Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

UFOs: The Secret History — David Cherniak’s feature-length documentary which airs on the History Channel will be my special guest at 11am on Monday on “Maritime Morning”.

It is interesting to see the range of approaches to the UFO phenomenon. UFOs have become something on a Rorschach/inkblot test, wherein people read into them what they themselves want to see; it is a projection.

In Medieval times, people saw religious “miracles”, and offered these visions as proof of God’s guiding hand.

Throughout time, there has been a very conscious and unconscious impulse to feel that “someone is watching over us from above”, that there is an advanced being among us. I blame this set of circumstances today on the issue of diffuse Christianity, where people maintain unfocussed religious beliefs and do a fair amount of psychological projection as a result. For example, it seems “more scientific” to believe in aliens that are an advanced life form than to deal with the rigors of a belief system like Christianity that actually makes demands of you. Nobody wants to do the hard work anymore, and loving yourself and your neighbor isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

The psychological dimensions of the UFO “mystery” remains an area where very little academic study has been done. Our world is a mass of contradictions where people in polls claim to believe in “something” greater than themselves without giving shape to it in a formal religious context. But the need for religion remains, however denied.

The great equalizer in all of this is the unknown. No matter how sophisticated we get scientifically, we are constantly surprised by that which we don’t know and by a science that seems inadequate.

There is a tremendous human vanity in the notion that we will never know everything, that the human spirit is ineffable; that the human spirit is too grand. Maybe it is.

But what if that human vanity of the spirit is false? Perhaps that is what scares us.

It is lonely at the top.