Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (54 page)

Leslie Kean,
UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record
(New York: Harmony Books, 2010). From former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta's foreword on, this is a game-changer. UFOs clearly exist, Kean observes, although we do not know what they are. Kean, an investigative journalist, presents the no-nonsense sightings of professionals from 1976 to 2007, from nine different countries no less; recounts the history that has produced the intellectual blindness, disinformation campaigns, and shaming techniques of the American government, media, and debunkers; describes the much more professional efforts of the Europeans; includes a powerful essay by two political scientists on the political roots of the UFO taboo, “akin to denial in psychoanalysis,” that protects the sovereign nation-state and the “anthropocentric structure of rule” from the threat of colonization, impotence, and “something analogous to the materialization of God” (276–79); and finally calls on government officials, scientists, and concerned citizens to organize major research programs around this potentially world-changing topic. If we could combine Kean's rigorous investigative approach and courageous truth-telling, which unfortunately relegates the mythical and mystical dimensions of the encounter experience to “whacky everyday people” (118), with the approaches of authors like Vallee, Méheust, and Bullard, who turn to these same dimensions as one of the keys to the phenomenon, we would be well on our way to a much-needed
maturity
on the subject. In short, more science alone cannot get us there (Kean herself intuits this at 282–83). We will need more,
way
more, if we are ever to understand our present situation and all those human beings who have “been transformed, in one way or another, and sometimes drastically so, by this interaction with the ‘impossible'
” (8).

Some
More Damned Anecnotes

AN IMPOSSIBLE OPENING

1
. The “some time later” of Adam's account here would have to be at least a good day later, as Kennedy was not declared dead until early in the morning of June 6, 1968. There is a debate about whether there was ever a live broadcast of the events immediately surrounding RFK's assassination, as opposed to a report aired soon after the event from a previous audio recording. Adam believes that what he heard was the famous audio broadcast of Andrew West on KDKR AM 1150, which is easily available online. The assassination occurred at about 12:16 a.m. PSD, which (pending any daylight savings complications) would have been 3:16 a.m. ETD in Toronto. If Adam in fact awoke at 3:00 a.m., this strongly suggests that he heard a live broadcast, hence Adam's memory of waking up at 3:00 a.m. may be incorrect. In any case, whereas the apparent precognitive element of Adam's experience hinges on the historical questions of whether there was a live broadcast and when he awoke, its otherwise “impossible” nature does not. Whether read as an example of precognition or some kind of occult connection, Adam's mind was interacting with history as it was presenting itself on the radio, be it live or recorded. My thanks to Jason Edwards for bringing my attention to these historical problems.

2
. Stanley Krippner, “Introduction to Third Edition,” in
Dream Telepathy
, ed. Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, with Alan Vaughan (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2002), xxi. As I explain below shortly, the subject of precognitive and telepathic dreams goes back to the very founding of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the Master himself wrote no less than six papers on the subject.

INTRODUCTION

1
. Jule Eisenbud,
The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind
(New York: William & Morrow Company, 1967), 313.

2
. See, for example, Ann Taves, “Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
71, no. 2 (2003).

3
. I am relying here on the entries “Crookes, Sir William” and “Psychic Force” in Nandor Fodor's wonderfully eccentric
Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science
(University Books, 1966/1934). Where else can you find entries on “Copyright” (on the legal issues surrounding the intellectual rights to a channeled publication or spirit communication); on “Poltergeists,” those haunted people (as opposed to haunted houses) whose noisy and destructive externalized vital forces Fodor, as a paranormally oriented psychoanalyst now, would later interpret as “projected repressions”; or, most impossibly of all, on “Apports,” a five-page essay in which Fodor calmly offers two explanations for how things like scissors, flowers, metals, rocks, even a tree branch fall into a séance room out of nowhere: (1) interdimensional travel; or (2) “the disintegration and reintegration of the apported objects.”

4
. I spoke to the general editor of the second edition of the
Encyclopedia of Religion
, Lindsay Jones, about this omission. He was not the least bit defensive, and he was entirely open about the reason: no one on his editorial board expressed any concerted interest in the subject.

5
. James H. Leuba, “Psychical Research,” in
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1918), 10:423.

6
. E. R. Dodds,
The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief
(New York: Oxford, 1973), 176–77.

7
. My sincere thanks to Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston for two animated tellings of this anecdote.

8
. For the fire story, which is told in numerous places, see, for example, Dean Radin,
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum World
(New York: Paraview, 2006), 59–60.

9
. For Hegel's engagement with the Hermetic tradition and various occult streams, see Glenn Alexander Magee,
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

10
. I am indebted here to Glenn Alexander Magee's unpublished paper, “On the Will in Nature: Schopenhauer, Animal Magnetism and Magic.”

11
. See Stephen E. Braude,
Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), ix–x.

12
. Stephen E. Braude,
ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979);
The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science
(New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986);
First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995);
Immortal Remains
; and
The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Braude's work easily constitutes one of the most reliable and philosophically astute oeuvres on psychical phenomena we possess. It also happens to be very funny in places.

13
. For the material in this paragraph, I am relying on Roger Luckhurst's wonderful book,
The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160–67.

14
. Ernesto De Martino,
The World of Magic
(New York: Pyramid Communications, 1972), 63.

15
. For Turner's encounters, see Edith Turner, “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?”
Anthropology of Consciousness
4, no. 1: 9–12. For an example of Mead's endorsement of the subject matter, see her appreciative introduction to what appears to be the first book on remote viewing, Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff,
Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability
(Delacorte Press, 1977). For an astute anthropology of the cultural wars around the paranormal in America, see David J. Hess,
Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

16
. Michael Winkelman, “Magic: A Theoretical Reassessment,”
Current Anthropology
23, no. 1 (February 1982): 44.

17
. Alex Owen,
The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 141.

18
. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou, eds.,
William James on Psychical Research
(New York: Viking Press, 1960). See also Deborah Blum,
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death
(New York: Penguin, 2006).

19
. For much more on this, see F. X. Charet,
Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung's Psychology
(Albany: SUNY, 1993).

20
. Dean Radin,
The Conscious Universe: Scientific Evidence for Psi Phenomena
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 131. For more on Pauli and Jung from some rigorous philosophical and scientific perspectives, see Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, eds.,
Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science
(Berlin: Springer, 2009).

21
. Cross-cultural surveys have shown that “about half of all spontaneous psi experiences occur in the dream state” (Radin,
Conscious Universe
, 68).

22
. Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
(New York: Basic Books, 1957), 3:380.

23
. Ibid., 394.

24
. I am indebted to Sudhir Kakar for this line of thought concerning Freud's late skepticism and his linking of analytic empathy and telepathy: “The Resurgence of Imagination,” paper delivered at the Breuninger Foundation's Symposium on Spirituality and Depth Psychology, August 4–8, 2008, Wasan Island, Ontario, Canada.

25
. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer,
Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind
(New York: Bantam, 2007), 3.

26
. Ibid., xii.

27
. Owen,
Place of Enchantment
, 139; Bruce Mills,
Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). For the British scene, particularly around Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, see Robert Lee Wolff,
Strange Stories: Explorations in Victorian Fiction—The Occult and the Neurotic
(Boston: Gambit, 1971).

28
. Quoted in Owen,
Place of Enchantment
, 41.

29
. Jacques Derrida, “Telepathy,” trans. Nicholas Royle,
Oxford Literary Review
10, nos. 1–2 (1988): 3–41 (originally published in 1981); and
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International
, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 11. See also Nicholas Royle,
Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000).

30
. Turner, “Reality of Spirits.”

31
. George P. Hansen,
The Trickster and the Paranormal
(XLibris, 2001), 366, 367. Hansen's work stands virtually alone among parapsychological writings for its deep engagement with the humanities and social sciences.

32
. Mircea Eliade, “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge,” trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts, in
Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader
, ed. Bryan Rennie (London: Equinox, 2006).

33
. Mircea Eliade,
Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 55.

34
. Mircea Eliade,
Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49.

35
. Eliade,
Autobiography
, vol. 1,
1907–1937: Journey East, Journey West
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 190.

36
. Eliade,
Ordeal by Labyrinth
, 49.

37
. Mircea Eliade,
Two Strange Tales
(Boston: Shambala, 1986), x–xii.

38
. Eliade,
Ordeal by Labyrinth
, 147.

39
. Eliade, “Occult and the Modern World,” 56.

40
. Ibid., 54. Along very similar psychoanalytic-gnostic lines, it is probably no accident that Eliade chose to conclude this same volume on occultism and witchcraft with his “Spirit, Light, and Seed,” an essay that advances a strong comparative case for the symbolic equation of divine light and sperm in the history of religions.

41
. See especially Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty,
Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

42
. Ted Anton,
Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

43
. I. P. Couliano,
Out of This World: A History of Otherworldly Journeys, from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein
(Boston: Shambalah, 1991).

44
. Ioan P. Couliano,
The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

45
. Ioan P. Couliano, “System and History,”
Incognita
, 6. See also his “A Historian's Kit to the Fourth Dimension,”
Incognita
1 (1990), 113–29, and his
Out of This World
.

46
. Couliano, “System and History,” 9.

47
. To my limited knowledge, other than Couliano, the only other scholar of religion who has recognized the mind-blowing implications of Einstein's physics for the practice of historiography is Elliot R. Wolfson. In his magisterial
Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), Wolfson explores the curvature of spacetime and the possibility of time loops in order to entertain the idea that “the past is as much determined by the present as the present by the past” (ibid., xvii–xix).