This UFO Dream of Ours: A Response to Daniel Socher

In our Spring issue, Daniel Socher wrote about the unusual career of David J. Halperin, a distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism who has written a study of UFO sightings as religious visions—and a semi-autobiographical young adult novel called Journal of a UFO Investigator. Professor Halperin’s response is below.

I’m deeply grateful to Daniel Socher for writing, and to JRB for publishing, his excellent review article weaving together my two UFO-themed books, the novel Journal of a UFO Investigator and Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. I couldn’t have asked for a finer, more empathetic, or more eloquent appraisal of my lifelong fascination with the UFO phenomenon, and how it fits in with the Judaica scholarship to which I’ve devoted my academic career.

As Mr. Socher’s readers will know, I regard UFOs as having nothing to do with any supposed visitations from outer space. They’re a purely human phenomenon, specifically a religious one. A UFO encounter, insofar as it’s not a simple misinterpretation of something seen in the sky, is a bona fide religious experience. UFO lore is a religious myth of immense profundity and power—understanding “myth” as Jung did, to mean not falsehood or error, but a collective dream of the culture or perhaps the entire species. My work with Jewish mysticism and Ezekiel’s merkava has given me a distinctive, if perhaps not entirely unique, perspective for viewing this UFO dream of ours.

This makes me a skeptic, if you will. Not, however, a debunker. (The very last thing myths are is “bunk.”) My aim is not to explain UFOs away, but to understand them as they are: vessels of meaning, visitors from the hiddenness of our own “inner space.” Seen this way, much of their mystery is dispelled. Much, however, remains mysterious—naturally, for we humans are very mysterious beings. Mr. Socher flags one of the dark areas when he observes that the social-psychological approach that I advocate seems to stumble, or at least to hesitate, when confronted with UFO encounters involving multiple participants. A UFO encounter, though normally triggered by something objectively real that at least for the moment resists explanation, is an experience of what I choose to call an “apparition,” but which others may unkindly but not unfairly label as hallucination. Almost by definition, hallucination is something solitary. What is going on, then, when more than one experiencer is involved?

The problem of the multiply witnessed encounter is indeed a thorny one, and I can’t claim to offer a resolution. What I can do is lay out a few stories that bear on the issue, and that branch off into other aspects of the UFO considered as an element of human psychology. We may not find ourselves, at the end, with many answers. But our questions will take on new depth and reveal new possibilities.

Let’s start with the Pascagoula, Mississippi UFO abduction of 1973, an incident I touched on in Intimate Alien but didn’t discuss in any detail. (This was the second abduction episode to receive national attention, the first being the Betty and Barney Hill incident described by Mr. Socher.) Two shipyard workers, by their account, were fishing off a dock in the Pascagoula River on the evening of October 11, when they were approached by a 30-foot-long, football-shaped object that hovered just above a clearing by the river. Three short humanoid figures, gray and wrinkled like mummies wrapped up in bandages, floated out to them, paralyzed them with their touch and carried them aboard the UFO. There they were given a physical examination—a familiar theme in the abduction experience—and afterward released.

It seems impossible that the event happened as described. Aside from its inherent implausibility, which is staggering, the location where it allegedly took place was near a busy highway. Surely, if a UFO were really present, someone besides the two men would have seen it. But the obvious alternative, that they made up the story for mischief or profit, doesn’t work very well either. In a conversation caught on a hidden tape recorder a few hours after the supposed incident, they sound very much like people who’ve gone through a harrowing experience together that they can’t begin to understand.

“It’s something you can’t get over in a lifetime, see,” says the older man to the younger. He adds, “They could have owned us, son, they had us”—and we recall that this was Mississippi, where human beings once did own one another, and where only a few years earlier the savage violence spawned by that historic wrong had turned the state into an arena of terror. These two white Mississippians were counterparts in their way to the white Betty Hill and her Black husband Barney; and it is hard not to feel that, in the experience they’d shared—however that sharing might have been possible—they enacted upon themselves the collective crime of their ancestors. But how?

Freud remarks somewhere that problems are like walnuts. You can’t crack one open by squeezing it in your hand. But set two walnuts side by side in that same hand, press them together, and their shells will yield. Pair the problem of the multiply experienced UFO encounter with some cognate problem, and perhaps we can find a way to lay them open and find the meat within. The “Marian apparitions,” to which Mr. Socher aptly draws attention in his review, may be one such cognate. May be—for still the problems are not cracked open. But each, seen in the light of the other, takes on a fresh appearance.

Since 1981, apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been a regular feature of a church in the town of Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They’ve been the subject of scientific investigations, described by Franciscan scholar Daniel Maria Klimek in his 2018 book Medjugorje and the Supernatural. The book’s theological bias is evident but is no excuse for ignoring his data. The youthful seers of Medjugorje—the visionaries seem nearly always to be teenage boys and girls—give every sign of sharing the same vision. Their lips move as they converse with the Virgin, while their eyes, strangely unblinking, are fixed on the same spot above their heads. They lower their eyes in unison when they see the Virgin depart. Yet, in the spot where they’ve been gazing, no one else sees anything at all.

Like the thirty-foot-long UFO of Pascagoula, this apparition is plainly not real in the same way that a plane or automobile or humpback whale is real. How, then, does it come to be multiply witnessed, by boys and girls who show no sign of conscious collusion?

Even stranger: the experience of some visitors to Medjugorje that, during the time the apparitions were taking place, the usually noisy birds in the church courtyard would suddenly fall silent. Some visitors—apparently not all. But one scientist was reportedly so impressed by the silence of the birds that he flipped from being an ardent atheist to a devout Catholic. When, in 2019, I wrote about this on my blog (at www.davidhalperin.net), one of my readers posted a comment:

I visited Medjugorje in late June of 2012 and sat with about 50 visitors like myself in an open courtyard outside the chapel to witness an apparition by Marija [one of the teenage visionaries]. It was about 6:30pm, and I was aware of the very noisy birds flitting around the courtyard. Marija entered the courtyard, said a few prayers aloud (in Croatian) and then became totally silent. Immediately the birds went silent. It was immediate and total silence and it lasted for the duration of Marija’s apparition. After the apparition, Marija stood up and walked away and the birds began a subdued chatter. … I might add, that silence was more than just quiet. It had a numinous quality.

Ufologists have called this phenomenon the “Oz factor”: the UFO’s appearance is accompanied by the environment turning strange (a busy street, for example, inexplicably emptied of traffic). Of course, I can’t vouch for the truthfulness of the woman who posted to my blog, although she sounds sincere and she has no obvious motive for faking. I do wonder, though: what is the difference between ordinary silence and “numinous” silence? Surely the numinosity the woman experienced derived from her own inner awareness, which she projected onto whatever it was that the birds may have been doing or not doing—thereby becoming a participant in the Virgin’s apparition, even without directly seeing it.

If I had been on the dock by the Pascagoula River, what would I have seen? Two men fishing—or doing what? (Surely not a gigantic UFO.) What would I have observed in that courtyard in Medjugorje in 2012? Birds turned inexplicably silent? Or birds chirping as they normally do, and a woman too rapt in her inner experience to be aware of them?

It was eerily quiet beside the river in south Georgia that cold December night early in the 2000s, when three youngsters—a thirteen-year-old girl, her brother, and a neighbor boy—sat on a dock fishing for catfish. The familiar riverside sounds of owls and other wild creatures had fallen still. These things the girl would recall some twenty years later when, a trained scientist employed as a forensic investigator, she told her story (under the pseudonym “Bella Clarke”) on the storytelling podcast RISK!

The episode featuring Bella aired on March 14, 2023. I was privileged to be part of that show as her respondent, and until we recorded it a few weeks in advance I’d never heard her story. Neither had anyone else, apart from the show’s producers. If you’d like to get a feel for what it is to experience a UFO, and how that experience can weave itself into one’s psychic life, you can’t do better than to listen to Bella’s story.

At one point in the show, one of the hosts remarks that if Bella and I had been teenagers together, we’d have been good friends, and I think that is true. Unlike Bella, I never saw a UFO. The opening scene of Journal of a UFO Investigator, in which a glowing red UFO falls from the sky, is an extension of a fantasy that I had when I, like the novel’s protagonist, was twelve going on thirteen—that is to say, just short of Bella’s age at the time of her experience. In that fantasy I stood in the back yard of our home on a frigid winter night, gazing up into the starry sky, as a blazing red disk passed leisurely overhead. The scene was very vivid in my mind; it was something, I was sure, that could and probably would happen to me in reality. Certainly, I longed for it to happen. But my wish never came true; in this respect Bella was more fortunate than I was. Or perhaps less.

There’s no way I can convey her story in its full richness. I can only relate its most basic details. Bella and her brother and their friend, fishing from the dock—shades of Pascagoula!—saw a yellowish-white light rise up some four miles down the river. It flew soundlessly toward them, following the path of the river. At last it hung over their heads, an enormous gray triangle silhouetted against the sky. It did nothing overt to threaten them. Yet, Bella would recall, “the terror was unimaginable … the impending doom of it was surreal.”

Would her brother and their friend, if we could interview them, tell exactly the same things? I don’t know. Yet all three seem to have shared an experience, felt by all to be uncanny and terrifying, remembered by all in the years to come though not necessarily in the same way. Bella fled up the dock, she says, while the two boys stayed frozen in fear beneath the hovering object. Then she ran back to them, and the three held hands, forming a knot. (Mirroring the triangular UFO, or being mirrored by it?) Eventually the object passed, and the youngsters ran to Bella’s house, crying out to her mother.

Three years later, now sixteen, Bella began to have her dreams.

Of horror-movie monsters . . . of futile strivings for her parents’ attention . . . of her and her family amid post-apocalyptic rubble, with a UFO coming as a savior from the sky. She dreamed of being led, in a sort of fog, into an unknown space where she was met by two individuals she couldn’t see, one older and one younger. (Again, shades of Pascagoula, which Bella perhaps read about at some point: one of the two shipyard workers was considerably older than the other.) “Do you think you went somewhere last night?” her mother asked the next morning, when she told her about the dream; and from then on, “all our conversations were about aliens.” With her mother’s intervention, what Bella was really experiencing—let’s say, her real experience of things unreal—was squeezed into the now-conventional template of the UFO abduction.

So Bella’s absorption in the UFO was bound up with her troubled, ambivalent relations with her mother, much as mine was at almost exactly the same age. (Mr. Socher has well conveyed this in his essay.) For years, she and her mother bonded around Bella’s abductions. Her mother even took her to be hypnotically regressed to the night on the dock, when she’d not merely seen the UFO but (she now “remembered”) had been taken aboard it. At last, Bella broke free. “I don’t want this experience anymore!”

Now a young woman, now a scientist, Bella cries out to her podcast audience: “You can’t make sense of something like this!” It’s “something that I don’t understand, probably will never understand. … You just recognize it, respect that it happened, and you just continue on.”

Mr. Socher’s beautifully crafted essay ends as it began, with the granddaddy of the UFO: Ezekiel’s merkava, his “chariot” vision as later generations were to call it. (Ezekiel himself never uses the word merkava for whatever it was that he saw.) Beginning as a fiery wind out of the north—an image I can recall seriously frightening me, as a child reading the Bible—the vision unfolds as four “living creatures” with human-like bodies and four different faces (one human, three animal) and four “wheels” that do not seem to function as utilitarian parts of some mechanism like a chariot, but to be living entities, perhaps UFO-like, in their own right. By an intriguing and evocative coincidence, Ezekiel’s encounter, like those of Bella and the Pascagoula witnesses, takes place beside a river.

Did Ezekiel have any understanding of what he encountered? Mr. Socher thinks not. He speaks of Ezekiel “prostrate in the face of a bizarre vision, too grand to comprehend.” Whether we agree will depend on which version of the merkava we choose to follow. For the merkava, initially described in the first chapter of Ezekiel’s book, returns for an encore in chapter 10.

It’s embedded there in a long and complex vision, dated to a little over a year after the initial merkava vision, of God’s departure from his long-time dwelling in the Temple of Jerusalem. At the climax of the process, the “cherubim” lift themselves up to carry away the Glory that marks God’s presence, and we’re told that “this is the living creature that I saw by the river Chebar” (10:15). Verse 20 repeats this equation: “This was the living creature that I saw under the God of Israel by the river Chebar, and I knew that they were cherubim.”

Thus does the unidentified become identified, the incomprehensibly grand turned comprehensible—as though it were mysterious at first only by being outside its Temple context. Ezekiel and his contemporaries knew very well what a “cherub” was: a human-faced winged monster on whose back God rides through the skies. (Not a chubby little boy; that’s a Renaissance innovation.) Two of these “cherubim,” carved from olive wood and overlaid with gold, sheltered with their wings the ark in the Holy of Holies where God dwelt. Fittingly, when he was ready to abandon his sin-polluted sanctuary, it was they whom he used for his mount.

So says Ezekiel 10. But the crucial passages of that chapter, including the ones I’ve just quoted, are agreed by most scholars to be interpolations. Their author wasn’t really Ezekiel but some later writer speaking in his name. So eager was this writer to reduce the bizarre and ineffable entities of chapter 1 to the conceptually familiar, that he was willing to ignore the obvious: that the “living creatures” of the river Chebar bear hardly any resemblance to the cherubim of the Temple furnishings. (A cherub has an animal body and a single human face; the “living creatures” had human bodies and four faces, only one of them human.) These “creatures” are something alien—and not just to ancient Israel. We search in vain for anything like them in the iconography of the ancient Near East.

It’s instructive to see how even a writer close in time and in spirit to Ezekiel could distort Ezekiel’s experience, forcing it into the familiar and accepted conceptual categories of his time and culture. Don’t we do the same with the UFO, either insisting it must be an extraterrestrial visitor—our culture’s only viable category for the alien—or else a sustained and absurdly tenacious delusion? I will resist both. Such experiences as Ezekiel’s, says Mr. Socher in summary of my views, “are before all conceptual frameworks, ancient and modern, and cannot ultimately be explained or contained by them.”

A few paragraphs back, I’ve called the merkava the granddaddy of the UFO. Might we also call it the UFO’s navel? I draw the image from a haunting passage in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. In even the most thoroughly interpreted dream, says Freud, “there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled,” and “this is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.” Is the merkava that spot?

In my books, and in my blog posts, I have interpreted our collective UFO dream as thoroughly as I could. The process of interpretation will continue to unfold as the UFO itself unfolds. But always I anticipate the unknown: the depths of our own inner space, never to be fully explored.