Cryptids, UFOs, Lost Continents – Colin Dickey’s “The Unidentified”

Colin Dickey.  The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with The Unexplained.  Viking, 2020.

“Obsession” was perhaps an unfortunate choice of words for the subtitle.  It suggests a lesser book than The Unidentified in fact is.

Any book that incorporates between its two covers UFOs, lost continents, and cryptids–the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the yeti–is likely to fall into one of two genres.  Either it’s a catalogue of “unsolved mysteries,” related with open-mouthed credulity, or else it’s a bemused tour of the silly things that people somehow can bring themselves to believe, enlivened with anecdotes of those amiable but slightly dotty folk who really do believe them.  “Our Obsession,” its inclusive pronoun notwithstanding, would seem to assign Colin Dickey’s The Unidentified to the latter category.

Only it isn’t that kind of book.

What Dickey has done is to transcend both genres with a subtle, humane and nuanced piece of work whose breezy, casual style belies the depth of thought that underlies it.  It’s always a delight to read, always informative, even for someone like me who’s spent most of his Biblically allotted threescore-and-ten puzzling over the unidentified and the unexplained.  It is, in places, genuinely profound.

“Through the course of investigating cryptids, UFOs, and aliens,” Dickey writes in his conclusion, “I kept coming back to the conclusion that they were mostly a sideshow, mostly a distraction from the real event, which was a longer-term history of the institutionalization of the modern scientific edifice and our need to push back on this, as well as an attempt to claim the middle ground between science and mainstream religion.”  It’s not extraordinary, then, that the the closest thing his book has to a hero is Charles Fort (1874-1932), the eccentric philosopher of the Bronx who in four wild, maddening, exhilarating books documented thousands of events that according to orthodox science shouldn’t have happened but–at least if you trust the contemporary newspapers–actually did.

Not necessarily meaningful events.  Indeed, the less meaningful an anomaly is, the more it’s truly Fortean.  Like meat, or frogs, or something else unexpected and implausible, falling from the sky.

The goal to aim for in our thinking, says Dickey, is “to be free of a preconceived certainty, to be willing to admit the unexplained without that automatic obsession”–there’s that word again, used in a more appropriate context–“to explain it. … What Charles Fort offered was a means of looking at these strange events that militated against ideology seeping in, which remains, a hundred years later, his most valuable gift.”  Often perverted, unfortunately, by those “cranks”–from Ignatius Donnelly, who used Atlantis as the open sesame for all the riddles of history, to the UFO conspiracy theorists of today–who use the genuinely unexplained to create their own edifices, as rigid as those of conventional science and far less grounded in the reality of the world around us.

If this was all that Dickey argues for in The Unidentified, it would still be a great and enlightening read.  But there’s much, much more.

Some years ago, I read on the web that DNA testing of hair specimens had suggested that the yeti, the so-called “Abominable Snowman” of the Himalayas, indeed existed and was an unknown subspecies of bear, perhaps surviving from prehistoric times.  (I understand that this idea has since been modified to make the yeti a fairly ordinary sort of bear, but the point I’m making remains intact.)  Posting on this to Facebook, I raised the question: does this move the yeti from the field of “cryptozoology” to orthodox zoology?  And if so, what has changed about it?

Dickey has shown me what’s changed about it.

Namely, that the “Abominable Snowman”–its name a significant mistranslation of a Tibetan phrase, echoing (Dickey suggests) the “abominable” creatures forbidden by the Book of Leviticus–is important to those who believe in it, in that it provides a mirror of our human condition.  Not too many centuries ago, Dickey points out, scientists studied Nature, with a capital N, as a sort of second Bible, a revelation of God’s design in the world and our part in it.  (Not necessarily faithful Christians.  The Deist Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, revered “the Bible of the creation” as the one true source that grants us knowledge of our Creator, as opposed to “the stupid Bible of the church, that teacheth man nothing.”)

Cryptozoology is zoology in this antique, and therefore existentially meaningful, key.  It’s about “abominable” men and not Himalayan bears, even hitherto unknown Himalayan bears.

“The main and central difference,” Dickey writes in a different but applicable context, “hinges on the question of what you expect out of the natural world: do you see it as a wondrous and strange thing unto itself, or do you expect it to reveal humanity back to itself?”

The ocean, he points out, is home to far weirder creatures than sea serpents, which nevertheless don’t qualify as “cryptids.”  There are “deep-sea isopods, colossal squids, feathered lobsters–things that are beautiful and strange but that still belong in the realms of taxonomy.  These creatures do not exist for our own symbolic matrix.”  They “have no symbolic meaning for ourselves, as the natural world once did.”

Now: can we live with that?

The TV series Ancient Aliens, Dickey quotes its producer as explaining, isn’t “about little green men in outer space.  That’s the three-headed snake lady that gets you into the tent.  It’s really a show about looking for God.”

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Which brings us–of course–to UFOs.

I have my quibbles with Dickey’s account of UFOlogy, which occupies just under half the book.  I think he exaggerates Raymond Palmer’s influence on the burgeoning UFO myth of 1947 and the years just afterward–he’s perhaps been too impressed by John Keel’s self-confident but slovenly article hailing Palmer as “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers”–while understating the man’s spiritual greatness, which co-existed with his more obvious Barnumesque qualities.  (I discuss all this in my chapter on the Shaver Mystery in Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.)

Similarly, Dickey goes too far when he calls Paul Bennewitz “the figure around whom the entire axis of UFO history rotates.”  And I really wonder if Betty and Barney Hill’s marriage was “disintegrating” at the time of their UFO abduction, as Dickey says.  What comes across to me from their story is their selfless and enduring devotion to one another, interrupted only by Barney’s tragic death.

But these flaws, if such they are, are dwarfed by Dickey’s repeated bull’s-eyes.  There was one point, in particular, at which I wanted to stand up and applaud: his calling attention to how strange it is that the African-American involvement with the UFO seems to have been read out of the record.

“While the standard history of UFOs and aliens–at least in the United States–almost entirely involves white people, [the great jazz musician] Sun Ra was not the only black American to commune with aliens.”  A dozen pages later Dickey remarks on the oddity that “like Sun Ra, [Louis] Farrakhan is rarely mentioned in collections of other contactees and abductees.”  (Jerry Clark’s monumental UFO Encyclopedia, that indispensable treasure-trove of information on everything having to do with the UFO, has not a single reference to Farrakhan, although of all the contactees/abductees he’s the only one who qualifies as national figure.)

In a blog post over six years ago, I drew upon Ralph Ellison’s use of “the invisible man” as a metaphor for the Black condition in America.  “Is there also an ‘invisible UFOlogy’?” I asked; and in another post the following year I called attention to the pioneering work done by Stephen C. Finley in bringing this “invisible” African-American UFOlogy to light.  Have any of us explained, though, why it’s been so neglected, its very existence so (almost) universally unrecognized?

Dickey doesn’t solve the problem.  But he flags it, and that’s an excellent first step.

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But is there fire behind all the UFOlogical smoke?  Though skeptical in his orientation to all the anomalies he discusses, Dickey has to admit: yes, there is.  There is a genuinely and truly “unidentified.”

Not just with regard to UFOs.  Dickey doesn’t believe in sea serpents, exactly; but he insists that the sightings of a strange creature in Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in 1817 can’t be easily explained or brushed off.  And of the sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, that kicked off the modern UFO era, he writes:

“Arnold never offered a definition of what he saw: all he did was report the sighting. … It was this, plus his reputation as an unimpeachable witness, someone sober and serious, trusted by his community, someone whose eyewitness account wasn’t too exotic or far-fetched, that stayed consistent with each telling, with calculations and measurements as best as Arnold could make them, that gave his account such legitimacy.”

Never does Dickey make any attempt to explain Arnold’s sighting.  Nor does he offer any explanation of what happened at Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964, when a policeman of unquestioned integrity saw, or believed he’d seen, an egg-shaped object landed in a desert arroyo with two diminutive human-like beings standing beside it.  Like me, Dickey regards this as one of the most baffling, if not the most baffling incident in the UFO record; and he devotes his final, climactic chapter to the event and to his attempts, more difficult than he’d ever expected, to find the site where it happened.

As if to say: the unidentified remains just that, the irreducibly unidentified.

As he writes in connection with Kenneth Arnold: “By definition ‘unidentified,’ once you postulate that [UFOs] are aliens, or angels, or even Russian spy craft, you’ve taken a stab at identifying them and the jig is up.”

Yet we can’t stop trying.  The state of suspended doubt in which Charles Fort left us is an exhilarating place to be, yet it’s hard and possibly unhealthy to stay there very long.  In Intimate Alien, I took my own stab at identifying the possibly unidentifiable, with what success I must leave for others to judge.  (Yet I ended with a quote from Sigmund Freud: even the most thoroughly interpreted dream–which is how I regard UFOs, a collective dream that I’ve tried to interpret–has its unresolved “navel,” its “spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”)

Would Dickey quarrel with me on this point?  I’m not sure.  What I know is that he and I share with many others the thrill of the unidentified, and that this thrill cuts to the heart of who we are as human beings.  And that he’s written a marvelous book that shows, in the most appealingly human terms, what it’s all about.

by David Halperin
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