|
Jodi Dean argues how ironic that ufology’s very
stigma makes it “seductive and transgressive.
Those of us attracted to left-wing causes, to critical positions against
political, governmental, and corporate authorities, or maybe just to underdogs
in general may feel at home in ufology.”23
Notice also
how domesticated aliens have become as in the TV show Third
Rock From the Sun—One forgets they are aliens and tends to think of them
as mererly spaced out counter-culture sixties types like Robin Williams’
spacey Mork of Mork and Mindy, Ray
Walston’s affected beatnik of My
Favorite Martian, or Jerry Lewis’ childish pixie in Visit
from a Small Planet. Taking a musical, cerebral, or intergalactic trip
aboard a sailing ship--whether it’s with Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, Jerry
“Captain Trips” Garcia, the crew of Paul Kantner’s (pre-Heaven’s Gate)
Jefferson Starship, or a group of gray, technologically superior ova and sperm
curious aliens—each excursion nicely conforms to the alienated trip of LSD, or
magic mushrooms, or of Buddhistic meditation.
One becomes alienated from
one’s ego. In his book Abduction: Human
Encounters with Aliens, John Mack states the contactee’s similar
experience this way: “They shed
their identification with a narrow social role and gain a sense of oneness with
all creation, a kind of universal connectedness.” 24 Of course this interconnectedness can get mighty
heady. The consistent humbling effect of these trips results from the sublime,
awe-full revelation that not only is one not alone nor a lone, single monad in
the universe, but neither is one master of that universe. One might term the
result of such an experience The God Effect, described by Jung as Jung “religious
experience,” whereby “man comes face
to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.”
25
[INSERT
X-Files we’re not alone poster]
we’re
not alone
text
from the famous poster in Special Agent Fox Mulder’s office
esse
est percipi
(To Be is to Be Perceived)
Bishop Berkeley
loneliness is such a drag
“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” Jimi Hendrix
I think it’s significant that the soundtrack to The X-Files film
(1998) opens
with Filter’s version of Harry Nilsson’s “One”—“One is the loneliest
number that you’ll ever do . . . One is the saddest experience you’ll ever
know.” Now, while I would not
want to claim outright that all folk of the ufological persuasion are cultish
loners, i.e., lonely people who find each other in common experience and cause,
I am nonetheless compelled to point out that in the entire paranoid—the
unexamined-life-is-not-worth living/oblivious—ignorance-is-bliss behavior
dynamic, those who are self-reflexive, intellectual, and anti-authoritarian
necessarily are minor in some way.
Jodi Dean mentions in passing that “abduction provides cultural expression of
the confused passivity accompanying the collapse of the real.” 26
There’s an undeniably masochistic, victimological pole in anyone whose
position allows for the Other—alien life, whether terrestrial or
extra-terrestrial—what John Mack would call an allowance for “the unseen
realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are
phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and
show up in our literal physical world.”
27 The ability to identify with an Other necessarily betrays a liberal
bone or two in one’s body. There
may also be a maturity issue here that turns on the strength and ability to
accept the proposition that we are on our
own—a chilling/enthralling proposition Bob Weir and John Barlow confront
in the Grateful Dead’s apocalyptic/hopeful warning called “Throwing
Stones:”
So the kids they dance they shake their bones.
'Cause it's all too clear we're on
our own. Singing ashes, ashes
all fall down. Ashes, ashes all fall down. Picture a bright blue ball just
spinning, spinning free. It's dizzying, the possibilities.
28
Riding alone on my
bike out into the corn and bean-fields of rural Illinois late one recent June
night to better glimpse the big gibbous moon “rise” over the horizon, I was
reminded—apart from a brief Children of
the Corn-like shudder—of having similar feelings of breathtaking solitude
beneath the big sky in Arizona and Mexico.
It is certainly no surprise and no secret that the wealth of sightings
occur in the desert. One only need
try to account for the recent mass sightings (millions of eyewitnesses and
multiple amateur videographers) on New Year’s Day 1994 in Mexico and the
thousands of corroborative witnesses of the spectacular UFO display in the
Phoenix sky reported by all the local media in March 1997, and one is led to
ask: Why this desert locale? Limitless
visibility certainly is keen and key—but more is going on here. At least since
the days of Abraham and his cult of Yahweh, the desert has always required of us
a certain sublime, spiritual response.
[INSERT FST LP cover
image]
In their very funny
and insightful 1974 LP Everything You Know
Is Wrong, the Firesign Theatre manage to synthesize UFO sighting/alien
abduction with Carlos Castaneda (his hallucinogens, ancient native shaman wisdom, and
bird comrade), communistic brainwashing (“everyone must learn to play the
piano!”), New Age desert religion, and “Gas Music From Jupiter”—setting
it all in the scorching desert of “Hellmouth, California.” Counter-cultural
interest in UFOs moves from the (mostly) grade “B” outer space movies and
pop songs (“Purple People Eater,” “Mr. Spaceman”) of the 50s to the
Hippie and nascent New Age interest in the late 60s/early 70s—in addition to
the Firesign Theatre I am thinking specifically of the pot smoking lesson and
discussion of a very real alien invasion under the nighttime desert sky between
the believing Dixie attorney George (Jack Nicholson) who tries to convince the
skeptical spaced cowboy Billy (Dennis Hopper) in Easy
Rider (1969) and Fleetwood Mac’s “underground FM hit” “Hypnotised”
(by Robert Welch from Mystery to
Me,1973)—all mention separate realities, saucer evidence, and Mexico.29 Skeptics would be satisfied with the following
glib analysis—a drug-induced desert mirage.
The Roswell crash site is not only significant because in the desert,
but persists as a terrifically “loaded” locale due to the atomic weapons
testing conducted nearby, not to mention that in1947 Roswell Army Air Field
housed the 509th Air Group—solely responsible for delivering the
atomic bomb. Those only passingly familiar with UFOs certainly have at least
inklings about the connection between that privileged military site as the first
crash site and the compelling alien message that we must ween ourselves away
from developing technological means of mass destruction before it is too late.
This alien alarm is a
direct response to scientific, species
arrogance, to a kind of earth-bound hubristic, solipsistic worship of genius, and is, needless
to say, a particularly “Hippie” insight. Here is also more of the God Effect in that Tower of
Babel/Garden of Eden sense: a
superior force chastises reckless overachievers.30
While there’s something potentially paranoiac (in an
Orwellian-Pynchonian/X Files/JFK conspiracy way) about the notion that someone
is watching us and taking note, there’s also something existentially affirming
(in a Berkeleyian way) and frankly complimentary and comforting (in an
ego-stroking, “hey Mom and Dad look at me!” childlike way).
In his spectacular and very early UFO contact account The
Secret of the Saucers (first abduction reported 4 August 1946), Orfeo M.
Angelucci transcribes the following pronouncement from his alien kidnappers:
The people of your planet have been under observation for centuries . .
. Every point of progress in your society is registered with us.
We know you as you do not know yourselves.
Every man, woman, and child is recorded in vital statistics by means of
our recording crystal disks. 31
I think of
Yahweh’s big book of life and deeds, referenced variously in the Pentateuch,
Psalms, and in that tripped-out, inter-galactic prophecy by St. John the Divine,
the mystic Jewish-Christian Book of Revelation. 32
Yes there is a comfort and consolation in the notion that someone knows us
better than ourselves . . . and cares! Jung connects UFOs with “God-images.”
Both are “often associated with fire and light,” both are “round,
complete, perfect.” 33 The day after the opening of the UFO Show, I participated in the panel discussion "Ufology and Art"
alongside Claire Jervert, Amy Wilson, Ken Weaver and Barry Blinderman, and was
particularly struck by what Claire Jervert revealed regarding her working
process. Like the alleged activity
of aliens, she tirelessly monitors and records TV shows looking for images and
information she can use, such as her “Video Still.” In true
conspiracy-seeking style, Ms. Jervert also uncovers evidence of subliminal
messages in both advertisements and feature programming.
[INSERT Jervert & Pink Floyd LP cover HERE]
A Saucerful of
Secrets
Then
at last the mighty ship
Descending on a point of flame
Made contact with the human race
And melted hearts
from “Let There Be More Light” by Roger
Waters on Pink Floyd’s
A
Saucerful of Secrets (1968)
The
nature of Angelucci’s aliens’ “crystal disks,” which contain all of this
intimate, personal data about us, seem to preternaturally anticipate our fairly
recent CD-ROM technology. But is it
“ours”? According to
Retired Colonel Corso, the recovered UFO at Roswell has been a sort of Saucerful
of Secrets whose “artifacts” the United States military has “harvested,”
and via “negative engineering,” has exploited the alien technology in ways
that has led to the development of: Integrated
circuits, Fiber optics, Lasers, and the Stealth technology.34
But the most compelling aspect of Angelucci’s account is his continual return
to the alien music. Aboard the Mothership he hears:
a
kind of humming, a rhythmical sound like a vibration, which put him in a
semi-dream state. The room grew
dark, and music came from the walls. . . .Through the window he saw a Ufo about
one thousand feet long and ninety feet thick, consisting of a transparent
crystalline substance. Music poured
from it, bringing visions of harmoniously revolving planets and galaxies.
In his analysis of Angelucci’s account, Jung harps on, but doesn’t
analyze, the “almost incessant” and “obligatory etheric music.”35
In the pop music realm, as I’ve already suggested, we move from 50s doo-wop
and novelty records (have you heard Buchanan & Goodman’s 1956 “Flying
Saucer”—a Wellesian “interrupted broadcast” of 50s hooks depicting
doo-wop singers as aliens) to Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix in the 60s; Bowie,
Boston’s album art, UFO, Jefferson Starship in the 70s, Newwavers like Gary
Numan, B-52s, and Klaus Nomi in the 80s, and then just a pop musical explosion
in the 90s, headlined by Roswell Records’ the Foo Fighters (named after lights that accompanied the Allied bombers
over Germany (Foo-feu) which were
thought to be UFOs)
36 and
Special Agent Frank Black, formerly of the late 80’s alternative-pop band the
Pixies. Claiming the youthful
mindset necessary for UFO faith in his song “Space Is Gonna Do Me Good”
(“I’m done with adult matters,”)
Frank sings specifically of the Afro Mothership Musical Connection
I’ve been attempting to forge when at a “UFO convention” he gets
“patterns from a trekker and it sounds like soul records to me”—early
reggae-pop in fact—as he goes onto to clarify: “Patterns from a trekker,
sounds like Desmond Decker to me.”37
While I’ve been figuring the Mothership music as
receiving its alien quality from Africa and its space-age electronics from Rock,
the de rigeur Hollywood and TV sound
of aliens in the 50s and 60s is produced almost exclusively by the theremin.
Is there anything more alien sounding on this planet than the warbles
produced by this truly bizarre, spacey instrument?
For example, whenever “Uncle Martin” performs an alien act on “My
Favorite Martian,” it is conferred authenticity via theremin accompaniment.
Invented by Professor Leon Theremin in 1920, it works by means of low
power, high frequency electromagnetic fields around antennae, employing a beat
frequency oscillator. Beyond its
“artificial,” radio-electronic sound source, the theremin performer “plays
without the benefit of any tactile reference whatever . . . the thereminist
feels no shape or force as he moves from one pitch to another.”
There is neither attack nor decay, the creepy sound literally creeps up
on you. As premiere thereminist, Clara Rockman, once put it: “today’s `space
conscious’ listeners are interested in electronic music, and what is more
natural to electronic music than a space-controlled instrument?”38
The sound produced by the theremin is a bit like the musical buzzing of a
fly and therefore connects also with the alien-insect phenomenon. In Mark
Snow’s “X-Files Theme” we cannot mistake the theremin-like synthesized
whistling-in-the-dark main melody. What is it about that sound?
The aliens in Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind are all about communicating with humans by
means of a catchy five note melodious hook. Invaders
from Mars privileges that eerie alien SOUND. In his mixed media UFO Show
piece “Forget SETI,” Andrew
Detskas throws down the following gauntlet:
“What if an alien life form evolves on a planet with its sensory acuity
centered in its auditory system—a world absorbed by the intricate movements of
sound waves?” He asks us to ponder a version of John Mack’s “unseen
realm” by challenging us to wrap our minds around an alien concept. That’s
the sound connection I have been unpacking throughout this essay and its rhythm
may be as square as John Williams’ alien anthem from Close
Encounters, or as funky as the music of P-Funk or your Mother’s heartbeat
or a soul record, that is to say, a recording of your own soul.
the concluding
experiment
After having written the essay above and in the
spirit of the scientific method, I decided to test my Mothership Connection
hypothesis on a recent Hollywood blockbuster UFO movie I had yet to see—a kind
of blind taste test—so I screened the much ballyhooed and subsequently booed Independence
Day (1997). I had been right to
resist the production company’s initial hype: To my dismay, sitting through
the film was a dreadful bore, which led me to wonder—um, Director Roland
Emmerich, how do you make an unintentionally laughable and unrelentlessly
un-entertaining movie about an alien invasion that brings us to the brink (4 or
5 times) of the end of the world? The same way you botch a movie about the big
radioactive lizard Godzilla I
guess—two BIG films that proved size does NOT necessarily matter.
But to my immense heterogeneously speculative and scientific delight, Independence
Day wants it both ways and features prominently a number of key ideological
ingredients of my Mothership Connection. The
“profoundly alien psychic world” of the insect and the hive/communist
group-think fear of the 50s surprisingly remains.
After a brief alien mind-meld, President
Whitmore reports: “I saw... his thoughts. I saw what they're planning
to do. They're like locusts.” It is
also made clear throughout the film that those “alien groupies” as they are
called in the script are those left-wing lunkheads Jodi Dean pegs in her book.
Looking like a touring troupe of the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Hair,
they have gathered on an L.A. rooftop with welcoming signs and innocent, sappy
alien desire only to get mercilessly zapped by Emmerich’s boogiemen.
Here is liberal critique at its flimsiest.
And in case we’ve missed any of this message—like President George
Bush at the “end” of the Gulf War announcing that America has finally
“kicked the Viet Nam Syndrome”—Emmerich attempts to kick the late
70s/early 80s post-hippie love affair with aliens by kicking the Steven
Spielberg Syndrome. Tough-talking, no-nonsense African-American Captain Steve
Hiller (Will Smith), who earlier in the film announces to his group leader and
fellow fighter pilots to great laughter and applause that he’s “a
little anxious to get up there and whup E.T.'s ass,” captures
one of these alien invaders by
smacking him unconscious upside the head with his next “memorable lines”:
“Welcome to Earth! That's what I call a close encounter!”
It should not seem strange that this character (and this actor who
notoriously refused to kiss another male actor in Six
Degrees of Separation and is therefore a darling of the Right) is given
these politically revisionist attitudes and lines.
As espoused by the terrifically successful current leader of the Oakland
Chapter of the N.A.A.C.P, this is the new wave of African-American politics that
seeks a Buppie-inspired distance from old school leaders like Jesse Jackson (who
is impersonated in the film by the Caucasian pilot/class clown). But as I’ve
suggested this film wants it both ways—it conducts this reactionary sniggling
at perceived hippie-liberal weakness while at the same time revels in
Roswell/Area 51 truth by corroborating conspiratorial fears of a U.S. Government
cover-up of the 50 year reality of UFOs. Of course the true weakness is on the filmmaker’s part.
It springs from a colossal human inferiority complex when it comes to
technologically superior aliens who the President finally “nukes” because
he’s man enough—kicking the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon Syndrome—declaring
“independence” from said superiors at the end. Now for most of this whacky
business I had been prepared by Tim Burton’s self-loathing, disappointingly
cynical Mars Attacks! (1996) with its
send-up of a Clinton-like, liberal, trusting President play by Jack Nicholson.
What I wasn’t prepared for, though I should have been since my theorem
had predicted it, was the encrypting of the alien as not-so-vaguely African-American.
As Captain Steve Hiller carries the body of the unconscious alien back to the secret
Roswell base, he talks to him as a brother—and I mean as both a sibling and a
“bro”:
Y'know, this was supposed to be my weekend off, but
noooo. You got me out here draggin' your heavy ass through the burnin' desert
with your dreadlocks stickin' out the back of my parachute. You gotta come down
here with an attitude, actin' all big and bad... and what the hell is that
smell? I could've been at a barbecue! But I ain't mad.
Dreadlocks
eh? “Patterns from a trekker,
sounds like Desmond Decker to me.” Leonard Maltin says Independence Day manages to “make some silly 50s sci-fi movies
look brilliant by comparison.” Emmerich’s
block-bluster returns us to figuring
the alien the old fashioned way, but not nearly as magically and imaginatively
as Invaders From Mars—no.
No gentle, inquisitive Spielbergian grays who benignly only wish to
encounter us closely and then return home with some pieces of candy-coated
chocolate. Gee Whiz!
Notes
1 DVD Savant is hip to the film’s SOUND.
He writes about “an eerie, stomach-twisting vocal effect that seems to
be an inversion of a stock 'heavenly chorus.' This collection of slippery tones
is incredibly creepy, and will grab the attention of any child. It's far more
disturbing than the Theremin, if only because of that instrument's overuse. The
chorus seems to be part of the musical score, until Sgt. Rinaldi is taken in the
Sand Pit. David blurts out, "That noise!" as if hearing it for the
first time. Do the Martians sing as they operate their sand-trap, or is David
hearing the soundtrack of his own dream? Later, both David and Pat hear the
'music' just before they are captured. And the entire cast reacts similarly to a
choral burst as the saucer prepares to lift off. The logic of David's dream
fully enlists the soundtrack in its surrealism.” DVD Savant’s on-line Invaders
from Mars essay, Part 2: http://www.dvdresource.com/savant/s97InvadersB.shtml.
2 Ein
moderner Mythus: Von Dingen, die am Himmel geshen werden [1958] translated
by R.F.C. Hull as Flying Saucers: A Modern
Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, MJF Books, p. 77.
3
As the
“Government’s UFO Expert” Nick Pope in The Univited: An Expose of the
Alien Abduction Phenomenon (Overlook, 1997) puts it: “The sheer volume of
reports, the commonality in independent accounts coupled with the physical and
emotional effects on abductees convinced me that we were dealing with more than
just hoaxes or psychological delusions. While
such prosaic explanations undoubtedly accounted for some abductions, they could
not account for them all,” p. 276.
4 Interviewed by C.D.B. Bryan in his Close
Encounters of the Fourth Kind. A
Reporter’s Notebook on Alien Abduction, UFOS, and the Conference at M.I.T. (Penguin,
1995) pp 260-263.
5
Jung p. 94.
6
“There are large mother-ships from which little UFOs slip out or in which they
take shelter.” Jung, p.11). See Orfeo M. Angelucci’s shapely description of
his Mothership in The Secret of the
Saucers: like an “igloo” or a “huge misty soap bubble,” and inside
there was “a vaulted room 18 feet in diameter” with “walls of ethereal
mother-of-pearl stuff” in Jung, p. 114. “The
experience has a fetal aspect—abducted experiencers enter the hovering alien
craft through a slit or other quasi-vaginal openings.
Once inside the ship, whose interior is almost invariably dark, murky and
warm, they are tested and probed . . . . a kind of return to the womb.
The experience is of helpless release, of surrender to something bigger
than oneself.” Dreams of Millenium: Report From A Culture On The Brink by Mark
Kingwell (Faber and Faber, 1996) pp. 252-3.
7 While I sense a decade-skipping pattern, I also view
the paradigm shift that UFO phenomenology requires as fitting into other
decade-marked shifts:
A-Bomb, Space Travel & Rock ‘n’ Roll 1947-57
LSD
& Anti-Millitarism 1967-77
AIDS
& Deconstruction 1977-87
Cyberspace & Millenialism 1987-
As to the 70s phenomenon, see also my mention of Fleetwood Mac’s 1973 “Hypnotised” and Frank Zappa’s “Inca Roads” of the same year. As for Jefferson Starship’s hippie, escapist “plan,” it is enunciated in a number of songs from Kanter’s 1970 Blows Against The Empire, particularly “Hijack”:
“You know - a starship circlin’ in the sky - it ought to be ready by 1990
They'll be buildin’ it up in the air even since 1980
People with a clever plan can assume the role of the mighty
and HIJACK THE STARSHIP
Carry 7000 people past the sun
And our babes'll wander naked thru the cities of the universe
C’mon Free minds, free bodies, free dope, free music
the day is on its way the day is ours.”
Words: Kantner, Slick, Balin, Blackman/Music: Kantner
and “Starship”:
“Hydroponic gardens and forests
Glistening with lakes in the Jupiter starlite
Room for babies and Byzantine dancing astronauts of renown
The magician and the pantechnicon
Take along the farmer and the physician
We gotta get out and down
Back into the future
Beyond our own time again
Reachin' for tomorrow
It's so fine Starshine”
Along these escapist lines, Jung writes: “It could easily be
conjectured that the earth is growing too small for us, that humanity would like
to escape from its prison . . . hydrogen bomb . . . population figures . . .
Congestion creates fear, which looks for help from extra-terrestrial sources
since it cannot be found on earth.” P. 17.
8
Jung, p. 71
9And
it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared
a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah
went up by a whirlwind into heaven. 2 Kings 2:11 (KJV).
Jodi Dean reports that at the 50th anniversary of Roswell —“UFO
Encounter ‘97”—the Roswell museum lectures included the Church of Christ,
“who featured alternative speakers testifying to the Christian message of
abduction.” Aliens
in America. Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace
(Cornell, 1998) p. 183. Jung calls man an
“utterly dependent creature”
(p. 53) who must “content himself with a prayerful yearning and `groaning’
in the hope that something may carry him upward” (pp. 54-55).
10
In a
footnote on p. 86 of his “UFO in Modern Painting” chapter, Jung reads van
Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) as a UFO painting: “There the stars are
painted as large shining disks” by Van Gogh whose picture represents a
“pantheistic frenzy,” reportedly a “remnant of an apocalyptic fantasy.”
Van Gogh compared the starry disks to a “group of
living figures who are like one of us.” Two year prior to “Starry
Night,” astronomer Giovanni Sciaparelli discovered channels all over Mars and
thereby began all of this Martian life on the Angry Red Planet. On June 21st
2000, scientists confirmed water, and hence very probably, life on Mars.
11 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/
Nova On-Line’s “Kidnapped By UFOs?
Exploring the Alien Abduction Phenomenon.”
This excellent site contains interviews with three Believers--John Mack,
John Velez, Bud Hopkins—and three Skeptics—Carl
Sagan, Paul Horowitz, Philip Klass. We
are warned: “This feature contains disturbing
material.” Artwork by John Velez is also presented.
12 Dean, p. 57.
13
Bryan,
p. 257, 269.
14
The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science,
New Castle, 1995, p. 84.
15
Mack
to Bryan, p. 270, 276.
16 Newitz, http://www.badsubjects-request@uclink.ucberkeley.edu.”
Quoted in Dean p. 168.
17 Campaign Book Review: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0045917,
my emphasis.
18 “To
my great interest, colleagues have jokingly referred to my own research as
`white trash studies’.” Dean, p. 60.
19 “Unfunky UFO” gets covered by Ice Cube on Dirty Mack. Covers of “Mothership Connection” abound: Above The Law—Pimp Clinic, Bitches With Problems—Comin' Back Strapped, Dr. Dre—Let Me Ride, Digital Underground—Tales of the Funky, Eazy-E—We Want Eazy, Infinite Mass—Mah Boyz, Run DMC—Groove To The Sound, Spice 1—Young Ass Nigga, Sweet T—On The Smooth Tip, Tone Loc—The Homies, Yo-Yo—Make Way For The Motherlode. Why are so many hiphoppers attracted to this song? Joseph Thomas negotiates this hybridity as a mix of the raw funk with the intellectual: “. . . Clinton coins the word Funkadelic, the term itself containing the tensions of carnival. Funk is ripe with earthy connotations: moldy, smelly. It also connotes unsophisticated, crude, natural. And the music funk is known primarily for low, repetitive bass sounds—the heavy kick drum on the one, the thump, the bottom, the groove. The delic side of the equation, however, comes from psychedelic. A quick etymology proves illuminating: the first morpheme, “psych,” is derived from the Greek psukhikos, meaning of the soul, or psukho, soul or life. The second, “Delic,” is derived from delos, meaning clear and visible.” After a brief analysis of the song “What is Soul,” he continues: “The surprising and comic juxtapositions found [here] stress the bricolage that is their music . . . gospel elements combined with blues and rock and psychedelia.” From “A Hamhock in Your Cornflakes,” unpublished manuscript.
20 Jung,, pp. 46-7.
21 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/ Nova On-Line’s “Kidnapped By UFOs? Exploring the Alien Abduction Phenomenon.”
22 Jung, pp. 31 38, 34, 36. In a footnote on p. 19, Jung
comments: “The obvious . . .
translation into sexual language springs naturally to the lips of people.
Berliners, for instance, refer to cigar shaped Ufo as a “holy ghost,”
and the Swiss military have an even more outspoken name for observation
balloons.”
23 Dean p. 60.
24 Quoted in Dean, p. 148.
25 Jung,
p. 39.
26 Dean, p. 123.
27 Nova On-Line’s “Kidnapped By UFOs? Exploring the Alien Abduction Phenomenon.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html
28 My
emphasis. Intergalactic loneliness in at the heart of Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey and in the eerie mellotron and lyrics of Jagger/Richards’
“2000 Light Years From Home” from the otherworldly Rolling Stones LP Their
Satanic Majesties Request:“it’s so very lonely, you’re two thousand
light years from home.” E.T. needs to call and get home and many believers
feel our home, Earth, has been broken into by alien perpetrators/tresspassers.
Here are the lyrics to “Throwing Stones”:
Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free,
Dizzy with eternity.
Painted with a skin of sky, brush in some clouds and sea.
Call it home for you and me.
A peaceful place or so it looks from space
A closer look reveals the human race.
Full of hope, full of grace, is the human face.
But afraid, we may our home to waste.
There's a fear down here we can't forget,
Hasn't got a name just yet. Always awake, always around.
Singing ashes, ashes all fall down. Ashes, ashes all fall down.
Now watch as the ball revolves as the nighttime falls.
And again the hunt begins and again the blood wind calls.
By and by again, the morning sun will rise.
But the darkness never goes from some men's eyes. (Well I know)
It strolls the sidewalks and it rolls the streets.
Staking turf, dividing up meat.
Nightmare spook, piece of heat; you and me, you and me.
Click flash blade in ghetto night. Rudies looking for a fight.
Rat cat alley, roll them bones. Need that cash to feed that jones,
And the politicians throwing stones.
Singing ashes, ashes all fall down. Ashes, ashes all fall down.
Commissars and pin-stripe bosses roll the dice.
Any way they fall guess who gets to pay the price.
Money green or proletarian gray, selling guns instead of food today.
So the kids they dance, they shake their bones
And the politicians throwing stones.
Singing ashes, ashes all fall down. Ashes, ashes all fall down.
Heartless powers try to tell us what to think.
If the spirit's sleeping, then the flesh is ink. (Yeah)
History's page, will be neatly carved in stone.
The future's here, we are it, we are on our own. (On our own...)
If the game is lost then we're all the same.
No one left to place or take the blame.
We will leave this place an empty stone.
Or this shining ball of blue we can call our home.
So the kids they dance, they shake their bones
While the politicians are throwing stones
Singing ashes, ashes all fall down.
Ashes, ashes all fall down.
Shipping powders back and forth.
Singing "Black goes south while white comes north."
And the whole world full of petty wars.
Singing "I got mine and you got yours."
While the current fashions set the pace,
Lose your step, fall out of grace.
The radical he rant and rage,
Singing "Someone got to turn the page."
And the rich man in his summer home,
Singing "Just leave well enough alone."
But his pants are down, his cover's blown.
And the politicians throwing stones.
So the kids they dance they shake their bones.
'Cause it's all too clear we're on our own.
Singing ashes, ashes all fall down. Ashes, ashes all fall down.
Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free.
It's dizzying,
the possibilities. Ashes, Ashes all fall down.
29
What follows is a transcript of that improvised scene from Hopper’s film
followed by the lyrics to the Fleetwood Mac song:
“Billy: Oh, wow! What?
What is that, man? Wha-What the
hell was that, man?
Wyatt: Huh?
Billy: No, man. Like, hey,
man. Wow! I was watching this object, man—like—like the satellite
that we saw the other night—right? And
like it was just going right across the sky, man.
And then, I mean, it just suddenly—uh—(laughs) it just changed
direction and went—uh—whizzing right off, man.
It flashed and—
Wyatt: You’re stoned out of your mind, man.
Billy: Oh, yeah, man—like
I’m stoned, you know, man. But—like,
you know, I saw a satellite, man. And
it was going across the sky—and it flashed three times at me—and zigzagged
and whizzed off, man. And I saw it.
George: (Exhales) That was a UFO, beamin’ back at ya.
Me and Eric Heisman was down
in Mexico two weeks ago—we seen forty of ‘em flying in formation.
They—they—they’ve got bases all over the world now, you know.
They’ve been coming here ever since nineteen forty-six—when the
scientists first started bouncing radar beams off the moon.
And they have been livin’ and workin’ among us in vast quantities
ever since. The government knows all about ‘em.
Billy: What are you talkin’, man?
George: Mmmm—well, you just seen one of ‘em, didn’t ya?
Billy: Hey, man, I saw something, man, but I didn’t see it workin’
here. You know what I mean?
George: Well, they are
people, just like us—from within our own solar system.
Except that their society is more highly evolved.
I mean, they don’t have no wars, they got no monetary system, they
don’t have any leaders, because, I mean, each man is a leader.
I mean, each man—because of their technology, they are able to feed,
clothe, house and transport themselves equally—and with no effort.
Wyatt: Wow!
Billy: Well, you know
something, man? I think—you want
to know what I think? I think this is a crackpot idea. (Laughs.) How about that?
(Laughs.) How about a little of that? Think it’s a crackpot idea.
I mean, if they’re so—smart, why don’t they just reveal themselves
to us, huh—and get over with it? (Laughs.)
George: Why don’t they reveal themselves to us is because if they did
it would cause a general panic. Now,
I mean, we still have leaders—upon whom we rely for the release of this
information. These leaders have
decided to repress this information because of the tremendous shock that it
would cause to our antiquated systems, Now,
the result of this has been that the Venutians have contacted people in all
walks of life—all walks of life--(Laughs.) Yes. It—it—it would be a
devastating blow to our antiquated systems—so now the Venutians are meeting
with people in all walks of life—in an advisory capacity.
For once man will have a god-like control—over his own destiny.
He will have a chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for
all. (Easy
Rider. Screenplay by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern,
Signet, 1969.)
“Hypnotised”
by
Robert Welch
as
Recorded by Fleetwood Mac
from
Mystery to Me Reprise, 1973.
Yes
the same kinda story that seems to come down from long ago.
Two
friends havin’ coffee together when somethin’ flies by their window.
It
might be out on that lawn, which is wide, at least half of a playin’ field.
Because
there’s no explaining your imagination can make you see and feel.
Seems
like a dream, got me hypnotized.
(Your
body means nothing, when you’re hypnotized.)
Now
it’s not a meaningless question to ask if they’ve been and gone.
I
remember of talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange pond.
You
see the sides were like glass in the thick of a forest without a road.
And
if any man’s hand ever made that land well I think it woulda showed.
That’s
why it seems like a dream,
They
got me hypnotized
And
I know that’s right
MMmmmmmmmmmmmmm
MMMmmmmmmmmmmmm
MMMMmmmmmmmmmmm
MMMMmmmmmmmmmmm
Seems
like a dream, got me hypnotized.
They
say there’s a place down in Mexico where a man can fly over mountains and
hills,
And
he don’t need an airplane or some kind of engine and he never will.
Now
you know it’s a meaningless question to ask if those stories are right.
‘Cause
what matters most is the feeling you get when you’re hypnotized.
Seems
like a dream, got me hypnotized.
(Your
body means nothing, when you’re hypnotized.)
Seems
like a dream, got me hypnotized
(MMmmmmmmmmmmmm
MMMMMmmmmmmmmmm
MMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)
Yeah
that’s when they got you hypnotized.
Seems
like a dream, it seems like a dream.
When
your body means nothing, you float around they got you hypnotized.
30
Angelucci’s
aliens infer that “man had not kept pace morally and psychologically with his
technical development.” Jung, p. 115. John
Mack told C.D.B. Bryan that one of his contactees described the alien alarm this
way: “It’s like the butterflies coming back to stop the caterpillars that
are denuding the bushes.” Bryan, p. 274.
This ecological message is pronounced over and over again in 50s and 60s
UFO films, such as the Angry Red Planet whose
Martian message “You have invaded our home” is delivered to the intruding
Earthlings who they call “technological adults, but spiritual and emotional
infants.” This admonition is a stable element in most UFO abduction reports,
whereby contactees are often shown “films” of future Earth ecological
disasters. New Wave rock alien,
Klaus Nomi, announces a similar jeremiad in his signature song, “Keys of
Life.”
31 Jung, p. 113.
32 “Now
the rest of the acts of Josiah, and his goodness, according to that which was
written in the law of the LORD, And his deeds, first and last, behold, they are
written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.”
2 Chronicles 35:26-7 “Yet
now, if thou wilt forgive their sin--; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of
thy book which thou hast written. And the LORD said unto Moses, Whosoever hath
sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.”
Exodus 32-33.
“O God. Thou tellest my
wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” Psalms
56:7-8 “Let them be blotted out of the book
of the living, and not be written with the righteous.” Psalms 69:28
33
“circular symbols have played an important role in every age . . . not only
soul symbols but God-images. . . often associated with fire and light . . .
round, complete, perfect…” Jung, p. 21
34 Interviewed for The Learning Channel’s “UFO’s:
50 Years of Denial” as part of TLC’s “Alien Invasion Week,” April 2000.
Katharina Wilson believes “our government may in fact be trading alien
technology for genetic material . . . or has chosen to look the other way.”
The Alien Jigsaw quoted in Dean, p. 119.
Linda Moulton Howe speaks of a briefing paper that “these Beings have
been genetically engineering us for thousands of years in order that we might
achieve what importance we have achieved.” Quoted from Bryan, p. 270.
Thanks to Erich Von Daniken’s 1971 Chariot
of the Gods and the industry of books that have followed--The Return of the Gods: Evidence of Extraterrestrial Visitations, The
Eyes of the Sphinx: The Newest Evidence of Extraterrestrial Contact in Ancient
Egypt, Arrival of the
Gods: Revealing the Alien Landing Sites at Nazca—we
have stories about aliens from the stone age who gifted early peoples with
nearly every technological development humans might claim, from writing to
building the pyramids, an alien astronaut preserved in a pyramid, ancient
spaceflight navigation charts, computer astronomy from Incan and Egyptian ruins,
a giant spaceport discovered in the Andes whose saucer left what Frank Zappa
called “Inca Roads” (written in 1973) in his song of the same title from
1975’s One Size Fits All—“Did a
vehicle/Come from somewhere out there/Just to land in the Andes?/Was it
round/And did it have a motor/Or was it something different?”
35
Jung,
p. 114-17. One Howard
Menger has reportedly sold records of music taught to him by the aliens. Dean,
p. 40.
There’s
quite a trove of alien inspired recordings “out there,” that is to say,
purchasable from your local record store and Internet.
Here’s a short list of some titles of interest: Pauline Oliveros’ Alien
Bog, Margaret
Brouwer’s Diary of an
Alien, Bill
Laswell/Pete Namlook’s Psychic & UFO
Revelations In Last Days, Guided by Voices’ Alien Lanes, Max Brennan’s Alien to Whom?
Alien Nation’s Hazardous Curves – Sesquipedalien, Moody Alien’s Time
Warp and Spaceshore, Spectrum’s
Forever Alien,
everything by
Live Alien Broadcast, not to mention all of the alien-inflected songs on the
X-Files inspired Songs in the Key of X (1996)
and film soundtrack The X-Files: The Album (1998). Judging by those artists appearing on both of
these collections, we can safely add Soul Coughing and Filter to those 90s UFO
headliners Frank Black and the Foo Fighters. In keeping with my Afro-Mothership musical connection, a
number of jazz/funk/fusion/R&B artists also seem to channel
extraterrestrial-like music beginning, of course, with Sun Ra & His Solar
Arkestra and His Myth Science Arkestra. Herbie
Hancock’s early 70s Headhunters’ Sly Stone/George Clinton inspired funky
fusion music has a certain futuristic synthesized electronica feel that attempts
to be way “out there” and their 1998 reunion LP features natives getting
zapped by a Headhunter UFO on the front cover and the more alien-“manned”
saucers abound elsewhere. There’s the L. Ron Hubbard sci-fideology behind the
scientological jazz fusion of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever
band—particularly 1973’s Hymn of the
Seventh Galaxy, which includes the cut “Theme
To The Mothership” and the hip, organ and moog-synthesized starship-escapist
black jazz of Charles Earland’s Leaving this Planet (one of my favorite jazz
Lps with “monster” players Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, et al) which
features Earland on the cover of the Prestige vinyl (only—lost to CD cover
miniaturization) Lp sitting in another planet’s crater playing a circular
three-tiered keyboard with an Easter Island-like head in front him and an
apocalyptic sky in the background. Along
these lines falls the San Franciscan electric Miles trip-hop fusion music of
Grassy Knoll, whose paranoid Positive Lp features the songs “Black Helicopters” and
“Roswell Crash.” Even Earth,Wind & Fire’s 1977 zodiacal All in All contains a song called “Fantasy,” that invites
listeners to “Take a ride in the sky, on our ship fantasii.”
36 “The signal for UFO stories was given by the mysterious projectiles seen over Sweden during the last two years of the war—attributed of course to the Russians—and by reports of “Foo fighters,” lights that accompanied the Allied bombers over Germany (Foo-feu).” Jung, p. 9. Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters chose to cover Gary Numan’s alien abduction saga “Down in the Park” for the Chris Carter/David Was 1996 Lp Songs in the Key of X, which includes, among many others, Frank Black’s “Man of Steel” and Nick Cave’s spooky tune about alien eugenics called “Red Right Hand.” During the second season of the X Files, Chris Carter heard “Red Right Hand” on an alternative LA radio show from his car radio driving home late one night and soon began to obsess over its “very ghoulish bass-line and mephitic lyrical imagery . . . I found myself cueing it up every time I sat down to write.” The song appears in the two-part episode “Ascension.” Note that like Buchanan & Goodman’s 1956 “Flying Saucer,” P.Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)," the first cut on Mothership Connection is also an interrupted broadcast, interrupted by the funky aliens themselves:
“Good evening.
Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong.
We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.
Welcome to station WEFUNK, better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P.Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.
Coming to you directly from the Mothership
Top of the Chocolate Milky Way, 500,000 kilowatts of P.Funk-power.
So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.”
37 From “Parry The Wind High, Low” on the LP Frank
Black: “And if a ship meets your car /You know you can`t go real so far /
They could treat you real nice / Or put a tracking device / Way
down
inside / I`m checking out invention at the UFO convention tonight / … I’m
getting patterns from a trekker and it sounds like soul records to me / …
Patterns from a trekker, sounds like
Desmond
Decker to me / Sleep machine / In your silo / Transmarine / Things you`ve never
seen. Other Frank Black UFO songs
include “Bad, Wicked World” from Teenager of the Year:
“Conquistadores that have been sent / Bad, wicked world / Bad, wicked
world;” “Men In Black” from Cult
of Ray
You
believe it (you better) / I got their number / Classic camcorder / I saw
everything / Dinner plate specials / The shapes of cucumber/ I`m going to the
papers / I am going to sing / In the cool, cool night / And in the middle of the
day / I`m watching my back / I`m waiting my visitation / From the men in black /
Are they grey or is it my own nation ? / It`s been a good year / It`s been a
good summer
/
I wait for the door or that phone to ring / Our little race / I don`t want to
fail / So just in case / I made you a copy / And I put it in the mail / You
believe it / I got their number / Classic camcorder / I saw everything.”
38
From Engineer Robert Moog’s liner notes to Shirleigh
and Robert MOOG present Clara Rockmore, theremin, premiere artiste of the
electronic music medium with Nadia Reisenberg, piano. Delos 25437 (1975).
Note also the melancholy registered by the theremin—not quite that of
its sister, the mellotron, but is evident in some of the literature contained in
Ms. Rockmore’s repertoire, such as Tchaikowsky’s “Serenade
Melancholique.”
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