[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Waiting for the Saucers

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (March 11 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Whether or not synchronicity has the importance that Jung and his
physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli attributed to it, it's something that
pops into my life often enough to be worth the occasional comment. A
couple of weeks ago, a fine specimen showed up - well, not quite on my
doorstep, but in the course of a half mile or so of walking that began
and ended there.

My walk that day took me to the post office, to pick up a package, and
to the local media exchange, to see what was new there. I'm not sure how
widespread media exchanges are just now, but it's an intriguing business
model: people drop off the books, CDs, DVDs, and so on they no longer
want; those that are worth $10 or more on the used book market get sold
over the internet, and the rest go on shelves, for anyone to take for
free. This particular media exchange gets a dizzying assortment of
stuff; for that matter, so does my mailbox.

This particular day had parallel finds in both of them. The mailbox
contained the first two copies of my new book on the UFO phenomenon,
rather unoriginally titled The UFO Phenomenon (2009), an attempt to get
past sixty years of bickering between the people who think any light in
the sky nobody can identify must be an alien spacecraft, and the people
who think that any light in the sky nobody can identify never existed in
the first place. The media exchange followed that up with a packet of
yellowing paper putting a full stop at the end of one of the oddest and,
in its own way, most moving stories I researched in the course of
writing The UFO Phenomenon.

The late Dorothy Martin never became a household name, but this is
mostly because she had her fifteen minutes of fame veiled by a
pseudonym. She was "Marion Keech", the central figure in the UFO cult
chronicled in one of the classics of American sociology, When Prophecy
Fails (1956). Martin, a suburban Chicago housewife turned contactee,
announced to the world that a vast flood would sweep over North America
on December 21 1954, and only those who were flown to safety aboard
flying saucers would survive.

A team of sociologists from the University of Minnesota had a couple of
grad students join Martin's circle under false pretenses. The result was
one of the few hour-by-hour accounts of what happens when a group of
true believers has to deal with the complete failure of their belief
system. The climactic scene of the story, the afternoon when a circle of
middle Americans gathered in a suburban backyard in a Midwestern winter,
watching the skies and frantically getting rid of every scrap of metal
on their bodies so the flying saucers could land safely, begs for
cinematic treatment; it's hard to imagine any series of events more
perfectly balanced on the thin edge between drama and farce.

It's hard to get through a degree in any of the social sciences in
America without being exposed to When Prophecy Fails, but very few
people know the rest of the story. Friends in the contactee scene got
Martin out of Chicago just ahead of a psych evaluation that probably
would have sent her to a mental institution, and she went first to
Arizona and then to Peru, where a group of contactees were attempting to
launch the Abbey of the Seven Rays as an international center for the
emerging New Age movement. When the Abbey folded, the promoters simply
walked away, leaving Martin penniless and stranded.

It took her years to get back to the United States. When she finally
made it home, she settled in the small town of Mount Shasta, California
as Sister Thedra, the name she believed she had been given by the
aliens. With a constancy and devotion worthy of some less delusional
creed, she lived in relative poverty, supported by donations from the
very modest network of people who subscribed to her newsletter and found
her messages appealing, and devoted all her time and efforts to the task
of preaching the extraterrestrial gospel to a mostly uninterested world.
Until her death in 1992, she remained convinced that the purifying
catastrophes and mass alien landings she had announced in 1954 were
still imminent.

The packet of aging photocopies I found at the media exchange chronicled
the last chapters of her story: several years' worth of her newsletter
from the last years of her life, along with a cheaply bound book of
messages she had transcribed from the aliens and a brief biography of
Martin written just after her death by one of her few followers. I
brought it home and read the whole packet several times. It will be
going back to the media exchange, but several aspects of her story seem
uncomfortably relevant to the current predicament of the industrial world.

To begin with, of course, a remarkable number of people even today
remain committed to the same faith in flying saucers that led Dorothy
Martin on the long strange trip of her life. I have had several
conversations with one person who is convinced that since the problems
besetting industrial society are insoluble by rational means, we need to
transcend reason and await rescue by spiritually enlightened
extraterrestrials. (It never fails to bewilder me how many people these
days think that "transcend" and "give up on" mean the same thing.) I
have spoken with another person who, having seen odd lights in the sky,
is convinced that they must have been alien spacecraft, and on that
basis argues that since it's clearly possible for intelligent species to
reach a higher technological level than humanity, humanity ought to be
able to get through its present predicament and keep on progressing.

All this is a bit like insisting that any hoofprint sighted in a forest
anywhere on Earth proves the reality of unicorns, and arguing from there
that the best solution to the current health care crisis is to rely on
the legendary curative power of unicorn horns. Still, Martin's legacy
has a broader lesson to teach. The contactee faith that shaped her
career drew its strength from the appalling contradiction between the
ideology of progress that dominated twentieth century America and a
growing sense that the trajectory being traced by progress was moving
toward a future no sane person would welcome. The slogan of the 1933
Chicago World's Fair - "Science Explores, Technology Executes, Mankind
Conforms" - had become the ideology of an inhuman future anatomized by
Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society (1954) and also, in the sly
language of satiric fantasy, by C S Lewis in his novel That Hideous
Strength (1945).

The result invites analysis in terms of Gregory Bateson's theory of the
double bind. Put a child into a family setting where the realities that
can be discussed flatly contradict the realities the child experiences,
Bateson pointed out, and mental illness is a pretty common result. Put
an entire society into the same sort of conflict between ideology and
experience, and new belief systems that promise a radical resolution of
the conflict spring up. The more drastic the disconnection between
culturally acceptable beliefs and personal experiences becomes, the
wilder and more apocalyptic the resulting belief systems tend to be.

There's an entire literature on revitalization movements, which is what
sociologists call the mass movements that sometimes gather around these
new belief systems in times of drastic social stress. Some dimensions of
the UFO movement came close to that category, though it never quite
managed to become a mass movement on the scale of the Ghost Dance of the
Native American plains tribes, say, or other classic examples of the
type. The social pressures that gave rise to the extraterrestrial faith
found other expressions before that faith could find a large following;
the widespread but mild belief that there could well be aliens out there
somewhere, and there might be something to all those reports of flying
saucers, replaced the total conviction that sent Dorothy Martin in
pursuit of her destiny.

Just now, though, the double bind that drove the radical movements of
the Fifties and Sixties - the gaping disparity between the Utopian
visions of progress that flooded popular culture and the manipulative
and inhumane technocracy so many people saw taking shape around them -
has given way to a different one. Where the stresses of an earlier time
grew from contradictions to the claim that progress is good, those of
the present and foreseeable future are building around the claim that
progress is inevitable. A society founded on the unquestioned belief
that economic expansion and technological development will continue
forever may have a very, very hard time dealing with a future in which
economic contraction and the abandonment of technologies too complex to
be sustainable will likely be dominant trends. It's not too far of a
reach, it seems to me, to suggest that massive revitalization movements
will follow.

Not all of those will be as obviously delusional as Dorothy Martin's
belief in the imminent arrival of the Space Brothers, though there will
doubtless be some, and the approaching "end of the Mayan calendar" in
2012 - I put the phrase in quotes, because the Mayan calendar doesn't
end then, and the recently invented mythology that has gathered around
the rollover of one of their calendrical cycles has no basis whatsoever
in ancient Mayan tradition - may well give rise to a whopper. Still,
it's the apparently saner fantasies that may cause the most damage, if
only by distracting us from steps that can actually be taken to cushion
the descent into the deindustrial age and make life better for our
descendants for generations to come.

Thus I'd encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any
movement in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may
seem, that claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that
is building around today's industrial civilization. I have argued here
and elsewhere that those crises define a predicament rather than a
problem - a situation that cannot be solved, only lived with - but that
definition flies in the face of some of the most deeply rooted
assumptions of our culture. I suspect that unless we cultivate an
unusual degree of common sense, a great many of us in the years to come
may end up doing some equivalent of standing in suburban backyards,
waiting for the saucers to arrive.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/03/waiting-for-saucers.html


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