Charles Swenson
Cthonic Charlie, Chronic Curmudgeon
How I Almost Became a True Believer
by Charles Swenson
by Charles Swenson
I can’t really remember when I first became fascinated with the concepts of UFOs and flying saucers, but it is firmly embedded with images of the library branch where I read everything I could on the subject. This was back in the early ‘60s so it was almost exclusively nuts and bolts related, though by this time there was also a healthy dose of contactee material sprinkled in. Okay, healthy may not be the right analogy, but it was certainly a heady mix, especially when supplemented by the very real fact that we were also travelling into outer space at the time, reinforced by a steady ongoing diet of rockets and space suits in the press.
This fascination with flying saucers didn’t go unnoticed by my family. My siblings came to me all excited and told me that there was one outside, an excitement which was contagious and sparked me to come running out to finally see the visitors from beyond for myself. What I found there was their hilarious derision and laughter at my credulity, as well as healthy respect for the very real human capacity for deceit in the pursuit of a hoax, as well as an appreciation for a degree of skepticism about the claims of nonbelievers.
I cut my teeth on the Condon Report when it was published, which I took to imply that although there is much going on in the sky which can be misinterpreted, which when sifted through leaves a residual amount of strange phenomena which is still beyond our current understanding. Eric von Daniken was all the rage in high school, but following through in studying the cultural, anthropological and archaeological backdrop he was drawing made clear the height of the conclusions he was jumping to and supplied an Occam’s razor which cut like butter through most of his conclusions.
But it was the whole Bill Moore and Aquarius affair that put the subject to bed for me for almost three decades. With so many conflicting theories and what was clear even then as massive amounts of disinformation the field of ufology was becoming so muddied I put aside the subject. Oddly enough it this same affair which has sparked renewed interest in the whole field of ufoology (thanks to Jim Moseley for that oh so perfect term!) when Greg Bishop’s Project Beta added some much needed perspective on that truly bizarre episode. For me it closed one window but opened up a door onto what the late Robert Anton Wilson called maybe logic, that blessed state of being able to consider everything while believing in nothing.
It was in that same period that another formative event occurred, which has not only helped me understand the nature of becoming a true believer, but the emotional commitment and psychological burden such a belief system entails.
It must have been well over thirty years ago, walking back from a friend’s apartment on a road alongside Saint Edwards in Austin, one with an incredible panoramic overview of the city. It was late at night when I notice a light in the sky approaching from the west. It grew closer and brighter, and as it became clear that it was a series of moving lights. Coming ever closer it began to resolve itself as a series of colored lights that seemed to be moving horizontally beneath a solid surface.
I began to get quite excited about this, visualizing it in my minds eyes as lights rotating around the bottom of a classic disc shaped flying saucer. The implications of this were beginning to reshape my sense of what this implied, that the world would change for me as I went from being someone who had always had an interest in the subject to becoming a full blown believer, one of many of what was sure to be a widely viewed phenomena that would perhaps not only precipitate a major flap but mark the beginning of a mass landing. There was an emotional excitement of anticipation mixed with fear mixed with wonder, a waterfall of feelings running over me, drowning out whatever doubt the inner skeptic could muster because there it was before my very eyes. My whole world view was changing right there and then, some inner element of my psyche welcoming it as a childhood dream finally come true.
And still it grew closer, the lights and their apparent rotation clearer. At one point, however, it became clear to me what was really going on. I could now hear the drone of a small private plane's engine drone, and see that it was pulling behind it a lighted advertising banner with still unclear words scrolling across it.
And so my world changed again. It was, and remains clear to me now, that I have to be careful about allowing my preconceptions and residual belief systems guide my perceptions into seeing what I want to or expect to see. That much is clear, and it applies every bit as much when reading or hearing about the anomalous experiences of others.
But there is another, more frightening aspect to this experience. If that plane had turned sooner, before I'd been able to make out what it really was, I would now be one of those poor fools who run around trying to tell everyone about the UFO I saw, wondering why no else had reported it (or why the sighting was being suppressed) and getting sucked into the bizarrely puzzling world of a true believer in visitors from another world. That is scary.
But it has also helped guide my views on the UFO phenomena. Over the past couple of years I've returned to a fascination with that phenomena, though I feel compelled to say without the true believer's psychological baggage. But high strangeness has an attraction all its own, if for no other reason that as a social and cultural phenomena that may even have distinct applications by the military as a tool of misinformation in psychological operations.
One very clear example of this is covered in Greg Bishop's book, Project Beta, which has implications well beyond Kirkland Air Force Base using intelligence officers to feed a believer’s investigations of covert operations there, leading not only to his mental disintegration but feeding the UFO community a new mythology of underground bases at Dulce Mesa well away from the air base in Albequerque to divert attention. Another recent addition to the field is the fascinating Mirage Men, by Mark Pilkington, which is one of the most delightful, readable, and enjoyable accounts of the military's involvement in attempting to understand as well as manipulate the public's focus on unknown aerial encounters and belief in aliens over the past 63 years. And H.P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake, about as well documented a book on MK-ULTRA as can be found, makes clear the degree to which government will go to hide its motives and methods, especially during the early days of the Cold War when its paranoia reached a degree that was not only pathological but bordering on the sociopathic.
But make no mistake about it, there is every bit as much paranoia and as many attempts to guide public opinion by true believers as well. What it is that the true believers believe in spans as wide a gap as the diehard skeptics on one side and the wide-eye New Age Naïf’s, Nazi nut-and-bolters, extraterrestrial exponents, ultraterrestrial underlords, transdimensional time travelers, abduction victimologists and far more evolving even as the anomalies emerge.
There is a cultural meme associated with this phenomena that is continually morphing and endlessly fascinating. The cost of admission to this freak show is minimal, but one must be endlessly cautious once inside the tent to remain part of the audience, for it is not always clear where the sawdust ends and the stage begins.
