-:- little vision tricksters -:-
-:- technospooks - aliens of the west -:-
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'This specific abduction occurred when I was seventeen years old...I was driving home and noticed a glowing object [in the sky]. I got out of my car to view it... it dropped down to land... I got scared and ran back to my car and for some reason it would not start... I saw four or five figures emerge out of the woods. I was shocked and frightened... They came closer and took me in their ship, and examined me. They put a drill in my nose and checked my eyes with some sort of metallic device.
'I asked [them] "Who are you?"... and they responded telepathically "We are from the future. We travel back in time to get organs from humans before we evolved because our planet is dying"...I asked "What happened at Roswell?" Another voice told me telepathically that the government did recover a spaceship there... and that [they are] trying to manipulate [the aliens] into helping them. Since then I haven't been able to sleep well and I suffer from paranoia.'
This story, taken from a random sample of typical alien and UFO stories from the Internet (click here to read the original story), is one of the darker and more chilling examples from the ever increasing corpus of UFO lore. Whether it is true in the literal sense or not, it contains numerous important elements from what might be termed modern alien mythology: a glowing ship which flies, aliens emerging onto the road, telepathic communication, medical examinations, Roswell and an alleged secret government programme to recover alien craft.
The body of extraterrestrial tales is growing among mankind, and like any growing mythology, it stretches across continents, into the future and the past. We read numerous stories of UFO abductions from Europe in the north to Brazil in the south, Japan in the east to Canada in the west, and even more reports of sightings from across the world. Here, for example, is a sighting from Essex, England:
'I saw four objects, moving extremely fast and always together. When they arrived, I felt a weird and strange feeling, like a sort of electricity wave flowing through my body - it made my spine shiver. As they moved, I did hear some quiet humming sounds, very low pitched. In under a minute they were gone.'
If we are to assume that aliens are not literally visiting our planet, either from the future or from space (*10), we are faced with two options - to disbelieve the vast number of people who apparently believe in their own stories, or to cast around for another theory. There are some quite famous stories of people reporting abduction experiences while their families or friends reported that at the same time the alleged abductees were doing nothing more exotic than falling asleep in an armchair, and these sceptical reports are often used by scientists and UFO investigators to 'prove' that UFOs cannot possibly be anything more than mere dreams or hallucinations.
This, however, appears to miss the point. Numerous abductees and witnesses report visionary experiences which consistently bear a strong resemblance not only to the notion of spooks here discussed, but also to a wide range of other human visionary experiences. Most notable in the two examples here are the feeling of electric waves passing through the body of a witness to a sighting - an experience so typical of visions and shamanising influences - and the report of telepathy between an abductee and the apparent alien.
Immediately brought to mind are the experiences of the Yanomami shamans in inviting the hekura spirits into their bodies to shamanise. Many shamans report it was through the medium of telepathic communication that the hekura preferred to contact them, singing their magic songs so that only the trained ear of the healer or sorceror could hear them.
We also note that some stories contain references to the removal of organs, to medical examinations or to some kind of purification. Again our minds travel to Amazonia, where the shamans again report that the hekura had to perform a thorough cleansing and purification of their bodies before they could take up permanent residence, and that this very often involved the removal of some aspects of their being, such as organs, blood or bile.
We can see that the classic 'alien' face - large black eyes, small mouth, large head with a lightly-built body - seems a typical image of what numerous tribal people report their spooks to look like. Indeed often have alien appearances been described as 'elfin', and one only needs to glance as an Aboriginal painting of a wandjina to spot the resemblance.
Finally, aliens are considered as the bringers of sickness; in particular, the symptoms of radiation sickness seem to be rather prevalent among abductees. In this regard, we might think of the Taotao Mona of Guam or the malevolent souls of the Japanese kami.
Indeed, the two-souled kami are a perfect image of these alien beings, since a potential 'abductee' can never know what particular mood the aliens might be in, and indeed this seems to exactly correlate to the mindsets of the abductees themselves: a positive, world-embracing person appears to be more likely to have a wisdom-filled life-affirming abduction experience than one who worries a great deal and has a basically paranoid mode of living. You get the spook that you ask for...
It is therefore the author's contention that aliens represent not the harbingers of doom or bringers of wisdom from an extraterrestrial species who visit our planet, but a revival of the ancient human belief in spooks beginning to rise again in the absence of dominating religions and belief systems which seek to silence such fringe mythologies. What is more intriguing is that the alien spooks appear to be a revival, not of the most recent substrate of spook beliefs, but of one more ancient, of the original level of magicians, custodians (of either wisdom or the human race) and shamanic sacred essences. There is also something of the malevolence of the mischief-maker or the benevolence of the prosperity-maker, depending on your point of view.
Thus, these are the Technospooks of the new boundary: no longer found in the ancient wild places of days gone by, they now come from the edge of the Universe and descend from outer space to bring us their boons and havoc. Mankind's boundaries in the last five hundred years have expanded beyond such places as the mountains and forests - Everest has been conquered, Amazonia has been explored - and so it is fitting that space is now their location. Surrounded not by ancient rocks (since mankind has increasingly less regard for what has gone before) but by futuristic technology beyond our wildest dreams (since mankind is increasingly reaching out towards the future he knows must be in space).
Aliens, then, are the newest spooks, a modern mythology in the making whose evolution has yet to complete. Our fascination with them has brought about the most wide-ranging revival in spook beliefs and functions since the beginning of the Christian era. And as the aliens blaze their trails back into the most ancient levels of our being, the pave the way for other, more homely spooks.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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