Re: A question

[Gerd Groenewold <venator@win.bright.net>]

Hello all,

I have come to see the whole UFO/ET mythology as exactly that, a
mythology, a religious phenomenon, however it is one that has been given
a technological twist, which explains its endurance in a titanic age. 
Instead of Angels and gods, we instead have beings who are thought to be
like ourselves, only "more advanced," either intellectually or
technologically or both.  In popular culture we see it in both positive
and negative reflections, for example the movie _Close Encounters of the
Third Kind_, which ends with a giant UFO descending from the heavens
like the New Jerusalem, or, on the negative side, every week we can see
another episode of _The X-Files_ on TV, where there is a secret
conspiracy in league with aliens in a way reminiscent of medieval
European ideas of a secret witch cult in league with the devil.

> "A nebulous yearning for other worlds is as ancient as man himself. Today it has technological
> features; our expectations of alien guests and their landing have been haunting our imagination
> for some time now. We must take this seriously, firstly as a symptom.
>         Bizarre aircraft are depicted, challenged, exposed as mirages. They serve as bait and a
> mechanism for the imagination; on the other hand, they indicate wishful thinking. The automatic
> apparatus is consistent with the spirit of the times. The end of the world, a vision at every
> millenium, likewise presents itself as a technological catastrophe. 
>         How strange that alien guests are expected now of all times, when astronomical
> investigations seem to have demonstrated that the stars not only are not, but cannot be,
> inhabited. This simply indicates the depth of our yearning. People feel more and more strongly
> that pure power and the enjoyment of technology leave them unsatisfied. They miss what used to
> be angels and what angels gave them."

I would say that what we see here is that in a titanic age, people feel
a great void in life, a void formerly filled by the gods, or to put it
better, filled in a different way when there were gods.  Incapable of a
belief in said gods, yet still bothered by the same yearning, they
instead attempt to fill this void with something more titanic, ET's in
spaceships come to save humanity with their wonderous technology.

There is a huge amount of paranoid UFO conspiracy material available to
anyone willing to look on the back shelves of an occult bookstore.  Some
of it is fluffy happy new age stuff, about how the aliens are going to
come and liberate us from our failings.  A large portion of it is less
than utopian, however, postulating a war in the heavens between on the
one side, the "reptiloids" and their henchmen the "greys," and on the
other, the "nordics," the latter being "resistance fighters" who look
like something out of a nazi propaganda poster.  Now, I have no idea
where the actual origins of this stuff are, I think somewhere there is
an anthropology student (or maybe better a folklorist) who could write
one hell of a dissertation studying this strangeness.  However, my point
is that even where we leave the happy fluffy new ageyness, we still have
a theme out of religion, with the angels and the demons easily separated
out, and a final battle soon to be upon us.  Of course, UFO cults like
"Heaven's Gate" are another facet of this phenomenon.

GERD

"The gods of aquarius are coming with UFOs,
They love me and they love you,
and what they have to say is true"

Nina Hagen (I can't remember the song title, but it's on "In Ecstasy")