Alien sex on the brain
RICHARD GEORGE asks if our libidinous temporal lobes might link various sexy fortean phenomena.
A“young couple, very much in love, sprawled together in the back seat of an old jalopy on a deserted dirt road in the isolated back hills east of Ravenswood, WestVirginia...”
It could only be John Keel. But look at what comes next.
“The phenomenon has an almost pornographic preoccupation with our mating practices.” 1
Cue AntonioVilas-Boas and his animalistically grunting spacewoman.
Albert Budden, whom I’ve been reading a lot recently, strikes me as one of the most important UFO writers since Keel. Highly scientifically literate, he develops the ideas of Michael Persinger (temporal lobes) and Paul Devereux (earth lights). I Googled “Michael Persinger sex”, and what did I find first? “Watch Michael Persinger gay porn videos here for free”! This is another Michael Persinger (at least, I assume it is). But on a more serious note, I also came across, in an article by AE Walker, the phrase “the libidinous temporal lobe”. 2
So in theory all we need is one of these earth lights, lightning balls, whatever, to descend upon Vilas-Boas in Brazil, and his tractor itself becomes a UFO, via confabulation, and his inflamed temporal lobes stage a vivid sexual scenario. We don’t need his galactic Gisele Bundchen at all. It hurts to let her go.
Comfort yourselves with Jenny Wade’s book Transcendent Sex. She marshals an impressive range of evidence to illustrate that sexual union itself can be telepathic, hallucinatory, even mystical. She calls this “one of
the best-kept secrets in human history”. 3
In fact, though, religions have long exploited it. Temples in Athens and Corinth employed hierodouloi, sacred prostitutes, 4 and for centuries Tantric yoga has channelled coition to visionary ends. Then there is Aleister Crowley. He, undaunted by lack of evidence, conjured a past life as Astarte, a holy whore in Agrigentum, Sicily. 5
According to one pundit, staring intimately into a lover’s eyes for 10 minutes can cause hallucinations. 6 Henry Miller did a great deal more than that, and captures this elusive phantasmagoria like few other writers:
I lay like a dolphin on the oysterbanks. A slight twitch and I’d be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically... In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight... 7
Very little study has been conducted into this distinct state of consciousness: William Burroughs deplored the “miasma of idiotic prurience and anxiety that blocks any scientific investigation of sexual phenomena”. 8
Returning to Persinger (the psychologist, that is), it is important to notice that endorphins, the brain’s own drugs, reduce the threshold for seizures of the temporal lobe, and that endorphins are released during sexual intercourse. Temporal lobe seizures can cause the whole gamut of experiences like Jenny Wade’s, including “disturbances of vision, distortions of colour, size or time and even illusions or fully formed hallucinations”. 9 Note especially “distortions of size or time”.
So sex itself can place us in Persinger’s confabulatory world, where the Cosmic Joker pulls Susan Blackmore’s leg. Keel’s TNT area was a magnet for “love cars”; 10 Jonathan Downes observes: “There were large amounts of sex hormones... floating around Mawnan Woods...” 11 When sex is interrupted, does something occur like hypnopompia ?
Congratulations, before I go, to a young radio ham called Bob Renaud, who in 1961 contacted Lin-Erri from the planet Korendor. She told him how to rebuild a boob tube to see her, revealing an intergalactic blonde bombshell of the first magnitude. 12 Vilas-Boas, eat your heart out! The Bonzo Dog Band nailed all this in a 1968 parody called Beautiful Zelda.
I’m intrigued by the name ‘Korendor’: it echoes the Greek verb korennymi, “to satiate”, a word with sexual connotations. We’re back with Keel’s cartoon Classics. 13 Venus is not just a planet: she is also a goddess of love. From Aphrodite to Astarte, and then to Ashtar, is a short step.
NOTES
1 John A Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, 1975, p103f. Janet and Colin Bord describe a similar case near Veedersburg, Indiana, in February 1981, where a couple amorously entangled in a car reported seeing Bigfoot. Modern Mysteries of the World, 1989, p33.
2 AE Walker, in Schweizer Archiv fur Neurologie, Neurochirurgie und Psychiatrie, 111(2), 1972, pp473-84.
3 Jenny Wade, Transcendent Sex, p.2 and passim.
4 See JP Sullivan in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1970, p512.
5 Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, 2000, p238.
6 www.wackoworldofyogibhajan.net/ forums/viewtopic.php?t=747.
7 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 1939, p165f.
8 William Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded, 1968 edition, p54 (footnote).
9 Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live, 1993, p205f.
10 John A Keel, op. cit., p59.
11 Jonathan Downes, The Owlman and Others, 1998, p73f.
12 Janet and Colin Bord, Life Beyond Planet Earth?, 1992, p124f. Compare Romy Schneider supposedly Skyping Claus Schreiber via ITC.
14 See my piece in FT356.55.
2 RICHARD GEORGE is a cryptid classicist. He was last spotted in Cambridge about 20 years ago.