The Once-Upon-A-Time Promise of Flying Saucers (UFOs)

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

During the earliest years of flying saucer mania, those of us paying attention thought they must be interplanetary spacecraft, flown by beings from outer space.

That’s what we (people like me and maybe CDA) believed or thought.

Inside that thinking was the hope that the beings flying the things, from there to here, could give us knowledge that baffled human beings from time immemorial, like why are we here; that is, why do we exist; what is the meaning of life?

What the cure for illnesses? Why does evil exist? Can we avoid death? And lots of other questions….all of them, some of us thought our visitors might have answers for.

Of course, such infantile thinking didn’t pan out, and flying saucers don’t come from outer space, nor contain wise beings from somewhere else.

And here we are, summed up by the Science Channel’s How the Universe Works Monday night, 2/18/18.

The Big Bang was the topic, and theoretical physicists were quick to tell viewers that they had no real idea how the Universe came into being, choosing “Inflation” as the mechanism that allowed the impossibilities of the Big Bang to be, including the idea that the Universe exists outside the laws of physics, even outside Einstein’s maxim that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

The madness of the topic was pronounceable and palpable: crazy talk that would put non-physicists in an insane asylum.

The Big Bang coming from nothing – ex nihilo – remains a stumbling block for many physicists, even as it is for some of us outside the physicists’ realm.

But then Fred Hoyle’s steady state theory, of continuous creation, to explain the Universe is hard to accept, as such an external process would seem to require a beginning itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

This is the problem with the idea of an external God. How did God come into being?

That original flying saucer hope (of answers from an advanced visiting species) remains nestled still, in the back of some ufological minds.

But like those notable but addled physicists, there are no answers coming forth from UFOs or those who pretend to research them.

It’s all a gigantic folly.

RR

UFOs (and “alien encounters”) in the Qur’an

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Reviews of two books, by Robyn Creswell, about Islam, in The New York Review of Books for March 7, 2019 – Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism by Alexander Knysh [Princeton University Press, $21.95 and Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr by Husayn ibn Mansur at-Hallaj [Northwestern University Press, $18.95] – caused me to dig out my copy of The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, an explanatory translation by Mohammed  Marmaduke Pickthall [Mentor/New American Library, $1.25!]

The Koran, more properly the Qur’ an, is, as I see it, a recapitulation (corrective), in part, of The Hebrew Bible and the Holy Book of Islam, Allah’s [God’s] word revealed orally to the Holy Prophet Mohammad in 609 A.D. by the angel Gabriel and transcribed by others after The Prophet’s death.

As in the Hebrew Bible and The (various) Bibles we are familiar with, there appear indications of things we’d call today UFOs, along with encounters that some today would attribute to extraterrestrials, but I and others, think the encounters were actually with angels, going back to my previous posting about the nature of reality (via Teilhard de Chardin).

That aside, in the sûrah (verses) in my paperback copy listed above, I find, as one expects in early religious texts, accounts that smack of UFO sightings:

For instance, in Sûrah LIV there is an incident noted by author/translator Pickthall where “ ‘The hour drew nigh and the moon was rent in twain.’ A strange appearance of the moon in the sky, as if it had been torn asunder, is recorded in the traditions of several Companions of the Prophet as having astonished the people of Mecca …” [Page 379 ff.]

In SûrahXCVI, vv. 1-5 … “the Prophet suddenly again beheld the angel who had appeared to him on Mt. Ḥirâ, and wrapped himself in his cloak.” [Page 419-420]

Sûrah LXXIX refers to “lone stars floating, By the angels hastening.” [Page 428]

Sûrah LXXXVI At-Târiq refers to a comet that “alarmed the East about the time of the Prophet’s call.” [Page 436]

On Page 221 is recounted Sûrah  XVIII about “the youths who took refuge from persecution in a cave (vv. 10-27) and were preserved there as if asleep for a long period – a story which is generally identified by Western writers (e.g. Gibbon) with the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.” [Reminds me of some stories related by Albert Rosales in his Humanoid Encounters series.]

There are more examples, and you’d do well to reference them in an English translation of the Holy book.

N.B. The Hallaj book mentioned above, and reviewed in the NYRB, tells the story of “Al-Halaj, an ascetic who lived and preached in what is now Iraq … best known for … his claim, ‘Ana-l-haqq’ meaning ’I am the Truth’ or ‘I am God’.” He was publicly executed in Baghdad in 922.” [NYRB, Page 29]

RR