AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

"I think there's alot of evidence that we've made contact."
-Dennis Weaver

Countries around the world have cultural mythologies, past stories that their people told to explain why and how things happened. The myths of Zeus and Athena, Herakles and Perseus were told in ancient Greece, while in Nordic lands, Odin, Thor, and Loki were heralded. Finnland had their Kalevala with Ilmatar, Ukko and Vainamoinen, the celts spoke of the Sidhe and Cúchulainn.

America, however, is too young and modern a nation to build the typical ancient mythology. To a certain extent western "tall tales" of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill fit some of this genre, although they were always told with a wink and not a temple. The only true mythology that America enjoys is that of UFOs. People passionately and deeply believe in these stories, they claim that they were captured by aliens and experimented on, that they saw a ship show up like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

This fixation on aliens and UFOs tend to be based on two things: a mistaken report of UFOs in the news in Roswell, New Mexico and various lights in the sky moving in ways they cannot have. It was July of 1947 that the Air Force reported that they'd shot down a UFO, then soon after said it was a weather balloon and reflector. Which was true? In my opinion it was an experimental craft crash and some wag said UFO to get the press off his back, then they scrambled to come up with something more rational.

Most recently, an Air Force report has come out explaining at least some of the lights in sort of a mundane, obvious manner. Recently, many people saw mysterious, colored lights over O'Hare airport, moving in odd ways no aircraft could and in patterns like a formation. A retired Air Force pilot spoke to the news about them:

"I believe these lights were not of this world, and I feel a duty and responsibility to come forward," Col. Brian Fields told WND. "I have no idea what they were."

I'm not sure why these lights would baffle an air force pilot, because not long after, the lights were explained quite simply:

"We were flying A-10s in that area and they were using flares," Jessica D'Aurizio, chief of public affairs at the 917th Wing of the Air Force Reserve at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, told WND.

She says the flares, which stay lit for about five minutes, produce nearly 2 million candlepower.

"It brightens up the target area," D'Aurizio said. "They go down in parachutes, so they're very bright. That had to be what it was, I'm sure."

A-10s fly low and rather slow for a jet, and have amazing maneuverability. They do have varicolored flares, and they tend to be fired in groups. The purpose of flares are to attract heat-seeking missiles rather than the carefully mounted engines on the A-10.

The sad thing is these myths are based on the same kind of myths as the rocks at Gibraltar being shoved into place by Hercules: inability to explain something and presumption of fantastical events by credulous and usually uneducated people. We live in a world that laughs out loud at the very idea of a creator and often considers someone who questions the Theory of Evolution, but is willing to buy into UFOs without a shred of evidence. The stories are fun, and creative, and movies made about them are entertaining.

It's just that on closer examination they don't hold up to logic or Occam's Razor. Was it an experimental aircraft crash and a government coverup of the tech and efforts... or a vast UFO conspiracy! The UFO thing is more fun to believe, but is absurdly less rational and simple. The bulk of these stories center around the exact same areas that the Air Force has it's experimental aircraft and top secret research. Coincidence? UFO folks claim that the area is used for this because the UFOs are there, and we only found out about it years after the AF started using the area.

Like most conspiracy theories, the lack of facts only fuels the fire, because that means they are covering it up!!!! Conspiracy theories are attractive to many because they give you importance and meaning. You know something that others don't and that the powers that be are trying to cover up! They are doing such a good job of it that the stories are everywhere, movies are made, books sold, television shows produced, the internet is blanketed with them. It's a vast coverup!

What complicates this are the highjinks that soldiers and men of action will tend to get into at other peoples' expense. Tall tales came out of this kind of thing, trying to pull one over on greenhorns and Easterners who came out West. "Yep, Pecos Bill roped a twister and rode it to try to impress his gal." Many Air Force pilots and astronauts are part of this fun, they will with a perfectly straight face look right in the camera or in the eyes of someone listening and say something like this:

At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone: there was a constant surveillance by UFOs .
-Astronaut Scott Carpenter

These guys joked around constantly, like all men who do incredibly dangerous things for a living, and this is exactly the kind of fun they'd pull on reporters and others. Let's see if we can get them to buy it. The problem is, lots of people have bought it and its taken on a life of it's own. The television miniseries Taken by Steven Spielberg and others was effectively the epic saga, the Bible of this mythology, step by step giving the coverup.

I remember summer nights with a childhood friend using straws, a birthday candle, and a laundry bag creating a UFO that moved oddly in the wind and floated ghost-like over the neighborhood, then vanished, leaving almost no evidence. Sometimes the bag lit up and burned brightly as it drifted down, disappearing. What was it! no plane could move like that! Against the night sky, how could you tell how far away it was or how big it was? With the proper setup and presumptions why, that was an alien life! Certainly the more advanced and simple doctoring pictures and video footage becomes, the less plausible imagery becomes.

Comedian Dana Gould had this to say about the abduction stories on his Funhouse CD:

I don't believe in them because it's always the same circumstances, the same type of people, the same situations: its never a black guy, its never a hispanic guy, its never a physicist from the Netherlands, its always some dumb white @#*% in the middle of nowhere.It's never anyone of importance, its always some cracker:

"I wuz abdukted and anally probed by two aliens who had disguised themselves as my buddies Brad and Duke. I was taken aboard a spaceship that was made to look like the back of Duke's warehouse. Their alien language sounds like humans when we giggle."

But here's my theory, if people are really getting abducted by aliens, and aliens really are doing that, what's going through their mind? They're the advanced culture, they got here before we got there, what are they thinking?

"We've mastered the infinities of travel through time and space, but the anal cavity eludes us! The vast sea of the unknown that is the universe is but a shallow pond compared to the depths of mystery contained in the human ass!"

Are there other races, peoples, cultures, intelligent lifeforms in the universe? Maybe, who knows? Maybe not. If you go by odds, they are pretty slim - the odds any life at all exists on earth alone were astoundingly small just going by scientific calculation and statistics. There's fun in imagining, and we can learn wisdom from the cautionary tales of good science fiction.

It's just odd to me to see how many otherwise rational, thoughtful, scientifically-grounded people buy into the UFO mythology with the wide eyed passion of a true believer.

UFOs