(This is the second installment of my review of M. J. Banias, The UFO People: A Curious Culture. N.p.: August Night Books, 2019. For the first installment, click here.)
“The UFO phenomenon/subculture is a reflection of ourselves, our fears and desires, our ghosts. In some curious way, it, whatever it is, tells us more about ourselves and the questions we still have concerning our reality and our place within that reality. We are the phenomenon and it is we. We shape it as much as we are shaped by it.”
–M. J. Banias
The case of “Roy,” one of the UFO experiencers whose stories Banias offers in support of these propositions, isn’t that hard to figure out. I doubt if anyone would offer him as an example of a true alien abductee, it’s just so evident that his nocturnal encounters with the uncanny are illusions born of rejection, abandonment, and loneliness.
The problem Roy poses is not intellectual but ethical. When face to face with such a person, whom you can’t believe without surrendering your brain but whom you mustn’t disbelieve if you want to have a heart–what’s a humane, decent UFOlogist to do? All this I wrote about in my last post.
The case of Amy McCormick is more complicated.
She’s not an abductee. She’s had, however, multiple encounters with UFOs and, on one occasion, with a ghost. In January 2017, when Banias met her, she was living in a lovely house on a farm in Manitoba with her mechanical-engineer husband Brian, who plainly adores and respects her. “Clever, creative and funny,” Banias describes her, and says she’s “a retired flight attendant turned writer.” If there’s any psychic agony here to be projected into the sky, it’s not evident from Banias’s account.
Actually, there are two versions of Amy’s story in The UFO People. One is Banias’s third-person retelling of her story; the other is Amy speaking in her own voice. She contributed a chapter to the book, entitled, presumably by herself, “The Startling Truth,” this “truth” being that UFOs exist.
Amy’s encounters with strange aerial objects began late one evening in June of 2012, when her television-watching was interrupted by a sensation as of “a thin veil of warm water” and she felt driven to go to the window. Outside, not far away, was an enormous glowing cigar-shaped object. She felt herself (in Banias’s words) to be “prey studying a predator, knowing full well that the predator was studying her as well … and that, whatever it was, it was presenting itself to her.”
“It had touched me,” Amy told Banias. “I had touched it, even with just my eyes. … I was altered in some way and have never been the same since.”
The climactic sighting came on September 28, 2016, a few months before her meeting with Banias. It happened 11:30 in the morning–maybe–when she spotted a silvery domed disk in the clear blue sky. As she describes it, the sight terrified her. “The more I watched it advance, the more it grew in size. … I was so scared. I am doomed, I thought. This thing must be able to see me. … Why am I alone with something so foreign, so unexplainable?”
She managed to take three photos of the object with her cell phone; and here her account and Banias’s diverge intriguingly. Banias: “The pictures showed nothing but an expansive sky and a curious blurry gray dot, far too mundane to be hard evidence.” Amy doesn’t mention this, but does note another oddity. Her phone registered the photos as having been taken at 5:20 p.m., not 11:30 a.m. as Amy remembered.
“I just didn’t know how to comprehend this,” Amy admits, and when she wrote her account of what had befallen her she’d come no closer to an understanding. “When I think about that encounter, what I endured emotionally and psychologically, it’s as though I’m remembering someone else, that it wasn’t actually me there but another body that looks just like me, as though my conscience [? does she mean “consciousness”] is separated from my body, the two are disconnected. This is, to me, very disturbing. I was in denial, like a woman in denial of a sexual assault upon her. No, this can’t be, I told myself.”
I think it’s called “dissociation,” but I don’t know if we understand it any better when we use this word. Say that Amy was experiencing a variation–perhaps “disturbance” is too pejorative–of normal consciousness. It’s tempting to pathologize it but we should resist the temptation, if for no other reason out of respect for the woman’s honesty and courage. She didn’t have to tell her story, using her own name. She could have glossed over the discontinuity between her memory of the incident and the unimpeachable testimony of her cell phone camera.
But where does that leave us? I don’t have any great problem with Amy’s “seeing” something vividly and close-up in the sky, which her photos showed not to have been there (although something now unidentifiable, which presumably was the stimulus for her experience, does seem to have been present). There are parallels, including the dramatic 1974 sighting–which ought to be famous, but which in fact few know about–by ex-Beatle John Lennon and his girlfriend May Pang. But could Amy really have thought it happened in the morning, when in fact it was the late afternoon? This boggles the mind.
(And it is curious that of the two anomalies about the photograph–that it didn’t show what Amy remembered having seen, and that it was taken in the afternoon when Amy thought it was morning–Banias mentions only the one, Amy only the other.)
Which brings us to the ghost story.
It happened–or Amy remembered its having happened, which is not quite the same thing–on a lovely autumn day in 2011, seven months before her first UFO encounter. On an impulse, she’d stopped by the neighboring farmhouse (to which she had a key) to walk her neighbor’s dogs. The neighbor’s family was away on vacation, leaving a young niece there to house-sit.
Someone was sitting on the porch as Amy approached. Not the niece, however, but a woman who seemed to be in her early sixties. “Amy smiled as she approached the porch, but the woman’s face remained unchanged. It was an uncaring scowl. … A feeling of discomfort came over Amy. She glanced away, unable to take the woman’s gaze.”
The encounter left Amy with an intense nausea. She had to fight back the urge to vomit. Back from vacation some days later, the neighbor was puzzled by Amy’s story–no, there’d been no one staying at her house besides her niece–but she showed Amy a photograph in which Amy instantly recognized the stranger. It was the neighbor’s mother, who’d died several months before.
It’s an impressive story. If it actually happened as Amy described it, I’d take it as convincing proof of the existence of ghosts and some kind of survival after death. But that’s a very big if. Not that I have the smallest doubt of Amy’s sincerity, that she’s telling the truth as she perceives it, but there seems to be a substantial gap between her perceptions and objective reality. We can attach psychopathological labels to that gap if we want. But does that really help us understand it?
Banias: “Whatever it was: a spirit, a specter, or a phantasmal representation of some deep latent ability within Amy, a myth made real, this ghost opened Amy to the phenomenon. Whatever doorway it was guarding, it unlocked the door for Amy. It showed her that something was on the other side, something unknown, and perhaps, in its own way, dared her to step through. Once that door opened, however, everything on that side would also be able to come to this side.”
Voila–the UFOs.
Banias again: “As I reiterate often in this book and in my other work, the UFO as object is fundamentally less important than the interpretation and the individual who experienced the phenomenon.” That’s the guiding principle of The UFO People.
A good principle. In my opinion an undisputably true principle. In its defense and illustration, Banias has written a remarkable book.
by David Halperin
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Interesting post. I have witnessed many strange phenomenon but the one that really sticks in my mind is the ghost of a priest. Here’s the story: https://avalinakreska.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-ghostly-priest.html
Thinking about Amy’s experience with seeing the dead mother, I had a feeling that something was not quite right about seeing this figure on the stairs that looked as present as my husband sitting next to me. The only difference is the ‘feeling’ – unnerved – and only later while driving out of town did I have a kind of shocking realisation that the person wasn’t real. Why I was surprised, I don’t know, considering the poltergeist activity I experienced as a child and so much more! But my theory is that some people are able to step between time, for moments in their life they can see things that once existed as if present in this time; but of course, we know there is no such thing as time in this ‘Matrix’ style plane of existence! There are more of us out there but many people would not admit to what they experience. For example, my husband’s father (he died in 2012) once saw a huge man in the sky, wearing workers overalls. When he came home, my husband could only describe his father’s pallor as that of having just ‘seen a ghost’. Questioning him further, he shrugged it off as a trick of the light. Why are we so afraid of the unknown? I guess the only ‘physical’ change can be the vibrational level – either lower or higher that would be unnerving to the inexperienced, I include myself in this. Maybe the trick is to believe that we know hardly anything about existence, time, our consciousness, so that when something strange happens we should approach it as a child, with curiosity, bravery and caution – but always with wonder. Our lives are so predictable and without risk, that we are not used to stepping outside, yet when we die we will all do just that – step into the unknown. How do we judge anything? If the Creator (if we believe in such a thing) allows ‘all’ to exist, we cannot judge if anything we encounter is good or evil – we only experience how it feels, how it affects us – fear is a great motivator and often we feel shame for having experienced it!
Interesting, Avalina! Thanks for posting.