Written for Afsane Rezaie's Intro to Folklore Class, Fall 2021.
I Want to Believe: The Persistence of Alien Folklore
C. Randall Nicholson
Whether we believe in them or not, whether we’ve personally seen them or not, we all know what a flying saucer looks like and what the people inside are supposed to look like. The big hairless green or grey head with the huge black eyes and tiny nostrils remains virtually synonymous with the word “alien” even as people speculate about all manner of possible extraterrestrial life-forms. It became engrained into my mind as a child while I watched the night skies with friends, hoping the satellites and airplanes we saw were really spacecraft from other worlds. What would we do if they were? We never thought that far ahead.
Though I’m certain, mathematically speaking, that intelligent life exists elsewhere in this vast universe, I think the likelihood that any of it has come such a long way to visit us is most remote. Yet the catchphrase made popular by The X-Files is accurate: I want to believe. I can’t help it. Aliens are cool. Others have been compelled to believe even though they would have much rather avoided their traumatic experiences. Some experiences are more positive, but most of them, barring the occasional hoax, are very real to the experiencers whether they’re “real” in an empirical sense or not. It is not my intention to rule out the latter possibility altogether. Folklorist David Hufford notes that
Though I’m certain, mathematically speaking, that intelligent life exists elsewhere in this vast universe, I think the likelihood that any of it has come such a long way to visit us is most remote. Yet the catchphrase made popular by The X-Files is accurate: I want to believe. I can’t help it. Aliens are cool. Others have been compelled to believe even though they would have much rather avoided their traumatic experiences. Some experiences are more positive, but most of them, barring the occasional hoax, are very real to the experiencers whether they’re “real” in an empirical sense or not. It is not my intention to rule out the latter possibility altogether. Folklorist David Hufford notes that
much of the investigation of supernatural belief, especially since the Enlightenment, has been implicitly governed by a desire to show that the beliefs under investigation are false. The easiest way to do this seems to have been to assert that believers lack an understanding of how to separate true propositions from false ones. This has ranged from statements about a lack of appreciation for the rules of logic to assertions that the believer fails to use, at least within the domain of belief, adequate reality testing…. But… poor observation and incorrect reasoning cannot account for all reported supernatural experience." (Hufford xviii)
I will focus, rather, on why alien folklore has such wide appeal despite its current lack of scientific support. Why has it captured the Western cultural imagination so successfully? Why does it persist? There may not be one definitive answer to these questions. Investigating them, however, can teach us more about ourselves as a species or at least as a culture – how we think, what we believe, and why. As Stephanie Kelley-Romano has written, “Exploring the ways these extraterrestrial others are described reveals as much about us as it does about any potential visitors from space.” (Kelley-Romano 403)
A Brief History of UFO Sightings and Alien Encounters
Though it’s become synonymous in most people’s minds with flying saucers or alien spacecraft, UFO just stands for “unidentified flying object”. UFOs obviously exist, because of course people see flying objects that they can’t identify. A common joke among skeptics is that anything can be a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying things. I saw one myself one night – a pair of red lights that rotated around each other as if on opposite spokes of a wheel, then disappeared. Unfortunately, by then my childhood imagination had fizzled out and I didn’t assume it was a spaceship, which I’m sure would have been more exciting than whatever it actually was.
UFO sightings, then, go back hundreds of years, but our modern fascination with them began in 1947. Above the state of Washington on June 24 of that year, pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine mysterious craft traveling at an estimated 1600 miles per hour, which he said “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Press coverage of this sighting brought the term “flying saucer” into our lexicon. During World War II, UFOs spotted by pilots were assumed to be secret enemy weapons, but because these flying saucers were faster and more maneuverable than conventional aircraft, people started to consider that they might be from another world altogether. (Bader 74-5) A little over fourteen years after Arnold’s sighting, a “new” genre of alien folklore with little apparent connection to previous benign UFO sightings entered the popular consciousness: the abduction. Though not the first such account, it was the first to gain widespread publicity, and remains the quintessential example:
UFO sightings, then, go back hundreds of years, but our modern fascination with them began in 1947. Above the state of Washington on June 24 of that year, pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine mysterious craft traveling at an estimated 1600 miles per hour, which he said “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Press coverage of this sighting brought the term “flying saucer” into our lexicon. During World War II, UFOs spotted by pilots were assumed to be secret enemy weapons, but because these flying saucers were faster and more maneuverable than conventional aircraft, people started to consider that they might be from another world altogether. (Bader 74-5) A little over fourteen years after Arnold’s sighting, a “new” genre of alien folklore with little apparent connection to previous benign UFO sightings entered the popular consciousness: the abduction. Though not the first such account, it was the first to gain widespread publicity, and remains the quintessential example:
On the night of September 19, 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill drove home from a vacation trip through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a distant flying light seemed to pace the car. This light neared until it loomed overhead as a huge, lighted disk-shaped craft. A series of beeps sounded and the craft vanished from sight. When the witnesses reached home they noticed that the time was some two hours later than they expected. A spate of nightmares and anxiety-related health problems led the witnesses to seek medical and eventually psychiatric help. Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist, carried out hypnotic regression therapy on the Hills... A remarkable story emerged of the witnesses encountering a roadblock manned by short beings with large heads and eyes, small ears and mouths, and hairless ashen-colored skin. These beings controlled the witnesses by apparently hypnotic means and escorted them into a landed saucer-shaped craft. A sometimes gruesome medical examination followed, then the leader conversed for a while with Betty Hill by means of telepathy before releasing the witnesses to continue their drive. All memory of the past two hours of the experience faded at the sound of the beeps until the nightmares and hypnosis restored full recollection." (Bullard 148-9)
The motifs of missing time, memories recovered under hypnosis, and alien medical examinations have remained staples of abduction narratives. On October 17, 1973, Pat Roach of Lehi, Utah became the first to claim that aliens had entered her home and kidnapped her and her family. (Van Wagenen 110) Aliens, it seems, could strike anywhere at any time, though most sightings and abductions remain outside and at night. Their physical appearances “exhibited a startling, almost embarrassing diversity” for a while, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s most of them coalesced around the iconic image we know today. (Bader 81)
Stephanie Kelley-Romano views abduction narratives through the lens of what she calls the Myth of Communion. Myths, in this case, do not mean “falsehoods” but rather sincerely believed stories that explain the world, “the glue of society that binds us to one another and to our traditions.” (Kelley-Romano 385) When old myths fall out of favor, new ones must take their place. Kelley-Romano examined 130 abduction narratives and divided them into four types of the myth – the “hero’s quest” where an abductee is selected to help the aliens and sometimes comes voluntarily, the “narrative of powerlessness” where an abductee is helplessly and callously used by the aliens (usually for breeding), the “betterment of humanity” narrative where the aliens give the abductee profound messages to bring back to the world, and the “sacred communion” narratives where the abductee gains a sense of their oneness with the universe. (Kelley-Romano) Already we can glimpse how these experiences resonate with people on a deep level.
Stephanie Kelley-Romano views abduction narratives through the lens of what she calls the Myth of Communion. Myths, in this case, do not mean “falsehoods” but rather sincerely believed stories that explain the world, “the glue of society that binds us to one another and to our traditions.” (Kelley-Romano 385) When old myths fall out of favor, new ones must take their place. Kelley-Romano examined 130 abduction narratives and divided them into four types of the myth – the “hero’s quest” where an abductee is selected to help the aliens and sometimes comes voluntarily, the “narrative of powerlessness” where an abductee is helplessly and callously used by the aliens (usually for breeding), the “betterment of humanity” narrative where the aliens give the abductee profound messages to bring back to the world, and the “sacred communion” narratives where the abductee gains a sense of their oneness with the universe. (Kelley-Romano) Already we can glimpse how these experiences resonate with people on a deep level.
UFO Sighters and Abductees
Keeping in mind still that “UFO” is not synonymous with flying saucer or alien spacecraft, UFO sightings are so common – one in four college students in a 2001 study had one, for example (Dewan 184) – that it’s probably impossible to draw many generalizations about the people involved. Like I said, even I’ve had one. Decades ago, sociologist Donald I. Warren examined Gallup Poll data from 1966 which suggested that 5% of the American population had seen a UFO and that they did “not differ from the nonsighters with respect to education, region of the country, age, or sex.” (Warren 599) He found a correlation between UFO sightings, belief in their extraterrestrial origin, and status inconsistency – that is, a mismatch between higher and lower markers of social status such as education, income, and ethnicity, which creates stress and cognitive dissonance. (Warren 600) Other scholars critiqued his interpretation of the data and argued that the status inconsistency and UFO sightings were more likely to both derive from the same underlying pathologies. Warren in turn pushed back, writing, “We do serious injustice to the diversity of our own society and mankind in general when we describe as ‘mental illness’ all those differences of perspective, value, and behavior that upset the status quo of middle class ‘rationality’ – particularly that of the academic elite.” (Cowgill 958)
People who claim to have been abducted by aliens are less common, however. The stereotypical alien abductee portrayed in media is an uneducated white male “redneck” who lives in the middle of nowhere and is implicitly understood to not be a credible witness. In fact, while abductees are overwhelmingly Caucasian, they tend to be more educated than the general public, and nothing unusual stands out about their gender ratio or marital statuses. Nor do they do have an unusually high rate of severe mental illness. (Kelley-Romano 390) Many of them, unlike me, don’t even want to believe, because their memories of being taken against their will, experimented on, and/or raped by aliens are sources of substantial trauma.
Bridget Brown argues that abduction narratives (which she doesn’t believe in) simultaneously make people’s lives more exciting and distract from their real-life problems or issues. “Mundane and ordinary sources of terror and suffering are, by virtue of their ordinariness, submerged in the subtexts and margins of alien abduction accounts. Abduction traumatists play a major role in overlooking those terrestrial sources of anxiety that plague their subjects in favor of the more fantastic scenarios of extraterrestrial brutalization that unfold under hypnosis.” (Brown 60) In other words, these patients would experience trauma in their lives anyway, but by attributing it to supernatural causes, they at least have cool stories to make them feel a little better.
She further argues that societal changes increase anxieties, decrease easy scapegoats, and thus increase the appeal of abduction narratives. “In a world lacking tangible oppression and identifiable enemies – first in the disappearance of the ‘evil empire’ and then in the decentralization of power in globalization – the alleged ubiquity of aliens has increased, an extraterrestrial locus of power that can indeed be held responsible for specific social issues.” (Brown 172) This is similar to the thinking behind conspiracy theories in general, which often seeks comfort by finding a powerful person or organization to blame for problems more likely caused by a complex web of factors. Those in positions of privilege tend to fear globalization and social change the most, which could help to explain why most abductees are white Americans.
People who claim to have been abducted by aliens are less common, however. The stereotypical alien abductee portrayed in media is an uneducated white male “redneck” who lives in the middle of nowhere and is implicitly understood to not be a credible witness. In fact, while abductees are overwhelmingly Caucasian, they tend to be more educated than the general public, and nothing unusual stands out about their gender ratio or marital statuses. Nor do they do have an unusually high rate of severe mental illness. (Kelley-Romano 390) Many of them, unlike me, don’t even want to believe, because their memories of being taken against their will, experimented on, and/or raped by aliens are sources of substantial trauma.
Bridget Brown argues that abduction narratives (which she doesn’t believe in) simultaneously make people’s lives more exciting and distract from their real-life problems or issues. “Mundane and ordinary sources of terror and suffering are, by virtue of their ordinariness, submerged in the subtexts and margins of alien abduction accounts. Abduction traumatists play a major role in overlooking those terrestrial sources of anxiety that plague their subjects in favor of the more fantastic scenarios of extraterrestrial brutalization that unfold under hypnosis.” (Brown 60) In other words, these patients would experience trauma in their lives anyway, but by attributing it to supernatural causes, they at least have cool stories to make them feel a little better.
She further argues that societal changes increase anxieties, decrease easy scapegoats, and thus increase the appeal of abduction narratives. “In a world lacking tangible oppression and identifiable enemies – first in the disappearance of the ‘evil empire’ and then in the decentralization of power in globalization – the alleged ubiquity of aliens has increased, an extraterrestrial locus of power that can indeed be held responsible for specific social issues.” (Brown 172) This is similar to the thinking behind conspiracy theories in general, which often seeks comfort by finding a powerful person or organization to blame for problems more likely caused by a complex web of factors. Those in positions of privilege tend to fear globalization and social change the most, which could help to explain why most abductees are white Americans.
Magic for a New Age
Although all systematic attempts to categorize the relationships between different forms of folklore have left something to be desired, it’s still a no-brainer that folklore doesn’t arise in a vacuum. Scholars have long failed to appreciate “the phenomenological continuities between UFO-related experiences and older folklore traditions.” (Rojcewicz 157) Alien folklore more than likely has some roots in older forms of folklore, and the motifs that have carried over may shed light on why it appeals to people.
In Newfoundland in the early 1980s folklorist David Hufford conducted a survey of hearsay and personal experiences with the “Old Hag,” a frightening apparition that allegedly appeared in people’s bedrooms at night, often paralyzing them in the process. Although open-minded about the stories’ empirical truth, he noted that some elements of them could be explained by psychological phenomena such as night terrors (“spontaneous awakenings from NREM sleep”), sleep paralysis (“a period of inability to perform voluntary movements, either when falling asleep or when awakening, accompanied by conscious awareness”), and hypnagogic hallucinations (“simply hallucinations that occur just before [or upon awakening from] sleep”). (Hufford 122) He noted the similar motifs in UFO and abduction accounts collected by John Keel, a topic he felt deserving of more attention by folklorists, and suggested that the Old Hag was being “assimilated… to UFO beliefs.” (Hufford 234)
Folklorist Tok Thompson has also drawn a direct comparison, noting that “green skin has come to be a distinct marker of other-than-human identity. From green trolls to green elves, witches, and Martians, green skin color has been a special motif in thinking about what is to be other-than-fully-human, with a long history in Western discourse.” (Thompson 135) I don’t know why green became the motif when it’s not the only color outside the range of human skin tones, but its continuity through the ages is apparently why we think of aliens as “little green men,” not little blue men, little orange men, or whatever (even though the iconic alien is more often grey).
Largely because of the early inconsistencies in description, UFO researchers in France and England posit a connection between UFO stories and fairy encounters and reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis entirely. (Bader 82) American UFO researchers have been reluctant to do the same, but Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard has explored this connection quite a bit. Fairies and other supernatural beings were often purported to abduct people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They seem to have stopped doing that sometime before the aliens started. The latter’s home planet(s) which abductees are sometimes privileged to visit, or the interiors of the spaceships themselves, are analogous to “an otherworld where gods, demons, fairies, spirits of the dead, or other mysterious beings dwell.” (Bullard 159) The large heads and eyes of the iconic aliens resemble those of Celtic fairies and Germanic dwarves, and they often float as well, in addition to other extraordinary abilities – but all is not what it seems:
In Newfoundland in the early 1980s folklorist David Hufford conducted a survey of hearsay and personal experiences with the “Old Hag,” a frightening apparition that allegedly appeared in people’s bedrooms at night, often paralyzing them in the process. Although open-minded about the stories’ empirical truth, he noted that some elements of them could be explained by psychological phenomena such as night terrors (“spontaneous awakenings from NREM sleep”), sleep paralysis (“a period of inability to perform voluntary movements, either when falling asleep or when awakening, accompanied by conscious awareness”), and hypnagogic hallucinations (“simply hallucinations that occur just before [or upon awakening from] sleep”). (Hufford 122) He noted the similar motifs in UFO and abduction accounts collected by John Keel, a topic he felt deserving of more attention by folklorists, and suggested that the Old Hag was being “assimilated… to UFO beliefs.” (Hufford 234)
Folklorist Tok Thompson has also drawn a direct comparison, noting that “green skin has come to be a distinct marker of other-than-human identity. From green trolls to green elves, witches, and Martians, green skin color has been a special motif in thinking about what is to be other-than-fully-human, with a long history in Western discourse.” (Thompson 135) I don’t know why green became the motif when it’s not the only color outside the range of human skin tones, but its continuity through the ages is apparently why we think of aliens as “little green men,” not little blue men, little orange men, or whatever (even though the iconic alien is more often grey).
Largely because of the early inconsistencies in description, UFO researchers in France and England posit a connection between UFO stories and fairy encounters and reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis entirely. (Bader 82) American UFO researchers have been reluctant to do the same, but Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard has explored this connection quite a bit. Fairies and other supernatural beings were often purported to abduct people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They seem to have stopped doing that sometime before the aliens started. The latter’s home planet(s) which abductees are sometimes privileged to visit, or the interiors of the spaceships themselves, are analogous to “an otherworld where gods, demons, fairies, spirits of the dead, or other mysterious beings dwell.” (Bullard 159) The large heads and eyes of the iconic aliens resemble those of Celtic fairies and Germanic dwarves, and they often float as well, in addition to other extraordinary abilities – but all is not what it seems:
Even the best fairy magic has definite limits. It often depends more on trickery and illusion than real power over humans or the natural world, as when fairies animate a stock to appear like the human they have stolen or give rich and splendid gifts that prove to be leaves and ordure once the magical spell breaks. Without a magical veil even the beautiful fairyland may be a squalid and ugly place, no better off than the desolate otherworld abductees describe. The aliens of abduction stories possess an advanced science and technology with many attributes of magic, but here too a fallibility shows through when the beings instruct witnesses to forget but they remember anyway, or more generally, when the superscience of the aliens proves little advanced over our actual capabilities and on a par with our fictional anticipations. Like fairies, aliens depend on deception as a key tool in their bag of tricks." (Bullard 160)
Fairies and aliens alike typically observe “a strict code of etiquette” toward their human captives that fails to entirely mask “an underlying indifference or even cruelty.” (Bullard 160) In both cases, the outcome is sometimes beneficial for the abductee and sometimes traumatic, but usually disorienting either way. Documentation from the pre-alien era is obviously sparser, but based on David Hufford’s research on the Old Hag (a similar supernatural myth that lasted longer) I think it’s safe to assume that fairy abductions were as real to the abductees as alien abductions are now.
It’s not just the aliens themselves that may have evolved from older folklore. So-called men in black have lost much of their intimidation factor nowadays, as most people associate them with a comedic movie franchise in which they’re just normal people protecting Earth. Yet when three of them allegedly visited science fiction and horror enthusiast Alfred K. Bender in 1953, he became frightened and ceased all of his amateur UFO investigations. (Rojcewicz 149-50) Several others since then have reported similar visitations by strange men in black suits who warned them against sharing or discussing UFO sightings. These men often walk and/or speak strangely, as if drunk or not entirely human. Shockingly enough, they may have their origins in older accounts of visitations by the devil himself, who has been described as having black skin and some kind of deformity. (I don’t think this blackness is meant to have racial connotations, because these accounts go back to the 11th century, long before modern anti-Black prejudice, and sometimes the black-skinned devil appears as a monster and not human at all.) (Rojcewicz 153)
It’s not just the aliens themselves that may have evolved from older folklore. So-called men in black have lost much of their intimidation factor nowadays, as most people associate them with a comedic movie franchise in which they’re just normal people protecting Earth. Yet when three of them allegedly visited science fiction and horror enthusiast Alfred K. Bender in 1953, he became frightened and ceased all of his amateur UFO investigations. (Rojcewicz 149-50) Several others since then have reported similar visitations by strange men in black suits who warned them against sharing or discussing UFO sightings. These men often walk and/or speak strangely, as if drunk or not entirely human. Shockingly enough, they may have their origins in older accounts of visitations by the devil himself, who has been described as having black skin and some kind of deformity. (I don’t think this blackness is meant to have racial connotations, because these accounts go back to the 11th century, long before modern anti-Black prejudice, and sometimes the black-skinned devil appears as a monster and not human at all.) (Rojcewicz 153)
Religion for a New Age
There’s something inherently spiritual about outer space. One can hardly contemplate stars, planets, and galaxies without recognizing one’s insignificance next to the scope and grandeur of the universe. This has been ever truer since the mid-twentieth century when humanity started sending satellites, probes, and astronauts into space itself. Bridget Brown observes, “The space race also offered another forum, more mainstream than contactee and occult cultures, in which the analogy between space and heaven, and by extension of space travelers with gods, was exploited, and the lines between fantasy and reality, religion and science further blurred, to varying ends. Just the possibility of space flight prompted speculation about what revelations would result from the human ability to assume a previously divine perspective.” (Brown 150)
The theology of many Eastern religions is not affected much by these issues, but the Western world where most UFO sightings and abduction narratives are centered has a Christian cultural milieu. Depending on which Christians you ask, the vastness of space may either affirm God’s glory or threaten the supposed special place of Earth and its inhabitants in His creation. The existence of other inhabited worlds could explain why God made space so big, but this possibility may also be seen as a theological threat, because the Bible (usually thought to be the totality of God’s Word) makes no explicit mention of them. Do extraterrestrials worship the same God? Did Jesus die for them too? Christian anxiety over inexplicable UFO phenomena was manifest as early as 1947 in the Buchanan Brothers’ song “(You Got to Pray to the Lord) When You See Those Flying Saucers”. (Van Wagenen 108) Yes, this song is as old as the term “flying saucer” itself.
My own denomination, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has no such qualms. I have been in multiple Institute of Religion classes and attended an exhibit at the Idaho Falls Temple Visitors’ Center where photographs of stars, nebulae, and galaxies were shown off to affirm God’s glory. Latter-day Saint scriptures teach that God occupies physical space on a planet somewhere and that he has created “worlds without number” inhabited by intelligent life. This doesn’t necessarily translate into belief in alien folklore, however – many, perhaps most, Latter-day Saints would assume that because we’re created in the image of God, the people on other worlds must likewise be created in the image of God and look very similar to us. In its early years in the nineteenth century, Saints interpreted strange celestial phenomena as signs of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ, until the prophet Joseph Smith discouraged such speculation to distance the Church from the sign-seeking of William Miller’s Adventist movement. (Van Wagenen 99, 105) During the UFO craze of the 1970s, church magazine articles referenced the phenomenon to grab attention before segueing into more serious religious topics, but stopped short of claiming an explanation for UFOs themselves. (Van Wagenen 112-15)
So-called “UFO religions” like the Unarius Academy of Science, the Raelian movement, the infamous Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, and the Church of Scientology (by far the most successful) have gone a step further and made aliens the center of their theology. This step was a surprisingly intuitive and perhaps inevitable one. Religion researcher Benjamin E. Zeller explains:
The theology of many Eastern religions is not affected much by these issues, but the Western world where most UFO sightings and abduction narratives are centered has a Christian cultural milieu. Depending on which Christians you ask, the vastness of space may either affirm God’s glory or threaten the supposed special place of Earth and its inhabitants in His creation. The existence of other inhabited worlds could explain why God made space so big, but this possibility may also be seen as a theological threat, because the Bible (usually thought to be the totality of God’s Word) makes no explicit mention of them. Do extraterrestrials worship the same God? Did Jesus die for them too? Christian anxiety over inexplicable UFO phenomena was manifest as early as 1947 in the Buchanan Brothers’ song “(You Got to Pray to the Lord) When You See Those Flying Saucers”. (Van Wagenen 108) Yes, this song is as old as the term “flying saucer” itself.
My own denomination, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has no such qualms. I have been in multiple Institute of Religion classes and attended an exhibit at the Idaho Falls Temple Visitors’ Center where photographs of stars, nebulae, and galaxies were shown off to affirm God’s glory. Latter-day Saint scriptures teach that God occupies physical space on a planet somewhere and that he has created “worlds without number” inhabited by intelligent life. This doesn’t necessarily translate into belief in alien folklore, however – many, perhaps most, Latter-day Saints would assume that because we’re created in the image of God, the people on other worlds must likewise be created in the image of God and look very similar to us. In its early years in the nineteenth century, Saints interpreted strange celestial phenomena as signs of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ, until the prophet Joseph Smith discouraged such speculation to distance the Church from the sign-seeking of William Miller’s Adventist movement. (Van Wagenen 99, 105) During the UFO craze of the 1970s, church magazine articles referenced the phenomenon to grab attention before segueing into more serious religious topics, but stopped short of claiming an explanation for UFOs themselves. (Van Wagenen 112-15)
So-called “UFO religions” like the Unarius Academy of Science, the Raelian movement, the infamous Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, and the Church of Scientology (by far the most successful) have gone a step further and made aliens the center of their theology. This step was a surprisingly intuitive and perhaps inevitable one. Religion researcher Benjamin E. Zeller explains:
Most religious individuals believe in a heaven, superhuman angels and demons, and a universe of existence beyond normal human comprehension. People who believe in the existence of UFOs and their visitation of Earth similarly insist on the existence of life in the heavens, often in the form of powerful superhuman ETs, either good (angelic) or bad (demonic), and a cosmos filled with forces beyond humanity’s currently limited comprehension. Both religious people and believers in UFOs make specific postulations about the nature of humanity and its relation to the broader universe. UFO religions combine these two sorts of analogous belief systems, merging ideas about UFOs and ETs into religious frameworks that answer questions about myth, ritual, purpose, and salvation, as well as the nature of life on other planets and visitations by ETs." (Zeller 666)
No UFO religion has gone mainstream yet – even the Church of Scientology, with thousands and perhaps millions of members worldwide, is widely regarded with suspicion and derision. For some people, however, alien myths provide a satisfying alternative to more traditional religious myths. They accommodate the size of the universe. They are more ostensibly “scientific” than gods and angels and thus fit for a more secular age. They have even found some mainstream appeal in a popular 1975 Christmas song, Chris De Burgh’s “A Spaceman Came Travelling,” which recasts the star over Bethlehem as a hovering spacecraft, and the angel who addresses the shepherds as the titular spaceman. Despite its unorthodox subject matter, it’s treated as a legitimate Christmas song. It just works.
Conclusion
When people see strange lights in the sky or have a nighttime encounter they can’t explain, their interpretation and recall of the event are shaped both by prior knowledge and by what they may learn from subsequent research. “During an experience, a process of revision in light of the person’s beliefs and expectations occurs immediately, if not simultaneously with the experience. Once the memory is encoded, subsequent recalling acts as a reconstruction that involves the affective (emotional) states and social circumstances (e.g., campfire story) of the rememberer.” (Dewan 188) The rise of abduction accounts in the 1960s was preceded by similar motifs in the science fiction movies of the 1950s (Bader 164), and by this point, a feedback loop exists between alien folklore and mainstream science fiction like The X-Files that both draws on it for inspiration and spreads it to a still wider audience. (Luckhurst 30)
Generations ago, most people hadn’t grasped the concept of a spaceship or the possibility of life on other worlds, so they couldn’t interpret their experiences or memories in that context. But in today’s world, people often see it as the most viable option. “If they lack a belief system able to accommodate the experience, they may embrace the extraterrestrial interpretation when they learn of it from ufologists or popular literature, perhaps not so much because of firm conviction as because this interpretation gives them words to express the ineffable and concepts to grasp the incomprehensible.” (Bullard 152)
Space does not permit me to discuss all of the hypotheses and intriguing information I’ve come across, but I believe I have a good idea of why alien folklore has stuck around. In a strange way, UFOs and their occupants – however terrifying they are to some, however laughable to others – help people to find sense and meaning in a changing world and a vast universe as older paradigms like magic and religion lose much of their influence. If aliens ever fall out of favor like fairies and witches did, something else will have to take their place. Only a far more seasoned folklorist than me could begin to guess what that may be.
Generations ago, most people hadn’t grasped the concept of a spaceship or the possibility of life on other worlds, so they couldn’t interpret their experiences or memories in that context. But in today’s world, people often see it as the most viable option. “If they lack a belief system able to accommodate the experience, they may embrace the extraterrestrial interpretation when they learn of it from ufologists or popular literature, perhaps not so much because of firm conviction as because this interpretation gives them words to express the ineffable and concepts to grasp the incomprehensible.” (Bullard 152)
Space does not permit me to discuss all of the hypotheses and intriguing information I’ve come across, but I believe I have a good idea of why alien folklore has stuck around. In a strange way, UFOs and their occupants – however terrifying they are to some, however laughable to others – help people to find sense and meaning in a changing world and a vast universe as older paradigms like magic and religion lose much of their influence. If aliens ever fall out of favor like fairies and witches did, something else will have to take their place. Only a far more seasoned folklorist than me could begin to guess what that may be.
Bibliography
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Hufford, David. The Terror That Comes in The Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Kelley-Romano, Stephanie. “Mythmaking in Alien Abduction Narratives.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3, Aug. 2006, pp. 383–406., https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370600878545.
Luckhurst, Roger. “The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, Mar. 1998, pp. 29–52.
Rojcewicz, Peter M. “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition: Analogues with the Traditional Devil Hypothesis.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, no. 396, 1987, pp. 148–160., doi:10.2307/540919.
Thompson, Tok. “New Myths for Modern Times: Changing Ontologies and the Green-Skinned Other.” Posthuman Folklore, by Tok Thompson, University Press of Mississippi, 2019, pp. 133–144.
Van Wagenen, Michael Scott. “Singular Phenomena: The Evolving Mormon Interpretation of Unidentified Flying Objects.” Between Pulpit and Pew: the Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore, by W. Paul Reeve and Michael Van Wagenen, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp. 97–124.
Warren, Donald I. “Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings.” Science, vol. 170, no. 3958, 6 Nov. 1970, pp. 599–603., doi:10.1126/science.170.3958.599.
Zeller, Benjamin E. “At the Nexus of Science and Religion: UFO Religions.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 11, 2011, pp. 666–674., doi:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00313.x.
