ETs vs. Faeries: 1 Introduction

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that immersing myself in the UFO/ET mythos might trigger new ideas for the Shaggy Mythos. Over the last couple years I've had the urge and intent to bring the Mythos from its 'once upon a time' orientation into engagement with the present and future-- the future-primitive thing. It was about time for this, the next step to take, but how?

Well, I've been working on it, but it's problematic. I've read and taken notes on a great many books that are more contemporarily oriented and it's made me more sophisticated, but though it all puts what I'm doing into a deeper, wider cultural context, it doesn't inspire departures for the Mythos like mythic-folkloric material has-- it isn't directly usable, just serves as background information, I complain to myself-- but really, it does work indirectly, and some of it is pretty mythic-folkloric in its ideology. Thus the idea of investigating the UFO/ET mythos.

I hadn't read anything on 'space aliens' for two decades, when I read books by Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins on abductions. They were disturbing but I had my doubts-- a sci-fi horror-fiction writer? and a New York sculptor? Besides, a lot of the 'abductees' seemed to be pathetic cases who might have psychiatric reasons for what they claimed to be experiencing. And then there was the hypnosis, which became dubious as a means of retrieving objective memories after the 80s wave of child-abuse hysteria. Before that, I had read John Keel's Mothman Prophecies, which read like fiction instead of journalism.

Beyond my skepticism, I just don't like the idea of 'aliens from outer space' interfering with our planet-- don't we have enough on our plate without that? It detracts from our need to keep our attention on what we're doing to the Biosphere and mobilizing ourselves to rescue it. And counting on 'space brothers' to save the day is demotivating.

But I told myself," Well, I'll read for the mythic-folkloric stuff and skim the rest". But as I started reading I got sucked into the mystery of what UFO/ETs really are. I've gone through a half-dozen high-end books so far (except for one) that present a great deal of evidence and analysis before coming to the conclusion that UFOs, at least, are real, not just delusions or misperceptions, but the authors admit they don't know what they are, though they doubt they're extraterrestrial. I admit I have no idea, either. But everyone loves a mystery, even an insoluble one.

Well, I put in a lot of time, and effort taking notes, and ended up concluding the same as when I was a young man--"I can't be convinced merely by reading books". And since I have not had convincing personal experiences of UFO/ETs or of parapsychological phenomena-- and all the authors believe that the phenomena require an openness to parapsychological explanations if we are to go further in solving this mystery, well, it was intriguing reading, but only the mythic, psychological, and cultural critiques are likely to be of much use.

So I've been racking my brains trying to sort out all that material into discrete topics, which hasn't been easy because it all hangs together, as things do in reality, and we falsify that when we pick it apart to make a rational structure. But I've got it down to a few basic takes out of which discrete pieces can be written-- along the lines the title of this one suggests-- essentially, New Age vs. Pagan mentalities, and the symbolic meanings of UFO/ETs, and the process of Mazeway Resynthesis that seems very applicable to this whole matter. So, I will see what I can do to work these up into pithy pieces in the next few weeks.