Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (40 page)

Méheust began to suspect that just as Christian mysticism had produced a certain type of fictional literature that clearly exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the saints, so too the UFO phenomenon produces a certain type of fictional literature, science fiction, that exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the witnesses and contactees. The comparative model, then, looks like this: mystical event : hagiography :: UFO phenomenon : science fiction. That is to say, Christian mysticism is to the hagiographical literature as the UFO phenomenon is to the science-fiction literature.

There were differences, of course. The hagiography, after all, was written after the lives of the saints and for the edification of the faithful, some of whom would then imitate this literature and become future saints, thus establishing the typical dialectical relationship between consciousness and culture, or in this case between sanctified subjectivity and public textuality. The science-fiction literature, however, was written for cheap adolescent entertainment and was generally not known by the later abductees. This is the central intellectual scandal of Méheust's first book. How exactly
does
one derive the absolutely terrifying and often completely debilitating traumas of the later UFO abductions from an earlier lowbrow literature sold literally for pennies to pimply adolescents? This is a question Méheust asks himself and his readers in the strongest terms (SF 59, 202).

Contrary to first expectations, whereby one would simply reduce the later abductions to the earlier cultural fantasies that had entered the public realm, Méheust's own understanding of this morphing of science fiction into occult experience is much more complicated, as he sees these
alien
narratives as engaging real metaphysical ground
and
as being dependent on the earlier imaginal frame of science fiction. That is to say, in my own terms now, Méheust refuses to reduce consciousness to culture, while at the same time he demonstrates how consciousness must express itself through culture, and in this case popular culture. He shows how consciousness encoded in culture is finally
fantastic
.

Méheust thus refuses, like a good author of the fantastic, to allow the reader to settle into any comfortable conclusion concerning the final nature of the experiences under discussion. As he repeatedly reminds his reader, the central idea of the book is the mindboggling observation that these experiences clearly possess both physical
and
psychical components (SF 237). UFOs leave traces on radar screens and landing marks on the ground. Entire militaries worry about them, and fighter jets routinely chase them. They occasionally heal people (SF 150). They also occasionally kill people (SF 146–47). They clearly cannot be reduced to subjective fantasies. But they also, just as clearly, behave like dreams, like myths or “super-dreams” seen in the sky (SF 117, 200, 215, 229, 289, 296).

Moreover, and more bizarrely still, they are mischievously omnipotent in their ability to show themselves to us in quite outrageous ways, as in a picture window, while at the very same time
completely
eluding any lasting or conclusive contact. We have more than enough evidence, up to eighty thousand cases reported around the world, Méheust notes. And yet we have nothing, not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence. Working much like a mystical text, they reveal themselves only to conceal themselves. Apparently, they can never be known as they are. The UFO, then, is “the unnameable thing” (
la chose innommable
) that clearly manifests intentional properties but frustrates all psychological and sociological explanations. Whatever it is, it exists “before all determination” (SF 19, 33–35). Accordingly, the UFO phenomenon creates epistemological conditions that are inherently solipsistic, circular, and maddeningly paradoxical for those who attempt to engage it (SF 277–78). In a word, my word anyway, they are hermeneutical realities.

These unnameable things, these damned things, as Fort would say, express themselves in the cultural fantasies of the time and place. They can also be scarily mimetic, as, for example, when they literally hunt hunters or fish for fishermen, as we saw with Vallee's study of the Latin American cases (SF 201, 203). They are thus hardly objective things “out there.” They are objective things “out there”
and
subjective things “in here.” They are interactive, participatory realities that cannot be understood outside the forms of consciousness that perceive and experience them, that is,
us
(SF 75).

Méheust
has many ways of expressing this central paradox of his book (which is also the central paradox of this book). It is certainly not an easy idea, one all too easily collapsible into a simple subjectivism, as if UFOs, poltergeists, or telepathic communications were just our cultural or psychological projections;
or
a naive objectivism, as if UFOs were spaceships piloted by Martians or Venusians and poltergeists were pissed-off dead people named “Joe” and “Kathryn.” Méheust avoids both of these rationalist and religious extremes, consistently arguing instead for a richer and more nuanced position.

That position comes down to this. The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion requiring, say, a physics for their complete explanation. The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment. Whatever they are, UFOs “vibrate in phase” with our forms of consciousness and culture. We thus cannot even conceive of them outside or independent from their observation. This most basic of facts puts into serious doubt the adequacy of any traditional scientific method. Such methods, after all, work from an ideal of complete objectivity, which in turn demands an effort to eliminate all interference with the observer. But what if the observer is the very mode of the apparition? What if the observer is an integral part of the experiment?

For his part, Méheust argues that the naive idea that consciousness is a clean “mirror” separate from the objects that it reflects needs to be abandoned immediately and put into the museum of bad ideas. He cites the physicist Von Neumann here, who wrote that “the conception of an objective reality has thus evaporated” (SF 321). Méheust had arrived at the same conclusion twenty pages up: “We therefore find, but now transposed into the domain of the symbolic representation, the paradoxes of micro-physics: as with the electron, the notion of a UFO independent from its human observer is nonsensical” (SF 302). The implications of all of this for the study of the UFO phenomenon as a “mythical-physical reality” are immense: “
one is not able to envisage [the UFO phenomenon] independently from our consciousness; what is more: there can be no question of eliminating that part which the human spirit adds to it; it is, on the contrary, an essential component of the phenomenon
” (SF 321).

Such a hermeneutical shocker carries other shockers. There is the notion, for example, that a meaning or a representation can become an efficient cause in the physical world (SF 302), that there is such a thing as “a concrete action of a meaning” (
l'action concrete d'un sens
) (SF 305). But how? How, Méheust asks, can something entirely without location, mass,
or
energy, like a meaning or bit of information, interfere with solid objects, with things? After a fascinating footnote on Freud's letter to Karl Abraham in which Freud suggested that biological evolution may be driven by unconscious mental representations, that is, that consciousness may somehow be able to imprint itself on physical forms (remember Fort's “wereleaf”?), Méheust finally plays his cards and suggests that reality appears to possess two sides or faces: a public face involving physical matter and causality, and an esoteric face (
une face ésotérique
) involving the presence of meaning and information (SF 307).
¹⁸
This is how, for Méheust, a meaning (
un sens
) can really and truly structure a physical event involving matter, as in an experience of synchronicity (SF 263). Reality
really is
double-faced. It is matter, and it is meaning. It is “it,” and it is “bit.”
¹⁹
Not only is the Human Two. So too is the World.

Méheust also employs mythical language to say the same thing. Hence he can describe the entire UFO phenomenon as a “technologized Hermes,” after the Greek trickster god of lucky finds, language and communication, doorways, and dreams (and the etymological base of our own “hermeneutics”).
²⁰
Here he points out that in reading the abduction narratives one often has the impression that the victim has “penetrated” into the UFO as if it represented “the other side of the mirror.” Like Alice in Wonderland, the victim has somehow entered another universe, this one of an atemporal and nonspatial order. The UFO has in effect acted like a “windowsill,” even like a “reality changer.” Méheust is particularly struck by all those stories in which a gardener, hunter, fisherman, or driver is engaged in some utterly banal activity when—pop!—another reality opens up in the very midst of the mundane activity. He thus sees these narratives as a return of the repressed Hermes archetype, as a lived embodiment of that most basic of Hermetic principles, “where the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory” (SF 215–17).

Very much related to these Hermetic notions of the UFO functioning as a windowsill, reality changer, or portal and of paradoxically joining the spiritually profound and the mundane (or the culturally lowbrow) are the key issues of
the absurd
and
the symbolic function
. We might recall that Vallee had highlighted the utter absurdity of many of the UFO narratives. He felt that this absurdity was not accidental or meaningless, that it was somehow part of the message. Aimé Michel highlights the same in his preface to Méheust's book, “Requiem pour des chiméres trés anciennes” (“Requiem for Some Very Old Chimeras”), a potent little gnostic essay in which the author expresses his disgust with “the ideologues and the theologians,” that is, with the representatives of reason and faith, neither of whom, he suggests, have
really
confronted the facts of the case at hand. Such facts, Michel admits, appear both fantastic and absurd. But does not this nonsense itself make sense? Is not this genre of absurdity entirely appropriate, even expected, before the possible presence of another thought (SF 68)? Hence Michel's fantastic realist mantra, which is also Méheust's mantra, “to envisage everything and to believe nothing” (SF 323). Méheust follows the master here, pointing out, for example, that the UFO phenomenon acts like a “super-dream” (
sur-reve
) that works through a process of radical “absurdization” (SF 289).

Méheust's most profound treatments on the absurd, however, involve his notion of the symbolic function embedded in the UFO narratives and encounters. For Méheust, the symbolic function is about communication between different orders of reality, orders
so
different that they cannot communicate to one another in any straightforward or simple way. As an expression of the symbolic function, then, the religious image, the myth, or, in some cases, the dream does not work like a simple word or a precise number. Its meaning is not, and
cannot
, be a straightforward one. There can be no direct or one-to-one translation, not because the process is being intentionally deceptive or ridiculous, but because a fisherman is trying to talk to a fish. We are back to the Flatland insight.

Méheust thus notes the central role of “bubbles” or crystal-like “encasements” common in both the sci-fi and encounter literatures. Aliens are often imagined or seen floating around in them, revealing themselves through the bubble, and yet also
not
revealing themselves by staying inside the bubble. Such transparent encasements, such revealings that conceal, symbolize for Méheust the symbolic function itself to the extent that they are all about permitting “the otherwise impossible encounter between two heterogenous realities” (SF 195). Such symbols are relays, as it were, from something invisible and structurally unknowable, something truly alien, to our own local forms of culture and consciousness (SF 310). That is to say, in my own terms now,
to the extent that it permits at least some type of communication across radically different metaphysical orders, the symbolic function renders the impossible possible
.

It also, alas, renders the possible impossible to the extent that a culture or a person loses the ability to think symbolically. So deprived, people literalize their cultural myths and symbols and fall into all sorts of genuine absurdities, including the absurdity that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts machines piloted by aliens from outer space. This, Méheust points out, is simply to mistake our own cultural moment—which happens to be imbued by a modern sci-fi register and a cold war space race—as somehow privileged and absolute, that is, as applicable to all place and time in the
universe.
²¹
For Méheust at least, this is definitely not what the UFO encounters are about. They are not literal messages. They are not what they seem to be. They symbolize. They translate across metaphysical orders. They reveal the sacred in the mode and code of the day.

And that code is largely pop cultural. Faithful to his Hermetic principle about joining the high and the low, Méheust dedicated this first book to the religious revelations of popular culture, that is, to the high revealing itself in the low. Not surprisingly, other pop cultural allusions appear alongside all those spinning, darting, shining discs.
²²
Sometimes this is a rather subtle process, as, for example, when Méheust refers to the astonishing displays of the UFOs as their “special effects,” as if what we are witnessing here is a Hollywood movie (SF 16, 132). At other times, the pop cultural allusions are more direct and obvious. The French comic-book character Tin Tin appears to be one of his favorites. The character makes appearances in both
Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes
(SF 283–84) and, a bit later, in
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
, to which we will return.