It’s been almost fifty years since the modern era of UFO reports began, and in all that time and out of thousands (millions?) of UFO sightings, no definitive evidence regarding the nature of Our Shining Visitors has been found. Much has been alleged/hypothesized/theorized/dreamt during that time, but as of 1996, we are no closer to The Truth than Kenneth Arnold was in 1947.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis is by far the most popular theory of UFO origins, but it presents many problems. As the great UFO waves of the late 1960s faded into history, many UFOlogists were left wondering if the “nuts and bolts” approach was really valid. They had abundant eyewitness reports, some landing traces, and even purported fragments of flying saucers, yet they were not able to pin down the true nature of the phenomenon. The exclusive domination of the ETH among serious UFOlogists began to crack under these paradoxical conditions, and a new theory emerged.
But was it new? As far back as 1919, writer Charles Fort had been collecting accounts of inexplicable anomalies, including strange objects seen in the sky. Fort was a philosopher and a humorist, and he proposed many tongues in cheek theories to explain the events he described. One of his favorites was that the Earth did not belong to mankind, but in fact was a sort of cosmic game reserve, owned by a race of superbeings. He summed up this idea in the pithy aphorism: “I think we are property.”
Fifty years later, John Keel came to the same conclusion. Keel, a New York writer, got a publishing contract to write a UFO book. He set off for the hills of West Virginia, which in 1967 was inundated with UFO sightings, monster reports, and general weirdness. Keel spent some weeks investigating the antics of an entity dubbed “Mothman,” and the mysterious Men in Black (MIB). The latter was an underground legend in UFO circles. Supposedly strange men clad in dark suits cruised around the country threatening UFO witnesses into silence. Everyone knew about them, but the conservative NICAP crowd thought if they existed at all, they were likely agents of the US government, engaged in a massive cover-up of the UFO problem. Keel saw them as something quite different. To him, they were ordinary people controlled by entities from another dimension, a force he dubbed “the Superspectrum.”
After the Flap of ’67 ended, he spent a few years digesting what he’d learned and issued a series of odd but compelling books in the early 1970s: UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, Our Haunted Planet, The Mothman Prophecies, and The Eighth Tower. Keel’s thesis, like Fort’s, was this planet was more of a private zoo than a sovereign world, and we are the exhibits. So who are the zookeepers?
Keel, drawing on a background in folklore and the occult, dubbed these higher entities “Ultraterrestrials” (UTs). UT’s were the gods of our ancestors. Their meddling was responsible for all human progress and human woe, from religious and scientific enlightenment to wars and murderous cults. Because our modern culture thinks in terms of spaceships and visitors from other planets, that is how we see the UTs when they manifest themselves today.
All of this was kind of hard to swallow for the nuts-and-bolts crowd, who tended to see Keel as a nut, no more acceptable than a Space Brother-worshipping contactee. But as the ’70s wore on and the cherished hard evidence of the ETH failed to appear, others decided to explore the paraphysical realm.
Most notable of these was Dr. Jacques Vallee. Vallee started out on the hard science end of the UFO spectrum (his Ph.D. is in computer science), but the untenability of the ETH gradually pushed him into alternate theories. He cut his ties to the nuts-and-bolts thinkers and began exploring the links between UFOs and cult groups, religious movements, ghosts, angels, and psychic phenomena. Because his views are still evolving, it’s hard to characterize Vallee’s position, except to say he thinks UFOs are merely the modern manifestation of an age-old phenomenon. He’s less sure than Keel about the role of UTs in human history and more concerned with the deliberate manipulation of human society by the phenomenon — and by those who use UFO trappings to influence us.
The greatest weakness of Paraphysical Theories (and there are many variants) is that while they explain some of the weirder aspects of the UFO experience, they are inherently untestable and unprovable. Both Keel and Vallee have “retired” from UFOlogy for periods because there seemed nothing more to do. They have come back and made new studies, but the total knowledge of the phenomenon doesn’t seem to advance much. In the end the PT is not so much an answer as an objection to the shortcomings of the ETH or the skeptical view that there’s nothing to UFOs at all.
Two minor variations of the PT are the time-travel hypothesis and the angel/demon theory. The time travel idea holds that UFOs are time machines from our own future, coming back to study us primitives. (A humorous exposition of the time travel theory can be seen in the movie “Repo Man.”) The angel/demon theory, as its name implies, says that UFOs are God’s angels (or Satan’s demons) reinterpreted by modern mankind as visitors from space. The weaknesses of these two concepts is self evident.
After a peak in popularity in the early 1980s, paraphysical theories have declined in favor among the UFO cognoscenti. The thrust of research in UFOlogy in the past decade has been either historical (digging into alleged UFO crashes in the past, like Roswell), or psychological (hypnotic regression of alleged UFO abductees). In both cases the underlying assumption is that UFOs are extraterrestrial machines, though some abductionists do entertain notions of psychic influence and out-of-body travel, two staples of the paraphysical theory.
(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.