UFOs From Heaven, or Hell?
The last post on Richard Shaver and his unruly offspring of hollow-earthers brings up a strange dichotomy that should bother anyone interested in the UFO subject: Those who study the saucers and space people generally assume that they come from the heavens. A minority vote for underground civilizations in the hollow earth, or at least vast cave systems supporting evil broods of scary monsters.
This recalls a quote from William S. Burroughs. Referring to a rich American who is looking for the secret of eternal life in the pictograms of Mayan priests, he says: “[he] does not think of himself as a Christian, yet all of his thinking is formed by Western Christianity. He thinks in either/or, that is one-god terms…’must be one thing or the other,’ he tells himself.”
Likewise, many of us may be laboring under the misguided assumption that our “aliens” must come from heaven or hell, at least in abstract terms. This is the subconscious model that informs much of our major public discourse: “Is it good or bad?” Labels are insidious and possibly misleading, especially in areas that we don’t understand fully as yet.
It may be that most people really want the imponderables to come from the sky, where gods have always lived. If we can’t explain it fully, at least we can reassure ourselves that it is probably good. After all, manna comes from above, and sulfur and brimstone are spit out by the earth. Anything that comes from below is bad.
This seemingly ignores the view of a host of worldviews that worship the earth as a life-giving mother, such as Native American beliefs that all life originally emerged from a hole in the ground. The southwestern tribes call this opening the sipapu, and include a representation of it in their buildings used for ritual purposes.
This is not to suggest that one view is better than the other. It is mentioned to point out the fact that people have different belief systems which influence their ideas about aspects of the human experience which may be new, unexplained or undecided.
People generally want to assume the best about things, so it is understandable that we would point to the sky as the origin of UFOs. After all, most of them are seen flitting though the atmosphere or disappearing into it.
To go out on an ontological limb, perhaps they appearing there because we want them to. The tiny minority of undientifieds that are reported disappearing into the ground or emerging from it might be the products of paranoid thinking, at least in the Western mind. For many of us, this brings up fancies that may extrapolate the origins of the phenomenon too far.
As Nick and I have written repeatedly on this site, there are far more ways to look at this UFO thing than a simple dichotomy of good or evil, and locking ourselves into it creates a blind alley from which many have not yet emerged.
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Oct 29 2008 
October 30th, 2008 at 3:54 am
It’s like the Meister Eckhart thing: if you resist to the demons they torture you, but if you accept your fate and dettach from the earthly cravings, the demons turn into angels who lift you to the Heavens.
October 30th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Now thats a trippy concept. I know the
name of Eckhart, but thats about it.
( Medieval Theologian, wasn’t he? )
Myself, I blame Drew.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Well, Craig, I only know of that Meister dude because he’s mentioned in Whitley Strieber’s books… and the movie “Jacob’s ladder”
October 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
RPJ,
This sort of scenario is (apparently) familiar to those who have ingested psychoactive compounds.