Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2024
Chasing Chimeras: An Occupational Hazard in UFOlogy
by: Brent Raynes
In this issue, as in every issue really, I am prepared and committed to tackling the very challenging high strange elements and seemingly insoluble nature of the UFO enigma that faces those of us who struggle with its complex and confounding characteristics and aspects. I believe in the old adage "leave no stone unturned," even though many of those stones are continually cast aside in utter dismay and disgust by the ufological "nuts and bolts" mainstream. The reason for this state of affairs is the nonsensical, trickster-like nature inherent in so much of this data. Surface appearances are potentially misleading in this field of many rabbit holes and we often might as well be chasing ancient chimeras. "Ancient investigators suffered the same frustrations when they turned out to track down the dragons, fire-breathing chimeras, horned demons, and hairy bipeds reported in earlier times," John Keel wrote in his The Eighth Tower (1975), adding, 'So thousands of years ago men concluded that the monsters were not real. The Greek word khimatra ("chimera") came to mean an unreal, fire-breathing, smelly transmogrification. The word specter, meaning ghost or apparition, stems from the Latin spectrum, for the ancients noted that land-bound and aerial apparitions often passed through all the colors of the spectrum just as modern UFOs do. When new frames of reference, such as the fairy faith of the Middle Ages, were introduced, scholars and scientists performed careful investigations and ultimately concluded such things were unreal." Elsewhere while touching again on chimeras (The Mothman Prophecies, 1975) Keel further noted, "Seeing a spaceman disembark from a flying saucer is no more remarkable than seeing an angel descend in a luminous cloud (and angels are still reported hundreds of times each year)."
Very early on in my own UFO journey, in 1971 at age 19, I sought in correspondence with Keel his advice on how to look into the UFO contactee syndrome. What he shared with me then was certainly consistent with what he wrote in his books about chimeras. "Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors," he wrote. "It might be best to familiarize yourself with the medical and psychiatric studies of the religious cases before you tackle the UFO variation." He also recommended I read one G.N.M. Tyrrell's book Theory of Apparitions, which I picked up in a bookstore in New York City shortly afterwards.
Our intrepid Albert S. Rosales, a regular contributor to our magazine who has collected thousands of very bizarre but very intriguing testimonies from around the globe of UFO occupants who fit an endless variety of archetypal representations on the vast chimera spectral scale of beings - entities who are most likely second cousins to the elementals, djinns, fairies, angels, demons and so many others of the chimerical frames of reference.
In Albert's latest postings (if you're interested in this subject you absolutely must check this site out) on his Facebook page Humanoids, UFOs and other strange phenomena, I had to chuckle some over a reported observation from Pordenone, Italy, from back on the night of May 19, 1995, of a hovering metallic top shaped craft with a large window in which the "professional" witness saw roughly 25 4-foot-tall naked humanoids, with large, elongated heads, wearing nothing but big smiles on their faces. So, now we can add smiling nudist alien tour groups from Alpha Centauri visiting our earth.
As I recall from a reader of the late Jim Moseley's newsletter Saucer Smear came a statement like this: Have the archetypes of Jung's collective unconscious run amok?
Good question, is it not? It sure seems like it at times.
The literature on the UFO subject is an inescapably bizarre theater of the mind (a kind of collective psyche, if you wish), but who is the projectionist? The late Rosemary Ellen Guiley expressed it like, Who is the Oz behind the curtain? I feel that this question is a significant one and it involves a variety of causal factors. It's impact on us down through the ages is nothing new. It just has many, many different variations, different frames of reference, and it's at the very heart of trying to comprehend the deepest levels of our very humanity.
Mind, body, and soul.
