I find myself thinking more and more these days “Whatever happened to UFOlogy?”. This enigmatic little term is what originally got me into the paranormal; as a kid I was obsessed with and slightly terrified by TV specials like Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? and anything Whitley Streiber had going on back in those days, and who could forget A Fire In The Sky? When I think back on it, as a horror movie it does little for me outside of the first half hour, but it was huge in the mid-nineties. But this is all pop culture right? It's art imitating life right? At least so the legend goes. The other day I read an article that Skeptical Enquirer posted on their facebook about the demise of Abuctology, a branch of UFOlogy I'm assuming, and suddenly it all started to make sense. The article, which can be found here: http://badufos.blogspot.com/2011/01/abductology-implodes.html is a scathing expose on the outright frauds that were the founders of abduction theory in the 80's and 90's. People like Budd Hopkins, of which I'm not proud to admit, but I've read everyone of his books about hypnotic regression and the abductee, and a couple of other jokers whom I've only heard of in passing. The history of abductology is one that started as a rather far flung, yet disturbing, theory about visitors from other dimensions or outer space actively working to abscond with unsuspecting victims to preform odd medical experiments and/or reveal some arcane truth about the universe to. And somewhere, without scientific scrutiny, it became an accepted fact by far too many people. Does this mean that some people are just stupid and gullible? Hardly, but it speaks to one of our basic fears. No one wants to be kidnapped by strange looking creatures, who's mercy we are at and violated. It flies in the face of our cultural and individualist urges. We all have unalienable rights, right? So if invasion of our personal space is one of our great fears, and persists to this day as one, how do we explain this recent obsession with ghosts and vampires and the disappearance of UFOlogy?
It shouldn't take Freud to see that people, the world over, are concerned with death. And death here really translates to a fear of the unknown (of which the previous paragraph also has some claim to). For any individual or group to claim they know what lies beyond this mortal coil (if anything) is dangerously absurd. Authors Michel Onfray and Chris Hedges have both hinted at organized religion being something akin to “death cults”, organizations concerned at times more with how grand the afterlife will be at the expense of making life on Earth more tolerable. After all, life is for the living. But my beef today isn't with religion and everlasting life in some heaven or hell, it is with the somewhat secular variation of life after death or the rejection of death all together.
If pop culture is to be used as a cultural barometer then we have a clear interest in ghosts and a spiritual afterlife. Shows like Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State, Ghost Adventures, and the like can't help but point towards this. But what do shows like the aforementioned tell us about the afterlife? That we're doomed to spend eternity making only the briefest of appearances in run -down historic sites and quaint New England homes? The answer is that these shows tell us nothing except for the fact that people are afraid of death and want to know what happens next. The life equivalent to an epilogue. But more to the point, these shows are part of an ever changing and oh-so topical fad. We are witnessing a paranormal changing of the guard. What was Betty and Barney Hill some far of decades ago are replace by Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes (of TAPS fame) to fuel our interest in the unknown, and while they're at it, why not make some money? Keep in mind I'm not suggesting that the Hill's made money off of their oft quoted and sited supposed abduction, but there are plenty in the UFO field who have. But Cold Wart hysteria has thankfully subsided in its traditional sense, UFOs and alien abduction is looking a tad long in the tooth. But there's that tricky specter of death still hanging around, and ghosts are only the start of our fixation on death. Everlasting life is the next logical step, after all, who wants to spend an eternity in a place where they died?
In the fall of 2008 I began to surf various message boards about the paranormal, simply trying to answer any UFO history questions or give skeptical advice to misguided paranormal hunters I might find. I noticed there to be several threads common to a lot of posts on these boards and that was an interest in vampires. 'Why vampires?' I thought to myself, 'Do they mean real, honest vampires, or is this a literature question?' thinking only of Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. I was hoping (and ultimately saddened) that people weren't seriously asking if vampires were real. But, oh, they were. Upon some thoroughly half-assed research I found that there was in fact a literary connection to all this, much to my delight. That is until I read said literary inspiration. 2008 was the year the series of novels Twilight were beginning to be made into film adaptations. I'd seen the preview at theaters and didn't make any connection between there being a book of the same title or even that it involved vampires, but now I had a link. Upon reading everything Twilight and seeing the film(s) I was amused at the nearly limitless philosophical timeliness and implications of the books and the present dilemma of the popularity of ghost hunting shows. The key to both was that they either offered an escape from living (being an immortal and good looking vampire) or an answer to what happens after death (being a spirit trapped on earth for whatever reason). Both were rejections of the conventional notion of death and to assent to some heaven. It's perfect for the post 9/11 generation, it's theistic (in that there is a soul and/or afterlife) without being religious, it offers panacea to those worried (and unrealistically so) that there life will end at any second at the hands of a mad man.
Despite the seemingly bad idea that is using the paranormal as any kind of positive cultural indicator (my deepest apologies James Randi), it seems as though ghosts, vampires, and space aliens are a perfect psycho-analysis tool, instead of asking 'What's wrong today?' perhaps we ought to look at what's on TV.
-Pete Tognetti (01/27-28/11)
Recommended reading:
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner
Flim Flam, James Randi
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