When the Angels and Fairy Folk Called on Congress
By Rick Fehr
October is the unofficial start of my favourite season. It’s a time when stories of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls from times gone by are allowed to return, even if it’s only for one short night on Halloween. Our ancestors told of such accounts as they would gather around the hearth when outdoor labour was cut short because of the longer nights and frigid temperatures.
A poor storyteller might fumble a denouement or offer a readymade moral for the listeners, leaving little for the audience to digest. An okay storyteller might be overly verbose and miss certain signposts or reveal a bit too much. A great storyteller, on the other hand, is a rare treat, and their presence is not easily forgotten after they’ve paid a visit. A master of their craft knows how much information to give, and perhaps more importantly, how much to hold back. There are standard ingredients to most stories, but only a true master knows how to combine them and leave listeners hungry for more.
When stories were told effectively, the ghosts, ghouls, and the trials they issued acted as clever metaphors for the listeners’ own life experiences while simultaneously evoking deep emotional responses. The fears, hopes, dreams and ambitions of the audience were reflected in the fantastic events shared by the storyteller.
We might think the old form is dead. Movies and television have been a staple mode of delivery, but their visual accompaniment often overpowers narrative with exhaustive jump scares and well-worn tropes. Podcasts get a step closer to the older craft, with their reliance on spoken word and lower budgets, providing a great example of the adage “less is more.”
Over the past few months, I think everyone’s desire for true storytelling came from an unexpected source: live performances in the halls of the US and Mexican Congresses.
In July, viewers of C-SPAN and the major cable networks were treated to the folkloric tradition in real time. While viewers might not have been aware, the digital firelight became the hearth, and we were all told of mysterious objects in the sky, anomalous encounters, and truths long buried by government forces. The storytellers were David Grusch, a retired Air Force Major; David Fravor, a retired Navy Commander; and Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot and now the Executive Director of Americans for Safe Aerospace.
Ryan Graves, David Grusch, and David Fravor: Photo: Elizabeth Frantz (Reuters)
I can’t help but look to the three clean-cut, well-dressed men as fulfilling the much-needed role of master storytellers. My aim here is neither to verify nor to debunk the accounts shared by Grusch, Fravor, or Graves. Rather, I want to acknowledge their presence as awesome storytellers! Besides, how could anyone possibly verify or renounce the narrative threads woven by these three men? They were not there to offer evidence, but—as Grusch so eloquently demonstrated through his testimony—to tell of stories that are already circulating throughout high levels of government. As our guide into the unknown, Grusch did the one thing all master storytellers know well: only reveal enough to keep the listeners’ interest kindled. As the most verbose of the three, Grusch knew to breathe just enough oxygen into his accounts to light the fires of curiosity.
It is fitting that the three Americans claimed some narrative ownership of UFOs this past summer, considering so much of the contemporary discourse on the subject traces its roots to postwar encounters over American skies and soil. Yet, narratives of sky-beings and fallen visitors are much older and global in reach, to the point of being ubiquitous in antiquity. Jacques Vallée, often referred to as the grandfather of modern Ufology, notes in his now classic 1970 book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, there are countless unexplainable aerial events throughout history, but:
[What] do they prove? Nothing. They only indicate that, if there ever was a time for scientists to bow their heads with awe before the variety and power of natural phenomena and human imagination, it is to be found in our own age of technology and rational thought, not in the confusion of medieval thought.
Of course, what we’ve seen happening in our time, however, is scientific experts and government bureaucrats taking control of the narrative. This should come as no surprise; after all, even experts and bureaucrats have a desire to share ideas, stories, and their own personal experiences. Far from being objective materialists, it turns out that scientists and bureaucrats are human, too! The opening words to Diana Walsh Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology begins with a rebuke of Stephen Hawking’s 2008 TED Talk in which he said UFOs only appear to cranks and weirdos. Challenging Hawking’s all-too-easy dismissal, Pasulka’s ethnography of bureaucrats and scientists reveals a far more widespread belief on the subject across all spectrums of society.
The comparison between aliens and angels was immediate for Pasulka, a religious studies scholar, but her study provided the necessary nuance of critical inquiry to silence the knee-jerk reaction that this was only the realm of cranks and weirdos. Stories of UFOs and unexplained encounters are coalescing into a broader metanarrative as more professionals come forward with public accounts or personal experiences. The themes, instances, and tropes emerging from stories about UFO phenomena do not come from nowhere—indeed, they inherit the story structures of their folkloric predecessors.
This lesson hit home during the September congressional hearings in Mexico City. Journalist and UFO enthusiast Jamie Maussan went considerably further than Grusch, Fravor, and Graves. Rather than tell a story, Maussan revealed two alleged mummified bodies of miniature humanoid beings that were reportedly found in Peru.
Remains of alleged “non-human” beings presented in Mexico. Source: Reuters
The spectacular reveal of bodies, complete with small, cushioned coffins, left little space for nuance, and most viewers were in one of two camps: real or fake! Such is the work of a storyteller who wants to leave little to the imagination, contrary to the US Congressional hearing. The firestorm of Maussan’s theatrical reveal has only grown since the September hearings in Mexico. Accusations of forgery, grave robbing, and defilement of Indigenous remains are just a few examples of the resulting chaos.
Fresh from his own testimony in Washington two months earlier, Ryan Graves took aim at Maussan in a social media post, saying the “[demonstration] was a huge step backwards for the issue.” Whereas Maussan stepped forward with claims of irrefutable proof, Grusch, Fravor, and Graves left breadcrumbs for further inquiry. Again, these are two different approaches to storytelling, with the Mexico hearings offering spectacle and the American hearings dangling carrots.
In terms of Maussan’s story, the display of supposed miniature remains instantly tapped into the global archetype of small, fairylike people. There was no need for this connection to be made explicitly, since, at some time, every person around the world would have read or heard children’s stories of diminutive mischievous agents. The journey from fairy or elven-like little people to sky-beings was instantaneously made by viewers without the storyteller ever having to say a word.
Old forms of storytelling are not dead. UFOs and humanoid beings from the sky make for some of the best stories, regardless of whether they are spectacles or cloaked in secrecy with only a trail of whispers to follow. Greg Bishop, a prolific UFO researcher, writer, and host of the Radio Misterioso podcast offers several working models for understanding the phenomena that cover a spectrum of how people experience and report encounters. Much of Bishop’s commentary delves into memory, consciousness, physical environment, bias, and consensus-building. Noteworthy to the recent congressional hearings in the United States and Mexico, is the well-trodden path of effective storytelling, to which Bishop says, “[We] wrap our metaphors around the experience and encode it with language.”
At its core, the otherworldly experiences of UFOs are a very human experience in need of human language to express what might at first might be ineffable. Filled with metaphors and archetypes, stories of alien encounters are ultimately a reflection about ourselves and our place in the world. In this sense, we are not viewing an “other” so much as we are uncovering aspects of ourselves that we might not easily identify. These tales also happen to be the basis of some of the oldest stories that have been passed down to us—stories rich with empathy, tragedy, and love, stories that seek to unlock the wonders of the universe.