Fairies, Aliens and Ball Lightening
The inspiration for this post is the fact that Communion is one of the books on the Group shelf. I find the entire phenomenon of alien abduction fascinating and I can't decide if I think it is real or not.
I do find it intriguing that the earliest reports of alien abduction (that I am aware of anyway) date from around the late forties or early fifties. This is around the time that the "fairy" generation - the folks the age of my great-grandmother who were from Europe and were raised to believe in the Fay People - had had their day and their children (like my Nana) didn't believe in Fairies.
The thing is, that before "modern people" were reporting alien abductions, traditional country people had traditions and legends of fairy abductions. These were traditions they took very seriously, and they had a lot of common links with modern tales of alien abduction. The idea of being taken somewhere strange and enclosed (ship or fairy mound), of your abductors speaking in a strange language but you understand them, the idea that they are not trustworthy and are dangerous, that while you are with them you are somehow outside of time or time does not pass as it should, then you are returned where you were taken from.
So were these alien all along, and traditional people had no context for them? Are they fairy people - some kind of embodiment of nature that modern people have no context for? Are they something else all together, and both sets of people are seeing these interlopers through their own lens of comprehension?
To add to the subject, I saw a special on a science show on PBS (NOVA?) that featured a scientist who believed that stories of alien abduction were prompted by a neural reaction to the presence of ball lightening.
His theory was that in the presence of ball lightening (which witnesses take for a spaceship), the electrical field generated affects the brain.
To illustrate this, he rigged up a helmet to generate the same electrical field the brain would be subject to when in the presence of ball lightening, and strapped it onto the head of a volunteer who was not told what the experiment was about. The volunteer was then left to sit, strapped to a dentist-like chair, for sometime alone (with this helmet on) in a sealed room.
When the scientist and the TV people interviewed the volunteer, he said that he had believed that when they had left the room he was alone. However after a few minutes, he realized they were other people in the room. He "realized" that in fact he could feel people standing all around - but it was too dark in the room to see them. He knew they were talking to one another, but he couldn't quite hear them.
Apparently, this is a typical reaction to the experiment - which the scientist took as "proof" that it was a hallucination. My question is, how did he prove that? I could just as easily state that ball lightening alters people's perceptions to the degree that they are capable of sensing intelligent beings existing....I don't know.. on other planes of existance or something. He has no more "proof" of his theory than I do for mine! Sloppy!
Does anyone have any theories about abduction, the ancient references to abductions and the whole "hallucination" thing? As I said, I don't know what to think - but there seems to be something there!
:)
AT
A T started this discussion 1 year ago. ( )
