from: AMERICAN ATHEISTS subject: AANEWS for July 7, 1997 A M E R I C A N A T H E I S T S ~~ A A N E W S ~~ #308 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 7/7/97 http://www.atheists.org ftp.atheists.org/pub/ From Mars to Roswell... "WORLDS IN COLLISION" AS SCIENCE AND MYTHOS VIE FOR ATTENTION Two dramas began playing out this past weekend, each representing vastly distinct sensibilities and views of the universe. On July 4, the Pathfinder space probe completed its 300 million mile orbital trek to Mars, literally bouncing onto the surface of the red planet while nervous scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California waited pensively for a confirmation signal that the probe had survived its torturous landing. Cheers went up from Mission Control when the good news arrived. Despite minor technical glitches, Pathfinder is already considered a success, and both the the main craft and the little Sojourner rover have sent back hundreds of spectacular photos of the landing areas. For imaging experts, planetary scientists and astronomers, this latest mission to Mars has already provided an embarrassment of riches, a treasure trove of information far surpassing the quantity of data returned by the two Viking spacecraft 21 years ago. And public interest in this space program achievement seems to be high. Major television and other media provided live coverage of the seminal portions of the Pathfinder landing, and CNN, Discovery and even the Sci Fi Channel aired regular mission updates. The NASA website has recorded over 100 million "hits" and project scientists noted that the Pathfinder landing "is the biggest internet event in history." But while public fascination in the Pathfinder landing has been evident, that interest overlaps with another drama which took place on another desert much closer to home. July 1-6 marked the 50th anniversary of what some insist was the crash landing of an alien space craft near Roswell, New Mexico. Nearly 100,000 people (none of them reportedly extraterrestrial) descended upon the small town lying on plains east of the Sierra Blanca mountains; many paid $15 for a trek nearly as dangerous as Pathfinder's mission, enduring the 100-degree plus desert temperatures to view the "crash" site. Others flocked to the two UFO museum in town, or fell prey to clever merchants cashing on the "ET mania" by selling everything from "Alien Juice" snowcones to T-shirts and other tourist-kitsch with outer space themes. At the Star Child gift shop, a busy clerk told CNN that "This boon could go indefinitely. People just can't get enough of it." Indeed they can't. Roswell is only the tip of a cultural iceberg, a social phenomenon linking bizarre, often unsubstantiated claims of alien abductions, giant space craft, secret bases and government cover-ups to more traditional themes and metaphors, including the established mythos of religious faith. It incorporate the pop culture artifacts and symbols from movies, or TV programs such as "The X-Files" with similar ideas about the paranormal and mystical finding surprisingly widespread acceptance across the social landscape. Fact, speculation and fiction quickly become blurred, and what emerges is a sort of confabulated, postmodernist, late twentieth century religion or mythos. Fueling the Roswell phenomenon has been a rash of movie offerings emphasizing alien or invasion themes, such as last year's summer blockbuster "Independence Day" and earlier films like "Star Gate" and "The Arrival." Having worked through the pop-psych themes of the sixties and early seventies which emphasized interpersonal relationships a la Woody Allen, Hollywood began finding a lucrative market in selling extraterrestrials beginning in the late 1970s. They could be enigmatic, as in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," friendly and playful ("ET") or menacing, as in John Carpenter's remake of the classic "The Thing" or the less impressive "Invasion From Mars." Much of the angst in 50s-era sci-fi clearly played on subversion motifs and invasion; lurking communist agents and Commissars were thinly disguised as marauding monsters from other planets. They menaced Washington D.C. in "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers," or literally took over our bodies in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The outcomes were usually upbeat, though. Even advanced aliens were turned back thanks to the ingenuity of scientists and soldiers, or in the case of the 50s adaptation of "War of the World," with a last-minute intervention by god who, it was claimed, in the genius of His creation fashioned tiny microbial life that killed off invading Martians and brought to a crashing halt their predatory war machines. While most of the films from that era reflected the political uncertainties of the cold war, an angst that found potent expression in popular novels or cinema with the prospect of impending nuclear confrontation and apocalypse ("Fail Safe," "On The Beach"), the alien rejuvenation of the late 70s and beyond saw enemies from beyond and within. Doubts about our own government, piqued by unresolved questions over the assassinations of charismatic leaders such as John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the revelations of Watergate contributed to a corrosive process which held to doubt the leading cultural and political institutions. The army was no longer turning back alien hoards; it was concealing evidence of their presence. Terms like "conspiracy" and "cover-up" spilled over from the political lexicon to describe an even darker and more sinister plot. Just who were the "men in black" who supposedly intimidated witnesses, confiscated evidence of extraterrestrial encounters, or prevented word of the REAL story from leaking? Fin De Siecle Mars, Past And Present Approaching the end of the twentieth century (and a new millennium), there is little that should surprise us, especially in the building obsession with things religious, arcane and mystical. The events in two such disparate places as Roswell, N.M. and a rock-strewn plane on the Martian landscape now being traversed by the 2-foot long long rover testify to the polarity and confrontation of differing views about reality. One clearly represents the Enlightenment project in its most refined state, a triumph for science, reason and technology, with the other, the recent events in Roswell and the wider elaborations about alien abductions, conspiracies and paranormal truths representing something less defined, and more amorphous, confusing and opaque. The prospect that there may be life on Mars dates back long before the Pathfinder mission blasted off, or reports of a giant "face" built on the Martian landscape began circulating. (No one bothered to ask: if Voyager or the Hubble Space Telescope had indeed found such an artificial structure and the government was attempting to cover up that fact, why had they allowed the photographs to be made public in the first place?) The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) is today known mostly for his description of markings on the Martian surface which he called "canali" or "channels." The prospect that these were artificial, the product of an intelligent (and by earth standards, highly advanced) race of beings later caught the public imagination. It was Percival Lowell (1855-1916), though, who was the true popularizer of the "canal theory." Starting with his book "Mars" in 1895, Lowell argued in print and on the lecture circuit that the network of fine lines which crisscrossed the red planet were the product of a civilization desperately scrambling to avoid extinction by transporting water from the polar caps. For some, it was a credible hypothesis. Memories of the canal-building period in American history were still relatively fresh, as were those of the Suez Canal constructed 1859-1869 under the organizational genius of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Even as Lowell was publishing his subsequent books ("Mars and Its Canals," 1906; "Mars as the Abode of Life," 1908) the United States -- picking up the shovel, so to speak, in the shadow of earlier failed attempts by the French -- was digging and blasting through Colombia's Isthmus to build the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The prospect of intelligent aliens doing similar engineering, though on a vastly greater scale, seemed plausible, reasonable. Martian life also existed in the public imagination thanks to another compelling medium, that of the novel. H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds," which described a Martian invasion of the earth became an instant sensation in 1908 when it was first published, a skillful blending of scientific speculation and sociological idealism and commentary on the human condition. Schiaparelli and Lowell were guarded about describing their Martians. (Schiaparelli, perhaps influenced by syndicalist thought and other influences from the labor movement, mused that Mars had to be a cooperative commonwealth. Lowell, the product of industrial age capitalism, feared that so enormous a feat of engineering as the canals suggested could only be the work of a ruthless oligarchy.) Wells faced no constraints, though; his Martians were of superior intellect, dark in their intent, brooding and gazing with envy toward the earth. On a symbolic level, those Martians represented science and evolutionary theory both of which continued the inexorable process of de-enchanting the world of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Machines were the new gods of men, and for Wells, anyway, it was only appropriate that in the end, those glistening war machines and their Martian occupants should be stopped not by armies or scientists, but by germs, the microbial creation of a god who "in his wisdom" placed them on earth. Other astronomers did not see the canals which Lowell claimed he could observe through his telescope located under clear skies in northern Arizona. Critics suggested that the markings were an artifact of the human mind working in conjunction with the observational process. Photographs of the Mars surface showed hazy areas, and lacked the distinct clarity rendered by Lowell in his hand-drawn maps and global projections of the red planet. Seeing a colossal visage on the Martian surface at the end of the twentieth century was only the conclusion of a process of imagination and perhaps yearning which had been rampant at the beginning of that same era. In literature, the notion that advanced and even spiritual beings of a sort resided on Mars dates back for over a century. One source was ironically the atheist satirist and literary hoaxer Leo Taxil, born Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages (1854-1907). Taxil was active in the French Anti-Clerical League which boasted over 15,000 members, and served as editor of the League's publication, Anti-Clericale. In the 1880's, he had edited a non-believer journal of humor and insult published as La Marotte, or "Fool's Bauble." In 1892, working with Dr. Karl Hacks, Taxil began issuing a serial publication known as "The Devil in the Nineteenth Century," designed as a satirical expose of Freemasonry. It became one of the great literary hoaxes of all time, and Taxil even was treated to a private audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1887, who endorsed the work. Editions of "The Devil in the Nineteenth Century" were soon rolling off printing presses in over two dozen languages, often thanks to the efforts and funding of church-linked publishing houses. One feature of Taxil's hoax was the story of Ms. Diana Vaughn who supposedly had been raised in a Luciferian household and placed under the care of the demon Asmodeus, one of the major satanic functionaries. Asmodeus sometimes appeared in the form of a handsome suitor (emitting the strong scent of balsam), and escorted Ms. Vaughn on pleasure trips and jaunts to purgatory, even to the planet Mars where the two picnicked next to Schiaparelli's canals and strolled amongst the pygmie inhabitants. More sincere (if not delusional) were the ersatz recollections of the French channeler/medium known as Helene Smith. In her trance states, the diminutive Smith claimed the be the reincarnation of noted personalities, including the wife of a 15th century Indian prince. She also insisted that she was telepathically linked to the inhabitants of Mars, and described the lush flora, fauna and even architecture to be found on that distant planet. It was hard to verify (or disprove) such bold claims, of course, but the psychologist Thomas Flournoy became fascinated with the medium and began to investigate. His subsequent book "From India to the Planet Mars" summarized his thoughts on the matter, including his finding that Helene's "Martian alphabet" and language were really a form of French. That didn't prevent Ms. Smith from gaining a wide and credulous audience for her claims; and it is interesting to note that following her evocative descriptions of Mars, Helene Smith moved into a more religious phase of mediumship in which Jesus Christ, the Virgin and various other Biblical figures are prominent. Indeed, her "visions" at the turn of the century were part of a wider phenomenon which included such visitations, and are said to have expressed the fin de siecle spirit running rampant at that time. Is the "face on Mars," or the giddy fixation with alien autopsies and abductions a more technologically-updated version of this? Old Wine, New Bottles Both the traditional religions and new age accounts of alien visitors possess remarkable thematic similarities. Whether saint or alien, the notion of supernatural agencies and creatures interacting with human beings -- often in the context of a disturbing or convulsive encounter -- seems to exist as a common feature. Writing in "The Demon Haunted World," the late astronomer Carl Sagan observed that many features found in the elaborate, often detailed accounts of alleged alien abductions have their counterparts in more traditional religious hagiography and demonology. Before stories about alien rape and genetic experiments began percolating through fringe culture (and then into mainstream media), Pope Innocent VIII declared in his Bull of 1484 that, "It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi , and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women..." Sagan added the declaration of two Inquisitors who insisted: "Devils...busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it." Several things are remarkable about earlier claims of witches, demons and devils, and the more contemporary version of this mythos, usually in the form of UFO apparitions or alien encounters. Belief in witches enjoyed a thriving popularity at one time, as do modern paranormal phenomenon and even more traditional religious claims. Thousands will flock to Roswell to see a movie prop said to depict a dead alien, or drink in more mainstream yet miraculous events, such as the apparition of Jesus appearing on the side of a rusting grain silo (the "Soybean Savior"), or Mary suddenly manifesting herself in a water stain in a Mexico City subway station. When claims of such events are refuted or reasonably questioned, they enjoy an incredible immunity to truth in the public discourse. Even one of those claiming to have seen dead aliens at Roswell chafes at the more bizarre tales of abductions or interplanetary rape. Frank Kaufman, now 81, says that he worked at the Roswell Army Air Field in 1947. "Seeing those bodies and the craft made me realize we're not alone in this vast universe," he told Reuter news service. But Kaufman added that the Roswell anniversary celebration "had a lot of crap in all this." "These people who claim they've been abducted by aliens, it's so transfixed in their minds they fantasize it and there's no way you can budge them." All of these events, whether religious miracles or apparitions, or strange accounts of alien intelligence, possess an etheric, evasive quality, yet remain compelling for those who believe in them. Modern day accounts of UFO's may simply be a contemporary adaptation of older myths where powerful intelligences from afar intervene in the affairs of human beings, to save, warn, even impregnate. Aliens and their spacecraft may have emerged in our time as evocative symbols for the hopes and fears once the exclusive domain of traditional religions. This new mythos seems to have no qualms about cannibalizing the symbols and even the stories of everything from mythic and religious history to the latest sci-fi flicks, or episode of "The X-Files." Even a new age writer like Keith Thompson ("Angels and Aliens: UFO's and the Mythic Imagination," 1991, Addison-Wesley) notes the thematic similarities between the granddaddy of abduction tales, that of Betty and Barney Hill, with an episode of "The Outer Limits." Roswell and the Pathfinder mission stand at opposite ends of a cultural spectrum, although many people borrow generously from both. They represent different and competing concepts of how the universe operates, as well as vastly divergent notions concerning the efficacy of human intelligence. The final irony in this story, though, may really be played out on the surface of Mars, not the desert outside of Roswell, N.M. The sci-fi films, even the tales about flying discs and advanced alien races, got it backwards. They aren't visiting earth. It's the humans who seem to be headed to Mars, and maybe beyond... ** WANT TO STAND UP FOR YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS ? 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