Among the unanswerable questions that come up as I ponder my life: At age 12-going-on-13, scared out of my senses but also thrilled and energized by Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, could I have imagined that at age 71 I’d be planning to use that same book as a text for a course on UFOs at an institute for “lifelong learning”?
Probably not. At age 12 I couldn’t imagine being 71 at all. I knew people, like my grandparents, who were that old; I knew I’d be that old someday if I didn’t die first. But that future 71-year-old wouldn’t be me in any recognizable form. I couldn’t have grasped that as you grow old you stay young, not in any romanticized young-at-heart sense but in the sense that your young self remains the essence of who you are, guiding, yearning after things possible and impossible, at times controlling.
And that in my case, once a UFOlogist always a UFOlogist.
I’ll be giving the class from January 7 to March 25, 2019, in the framework of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke University in Durham. According to its website, OLLI “seeks to engage the minds, elevate the spirit and foster the wellbeing of our members,” who number more than 2300. Most of these are older people, retirees using their leisure to expand their mental horizons. What will they make of a course entitled “UFOs–Encounter, Mystery, Myth”?
It’s not the first time I’ve taught a course on UFOs. In the spring semester of 1996, when I was a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Religious Studies, I gave a seminar called “Special Topics in Mysticism: Heavenly Ascensions and UFO Abductions.” One of my colleagues indulgently labeled it “a funny course.” He didn’t understand. Whatever UFOs are, they aren’t funny.
The first of the abductees, Barney Hill, began to re-live his abduction under hypnosis on February 22, 1964. He died on February 25, 1969, at age 46, of a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from a stroke. That was five years almost to the day after hypnotic regression brought him face to face with the enormity of what he’d endured; I can’t imagine there was no causal connection. Was this funny?
It was easy to convince the young students at UNC that experiences of the uncanny that haven’t been hallowed by long tradition are nevertheless to be treated with gravity and respect. We read together Whitley Strieber’s Communion, among other books and articles, including transcripts of the Hill regression tapes. I assigned, as a preliminary paper, a review of Communion.
“The review … should attempt to provide a reasoned answer to the question of what experiential reality, if any, underlies the book. If you wish to argue that it is a conscious fraud, you may do so, provided that you offer a plausible motivation for Strieber’s having concocted it. You may also argue, if you like, that Strieber is insane; but, in that case, you must at least make some attempt to analyze the nature of his insanity. Just saying, ‘He’s nuts,’ will not do the trick.”
The students rose to the challenge. The book frightened them; some reported eerie events in connection with it, which I didn’t have the presence of mind to write down at the time and now can’t remember. (That’s happened to me more than once; I’ve neglected to record important testimonies, imagining that of course I’ll never forget this, and then time goes by and I forget it.)
For the second half of the semester, the students gave class presentations which they wrote up as final papers. Katie N. spoke about the “X-Files” TV series, then at the height of its popularity. Mandy M. spoke on the role of Sirius, and of alien contact, in the traditions of the Dogon and Bozo tribes of west Africa, while Derek B. extended Mandy’s presentation to other aspects of Sirian belief, as in the modern Order of the Solar Temple. Andrea R., Thomas N., and Ivan V. explored different aspects of the UFOs’ impact on African-American culture.
This last subject, in particular, was something I’d never noticed or thought about. You can read some of the things I learned from my wonderful students in my blog post “An African-American UFOlogy?” Their insights will be part of my forthcoming book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
I retired from teaching four years later, and never taught my UFO course again. I didn’t know that UFO abductions, just past their peak in 1996, would fade away as the new century began. Abductions are still experienced and reported, but as a cultural phenomenon they’re no longer on the map.
UFOs are still with us, however, enjoying a surprising new respectability in the world that’s emerged from the 2016 Presidential election.
And now I’m getting ready to teach about UFOs again, to students of a very different sort. Matured, seasoned by their decades of life experience, as I hope I myself have become. Will they be as open-minded, as eager to consider and explore new ways of thinking, as the young people I was privileged to work with at UNC for so many years? If so, “UFOs–Encounter, Mystery, Myth” promises to be an amazing experience for us all.
It’s not just about abductions this time around, though naturally they do play a large role. Whitley Strieber will be a central figure once more, this time paired with Rice University religious-studies professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, with whom Strieber collaborated on a breathtaking book, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), that takes Strieber’s fantastic encounters seriously as religious experiences.
“If Communion is not a piece of modern erotic mystical literature, then I do not know what it is,” Kripal wrote two years earlier. I can’t help but wonder: how will my OLLI students respond to this?
Roswell will be part of the course, and also the supposed UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1966, about which I’ve blogged extensively. And Gray Barker will be back, in all his glory.
His They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, out of print for many years, is now available once again thanks to Andy Colvin and his New Saucerian Press. (“Saucerian Press” was the name of the publishing house that Barker owned and operated until his death in 1984.) The OLLI students, men and women whom I expect to be more or less my own age, will be able to read the book that set my adolescent life on the course from which it’s wandered over the years, but never abandoned.
I wonder: what will they make of it?
“I’m going to say something blasphemous here. Gray Barker has written one of the Gospels,” says David Houchin, curator of the Gray Barker Collection in the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library (West Virginia), interviewed in Bob Wilkinson’s brilliant 2009 documentary on Barker’s life, “Shades of Gray.” What will the OLLI students think of this “blasphemy,” that They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers is indeed a gospel–a dark new gospel of strange things in the sky and stranger things on earth?
One that might strike many readers, and not just an impressionable young boy reading it for a science-class project that got out of hand, as being the Gospel truth.
I expect I’ll find out in not much more than a month. It should make for an exciting New Year.
by David Halperin
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