Who Are They Really?

New Approaches to Identifying UFOs, Abductions and Extraterrestrials

Daniel Harran Schiffer Publishing 2021 Pb, 223pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780764361906

Daniel Harran taught physics at the University of Pau, France, for 16 years, but in this retirement project appears to question if scientific orthodoxy has any jurisdiction in the subject of whether people “have been confronted with non-human beings who physically abused them”. He asks the reader “not to let themselves be put off by the implausibility” of the testimonies he uses as evidence. “[They] are indeed unbelievable,” he writes, but only “from a scientific perspective.”

In this comprehensive study of UFO-related abductions, the greater part of his investigation concerns subjective narratives of such encounters; he interprets these as similar to out-of-body experiences containing “overlooked traditional, religious and spiritual knowledge”.

He concludes that humankind has indeed been visited by extraterrestrials, but only in a few cases; the vast majority of “close encounters of the third kind” are with Earth-based “entities”. Unfortunately his very logical argument begins with a faulty premise about science’s “failure”. Scientific arguments against these subjects have their own logic, which might well be inadequate as an arena for debating subjective experiences, but certainly are not necessarily “wrong”.

Harran’s initial statement – that the UFOs and associated “entities” are not true aliens but nevertheless “real” – is declared as a fact; he dissects a few classic cases and traces their component motifs into the historic past of most cultures. He also relates the “encounter” narratives of modern spiritualism, “possession” cases and related mystical experiences to the “airy” entities of mediæval demonology, which, he states, have always been with us. He supports this with acrosscorrespondence between Celtic fairylore and Islamic djinn – especially their proclivity for sex with humans – and introduces some fascinating new material from modern AmerIndians.

This is, undeniably, an interesting thesis, frustrated by his attempts to make his discussion seem scientific. This approach will inevitably lead to criticism of his work as an attack on scientism, when he could have concentrated on a calm exposition of a metaphysical inquiry. The lack of an index also hampers the book’s usefulness.

Bob Rickard

★★★