“Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” – Two Reviews, an Interview

Something of what it is to publish a book:

You send your thoughts, your ideas, your stories out into the world.  You hope to hear echoes; you dread the inevitable silences.  You just love it when you get applause.  But when you get thoughtful criticism, you’ve received a gift just as fine–not wrapped in pretty paper with curled ribbons, but precious nonetheless.

Over the past month, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO has been privileged to have two reviews of the best kind, praise and reservations combined.  One review is by Anna Lutkajtis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney and author of the just-published Dark Side of Dharma: Meditation, Madness and Other Maladies on the Contemplative Path.  It’s slated to appear later this year in the Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review; you can access it now on Anna’s page at Academia.edu.  (Scroll down about a dozen titles.)  The other is by skeptical British UFOlogist John Rimmer, published on the web at Magonia Review of Books.

I’ll speak first of John’s review.  But I’ll preface it with an account of another “high” I’ve experienced over the past weeks: a wonderful interview (April 6) with Steven Cambian on his “Truth Seekers” podcast–for which I’m deeply grateful to my friend Luis Cayetano, for having put Steven and me in touch.

We had a lot in common, it turned out, besides our connection with Philadelphia, where Steven is from and near which (in Bucks County) I grew up.  “Are you saying you were a nerd–a UFO nerdy kid?” he cried out, laughing, when I numbered myself among the dateless boys who populated the teen-UFOlogist scene of the early 1960s. “I can relate!”  It was the first of many laughs we had in the course of the interview.

And the first of many things we shared.  “Me too!” Steven exclaimed when I told him about my lifelong attraction to the Book of Ezekiel, particularly the vision described in its opening chapter.  He’d had twelve years of Catholic school and Scripture study with the Jesuits, he told me; he was always fascinated with Ezekiel’s wheel.  Not unnaturally, we wound up talking a lot about the Bible, and the ways in which exploration of the Bible’s mysteries interacted with UFOlogy.

In our conversation, I registered my dissatisfaction with the standard “ancient aliens” approach.  To call Ezekiel’s experience an ET visitation, I said, was no less a conventionalization than to call it, as Ezekiel himself did, “visions of God,” meaning the parochial God of ancient Israel.  (Who begins speaking to Ezekiel in chapter 2:  “Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to rebellious nations that have rebelled against Me, they and their fathers unto this very day,” etc. etc.)  The previous chapter has given an account of something more, strange and awe-inspiring: an encounter with the numinous that transcends both, that refuses to be squeezed into either the ancient Judaic box or the modern space-age cubbyhole.

Yet, paradoxically, it’s something that comes from within Ezekiel himself, that even in its alienness is a fully human experience.  (Which is part of what I had in mind when I entitled my book Intimate Alien.)  We have no model today for this sense of alienness, other than to project it into outer space.  Which is why, against all probabilities, we keep spinning (and eagerly devouring) speculations of “ancient astronauts.”

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Which brings me to John Rimmer’s Magonia review.

For John puts a question mark beside the whole assumption, which underlies my treatment of Ezekiel in Intimate Alien–and my fuller discussion in a chapter in the newly published Brill Handbook of UFO Religions, which I entitled “Judaism and the UFO; with Emphasis on the Vision of Ezekiel”–that Ezekiel and UFOlogy belong together at all.

“I think Halperin, like a number of other academics who have written on the UFO topic, perhaps quite understandably, overemphasize the relevance of their own fields of study. … It is probably inevitable that a Jewish theological scholar would find the idea of the wheeled visions of Ezekiel of great interest, and his speculative analysis of the imagery of those visions is fascinating, if complex.  However, Ezekiel’s vision is only drawn into the UFO debate because some literal-minded ufologists claimed it as a report of a physically real aerial vehicle and therefore annexed it as part of their subject – a brazen act of cultural appropriation!”

It’s true, the part about overemphasizing the relevance of my own field of study.  As the saying has it: when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.  I’ve been criticized along these lines from a perspective far different from John’s, for my insistence on treating the UFO as a religious phenomenon.  What else would you expect from a prof of religious studies?  And, while I’m not tempted to modify my approach in the slightest, I can’t deny that my professional conditioning played a large part in my embracing it.

But is it true that the Ezekiel-UFO connection is an illusion fostered by “some literal-minded ufologists,” the rest of us dragged after it?  I can call a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), from Carl Jung’s 1958 classic Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies to Jeffrey Kripal’s delightful 2015 essay on “La Madonna dell’UFO” (reprinted in his Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions), to testify to the contrary.  But John could apply the same critique to all of us.  Surely most of us have the intuitive sense, especially when we hear the spiritual Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air, that something like a UFO is being described.  Lots of things are intuitive and also false.

I can only answer the question with a question.  In the first book of UFO debunking ever published, Donald H. Menzel’s Flying Saucers (1953), the distinguished Harvard astrophysicist felt bound to include a chapter on Ezekiel (whom Menzel praised as an objective scientific observer of the first rank).  He explained what Ezekiel saw, very implausibly, as an atmospheric phenomenon akin to the “temperature inversions” that gave rise to modern saucer sightings.  That was his hammer; and he picked Ezekiel as one of his nails.  Why?

Was Menzel reacting to earlier claims that Ezekiel’s wheels were spaceships?

Or perhaps he shared the same intuition with Steven Cambian and me, with Carl Jung and Jeff Kripal, that when you’ve got a wheel  way up in the middle of the air, that’s a flying saucer–whatever a flying saucer may turn out to be.

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Anna Lutkajtis raises an even more fundamental question about my approach.

“The use of depth psychology as an explanatory model”–which I do all over the place–“has a fundamental weakness; that is, a psychoanalytic reading of the book might suggest that it is really about Halperin’s own personal search for meaning and psychological resolution, which he then generalises to the UFO experiences of others.”

To which Anna adds:  “However, Intimate Alien is so beautifully argued that even the most rational-scientific readers might find themselves being persuaded by Halperin’s thesis.”

But her reservation is legitimate.  And of course she’s right.  Is the book I wrote about my own personal search for meaning?  Indubitably.  But does it follow that that’s all it’s “really” about?

I think back to the way my favorite author, George Orwell, concluded his 1945 essay on “Antisemitism in Britain.”  (And before I go any further, let me clarify that I am not, not, NOT suggesting that the content of UFO belief is in any way tainted with anti-Semitism.  But they do have this in common: that people come to them for motives that are, at bottom, other than rational.)

Any investigation of anti-Semitism must begin, said Orwell, “in the one place where [the inquirer] could get hold of some reliable evidence–that is, in his own mind. … I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another.  It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual.”

Our starting point, therefore (said Orwell), can’t be, “Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?”  We have to ask first, why does it appeal to me?  “What is there about it that I feel to be true?”

That was how I proceeded in Intimate Alien.  I knew this, from inside my own brain: what as a teenager I “felt to be true” about UFOs was bound up with with my awareness of my mother’s approaching death.  So when I read, a dozen or so years later, the remarks of psychiatrists Lester Grinspoon and Alan D. Persky at the 1969 UFO symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science–

“It is also possible that some of the affective energy which is displaced onto the UFO controversy derives from the unconscious concern with death and immortality … that for some of those who vehemently defend the extraterrestrial hypothesis it symbolically represents a denial of the finite nature of life.  On the other hand, those who have a need to deny that there is any anxiety at all around the issues of death and immortality may be led to attack the hypothesis with considerable passion” (in Sagan and Page, UFO’s – A Scientific Debate)

–it was an Aha! experience, which I spent much of the following decades pursuing.

Persuasively?  Less than persuasively?  Read Intimate Alien, and decide.

And consider this: that the most recent book by Leslie Kean–best-selling author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010), co-author with Ralph Blumenthal of the seismic New York Times UFO articles of December 2017–is … Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (2017).

“UFOs” = “Surviving Death”?  Denial of the finite nature of life, indeed.

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And the verdicts?

John Rimmer:  “Halperin is a sympathetic guide to the ufological world, he writes as an insider and from personal experience, and brings the depth of his academic knowledge to the topic, without drowning the reader in academic jargon.  It is well written and a surprisingly compelling read.  It’s not a book for someone new to the topic, but for anyone who has looked at it in some detail and is open to challenging concepts, it will be a source of intriguing new ideas.”

Anna Lutkajtis:  “Intimate Alien is a highly enjoyable read.  Halperin’s easy and elegant prose reveals his obvious passion for, and complete mastery of, the subject matter.  This book is recommended to those who are interested in anomalous phenomena, the mysterious relationship between the physical and the imaginal, and the role that myth plays in shaping our collective cultural reality.”

Steven Cambian:  “A book that people interested in the phenomenon will be reading and talking about for decades to come–it’s that important of a work.”

These are the judgments of people I respect.  How much better does it get?