The UFO Culture

 
   
     

 

First Field Site: The 1999 Bay Area Conference

 

There are many people in the United States and around the world who believe they have seen strange objects in the sky. I recently attended the Bay Area UFO Expo in San Mateo, where at least 600 attendees listened to several speakers make a case for (variously) extra-terrestrial or inter-dimensional origins for these strange objects.

 

In this set of pages, I publish first my initial fieldnotes - which I anticipate it will take some time to do - and then my eventual analysis. Fieldnotes are first impressions, based on notes taken in real time at the event. I'm hoping that anthropology students will get some sense of how one anthropologist does fieldwork. In this case, I paid my money and went inside just like any other participant to the event. The speakers' names and ideas are public (videos and audios are for sale). While it is likely I will eventually have a lot to say about what was said at the podium, my fieldnotes begin at a much more prosaic place.

Basics

If I had purchased my two-day ticket in advance, it would have been $40. At the door, I paid $50. This entitled me to about 15 hours of lectures. There additional fees for workshops. I overhead one workshop leader say that of the $20 fee charged per person for the additional workshops, he collected $10. This was, I believe, a very reasonably priced conference. Most of the academic conferences I receive notices for are $200-375 per weekend or three day event. Self-help conferences seem to run even more, and computer training conferences can get even higher. It would be an interesting piece of side research to find out what kinds of conferences sell for the most money. (Are there $10,000 conferences to which only the elite go? Is that how I should view presidential fundraising dinners? Indeed, it only just occurred to me as I was writing this that political fundraising is in the same nature as these other, managed public events, where certain ideas are permitted at the podium - and others are not). 

I was supplied with a blue wristband, which set me apart from the yellow wristband people (who had only purchased one day). Conference staff, leaders and speakers had additional badges and insignia. There was a "bouncer" at the head of the corridor to the conference. You could not visit the vendor area or the lectures without a wristband .

After two days at the conference, I would describe the demographics roughly as follows: nearly everyone was Anglo-European in ethnicity, and at least two-thirds were upper-middle or middle-middle class or professional people. There were no children (I saw one boy about 12 or 13) and only two or three teenagers. Every adult age group was well represented. I'd say the average age was around 40. There were several very old people there, and several folks with serious illnesses or disabilities.There were some Asians/Asian-Americans, a couple of Hispanics, and perhaps three or four African/African-Americans. I heard several people speaking French, and met one man from Brazil. I base the class assumptions on dress details such as the price of eyeglass frames and the carrying expensive handbags, etc. There was a strong mixture of lower middle class and working class folks, too. One man came in uniform from some kind of mechanic's job. A newspaper report in the San Mateo Times on Monday, September 6, stated that all of the people the reporter talked to had either seen UFO's or been contacted by aliens. Prominent among the speakers/vendors were psychics, physicists, psychotherapists, lawyers and filmmakers.

The First Hours: Etiquette, Love and Rudeness

There were more people at the first lecture (Stephen Greer) than the room could hold, which meant people were standing in the aisles, the back, and in the doorway, straining to listen. People tried hard to press into the room to hear, creating a crush. Even so, several people carried on conversations in a normal or even louder than normal tones of voice, making it hard for many to hear. People were disgruntled over this, and saying "shh" didn't work at all. Others were clearly unhappy that people pressed past them into non-existence space, effectively ejecting earlier comers from the room. I got there early enough to get a standing space along one wall, which was great because I could see the whole room (as well as one can seen in a darkened auditorium). The room was very warm, there appeared to little or no air conditioning.

The pushing/crowding behavior lessened at the next lecture ( ). I heard one woman say, "All the men have left. Men don't like this metaphysical stuff." The lights were on, it was true that women outnumbered men at this lecture at least 3 to 1. Talking continued in the back. In fact, it seemed to me that the speaker, a softspoken person, kept looking toward the corner in the back from which the talking emanated. One person shushed the talking pair (a man and a woman), others stared at them. It seemed their talking was now almost defiant. One man loudly asked them to please go outside if they couldn't refrain from talking because everyone was there to hear the speaker, not them. They in fact fell quiet, but appeared sullen. My impression was that they did not exactly mean to be disruptive, but were excited and reacting as if they were the only ones in the room.

At this lecture, and the next, the theme seemed to be "love." We were told that "the aliens love us" and that's why they are coming to Earth. The third speaker (who spoke to a very crowded house with absolutely no chattering) joked that if they love us, why are they coming to eat us? Nevertheless, the theme of these two speakers had to do with spreading light and loving those around us. We were assured that loving (and hugging) the people around us would make things better. There was enthusiastic applause, some whistling and cheering almost every time this advice was offered. I didn't want to hug anybody. I tried to reconcile this message with the crowding, the incessant pacing around the room of some participants (even walking in front of the slide projector!) and the talking. I think the disruption was about average - but way more than I see in my college classroom. About like you'd see in a typical movie theatre (the kind with teenagers) or amusement park ride. I also noticed a lot of sneezing and coughing without people raising their hands to their faces. I thought this was distinctly non-loving and found myself wishing the speakers would be more specific in their love-instructions. What, exactly, did love mean to the speakers? Were the listeners listening but not agreeing? Or did they agree, but have a different definition of love than me? Two days was not enough to even begin to answer this question.

 

The third speaker, who opened his talk with the words, "I love all of you. I really do," questioned a lot of the "silliness" around the UFO phenomena. So far, I had heard very little about UFO's, abductions, implants and so on. I missed part of Greer's lecture, but saw his slides, which were all pictures of flying saucers, most of which I had seen before, and which turned out to be for sale in the vendor area. Greer's point was that real physical saucers clearly exist. The second speaker stated that he was himself a kind of alien, having lived on other planets in previous lives, and having chosen to come to Earth at an important time in our history. The third speaker is a famous Near-Death researcher who has been struck by lightening and been dead three times. The third speaker, as I remember him, said nothing at all about aliens or UFO's except that some of the things about them were very silly (Giant Reptiles riding on asteroids trying to get to Earth to eat us. Do we taste like rabbit? he pondered)

The organizer of the conference introduced the next speaker as finally giving us the "good stuff" - real evidence about alien lifeforms. The crowd cheered enthusiastically. The crowd problem was now solved for me. A colleague (a UCR anthropologist) and I stayed put in our chairs or spelled each other in going for water or restrooms, so that we always had an aisle seat. A lot of other people were doing the same thing. We heard people carefully planning the next three hours, intending to make sure they had seats. Latecomers were complaining rather bitterly outside the door that they had paid and could hear nothing.

The shoving approach to get into the room continued, but now I observed a lot of inefficient behavior in leaving the room. There was a long gridlock when almost the entire room tried to leave at one break, while dozens of people tried to get in at the same time. No one directed traffic.One person stood firm in the middle of the doorway, nearly blocking it, trying to get signatures on a petition. Another person just stood there, gazing off into space, also blocking the door. The man in front of me gallantly stood back and with a grand gesture, allowed people merging from another aisle to go ahead of us. While dozens of people streamed past, the people in my line grew very restive. Why had this man decided to be gallant at our expense? He continued to smile, hold open the door, and let the others through (about one third of the room) while two-thirds of the room were blocked altogether on the other side of him. I noticed that total standstill really irritates people. There was enough noise though, that the complaints behind me went unheard. I wondered about the love, the lightsharing, etc., while pressed in between all these people. There were some real good shovers, too, who managed to get past me and the gallant man and out the door.

I heard one man remark, "Look at those two people just standing in the doorway, blocking it. It's like they don't see or hear anything around them."

 

His companion replied, "Or they haven't been in public places before."

 

I thought about this. Could these people be very unaccustomed to public experiences of this kind? Were they in trance? In the vendor area, while looking at some interesting posters of aliens smoking bud (captioned...this is why we came...), I noticed a woman about my own age (40-ish) standing very close to me (and there was lots of other space in the vicinity) not looking at anything, but rocking back and forth slightly with her eyes slightly closed, arms slightly extended, palms outward. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She continued her rhythmic movement for more than ten minutes, without moving. She appeared to be in some sort of trance. People walked right around her, and she gave no appearance of noticing anyone. While I saw the trance woman for a long time in the vendor section, I didn't see her again at the conference.

Or maybe, as some other people suggested, the doorway blockers were just rude.

Since basic rules of etiquette help delimit a culture (and I was brought up with very different rules: don't talk in a lecture, don't sneeze without covering your mouth, don't stand up and walk around during lectures, don't shove past in a line, if you cough more than twice, go outside) I wondered if these people were a mixture of various different etiquette cultures (since some agreed with me and some did not). By the way, I was taught it is okay to whisper very quietly in someone's ear if you need to, for example, leave the room or communicate urgently - as long as it is inaudible to everyone else.

The Fourth Lecture

We had been told at the entry that the most crowded event would be Richard Hoagland's lecture, so of course we were in our seats in plenty of time to hear him. By then, I was becoming accustomed to the circumstances and relaxing about the etiquette thing. At the Fourth Lecture (the "good stuff") the men came trooping back in, including a fair number of what my colleague dubbed Lone Gunmen types: young men with long hair, or glasses and sports coats, with a real intensity about them. I heard them talking about the "lack of logic" in various presentations, and in the bar later that evening, I heard one of them complain bitterly about being told to love people at a UFO conference. Hoagland had only 45 minutes to present his data, which was a teaser for his longer conference in the afternoon. He did a good job of teasing. His proposals and hypotheses apparently encompass the following:

 

There was intelligent life on Mars until very recently (or maybe there still is, I couldn't keep it straight).

The Martians built cities and huge pyramidal monuments. This was his main point, of course. Using the Mars data of recent years, he showed two pictures of the famous Face on Mars taken at different times and explained their geometry, and archaeology. He cited a recent article in Nature that says some formations on Mars do not appear to be purely inorganic in nature and may be the result of some purposeful or intelligent life. If this article in fact exists (I have to check), I received no indication of what the author meant by "intelligent life." But Hoagland meant "life almost like us."

Here are the main points in Hoagland's argument:

There are pyramids and "arkologies" on Mars.

The Martians destroyed their own environment.

The Martians were probably very warlike (hence the name, Mars).

Our ancient ancestors (the Greeks and Egyptians) either had contact with them, are in fact them, or interbred with them (I think Hoagland would admit he's hypothesizing here...he thinks it might be any one of these things)

The Ancient Egyptians created glyphs at Abydos that show helicopters, jets and UFO's (indicating contact with Mars)

There's a tank on Mars.

There are other machine artifacts on Mars, including some that were clearly visible to us when Sojourner took her pictures.

There's some kind of secret Masonic society trying to cover up the existence of life on Mars.

 

Hoagland's slides of a Martian Sphinx, a Martian tank, and of Egyptian hieroglyphs that depict mechanised, supposedly from the Temple of Seti at Abydos in Egypt, seemed to be the highlight of his presentation. People left the room saying, "That looked JUST like a helicopter. And the thing next to it looked JUST like an airplane." I made a note to go home and find out if these glyphs even exist and what an Egyptologist would say about them. Fortunately, someone in France had already asked this question and published a webpage about it.

 

My thoughts so far

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