Earlier this year, Fox aired a 6-episode reboot of the X-Files, which I watched with great interest. It was so good to have Mulder and Scully back on TV. The 3rd episode, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, was pure genius. An instant classic. I kept thinking about it for days after it aired, and even now I marvel at how unique, creative, and funny the story was. I recommend it! It's a "monster of the week" style episode, which means the plot is self-contained, so you don't need to know any of the long-running mythology of the series. I hope we get more X-Files seasons in the future, so we can, hopefully, get more episodes as good as that one.
Around the time the X-Files aired, I was reading The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal.
It's a very unique book. The two authors take turns writing chapters. First, Whitley Strieber, a best-selling author who's had a number of what is popularly called "alien abductions", writes about some of his experiences. Then, Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, analyzes Whitley's accounts through the lens of comparative religious studies. It seems like an odd combination at first, but the more you read Kripal's analysis, the more fascinating it becomes. And it's also rather amazing, and refreshing, that an academic takes the UFO subject so seriously.
The chapters by Whitley are good, but since I've read a number of his previous books about his experiences, there wasn't a lot that was new. His first book about his experiences was Communion, published in 1987. It skyrocketed the "alien abduction" phenomenon into the mainstream consciousness, became a best-selling title, and caused a firestorm of controversy. It also led to Whitley being criticized, ridiculed, and even spat upon in public.
But, not everyone reacted so negatively. Shortly after the book was published, he began receiving a lot of letters from people who had similar experiences. He estimates he received around half a million letters; he and his wife stopped counting after they reached 200,000. For a while, the post office delivered their mail in large canvas bags. His wife, who recently passed away, took it upon herself to read and categorize all of the letters. One conclusion she reached is that whatever this phenomenon is, it "has something to do with what we call death". There were many letters from people who saw their deceased family/friends in connection with UFOs. In Whitley's case, during an abduction he saw an acquaintance of his who was in the military. He tried to contact that person afterwards, only to learn that person had died several months prior to the event.
Which brings us to the other author, Jeffrey Kripal. He says that as a professor of religious studies, he doesn't really study religions. He studies their building blocks. Specifically, the anomalous events that lead to their creation. That was a big surprise to me! It makes "comparative religious studies" sound far more interesting than I would have ever guessed.
In the chapters that Kripal writes, he introduces and then applies techniques used by scholars when studying religions. There are 9 different techniques he discusses; a few examples include:
- the act of comparison
- studying how things appear, rather than what they are or how they work (aka phenomenology)
- placing events within historical context
The second and third techniques were especially interesting. He says that "making a cut" between how something appears and what it actually is, is very effective. It lets you study some fairly wild and incredulous events, because you're not claiming the events are "real" or "true", you're just studying what they look like.
Also interesting is that historical context is one of the main reasons he takes Whitley's accounts seriously. When you look through the historical record of upstate New York, where Whitley's events took place, it doesn't take long to find many similar accounts from other people going as far back as the late 1800s. And if you step way, way back, he says, the history of religions is full of beings descending from the sky to inspire, educate, and/or terrorize humans.
That almost makes it sound like he's a proponent of the "ancient alien" theory, which is so popular on the History Channel these days, but that's not the case. The UFO phenomenon, he says, has been framed by our technology-focused, spiritually-naive culture, which ignores the more unusual evidence, such as abductees seeing dead people. If anything, he thinks we need to adopt a more magical/spiritual mindset from ancient cultures, where there was a place for these things: people who experienced them were called shamans, seers, prophets, mystics, etc.
And that, finally, brings us to the whole point of the book. When you put all of the UFO-related evidence on the table, and (using that act of comparison) compare them with all the other anomalous events throughout the history of religions, the evidence starts to look similar, and not so anomalous. Kripal claims the evidence points to a fundamental human experience, a basic capability that we all possess. In other words, all of the strange, paranormal, supernatural experiences are really just part of the natural world. We just have too limited a notion of what the "natural world" really is. Hence the title of the book "Super Natural" is two words, not one.
Well, that's my take on it, at least. The book is really deep, and I've only barely skimmed the surface. I probably need to read it again to absorb more of it. And if this all sounds weird, trust me, I haven't even mentioned the really weird parts of the book. I also feel like the terminology introduced in the book takes a step towards explaining some of the strange experiences Whitley describes. And that is no small feat.
A few more noteworthy aspects of the book:
The footnotes were fantastic. There are over 100 of them, which mention further sources of information, almost all of which sound fascinating. I feel like I could spend a good 10 years reading all the referenced books, and be quite happy doing so. Happily, I discovered I already own 2 of the books mentioned in the footnotes, having bought them at a company book sale but never gotten around to reading them. I just finished reading one (Journal of a UFO Investigator), which is what prompted me to write this enormous-sized blog post.
Even some of Kripal's other books sound fascinating, too. His previous book, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, discusses how some of the most influential science fiction authors and comic book creators of the 20th century were inspired by their personal experiences with the paranormal.
The Super Natural also gave me a tremendous new appreciation for Charles Fort, a researcher of anomalous events who lived during the late 1800s/early 1900s. I'd heard of him before; the magazine Fortean Times is named after him, and in the X-Files episode I mentioned above, Mulder quotes Fort at the beginning. What I did not realize is just how advanced and sophisticated his research was. He had a sense of humor, too. The title of his book The Book of the Damned (published 1919) referred to paranormal experiences and how they were ignored by both science and religion. For the most part, that's still true today, but books like The Super Natural offer a glimmer of hope.