Thursday, October 20, 2011

Rational Liminality and the UFO abduction experience.



 Hello everybody! Been busy getting ready to defend MS Folklore thesis but wanted to post a taste of what I'll be discussing and including in issue 2 of MagusMagazine. Give it a read.......

            In 1973, nineteen year old Calvin Parker and forty two year old Charles
            Hickson, both of Gauter, Mississippi were fishing in the Pascagoula river
            when they heard a buzzing noise behind them. Both turned and were terrified to
            see a ten-foot wide, eight-foot- high, glowing egg-shaped object with blue lights
            at its front hovering just above the ground about forty feet from the riverbank. As
            the men, frozen with fright, watched, a door appeared in the object, and three
            strange Beings floated just above the river toward them.
            The beings had legs but did not use them. They were about five feet tall, had
            bullet-shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths; and where their noses or ears
            should be, they had thin, conical objects sticking out, like carrots from a
            snowman’s head. They had no eyes, gray, wrinkled skin, round feet, and clawlike
            hands. Two of the Beings seized Hickson; when the third grabbed Parker, the
            teenager fainted with fright. Hickson claimed that when the Beings placed their
            hands under his arms, his body became numb, and that then they floated him into
            a brightly lit room in the UFO’s interior, where he was subjected to a medical
            examination with an eyelike device which, like Hickson himself, was floating in
            midair. At the end of the examination, the Beings simply left Hickson floating,
            paralyzed but for his eyes, and went to examine Parker, who, Hickson believed,
            was in another room. Twenty minutes after Hickson had first observed the UFO,
            he was floated back outside and released. He found Parker weeping and praying
            on the ground near him. Moments later, the object rose straight up and shot out of
            sight.  (Bryan 1995: 115)


            This supernatural abduction narrative is called the Pascagoula incident and is one
 of the most famous accounts of supposed extraterrestrial interaction with human beings.
 Known as a close encounter of the fourth kind, the abduction narrative is ripe with
 terrifying accounts of regular people being accosted by otherworldly Beings that subject
 their captives to torturous ordeals. According to UFO mythos, a close encounter of the
 first kind involves a UFO sighting that is reported at close range. The second type of
 encounter is when there is physical evidence of the UFO. Some of this trace evidence
 might include burned vegetation, frightened animals, and loss of electricity. An encounter
 of the third kind is characterized by ‘contact’ with an extraterrestrial Being. But the
 fourth is clearly the most disturbing because it involves an actual abduction. These
 stories of supernatural abduction have a clear structure and  fit into consistent themes.
 Typically, the episode begins with an initial capture, which is followed by a sort of
 medical examination and otherworldy journey. In many cases, interaction with the Being
 produces a theophany in the abductee. The sequence usually culminates with the return of
 the victim, but the aftermath of the ordeal lingers sometimes for years after the event.
           My own interest in UFO narratives stems largely from my fascination with the
 esoteric and arcane.  From as far back as I can remember, I’ve had a profound interest in
 all things occult and/or mysterious. In terms of the UFO abduction, I’ve always found it
 fascinating how somebody could experience something largely indefinable and have their
 world-view changed forever. I often wonder what it is about anomalous experiences that
 have the potential to spark a life-changing shift in a person’s ethos or societal niche. Also,
 popular culture has had an influence on why UFO narratives hold my interest. Television
 programs such as the X-Files and Roswell were popular when I was in high school and I
 think that their story-lines, coupled with the fact that I was at an impressionable age,
 instilled a fascination with the UFO in me. To this day, I try to draw correlations
 between the occult and UFO narratives. So as something as mysterious to me now as it
 was when I was younger, these stories of the unknown spark my imagination and inspire
 me to delve deeper into their structural nuances.
         Of all the imaginings the human mind can produce, those of the supernatural may
 hold the most proclivity for individual expression. As part of our unusual psyche, ideas of
 the paranormal or supernatural manifest in a variety of ways. Throughout human history, 
 ideas of otherwordly or inherently inhuman beings have been used to explain pervasive
 or otherwise frightening occurrences. The supernatural abduction, whether by witches,
 ghosts, or goblins, is a common staple in all civilizations and is a structural part of a
 community’s social organization.  According to Jodi Dean, “abduction stories describe
 the interventions of non-human folk in human lives. They are stories of border crossings,
 of everyday transgressions of the boundaries demarcating the limits of that define reality”
 (Dean 1998:163). The idea of abductions by fairies, for example, is a type of assault
 narrative. As described in Western European folklore, a changeling was the offspring of a
 fairy or some other supernatural entity that was put in place of a normal human child.
 People believed that the abductee could only be returned if the changeling was made to
 laugh.
          Nowadays, UFO abductions are perhaps the most popular supernatural assault
 tradition to saturate popular media. Due to the plethora of science fiction movies and
television programs, the appropriateness of the UFO abduction as material for academic
study can easily be questioned. Many academic disciplines dismiss the UFO narrative as
 pure science fiction.  Nevertheless, Thomas Bullard is correct when he states that “the
 question before us is not whether UFOs are folklore. They certainly are, and just as
 certainly resemble other folklore in forms and function. The coherency of abduction
 reports stands out as the most unequivocal piece of evidence that folklore scholarship
 contributes to the UFO mystery” (Bullard 1981: 48). In fact, Bullard himself conducted a
 study of 270 abduction cases and concluded that the narratives hold structural similarities
 regardless of who the abductee was or who the researcher was (Jacobs 2000). Drawing on
 Bullard’s notion that UFO abductions are folklore, in this paper I suggest that UFO
 abduction narratives can be interpreted productively by using Arnold van Gennep’s rites
of passage. I will be utilizing what I have come to call ‘rational liminality’ to show that
after the abduction sequence, an ultimate reincorporation into society is achieved by the
 abductees’ rational acceptance of his/her liminal experiences that occurred during the
 initial event.
        Arnold van Gennep was instrumental in recognizing and discussing the rites of
passage that accompany specific life stages. A French anthropologist and folklorist, van
Gennep coined the idea of rites of passage and used this schema to address various
 transitory events in a person’s life. He identified three distinct steps that make up a
 typical rite of passage. The first involves a separation from society. This separation is
 followed by a complex set of events that are liminal in nature. The term liminal refers to
 an in-between state. Something on a threshold or ethereal, the liminal is an intermediate
 phase of the event. After the separation and liminal experiences, a period of
 consummation or reincorporation into society occurs. Van Gennep utilized these three
 gradated steps to explain everything from puberty rites to secret society membership.
 In order to thoroughly examine the rites of passage apparent in UFO
 abduction narratives, I draw on various abduction  accounts....

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