David Halperin Returns

[Randall]

How does a teenage UFO investigator from the '60s mature into a professor of religious studies specializing in the traditions of heavenly ascent? Now's your chance to find out when David Halperin joins us this Thursday.

David taught Jewish history in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1976 through 2000. His perspective on UFOs is that like religion, they are a human construct that has nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. They are alien, but instead of coming from space, they come from within our own minds, our own souls, where there’s enough alienness to fill a universe.

The UFO phenomenon is about us–our hopes, our longings, our terrors. Some of it is emerging … With messages for us? Perhaps. We just need to learn to decode them. - David Halperin

Now retired from teaching, he lives in North Carolina with his wife Rose. Journal of a UFO Investigator is his first novel.

• The show will be recorded Thursday August 29 at 3:00 pm Pacific 4:00 pm MDT.
• Post any questions or comments for discussion below.
• The Book - Journal Of A UFO Investigator

 

[Randall]

We'll be asking such questions as:

• Your non-fiction book, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, will be published next March by Stanford University Press. Can you please give us an author's perspective of what this book is about?
  
  
• I'd like to establish a baseline starting with the ufological definition of UFO as an alien craft. When we do that, then your perspective on UFOs has little or nothing to do with the craft themselves, but what they represent on a cultural level, particularly through the lens of religious mythology. From a ufology flow chart perspective that puts it in under ufology studies > philosophy > theology and/or mythology which then wraps around to ufology culture, completely bypassing elements of sighing investigation such as field and scientific lab work.