© 1999, by Thomas Canty

     "Is it not enough for one of us to see an Angel, in order for all of us to believe in the other Angels?" -- Paracelus

1.
     1987 was a watershed year in UFO studies. Communion: A True Story was published in the spring, and for the first time, an abduction narrative purporting to be true became a mainstream bestseller. Though its author, Whitley Strieber, was quickly the center of controversy regarding the authenticity of his account and the nature of his motives (largely because he had been paid a million dollar advance), the field has never been quite the same. Whether or not the narrative was true, it introduced the alien abduction narrative as a major theme in popular culture -- something that earlier accounts had never quite been able to accomplish.

     Strieber, who was a well-established writer of fantasy fiction before the publication of Communion with works like The Wolfen and The Hunger to his credit, suffered both the positive and negative effects of his celebrity with a very interesting progression of follow-ups to Communion. After a long withdrawal from the public eye, he returned with a more comprehensive story that built on the rather literal-minded rhetoric of Communion. What he did was to draw on concepts that had been introduced twenty years earlier by the French UFOlogist, Jacques Vallee in Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds.

     In 1992, Strieber wrote the foreword to Kenneth Ring's The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large. By then, he was already referring to his "alien abduction" in quotation marks and suggesting (though somewhat implicitly) that the abduction phenomenon was mental and not physical. But Strieber seems to have remained rather ambivalent, because in 1994, in an essay called "Communion: Ten Years After," he posed the following questions: "Given that the visitors are physical, what are they? Aliens? Some sort of new step in evolution? Beings from another reality? Demons or angels?" These are all questions that had been circulating in academic UFOlogy for some time; Strieber reflected the debate on-and-off, from divergent points of view.

     If Communion had been a work of fiction brilliantly and deceptively marketed as fact, then Strieber had been forced to immerse himself in his subject and become the person he had purported to be. Like thousands of others, he became subject to Communion's impact on the collective consciousness. Afterwards, in his writings, he showed the kind of vacillation that is typical of people and cultures trying to deal with new phenomena that threaten to challenge the basic foundations of a cultural world view.

     Resonant narratives like Communion, particularly when they have a high truth claim, have an immediate and deep impact on culture, particularly when they are presented at receptive times like the turn of a millennium when ideas are at a point of convergence (James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy, published in 1993, is another example, though it was clearly a work of fiction). Strieber served as a transition point in UFO studies, laying a popular culture groundwork for the next generation in the discourse about aliens, and in doing so, he looped the cultural imagery back on itself. By straddling the fence on the issue of whether aliens were physical or not, and then by putting aliens in the same discourse as angels, he took two symbols that seem at first to be in radically opposite categories, and he pointed at ways in which they were actually of common origins, if not identical. Valee and other scientists had tried to accomplish this in the '60s without success, but once Strieber was on the scene, abduction narratives and angelic encounters seemed to be everywhere.

     To give an example of how quickly the imagination responds to resonant images, let me digress for a moment and give you an example from my own experience. This is how I was affected by these convergent symbols only a year after the publication of Communion.

2.
     It was the summer of 1988. I was in a timeshare house a few miles from Yosemite Valley with three other people, including my wife, Anne. We had driven for several hours to get there, and we were tired, so we went to bed around midnight (which is generally early for us). I fell quite quickly into a deep sleep, and I woke up in the early morning with my mind spinning, so full of dream imagery that I didn't quite know where to begin thinking about it. At around seven, while the others were still asleep, I quickly wrote down my dream accounts before the images could dissolve (I had been practicing lucid dreaming for the past three years, so my techniques for recall were very good). I jotted only notes for the six or seven other dreams, but for the one that included the abduction, I did a more thorough narrative, from which I quote below:

     Trying to hide in the rubble of a factory building. Water around me, a waterfall in the distance with an old mill building above it. Lots of red brick. In the night horizon is the skyline of the city. Building that looks vaguely like the top of the Seattle Space Needle, but squat. A revolving restaurant?

     Other people also around, hiding. Occasionally, a beam of blue-white light will shoot down from the night sky and carry people up. I have to change position and go out into the open. Hit by a beam. I'm flying, disoriented, changed into something formless. Then I'm in a hangar-like place inside a spaceship manned by lizard people. They're segregating the humans into groups -- sort of cutting them like cattle into different hallways. There's a black staff (looks like wrapped leather) at the junction of two halls, and it's telling people which way to go. Wants me to go to one place (which looks like diner booths) where I will be separated from Anne. I refuse. Tension. Some police figure about to be called, and I find a way to trick the staff.

     I end up in a place where people are being trained to go back down and introduce knowledge to the humans -- things like the true history of the planet, technical subjects, etc. Each particular discipline or category comes in a clear plastic tube with a hypodermic needle on each end. You take it out of its plastic wrapper and stick a needle in each side of your neck, injecting yourself with a blood-like substance that contains the information. It enters your memory, and then you can teach it to other humans. My tube contains history.

     At some point, people are being brainwashed or reprogrammed. I don't want to be part of the process. Find some way to enter a room that looks like a galley. They're beaming things down, and I leap through the door of what looks like a microwave oven. Spinning, disorientation, and I wake up cold, curled on cobblestones in some Canadian city. Toronto? Montreal? I'm crouched, naked, by the front fender of a police car, and I'm thinking, "Should I go to the police?" I realize they'll never believe me. Probably arrest me for vagrancy. I've managed to keep my dose of history. Get up and stumble off and a passer-by notices me. He recognizes that I've just returned from an abduction.

     The dream, as most of you will know, is a slight variation on the classic abduction narrative. There's nothing all that remarkable about it, and ironically, like Strieber's narrative or the seminal abduction narrative of Betty and Barney Hill (whose case actually initiated the field of inquiry), there's no significant image that can't be accounted for by quickly examining Science Fiction films and novels. You don't even have to go to purportedly true abduction narratives to get the appropriate imagery.

3.
     In the late '80s I was a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, and as part of my interdisciplinary social science training, I took courses designed to complement my areas of study. One of these courses was a cognitive psychology seminar taught by Charles Tart, author of the seminal work, Altered States of Consciousness. Tart, at that time, was one of the very few professional academics still seriously researching phenomena like ESP; in his class, which was actually a seminar on the works of Carlos Castaneda (taught as cognitive psychology probably to make it acceptable at the university), I focused on the topic of dreams in Castaneda's collected body of work. To make a long story short, by the following year, I was deeply immersed in a range of subjects that, until that time, I hadn't realized were closely related: lucid dreaming, out of body experience (i.e., astral projection), remote viewing, near death experience, channeling, past life regression, shamanic journeying, angelic visions, and, finally, alien abductions. It was while I was still immersed in such topics that I had my abduction dream.

     Later that summer, in another semi-lucid dream, I accidentally stumbled onto Heaven. I hadn't intended to go there, but I must have made a wrong turn somewhere, because there I was -- in the place that has become generically familiar to all of us: brightly-lit, Greek columns, an amphitheater, vividly blue sky, people in white robes. It was just short of having angels harping on their personal clouds.

     I'm not making light of this place -- the reason I describe Heaven in these clichéd images is because those are what my mind provided when I first remembered the experience. When I returned to the memory and focused more closely on the specific, concrete details, what I recalled was something much more abstract (or perhaps more concrete?). That place did not really have any spatial dimensions, nor was it inhabited by people in white robes. It was more like a sort of solar system of energy bodies circulating around a brilliant consciousness. Part of my mind was fine with this, but another part had to replace these unfamiliar details with things I conventionally associated with Heaven. (And this much to my disappointment, since I find this sort of Heaven Can Wait kind of Heaven to be entirely boring. You can see a version of it in the recent Xerox commercials if you're curious.)

     In any case, I found myself wandering around at the edge of the amphitheater where, beyond the columns, some sort of important lecture was going on. The figures in white robes were there to learn something. They were attending a seminar (probably about what it meant to be dead, or something equally predictable in this sort of scenario). I was lucid in this dream, so I was making up my mind whether to attend this lecture (which I imagined would be rather tedious given how bored the attendees looked) or whether to continue wandering around, when I was discovered by a member of Heaven's Security Force.

     It was an angel, complete with wings and some long object which I took to be the shaft of a trumpet. Suddenly I found myself unable to move. The angel descended on me, and after I was immobile, it said to me, "You do not belong here. You are not meant to hear these things yet." At that moment I looked at myself and discovered that I had no body. I was just a ball of energy. And yet I also did have a body, because the angel lifted me out of it by my heels, and it carried me up into the sky of this Heaven, which grew darker and darker by degrees. As the angel carried me up and away from Heaven, I heard The Celestial Music. I instantly knew what it was -- a single note sung by the voices of the angels. A sound so incredibly and indescribably beautiful that I woke up in tears.

     The Heaven dream is no more remarkable than my abduction dream in terms of its content. Both the images of Heaven and the divine lecture hall are commonplace and can be found in sources ranging from narratives of near-death experience to accounts of astral projection. (Strieber, I should note, has a sort of divine lecture series in his later work.) Even the theme of being escorted out of Heaven because I was not supposed to be there is quite common. What I find interesting about the dream is the fact that the entire episode was a screen memory that provided an easily-understood façade for a less-accessible subtext.

     I can explain away both dreams point-by-point if I want to be entirely skeptical, but I am wary of doing so precisely because they reflect, for me, how quickly my own mind was influenced by the convergence of angels and aliens in the collective (un)consciousness.

     When I go back and compare the two dreams, what I find is that they are far more similar than they first appear to be. The first dream is about being involuntarily taken to a place where I am supposed to acquire knowledge, but then escaping because I do not want to be part of the reptilians' project. The second dream is what Structuralists might call a parallel inversion of the first: it is about voluntarily (though accidentally) going to a place where I am not supposed to be -- a place where others are acquiring knowledge -- and then being expelled because I am not ready for the angels' project. In each case, the aliens and angels are the authority figures, but they are also working under some other, greater plan.

     When I regard the dreams critically, it makes little difference whether or not the events in them were true, just as the factuality of Communion is the least interesting question. What matters, more importantly, is the issue of meaning. What the dreams accomplished was to spell out for me, dramatically, my emotional and intellectual feelings about the issues that had been preoccupying my attention. Afterwards I had a clearer knowledge -- a visceral knowledge -- of my own attitudes towards religion and science, attitudes so full of ambivalence and contradiction that they would have been impossible to express coherently.

4.
     These days, thanks to works like Communion and their New Age spiritual counterparts, it's hard to make your way through a shopping mall without running into some prominent display of angels and aliens. The images of angels -- ranging from calendars full of Pre-Raphaelite paintings to photos of human infants doctored up with false wings to represent cherubim -- are marketed side-by-side with the latest "gray" face from The X-Files and nostalgic posters of ET, the Extraterrestrial. On television, some of the most popular shows, both fiction and purportedly factual, are devoted to these phenomena: Touched by an Angel, The X-Files, Sightings, Unsolved Mysteries. Even the fluff of Charlie's Angels is a generation past, and our time is one for the more socially conscious and responsible "Oprah's Angels."

     Although there exists an entire culture whose goal is to demonize both phenomena from a fundamentalist religious perspective, the trend these days is to synthesize aliens and angels. There are dozens of books published in the past fifteen years that address this synthesis, and they are required reading for those who want to understand the profound implications of this cultural convergence. In Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries, Zecharia Sitchin (my favorite crypto-Antiquarian) traces the connection between angels and aliens through Biblical literature and back to its sources in ancient Sumerian texts. Sitchin is probably the most credible of the independent scholars who makes a case for reading religious texts literally to get at their original meanings. In A Handbook of Angels, H.C. Moolenburgh takes a comparative look at higher realms and the creatures associated with them in various traditions around the world. In Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination, Keith Thompson gives a comprehensive overview of the UFO phenomenon and where it is headed in the cultural consciousness. In The God Hypothesis: Extraterrestrial Life and its Implications for Science and Religion, Joe Lewels addresses this difficult issue head on, and makes a fascinating case for how the phenomenon may be part of the human evolutionary process.

     My own impulse is to go back and begin by reflecting on the angel and alien narratives I know through literature and folklore. Technically, aliens are angels in that they are intermediaries; likewise, angels are aliens in that they are non-humans who come from another world thought to be "above" this one. The term "angel," which we generally take to mean "messenger," is our inheritance of a Greek translation of the Hebrew word mal'akh, whose original meaning referred to the shadow side of God.

     Every culture has well-known stories about encounters with divine or other-worldly beings. I grew up hearing the story of "The Heavenly Maiden and the Woodcutter," which is a Korean variant on the Celtic Selkie story. The story of "Thomas the Rhymer" has all the classic earmarks of an abduction narrative, including the theme of having sex with the alien. Ellen Kushner's novel of the same title dramatizes the transformation of Thomas into a man who can only tell the truth; he becomes very similar to the returned abductee whose altered consciousness inadvertently changes the lives of those around him. In American literature, we have Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," which has uncanny similarities with Strieber's body of works if you consider that it is presented as a true account found among the papers of a Diedrich Knickerbocker. "Rip Van Winkle" also comes with a simultaneous disclaimer and authentication at its conclusion, and it draws on German folklore and then combines it with local Native American trickster tales. From T'ang Dynasty China, over a thousand years ago, we have a story called "The Nang Ko Journal," in which a man learns a moral lesson about the value of all life after he is abducted by a black-clad army. He marries the king's daughter, but he eventually returns to his own world because he is lonely, and then wakes up to discover that he had been dreaming about a hive of ants. In Biblical lore, the alien/angel theme is hardly disguised. There are plenty of abductions and UFOs, including Ezekiel's wheel-within-a-wheel (which motivated Josef Blumrich, a NASA engineer, to write a book called The Spaceships of Ezekiel); there are flaming chariots and Jacob's ascent up the ladder into a UFO (in addition to his angel-wrestling). There are angelic messengers who save those about to be destroyed in divine catastrophes (including Lot and his family, who are rescued from Sodom). There are those who have seriously argued that the Star of Bethlehem was a UFO, and even Satan's temptation of Christ in the wilderness has the earmarks of an abduction (remember, Satan is Lucifer, a former archangel, who becomes the cursed reptilian). In pre-Biblical literature, there are plenty of abductions and UFOs, as well as divine creatures, in the Vedic classics like "The Mahabarata" and "The Ramayana." In Sumerian literature, the oldest recorded human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh even includes descriptions that could only be eye-witness accounts of Earth seen from varying distances in space.

     One need only look at familiar things with a slight shift in perspective. The current synthesis of aliens and angels into what I call "aliengels" is causing exactly that sort of shift, and it has profound implications for culture, whether one's worldview is scientific or religious. After all, the angels are the unstoppable folk reality that confounds those who try to control organized religions; likewise, the alien is the folkloric figure that confounds science (which, some argue, is a religion of its own).