E. J. Brill, according to Wikipedia, is “a Dutch international academic publisher founded in 1683 in Leiden, Netherlands. With offices in Leiden, Boston, Paderborn and Singapore, Brill today publishes 275 journals and around 1200 new books and reference works each year.” I’ve known its hefty, richly bound volumes ever since I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, roaming the Cornell library stacks.
I don’t think I imagined back then that Brill would eventually publish a book on UFOs, much less that I would have the honor of being part of it.
Well, maybe not exactly on UFOs. The book’s title is Handbook of UFO Religions, and its editor is Benjamin E. Zeller, Associate Professor of Religion at Lake Forest College in Chicago. Its contents range over the world from the US through India to Japan, and although naturally focused on the modern world, they touch upon much of human religious history. Not all religions are equally covered–in his introduction, Zeller notes and regrets the absence of Islam and Buddhism from the book’s panorama. But the scope and variety of the issues explored in its 500+ pages remain breathtaking.
The book is scheduled to appear in a little over two months, on March 18. I plan to devote the first few blog posts of this New Year to sampling its contents–and I’ll start with my own chapter.
The title is “Judaism and the UFO; with Emphasis on the Vision of Ezekiel.”
In ancient Judaism, I begin by noting, the idea of UFOs as visitors from other planets would have been meaningless. The cosmology of Biblical and rabbinic Judaism had no place for any such thing as “other planets.” (I still remember my grandfather’s bafflement when I asked him, as a teen UFOlogist, what the Talmud had to say about extraterrestrial life.) The Earth was a flat disk surrounded by waters, topped by the heavenly dome at the top of which God sat with His entourage. The lights in that dome were placed there “as signs and to mark the festivals, the days and the years” (Genesis 1:14).
No other worlds–there’s only this one, marvelous in the complexity of its design, yet created in its entirety to serve the needs of human beings.
“The question of UFO s’ role in Judaism, at least down to the eighteenth century”–when Jewish thought finally caught up with the Copernican revolution and its implications–“would therefore seem entirely out of place. It is only when we question what we mean by ‘UFO’ that we may discover it has a meaning and importance after all.”
After a brief introduction to C. G. Jung and his 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, I go on:
“Grant, provisionally, that Jung’s approach may be at least thinkable, and ‘UFO s’ will take on a meaning to which extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial beings are tangential. We space-age people, our heads filled with moon walks and Mars probes, impose that conventionalization on them because it is the only model our culture provides for the ‘alien,’ the reality that goes unrecognized by normal consciousness. Earlier cultures may have experienced this ‘alien’ no less than ourselves, but conventionalized it in other ways. Seen this way, the limited cosmology of classical Judaism may not have prevented its encounter with UFO s, but only forced them into different explanatory schemas.”
And from there to the vision of Ezekiel chapter 1, which I think, yes, does describe a UFO, but no, not an extraterrestrial spaceship. Because, as readers of this blog will be well aware by now, that’s not what I think UFOs are.
In my article, I speak of heavenly ascensions in ancient Judaism, as attested in sources like The Book of Enoch, and of the ecstatic mysticism reflected in the strange literature called the Hekhalot, rooted like so much else in Ezekiel’s vision. (“If the Enoch literature can be seen as a sort of antique science fiction, the experiential substrate of the Hekhalot can be likened to contemporary UFO abductions.”)
I describe what happened in the 18th century, when Jewish thinkers at last discovered the extraterrestrial, and one of them, Rabbi Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz, constructed the most ingenious Biblical-Talmudic argument for intelligent life on other planets. (Grandpa, if only you had lived long enough for me to tell you about it!)
And to the present day …
“To judge from their web postings, contemporary Orthodox Jews, when they think about extraterrestrial life at all, think about it along the lines laid out by Hurwitz, rehearsing his Biblical-Talmudic proof of its existence or at least its possibility. But what of the unorthodox? Is it possible that the ancient Jewish engagement with the alien, the unrecognized and unacknowledged, crops up among them in up-to-date disguises?
“Here we have questions and speculations, hardly anything more. Is it significant that it was a Jewish filmmaker, deeply engaged with Jewish issues and haunted by memories of his alienation as a solitary Jewish boy facing cruel anti-Semitism … who created the enduring UFO classic of our time, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’? That it was a pair of secular Israeli astrophysicists who made headlines in 2018 with a paper arguing that a mysterious object that had penetrated our solar system—’Oumuamua,’ a Hawaiian word meaning ‘scout’ or ‘messenger’—was an interstellar probe from an alien civilization? The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, interviewing the lead investigator Avi Loeb, seems to have sensed a religious motivation behind this fantastic (and almost universally rejected) hypothesis, and asked Loeb a question about his religious beliefs. Loeb responded with huffy defensiveness. ‘I am not religious. Why do you make that assumption? … My work as a scientist is purely based on evidence and rational thinking. That’s all.’
“Only ‘rational’ thinking? I wonder.”
Thus far my contribution to the Handbook of UFO Religions. In the coming posts I’ll talk about some of the others.
by David Halperin
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My book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–published by Stanford University Press, listed by Religion News Service among “the most intriguing books on religion we read this year.”
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It is hardly an original point of mine that Spielberg’s ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’ is also a metaphor, ET is a literalization of Spielberg as a boy, alienated from his fellows by his Jewish identity and subjected to bullying as a consequence. E.T. is hounded and chased by the cruel authorities, who do not see E.T.’s ‘humanity’, the latter is alienated from human society, he is not one of them. He doesn’t belong.
Of course one cannot talk about ufology without talking about science fiction. No science fiction genre, whether in comics, movies, the mags, the books, the whole culture of it, no ufology as we know it. And Jews have been big in science fiction, in the growth of the genre in America, as writers, editors, in publishing, and later as filmmakers.