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?
 
 

I feel that the current xenophilia of the milieu of our contemporary culture is nothing new at all.  The mass media represents what has been going on in all of our minds for a great while.  Maybe it is an attempt by our mass consciousness to transcend the limitations of our current perceptions of reality, but not an actual agent of change.  If anything, it is simplified and reduced to the lowest common denominator from actual intellectual and spiritual movements that have been going on throughout history.  I feel we are on the same verge of discovery as we were when the first hominids walked in the Olduvai Gap, peering over brushes and shrubs--not for the next predator--but at the stars and the shadowy-shapes between the trees in the distance.

Let me take the specific words of the topic to illustrate this.  UFO's have been studied throught history:  Haley's (the Hairy Star) Comet; St. Elmo's Fire; and (according to Chariots of the Gods) the Incas had landing signals for extraterrestrial craft.  Paranormal research that has taken the scope of folklore, psychic phenomena and afterlife research, is probably the basis for psychology and occultism.  DreamTime, well, the aboriginal tribes of Australia beat everyone to that, and they are one of the later Stone-Age culture-groups in existence.  The more advanced Stone-Age cultures represented by the western Indian nations, before the invasions by the Europeans, had quite a good grasp on the separation of the spiritual self from the mundane for achieving balance.  Once again, I must say it was there all along, and people were looking.

What I feel is going on is our culture's attempt at accepting these unorthodox forms of spiritualism (for lack of a better word), and this embodies the above "alternative" themes within our societies.  Our mass media is the result of greater numbers of our people experiencing, viscerally if not physically, other cultures and life experiences outside of what they consider normal.  Even those with the same listed traits and beliefs as their own, but geographically separated, but still somehow different.  This lends itself to a bit of irreverence towards, say, the "Earth as the Center of the Universe," leading Baby Boomers to be patient towards the Generation X'ers and their fascination for UFO's or occult matters.  Not an actual change in the way things are done from the day-to-day in our life, but the allowance of expression greater than the orthodox ways of before.