As we speed towards the new millennium, popular culture is being invaded by psychoses, conspiracies, warnings of digital chaos – and little grey creatures. In our heads and on our TV screens we are watching the invasion. Believe.
Dror Eyal
GREYISH skin, elongated oval head and huge wraparound eyes. It’s an image that heralds the end of the millennium. New technology, improved medicine, global unity. It peeps at us from the cover of popular novels, it gazes unflinchingly off a mallrat’s shirt, it stares out from the television screen. Greyish skin, elongated oval head and huge wraparound eyes. It’s an image which resonates to an ancient submerged horror. Our nightmares are back to haunt us.
It sells tickets at the box-office; it flogs shirts at chainstores; it screeches over an ambient track by The Orb. Accept that the real image of extraterrestrials, the “grey” as it’s known by Ufologists, is slyly slipping into our collective subconscious. It’s slowly replacing the peace sign as the cultural icon of our times.
It started 50 years ago, on June 24 1947. It didn’t really, depending on who you ask, but that’s where I’d like it to start. On June 24 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying a routine mission for the United States airforce when he saw a formation of nine brightly lit objects skimming through the air. When he landed he told the press that the objects skimmed like a spinning saucer would over a pond. Flying saucers.
“Black. Out. Cold. I’m on my back. There’s a light above me. My eyes won’t focus. Pain everywhere. Pain in my head. Pain in my chest. Rustling. I can hear movement in the dark.”
It’s 50 years later now, and 15 million Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens. There are support groups, dozens of books, countless magazine articles, photographs, films, societies, artists, hoaxes and myths. Believe.
It’s 50 years later now and if the governments of the world are investigating alien phenomena they are keeping quiet about it. The heroes of Ufology today are people like James Mulder from the X-Files, The Orb and various researchers with multi- million book deals, out to punt their latest novel. There is a growing body of theories, tales of abductions, unproven stories. Put that all together and what you have is either an alien invasion, cultural psychosis or a compelling new myth.
“I open my eyes. There are these creatures all around me. I scream. They’re short, maybe five feet, large heads, enormous brown eyes … man, those eyes, they just stared right through me. No eyelashes, no eyebrows, just these two big brown eyes.”
There are 1 028 days left and the UFO myth is emerging as one of the most potent quasi-religions for the new millennium. Like any good religion, Ufology’s messengers of peace, hope and a visionary tomorrow are being persecuted and conspiracy theories abound as to exactly what information is being kept hidden from the faithful. Is the government experimenting on humans with alien DNA? Are they hiding some secret message from the aliens? Is the X-Files a plot by aliens to prepare humanity for their arrival? Trust no one.
“I scream, I jump up. This thing falls off my chest. A thick plastic strap. It hits the floor and rocks back and forth. A light comes on from beneath it, but there aren’t any wires or tubes in it. `Get away from me! Who are you? What’s going on here?’ I’m hysterical.”
Ufology is not the sole province of techno- anarchists, conspiracy fetishists or TV junkies. As society begins its countdown, the edge becomes the mainstream and more conservatives theorists move in, redefining our notions of where society is going.
The mainstreaming of “the invasion” can be seen in the myriad articles published about sightings and abductions. In T-shirts bearing “the grey” and the word “believe”. In mainstream television like the X-Files, where Scully and Mulder track down various alien cover-ups. But this is more than just pre-millennium paranoia and the stories that form the basis of this hit series are taken from actual accounts and documentation of the unexplained.
“Hot. The room is really hot. The air is heavy. Heavy and wet. I can hardly breathe. My mind raging. I feel like I’ve been burned. Inside and out. I ache like I’ve been crushed or something. It hurts. We go down a hallway. Through some empty space. The air is cooler, fresher.
Low legato flames of this culture are springing up all over; minimalist solos that result in aliens becoming more accepted; conspiracy theories that mark this mindset as this generation’s answer to the world they have inherited.
But if every action has an equal and opposite reaction, than every conspiracy theory has a scientific explanation. Psychologist Michael Persinger explains UFO phenomena as rogue electrical currents in the earth that stimulate a leakage from left to right hemisphere.
Dreams and illusions are shifting into the conscious mind. Reality. The reason we all see the same little grey men, the same pattern of abduction repeating itself, is not because we are being kidnapped by aliens, but because the same area of our brain is being stimulated.
“Hey, hang on a second. I’m hysterical. They’re putting me down on a table. They smile. Like I was misbehaving or something. They’re putting a mask on my face. I reach up to pull it off. Black. Out. Cold.”
There is, of course, no end to the number of sceptics either. John Menzies of the Sutherland observatory in the Karoo, has certainly seen his fair share of “odd things”. He attributes them to NASA rockets, satellites being moved or various natural phenomena. “Two or more moving lights are almost certainly an airplane … The strangest thing I’ve seen is a light that moved fairly slowly then speeded up. But I’m pretty convinced that what I saw was the tail end of a rocket … There hasn’t been any concrete evidence for the existence of UFOs.”
But what would be accepted as concrete evidence? Photographic evidence? Faked. Films? Faked. Alien autopsies? Faked. Repeating patterns in anomalous experiences? Brain stimulation. Abductees relating their experience under hypnosis? Hallucinations. What about implants removed from abductees? It’s hard to pin down what the scientific community would accept as evidence for alien abductions.
“I’m cold and awake in a phone booth at a gas station. My brother is on his way to pick me up. Those eyes haunt me. I can’t get them out of my head. Big. Glassy. No white, just brown. Like shades on a window.”
All of this makes for some very inconclusive science but some very wicked art. One group of artists delves deep into alien mythology, based in the urban sprawl of Johannesburg.
The High Frequency Audio Auroral Research Programme (HFAARP) makes performance art for viewing through a radioactive suit, performances that gurgle like a chainsaw going through an alien skullcase and vibrate to an otherworldly beat. HFAARP sets up alien scenarios, sound sculptures based in alien folklore, pulling peoples legs, counting the faithful, forcing a gap in reality. Believe?
This is the dark aesthetic of an alien nation, stitched together from the various conspiracy theories, abductions, sightings. Much of its mindset and many of its timbres are taken from pop culture and literature rather than scientific evidence. Freed from the need to explain, artists use alien culture to explore contradictions … the future now.
“We’ve been worried about you.” “But it’s only been a couple of hours?” “Feel your face.” “I have a real heavy growth of beard.” “You’ve been gone for five days!”
So what does it mean? Why the buzz about UFOs, crop circles, alien abductions and strange phenomena? Are we really being invaded? Does it really matter? Maybe, but it’s not about contact with aliens, it’s about contact with a new open-ended belief system.
It’s about creating gaps in reality; it’s about preparing ourselves for a new millennium and facing up to a brave new world. Aliens may be out there – we’d be silly to think that out of the whole universe we were the only living creatures. The only thing more shocking than finding out that there are aliens out there would be to find out that there aren’t.
“My name is Trevor, or just Trev. There are 1028 days left and I still don’t know what I want from life.”