“Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” – Coming 2020 from Stanford University Press

We were going to call our book The Flying Saucer Mystery.  This was 57 years ago, when I’d just turned 13, and my pal Bryan and I were fired up with the idea that two bright eighth-graders like us could write the definitive book on the “elusive disks,” as one writer called them.  Heck, we could figure out what made the saucers fly and build our own!  Maybe then girls would go out with us.

We never wrote our book.  We never built our UFO.  Slowly we discovered other, easier ways to get dates.  Bryan lost interest in the whole subject and, as friends, we drifted apart.  I became more and more immersed in UFOlogy.

In my junior year in high school I was director of an international research organization–it had 20 or 30 members, but they were all over the country and one or two in Great Britain–called the “New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena.”  I’d contributed the introduction and large chunks of the contents to a book called The Shadow of the Unknown, published in 1963.  The book was run off on a mimeograph machine and looked hideous, but it garnered praise from the British Flying Saucer Review, a glossy magazine that we 1960s UFOlogists regarded as the pinnacle of class. “The whole field of the UFO mystery is very competently surveyed by a number of contributors,” said the Flying Saucer Review reviewer.  I couldn’t have been prouder.

This wasn’t the book I had dreamed of writing, but for the next 50 years it would have to do.

I went off to college.  I gave up on the possibility of ever solving the UFO mystery; it was hopeless, and there was too much else that called to me.  My belief in UFOs faded, very slowly.  There wasn’t any one morning when I woke up and realized it wasn’t true, we weren’t being visited from outer space.  It took a while for that reality to sink in.

I never lost the sense that somewhere in my teenage intuition there was a real and vital truth.  There was indeed something important about UFOs, not for understanding the vast and empty skies but for knowing ourselves–as individuals, as a culture, as a species.  I became a professor of religious studies, with Judaica as my field of expertise.  My special interest: religious traditions of heavenly ascent and otherworldly journeys.

I’d never stopped being a UFOlogist, it turned out.  I’d just found a different way to do it.

And now I’m writing the book I always wanted to write.  It’s called Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.  I’ve just signed on to publish it with Stanford University Press.  We’re not sure when it’ll be out and available, but sometime in 2020 is our best estimate.

Of course it’s very different from the book I would have written at age 13.  A lifetime of study and reflection has come in between.  Most books on UFOs, I write in the introduction, “try to make a case for UFOs’ physical existence”–as I once would have–“as visitors from other planets or possibly other dimensions.  A much smaller but still substantial chunk of literature argues that they’re a sustained absurdity, a mishmash of honest human mistakes compounded by dishonest ones.  Those are the two main currents of thought on the subject: the ‘believers’ and the ‘debunkers.’  … 

“I don’t believe, nor do I debunk.  This book will advocate for a third way.”

Readers of this blog will have gotten many glimpses of that “third way.”  Again to quote my introduction: “This trail of ours is a wandering and idiosyncratic path.  It will lead us on detours from the post-World War II UFO phenomenon to remote times, places, and events.  The ships of the Atlantic slave trade … the moon over the Dardanelles one July evening in 1683 … back to Paul in the New Testament and Ezekiel in the Old, and far, far back to the prehistoric Balkans.  Our road will terminate in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, the place from which—speaking symbolically, not historically—the UFOs have their beginning.  Perhaps also their end.”

Why does Stanford University Press want to publish a book like this?  The answer in one word: religion.

Not the familiar sneer of the debunkers, that UFOs are “a religious cult.”  They aren’t a cult; they never have been.  Call them instead a religious phenomenon: a UFO encounter as a genuine religious experience, the lore of UFOlogy as a true religious myth.  Not understanding “myth” in the put-down sense of something untrue, but as Carl Jung used it, to designate a sort of collective dream–uncanny, transcendent, timeless.  (“When a myth takes visible form,” I write, “when it’s projected into the sky as a flying disk … that’s a major event, akin to what our ancestors might have called a vision of God.”)

My editor at Stanford University Press is Emily-Jane Cohen.  She’s Executive Editor in Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, a Ph.D. in literature who’s been a scholar of early and medieval Christianity, a teacher at all levels from elementary school to college.  It was her vision that brought into being a book series called “Spiritual Phenomena,” which (to quote the description on the SUP website) “features investigations of events, experiences, and objects, both unusual and everyday, that people characterize as spiritual, paranormal, magical, occult and/or supernatural.”

Which naturally covers UFOs, along with other things (like parapsychology and spiritualism) that we don’t normally package in the box labeled “Religion.”  But Emily-Jane is used to thinking outside that box.  That’s what she brings to her work with the religious-studies offerings of Stanford University Press.

Emily-Jane’s vision is shared by the “Spiritual Phenomena” series editors, Tanya Luhrmann and Ann Taves–two distinguished scholars of religion, professors at Stanford and the University of California at Santa Barbara respectively.  Luhrmann is the author of the 2012 bestseller When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.

A post on the Press’s blog, devoted to Emily-Jane and her projects, comments:  “Celebrity atheists, in the style of Dawkins or Hitchens, who fabricate all-or-nothing dichotomies that pit religious knowledge against science and reason, do themselves a disservice by checking out of important conversations.  By denouncing or ignoring how people engage with the world on religious and spiritual levels, ‘you shut yourself down to understanding other cultures,’ says Cohen.”

Not to mention: unrecognized or despised dimensions of our own culture.  Like UFOs.

Those “important conversations” can be conducted in a range of idioms.  Many of the “Spiritual Phenomena” offerings will be scholarly monographs, written in academic style.  Others, like  Intimate Alien, are trade books intended for a broad audience.  We’re all talking about the same thing: phenomena that are religious to the core yet don’t bear the stamp of any orthodox or institutional religion.  Phenomena that are indisputably real in and of themselves, even when they relate to entities that in all likelihood don’t exist.

We’re all struggling to make sense of what these phenomena are, and what they mean for us as human beings.

I’m honored to be part of this team.  I’m thrilled finally to be writing the book I’ve needed to write for more than half a century.

At age 13, or even 30, I couldn’t have written Intimate Alien.  At age 70, I think I just may be able to pull it off.  I couldn’t be more excited.

by David Halperin
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