“It’s … easy to make yourself see what you want to see”

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica

The title of this piece (above) comes from a line in a Broadway play – The Thin Place – reviewed in The New Yorker, January 20, 2020 by Elizabeth Vincentelli [Page 11].

It goes to my awkward contention that some UFO sightings (maybe all of them) are brought about by the desire (wishes) of the person or persons witnessing the enigma.

We know the psychological mechanisms for hallucinations and delusions. But there are occult and paranormal renditions that intrude also.

The magick maxims – “as above, so below” and “as within, so without” – exemplify the thinking that allows one to see hallu- cinations and delusions as something more than mental quirks, psychological mayhem or neurological malfunctions, as Oliver Sacks often pointed out; there is a reality here that is almost unexplainable.

And with the incursions of quantum mechanics into the mix one has to see the possibility that observations of things as possible quan- tum artifacts that show up and, by being observed (measured) that they assume a material reality.

Even the physical presence of the 2000-2019 decade’s now noto- rious UFO sightings, Tic-Tac (FLIR1), Gimbal, and Go Fast came about by wishful thinking on the part of the Naval pilots who encountered (saw) them and then also were captured on various technical, military gadgets and equipment.

That is, the wish (the desire) to see a UFO created the UFO, and brought it into material reality.

This was the view about visions for the early Greek “philosophers” and later alchemists.

The plethora of notables, such as Pythagoras and the pre-Socratics, not to mention the unknown cave painters/artists who left clues as to their equivalent thinking make up much of the accounts that example a belief in the tangibility of hallucinations and delusional episodes seen in cave art or mentioned in early Greek texts and much of the esoteric works that Blavatsky and other illuminoids touted.

The Great Wizards of Antiquity: The Dawn of Western Magic and Alchemy by Guy Ogilvy [Llewellyn Publications, MN, 2019] provides much that is worthwhile for readers here and those who like to know more about the paranormal in its earliest incarnations.

Physicists, especially those involved with quantum theory/mechanics, are starting to see the connection between the micro-reality and the macro-reality: as above, so below.

The idea that UFOs are real because they manifest results via technical measurement is the heart of quantum mechanics, but it goes beyond that, in so far as the thought is father to the deed – the wish to see a UFO creates the UFO, and one can postulate the behavior of the UFO is engendered by the wishes (the desires) of the person or persons seeing the UFO.

A group observation of UFO activity or a UFO is brought about by the energy or mental infusions of the many, the group propositioned by the inclination to see a UFO. It’s a kind of folie à many.

Mass hallucination or group delusions are not rare. The literature is full of examples, all recorded seriously by historians of the weird or collectors of the odd.

Let’s not be enslaved by the idea that the radar returns and videos of the Tic-Tac UFO and its brethren eliminate the idea that the measurement denudes the idea that hallucination or delusion took place when the things were encountered/seen and registered on equipment.

Hallucinations can do that, and as much as I loathe Persinger’s experiments, his work instructs us that the possibility is there.

RR