Chariot and Saucer

Sometime in the early Babylonian exile, a priest named Ezekiel had a vision on the banks of the Chebar Canal. Four winged creatures, each with four faces, emerged, borne on a fiery wind, drawing a bejeweled chariot (merkavah). In the air above them, God sat on a sapphire throne and said, “O Mortal, stand up on your feet that I may speak to you” (Ezek. 2:1).

Several centuries later, Jewish mystics, including, at least by legend, Rabbi Akiva, attempted to re-create Ezekiel’s vision, known as the Ma’aseh Merkavah. They developed complex meditative techniques to induce spiritual journeys through the heavens (though, paradoxically, they were generally said to descend rather than ascend). In these visions, they progressed through a series of seven concentric, glimmering palaces guarded by fearsome angels in search of the divine throne.

About two thousand years later, in the summer of 1947, a rancher named William “Mac” Brazel discovered strange metallic debris scattered across his remote land outside of Roswell, New Mexico. He reported it to the local sheriff, who got the US Air Force involved, since they had a base nearby. A day later, the Air Force issued a press release stating that it recovered a “flying disc” from the ranch—and the story, or myth, of the Roswell UFO was born.

In 2017 the New York Times revealed the existence of a UFO program at the Pentagon. Since then, UFOs—or UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena)—have stayed in the news and, perhaps, the skies. There have been military and civilian sightings, leaks from whistleblowers, alarming congressional hearings, startling official reports, and, most recently, a frenzy over thousands of apparent drone sightings in New Jersey. In 2023, then-Senator Marco Rubio (now secretary of state) said that secret Pentagon UFO programs represent, “in essence, some sort of an internal military complex that’s their own government and is accountable to no one.” A recent CBS News poll indicated that 78 percent of Americans believe the government is withholding information from the public.

In Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, David J. Halperin, a distinguished historian of religion who has published studies of the prophet Ezekiel, Merkavah mysticism, and other Jewish visionary experiences, seeks to explain the long-smoldering American fascination with aliens through the lenses of religious studies and Jungian psychology. In doing so, he aims to build what he calls a bridge between “reported existence and postulated cause” for a series of famous UFO cases and motifs, including Roswell.

Although Halperin is not the first scholar of religious studies to tackle UFOs, the subject is more personal for him than most. In 1960, he was twelve years old, the only child of a distant father and a dying mother. The three of them maintained a conspiratorial silence about the reality of her condition despite her dreadful physical state: “arms and legs spindly, belly swollen.” Death, Halperin writes in Intimate Alien, was the “ultimate alien” penetrating their lives.

Driven by the need to externalize this aura of familial mystery, Halperin threw himself into investigating UFOs, starting a local club and eventually becoming the teenage director of the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena. In the spring of 1964, he won a Bible contest and was awarded a summer trip to Israel. He was gone for eight weeks; when he returned, his mother was dead.

Halperin is brutally honest about this loss and its complex aftereffects. Although he suffered terrible grief, he admits that “in some ways life was better now.” His father, freed from the burden of his wife’s terminal condition, became calmer and kinder. Young David underwent changes of his own: He went to more parties, reconnected with friends, and even managed to kiss a girl or two. (He is frank and unsparing about the psychosexual origins of his own and others’ UFO obsessions and visionary experience more generally.)

As life normalized, Halperin’s UFO obsession gradually faded. He graduated from high school and went off to Cornell, where he buried himself in Near East languages, then on to Berkeley, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Merkavah mysticism. Later, as a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he would write a Jungian psychobiography of the prophet Ezekiel.

Upon his retirement, Halperin returned to the world of UFOs—although perhaps he never really left. In 2011, he published an odd and ambitious young adult novel called Journal of a UFO Investigator. It follows Danny Shapiro, whose early-1960s adolescent biography (sick mom, no girlfriend, Christian dad) closely mirrors Halperin’s own. Danny’s UFO research leads him to a chance encounter at the library with a suave older teen named Julian Margulies, who inducts him into the S.S.S. (Secret Science Society). There he meets Tom and his seductive girlfriend, Rochelle, and the three S.S.S. members quickly hook Danny into a surreal globe-trotting caper centered around a coveted copy of a UFO book that has been annotated by the mysterious, all-knowing “Gypsies.”

The plot of Halperin’s novel is fractured, weaving in and out of Danny’s journal entries, actual experiences, and dreams as we follow his journey through the wild world of the S.S.S. He gets his hands on the annotated book; is captured and tortured by the Men in Black, the government agents feared by so-called ufologists; and eventually escapes into a disc-shaped UFO, only to discover himself a prisoner again.

Danny’s abduction experience is bizarre and brilliantly rendered. Halperin imparts an uneasy and somehow archetypal sense of horror. Danny’s UFO goes down instead of up (recalling, perhaps, the descent of the Merkavah mystics), burrowing deep into the core of the Earth before stopping in a strange swampy clearing, where a dark fluid’s surface is lit by an impossibly low-hanging moon.

Here, Danny is confronted by six-legged clawed creatures the size of dogs, who telepathically urge him to drink from the marsh and send him ambiguous brain messages about the seeding. He has sex with a humanoid alien seductress, which is not unpleasant but also, it turns out, not the seeding. Then the real ceremony begins: He is placed on an altar by the eldritch creatures and sliced open so that they can surgically extract his seed. The nightmare surrealism of this scene is rare in science fiction, let alone young adult novels. Halperin lets the reader marinate in the weirdness of these images, without resolution. Here and elsewhere, the novel evokes the visceral body horror of David Cronenberg films like The Brood and The Fly.

Thereafter the plot moves quickly—too quickly. Danny travels to the Well of Souls cave under the Dome of the Rock in then-Jordanian-held East Jerusalem, where he confronts the ghost of his grandfather before sneaking across the border with his hybrid alien baby into Israel, so she can receive medical care. Eventually, he finds and reenters the UFO, which he pilots into the welcoming sky, baby swaddled against his chest like a midcentury mom navigating her Buick sedan before the advent of safety laws. After takeoff, however, he is distracted by a plane leaving Lod Airport. He flies alongside it and somehow sees himself in the plane. The UFO lurches into a celestial tailspin, crashing in . . .
Roswell, New Mexico.

The best chapters of Journal of a UFO Investigator reach dizzying, surrealist heights: Lovecraftian dream sequences in a Dune-ish setting that revolve around a miserably horny teenage Jew from Jersey. But its lesser elements, like Danny’s encounters with the government Men in Black (whom he dubs Snaggletooth and Pockmark), read as if they were airlifted in from a sci-fi drugstore novel of his adolescence. What is perhaps more interesting is that this erratic, ambitious, oneiric novel—written for God only knows whom—is a kind of first draft or autobiographical key to Halperin’s sober (more or less) academic theory of UFO phenomena and their place in modern culture.

In Intimate Alien, Halperin argues reasonably enough that UFOs emerge from the gap between “stimulus and perception.” Real physical phenomena—stars, planes, weather balloons, drones—trigger transcendent visions as they are filtered through a complex interplay of cultural archetypes and personal psychology. The witnesses really do see something, and the contents of the individual and collective unconscious are real too, but we are not visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft, and no earthlings were actually kidnapped or harmed in the making of these experiences.

In 1958, Carl Jung himself took something like this approach. In Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung argued forcefully for the significance of UFOs to the modern psyche. Flying saucers were mandala-shaped myths, hovering projections of our cosmic anxieties (according to Jung, the circular mandala was a universal symbol of the self). This tack is at the core of Halperin’s psychosocial approach. “I don’t believe, nor do I debunk,” he writes, proposing a “third way” that treats UFO encounters with the same gravity one would accord other myths that emerge from the collective unconscious.

As one would expect, given his personal biography and academic method, Halperin approaches UFO narratives with great respect. And yet he ends updebunking every UFO encounter he writes about. “Did it really happen?” is the least interesting question about a UFO account for Halperin, but he invariably concludes that it didn’t.

In this Halperin differs from the famous French ufologist Jacques Vallée and others influenced by him, including Halperin’s more sensationalist colleague in religious studies Diana Pasulka, who have pointed to the many mystical experiences and premodern legends that are strikingly similar to alien encounters. Where Halperin sees this as evidence of a long-existent psychological phenomenon, these scholars tend to suggest that visitations from another realm are a perennial feature of human experience, whose origins only came to be represented (or recognized) as extraterrestrial in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Vallée, who began his professional career as an astronomer—he worked on NASA’s first map of Mars in the early 1960s—has proposed that these are encounters with beings from another dimension rather than another planet. (A character based on him is played by the great French New Wave director François Truffaut in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) Though he has spent the better part of a lifetime obsessing over such experiences, Halperin doesn’t buy into their reality—in this universe or a parallel one.

In September 1961, Barney and Betty Hill were driving down a dark New Hampshire road when they spotted a bright light in the sky, moving in strange patterns. When they pulled over to look closer, the light swooped down toward them, revealing itself as an enormous disc-shaped craft with figures watching from illuminated windows. The Hills sped away in terror, only to be overtaken by strange beeping sounds and an overwhelming drowsiness. They arrived home the next morning with strange marks on their bodies, torn clothing, and faint sensory memories of the first-reported alien abduction in American history.

Skeptics think that the Hills lied or hallucinated. But Halperin makes it clear that the Hills are not so easily dismissed. Neither had any preexisting interest in UFOs, and they didn’t try to monetize their experience later. They couldn’t account for two full hours of that night, had mysterious damage to their car and clothes, and gave consistent parallel accounts (as well as severe trauma responses) under hypnosis in isolated sessions. Both of the Hills were gainfully employed and sober, respected members of their community when the incident happened.

They did, however, stand out in one way: Barney was black, and Betty was white. They were a married interracial couple at a time when such marriages were illegal in many states and uncommon everywhere else. Halperin’s exhaustive analysis of the transcripts of their hypnosis reveals how deeply race colored their everyday experiences. Something as simple as finding a motel room in the wrong city became what Halperin calls “an exercise in courage.”

Here Halperin makes an astute observation about the evolution of Barney’s story. In his initial account to a UFO investigator, he said the aliens “reminded” him of German officers. But under hypnosis nearly four years later, he described his abductor as “a German Nazi. . . . He had a black scarf . . . black shiny jacket.” What changed? Halperin locates the shift in Barney’s growing attachment to his Jewish hypnotist, Dr. Benjamin Simon.

But Halperin’s boldest conjecture connects their abduction experience to the historical trauma of the Atlantic slave trade:

You were abducted, perhaps in a night raid
. . . marched to the coast, your destination an alien craft. . . . To the Africans in first contact with them, the slave ships were something altogether fantastic.

Halperin argues that Barney and Betty Hill, who were descended from slaves and (perhaps) slave owners, respectively, “relived that trauma” together, their psyches unconsciously putting on a mythological coproduction in “hidden tandem.” He goes on to compare this to the “unvocalized deep memory” that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors carry with them.

Again, perhaps. But what were the real-world stimuli for the Hills’ otherworldly experience? Here we get Halperin at his most empirical.

There was an observation tower light atop a nearby mountain; if you were driving through this particular stretch of New Hampshire in the middle of the night, it might look like it was following you. What’s more, Hill reported one of the aliens as having “wraparound eyes” that stretched to their temples. This happens to also describe an alien on an episode of the sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits that aired just twelve days before hypnosis. Thus, Halperin synthesizes primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how mundane stimuli were transformed, through the psychology of racial trauma and the influence of pop culture, into America’s foundational alien abduction myth.

Erich von Däniken popularized the idea that Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot was actually an ancient spaceship sighting in his late-60s bestseller Chariots of the Gods? But the interpretation goes back at least to a 1961 sci-fi magazine article titled “The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel,” mentioned here by Halperin. He dismisses this idea as a boring and anachronistic conventionalization of a numinous experience, though given his intellectual biography, it is hard to believe that he never found the identification interesting, even beguiling; indeed, he has described Ezekiel’s vision as a premodern parallel to UFO sightings.

Halperin’s larger point is about the nature of mystical experience in general. Of the Ma’aseh Merkavah, he writes that even “‘calling it visions of God,’ as Ezekiel himself does, is a conventionalization of a different sort. . . . It’s something unknown, indefinable, erupting from within Ezekiel yet outside his conscious control.” Such experiences are before all conceptual frameworks, ancient and modern, and cannot ultimately be explained or contained by them. Or almost all frameworks, for Halperin does appear to think that Jungian theory is more than another conventionalization; it sounds the depths. Hence, for instance, the symbolic significance of Ezekiel’s four creatures with four faces is that they form a quaternity, which in Jungian symbolism is the deep symbol of wholeness.

This is not to say that Halperin’s approach does not yield insights. It clearly fascinates him that the Merkavah mystics were “descenders to the chariot” who paradoxically had to first go down before ascending to the heavenly palaces. Following Scholem and others, Halperin connects this to the mystics’ practice of dipping their heads to their knees in meditation. He compares it to the shamanic practice of entering trance states and further notes the parallels to the hypnotic regression undergone by UFO abductees in the recounting of their experience. Halperin suggests that the place to which all these journeyers descend is “surely the unconscious.”

The limitations of Halperin’s Jungian psychosocial approach arise most vividly when he takes on the task of complex cases with larger casts of players. His analysis of the Roswell incident, for example, feels relatively underbaked. The problem with Roswell has always been whom to believe and how to explain the testimony of those one doesn’t.

On July 8, 1947, the Air Force put out a press release on the recovery of a “flying disc.” By July 10 they had changed their story, holding a press conference in which the “disc” had become a “weather balloon.” Air Force officials even staged a photo op with the supposed debris. In 1978, Air Force Maj. Jesse Marcel, who transported the original materials, claimed the press conference debris was fake and alleged a cover-up. By 1994, under political pressure, the Air Force offered yet another explanation: The debris came from a Project Mogul spy balloon, used to detect sound waves from enemy nuclear installations. (In 2020, President Trump said he had heard some “very interesting” things about Roswell but wouldn’t tell even his eldest son, Don Jr.)

A Roswell skeptic like Halperin must explain that first press release—why would the Air Force announce the recovery of a flying disc that didn’t exist? Halperin is forced to suggest that Air Force Col. William H. Blanchard and his subordinates fell under the spell of “the core [UFO] myth, of a celestial entity descended to earth,” which “overrode the plain evidence of their eyes as to what lay before them. Like Jonah’s gourd in the Bible, it sprang up in the day and perished that night.” In his attempt to avoid endorsing extraordinary claims about alien spacecraft, Halperin ends up proposing something perhaps almost as extraordinary—a synchronized mass hallucination powerful enough to generate official military communications.

Although Halperin’s framework offers profound insights into cases like the Hills’ UFO encounter, its utility is less clear when multiple witnesses and official documentation are involved. Take the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” incident (revealed in late 2017) when several Navy pilots reported a structured craft performing impossible maneuvers at top speed; their testimony was apparently corroborated by as-yet unreleased radar data.

On his blog, Halperin breaks down a 60 Minutes segment on the Tic Tac. Although he is skeptical, one detail of the pilots’ account—the UFO mirroring the movement of the planes—stands out to him, as that detail is mirrored itself in various UFO accounts over the years. This is enough for him to take the pilots seriously as witnesses, suggesting their experience contains true mystery, albeit mystery that emerges from the collective unconscious instead of another planet. (In another blog post on the Nimitz encounter, he gets more Jungian, writing obliquely about secondary   and female pilot Alex Dietrich’s appearance on the scene in 2021 as somehow an obscure reflection, or projection, of the “national ‘second’ [in command],” Kamala Harris.)

Halperin’s near-mystical mode of psychological parsing falters when confronted with military witnesses, corroborating data, and institutional communications. Nonetheless, there is real value in this approach, and Halperin, who has collected wild Jewish visions in Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah, could productively extend his approach to, say, mythical anecdotes about the Lubavitcher Rebbe (or Marian apparitions). However, he was a ufologist long before he turned to religious studies or Jung, and every page of Intimate Alien betrays his lasting fascination with this topic. Halperin has spent more than six decades wrestling with the UFO phenomenon, and he is refreshingly honest about the origins and extremity of this obsession, which led not only to his academic career but to the main occupation of his retirement.

UFOs occupy a seductive position at the edges of our culture, occasionally flashing into sight: an abduction story here, a congressional hearing there. But after eighty years of so-called whistleblowers, mimeographed newsletters, Reddit detectives, and underfunded government probes, the question most people who turn to books on the phenomenon want answered is: Could these things (or some of them) possibly be real?

One does not come away from David J. Halperin’s books, articles, and blog posts on the subject with an answer to this question. Instead, his Jungian inquiry into the subject leaves the reader with a series of arresting images: a car idling on the shoulder, a married couple standing rigid beneath a spectral light. An ancient priest prostrate in the face of a bizarre vision, too grand to comprehend. And a little Jewish boy from New Jersey, staring at the sky, desperate to transcend the reality of his fractured life at home.