Keith Thompson

COPYRIGHT CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION

INTERVIEW WITH KIETH THOMPSON

You know, a lot of people in the UFO field hear the term "mythology" and, because ours is a culture that has lost touch with its mythologies in a conscious way, that is assumed to mean that the person talking about mythology is saying UFOs aren't real. They could very well be real objects from someplace, and there is a profoundly rich mythology around them now. One thing a myth is - a myth tells the story of origins. It tells the story of the first time. The garden of Eden. Creation stories are profoundly mythic. It tells about the first instance of something profound, usually that was done by the gods or goddesses, or the ancestors before time. And what makes a myth powerful is that it is repeated periodically and, through the repetition of a myth or performance of a mythic action or a ritual, a community is renewed.

I think you waste your time trying to find the answer. And that is what UFOlogy - I was simply amazed as I did my research for my book, at the extent to which that is the driving force of the world of UFOlogy. And that means both sides, and that is roughly speaking proponents versus demoters. Both of whom I consider different classes of believers. There's essentially a belief dynamic going on. "What do you believe?" Both are strongly committed to a particular viewpoint. The debunker says this, in effect - you scratch all the other statements at their surface, and the statement that comes up for the debunker is: This isn't real, because it can't be real. UFOs aren't real because they can't be real. We know that there are no such things as craft that can go this fast, that can stop on a dime, that can avoid radar, and so forth ... we know that it can't be the case. And that's the guiding mythology of that side. The other side is: UFOs are real because they must be real. I mean, who's to say that we're the only ones in the universe? What arrogance for we humans to think that. And so, that becomes the mythology for that side. Both provide interesting arguments. But both tend to look for proof of their particular viewpoint. And there are enough cases that have enough rich aspects - a proponent can stand forth with 10 good cases for the UFO phenomenon. The debunker can take those same 10 cases and find details that cast doubt on the original reports and use those same 10 cases to negate them. Both sides end up with categorical proof of their viewpoint.

Let me give you an image, talking about the Greek gods - there's a Greek god named Proteus. Proteus was the god who could change his shape and form at will into all manner of things: swine, fish, birds, ah, he changed his person into many different people when it suited his needs. He could change the shape - he was a shape-shifter. And, ah, the Greek myths are full of images of how hard it was to get hold of Proteus because he would change his shape. As soon as you corner him, he would change his shape and form and become something else. Um - there is some reference in Greek myth to the fact that, if you will corner him, and if you hold him steadfastly, he will reveal his truth. Then there's an interesting qualification. The qualification is: he will respond to the particular question asked him according to the wisdom in that question. It's remniscent of modern politicians - they will answer the question in very literal, specific terms. Well, so, when the debunker says to Proteus - let's call Proteus the UFO phenomenon, let's assume Proteus as incarnated in the modern UFO phenomenon - the debunker says: UFOs aren't real, are they? And Proteus says, No. And Proteus gives up a certain number of cases that cast doubt on the reality of UFOs. The UFO proponent comes along, on the other hand, and says: Are UFOs from outer space? Are UFOs extraterrestrial spacecraft? There are enough cases in which that hypothesis seems compelling. It's persuasive. And so Proteus says Yes. So Proteus responds to each question in the UFO phenomenon. The UFO phenomenon had a protean quality - that really what ???, turn it into an adjective. The UFO phenomenon has a protean quality whereby it gives answers according to specific questions, and there are enough questions asked, and there are enough UFO cases now, after 50 years, that - and maybe a hundred years before that, depending on what you want to say is the beginning of this, where does it all begin? Modern UFO followers say it began in 1947. Others say, Well, it looks like it's a continuation of something happening throughout history. I could make a convincing case for both. And that's, that's what's interesting - there's no final jury on this.

Well here's the case for the idea that this has been going on throughout history. You look in folklore mythology throughout the world and you find these encounters in which human beings make contact with marvellous creatures from the sky ah, chariots of fire were seen in the middle ages. In the wars of Christendom, firey crosses were seen in the sky. There were craft, what we would, craft is a loaded word, but what would appear to be craft or ships landing, Ezekiel sighting in the Bible is frequently used by ufologists, so there can be a tapestry that's put together that shows that there is something continuous throughout human history of which the UFO phenomeonon is simply the latest chapter and this phenomenon is infintely intelligent and in fact it's the phenomenon that generates mythology, according to this viewpoint. It's the phenomenon that gives us the particular motifs and events which we ah, in our short sighted vision don't understand and we create stories about as the truth and it's the source of all religion according to those so the UFO phenomenon appears in the modern day as metallic craft because after all that's what we would believe.

Something came together in that sighting. There was, you know just as this whole phenomenon is there are many factors that seem to come together to make a good sighting. One is that in this case was that Kenneth Arnold was a credible witness. HE didn't want to tell his story. He didn't want to become famous, there's a lot of evidence for that idea. He did not want to become famous but when the story came out there was evidence that he had done his best to disprove the idea that he was seeing anything miraculous or extraordinary that every test he made about the speed of these objects and the distance he was a professional pilot, a professional observer, deputy sherrif and so forth. Had a lot of skill in observing, he realised they were going as fast he had clocked them. They were as far away from him as he knew, because he knew how to measure these things. So he was not a true believer. ANd he told the story once, the story was repeated by others. THe press came and said tell us Ken what you saw because he was a credible person in his community, that was one aspect of it. The other thing was just something amazing about the beauty of the objects these were nine objets flying with Mount Reneer in the background, ah, the other aspect of this that makes it a great story is that it was picked up by the united press and associated press very quickly the local reporter who wrote about it in a local newspaper, ah, that story got picked up and was carried for whatever, you know collection of reasons that story became an international story very quickly. ANd then here's where it becomes very interesting, here's where the debunkers want to say well, because this was reported throughout the world, other people saw these kinds of things. That's a good. That fits one mythology. That's statisfying to the, if you want to explain this phenomenon, that's a pretty good explanation. But you look a little deeper it turns out many of the sightings were reported in the weeks before this phenomenon, before the Kenneth Arnold story and there were many good sightings it turns out during World War 11 of something called (unclear) flighers, and ghost rockets that were seen by skilled military observers. These were brought forward suddenly in to this emerging mix and gave it more credibility.

a myth holds a myth takes hold when it connects with something very deep in the human psyche, it connects with what appears to be the very basis of things.

well the deep truth of UFO's as far as I can tell is that the phenomenon comes close enough to us with images ah of reality that are so compelling and persuasive on film, on video, first hand witnesses who have no need to believe and yet the phenomenon comes only this close, it's as if it hovers and then leaves, or it stays hovering, it stays, it comes close enough that it seems ah, to be a solid real, real world time and space phenomenon and there's evidence, you know physical measurement radar like I said photographs and yet the phenomenon stay sufficiently ambiguous at the same time.

So the phenomenon, every statement you can make about the phenomenon in some sense can be can be argued intelligently but it can't be proved So the debunkers are not really able to show convincingly that ah, there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon though they can make the case. The proponents still don't have the crash piece of something to show on Geraldo and I'm not sure if it were shown on Geraldo at this point in the modern, or post modern world that we would even understand it as a signal as an intelligent piece of anything because everything is argued. We live in an age when any argument can be made for everything, anything and is regularly done.

WELL WE LIVE IN A SCIENTIFIC AGE. WHERE WE'VE ALL BEEN TRAINE THAT WE GET PROOF. YOU'VE GOT TO GO PUT IT THROUGH THE THEORIES AND ULTIMATELY WE ONLY BELIEVE WHAT CAN BE SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN?

That's right. And we're told by the great avatars of science, the modern science, who've studied the UFO.. who actually have not studied the UFO phenomenon, one of the great fallacies is the idea that any that most of those who debunk UFO's have studied them very carefully. But in any event the leading voices in modern science, Carl Sagan and others who appear on talk shows can assure us with wonderful scorn and irony that there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon and that therefore we should put our minds at rest. In 1969 there was a federal commission to study UFO's headed by a physicist named Richard Comden it only looked at those cases that were asily dismissable and then it reavealed that the phenomenon had been explained. Even though 25% of the caes in the condem study were very compelling cases and by their own admission couldn't explain them. See this is what you've asked how does it all go on, the Conden commission officially passes the judgement, passes the verdict that the UFO phenomeonon can be explained in terms of hoax, hallucination and misidentification. Meanwhile in their own report, buried in their report is the statement that the following 25% of cases can't be explained. When you read their own descriptions these are very interesting and compelling cases. The news media doesn't even read the whole report. They cover the Condem Commission's conclusion that there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon but the UFO researchers make a kind of hobby out of, make a career out of pointing out that yes, the Comden report itself says it's real so it goes forward and it takes a step back.

and by the debunkers I mean those people who are committed pretty much honestly, if you really push them to the hypothesis that all UFO's can be explained in conventional terms if we only had enough information. Well that ceases to be a scientific argument, that's an argument of faith, that's a theological statement in effect, but in any event they, whenever you can find a UFO that's that's debunkable as a photograph of a garbage can lid or something along those lines it's always a victory for them because they say you know if we had the same exact proof we could actually prove that the rest of these could be explained. Well they said the same thing when those two guys came forward and said that the crop circles were hoaxed. IT turns out one or two of them were hoaxed and that there was proof of that. And even more remarkable hypothesis than the ET hypothesis would be how did these two guys get all over the world and create 600 of them. Thta's not saying that I believe they're from outer space, but the hoax hypothesis in some ways is even more extraordinary cause the we have to find out how these guys or did they have confederates all over the world and if so, this is the kind of conspiracy that we should understand so likewise with that idea that they've all been hoaxed it, it's continues to you know the debunkers make their argument but that doesn't quite hold, ah, neither does the case hold that all 600 crop circles are good. Some of them you know, some of them are hoaxed, but some of them can't see that's the point with the UFO phenomenon, some can be explained, are likely to have a mundane origin, crop circles or the saucers, but some don't fit that easily debunkable mold . and it is those, that percentage that continues almost like a magnet to speak to not only those UFO researchers who were you know who build their lives around the phenomenon but ah, ordinary people who watch these tabloid tv shows or read the tabloids at the Safeway, by the way sometimes the tabloid reports, this is one of the things that makes the phenomenon so rich. Sometimes in the tabloids in the grocery store, ah, the reports of UFO's are actaully pretty good reports cause I now enough about how a case has been debated, but other times, they're obviously absurd, made up by the writers and it's that inability to determine is this information or disinformation that makes up this phenomenon.

but Jung's idea, nevertheless, that there was something of profound significance about the UFO phenomenon, whether it signals the end of an ear or not Jung was the first modern psychologist to look beyond the idea of you know are these being perceived accurately, instead to argue that there is some shift in our collective life, collective mind, collective unconscious and these events are significant because they signal that shift. It brought a whole new level, he was one of the first psychologists of his, with, with ah, a serious status to take the phenomenon seriously and the phenomenon thrives by these periodic infusions of some credibility and Jung brought a kind of credibility and a new approach and that approach is we should look to mythology, we should consider the possibility that these have been seen throughout human history and there's a phenomenon that continues to make it's appearance which is at odds with the idea of mainstream ufology which is that these are modern, discrete, historical events in our time only.

Well long before our ideas about angels were clear to us as they are now we think of beautiful gossamer like beings with big wide wings and there's usually a very positive numinous spiritual quality associated with angels but before that distinction was made the ancients lived with the idea of a whole realm of intermediate beings, it was called the great chain of being, it's one of the the really big ideas in history and that is that between us and God and between us and lower animals there must be a whole ah, continuum of, of states of being and beings at different levels, some more material, some less material and there are theologies that have very rich understanding of the many levels of angelic and demonic but the word demonic really comes out of a Greek term for Daimon, Daimon and the daimon was understood as one's well it has many levels of understanding but it's the idea of these levels of intermediate planes of being between us and teh divine and it provides a language for understanding phenomenon like UFO's. IT occurs to me that if ours had not been, if ours were not a culture that since the scientific revolution had so narrowed the focus of reality to the material plane we might not have such obsession with these phenomenon that seem to come in from the edges like UFO's cause it seems to me these older ideas like of, of a hierarchy of beings, some more material like us and some less material and the lesser material the less physical in the real of the angelic, in the realm of the demonic. That's why I titled my own book angels and aliens cause it seems to me there's some wonderful parallels between the traditional angelic orders who angel means a messenger and angels came as messengers including to the virgin mary in the Christian theology to give her some pretty big news about her next few years. Likewise in the UFO world, the aliens, especially in the 1950's came with a kind of saviour quality, they came, they were often described by the early contactees in angelic terms which is one of the reasons it's so easy for science to assume that there was nothing to any of this, because these people were reporting encounters, it simply sounded like fairy tales and mythology and folklore and since science doesn't assume that it's operating according to folklore or mythology my goodness that this can all be dismissed. So in any event there's this rich sort of lore of these intermediate realms, including in the UFO world. There are many kinds of aliens who are described, not just the short grey ones, but there are tall blonde ones as well, especially in Europe so there's almost, there's an interesting parllel between the idea of a hierarchy of aliens that have been reported for 50 years and the hierarcy of angels. In both cases these are creatures who can sometimes manifest in physical form to be seen by the human being who reports them, by the prophet usually who has the encounter. They can also move through walls, turn ot light depart at great speeds with no sound. There's again a common ground between angels and aliens in that sense. Are we dealing with the same? is it all the same thing? You know in one sense yes, in that they are all, there's a mythic quality to all of it. There's a sense in which it is larger than real more real than real. But at the same time it never really you know crosses the threshold of proof that we have established proof so in the meantime these phenomenon stay in the periphery with people all over the world apparently reporting this phenomenon called abduction

the abductees whatever is going on ultimately with them it's as if they are all getting different, different aspects of some new message and it's not a simpole message but it's as if ah they are almost a distant early warning system. They are almost unwittingly like portraying the role of the traditional shamans portrayed, in traditional culture the shaman was in congress with beings of all sorts Was negotiating with spirits, higher spirits, lower spirits, friendly angelic, lower demonic spirits all the time and it was the job of the Shaman to travel into the other world to gain information to bring healing information, to help get the tribe free of curses. And come back and bring this for the health of the community. Likewise, if you expand the community to the human community as a whole, the whole human animal, could it be that there is, that that kind of experience is somehow becoming generalised and that the abductees are people who are reporting real encounters of some kind but encounters with the reality so so complex, so vast, so large that they're getting pieces, bits and pieces for some new level if you will that's emerging for all of humanity.

there is in the human animal this enduring expectation of a second coming and I don't just mean in the CHristian sense, something is coming, there's an end to history, there's an end to ordinary history that somehow there will be a redemption at the end of history and that the world will become spiritualised well I think that's a language for some . . . for the idea of that evolution isn't finished. And it certainly isn't finished with us and that in some way the interesting task of an evolutionary theorist, now that we have Darwin's partial and yet of course, very impressive line of thinking in which he connected us to other species in the in the material realm of earth it may be that the job of the next evolutionary theorist is to connect us with those other beings in other realms, that are partly physical, partly mental, and in other words I think we're dealing with the UFO phenomenon, with the reality that is at home in both of what we call the mental world. Of symbolism and the physical world of time and space. We humans because where we are and because of the way our brain works and the way our mind apprehends reality need to assume that mind is mind and matter is matter. The UFO phenomenon to me suggests more that rather than reality being an off and on switch, either we're in matter or we're in mind, it's more like a dimmer switch and you can go all the way to the left which would be the material realm and then you could switch it all the way to the right which would be the mental realm of the world of ideas beyond time and space for telepathy and clairvoyance and all sorts of quote miracles happen, all the way out there to miracles but what if reality you know we can in ways that we don't understand, I have a feeling that we're always involved in, in turning the dimmer switch that somewhow we're all part of the mechanism that that switch gets turned but it's turned very slow and incremental levels so that the UFO's somehow seem to be able to transcend mind and matter. They're able to move back and forth disappear, reappear, and I guess what I'm getting at is it strikes me that UFO's rather than being from out there, away from here, and a totally different reality they may be all, they may be part of the same reality that we're part of all the time and that we as a species are simply just now moving into. So the abductees this is my point, the abductees without knowing it and without wanting it in most cases, are are people who are finding themselves able to move into that realm with those beings and then move back and bring stories about it. I use the image in my book, I call it the parable of the bobber, and the bobber you know, one day a fish swims to a new part of the ocean and looks up and sees what you and I would call a bobber, and the fish doesn't have a name for it it's a cylindrical, spherical, saucer like round shape floating at the upper edge of reality so he swims back to the other fish and says I've seen something, and it's a bobber, I saw a bobber. And all the other fish say oh ya right with your bobber will you get, we've got a lot of kelp here and we have to get to the southern waters by winter, we don't need you talking about bobbers meanwhile more fish begin to see the bobber and it becomes a legend of the bober, well remember wehre is the bobber, the bobber is floating right at the very edge of reality although the fish don't know it per se. One day one fish gets too close to the bobber and gets hooked and gets pulled up out of the water in to this vast new realm of air and land and ends up on the bottom of a boat and one thing leads to another and for whatever reason that fish is thrown back and comes back with a story. Called an abduction. What my point is is that the fish has been taken to a larger reality that is there all the time even though the fish doesn't know it it's the reality of air and land and human beings and whole other, remarkable creatures called humans. There's an old Chinese aphorism that says the fish is the last one to know that it lives in water. And the only way a fish learns that it lives in water is when one of the fish ends up being out of water and interacting with these other beings outside. Gets thrown back in and says you know we live in water but the water is not what we think it is. We've taken it for granted, we think it's the only thing there is but we've somehow learned to swim in water but there's more than water, there's air and land. Eventually that becomes a truth that all the others realise. Well likewise it occurs to me that the abductees are people who are finding themselves amphibians I see the, the abductees as amphibians, who are somehow going through a course that they didn't remember signing up for in the university extension of life and they are learning to swim in other elements.

And what interests me is the possibility, given that abductees report the experience more than once, that's one of the new unfolding myths of the UFO world, and I mean myth in a positive sense that ah, the aliens pick up the same person over time and pick up their family members. Well what if we would train abductees to navigate the strange realm in which typically they're paralyzed, right? The abductees report they can't move and they have these procedures performed upon them. What if the abductees would learn to, what if they would practise various kinds of disciplines, martial arts, mediatation, visualization, lucid dreaming would be an interesting one to teach abductees because in lucid dreaming what one tries to do is remain, remain aware in a state that usually is a dream state. It's to become aware of dreaming and being conscious and learning to act with in the dream and having certain choices. So when the train comes at you in the dream and you can't move, you're able to get out of the water. What if the same principle would work that abductees are indeed entering a new realm in which they're simply paralyzed because they don't have the resources to interact with these new beings who in some for some reason some logic that we don't understand are now making contact wtih us, or maybe we're making contact with them. It's as hard to, it's hard to say.

Perhaps we're maybe it's the humans who are moving closer to a realm that's always been there, where these aliens live perhaps our evolution is somehow taking us to an edge of the water if you will and we are somehow interacting and maybe the aliens are as surprised about us as we are about them.

YOU KNOW WHAT I THINK REALLY CURIOUS, JUST TO COME BACK TO SOMETHING YOU SAID THAT THE MODERN MIND SEEMS TO BE AND I DON'T KNOW IF THIS IS JUST TECHNOLOGICAL SEDUCTION BUT WE SEEM MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE WITH THE IDEA THAT FOUR BEINGS SOMETHING LIKE US, HAVE TRAVELLED FORTY FIVE MILLION LIGHT YEARS AND HAVE LANDED IN THE DESERT IN NEW MEXICO THAN WE ARE WITH THE THOUGTH THAT THEY'RE RIGHT BESIDE US AND THAT THE REALM IS HERE. WHY ARE WE SO COMFORTABLE WTIH THAT THOUGHT AND NOT THE IDEA THA TIT JUST MIGHT BE AROUND US ALL THE TIME

It has to do with the fact I think that we, we can only extrapolate from our metaphors, ah, I we live in time and space, and you know you're here in front of me and I'm here, if I reach far enough I can touch you and that will verify my experience of you and so forth and all of our experience comes in time and space, or much of it, the experience we know and so therefore it's easier for us to extrapolate out into outer space based on our own ideas about distance and so forth. Even though the new physics tell us that reality is much, even ordinary reality is much more complicated and strange and in fact there's really no there at a subatomic level there's enormous space and between the particles. In any event our common sense reality tells us that there's distance between things and that we can get there from here. So the idea of things of us going to outer space which has been a predominant idea for 30 years or more with the space program and the idea of therefore things coming here, that. .

MAKES SENSE.

Makes sense. WHereas the idea of other dimensions, of time and space that are just this close all the time, that are peopled by beings and strange creatures that might end up we remember from the star Wars bar? I love the Star Wars bar scene because the guy, they go in for a drink and they're all these beings there and I have a feeling that reality is more like that than we realise. There are tall hairy short bald gnome like, elf like creatures and that we have somehow walked into the outerspace saloon in the past forty years of UFO research and we have found this particular, primarily the short greys, but there seem to be others who are, who are around too.

YA I MEAN IT'S ALMOST LIKE REALITY KEEPS THE LID ON IT, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT YUGOSLAVIA BEFORE THAT GIVES US ORDER AND WE UNDERSTAND WHAT'S AROUND US.

Therefore it's easiest... easy for us to assume that the abductees they must just be strange people and they are reporting there's something a little wrong with them. The main thing is we've got to keep reality intact, we've got to save reality again, one more salvation job, more more reality. .

AT ALL COSTS?

At all costs. Modern you know science, scientists are mainstream scientists are committed to that idea of keeping, to some extent, are interested in keeping reality intact so of course what is intersting to me, consider Carl Sagan and others who on the one hand pooh pooh the idea of UFO's they think it's the sheerest of nonesense and yet they're very much committed to the idea of, of listening through radar radio telescopes for signals from outer space which as wonderfully antrhopocentric idea that number one that they would be out there, that number two that they would have a technological abilities to send us signals and three that they would be sending us signals so Carl Sagan and others expect ET to be discovered through technology that Carl Sagan prefers it might well be the ultimate irony of all this would be that you know these, these telescopes haven't picked up any signals for as long, there's not the single bit of evidence to support the expenditure. I hope it continues I think it's a wonderful project, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by listening for radio waves. I'm for it, but we have to admit there's no, no evidence for it yet and it's almost lik waiting for Godot, we're all waiting, we're all spending a lot of money and still we're not getting any signals from outerspace. Meanwhile, what if it were to turn out 100 years from now that these odd saucers are in fact what we're looking for but because it comes in a form that's so grotesque and so tabloidesque, so ludicrous, so absurd so contrary to what we would expect that our leading scientific minds of our age simply missed it. I find that a wonderfully provocative idea.

One of the interesting things about the abduction phenomenon that makes me think, uh, we would do well to look at mythology and folklore is that that the idea of the gods coupling with humans, having sexual intercourse with humans is, is throughout human history, including the Christian myth. Now I know it's, it's, for many people, it's a huge leap to even talk about the life of Jesus in, in the same context as UFOs, but the point is, um, Jesus is God incarnate . And there are many other instances of the gods and humans coupling. Whether aliens are gods in an ultimate sense isn't as interesting as the fact that they are from the other world; they're godlike; they're imbued with godlike qualities by the people who interact with them. And, um, aliens are coupling with human beings. And what typically results from one of these couplings in mythology and religion is a hero, a, um, a superhuman, a prophet, someone who has come to lead us to a new level of something, to a new understanding of wisdom. So the idea, again - what would be the result of the coupling between aliens and humans? It could be that the, ah, that the coupling is, is some new joining of the material and the psychic realms in ways that we haven't really grasped yet. If we are amphibians, if human beings are already amphibians and we don't know it, if we're already living in more than one realm at once as - even though much of our modern psychology and physics want to keep everything in categories - if that's the case, then it could be that the interaction that's happening with the aliens and the humans, the coupling, the intercourse, the idea of a progeny being created, is best understood as something, some real concrete, tangible symbol of this new level of human - something new emerging for humans. What it is, it's hard to say because we're living in the midst of it. If that's what it is.

One of the reasons it was easy, in the first phase of the UFO phenomenon, - I should say the second phase. The first phase of the UFO phenomenon was the interesting um sightnings in the skies - apparent objects that were showing up on radar, showing up to ordinary witnesses. The second phase was the contactee phase. The contactees were the people who came forward with a new level of story, and it was almost a matter of time until this happened. They came forward to say that they had ridden in spaceships. That they had gone to travel throughout the universe, they had made contact, first-hand contact, with the aliens, with the passengers, with the crew , with the pilots of the spaceships. Well, on a surface level there was, you know, there was a lot of absurdity and it made it possible for the mainstream scientists, who didn't know what to do with all this anyway, with the sightings - it made it possible to put it all in the same category and say, Oh, it's all a bunch of silliness, you know. We know people haven't been riding in spaceships. But nevertheless one of the interesting things is, that the contactee reports had ah, had a saviour-like quality to them. It's as if, um, people were having, it's as if the contactees were cast in the role of the modern prophet. In many cases, for example, the contact was made in the desert, away from ordinary reality , away from other people. Well, prophets typically walk into the desert and are given a miraculous sighting, a visitation, a visionary experience. So, there was a sense in which the UFO phenomenon, almost from the beginning, has had this expectation of salvation, of something religious, of something deeply spiritual. Um, which has made it - which has added, you know, a new dimension that makes it impossible to place in any one category.

COULD THAT BE WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT - IS TOO REACQUAINTANCE WITH THAT -

Well, you know, it could be, you know - Freud in a very limited way - to me, Freud's great discovery was the idea of repression. The idea of the return of the repressed. He had a very limited context for it, that if I'm not in touch with a feeling, that feeling will come back in some form that I least expect. But it will come back. Because what it repressed demands to be expressed. Well, if in a larger sense that's what's going on, we might come to expect it in the UFO phenomenon, in that,

What is repressed demands to be expressed, eventually. Likewise, it could be that for the past 500 years, our modern scientific, materialistic rationalist linear mentality has systematically driven out to the periphery all sort of paradoxical, problematic ah, multiple phenomena that don't fit, and yet may well be part of the very core of reality. So, if these phenomena are forced off to the sides by blinders of our choice and our making, then it somehow makes sense that they would devolop enough energy and force and power, especially in the fact that they've never really left, but they continue to work within us - if that's what's happening, then it shouldn't surprise us that the UFO phenomenon should appear with a lot of energy, psychic energy. It should have - we could expect that it would have a certain charisma, and there is that quality. As I was working on my own research and writing my book, there's a charismatic quality, a deep almost magnetic quality to the UFO phenomenon, including a quality that tends to almost possess the researchers and commit them to various efforts to try to figure it all out in some, single, singular sense, to find a single answer. And they never get that single answer. Oh, they arrive at it and then, as they hold the position, meanwhile the phenomenon continues to misbehave, and change shape and change form , and the abductions are now the most recent aspect of the phenomenon, and I have no doubt that the abductions today will be - whatever we're calling abductions today will change in five or ten years. The phenomenon does have this ability to change shape, change form, sprout new motives and motifs and strategies. So - but in any event, that shouldn't surprise us, if this is all part of the core reality and it's been distorted by virtue of us being willing - not being willing to look at it. And if it's coming back in with that kind of power, we could expect it to wreak havoc on our categories and our desire for sense.

I have not figured this out, I have not figured this phenomenon out, but at the same time - you know, there's a parallel for me. When I go home to visit my family, when I used to go home to visit my family, I would go with a desire to get everything straight this time, and that we're all going to get along, or I'm going to understand why my relationship to my mother or my father, and I'm going to somehow not be - end up feeling like a 12-year-old again, you know. And I'm going to go and - get it all right this time. That's always a set up. It never worked. I was never able to do it. Now when I go home, I'm much more in a spirit of observing. Like, gee, how do we do this? What a, what a funny mix it is, that we're all part of the same family but we don't have any of the same opinions, and that we disagree about this or about that. We're such an odd lot. But that's what it means to be a family. It used to be, I would think that, that there was some way to get over all that. Now I kind of celebrate it as what my family is about. Likewise the world of UFOs is a world that I have not been able to get straight, to figure out, to make sense of ultimately, and yet in accepting that, I've made a certain sense out of it, I've come to peace with the fact that, um, it's wonderful enough, marvellous enough as it is.