“The Phenomenon.” Directed by James Fox. Released October 6, 2020.
In my last post, I began talking about my reactions to James Fox’s new UFO documentary “The Phenomenon.” I talked about what I thought the film had succeeded in establishing: first, that some very smart and very serious people take UFOs very seriously.
And second, that over the past 70+ years there’ve been some genuinely baffling and intriguing UFO incidents.
What I thought the film hadn’t established: that we’re being visited by alien craft of some sort. In other words, that UFOs really exist, and are flying around and occasionally landing. (And of course I don’t believe that “disclosure” of this non-fact, supposedly shrouded for decades in government secrecy, is about to happen.)
So then what do I do with the wealth of evidence invoked in “The Phenomenon,” often in the most dramatic and persuasive ways?
I don’t propose to “debunk” it, to explain it all away and show that it’s all–well, bunk, with nothing of substance involved. I do think Fox has shaded and sometimes distorted the evidence to make his case seem better than it is; I’ll give examples below. But I’ll concede that he and the UFOlogists in whose footsteps he follows have called attention to some genuine mysteries that demand our attention.
Only, I believe that these mysteries can and must be approached in purely human terms. Sane and honest people have seen things, or remember having seen things, that weren’t there. What does it mean for our understanding of ourselves–as individuals, as a species–that these things can happen?
I can’t talk about every case that “The Phenomenon” presents. I’ll focus on three–all of them, by a curious coincidence, coming from the Southern Hemisphere. The first two I’ll discuss in this post. The third I’ll have to hold off for the final installment, in another two weeks.
I’ll treat the incidents in chronological order, not the order in which they appear in the film.
Case 1: Papua, New Guinea, June 26-27, 1959 (“The Phenomenon,” 1 hr. 20′ – 22′). This is a classic from the UFO literature, sometimes labeled “history’s best case,” and understandably so. For two successive nights, at Boianai on the coast of Papua New Guinea, a young Anglican priest named William Booth Gill and some 25 of his Papuan parishioners watched as mysterious disks came from the sky, hovered low above the mission, seemed on the verge of landing. At one point they exchanged signals with the witnesses. The pilots of one disk emerged and walked about its surface, like sailors on the deck of their ship.
The witnesses’ sincerity seems impossible to doubt.
“The Phenomenon” presents a filmed interview with Father Gill–unfortunately, as with nearly all of the interviews in the movie, without giving its date–in which the priest describes the collective experience. At one point in the interview the movie’s narrator (Peter Coyote) intervenes, “All were amazed to see four small occupants dressed in what looked like black diving suits,” and I’m obliged to say this summary is slightly but significantly deceptive.
Gill spoke of his and the Papuans’ seeing four occupants of the disk, all right. But he never said they were “small,” or different in size or shape from ordinary human beings. On the contrary: “no doubt that they are human,” he wrote not long after the experience; and later on he was to tell UFOlogist Jerome Clark: “The figures inside looked perfectly human. In fact, I thought they were human, that if we got them to land we would find the pilots to be ordinary earthmen in military uniforms and we would have dinner with them.”
Not, in other words, the diminutive humanoids sometimes reported in connection with UFOs. This disconnect undermines the film’s assumption that we’re dealing with a consistent phenomenon “out there,” to which Gill and others have borne witness. Rather, we’re to look for the locus of the experience within the witnesses themselves.
(And by the way, I don’t know the source of the statement that the UFO pilots were “dressed in what looked like black diving suits.” I don’t recall this from any account of the Gill sighting.)
But if the figures were “perfectly human,” Gill also described them as self-luminous, or in his word “glowing.” Years afterward he was to say, “I thought they were angels.” As I wrote in my analysis of the sighting in my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO: “The paradox, that the visitors were human and also beyond human, must be allowed to stand intact.”
By “beyond human,” I don’t mean extraterrestrial. The beings that Gill experienced can’t be squeezed into the conventional mold of “little men” from outer space. This is the point that “The Phenomenon” obfuscates, and it’s the crucial point.
So what did Gill and his parishioners see, if not ETs? The four UFOs’ positions in the sky, as plotted by Gill on a diagram done in 2007, show pretty convincingly that the witnesses were looking at the planets Jupiter and Saturn, the stars Spica and Rigel Kentaurus. This would explain why the UFOs seemed to approach and to vanish, as the clouds dispersed or thickened.
But if that’s what they were looking at, it’s not what they saw. In their experience, as they recalled and described it, these mundane stimuli were transmuted into a religious vision that harmonized Biblical traditions–like Abraham and his three angelic visitors, in Genesis 18–with indigenous Papuan beliefs in humanlike ghosts or spirits who dwell in the sky but sometimes take full human form and descend to earth. The psychic alchemy by which this happened is the real mystery of Boianai.
Case 2: Westall High School, Melbourne, Australia, April 6, 1966 (“The Phenomenon,” 23′ – 27′). On that autumn day–we’re in the Southern Hemisphere, remember–hundreds of students (who seem to have been at what what we’d think of as middle-school age) saw an unusual object in the sky outside their school. The science teacher, Andrew Greenwood, saw it too. At first, he admitted, he couldn’t see it until the kids pointed it out to him. Silver-gray against the sky, it wasn’t very striking.
“It’s one of those things that, once you see it, you go on seeing it,” he explained a little over a year later to the American physicist James McDonald, who’d taken advantage of a research trip to Australia to look into the local UFO sightings. “Hard to pick up.”
Greenwood’s remarks to McDonald are preserved on a tape recording which the American made of their interview. They’re a precious near-contemporary account of the incident, of which “The Phenomenon” makes no mention. Instead, Fox chose to rely on the decades-old memories of those who’d been boys and girls at Westall. Not unnaturally, these are considerably more dramatic.
It was a disk, one woman recalled. It turned on its side, it descended into The Grange, a pine grove outside the school grounds. “I … jumped the fence and ran towards where it looked as though it went down into the trees, then stopped dead because it was right in front of me on the ground. Like a disk with a slight rise in the middle. I also heard a low sort of humming noise, and felt a heat coming off it as well.”
This woman’s memories of what happened long ago are fairly typical. Ten years before “The Phenomenon,” such recollections had been the backbone of the compelling Australian documentary “Westall ’66 – A Suburban UFO Mystery,” written and directed by Rosie Jones and featuring investigator Shane L. J. Ryan, who collaborated with Fox on “The Phenomenon.” (And I’ll take this opportunity to thank Shane for his warm friendship and generous help with my own inquiries into what happened at Westall, in spite of our very substantial disagreements over how to interpret it.)
Memories easily transform themselves over a span of 50 years. It’s easy and tempting to write off the memories of the landed UFO as imaginative creations of the time interval that intervened between the humdrum event in the sky–a weather balloon? a device used by the Royal Australian Air Force for target practice? both theories were advanced at the time, and both have their advantages–and the dramatized retellings of it.
Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.
Very shortly after the event, some at least of the students seem to have been convinced that the object they’d seen in the sky had landed in The Grange and that they’d managed to see it close up. Greenwood, for one, wasn’t inclined to take them too seriously. Here’s what he told McDonald:
“Now, there were all sorts of reports of different things–one girl said that she’d seen the thing on the ground, that it was this sort of shape, with windows around it and all the rest of it, but I really don’t know how much faith we can put in her story. There was a report of some sound from it [inaudible word or two] from one girl who was supposedly close to it. I heard nothing, from here where we were all standing in a large group watching it. But as I say, lots of them jumped the fence and went off after it. I only jumped–leapt the fence–after it had disappeared.”
He also told McDonald that, although at one point the UFO disappeared behind a tall row of pine trees, “we were never sure at any stage that it was anything but airborne.”
Greenwood’s own memories transformed themselves radically over the years. He’s interviewed in “The Phenomenon,” anonymously and shown only from the back, insisting that his identity be concealed (though anyone who’s seen “Westall ’66” will have no difficulty recognizing him). He tells Fox a harrowing story of hearing “a knock on the door one night” and opening it to a pair of older men, one in uniform. They’d come to tell Greenwood that he’d seen nothing, there was nothing there, he’d imagined it because he was drunk. He’d lose his job and be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act if he didn’t keep silent about what he’d experienced.
Proof that the Australian government knew far more about UFOs than it wanted to admit–right? Well, not quite.
Greenwood had related something similar to Ryan ten years earlier. But in June 1967, hardly more than a year after the event, he gave McDonald not the smallest hint of any such “silencing” by government authorities. (As opposed to plentiful harassment from his headmaster, who was fanatically opposed to the whole idea of UFOs and seems not to have liked Greenwood to begin with.) This in spite of McDonald’s having given him ample opportunity to tell such a story.
If he’d had such a story to tell.
What really happened at Westall? In my review of “Westall ’66,” published on my blog on May 6, 2016, I suggested that the true story was not of extraterrestrial visitors but “of children turned adolescents, of a magical place called The Grange where sons and daughters rebel against their parents to pursue something preserved in their collective memory as a UFO.”
In a series of subsequent posts, I developed this line of thought. I found it significant that, as Shane Ryan remarks in “Westall ’66,” The Grange was a favored place for “illicit smoking and steamy liaisons.” No wonder that student drawings of the UFO or UFOs–those who remembered them couldn’t agree on just how many there were–sometimes show them as looking like the breasts of a girl or woman lying on her back.
Even apart from its offer of sexual adventure, The Grange seems to have been a place to evoke the thrill of the unknown and forbidden. “I have visited it,” a man in Melbourne was kind enough to email me last April, “and it really has a wonderful murky, even powerful presence. I can well imagine this place in 1966 as a fertile source of children’s occult stories. There was even an abandoned farm house on this land back then which the Westall school kids knew as the ‘haunted house.’ The land was charged and waiting for a myth to make good use of its primal puissance.”
How was this “primal puissance” transformed into perceived experience, then into ever-flourishing memory? This, and not landed spacecraft, is the true mystery of Westall.
Case 3: Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe, September 16, 1994 (“The Phenomenon,” 1 hr. 22′ – 31′). “The Phenomenon” reaches its climax with this case (immediately following the Gill sighting), which it calls “the most significant close encounter in modern history.”
I’ll agree it’s mysterious, and I can’t claim to explain it. I’ll agree it’s extraordinary. I’ll agree it’s significant, though probably not in the way Fox thinks. What strikes me most about it is its parallel with Westall, not in terms of the supposed aliens involved but of the school setting and the child-witnesses. Factors akin to those operating in Melbourne, I suspect, were operating also in Zimbabwe.
I need to stop for now. I’ll pick up from here in another two weeks.
by David Halperin
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I’ve been reading about UFOs since I was in high school in the mid-60s. Plus reading sci-fi and about astronomy since Oct. 1957 (Sputnik launch,) when we grade school kids were given an intro to space science. I guess so we’d become scientists and beat the Soviets.
I was (and still am) fascinated by these subjects, but terrified at the same time. Because I’m also one of those classic abductees; perhaps dating back to 1952 when I was 4, and intermittently ever since. I do NOT take that literally. Over the decades, I’ve tried out a number of explanations. Some I kept for awhile, but none were satisfactory since none could account for all of the associated aspects. Add to that a lifetime of mystical and flat out spiritual encounters, which seemed related to the UFO/ET phenomena like a set of Venn diagrams with bizarrely warped boundaries, while also of a different order entirely.
I’ve posted on some well known sites that are dedicated to modes of consciousness and/or UFO and contact experiences. Unlike the 80-90% majority, I’ve refused to characterize my experiences as benevolent or uplifting. In polite and caring language, I’ve been told that I’ll change my mind when I’m more spiritually mature or some such. In one case, a well-known participant called me a liar and accused me of deliberately misleading people. That was so hysterical I considered it a tip-off as to the underlying psychology. A need to believe that some entirely benevolent entities from above were going to rescue benighted humanity. And a few people are advanced enough to warrant becoming their special contacts. A species of cosmic neo-Gnostic dualism complete with a pneumatic elite. Yet by insisting there is only Light, casting a large shadow.
Since my late teens, I’ve also been reading Carl Jung. I just finished re-reading his dense later works, including Answer to Job and Mysterium Coniunctionis. Finally, at 72, I’m beginning to understand. The big message being that the old Aristotelian either/ors won’t suffice. Nothing, including our images of deity, can remain simply all good or all bad, from above or from below, physical or mental, or even real versus unreal. We have to learn to bear all the contradictions, the ambiguity and uncertainty. To me, there is a certain wisdom in learning to live suspended in between. Which one can apply quite nicely to the ET/UFO phenomenon. Just maybe that’s the reason for all of this high weirdness.
Thanks for posting, Rafi!