Given the proliferation in recent years of ufo/paranormal/dreamtime imagery in the media (VW's "Reverse Engineered From UFO's" ad comes glaringly to mind), do you feel that this is actually changing or affecting the phenomenon itself? Is the mass-media consciousness causing the UFO phenomenon to change the way it interfaces with us?
 
 

In American culture today, unexplained phenomena (specifically, UFOs and "contact experiences") have become cliche & cute; stereotyped and shoved in a file marked "solved." Whether this file is in the "nutty B.S." drawer or the "I believe" drawer depends merely on whose cabinet you are checking, but either way, the answers are known, or damned close. This popularized stereotype doesn't differentiate between UFOs and unusual entity or contact experiences; it automatically associates one with the other, and often throws in reverse engineering, as well as any cattle unfortunate enough to be in its path, for good measure. Is this stereotype in any sense accurate, and is it affecting either the true nature of the UFO or contact phenomena, or could it biasing the data that we see representing those phenomena?

Many bright minds who have examined the "contact" phenomenon for quite some time have come to the tentative conclusion that the nature of the phenomenon is very dependent upon our expectations, in quite a literal sense. Things may be quite a bit more complex than being explainable exclusively in terms of hypnagogic states or physical aliens from *insert token star system of your choice here*. When a "genuine" experience occurs, the expectations of the person involved could be perhaps as important as the nature of the stimulus. Not only in respect to how an experience is reported and remembered, but perhaps even in terms of the brain chemistry or belief systems and schemas of the participant involved in their structuring of an amazingly odd and chaotic encounter into a coherent experience. Perhaps the line between the phenomenon and the participant is extraordinarily fuzzy, and neither can be measured accurately without the other.

The little gray skinned doctors flying across the galaxy in saucers we commonly reverse engineer at Area 51 has become the stereotype representing what an unusual experience "is." However, upon digging into reports of weird encounters, one may be surprised to find that reports involving this stereotype are not nearly as common as some of its more vocal proponents would have us believe. Then why has it caught on so well? Although the possibility that some of these stories are accurate narratives, uninfluenced by the stereotype itself cannot be discounted (though I maintain that this percentage is very, very small), other variables could be at work as well. Consider that this stereotype has been well promoted by gifted writers and speakers, as well as becoming the butt of loonatic fringe jokes on late night TV and tabloids. Advertising gimmicks have played on the alien myth, and nearly everyone knows someone who knows someone whose uncle (who is quite sane, by the by) actually saw one the damned things. The chicken and the egg, the usual mindphuck, nothing is ever as simple as we'd like it to be, or at least very rarely. Although this stereotype is not accepted universally to characterize unusual experiences, it is by far the most popular in American society today, and in many cases accounts which do not fit this mold are actually discounted because of that fact alone, while ones which do "fit" may gain credibility for no other reason than their similarity to the stereotype. I propose that perhaps, to use a communications model, we are seeing that the noise in the UFO and contact phenomena have been amplified and that the signal (or signals) has actually been written off as the chaos in the background. Perhaps rather than ignoring the accounts which do not fit this stereotype, we should pay particular attention to them. Though they may not corroborate what we wish to believe about the nature of UFOs, they may still present valuable data, and data which contradicts this well ingrained and oversold stereotype.

If the meme of little gray scientists infects enough minds, could it become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? If the mass consciousness of America is conditioned to believe that unusual encounters with an unknown stimulus nearly always involve gray skinned humanoids from outer space with anal fixations, could it? Could this stereotype become ingrained deeply enough in the minds of enough people so that when a brush with something unknown does occur, it could be interpreted and experienced in these terms? If the nature of the phenomenon really does depend to a great degree upon our expectations, then the answer may be yes.

The anthropomorphic view of alien scientists snatching up subjects for genetic experiments is surely a concept that, while an obvious challenge to many people's belief systems, is an idea which is not so foreign as to be unapproachable. Perhaps it is simply an example of the nature of the collective mind of humanity dumbing down everything it approaches, making experiences more easily understandable and easier to relate to. Easier to either buy into or blow off as something which was simply "seen on the X-Files." It is the Rorschach blot that we face collectively, and either by conditioning or as a product of human nature, we seek to quickly identify and stereotype it, to make it easier to deal with in any way we so choose.

In any case, even with the deep imprinting this concept has achieved on our collective minds, I predict (Criswell style, no less) that in the future the myth will continue to evolve. Much as the Aryan space brothers became too hokey to live on as viable beings, so do the primitive pinpricks of the fetus-like aliens. In twenty years will we disregard such accounts, which are all the rage today, in exchange for whatever fad has become the next evolutionary step in our mythology? If we don't begin to analyze this phenomenon (or these phenomena), and hence ourselves and the way we think, more deeply, we will continue to be at the center of someone or something's (maybe even our own) absurd and ironic, misunderstood cosmic mystery.