The video above is a documentary about the 1966 Westall High School UFO incident in Melbourne. This sober production refrains from building imaginative speculations on the weird accounts that fuel UFOlogical interest; rather, it simply provides some space for people to express their memories. This low key approach leaves us with a set of startling core reminiscences unsullied by wild and fanciful interpretations.
Is there any hope of accounting for these UFO narratives without recourse to the supernormal? In the video one reasonable shot at explaining the Westall 66 events in terms of normalcy is taken by a military expert: He thinks it significant that military personnel (possibly some being American personnel) appeared very quickly after the event; they would not have appeared so quickly if they had been surprised by the appearance of some strange object. Therefore, in his opinion, it is likely that the object observed was some kind of military drone that had gone astray.
What did the Westall 66 children see?
Nice try, but I feel this explanation is not entirely satisfactory; it fails to do justice to what the school children (now adults, of course) claim they saw; it is difficult to believe that even school children could confuse a chugging drone with a highly maneuverable seamless and smooth disk shaped object. Moreover, if they saw a real object then it is conceivable that the appearance of military personal was a response to the radar tracking of this object.
I’m not particularly persuaded by the theory that UFO reports are the accounts of the visits of little green or grey men from some far flung part of the Galaxy. One of my reasons for not favoring this explanation, as I have said in part 2 of this series, is because the UFO anecdotes are no better (or worse) than the rumours and anecdotes about ghosts. Moreover, UFOlogy is of a piece with the paranormal field as a whole: Stories of alien abductions are in most cases extracted using hypnosis as are so-called past life regressions. These abductions are accompanied by the ”The Oz Effect”, an effect that also seems to have been reported in the famous Morberly-Jourdain incident. Arthur C Clark’s Mysterious World describes Morberly's and Jourdain's "Oz" experience thus:
Did the two women perhaps share a sort of waking dream? A close reading of "An Adventure" suggests they did, for they repeatedly refer to an eerie, unreal atmosphere that seemed to pervade the park: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still' [p123 1987]
If one is to take the UFO protocols seriously one must also take seriously a whole Pandora’s box of bizarre paranormal protocols. They stand or fall as a whole. As I have already mooted in this series “waking dreams” may have something to do with the paranormal; perhaps some kind of change in the mode of consciousness is involved, something akin to Charles Bonnet syndrome, mingling dream life with the normal coherent mode of consciousness that we usually associate with waking life.
I’m left with the feeling, however, that so far we have no explanation that does justice to Westall 1966. The Fortean feel of the whole subject is difficult to dispel and I’m reminded of the Martian Canal phenomenon because it too has an occult air and has left some people wondering if there is something here that is neither easily explained nor dismissed. In his book on the history of Mars observation [The Planet Mars 1996] William Sheenan spends four or five chapters on the subject of the Martian Canals; not a disproportionate passage given that the question of these canals dominated the subject of Mars observation for the best part of 30 years from around1880. On the nature of these apparent canals Sheenan says:
I must admit that I have never seen a fully convincing explanation (p137)
In his book “Cosmos” [1981] Carl Sagan's comments on the subject of the Canals are particularly interesting: (p110)
In reading Lowell’s notebooks I have the distinct but uncomfortable feeling that he was observing something. But what?
When Paul Fox of Cornell and I compared Lowell’s maps of Mars with the Mariner 9 orbital imagery – sometimes with a resolution a thousand times superior to that of Lowell’s Earth bound twenty-four-inch refracting telescope – we found virtually no correlation at all. It was not that Lowell’s eye had strung up disconnected fine detail on the Martian surface into illusory straight lines. There were no dark mottling or crater chains in the position of most of his canals. There were no features there at all. Then how could he have drawn the same canals year after year? How could other astronomers - some of whom said they had not examined Lowell’s maps closely until after their own observations - have drawn the same canals?
…I have the nagging suspicion that some essential feature of the Martian canal problem still remains undiscovered. Lowell always said that the regularity of the canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. This is certainly true. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on.
Joining the Dots; wrongly, this time!
Many good observers with high quality equipment failed to see the canals and this tends to suggest a subjective component to the Martian Canal experience. That there was something strange going on with human consciousness is perhaps hinted at by the experience of Giovanni Schiaparelli, one of the first observers to “see” the canals: William Sheenan quotes Schiaparelli as follows (p 87):
What strange confusion! What can all this mean? Evidently the planet has some fixed geographical details, similar to those of the Earth……Comes a certain moment, all this disappears to be replaced by grotesque polygonations and geminations which, evidently, seem to attach themselves to represent apparently the previous state, but it is a gross mask, and I say almost ridiculous.
I don’t hold out much hope that a definitive explanation of Westall 66 and many other peculiar paranormal anecdotes will ever come my way; after all, we are dealing with anomalies at the very heart of what makes coherent and rational science possible; namely, the observations of conscious cognition. However, these anecdotes do have some notable features in common; Viz: They hint at apparent changes in the mode of consciousness (the "Oz" effect), a dreamlike/Charles Bonnet type quality pervades these experiences and yet, inexplicably, they can be shared between observers - however, some people are more susceptible than others. We must also add that these reports leave outside observers (like Carl Sagan and myself) uneasy as to what is actually going on, because most difficult of all to account for is the claim that these events sometimes leave physical traces. (Like radar effects)
As this series progresses I’m hoping to develop another common theme and that is the “Freudian” connection: Like dreams these experiences appear to have an oblique, encrypted if rather muddled connection with what is going on in our waking lives, personally and in society as a whole.
The first two parts of this series can be found here:
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html
