extraordinary%20encounters

xii Introduction
things that existed not just in supernatural belief
but in actual experience. We also know
that our poor, benighted ancestors knew no
better. Superstitious, fearful, deeply credulous,
they mistook shadows and dreams for
denizens of realms that had no reality beyond
the one ignorance and foolishness assigned it.
Finally, most of us are aware, even if only
dimly so, that a handful of people in our own
enlightened time make more or less public
claims that they have personally interacted
with supernormal beings. Such persons are
thoroughly marginalized, treated as eccentric
and novel, as different from the rest of us; if
they are not lying outright, we suspect, they
are suffering from a mental disturbance of
some kind. And we may well be right, at least
in some cases. As for the rest, we could not be
more mistaken.
As it happens, reports of human interaction
with ostensible otherworldly beings continue
pretty much unabated into the present.
They are far more common than one would
think. The proof is as close as an Internet
search, through which the inquirer will
quickly learn that material on the subject exists
in staggering quantity. A considerable portion
of it is about channeling (in which an individual
is the passive recipient of messages
from the otherworld, usually speaking in the
voice of an intelligence from elsewhere) from
a wide assortment of entities: nebulous energy
sources, soul clusters, extraterrestrials, ascended
masters, interdimensional beings, discarnate
Atlanteans and Lemurians, nature
spirits, even whales and dolphins. Besides
these purely psychic connections with the
otherworld, there are many who report direct
physical meetings with beings from outer
space, other dimensions, the hollow earth,
and other fantastic places. Not all of these
ideas are new, of course. The hollow earth and
its inhabitants were a popular fringe subject in
nineteenth-century America, and in the latter
half of that century, spiritualist mediums
sometimes communicated with Martians or
even experienced out-of-body journeys to the
red planet. In 1896 and 1897, during what
today would be called a nationwide wave of
unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings,
American newspapers printed accounts of
landings of strange craft occupied by nonhuman
crews of giants, dwarfs, or monsters presumed
to be visiting extraterrestrials.
But in the UFO age—that is, the period
from 1947 to the present, when reports of
anomalous aerial phenomena became widely
known and their implications much discussed—a
small army of “contactees,” recounting
physical or psychic meetings with
angelic space people, has marched onto the
world stage to preach a new cosmic gospel. In
a secular context, UFO witnesses with no discernible
occult orientation or metaphysical
agenda have told fantastic tales of close encounters
with incommunicative or taciturn
humanoids. Some witnesses even relate, under
hypnosis or through conscious “recall,” traumatic
episodes in which humanoids took
them against their will into apparent spacecraft.
The early 1970s, the period when most
observers date the beginning of the New Age
movement, saw a boom in channeling—again
nothing new (spirits have spoken through humans
forever) but jarring and shocking to rationalists
and materialists. The same decade
spawned such popular occult fads as the
Bermuda Triangle and ancient astronauts
(prehistoric or early extraterrestrial visitors),
based on the notion of otherworldly influences—benign,
malevolent, or indifferent—
on human life.
As cable television became ubiquitous, television
documentaries or pseudodocumentaries
(some, such as a notorious Fox Network
broadcast purporting to show an autopsy performed
on a dead extraterrestrial, were thinly
concealed hoaxes) served to fill programming
needs and proved to be among cable’s most
popular offerings. Books alleging real-life encounters
with aliens, such as Whitley
Strieber’s Communion: A True Story (1987),
fueled interest and speculation. In the 1990s
Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard University
psychiatrist John E. Mack, who had hypnotized
a number of persons who thought they