James Hynes

My friend Roger Boylan has sent me a very cool link, to a gallery of nearly 60 classic photographs of UFOs from the Daily Telegraph, dating back (no kidding) to a photo taken in New Hampshire in 1870. Most of them, though, are grainy, blurry, unsteady snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, most of them in black and white, and if you misspent your childhood like I did, reading grubby little paperbacks about UFOs, you've probably seen most of them before.

I still want to believe, of course, but I have to say, looking at them after all these years, a lot of these old favorites look pretty fake to me now; more than one of them looks like somebody flung a hubcap or a straw hat or a pie plate into the air while somebody else snapped a picture with a Brownie or a Polaroid. Then, smirking like mad, no doubt, they mailed it to their local newspaper, which probably published it under the unironic, pre-Onion headline, "Area Man Photographs Flying Disc." This one, which turned up in most of the UFO books of my childhood, looks to me now like a clumsy double exposure.

The main response these pictures provoke in me now, in fact, is nostalgia, for that row of paperbacks by Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others whose names I don't remember any longer that occupied the bottom shelf of the bookcase over my bed, where I could reach them without having to lift my head from the pillow. I plowed through most of them more than once, provoking a good deal of eye-rolling from my very skeptical father and some flat-out disdain from my mother, who once told me I couldn't buy any more UFO books until I'd read Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I kept buying them anyway, and didn't end up reading Huck Finn until I was in my late 20s. More fool me, I know. I should (as always) have listened to my mother.

And I don't know what it is with the big British dailies this week, but yesterday I got a similar nostalgic thrill from this gallery of photos of the Loch Ness Monster in the Guardian. In this case, the nostalgia dates from later in my life, in 1982, to be exact, during my first trip to Scotland. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend, and like every other backpacker who ever lived, I was trying to walk it off in the remoter parts of the UK. In Inverness, I rented a bicycle from my youth hostel and cycled about ten miles down the side of Loch Ness on a cold, damp, overcast November day. Minus the monster, which of course I didn't see, the road alongside Loch Ness is pretty dreary, just a two-lane blacktop with a dank pine forest rising pretty much straight up a steep hillside on one side of the road, and the underachieving waves of the loch feebly slapping the stones of the shore on the other. If that wasn't depressing enough, the bike was too small for me and I was out of shape, so that by time I finally gave up and turned around, I was sore, damp, sweaty, and pissed off—and still had ten miles to go before I got back to the dank, overlit, and underheated youth hostel (where the warden, whose accent made him virtually incomprehensible, was always trying to pick a fight with me over Reagan and the Trident missile). The one virtue of the experience was that it finally transformed my sorrow and self-pity over my ex into a purgative anger, so that by time I pumped uphill into Inverness again near sundown (which is about 3 in the afternoon that time of year), it was her fault I was wet and cold, her fault my knees ached, and her fault that I cycled 20 fucking miles in the fucking rain on a fucking kiddie bike and didn't even see the fucking monster.  

Which is also probably just as well. The most famous photo in the Guardian collection, the so-called "Surgeon's Photo," which was long considered the canonical photo of Nessie, has since been definitively revealed to be a hoax; it's a toy submarine with a lizardy neck and head stuck on.

Yet I still get a pleasant chill up my spine, even knowing it's a fake, probably because it's so blurry and grainy and crude. The same goes for all those smudgy photos of UFOs: the photo that would convince all the skeptics would have to be crystal clear and detailed and taken in front of a small army of witnesses. It's the dodgy nature of the photos—their clumsiness, their uncertain provenance, their risibility—that makes them so appealingly mysterious. I don't think a clear, hi-def photo or video of a UFO or Nessie would have anything like the power of these pictures, which are like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, or something from a dream. I suspect they still move people because they aren't convincing; you have to invest them with faith in the mysterious to make them work, and after you do that, of course, it doesn't matter how silly they look: they're lodged forever in that part of your subconscious that still jumps at things half seen in the dark.

I also suspect that apart from the Fox Mulders of the world and the guys on UFO Hunters, most of us don't want the mystery of UFOs or Loch Ness or Sasquatch cleared up; they're too much fun to look at on the web, or read about as a kid, or watch half-awake from the couch on the History Channel. The day the Zeta Reticulans actually land on the White House lawn, or a plesiosaur washes up in Inverness, or a Sasquatch wanders out of the Cascades and gets hit by a semi on Interstate 5, that day, all the fun will go out of them, and the world will be a little less mysterious, and hence, a little less interesting.

I got a delicious little thrill up my spine today from this, courtesy of the Guardian website. It's a British radio interview last month with Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo astronaut, and the sixth man to walk on the moon (that we know of, ho ho). In the interview, Mitchell says that he knows there is extraterrestrial life, and that they've visited us, because he's been briefed by government officials about the truth of the Roswell incident, among other things. Of course, he also says, according to this Guardian article, that his kidney cancer was cured long-distance by a Canadian named Adam Dreamhealer. Soooo, bearing that in mind, the interview's kinda thrilling to listen to, if, like me, you're a Scully with Mulder tendencies. At the very least, the breathless, jokey incredulity of the interviewer makes it worth listening to.

Okay, got that? I e-mailed the link to, well, let's just say, a friend, because why drag him into this publically? And he asked me by return e-mail what I thought: was there seriously anything to this, or is Mitchell one of those Apollo moonwalkers who's been driven round the bend by his experience? Well, on the one hand, the guy has a Ph.D from MIT and he was fucking astronaut, okay? On the other hand, Adam Dreamhealer. Which makes it, as my late, great dad used to say, six of one, half a dozen of the other. But, just for the record, I don't believe it (though I think Mitchell does), but I wish I did.

See, there are two Jims when it comes to this subject. One is the kid who spent much of his childhood in the 60s reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as every paperback on UFOs for which he could scrape together the cash, from semi-respectable ones like The Interrupted Journey and Incident at Exeter (which my mother tolerated) to really lurid ones (which I hid from Mom), such as the book that posed the question on the back cover, "Is There a Galactic High Command?" Let's call this Jim, say, Lizard Brain Jim, because that's where he still lives, and Lizard Brain Jim really really really wants Mitchell's interview to be the first trickle through the levee of cover-up and denial, culminating with benign Zeta Reticulans shaking hands (or whatever) with President Obama on the White House lawn on the afternoon of Inauguration Day. After which, over the following weeks, they will divulge the secrets of faster-than-light travel and teleportation; cure cancer and end racism, hunger, and war; reveal whether God and the Higgs boson really exist (and if they're the same thing); and show a middle-aged midlist writer how to make a living without having to take a day job. This is the Jim who, even now, still secretly devours books about UFOs, alien abduction, crop circles, and cattle mutilations with the avidity other middle-aged guys devote to internet porn. This is the Jim who never misses an episode of UFO Hunters on the History Channel, the Jim who made a road trip to Roswell once, the Jim who actually saw a UFO once (kinda) when he was a teenager and will tell you all about it with very little prompting. Okay, usually, no prompting at all.

Then, there's Forebrain Jim, who at the same tender age as he was reading Childhood's End and Flying Saucers: Serious Business was also reading every popular physics and astronomy book he could get his hands on, especially the works of Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, and who was planning on studying astronomy in college. This is the Jim who taught himself the constellations from his parents' back yard, and eventually learned how to tell the difference between the planet Venus, a meteorite, a satellite, a jetliner, and, you know, the mothership. This is the Jim who, today, still keeps up a bit with popular physics books (and who even has an ill-informed opinion about string theory), and who knows why it's really really really unlikely, even if there are intelligent ETs, that they would cross vast reaches of interstellar space to make goofy patterns in Wiltshire wheat fields, suck the blood out of cows in Colorado, and diddle middle-class white folks in their sleep. And, since they unfortunately share the same brainpan (where they coexist like Mulder and Scully, though unfortunately without secretly liking each other), at the same moment as Lizard Brain Jim is geeking out over UFO Hunters (or the History Channel's bottomless store of cheesy international Roswells: Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc.) Forebrain Jim is rolling his eyes, sighing audibly, and often laughing out loud at the sheer, pseudoscientific silliness of the show, especially at the staggering credulity of the Hunters themselves, especially the guy in the MUFON baseball cap, who is positively eager to believe that every blinking light in the sky is an extraterrestrial roadster, that the same government that can't even lie convincingly about Iraq and Katrina could keep dead aliens at Wright-Patterson AFB secret for 60 years, and that lunchtime in the break room at Groom Lake is like the cantina scene from Star Wars.

So there you have it, my Hegelian/Reticulan dialectic. (Only one dialectic of many, of course.) Put a gun to his head, and Forebrain Jim will tell you, don't be an idiot, of course I don't believe in UFOs (even if he did see one). But bear in mind that, even with the gun to his head, Lizard Brain Jim is keeping his fingers crossed behind his back and hoping that they're really Out There, hiding behind the moon where we can't see them. Because he's thinking, just like Lady Brett in A Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"

This Just In: But wait, there's more! Bigfoot's real, too...well, maybe. At any rate, there's an article about it in yesterday's New York Times, "Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot's Body." And there's even a picture, I kid you not, of a dead bigfoot in somebody's basement freezer. Looks like a gorilla suit with some organ meat tossed in. Did I mention I sometimes watch Monsterquest, too?

Oh, Well: Turns out the two DNA samples collected from the Bigfoot in the Freezer are from a human being and an opossum. And the Bigfoot in the Freezer really is a gorilla suit with some leftovers. Sigh.

Messin' With Sasquatch: Turns out you don't want to piss off sasquatch hunters, either.

In The London Review of Books, British novelist Hilary Mantel has a review of a new compendium of the paranormal, the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained. It's not really a review, truth be told—how would one review a dictionary of UFOs, witchcraft, and telekinesis, anyway?—but it is a thoughtful and witty examination of the whole idea of the paranormal and how it functions in modern life. Here's my favorite paragraph:

In fact, if you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fayre’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief; it is just as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality. They read the story, or listen to the dead talk in a public hall; two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza. In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture, with its extensive TV spooks programming and Mind-Body-Spirit events held every weekend in sports halls up and down the country: the ineffable now smells of stale sweat and hot feet. An olla podrida of new age hogwash is served up to anyone who has a spare tenner and seems likely to part with it. We are only in the market for fun-size beliefs, unlike the US, where the aggressive fundamentalist irrationality of evangelical Christianity moves real money around, affects how children are educated, and darkens believers’ perceptions of other cultures. On the whole, we have the better part: superstition is easier to accommodate in the body politic than religion. It is less divisive: no one ever went to war about what you should chant when you see a magpie, or was burned at the stake for denying the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.

I have to mildly object that there are plenty of us in the US who are perfectly happy with fun-size beliefs. I'm one of those who doesn't really believe this stuff—not really—but who has been known to drop everything and watch three episodes in a row of The UFO Files on the History Channel. I especially love their little marathons of other countries' Roswells—Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc. There's even, as I recall, an episode about Texas's Roswell—Texas, of course, still being its own country, in spirit if not in actual legal fact anymore. And no, I haven't driven up from Austin to Stephenville to check out the sighting there. Not yet, anyway.

On the other hand, Texas is also where the Texas Education Agency's director of science lost her job because she was perceived as not being "neutral" about evolution. (No word yet on the TEA's stance on gravity and photosynthesis). So perhaps Ms. Mantel has a point.