Have you seen the aliens today?
JENNY RANDLES thinks it’s time we listened to non-Western accounts of close encounters
Three decades ago, when I was young, I undertook the most amazing journey.
I had been in Sydney, Australia, and then the Gold Coast to lecture on UFOs, and decided to take the opportunity to embark on a true adventure by plane and bus hundreds of miles into the heart of the outback east of Darwin. I visited the beautiful, vast open spaces where Crocodile Dundee had been filmed. It was a magical few days that I will never forget.
By good fortune, this coincided with the opportunity to go deeper into the indigenous territory of the native Australian people, where extra permission is needed. Here the land had been happily returned to the aboriginal occupants who were there long before the British came to ‘colonise’ it, acting as if those who had built that civilisation were of less importance than those who arrived to tell them how to do things ‘properly’.
Hopefully, we are a bit more civilised ourselves now, but it was an eye-opener to me back then. I was able to fly over in a light aircraft and then enter the interior, where schoolchildren were being taught not about dangers of crossing the road (there were few of those) but given more pertinent life-saving precautions needed against a crocodile attack.
More intriguingly, I also encountered a notice (pictured above) that made me giggle thanks to the irony; it was as if someone had placed it there to welcome me, although it was just part of an art exhibit. Yet I saw how it held a deeper meaning. In relation to the indigenous people I was graciously allowed to observe that week, I only had to look in the mirror in my handbag to find an ‘alien’ staring back: me, along with the few others around me stepping off that bus, now caked in ochre dust after the long trek along sand-filled tracks that took us into this lost world.
I recalled all this recently when reading a book by Dr Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, a Montana State Professor. She has a passionate interest in the education of women in her native American culture. This has led her to investigate many stories of their lives, and among them she has found tales of alien encounters. These come not from the usual Western sources, steeped in ufology lore and sci-fi movies, but from tellers with their own rich history as indigenous people and the encounters they have had living as what the book’s title calls Space Age Indians (Anomalist Books, 2019).
Dr Clarke’s book detals extraordinary personal encounters with what we would term alien abductions. But these stories were different, because the tellers had a long oral history of ‘alien contact’. When they had such experiences, they associated them with this history, much as we do in the West with UFO tales. But, as I’d started to see on that trip into the Aussie hinterland, these are just our own take – the lore and legends of the modern age – even though we presume superiority of understanding and we see ourselves as the ‘wise’ ones.
Just like those ‘colonists’ in Australia, or a dozen other countries, we impose our concepts and laws as well as our technology onto others, feeling it is our duty to ‘civilise’ those in need. And I suspect we do exactly the same with our modern mythology of alien contact – presuming we know best and so interpreting the stories of others in our own terms, believing the tellers are too unsophisticated to understand the ‘truth’ as we do. The problem is that you can come to believe in your own omnipotence rather than be willing to learn from others and see how their ideas about encounters that were, after all, every bit as ‘real’ as our UFO cases, might enhance our own perceptions of reality.
Ardy’s book contains some extraordinary tales of a presence that indigenous people call “the Blue Men”. They seem no less real, or no more likely to be truly “there”, than our own pop mythology of UFOs and “grays”. If one exists, then so could the other: all that separates the two is our firmly entrenched sense of “knowing best” what is true and what is mythology – and what folk should believe. Western arrogance, you might call it.
Dr Clarke recounts how a Cherokee serving in Vietnam was badly hurt in a bombardment just before pulling out, but was rescued by the ‘blue men’, who salved his wounds and shepherded him to safety. Another story was from a half-Navajo nurse who was treating a man who had lost both legs and was being watched carefully as he had all but given up on attempts to rehabilitate him. She was at his bedside when the ‘blue men’ arrived in the night and appeared to ‘embrace’ this man. She watched as they seemed to suck all the tension and stress away, also filling her, sitting nearby, with a positive energy and calmness. Many will argue this was just the dream of a caring, exhausted nurse. But that misses the sequel. The man suddenly changed his life and was on the road to recovery, playing sports and encouraging others. It was as if that visit from the ‘blue men’ was what had turned his life around.
The entities in these stories appear like a sort of light: the blueness is a glow that fills the air, soothes the soul and absorbs negative energy, making everything work again. The beings hover, as if levitating, but do take a humanoid form, tall, with an angelic appearance. The obvious parallels with the guardian beings that populate many religions is striking.
Religion, after all, is evidence-based in much the same way that ufology is. Only in the West do we choose to subsume our modern version of ‘aliens’ and their activities into a pseudo-technological narrative of visitors from the stars, one that we evolved by happenstance as we lived through the Space Age. Our current interpretation is a fleeting concept: true to this era, but maybe nothing like how people will see such things 100 years from now.
The cultural beliefs of the indigenous peoples of the world in intervention from beyond have survived millennia, in many cases handed down through countless generations. What makes them any less valid than our own interpretation, where we can clearly see how the events of the past 75 years in the West have driven our presumption that UFO contact is alien in origin? There are other interpretations of what we term UFO phenomena – that is all I’m saying. And as the world reaches, in 2022, the 75th anniversary of the birth of the modern UFO age (not necessarily the only such age), maybe it’s time to start thinking differently. We hear cries for inclusiveness of thinking in many areas of modern life. Perhaps ufology should take this as an opportunity to embrace that wisdom too. Our Western arrogance might be just the thing getting in the way of our better understanding the truth.