M. J. Banias, The UFO People: A Curious Culture. N.p.: August Night Books, 2019.
This is a book that’s brilliant in spots, fascinating in long stretches, intelligent and thoughtful throughout. It contemplates the paradoxical reality of a subculture committed to what to our cultural mainstream seems gross unreality: unidentified flying objects, with all that belief in them entails.
As the title suggests, the book’s central thesis is that UFOlogy is not about spaceships but about people, ordinary humans who’ve made themselves extraordinary simply by entangling themselves with it. “The UFO phenomenon/subculture,” Banias writes, “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.”
In support of these propositions, all of which I would heartily applaud, Banias offers case studies of three individuals. One of his subjects is more or less famous: the enigmatic Richard Doty, his persona intertwined with the mythology of crashed UFOs and “Extraterrestial Biological Entities,” and the layers of official disinformation–some imaginary, some possibly real–in which it’s all blanketed. Another is the man Banias calls “Roy,” whose sad story commends itself to me as the most readily understandable in the book.
The third of his “UFO people,” the hitherto unknown Amy McCormick, is perhaps the most baffling and therefore the most instructive of all. I’ll talk about her in my next installment.
Start with “Roy.” He comes across vividly in Banias’s account as a man in nearly intolerable psychic pain, and with plenty to be pained about. When Banias met him in 2011, he was without a job and lived on disability payments. His wife and his adult son, whom he loved dearly, had cut themselves off from him the year before; Banias was never able to discover the reasons. That was when Roy began to experience alien abductions.
These occurred repeatedly, and involved the sense of being surrounded in his bed at night by multiple beings whom Roy never could see. He did see a bizarre machine, black and metallic and with glowing lights, which his abductors used to render him unconscious. The machine left a wound on Roy’s scalp, which he offered as evidence for the reality of his experiences. A nurse to whom Banias sent a photo of the wound thought it might have been made by Roy’s knocking his head against his headboard, perhaps in the throes of a nightmare.
“Pain, loss, and depression are much more potent than any alien visitor,” Banias writes. Who can doubt, reading Roy’s story, that these and not ETs were what encircled his bed through his dismal, lonely nights? Banias speaks with some shame of how he dealt with Roy, the first UFO experiencer with whom he had any sustained interaction; and while his self-criticisms are wholly unfair–he seems to have treated Roy with outstanding wisdom, delicacy, and compassion–they’re also in a sense warranted and realistic. He was in an impossible position, where he couldn’t have done right by Roy because (as one of my teaching mentors once put it) there was no right thing.
Roy was sick and needed help, and not the help a UFO investigator could provide. Banias knew that. He also realized early on that to convey that to Roy would inflict one more wound on a man who was just holding himself together. And Banias was helping Roy get by from day to day, by listening to him and seeming to believe him. “He had someone in his corner,” Banias says; and, so he could stay in that corner where Roy needed him to be, “I, like a coward, decided to not tell Roy my thoughts.”
Not “like a coward.” Like a decent, caring human being. Yet also, in a sense, like a coward. There was no right thing.
The dilemma was insoluble. As Australian UFOlogist Shane Ryan discovered in his investigations of the decades-old UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, hearing witnesses’ stories and believing that they indeed saw what they thought they saw can have a profoundly healing effect, even after many years. Disbelief is correspondingly wounding; and it’s not enough that you believe their sincerity. You have to believe in the objective truth of their experiences.
What if you don’t believe? You owe them support; you also owe them honesty. When the two cut against each other–which do you pick?
If it’s any comfort, professional therapists have encountered the same dilemma. The late psychologist Susan Marie Powers, contemplating the problem of how to do therapy with a suffering person who believes (as the therapist does not) that he or she has been abducted by aliens, counsels a humane “cowardice” of the sort that Banias intuitively chose. “In some cases, it might be useful for therapists to begin with interventions which do not immediately challenge delusional systems … establishing a therapeutic alliance through listening to the subjective experience of the patient and taking the patient’s point of view.”
There are hazards to this approach, Powers concedes. But the alternative is yet more dangerous:
“For the person claiming extraterrestrial abductions, a downward spiral might be perpetuated in the following circumstances: first, the individual is incapacitated by horrific memories, and then he or she is further assaulted by a psychological system which challenges the veracity of these memories. Effective therapy is made almost impossible because the individual feels further traumatized by the therapy itself.”
Eventually, the delusional system–as Powers regards alien abduction–will need to be confronted head on. But not now, not yet. For now, the goal is “to help the patient cope with his or her authentic experience of trauma without undermining the individual’s sense of sanity … providing a sanctuary from a harsh world which can demand logic in the face of unimaginable confusion and terror.”
(Quotes from Powers’ article “Dissociation in Alleged Extraterrestrial Abductees,” in the March 1994 issue of the journal Dissociation.)
Whatever else Banias may or may not have done, for at least a few months he provided Roy with such a “sanctuary.” In the process he learned “that this [UFO] phenomenon is much more human than I thought initially,” and that “UFOs and aliens manifest not only in our skies, but in our minds as well.”
How shall we apply these insights, not just to Roy–whose experiences seem fairly straightforward, if unbearably painful–but to the more complex and ambiguous case of Amy McCormick?
I’ll take that up in my next post.
by David Halperin
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