People think the recent rise of conspiracy theories and secret societies just came out of nowhere, but we’ve had moral panics forever. I’m currently writing a book on secret societies, real and imagined, in America - things like the Underground Railroad, Freemasonry, The Illuminati and the New World Order, the CIA and the FBI - and how conspiracy theories form our understanding of such societies. There’s actually a whole philosophy around prison architecture - to build places that inspire melancholy. It’s not a good place to be in, and we attach ghosts to places we feel uncomfortable in: prisons, asylums, cramped spaces. We probably say its haunted partly because it’s awkward and disorientating it feels like a prison. While writing this book, I spent time in the Westin Bonaventure hotel, which is purportedly haunted by a girl in a red dress. Most haunted places are old Victorian houses, but in Los Angeles we have haunted hotels like the Biltmore or the Roosevelt. Do you know a good Los Angeles ghost story? Your previous book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places is all about ghosts. And, I definitely think there is still something important about keeping your eyes open to wonder. So, things start happening that seem to resist explanation.
Suddenly, everything could be explained scientifically or theologically. In the 19th and into the 20th century there was this disenchantment with the world. There are explanations, but none of them are that great. In fact, a newspaper reporter showed up and tried to convince someone to taste a piece. This wasn’t a hoax this is something that really happened. The Kentucky meat shower happened in 1876, when a woman and her grandson witnessed chunks of meat raining down in her yard. Can you explain what that was and what the reaction to it suggests about human nature? The Unidentified mentions something called “the Kentucky meat shower,” which sounds incredibly weird. We don’t talk about that and it raises some questions: What’s an acceptable purpose around contactees? Who gets to have contactee experiences? Are people not talking about these experiences because of their prejudice about who they think aliens want to contact? Louis Farrakhan and Sun Ra both had elaborate narratives around their contactee experiences. Which is wrong because some of the most famous people in the history of contactees are Black men. It seems the stereotype of an “alien contactee” is of a geeky white guy who watches The X-files.
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A movie was made about them that is clearly also about the racism they experienced, but that component was ignored by audiences. Their experience has become the standard template for abductee stories. Two of the most famous abductees are Betty and Barney Hill, a biracial couple. There’s also a racial erasure in ufology. She couldn’t just tell people her ideas as a flight attendant and get taken seriously, but using this extraterrestrial invests the ideologies with importance. who transmitted spiritual teachings to her.
Some of the earliest alien contacts describe blonde-haired, blue-eyed aliens spreading the word about a Utopian or Christian society.Ĭontactee Gloria Lee, a flight attendant, claimed to be speaking with an alien named J.W.
(Image Source: Penguin Random House.)Īliens often seem to exist in our culture to help someone promote their preferred sense of reality as an inevitable. What do you think belief in aliens says about our society?ĭickey’s The Unidentified explores aliens, Bigfoot creatures, flat Earth believers and more. Let’s talk about your most recent book, The Unidentified, which looks at paranormal events. He recently sat down to discuss aliens, ghosts, secret societies, and what we can learn from them about our fears, prejudices and fantasies. We think it’s all weirdos and whackos, but fringe culture has real implications,” says Dickey, whose most recent book is The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained (Penguin Random House, 2021). “What I found is that even if something seems bogus, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a real impact on our world. Slave-holders, for example, often used phrenology to falsely assert the inferiority of Africans based on pseudoscientific examination of skulls, and to argue against emancipation. This discovery became his first book, Crankioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius ( Unbridled Books, 2010), which explores how bizarre practices like grave-robbing connect with larger cultural phenomena like phrenology, whose adherents believed skull shape says something about personality or intellect. I started asking myself, ‘Wait, is this a thing?’” “I then discovered that the composers Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn had their heads stolen as well. “I was researching for a class I was teaching and stumbled across a mention of how Sir Thomas Browne’s skull was stolen from his grave,” explains Dickey. Colin Dickey is currently a professor at National University.
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