“Have you ever,” he inquired hesitantly of Yossarian … “been in a situation which you felt you had been in before, even though you knew you were experiencing it for the first time?” Yossarian nodded perfunctorily, and the chaplain’s breath quickened in anticipation as he made ready to join his will power with Yossarian’s in a prodigious effort to rip away at last the voluminous black folds shrouding the eternal mysteries of existence. “Do you have that feeling now?”
–Joseph Heller, Catch-22
And have you ever been in a conversation like that, in which your ideas and the other person’s mesh so excitingly that you feel you’re about to–well, maybe not quite rip away the black folds surrounding eternal mysteries–but to move to a new level of understanding you couldn’t have achieved on your own?
I’m privileged to have had two such public conversations over the past months, with two very different but equally remarkable people. One was Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society and author of books like Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye, and most recently Giving the Devil his Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. The other was Whitley Strieber, whose book Communion gave our culture its canonical image of the UFO alien, and whose repeated encounters with the uncanny have driven him to explore arenas that most scientists would consider over the edge.
Both interviews were recorded several weeks ago, but went live only last week: on Michael’s “Science Salon” podcast (video; July 14) and on Whitley’s “Dreamland” (audio; July 17). Both focused on my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
“He’s a skeptic, like me,” Michael introduced me at the beginning of the interview, and I couldn’t deny it. Like Michael, I don’t believe in the existence of physical spaceships visiting our planet. But Michael’s also a skeptic like me (without the comma) for whom this disbelief doesn’t equate with dismissal or scorn. “I have never ceased to feel their pull on me,“ I said of the UFOs, “and so in this book I turned to ask, what was that pull, and can I use it as a flashlight as it were, to illuminate the pull that they have on our culture?”
Michael understood and agreed.
The UFOs, in my view, are fundamentally about human mortality, and thereby qualify as a religious phenomenon. “I know that you are an atheist,” I said to Michael, “but I also have the sense that you have a great deal of sensitivity for religious issues”; which I followed up with the admission that “I myself am very much plugged in to the religious world-view.”
He nodded. “I think,” he said, “that’s why I resonated with your book a lot.”
Two religious, or at least religiously sensitive, atheists? Whitley Strieber, in introducing our interview, suggested that I am an atheist, which somewhat jarred me since I don’t like to think of myself as such, although I probably am. “I would find it very difficult to argue for the existence of a God outside us,” I told Michael, while leaving the door open to the possibility that there’s something inexplicable within us that we project outward and call “God.” (In Intimate Alien, I spoke of the UFO story as being about “our interactions with our shared unconscious, which if not ‘God’ in the traditional sense is psychologically indistinguishable from It.”)
When I spoke with Whitley, one of the first issues that came up between us was the related question of life after death.
In speaking of UFOs as representations of death, I normally take for granted that death is the end of our existence, the most profoundly alien thing that we can (not) imagine. Michael didn’t challenge me on this, presumably because he shares this view. Whitley, however, did.
He does believe in a life after death, and his penetrating questions forced me to clarify my own stand, which was shakier than I normally take it to be. Partly, I admitted, because there seems to be some evidence, however uncertain, for reincarnation. More significantly, though–and I don’t think I actually said this–because I deeply want myself to be wrong. I wish more than anything for there to be something more.
My conversation with Michael was a rich exchange between two essentially like-minded skeptics. That with Whitley was a conversation, as he put it in the beautiful blurb he wrote for our podcast, across the fence by two friends on opposite sides of that fence. Whitley, though gifted with a fine critical intelligence, can’t be a skeptic like me; his first-hand encounters with the transcendent bar that path for him. This split was nowhere expressed more eloquently than in our discussion of the warts that encircled Barney Hill’s groin.
Barney Hill, with his wife Betty, was the first of the UFO abductees; and his 1961 encounter with the UFO and its machinery left its trace on his body in the form of a perfectly formed circle of warts in his most intimate place. I believe the UFO and its machinery never existed, that the warts were real but were produced by causes within Barney. The abduction, I insisted, never happened.
Whitley: “You’re right. I don’t think it happened. And I think also that it did happen and I live in that place of balance because I have to, because these things have a very physical manifestation in my life.”
Hier ich stehe, he might have said with Martin Luther. Ich kann nicht anderes. Here I stand; I can do no other. And I, obliged by my own inexperience of the things Whitley speaks about to stand in a different place, have no choice but to do so. And at times to wander over to the fence for a friendly chat.
In his blurb, Whitley invites his listeners to join us at the fence–“it’s a great place to hang out and just wonder.” To judge from the comments posted, there were many who did, and who enjoyed what they heard there. “Wow. Civil discourse,” a woman named Duann posted. “Almost forgot what it sounded like.” And one Von Hausenberg:
“This is one of the most pivotal Dreamland shows I’ve ever heard. Through a combination of the quality of the voices of both David and Whitley, the content, the free thinking conjecture and the discussion of Sheela Na Gig, I found myself drawn, almost hypnotically, deeper into a mist like fascination and wonder.”
My favorite exchange in the show? This one (referring to the Sheela-na-Gigs, the strange sculptures on medieval churches that I find repellent and Whitley alluring):
Me: “Whitley, you force me to see it in a different light. You’re right.”
Whitley: “That’s what we’re about, David. You force me to see a lot of things in a different light too. That’s why we have so much fun together.”
And in the “Science Salon” show? An exchange near the end, when Michael asked me what I was working on now and I spoke of my long-neglected translation of the 18th-century Kabbalistic text, I Came This Day to the Spring, by Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz.
“A Kabbalistic book, written in the 18th century by probably the most prominent rabbi of his time, that I read as a charter of the world religion of the future.” This religion, I explained, advocated “the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, gender equality, and the recognition of gay sex as a legitimate form of sexual expression.”
Michael: “Like the elevation of secular humanism into a world religion!”
Eibeschuetz a secular humanist? As with the label “atheist” applied to me, it seems not quite to fit. Yet there’s a truth in it, though as with me not the whole truth. I demurred: “But proven by Scripture and by the sayings of our ancient sages of blessed memory!”
I added the verdict passed on his book by one contemporary rabbinic authority. “This is a book of heresy beyond anything any Gentile has ever written, and it most certainly deserves to be burned.”
Michael (laughing): “Oh my God. You have to do this book. This is fabulous.”
Which, thanks to Michael, I just may have found the oomph to get back to doing.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? (Now listed among the “Top 75 UFO Blogs and Websites about Unidentified Flying Objects.”) Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
I am reading and really enjoying your book. I appreciate the approach you take to the subject. I’ve had experiences with what I can only describe as grey aliens. My skeptical mind tells me they are likely purely psychological, but these experiences are so vivid I can understand why people like Strieber become true believers.
I am also eager to read your translation of I Came This Day. My Hebrew is too limited as of now to fully understand the original, so I’ve been hoping to someday read a translation. I have a weird fascination (obsession?) with Sabbatai Zevi and Sabbateanism.
Thank you, John! I think many share your fascination with Sabbateanism. I’m afraid my translation has been on ice for a while, while I’ve worked on Intimate Alien – but I’m getting excited about coming back to it!