UFOs and the Numinous Hole in Our Hearts

Anthony here. I’m something of an aviation buff. One of the most fascinating parts of aviation history is the "black projects": ultra-secret aircraft that push the envelope of aviation technology. The greatest of these black projects have been created by the Lockheed "Skunk Works," a small, brilliant, unorthodox division within the Lockheed company. I don't know what it is like today, but in its heyday the Skunk Works was pretty much the Pixar of the aviation industry, doing things differently and far better than everyone else, driven by the desire to create great technology and free from bureaucratic interference from the main company. The results were three of the most impressive and secretive aircraft ever created: the U-2, the SR-71, and the F-117.

SR-71 Blackbird

The U-2 was a top secret spy plane created with the express purpose of overflying Russia. It was designed to fly higher than any aircraft in the world, high enough to be out of range of Soviet missiles. It was a success for a few years, until Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was shot down over Russia, forcing the U.S. to acknowledge the aircraft's existence. A replacement for the U-2 that could fly even higher was needed. To accomplish this Skunk Works had to shift focus from the slow, ultra-lightweight, glider-like U-2 to a machine that would force itself through the thin air at super-high altitudes at speeds hitherto unseen. The result was the SR-71 Blackbird, at Mach 3.2 and a top altitude of more than 97,600 feet still the fastest and highest flying jet (not rocket) in existence — that we know of. The Skunk Works is also responsible for the first stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk, and they created a prototype for the stealth bomber but lost the Defense Department competition to Northrop, creator of the B-2 Spirit.

F-117 Night Hawk

In the book Skunk Works, by Ben Rich, head of the Skunk Works at the time of the F-117's development, I read about how the Skunk Works needed a secluded place to test the U-2, which was a CIA-sponsored project and hence totally secret. Their test pilot took a small plane and flew over the Nevada desert for a few days, looking for a place suitable for testing aircraft. He found the perfect spot at at Groom Lake, a dry lake bed. Dry lakes are the best places to test new aircraft — their flat expanses are perfect for dangerously experimental aircraft to take off and land — and this one was conveniently located in the middle of nowhere. The resulting Air Force base was home to not only the U-2, but also to the SR-71, the Nighthawk, and Northrop's B-2 Spirit while they were tested. The F-117's first operational squadron was based only a few miles from Groom Lake.

A few years ago I was reading something online about "Area 51," the super-secret airbase where, so goes the legend, flying saucers and alien bodies recovered from the Roswell crash are kept. The location of the base was given as Groom Lake, Nevada. I had heard about Area 51 for years — it's part of the zeitgeist for anyone who grew up in the nineties — but that was the first time I'd seen the connection with the Skunk Works' secret airbase. I thought that was hilarious. All this time, UFO nuts who have excitedly reported strange lights and strange shapes (including "black triangles") in the sky were just seeing Skunk Works test pilots tooling around in the latest and greatest example of American aviation engineering. It's fun to think what might be being tested in "Area 51" right now. We know that the stealth drone RQ-170 Sentinel, known as the "Beast of Kandahar" after its

"Beast of Kandahar"

sightings in Afghanistan, was tested there. That aircraft only became public knowledge in late 2011, when Iran downed one. And since the Groom Lake base built new, massive hangers in 2007 and 2014, they're evidently getting fresh business. If the past is any indication there are probably several aircraft in existence that we don't know about.

Most "UFO" sightings can be attributed to government aircraft, both secret and non-secret. Take two of the most famous: the Roswell crash and the Pheonix lights.

Skyhook balloon

Out in the desert close to Roswell at the time of the crash, a Navy group was engaged in "Operation Skyhook," sending high-altitude weather and recon balloons aloft. These balloons had to be only partially inflated at launch in order to survive the pressure change as they ascended, and hence they looked very odd. Often they had a saucer-like bulge where the gas had gathered at the top of the bag. They were made of reflective aluminum, giving them a metallic look. The head of Operation Skyhook used to joke that they could track the balloons by the UFO reports from Roswell. One cargo plane hit the small payload of a Skyhook balloon and reported being attacked by an alien spaceship while the "mothership" — the huge, reflective, and ethereal balloon — looked on.

What crashed at Roswell was most likely a balloon. The contemporary reports seem to indicate such. If it wasn't a balloon, it was probably still a part of a government program. Not far from Roswell the U.S. Air Force had a group of German scientists working on all kinds of unconventional air and space projects, often based on captured German designs from the end of World War II. Take this design for the Zimmerman "flying pancake" wingless aircraft, for instance:

"Would you describe what you saw as a pancake, or a saucer?"

Many of these aircraft worked better on paper than in actuality. It seems possible that whatever crashed at Roswell could have been an experimental and top secret aircraft. Certainly such aircraft explain the UFO sightings at the time that can't be explained by balloons.

The Roswell Incident was accepted as having been a crashed balloon and forgotten . . . until the UFO craze of the '70s. Then Jesse Marcel, one of the men who had been involved in recovering the debris, said that he believed that what he had been gathering up was pieces of an alien spacecraft, and that the government had hushed it up. Of course there is not a shred of evidence to support his hypothesis, but that just proves there was a conspiracy, right?

This is similar to the infamous Bob Lazar Area 51 report: a case of a single individual's proof-less postulations jump-starting a UFO legend. Lazar went to the press in 1986 with an incredible story of an underground base at Groom Lake with captured alien saucers and even captured aliens. He named the Groom Lake base "Area 51" based on an old Atomic Energy Commission map that divided the desert, where they performed nuclear testing, into a grid of numbered areas, and the name stuck. Lazar's credibility was lost when it was discovered that he had lied about being educated as a physicist and so could not possibly have been employed as a physicist at the site, but the legend took off and is still going strong, fed by the base's strict security and the nighttime flying of top-secret aircraft.

The more recent Phoenix Lights of 1997 are quite a funny UFO phenomenon because unlike Roswell and Area 51 there is nothing secret about them. These were not "black" aircraft but Air National Guard A-10 Thunderbolts, which flew over Pheonix in formation and dropped flares as part of a training exercise. This gave rise to wild reports of a huge, silent triangular craft and floating lights. The A-10s were in a triangular formation but were interpreted as a single craft, low and close. Since it was so low yet no sound was heard, the craft must have been using some kind of unknown propulsion technology! (A-10s are notoriously quiet. In the first Gulf War they used to scare the blankety-blank out of the Iraqis by appearing out of the night without warning. Their dark green paint scheme and the fact that they were difficult to hear above 500 feet made them almost invisible at night. The Iraqis later identified the plane as the one they feared most in the war.) Still, I doubt the triangular lights would have drawn interest (most people would have dismissed them as planes — indeed, one Phoenix resident pointed his telescope at them and discovered that that is exactly what they were) except for the floating lights which followed, which were beyond the experience of the observers, who had never seen military flares before. The lights floated around for a while before mysteriously disappearing . . . behind a mountain, as it turns out:

The CIA recently declassified one of its internal reports in which it is revealed that the CIA happily fostered the UFO phenomenon. Much of the agency's budget is spent in misinformation, and they were not about to let such a good — and free — cover story for their black project aircraft go to waste! Of course, most UFO buffs claim that it is this story that is the misinformation: that the CIA is just trying to make people believe that there are no UFOs.

A quick search on the internet reveals that many people are seemingly desperate to believe in UFOs. Just look at the comments for the Youtube video above. Common sense explanations are dismissed. Contradictions are overlooked (for example: why in the world would secretive aliens zip around the country with extremely-visible running lights? If aliens are as powerful and technologically advanced as UFOlogists claim, why have they let some of their own languish in Area 51?). The really funny thing is that many UFOlogists scoff at religion, failing to realize that their own belief is pretty much a religion. The X-Files tag line is apropos: "I want to believe." They certainly do.

Actually, the comparison to religion is apt. We all have what C.S. Lewis calls a "sense of the Numinous" wired into us. In the Introductory to his book The Problem of Pain, Lewis explains:

Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room," and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking – a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visit and of prostration before it — which might best be expressed in Shakespeare's words "Under it my genius is rebuked." This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as Numinous. . . . A modern example may be found (if we are not too proud to seek it there) in The Wind in the Willows where Mole and Rat approach Pan on the Island. 

"Rat," he found breath to whisper, shaking, "Are you afraid?" "Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid? of Him? O, never, never. And yet — and yet — O Mole, I am afraid."

We all have a sense of the Numinous built into us, an awe at something greater than ourselves, something mysterious, something beyond our usual capacity for sense-knowledge. It's why we all enjoy a good ghost story, even if we don't believe in ghosts. When the urge towards the Numinous takes a dark turn it manifests in an obsession with the occult. But it is also a compelling argument for the existence of God that every single civilization ever has felt this awe and most have worshiped imagined deities in response. The thinking is that there must be something deserving of the Numinous for us to feel that way; the pagan ancients just didn't know what it was and had to invent fictional deities to explain it. The Jews and, now, the Christians were and are fortunate enough to have the revelation of the actual God from whom this sense comes (and indeed, it is only the radical Judeo-Christian, Theistic conception of God as Being Himself that really satisfies this odd idea of the Numinous). Yet a modern atheist would counter that our sense of the Numinous is just the remnants of the fear of the unknown which our ancestors had, a fear born of not knowing the true, scientific causes behind events. Of course humans will feel that there is something greater than them when all nature seems to be conspiring against them! But Lewis explains,

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural that early man, surrounded by real dangers, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is indeed "natural" in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But it is not in the least "natural" in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dead or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be explained — as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should had attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object would ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of the human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist to the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at is fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.

Earlier in the Introductory Lewis wrote:

We do not know how far back in human history this feeling goes. The earliest men almost certainly believed in things which would excite the feeling in us if we believed in them, and it seems therefore probable that numinous awe is as old as humanity itself. But our main concern is not with dates. The important thing is that somehow or other it has come into existence, and is widespread, and does not disappear from the mind with the growth of knowledge and civilization."

No, the sense of the Numinous has not disappeared. What has disappeared is anything on which to hang it. Our modern society believes that it can explain everything without bringing God into the picture (never mind that nothing can be explained at all if a prime, uncaused Cause does not exist) and many people have ceased to believe in Him. But because of this sense of the Numinous, if we reject God we must create something else to fill the God-shaped hole in our souls. I saw an interview with a psychologist once who said that UFOlogists get the same kind of satisfaction from their belief in UFOs that other people get from religion. This manifests itself most blatantly in the kind of person who will cheerfully scoff at the idea of a Creator but will inform you that extraterrestrials are behind the pyramids, the Nazca lines, the Bermuda Triangle, and even terrestrial life itself. Richard Dawkins, for instance, is so against the idea of God that he paid for ads on London buses claiming that God does not exist, yet he does not have a problem with the idea of aliens "seeding" life on our planet. This attitude also explains why despite the wealth of evidence that the Phoenix Lights were from a mundane military exercise, people who witnessed them insist on describing them as a "profound experience" that changed their lives, and why Jesse Marcel could come to believe that the debris he was tasked with cleaning up came from something that was not from this earth.