“they measured me”
May 18th, 2007 by Glenn
What do Mormons think about UFOs? Alien abductions? Life on other planets? Quakers on the Moon?
I have heard many different thoughts over the years from members of the church. I have had many different thoughts of my own. I have even had a few encounters that I thought may have been UFO-related, but none have been more disturbing than an early morning conversation I had one day a few years ago with my then-three-year-old daughter.
I was filming my newborn son as he was flailing around on the family room floor when my daughter came down from her room and sat down on the couch. I said “good morning” and asked if she had a good sleep, did she have nice dreams, etc. Then she said, very casually, that the people came again last night.
It was not the first time she had said something like this, but she didn’t usually talk about it much, so I wanted to get it on tape. Being as careful as I could about not offering leading questions or making suggestions for her to follow, I asked her to explain what she meant. She said that she was in her bed and they came in through the window and took both she and her older sister (the older sister had no sense that anything had happened) outside into a room that was all red — and they put her on a table and talked to each other and “they measured me” — at this point she raised her arms out straight (like the letter “T”), which I thought was a strange gesture. She said that she wanted them to let her go home, and the did.
I asked her to describe more for me — who it was, what they looked like. She described that they were smaller than grownups and they had big eyes. I asked about the nose. She said they didn’t have a nose. I asked how it sounded when they talked. She was very confused about this and said that they talked through their mouth – but when I asked what the mouth looked like she said they didn’t have a mouth. I’ll really have to go back and watch what she said again, but she nailed so many of the alien abduction narrative motifs that it was a little scary.
Three-years old seems a bit young to be so well-versed in that kind of cultural discourse — I don’t think she had seen movies or TV shows about this – I had been teaching a section on alien abduction narratives in my folklore class and had a video that I showed my students, but I didn’t talk about that stuff at home, especially not around the kids, although I suppose it is possible she got it from me somehow. But what do you think? What do Mormons think about UFOs? Alien abductions? Life on other planets? How are narratives like this generally interpreted wuthin Mormon culture?
Glenn,
My Mom once gave me a mini-magazine (the kind you buy at a supermarket checkout lane) about alien abductions. Among other things, it postulated that visits from angels recorded in Isaiah and Ezekiel were close encounters with aliens. The mini-mag even postulated that Moroni was an alien that visited Joseph Smith!
I personally don’t believe any of the things it said, but I thought it was interesting what kind of spin some in the UFO culture put on things connected to the Bible and LDS beliefs.
j_t,
I’d love to see something like that. Do you still have it? What was the audience/circulation — was it an LDS thing or was it non-LDS that used the moroni story to support alien visitations?
It was definitely for a non-LDS audience. Most of the stuff seemed geared to people who espouse new-age type beliefs. I’m not sure if I still have it. I’ll have to search around for it at my parents’ house the next time I visit them and let you know if I come up with it.
Some UFO folks love the PofGP. Erich von Däniken had a field day with statements from Joseph Smith about the denizens of the sun. When I was in Hungary I had an investigator who was only interested because she thought we could tell her more about UFOs…
I met with an investigator like that in Japan…..once. He brought in magazines like the one j_t mentioned, but for a New-Age Japanese audience. He would patiently listen to us as we recited our memorized stuff, then he would respond to our questions with completely unreleated UFO-talk, taking it in an entirely different direction than we wanted to go. We didn’t dust out feet on him by any means, but it was clear he was only interested in his own crazy ideas, and that our crazy ideas only interested him inasmuch as they could get him a ticket onto the mothership (and as far as I know they didn’t).
There was a radio show called Ground Zero that used to be broadcast on KBER in Salt Lake every Sunday night. Clyde Lewis, the host, would talk about all sorts of weird stuff, like reverse speech phenomenon, ghosts, UFOs, etc. He used to bring the church up from time to time and talk about how he loved the fact that Mormons believed that God was an extra terrestrial from another planet. He would talk about Kolob and Abrahamic astronomy (as Fenevad noted, all from the PofGP).
When I offered to read this post to my husband, he declined, saying, “I don’t want to read about it, I’ll have nightmares.” He says he’s not ready to believe in aliens wholeheartedly, but does believe some of it. To him, the way your daughter (and others) describe their encounters of being probed or examined, is exactly how we treat animals we find in the wild. Capture them, measure them, etc. then release them.
Anyway, perhaps my husband’s propensity to nightmares is why our son has them. I’ve never heard anything like this from our 4 yr old, he mostly talks about monsters and goblins, although this post has given me reason to ask more questions next time . . .
Without getting into the truth value of UFO beliefs, I would just point out how similar the typical UFO experience is in many details to old stories of troll or goblin abduction in which individuals are taken away for a time and then returned. While some details (measuring and probing) are new, the overall narrated experience is very similar, and you see UFO abductions rise as tales of troll abduction and so forth disappear, which lead me to wonder if they aren’t the same thing in their respective culturally relevant forms…
In the old troll narratives, Christianity often played a role, with the trolls as some sort of pagan. In the UFO narratives science has taken on the roll of religion, but it is reversed: they are in control, not us. It seems that as belief has decreased as an operative factor in making sense of the lived world and science has taken its place, it would not be surprising to see a shift from a religiously defined experience to a technologically defined one. It is also perhaps telling that in old troll narratives it is Christian man who is firmly in charge once the troll abduction is detected, but now we do not have the same security in our role in the world, and now we are the weak victims.
Jessawhy, I hope I didn’t give Mar’cuz nightmares (what a great couple the two of you make). I hope even more I didn’t freak you out about your kids. As long as they don’t ever complain about ear infections you are okay (I’m only joking).
Fenevad, are you suggesting that the same tale-type is being repeated today? How do you think that happens? Is it filtering through word-of-mouth/cultural exposure, or do you think it is more embedded in the subconscience in a Jungian archetype kind of way?
Costanza, not only is He an extra terrestrial, He is an extra-telestial, too. (or would that be extra-extra-telestial?)
Good question. I don’s have a ready answer for either the why or the how. I’m highly skeptical of Jungian explanation, so I guess I would tend to lean towards some sort of word-of-mouth explanation. There was an article in Skeptic magazine a while back (I read all sorts of things) that had an interesting (althought hardly conclusive) explanation for the form of the “grays”. Basically it argued that the earliest visual imprinting in children is of their mothers at a time when they lack visual acuity. The article showed how you could go from an image of a person, and apply some visual transformations to it that simulate low visual acuity and you end up with a “gray”. The article further suggested that the roots of the abduction experience may be in sleep paralysis, but my one experience with sleep paralysis didn’t really fit (I knew what was happening and so didn’t get worried). Basically, in this view, when you are paralyzed, your earliest imprinted memories come back to you, so you start seeing your mother as a “gray.”
I don’t know that I buy the Skeptic explanation (which involved almost as much faith as thinking there are real UFOs and “grays” taking us away), but it shows that there are somewhat plausible explanations that don’t involve actual abductions.
Finally, the folklorist in me can’t help but point out that the details of the aliens and their intentions change over time and there are definite trends in the tales that suggest familiarity with a narrative framework helps abductees emplot the experience against existing tale types/motifs. I.e., something happens to me (e.g., I’m sleep paralyzed, I’m abducted, I’m hallucinating*) and I don’t really have all the details down, so I emplot them against current stories of alien abduction I’ve heard about or read about and then supply the missing details to make the story fit.
So my guess is that there is a real experience of some sort, but that the stories we tell (and believe to be true) are not the experience itself, but rather culturally mediated and construted sense-makings of that experience. As such we would expect all of the folkloric processes to be involved, so there would be tale types and motifs. If that is the process, then alien abductions could be the evolutionary descendents of troll abduction stories, and that—along with the commonality of the underlying physica experience—would account for the narrative similarities.
This explanation, however, breaks down for small children who (presumably) are reading UFOlogy magazines or watching Signs for fun. That I can’t explain.
* The one time I know I hallucinated at night (because of a fever brought on by border-line pneumonia), I thought I was Herbie in a road race, so I couldn’t extract a UFO out of that.
err:
…small children who (presumably) aren’t reading UFOlogy magazines…