Links for September

UFOs, WVU, Crime, Politics, Manliness, Music

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Now, on to some items of interest from around the interwebs.

UFO Beliefs

I’ve been interested in UFOs for a while — first as a kid taking the abduction narratives as scary but true stories, later as a sociologist taking them as a fascinating bit of modern folklore.

From that sociology of ideas and culture angle, consider this piece in Current by professor of history and religion Matthew Bowman on the Betty and Barney Hill case. If you haven’t heard of it, this supposed incident from the 1960s helped spawn the whole genre of reports about abduction by grey, bug-eyed aliens. There was even a TV movie about it starring James Earl Jones as Barney and the grandmother from Rosanne as Betty.

Bowman notes that various Christian leaders were initially receptive to claims about flying saucers and alien visitation, though their exact responses varied. Some rejected alien life as contradictory to Genesis, but nonetheless thought that UFOs were a real phenomenon and a sign from God. But in final analysis, the Unitarian Hills found their home not in Christianity but in New Age circles:

After their rejection at the hands of the American scientific and military establishment, the Hills found a home among such people, who easily incorporated their story of abduction and esoteric knowledge into a New Age worldview. By the end of their lives the Hills had blended the story of their encounter with psychic practice, the cosmic progress of all intelligent beings, and channeling of superhuman intelligences.

In a way, the Hills’ own story is a microcosm of the last fifty years of American religious history: a drift away from institution and toward eclectic practice, away from traditional models of Christianity and toward esoteric and Eastern belief, and away from the confidence of mid-century Christian leaders and toward skepticism and self-fashioning. The study of UFOs, it turns out, lies near the heart of much else. 

Pointer from John Fea on Twitter X.

A lot of people have noticed the similarity between modern UFO abductions and old folk tales about being kidnapped by fairies and little people. Modern UFO stories also have tales of aliens using humans to make hybrid babies, which sound a bit like the changelings of European folklore. For some, like folklorist Thomas Bullard (paywalled journal article here), this is a sign that society reinvented old folk beliefs with a coat of sci-fi paint. For others it’s a sign that aliens have been up to these shenanigans all along, only people in ye olden days interpreted it in a supernatural rather than scientific way.

One might apply either perspective to this essay by Leon at Hidden Japan. He writes of how a Japanese folk tale contains elements of the modern UFO story — it involves a human-looking woman eventually goes back to her home in another world via a craft that sure looks like a flying saucer.

One might suspect cultural diffusion as an explanation, but the story dates from a century before flying saucer stories took off in the US — which means it dates from when the Tokugawa Shogunate still ran the show, and Japan was fairly isolated. Leon notes inspiration for these stories may well have been coastal fishermen in Tokugawa Japan spotting weird Western ships for the first time.