Monday Musings #1– Tricksters

So, lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of what John Keel referred to as ‘Ultraterrestrials.’  To those unfamiliar with the concept, Ultraterrestrials are beings that either live in another dimension (the Universe Next Door?), or who share our planet unbeknownst to us.  These Ultras, in Keel’s view, are responsible for the vast majority of UFO sighting and alien encounters, as well as the Men in Black, and other mysterious figures scattered throughout history.  For the most part, Keel sees them as sinister entities, bent on messing with us poor humans to suit their own, indefinable needs.

But, presuming these beings exist, or co-exist with us, why would they want to spend their time messing with us?  Sure, the old UFO Contactee message of ‘take care of your planet’ makes sense (and, in fairness, is referred to by Keel in his classic Our Haunted Planet), but very little else does.  It seems to me that Ultraterrestrial is just another way to talk about Faerie lore.  We look down on ‘magic’ as superstition, but accept this current iteration as the new gospel.  In reality, they are very much the same.  The great Jaques Vallee made this argument brilliantly in his landmark tome Passport to Magonia.

However, for this inaugural missive, I want to focus in on something that’s largely been ignored, I think, when discussing these entities (whatever they may be).  I submit that, given the countless bits of paranormal weirdness that people experience, that the Ultraterrestrials we most commonly encounter belong to the family of Trickster gods—think Coyote, or Anansi, or even Loki.  Their entire purpose in lore was to mess with people, to introduce chaos into an orderly world.  I think that many of the entities encountered by percipients fall under this category.  How else to classify a grey alien wearing a cowboy hat?  Or a woman who encountered a gnome, complete with pointy red hat and beard? Or a bigfoot sighting in an area that couldn’t possibly sustain a breeding population of large, bipedal Sasquatches?  Or, better yet, the witnesses who swear that they saw Bigfoot leaving or entering a landed UFO? 

The experiences I just listed serve only one purpose—to sow seeds of chaos.  If the percipient reports their odd experience, the only outcome is usually to damage that person’s credibility.  If the observer is beyond reproach, then the experiences are classified under dreams, hallucinations, or other mental health issues.  But for those who believe the experiencer?  It just throws a wrench in the study of paranormal phenomena.  It takes a system with internal logic (alien visitors experimenting on or contacting us) and destroying that logic by donning a Stetson.  This absurdity serves to make the serious researcher (even the armchair variety) doubt any conclusions that may have been made.  Those who refuse to acknowledge such reports in their research see these incidents as outliers, at best.

And when that happens, a split is likely to form in the research community.  Regardless of the field of study, the community will split into at least two factions—one that connects Bigfoot to UFOs, and one who doesn’t.  One that believes in UFOs as nuts-and-bolts machines, and one that sees them as an Ultraterrestrial construct.  And so on.

The one thing we know for certain is that people around the world have strange experiences all the time.  The Tricksters come into our lives to disrupt and turn on end any serious research that’s being done.  I’m not questioning anyone’s experiences, or that alien abductions may sometimes actually happen, or that cryptids such as Bigfoot may well exist in our objective reality.  What I AM saying is that our Ultraterrestrial bunch of Tricksters exist in order to prevent us from understanding what is really going on.

And what IS really going on?  I have no idea.  To the Armchair, Robin!