s white smoke all around.” The visitor tells him, “That’s your home. That’s your home. You know why this will happen.” He finds corroboration for this account from friends at his house, who also recall a light and other disturbances.
This recollection leads him back to earlier ones, from childhood, from a period in 1968 when he had dropped out of college and experienced “four to six weeks” of missing time, associated “with a perfectly terrible memory of eating what I have always thought was a rotten pomegranate, which was so bitter that it almost split my head apart.” He spits up this substance in this encounter, but in later abductions, the visitors find ways to make him swallow what they are forcing on him. He is disturbed by the “structural coherence of the thing. First I am fed and it comes back up. Then I am fed again and this time drops are used to prevent the material from returning. . . . In short, my hallucinatory friends seem to have learned something about getting me to digest whatever it is they are trying to feed me.” Streiber wonders if he has the capacity to live with the notion “that my whole life might have proceeded according to a hidden agenda.” In one abduction, he was told, “You are our chosen one,” but this declaration was accompanied by a sterile humor on the part of his captors, who did not seem to take it seriously.
“The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange that we might expect,” Streiber writes. “Whatever may be surfacing, it wants far more than that. It seems to me that it seeks the very depths of the soul; it seeks communion.” The title of his book was given to him as a directive. He was planning to call it Body Terror until his wife talked in her sleep one night. Suddenly speaking in a “strange basso profundo voice” that was not her own, she said, “The book must not frighten people. You should call it Communion, because that’s what it’s about.”
In Streiber’s memoir and other abduction accounts, it is as if the whole inhuman mythical world, banished beyond the margins of the thinkable by the modern consciousness, returns to stare at us with detached longing and assault us with implacable fury. It is as if the muteness of created things, denied their aura and their place, demands recognition and redemption. Refused this hope of redemption, the mythic forces tell us quite clearly that they will happily assist in the extinction of our world. So similar, yet different, from the old fairy tales of fairies and gnomes, lurking on the archaic borderlands of our reality, the manifestation of the visitors seems to be something bodied forth by our throttled imaginative powers. With their mood of guilt and accusation, with their infernal and enigmatic and explicitly sexual punishments, with their peculiarly bureaucratic and murky quality, the abduction accounts suggest the particular fabulistic territory defined by Franz Kafka, known as the Kafkaesque.
The closest literary parallel to the abduction experience is found in Kafka’s fables—in “The Metamorphosis,” the story of the man who awakens as a bug one morning; in the inescapable accusation and existential guilt that permeates The Trial; in the infernal contraption that inscribes the condemned man’s sentence over and over into his flesh in “The Penal Colony”; in the jaunty, dispossessed figures of the assistants and guardians who multiply in his tales, and whom Benjamin connects with the gandharvas from Indian mythology, “celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state.” The horror of the visitors is matched by the horrific passivity of modern man, trapped in technological encumbrances and bureaucratic systems designed by modern man to keep himself distracted, comfortable, and asleep. Streiber undergoes a battery of psychological tests and learns he is “sane,” but what does that mean? Like the accusers in Kafka, his visitors do not seek to redeem or reform or change him in any way—they just are, like the somber reality of a crime scene.
Ransacking his mind and library for possible explanations, Streiber wonders if “we were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past.” He conjectures the intruders might represent a more primitive species that had attained a form of hive intelligence in a different manner from us. “What if intelligence was not the culmination of evolution but something that could emerge from the evolutionary matrix at many different points, just as wings and claws and eyes do.” He considers that humanity might be a larval form, transmuting into something entirely other after death, and the visitors were the dead returning in unknown form. “Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.” He reiterates theories of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and P. D. Ouspensky, rehearses ideas from Navajo, Greek, and Egyptian myth, from Zen, quantum physics, and Hinduism. None of these provide satisfaction or consolation. Accumulation of explanations is like the accumulation of things, turning increasingly cold and desolate, punishing us for our lack of presence, our insufficiency, our stubborn refusal to meet reality on its own terms. “Warmth is ebbing from things. The objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances . . . that they put in our way, we have an immense labor to perform,” Benjamin noted.
The weight of the dead upon the living is a common theme in Kafka, linked to the draining and dehumanizing pressure exerted by all authorities. In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin wrote: “Uncleanness is so much the attributes of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites. . . . In the same way the fathers in Kafka’s strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons’ right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.”
This original sin, for Friedrich Nietzsche, was ressentiment, bad conscience, which developed due to our amputation from our original condition as warriors, hunters, and “beasts of prey,” in civilization. Civilization domesticated humanity, made us docile, “a household pet,” although our inner nature continues to rebel against this deformation. “Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness—this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of ‘bad conscience.’” Modern nihilism revealed “man’s sickness of man, of himself,” but this “forcible breach from his animal past” suggested, and pressed toward, new conditions of existence, “as though something were being announced through him, were being prepared, as though man were not an end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise. . . .”
Streiber seems to represent a particular type of modern man who has recalled the need to seek for a soul—he notes that he worked for fifteen years at the Gurdjieff Foundation—yet in whom that desire, in itself, has somehow been blandified, routinized, losing its savor. It has backfired or sputtered out. The search for a soul becomes another detached pursuit—like the search for a new sensation or new possession one cannot quite identify. The quest stops short of the radical otherness of enlightenment or illumination, which robs the ego of its most precious possession: its ego-hood. As the Hindu guru Sri Ramana Maharshi put it, “Liberation exists—and you will never be liberated.” The “coming of the self” described by Edward Edinger is an apocalypse for the ego, the “you” that wants to hang along for the ride. It may be that the only way to survive the Apocalypse is to undergo it, first, within your own being.
Streiber’s memoir warns us that explanations are meaningless if we lack the inner resources—the cunning and high spirits—necessary to meet the forces of the mythical world, as they well up within us. “The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man,” Benjamin tells us. It is through the continuing activity of self-liberation that we escape the parasites that would prey upon us, overthrowing, at the same time, our delusory burden of original sin.
Goblins are clever: Our fairy tales tell us this. These entities—“unfinished,” half-created, or soulless—set age-old traps for humanity. The Grays or the visitors are perhaps best understood as an updated form of goblin or gnome. According to the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner, an extraordinary cartographer of the supersensible worlds, what gnomes and goblins are made of is “entirely sense, and it is a sense which is at the same time intellect.” Lower creatures such as these “have no bony skeleton, no bony support; the gnomes bind everything that exists by way of gravity and fashion their bodies from this volatile, invisible force, bodies which are, moreover, in constant danger of disintegrating, of losing their substance,” he taught, in Harmony of the Creative Word: The Human Being and the Elemental, Animal, Plant and Mineral Kingdoms, a series of lectures given in Germany in 1923. Despite its interstellar pretensions, nothing about the visitor narrative suggests an extraterrestrial origin. The Grays seem to possess no inner life, no history, nothing beyond their vindictive and macabre relationship to the human species. Researchers of UFOs have noted that many, if not most, observations seem to occur along earthquake fault lines, and the caverns that abductees sometimes describe being taken to seem to be deep underground. The “flying saucer myth” seems a construct of these entities, a theatrical staging, to compel our belief in them. They do not come down from empyrean reaches, but out of the mythological depths of the Earth—from a lower dimensional reality, perhaps, that is saturated with ancient gloom and dark yearnings.
According to Steiner, gnomes constantly move along veins of minerals and metals underground, and they “laugh us to scorn on account of our groping, struggling intellect with which we manage to grasp one thing or another, whereas they have no need at all to think things out.” These “root spirits” are also connected to the waste processes of the Earth, to toads and amphibians. Working beneath the surface of the planet, in the Earth’s mineral layers, the gnomes take a similar role in our dream lives. We are terrestrial beings, and therefore the gnomes are also at work “beneath the Earth” of our psychic life, in our subconscious depths. “Anyone who gets to the stage of experiencing his dreams in full consciousness on falling asleep is well acquainted with the gnomes,” Steiner noted. For somebody unprepared, the experience would be an alarming one: “at the moment of falling asleep, he would behold a whole host of goblins coming towards him. . . . The form in which they would appear would actually be reflections, images of all the qualities in the individual concerned that work as forces of destruction. He would perceive all the destructive forces within him, all that continually destroys.” If we were able to remain conscious as we dreamed, what we would perceive would be “a kind of entombment by gnomes” in the astral world.
One of the few modern intellectuals to appreciate Steiner’s work, William Irwin Thompson characterizes the “Steinerian vision” as one that “looks at the human as so completely embedded in the animal, vegetal, and mineral evolution of the solar system that it becomes nonsense to separate a fictive ‘matter’ from mind, and a mere three dimensions from ten. . . . All of the seemingly mystical perceptions of Steiner have a biological relevance that fits a new kind of science, and a new kind of culture.” For Steiner, the universe is a harmonic orchestration in which our minds are embedded, not as alienated organs, but as integrated aspects of the whole. Within this whole, other forms of mind also exist, a vast ecology of consciousness, that can be registered by us, if we work to attain what he called “supersensible perception.” Throughout his innumerable lectures and books, Steiner describes “lower creatures” such as the goblins and other “root spirits,” as well as great cosmic entities, angelic hierarchies, and higher spiritual beings.
In earlier phases of development, humanity had a deep affinity, an unconscious attunement, to the Earth and the cosmos. This affinity is reflected in our oldest stories and mythologies, which reveal cosmological secrets about the movements of the planets and the stars, as well as evolutionary processes in the history of the Earth. Thompson considers fairy tales and myths to be “forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.” He proposes that the ancient saga telling of fairies defeating goblins and banishing them beneath the Earth is a representation, as myth, of the original “pollution crisis,” more than 500 million years ago, when cyanobacteria developed photosynthesis, creating an oxygen-rich environment that was poisonous for other life forms, radically transforming the biosphere to make it sustainable for larger mammals. Translating from myth to biology, Thompson proposes that “the goblins are the anaerobic bacteria who live on and in our wastes and garbage, and the fairies, those airy creatures of light, are the cyanobacteria that were the first to invent photosynthesis to feed on light to give off the oxygen that would become the new atmosphere of an illuminated world.” Anaerobic cells contain no nucleus—like the Grays, whose bodies are undifferentiated and without internal organs.
In the saga of the visitors, we are witnessing a return of the repressed, the mythic world, surging into the postmodern consciousness in a form that strangely fits our fixation on technology, our space fantasies and genetic obsessions and dingy bureaucracies, and our terror of the unknown. The Grays exist on the boundary of the sensible, seeking entry into our realm. According to mythic thought, time is not linear but cyclical, or, more accurately, it turns in a spiral. It appears that we are experiencing a reenactment of the ancient narrative described by Thompson—of the battle between forces of light and darkness, or of degradation and evolution—but taking place on a different level, a higher octave of being and knowing. Burrowing away at the gaps in our subconscious and fragmented knowledge systems, gnawing on our bad conscience, the visitors have worked like industrious ants to create certain conditions, and to imprint a particular narrative into our popular culture, absorbed by the masses in a state of distraction. They force-feed their abductees, over decades, until they learn to swallow what they want them to eat.
The Grays are analogous to bacteria, but operating on the level of the psyche. Earthly bacteria derive energy from breaking down complex organic compounds that they take in from the environment. The visitors seem to be entities that sustain themselves from the negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety, emanated by the human nervous system and energy body. Just as earthly bacteria play a crucial role in the global ecosystem, we may eventually understand that our infraterrestrial intruders occupy a necessary niche in the ecosystem of consciousness, as it develops or decays.
Are the visitors “real” or “imaginary”? They are both, and they are neither. Like quantum phenomena, they do not exist or not exist, they also do not exist and not exist, nor do they both not exist and not not exist. According to Dzogchen, a tradition of teachings and practices linked to Tibetan Buddhism, ultimately there are no entities. Any entity only possesses relative reality, including ourselves. Overcoming dualism is essential to Dzogchen, as Chogyal Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State:
Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.
Entities who manifest in other forms of consciousness, such as the Grays, are, at the same time, separate from us and aspects of our psyche. We are the ground for their manifestation, and it is only by attaining a nondual perspective that we can understand them.
Reality, according to Eastern mysticism, is maya, illusion—a tonal tapestry or spectrum of vibrations called, in the Mayan tradition, tlalticpac, the dream-world of Earth. There is, according to Dzogchen, neither being, nor nonbeing. However, there may be an infinite number of relatively real entities, possessing varying forms of consciousness. Overcoming dualism, we can recognize such beings as fractal shards or autonomous archetypes of our own psyche, as well as self-directed entities undergoing their own forms of evolution.
From such a nondualistic perspective, it makes sense that some encounters with the Grays are neutral or even positive. Betty Andreasson, a woman whose accounts of abduction were published in the 1960s, described a classic mystical vision in which the Grays showed her a giant golden phoenix that was consumed by a flame. In her descriptions, and many others, the intruders reveal an ambivalent polarity. Monsters produced by “the sleep of reason,” they have a necessary part to play in the evolution of human consciousness—the process of psychic transmutation that alchemists called the “Great Work.”
Connected to our technological development, the Grays embody a malignant, supersensible element lurking beneath our fascination with mechanization, revealing the irrational basis of our constricted rationality. They also have lessons to teach us. As the critic Lewis Mumford noted, “Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests on our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.” Like transhumanist zombies, the Grays embody the reductive perspective that sees everything—matter, genes, human souls—as resources to be used for purposes of control and domination. In this way, the visitors serve as a warning, as well as an innoculation against a nightmarish fate we can recognize, and reject, in the time that remains to us.
As Prospero says of Caliban in The Tempest: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” According to occult tradition, humanity has a responsibility to all of the elemental beings, those other forms of consciousness that express themselves through the natural world. We are supposed to learn to work with the elementals and, also, alleviate their suffering—it is clear from the abduction accounts that the visitors are suffering. Like dusty insects attracted to flame, the Grays yearn for our qualities of soul-warmth; despite their cunning and technological acumen, these qualities remain beyond them. They are intelligent and sentient, hence aware of their exiled status. Unable to escape their de-souled condition, they desire to draw humans into their lower world, sustaining their half-lives on our subtle energies. They appear to be utilizing their dream-world technologies in a serious and desperate attempt to find a way out of their cul-de-sac.
The incomprehensible murkiness of the phenomenon suggests that it is occurring, for the most part, at a different plane of consciousness, not the daylight awareness of the waking state—the only form of consciousness that the modern mind believes real—but in a twilight or dream-like subliminal state. This quantum indeterminacy extends to manifestations that would appear to be purely material—such as the Roswell incident of the crashed “flying disc,” or the various government reports and semiofficial statements that reveal nothing, and perhaps conceal nothing as well. On books and Internet sites, there appear testimonies of former officials in the military or government who step forward, admitting to taking part in an organized cover-up of alien activity, without offering convincing evidence. Could high-level political and military figures be colluding with the visitors, even to the point of signing Faustian pacts, yet themselves flickering in and out of awareness of what they are doing? The conspiratorial route descends into deep levels of tabloid darkness, generating waves of fear and paranoia. The obsession with finding the literal truth of the abduction phenomenon may be, in itself, a red herring, obscuring the significance of the visitors as psychic archetype.
In one of Carlos Castaneda’s books—which are of appropriately sketchy provenance—Castaneda starts to encounter his “double” in dreams. At first, he assumes he is dreaming the double. Eventually, the sorcerer Don Juan tells him he is wrong: “The double is dreaming you.” Perhaps we are the dream of the visitors, as they are our nightmare. With their invasive probings and technological acumen and genetic obsessions, the visitors seem to be a kind of field effect or echo of our fixation on materialist technologies and hierarchies of dominance. While not the Other we would hope to encounter, the Grays may be, at this stage, the other we deserve.
In Mayan and Aztec traditions, the calendrical end date, or birth date, in 2012 “signified an open door to the cosmic center, in a sense the arrival of the cosmic source into local space-time, or, in other words, a renewal by returning into the central fire,” the independent Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins wrote in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. “The local and Galactic planes would then be aligned, opening the way, as the Aztecs said about the end of the Fifth Sun, for the tzittzimime (celestial demons) to pour down out of the sky to devour mankind.” The visitors appear to be the tzittzimime, an archetype from Aztec myth taking postmodern form as we approach the completion of this cycle. Now that they have colonized our movies and dreams, a literal manifestation of them cannot be ruled out. Against the wishes of the conscious mind, the psyche appears to be unleashing tremendous forces of creative destruction to attain self-knowledge and noospheric activation—to force its own evolution.
Or—or perhaps and—it is all just a fairy tale.