“And now we have the novel coronavirus,” I wrote eight months ago in a post for the Stanford University Press blog. “None of us knows how long this crisis will last or how deep and malignant will be the economic crisis that’s bound to follow. Already COVID-19 has inflicted on our society a trauma that will not soon be healed or forgotten. … How will it shape the UFO myth, the UFO experience?”
I refused to make a prediction. “Let’s meet again in a year, in five years, and see.” It hasn’t yet been a year, much less five. But as this freakish, dismal year 2020 draws to its close, the myth has taken on strange new (or old-new) forms that have made headlines the world over.
The news stories are themselves part of the myth. What is the noise in these tales, what the signal? Perhaps a question that can’t be answered and that it’s best not to ask. In the UFO myth, I’m convinced, the noise is the signal, and the spinoffs generated by the original events or reports of events are as essential to the meaning as the events themselves. And meaning is what it’s all about.
Start with the monoliths.
I probably don’t have to tell you what I mean by that. News accounts of these erect metal prisms, eerie in their glittering simplicity, began to circulate the week before Thanksgiving; by now most of us have seen them. At first I didn’t pay too much attention. We tend not to notice what doesn’t fit into our mental cubbyholes, and the monoliths–first there was one, then two, then more–didn’t fit into mine.
Amid the swirl of reportage, Constance Grady’s account on vox.com (updated on December 8) is the clearest I’ve seen. “They appear with no warning and disappear just as quickly,” Grady writes. “First, one in the Utah desert, which emerged on November 18 and vanished on November 27. Second, one outside the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt, which appeared on November 27 and disappeared on December 2. Third, one at the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, which appeared on December 2, was taken down on December 3, and reappeared on December 4. And fourth, one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which appeared on December 7 and was taken down the same day.”
“Emerged” is the right word for the Utah monolith. There’s reason to think it had been in place for at least the past four and possibly five years. No one noticed it, however, until it was spotted on November 18 by a helicopter crew counting bighorn sheep. “Okay,” one of the crew remarks on a video, “the intrepid explorers go down to investigate the alien life form.”
It was neither alien nor alive, but that doesn’t matter. Of course everyone who sees it thinks of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appears at crucial junctures in the human evolutionary process to stimulate a quantum leap in our development. I don’t think the film ever explains where they come from, but it’s plainly from somewhere outside our species, outside our planet.
This is the simplest explanation of why the Utah monolith and its successors have attracted such attention. We feel ourselves, not without reason, at a moment of apocalyptic crisis: wildfires and hurricanes on a scale largely unknown, a rampant virus killing more Americans on one day than died on 9/11, an election that feels like it’s taking our democracy to the brink. We’d love to believe that these are not markers of some final, irreversible collapse, but something more like what ancient Jews called “the birth-pangs of the Messiah.” Presaging, if not “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), at least the birthing of a civilization more just and more sustainable than the one we’ve got now.
The chronology of the monoliths is strange, and encourages the sense that something beyond the human may be involved. Isn’t it funny–the same day one vanishes, another appears? But the original monolith didn’t exactly “vanish.” It was removed in the night by two men who not only admitted but advertised what they’d done. They acted, they said, to preserve the environment. “The mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issues here–we are losing our public lands–things like this don’t help.”
We also know what happened to the Atascadero monolith. The story, as told by Mackenzie Shuman in the San Luis Obispo Tribune of December 6, is very remarkable, and points to a more sinister dimension of the phenomenon.
“The day it appeared, the Atascadero monolith was removed by a group of young men who left a wooden cross in its place.
“A grainy livestream video, shared to streaming site DLive.tv by a user identified as CultureWarCriminal, shows four men driving from the Southern California area to tear down the structure and ‘tell the alien overlords they are not welcome.’
“‘We’re going on a 500-mile roundtrip to steal a f—ing monolith,’ one camouflage-clad man says during the video, which has since been removed. ‘That’s how much we love Jesus Christ.’
“At one point, one of the men says they are operating ‘on direct orders of QAnon and President Trump himself.’ …
“‘This is go-time boys,’ one camouflage-clad member says just before they begin chanting ‘Christ is king.’ The chant continues as they push down the silver structure and tear it from the rebar.
“The video then shows one member of the group attempting to drag the monolith away as others try to install their homemade cross in its place.
“A second stream posted by the same user that has also since been removed shows the group dragging the monolith down the hill as they chant ‘America first’ and claim to be military veterans.
“At one point, the men appear to think they are being chased by someone and hide before returning to their car without the monolith.
“‘The Illuminati got it, so we’ll strike again when they put another pillar up,’ the streamer says.”
Alien overlords? Illuminati? Do I hear echoes of the infamous “Jews will not replace us” of Charlottesville 2017? It’s clear, at any rate, that these men take the monoliths very seriously as emblems of some kind of superhuman evil, corresponding and opposed to the cross of Christianity–a religious symbol no less than the cross, but with a negative valence attached. And one, it appears, that they want not so much to destroy as to have as their own.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune responded on December 4 with an editorial that shows an emotional engagement nearly as strong. It’s headlined: “Destroying Atascadero’s monolith was a disgusting act. Find those punks and punish them.”
The paper’s call to its readers:
“Don’t let these idiots get away with sneaking in under cover of night, outrageously destroying a playful work of art that obviously took effort and ingenuity to create and put in place — and then bragging about it on social media. We aren’t looking to throw the book at them, but there should be some sort of appropriate penalty. Maybe livestream a public apology, followed by oodles of hours of public service in Atascadero’s parks?”
Just “a playful work of art”? No way. There’s powerful symbolism in these monoliths, bound up with a sense–which can co-exist with a rational recognition that they’re human creations–of their alienness. Of their being, no less than the crashed disk at Roswell, “alien life forms” embedded in the desert rock of our planet–visible and tangible, yet in their essence the unidentified, with all its implicit promises and threats.
And let it be noted: no less than the “idiot punks” railed against by the Tribune, the people who dismantled the Utah monolith were acting out of a perception that it was a threat. Sure, their rationale for getting rid of it was more–well, rational, at least for those of us with liberal or centrist views. But the basic sense of the monolith’s menace, whether to Jesus Christ or to the planet Earth, was there for both.
Meanwhile, some 7000 miles to the east …
On December 2, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published an interview by senior editor Raanan Shaked, under the headline (in quotes) “The UFOs Requested That Their Presence Not Be Made Public, Humanity Is Not Yet Ready.” The blurb that follows the headline reads (my translation):
“Professor Haim Eshed served as head of the Israeli space program and directed the project of launching the ‘Ofek’ satellite. But only after leaving his official position could he turn to what truly interests him: aliens. In a new book, ‘The Universe Beyond the Horizon’ [the Hebrew word for “horizon” is ofek, the name of the satellite], he argues that ETs from all over the universe already walk among us, encounters of the third kind are just around the corner and the ‘Galactic Federation’ prevents that information from being publicized so as not to cause a panic. Now he tells how the aliens have already prevented multiple nuclear holocausts, what is really happening at the mysterious ranch in Utah, and when we’ll be able to hop by for a visit via the black holes.” [Does he mean, “wormholes”?]
I would have loved to read the full interview, but the Yediot firewall blocked me from seeing more than the first paragraph, from which it appears that Shaked was making fun full-blast of his interviewee. (I tried to subscribe to Yediot, actually, just to get past the firewall, but I was stymied by the array of electronic forms I needed to fill out.)
The story was picked up by English-language media, including NBC News (December 8) and the Jerusalem Post (December 10), and seems to have gone viral. You can read in the English versions that President Trump is well aware of the aliens’ presence and would have revealed it if the Galactic Federation hadn’t blocked him. No other source, however, repeats what Eshed said about “the mysterious ranch in Utah,” which must refer to the monolith even though it wasn’t found on a “ranch”–unless the presence of bighorn sheep qualifies an area as a “ranch.” [Added 12/14/20: as two readers have pointed out, my assumption was wrong–the reference is certainly to the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.] That’s what I’m most curious to know.
Other, of course, than what brought so distinguished and respected a man to such a bizarre set of beliefs, and what evidence he can possibly have for them. (Which are not the same question.)
Robert Sheaffer, writing on the page of the Facebook group “UFO Updates,” calls Eshed “Israel’s equivalent to Paul Hellyer,” which is apt but doesn’t really answer the question. (We could ask the same question of Hellyer.)
And David Clarke has posted to Facebook the front page of the British tabloid Daily Star, I think for December 9 (the date isn’t wholly clear), proclaiming in huge capitals SPACE SHOCKER: ALIENS’ SECRET PACT WITH TRUMP. The headline is illustrated with a huge-eyed alien wearing an orange wig, with a dialogue balloon saying “I’m the smartest in the universe … and I won the intergalactic election bigly!”
“Signal”–or “noise”? I vote for “signal.” But precisely what’s being signaled, I’m not very sure.
by David Halperin
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Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
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Just a little correction. The ranch in Utah that is referenced by Eshed will be the notorious Skinwalker Ranch found in that state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinwalker_Ranch
Tom and Lawrence, thank you for your correction! You are certainly right.
David, the mysterious ranch in Utah is surely a reference to the Skinwalker ranch. It’s located in the Uinta/h Basin in eastern Utah after all. It’s only the most famous haunted ranch or farm, if not place, in the United States at this time. And a supposed paranormal and UFO hotspot.
PS Thanks for the nod on the paracast podcast!