Spaceships and Symbols: A Rejoinder to David Halperin

Earlier this week, we published David J. Halperin’s response to Daniel Socher’s Spring article, “Chariot and Saucer.” Halperin wrote about the unvanquished ambiguity of UFO sightings and their deeper meanings. Socher’s rejoinder is below.

In his long and gracious reply to my review of Intimate Alien: the Hidden Story of the UFO together with his earlier Young Adult novel, Professor David Halperin describes himself as a “skeptic.” But he is a curious sort of UFO skeptic; much like Journal of a UFO Researcher’s credulous protagonist, Danny Shapiro, Halperin has immersed himself in the world of ufology.

In 2016, for example, Halperin attended a ufology conference at EarthRise, the 194-acre “Global Wisdom Center” in Petaluma, California that was built by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to house workshops and retreats for consciousness studies and meditation. I know this because Jacques Vallée, the godfather of modern ufology, describes a “heated exchange” between Halperin and noted ufologist Garry Nolan at the conference. Their dispute arose from Halperin’s contention that witnessed UFOs were attributable to “pyscho-sociological factors.” (Vallée also derided Halperin’s symbolic interpretations of UFO sightings by claiming that he has compared the shape of the classical UFO saucer to women’s breasts.)

What, exactly, was a serious scholar of Jewish mysticism—from Ezekiel’s vision of a celestial chariot to early modern imaginings of the messiah—and self-described UFO skeptic doing at a woo-woo event like EarthRise? Garry Nolan is, admittedly, also a distinguished academic—he holds a Chair in Pathology at Stanford’s medical school—but in this context he is a credulous believer who thinks that UFOs “have been on Earth a long time,” and has described a childhood experience of “alien figures” in his bedroom. Professor Halperin’s presence at such a gathering is both curious and characteristic. As the empathetic enthusiasm of his descriptions of purported sightings in this response attest, he remains captivated by the idea of UFOs, and steadfast in his commitment to engaging with believers. As he writes here, “UFO lore is a religious myth of immense profundity and power,” and as a scholar of religion he apparently wants to see the myth working through the lives of contemporaries.

On a fundamental level, Halperin wants to correlate—if not equate—UFO experiences with spiritual experiences. And he doesn’t wish to debunk or haggle over the details of spiritual experiences since, as he says, myths are not bunk. But if we accept that spiritual experiences are real, we must also accept that it’s possible for someone to make one up. The same tradition that warrants the reality of Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, recognized the possibility of false prophets.

In his discussion of the pseudonymous Bella Clarke’s experience of a UFO sighting, Halperin alludes to the possibility that the story she told on their shared podcast was altered by hypnotic regression that may have been inflected with UFO themes (or memes). But what if she was just making it up—either originally as an adolescent or now? What if she lied and was influenced to believe the lie, as in the case of “False Memory Syndrome,” associated most famously with the Satanic Panic of the late-20th century?

Professor Halperin brings up Bella Clarke and her friends as well as the Pascagoula case, as examples of how he approaches the problem of a “multiply witnessed encounter.” But such incidents are fairly amenable to his basically Jungian framework because they are effectively shared psychological experiences. They bring to mind the synchronic, intersubjective experiences of participants in psychedelic ceremonies, a phenomenon that has been reported and discussed by serious researchers. But what about when the multiple witnesses are sober military professionals who are alarmed but not spiritually moved?

In my review, I discussed the famous incident in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. It was one of the inspirations for Halperin’s novel, but it raises problems for the social-psychological theory he propounds in Intimate Alien. In that book, Halperin was forced to suggest that Air Force Colonel William H. Blanchard and his subordinates fell under the spell of the “core [UFO myth] of celestial entity descended to earth,” which “overrode the plain evidence of their eyes . . . Like Jonah’s gourd in the bible, it sprang up in the day and perished that night.” This explanation of synchronized mass hallucinations among military professionals powerful enough to generate memos and press conferences is almost as incredible as the idea that an alien spacecraft crashed in New Mexico. His recourse to biblical imagery is telling here, by the way, since unlike Ezekiel’s chariot, Jonah’s gourd was not a vision, it was a real plant (albeit a didactic one grown by God to teach the reluctant prophet a lesson).

Here’s another example. In 1976, several Iranian fighter jets were dispatched to intercept a bright object hovering over Tehran. Each jet approached the object, managed to get a radar lock, and then its weapons and communications systems failed. Major Parviz Jafari, who piloted the second jet, described the object as a diamond-shaped craft, which released a smaller object that darted around his airplane. The core components of this event—radar tracks correlated with visual observation by trained personnel and effects on military instruments—seem to emanate not from the “depths of our own inner space,” as Halperin writes, but from an external, physically real, and unidentified source. These were unidentified flying objects; there was nothing particularly spiritual or dreamlike about the Tehran Incident.

Professor Halperin refers to Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot as the “granddaddy” of UFOs, and suggests that our modern identification of aerial phenomena as alien spaceships reflects changing cultural influences. Certainly, UFO appearances seem to take on visual shapes according to their era and region—the petite, orbicular “Foo Fighters” reported by WWII pilots, the flying saucers of the ‘50s, and more recently the “Tic Tac UFO” seen by US Navy pilots—this sort of aesthetic evolution does suggest the mediated nature of such experiences. What remains puzzling to me is Halperin’s apparent belief that a vision of God or aliens is inevitably a “conventionalization” of an ineffable experience that only Jungian symbology, perhaps with a little help from Freud and others, can explain. Is there really a universal decoder ring for our “collective dreams”? And, more pressingly, what about when we are not dreaming?

In recent years it has turned out that, long after Roswell, some elements of the United States government continue to think that UFOs or at least some of them, are real—and important to cover up. But the classified labyrinth of American intelligence makes that trail difficult, if not impossible, to follow, certainly from the outside. Some of the most tantalizing clues may turn out to be deliberate misinformation, “psy ops,” or even just elaborate hazing pranks, as suggested in a fascinating , albeit sketchily-sourced, recent article in The Wall Street Journal. Whatever is going on here, it seems more likely that it will eventually be explained with reference to exoplanets and aeronautics, or, perhaps by bureaucratic perversity and spy craft, not collective dreams.

When it works, Professor Halperin’s psycho-sociological approach to explaining UFOs is compelling. I am more or less convinced by his thoughtful investigation into the Hill abduction in Intimate Alien, and his discussion of the Pascagoula sighting in this response is suggestive. But when it comes to events such as the Roswell and Tehran incidents or, say, the recent whistleblower reports of the Pentagon’s “Immaculate Constellation” program of UFO retrieval, I would suggest that Freud’s remark about cracking walnuts and cognate problems actually leads elsewhere. Not inward to the human psyche but outward to the stars, or at least the Pentagon.

Sometimes a spaceship is just a spaceship (or perhaps nothing at all).