High Strange on the High Desert

by Anthony DellaFlora

I'd like to claim right here in the pages of Lies that I was the first one to come up with the idea that the fascination with UFOs has become this century's new religion‹replacing acid, cybersex and Shaun Cassidy. But more eminent writers than I explored this avenue before I was old enough to walk across the street. Still, I know to steal a good idea when I see one, and the concept that UFOs are a vehicle for spiritual transcendence is one of those worth stuffing down the front of my jeans and walking out with. To quote Dr. Jacques Vallee in his 1988 book Dimensions: "I think the stage is set for the appearance of new faiths, centered on the UFO belief. To a greater degree than all the phenomenon that modern science is confronting, the UFO can inspire awe, the sense of the smallness of man, and an idea of the possibility of contact with the cosmic."
Whether you take UFOs as a literal phenomenon or a case of mass hallucinations, psychotronically induced delusions or folklore, you can't escape the fact that the UFO represents something to the collective consciousness. As psychologist Carl Jung said in his groundbreaking study "Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky," even the usual disk-shape of UFOs lends itself to a religious or metaphysical interpretation. Jung said the circular shape called forth a connection to the mandala, which comes from the Sanskrit for "circle," a psychological symbol for totality.
"If the round shining objects that appear in the sky can be regarded as visions, we can hardly avoid interpreting them as archetypal images," Jung wrote. "Anyone with the requisite historical and psychological knowledge knows that circular symbols have played an important role in every age; in our own sphere of culture, for instance, they were not only soul symbols but 'God images'...God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence is a totality symbol par excellence, something round, complete, and perfect." (Of course, the same could be said about new aluminum trashcan lids.)
Later in the book, Jung contends that a spiritual hunger, which we are no doubt experiencing as a population today‹I would point out the craze for deluxe sets of Tarot cards‹will be fed at a psychic level, as borne out in the tales of religious ascetics. "Just as a physical hunger is sated, at least metaphorically, by the sight of a marvelous meal, so the hunger of the soul is sated by the vision of numinous images." Yes, I had to look up "numinous." It means indicating the presence or influence of a god. As for the slightly less frequent sightings of cigar-shaped craft, well, sometimes a cigar-shaped UFO is just a cigar-shaped UFO.
Taking the concept of UFOs into the New Age, we find it has come full circle as Vallee predicted. UFOs are not only a religion. They're bringing us spirituality in the literal sense. People around the world claim to have channeled sacred information from space aliens. These entities typically wish to help us prevent the destruction of the planet and raise the overall level of consciousness of folks here on earth. They are an essentially benign group‹ the aliens, that is‹who wish us only the best.
We've noticed some other connections between ufology and theology. Most religions have scriptures or holy texts, for example. You know the usual suspects: the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching, the Tao of Pooh. In the world of UFOs, the texts have such titles as "Project Bluebook," the "Condon Report," the "MJ-12 Papers," "Grudge 13," or the "Bennewitz Papers." Other scriptures come in the form of declassified government documents that, depending on where you stand, either prove or disprove the existence of UFOs. As with all other such scriptures, the experts and the amateurs alike pore over them to glean a bit of indisputable knowledge.
The debates rage endlessly in books, magazines, journals, on radio programs, television shows and on the Internet. Every bit of information is subject to a rigorous going over, from the actual subject matter to the source of the material. As with even the most divinely inspired of texts, it's all subject to interpretation.
Did I mention that those most dedicated to the UFO cause are called "True Believers?" The True Believers represent those who have made the leap of faith, usually influenced by a combination of some profound personal experience, study of the aforementioned texts, manifestation of some deep-seated psychological problems or thoughts of financial gain. Like the term "liberal," it has taken on a nasty, derisive tone. In general, to call one a "True Believer" these days is to equate one with a car-bombing Islamic terrorist lured to his death by promises of virgin brides in heaven. A sucker, in other words. (We pause for a political correctness break here. Yes, I know that Islamic countries are not the only ones who produce terrorists as a cash crop. It's just another religious metaphor. I'll get to the Spanish Inquisition later, okay?) As with all slogan-based approaches to understanding, the nuances can get lost. Let me say I have interviewed men and women who have described profound, often traumatic, experiences with UFOs or aliens. They sincerely believe them. Their wardrobes do not consist of fuzzy slippers and drab green gowns that open at the back. They don't all reside in trailer parks.
When skeptics use the term "True Believers," what they really mean are the paranoid loons who seem willing to believe any sales pitch. To TBs, anything uttered, written or filmed is proof of extraterrestrials, and everything else is a government cover-up. They are the alcoholic uncles of UFOdom who end up under the dinner table every Thanksgiving. But just as it's the chronic gamblers who keep the casinos in business, it's the TBs who are tolerated to keep the wheels of commerce oiled.
There are also the "converts"‹those who have seriously studied the literature, the reports, viewed the fuzzy videos, listened to Art Bell's "Dreamland" radio show, had off-the-record conversations with ex-intelligence types, and maybe even seen an unexplained light one night from their back porch. They've approached the subject as scientifically as one can a very non-scientific phenomenon and they've made the decision to believe. For them, the discussion of UFOs has become the new "hot-stove league," to borrow a concept from baseball, which was a religion for awhile, until it was also corrupted by money.
At the other end of this spectrum are the infidels, the "True Non-Believers," who are often as fanatical and rigid as their TB counterparts. They generally don't like to hear this, because they are often men and women of science and rationality. They proclaim their fear for the general loss of critical thinking skills that they believe goes hand in hand with belief in UFOs. If you believe in UFOs, you obviously are incapable of intelligent thought, goes one warped version of this. They smugly dismiss all reports as hoaxes, hallucinations or the planet Venus and all reportees as deranged liars. It's not exactly science, and it does make you wonder why they spend so much time messing with something they don't believe in. All we need is someone else saving us from ourselves.
In the middle, are thousands of folks just looking for answers‹a wide cross-section of people who claim to have seen weird lights or been abducted and forced to undergo medical treatments worse than you get through an HMO.
For everyone else downwind from the TNB's, half the fun of UFOs is talking about UFOs, watching for them, reading about them and buying UFO paraphernalia. The point being that ritual is an essential part of any religion. "This is simply what humans do. Humans like rituals," says Glenn Campbell, expert on the top secret Area 51 in Nevada, and not a former country-western singer. "They like to be able to go some place. They like to be able to buy something and go through some ritual that makes them feel that they've done something. The ritual here in Nevada is to sit in your car all night and look for UFOs at this sort of sacred site along the highway. Roswell is no different. People want to feel in touch with Roswell. They buy things...and they go home satisfied.
"If you can take a tour to some place that someone claims is a crash site, well, you feel that you've done something. This is simply the way humans respond to the unknown. It's not something to be reviled. It's just the way that humans are."
Speaking of crash sites, that brings up the key point of this screed. I would argue that if that if UFOs are the new religion, then New Mexico is the Holy Land.
The modern era of UFOs, the New Testament portion if you will, didn't technically start in New Mexico. It began with the sighting of nine "flying saucers" by pilot Kenneth Arnold while on a flight from Chehalis, Washington to Yakima. That was June 24, 1947. It didn't take long for New Mexico to join in the festivities.
Just a couple of weeks later, on July 8, as word was racing across Associated Press wires, the stunning headline "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer" appeared in the afternoon edition of the Roswell Daily Record above a story about local rancher "Mac" Brazel discovering such a craft on the ranch near Corona where he worked. The excitement was ostensibly quashed a day later when the military announced that Brazel had done nothing more than find the remnants of a weather balloon. But as it turned out, it was just the beginning for New Mexico as a haven for UFO-related events.
Just a year later, scientists were called in to investigate the strange "green fireballs" seen over the top secret labs at Los Alamos and Sandia. That same year, a craft full of Venusians crashed near Aztec, NM, or so the hoax goes. In 1949, engineer Charles Moore of Socorro became one of the first legitimate scientists to report viewing an unidentified flying object‹ironic since the Project Mogul spy balloon project he was involved in is supposedly the key to debunking the Roswell Incident. That same year, Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, observed six to eight "windowlike" rectangles of light move across the sky, while skywatching from the yard of his Las Cruces home. In 1950, hundreds of Farmington residents, including the mayor, witnessed a UFO "armada," that hung around for three days.
In 1964, Socorro city police officer Lonnie Zamora heard an explosion while chasing a speeder and drove to a vacant lot off the main drag where he saw an egg-shaped craft with two small beings outside of it. When Zamora got closer to the scene, the object emitted a roar and rose into the air, disappearing at high speed within moments. Zamora's sighting has neither been discredited or solved.
Delving into stuff even stranger, military officials supposedly held a pre-arranged meeting with aliens at Holloman Air Force Base, possibly the day after the Zamora event. In 1980, guards at Kirtland Air Force Base [Albuquerque, NM] filed reports of encounters with UFOs near where atom bombs were stored in the mountains. Even the Nicolas Roeg film with David Bowie, "The Man Who Fell to Earth," was supposedly inspired by an incident near Yeso, NM.
In the late '70s, the book The Roswell Incident resurrected interest in the events that occurred more than three decades earlier. It was then that the stories of crashed saucers, alien bodies, strange metals, intimidated witnesses and government coverups surfaced. Another way of looking at it is that it launched the modern era of tourism in Roswell.
It was also about this time that Albuquerque scientist Paul Bennewitz began circulating tales of a secret underground base housing evil space aliens near Dulce, NM. The area had already been a hotbed for sightings of "unconventional aircraft," lending a slight aura of credibility to the Bennewitz story. That's not all that was going on up in the scenic seat of the Jicarilla Apache nation. Mysterious cattle mutilations, sometimes accompanied by sightings of odd lights and/or aircraft, plagued ranchers in the area. The term "cored-out rectum," for better or worse, soon became part of the UFO lexicon.
This litany in itself probably substantiates the state's claim to being UFO Central. But for each of these famous incidents, there are a score that don't get publicized. Stories abound, for example, that living aliens have been kept and studied at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Numerous rumors have also surfaced about a network of tunnels beneath the New Mexico desert housing aliens and humans or some combination thereof. At least two people trained in the Pentagon's "remote viewing" techniques claims there is a colony of Martians living in New Mexico.
In fact, nearly every facet of the UFO story has been recorded in the Land of Enchantment. But why New Mexico? Even before the first atomic bomb exploded at Trinity Site in 1945, there had been reports of UFOs over New Mexico‹and the rest of the world, for that matter. But the detonation of the Big One may have been the event that caught the almond-shaped eyes of intelligent beings from other galaxies. The experts and the amateurs all seem to agree that if there is any truth to the UFO phenomenon, the combination of wide open spaces, sparse population and top secret scientific and military research facilities would be a draw for intergalactic tourists.
"New Mexico would be a logical place if you were an alien explorer interested in the intelligent species on this planet and what it was up to. New Mexico would be a logical place for you to come and check out, because that's where the high end of the scientific, and particularly defense-oriented type scientific activity was going on," notes Placitas UFO researcher Karl Pflock.
Skeptic Dave Thomas takes a slightly more jaundiced view of why UFO stories refuse to cease and desist in New Mexico. Speaking to the Roswell Incident specifically, he explains the "ka-ching" factor. "Here's one book, here's another book. There's the movie. It's real moneymaker. I'm not gonna tell the people of Roswell, 'Hey you guys, we figured this out. Don't have a big convention. Don't get thousands of tourists to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. You don't need that.' They'd probably laugh at me. They like the exposure. They like the money."
University of New Mexico professor Peter White believes like Jung and Vallee and others that UFOs don't have to physically exist for people to believe in them. From his perspective, New Mexico is fertile ground for "urban folk tales."
"I believe the urban folk legend is a reflection of the tension that results from the conflict between an agrarian way of life, an old-fashioned way of life, which is very much threatened by a modern, technological way of life," White says. "It's this juxtaposition of the old society in transition towards a new, modern society that creates a great deal of anxiety and people work out their anxieties by telling stories and tales.
"The ironic fact is that the very old-fashioned way of life, that very rural and agrarian way of life, is set right up against the most modern, technologically advanced laboratories in the world. So the juxtaposition of the nuclear world of Los Alamos, the world of fission and fusion and all kinds of advanced systems and ways of thinking, butts right up against ranchers, and this creates a special kind of tension."
White believes the religious history of New Mexico and the stories of UFOs are no accident. "I think that if belief in UFOs and aliens is a search for spiritual meaning and significance, or spiritual reality. It's very typical and it's very natural logical that that would happen in New Mexico, because the history of New Mexico has been this search for spiritual values. This state is the state that has processions to Chimayo, that has the appearance of sacred tortillas, the image of Christ on a tree in the sap, the picture of Christ reflected in a mirror in a house in Belen. The spiritual world is right on the surface in New Mexico. So it's natural that the alien world would be right on the surface in New Mexico."
Whether you buy the religious connection or not, it's hard to disagree with Texas-based UFO researcher Tom Adams, who devoted an entire publication to UFO incidents in the Land of Enchantment. "Indeed, UFOs could almost be said to be a part of everyday life in New Mexico. Our contention is that there is a special relationship between the UFO phenomenon and the state of New Mexico," he states in Pardon Our Intrusion.
"Although New Mexico's per capita percentage of UFO reports may stand out, other states have certainly provided the stage for a great number of UFO events, some as potentially important as anything that happened in New Mexico," Adams wrote. "But our position continues to be that a major key or keys to the solution of the UFO mystery may have existed‹and may still exist‹in New Mexico."
Well, amen. It's nice to be number one in something besides drunk driving deaths and child-molesting priests.

Anthony DellaFlora is a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. He is working on a book and video titled High Strange New Mexico, a look at the history and subculture of UFOs in New Mexico. No, he has never seen a UFO.

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