The Betty and Barney Hill incident happened all of 63 years ago. And the path to it, all the way from now back to then, can’t possibly be straight. Just look at just some of what’s happened on the UFO cultural scene, since then: 

1977

1979

1982

1987

1993-2002

1994-2003

1994

1995

2015

2016

2021

Just some of what’s happened on the cultural scene since the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, 63 years ago. And those conversational themes I outlined in part one of this sermon? Still present. We continue to see attempts to explore UFOs factually side-by-side with fictional explorations. We continue to see people putting stories out there, presumably in good faith, accompanied with suspicions about conspiracies and government cover-ups.  

Are aliens friends, or are they foes? 

Do they exist, or not?

What the heck is going on? 

I can’t possibly promise you conclusions here that tie things up into a neat bow. We are eyeballs deep in a genuine, honest-to-God capital M mystery. As in

Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery….

But what I want to leave you with is perhaps an expansion in your sense of what we are dealing with here. 

Did you know that, in ufology, there’s an old school and a new school? 

Old school is the theory that UFOs and their alien pilots (if real!) are visitors from planets light years away. They are physical beings like us, but incredibly advanced, technologically. Call this the “astrobiological interpretation” of UFO phenomena. This is the interpretation that dominates the popular imagination. It’s pretty much all you find in fictional movies and stories and so on. It’s pretty much what’s in the back of most people’s minds when they think about UFOs.

It’s probably what’s been in the back of your mind all throughout this sermon so far. 

However, some ufologists found themselves questioning the astrobiological interpretation in light of the typical extreme strangeness of encounters with UFOs. Alien behaviors seemed inconsistent with what you’d expect from space visitors (especially given the time and effort it would presumably take to travel light-year distances). In fictional movies, aliens act with reason and purpose, whether to befriend humanity or to terrorize it. But from real life stories–say, ever since 1947 and Kenneth Arnold’s fateful sighting of the “unidentified flying bats” which kicked of the modern UFO craze–what we have learned is this: 

• UFOs blow the minds of scattered individuals while seeming to do everything they can to prevent a collective confidence that they actually exist. 
• If UFOs are trying to change human society, it’s completely under the radar. UFOs are not following standard fictional scripts of either befriending humanity or trying to destroy it.
• You would think (being the presumably super-advanced creatures they are) that, after 75 years or more of contact with humans, they wouldn’t need to do any more physical exams to know how human bodies work. But the physical examinations continue…. 

And so on. It all just seems inconsistent with the “astrobiological interpretation.”

Thus, the new school. It’s represented by such genuine luminaries in the field as J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee. Call it the “paranormal interpretation” theory. By the mid-1960s, Hynek and Vallee had seen enough data to start questioning the “astrobiological interpretation.” But they were also starting to acquaint themselves with the long history of human encounters with mythic entities like fairies and angels. They started to do their homework on the universal and perennial phenomenon of visionary experience. It’s somewhat analogous to the direction the mythologist Joseph Campbell took in his study of ancient Greek hero myths. Joseph Campbell started to look beyond Greece to other traditions which told stories that, on the surface, looked very different but, at bottom, echoed all the same basic themes. His book The Hero With a Thousand Faces has since changed our way of thinking about the hero myth. Similarly, Hynek and Vallee started to look beyond traditional UFO stories to all stories that embodied the basic theme of “human encounters with transpersonal beings.”

From this “paranormal interpretation” perspective, what you get is a picture of human reality that is multidimensional. There is larger intelligence, and our three-dimensional lives are enfolded in it. Spiritual entities which are of this larger intelligence have always been poking themselves into our flesh-and-blood lives. And, different people, in different historical times, will have interpreted these encounters differently. Some will say they experienced angels. Others will say they experienced fairies. Since phenomena in the skies have always fascinated humanity, it’s no surprise that there have always been stories of strange objects coming from above. But now, given how thoroughly our culture is saturated with technological development, people today are more likely to describe their encounters with transpersonal beings in science fiction terms: alien entities from different planets light years away who have big almond-shaped eyes and they fly in saucer-like spacecraft and they abduct people to do medical experiments on them….

Angels. Fairies. Aliens. They look different, but at bottom it’s an encounter with the same basic Mystery which is not so much “supernatural” as way beyond our current understanding of what is natural…. 

This “paranormal interpretation” of UFOs–it can be tough to wrap one’s mind around at first. And I really want folks to appreciate this new school of thought. So let’s take an extra moment to absorb it, starting with a description of a typical experience of a UFO abductee in current times (note the echoes with Betty and Barney’s experience): 

I. At night in a remote area or at home, a witness sees a UFO and tries to flee. 

II. He enters a zone of strangeness as surroundings lose normal appearance, machines misbehave, his volition is impaired and his memory blanks out. Strange humanoid beings appear and float or carry him inside the UFO. 

III. He enters a uniformly lighted operating room where one or more alien beings subject him to a medical examination, sometimes of a painful character. 

IV. Afterwards he may see long tunnels and other parts of the ship, or travel a great distance in a short time to a dark and desolate other planet, then to a light and airy realm, both of which have buildings. Among the aliens he may also see a human being, and receive messages. 

V. On returning to earth, he finds a memory gap and injuries, and may receive later visits and extranormal manifestations.

Ok, now take this and superimpose it on the experience of folks who encounter “fairies”–those creatures of Persian and European folklore which people have been telling stories about for a thousand years or more. 

I. At night in a remote area or in the vicinity of a fairy mound the witness 

II. Finds his surroundings unfamiliar as he encounters mist or is “led astray,” or loses his volition as he hears enchanting music. He encounters one or more unusual beings who invite or lure him away with them, and afoot or by some unusual conveyance, he passes through a dark tunnel, takes a ride in darkness or sails on a stormy voyage to an other-world inside the mound or across the sea. 

III. He enters a dimly or indirectly lighted hall, room or otherworldly country, and joins a society of beings in feasts, dances, games or pleasures, or assists a woman in childbirth, which is often painful. While there he may see a captive human, and acquire extranormal powers of knowledge. V. He becomes a captive or returns after a supernatural lapse of time, which causes him to turn to dust, or he receives later punishment for powers gained while in fairyland. [These typical experience accounts were written by Thomas Bullard]

So, on the one hand: the UFO abduction experience from current times. On the other hand: the fairie abduction experience from ancient times. Are these two fundamentally different experiences? The “paranormal interpretation” view says NO. Cultural and historical conditioning aside, it says that both stories are about a human encounter with some transpersonal spiritual being, with high strangeness as the result. 

It can also be argued that these transpersonal spiritual beings are very much aware of people’s cultural conditioning, and they actively shape their appearances accordingly. Remember, again, what Kenneth Arnold said about what he saw in 1947. It was “a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds.” They were “moving like a saucer would if skipped across water.” Because of the reporter’s mistake, the news spoke of “flying saucers,” and that image caught the imagination of folks world-wide. But what’s most curious is how, in the wake of this, UFO phenomena increasingly took the form of flat and round objects–“flying saucers.” It was as if the phenomena reshaped itself to conform to what people were expecting to see….

So very strange. 

And then there is this. It’s one of the pieces of the Betty and Barney Hill experience that makes my hair stand on end and sends chills down my spine. Remember what Betty said, about how the aliens didn’t understand what “aging” was? Aging? What is that? But how could a biological being not know what aging is? How could a being from this three dimensional world of time and death not know? But the aliens Betty and Barney encountered honestly did not know. From this comes the suggestion: they must be something that is indeed more like an angel, or a fairy, or some other creature of mythology whose stories we have been telling from time immemorial. 

Some folks are going to be old school when they try to make sense of what happened to Betty and Barney, our controversial Unitarian Universalist ancestors. 

Personally, I think the new school is on to something. 

And, I want to ask each of you in this worship space today this question, seriously and sincerely: what if? What if the new school really is on to something? That encounters with highly strange transpersonal beings which today we call UFOs are not anything new at all, but are as old as humanity itself? What if? 

Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery….

But the distinctively Unitarian Universalist question is, How to bring reason to the Mystery–not to impatiently debunk it but to get beneath surface appearances and appreciate more deeply and soulfully our understanding of the human condition and beyond?

In her book The Color Purple, Alice Walker has the character Celie say, “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.” 

And then there is something the Irish poet and believer in fairies William Butler Yeats said: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” 

More love. More magic. 

May it all be so.