One way to understand this strangeness is to examine situations in which there is a supernatural experience without a pre-existing tradition that gives meaning to people’s experiences and shapes their interpretations. By this I mean that if you have a mystical experience in the context of, say, a Pentecostal faith healing service or a Roman Catholic mass, you will likely interpret it in light of existing Christian theology . But if you’re having a religious experience “in the wild,” so to speak, the sheer strangeness is more likely to arise.
I’ve written about how you can approach this strangeness by reading the Christian Gospels without the structuring expectations of Christian doctrine. Much like the first-person accounts of the Jesus phenomenon, their mysteries cannot be adequately explained by an overactive theory of mind among Jesus’ followers and the benefits of Christianity for social control thereafter.
But another path, which I have been following lately, is to read about UFO encounters – because it’s clearly the Pentagon that wants it! – and consider them a form of religious experience, or even the basis of a new, half-formed religion of the 21st century. That’s the line taken by Diana Walsh Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, in her two books on the subject, “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology,” and its recently released sequel published, “Encounters”. : Experiments with non-human intelligences. It is also a subtheme in Matthew Bowman’s “The Betty and Barney Hill Abduction: Extraterrestrial Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America,” which focuses on one of the most notable early UFO encounters , involving an interracial couple in 1960s New Hampshire.
Both in Hill’s story and in the broader range of narratives Pasulka discusses, you see people having largely unexpected encounters with entities that defy easy categorization and explanation. Some aspects of these encounters fit a Spielbergian science fiction model, and since we are in a secular, scientific age, society as a whole is adopting this model and wondering if we might actually be visited by aliens from Alpha Centauri or Vulcan or wherever. But when you dig deeper into the stories, many of their details and consequences don’t resemble “Star Trek”-style first contact, but the supernatural experiences of early modern and pre-modern societies, from fairy abductions to holy and demonic encounters through brushes. with the gods.
And what we see in the communities that have developed around these experiences is not a ratification of existing religious structures (even if some people interpret them in accordance with Christianity or another faith), nor a set of Simple stories that provide meaning and purpose. and ratify a moral order. Rather, it is a landscape of destabilized agnosticism, filled with competing theories about what is really going on, half-formed theologies and metaphysical images blurring with scientific and pseudo-scientific narratives, with potential gurus rushing to espouse specific views and skeptics warning of malicious potential. intentions of visitors, whatever they may be.
