Evolutionary Metaphors – A Book Born of a UFO Encounter?
By David J. Moore
Over a decade has passed since I had my UFO encounter in Ridge Wood, a small, rugged woodland near the village of Kingswinford in the West Midlands. The event took place when me (then 22 years old) and my best friends – two of whom went on to form the heavy metal band, Dark Forest – went out on a late February evening for a bonfire. This was something we did as a weekend getaway from the usually crowded Black Country pubs.
Once we had set up our small fire and found a comfortable place to sit, I decided to scout out and crawl along the huge body of a fallen tree which stretched out towards the horizon (facing the village of Kinver). This allowed me an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. But, before long, a strange concentration of white light caught my attention; an apparently silent, slowly moving sphere of pure light. At first, I simply thought this was a car coming up over a hill, and would soon turn, shining its headlamps into the winding roads. However, as I watched it for longer, I realised that it was much closer than I had initially expected. I called my friends over, and we all watched it as it steadily floated towards us through the nearby farmland.
PRESS PLAY: Listen to David Moore discuss his UFO experience and motivations for writing his New book
And then it floated above us – again, just above walking pace – and turned completely red as we watched it through the gaps in the trees. I immediately went into what I described as a ‘fight or flight’ mode, panicking and running through the gorse and bracken; my friends, by contrast, stood in awe watching this anomalous object of wonderfully bizarre luminescence, all silent and mysterious. We all returned home early that night, frantic with discussion and sharing our descriptions.
Now, as weeks and months passed, I had this strange and apparently unexplainable phenomenon haunt my mind. After writing down my witness statement to a local UFO group I decided it was time to read up on as much literature on the phenomenon as I could. I began with Colin Wilson’s 1998, Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience.
Over the years I continued to explore the mystery obsessively, which led me onto reading books on the occult, esoteric philosophy, quantum physics, and cosmology. My world, all from that fateful night, had wildly expanded; and I was left with a whole new inner-universe as a result. A universe in which apparently miraculous events do – and can – occur, and in which the human mind has the ability to reach out, with unknown powers, and involve itself with the mystery of the cosmos.
Now, this was all a radical departure from my previous obsession with gloomy French and Romanian philosophy, with the likes of Jean Paul-Sartre and the nightmarish Emil Cioran, being some of my favorites. Prior to the UFO event, I had immersed myself into a state of gloomy materialism, accepting reality really ‘as it is’, and not suspecting any heightened awareness of a greater reality. An anomalous event such as this one, it turned out, eroded this self-limiting scepticism.
Eventually, it seemed altogether logical that I should put together my own thoughts on paper. For years I had struggled to fully articulate myself, and so I decided to study English Literature at the University of Worcester. After I had finished my three years, I felt that I had to write something entirely for myself, without the oversights of academia; and so, I began to write about science-fiction.
Soon after I began sketching out a series of essays on the UFO phenomenon. The first part in the series was called ‘New Existentialism and the UFO’. However, after nearly a decade of thinking and reading about the phenomenon, I decided that instead of a series of essays, my insights and intuitions required a full-length book. Almost straight away I knew it was going to be called Evolutionary Metaphors.
Evolutionary Metaphors: UFOs, New Existentialism, and the Future Paradigm (6th Books: 2019), as it came to be called, is a culmination of over a decade’s worth or reading and deliberation on the UFO experience. In it, I brought together my interests in philosophy and the essential meaning of human condition, and a ‘conceptology’ that would provide a general theory of the paranormal. Indeed, the occult, with its symbolisms and challenging inside out logic, became a close companion in my investigation – the intellect and intuition came to sit side-by-side in my writing process.
At times, I felt like I was doing a Tarot reading for a UFO, but the new and illuminating arrangements of logic, both present in the phenomenon itself, and in the approach I had undertaken, offered an incredibly creative and no fewer penetrating insights into this twilight zone.
And as the UFO and its entities often appeared to harness miraculous powers – which would have been called occult in any other age – it seemed to be logical to incorporate both its logic, that of magic and occultism, as insights during my own research.
Naturally, I began with the most reliable and well-authenticated researchers I could find, beginning with the work of John E. Mack, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who investigated at length individuals who had claimed to be abducted; the early pioneer of ufology, Jacques Vallee, who was instrumental in the development of the Internet, and made the unique connection between fairy folklore and the UFO mystery; and the horror novelist Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling non-fiction book, Communion (1986), has an air of authenticity and the deeply esoteric quality of an occult document from the Middle Ages.
What struck me forcibly while researching the UFO phenomenon was that it appeared as an evolutionary symbol; even a sort of test in which one’s sense of possibilities simply have to expand to fully encompass its enormous complexity – its sheer dizzying implications. In fact, the American astronomer, J. Allen Hynek, once wrote of Raymond E. Fowler’s classing in ufology, The Andreasson Affair (1979), that the whole “narrative [of the phenomenon] seems to deal with a reality so alien that it can be described only in metaphors, and perhaps only understood in terms of an altered state of consciousness” [my italics].
More recently, Bernado Kastrup in his book Meaning in Absurdity (2010), commented nature itself is “fluid and elusive as thought” and that contradiction, “paradox, and absurdity would have to be recognized as valid parts of reality.” And so, through reading cases of abduction phenomenon, UFO ‘theatrics’ (see the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter, for example, in which bizarre creatures appear to do backflips are witnessed by an entire family, and their neighbours!), as well as the general eeriness and surrealism of much of the material, I settled on an approach that could wrestle with all of its meta-logical games.
In my book I incorporate Colin Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’, a philosophy argues that in heightened states of consciousness we can objectively grasp reality; Wilson says that our perception reaches out towards the outside world and grasps it like a clenched fist. He also emphasised how a sudden shock, and then a sense of relief, makes us much more able to appreciate reality. And in these moments, we realise – more fully than in any other moment of our lives – that we could have always known that this meaning truly exists, and that it was only through a shock – usually external to us – that we can grasp this fact. Importantly, Wilson argued, we were required to know this so readily that we would never let our lives slip away into low-intensity consciousness.
Importantly for my own approach, I took heed from the psychologist Carl Jung’s late 1958 book on flying saucers, seeing them as simultaneous events both happening in objective reality, and also having what could be called a ‘psychic component’ which could be read as an unfolding mythology. I took Jung’s dictum to heart: “The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd”. But, I added, that in heightened states of consciousness, we can unveil elements of reality that reveal its truer meaning; and that is why, with the UFO phenomenon, it is important to approach it with all the advice of esoteric psychology; as explored by mystics, magicians and psychonauts such as G.I. Gurdjieff and the Stanislaw Grof, who descript and mapped the furthest reaches of consciousness.
Shamanism, a word that invokes many far-reaching cultures from Mongolia and Siberia to the South American basins and central Africa, is also a psychological technology that most of us in the West have lost. And these shamans, called such for their ability to walk between worlds, open up rich interpretations of these bizarre, liminal entities. It was after reading Kevin Turner’s Sky Shamans of Mongolia, that I realised many abduction cases cross-over with this ancient tradition of communing with spirits and the dead.
Firstly, there was the initial shock and trauma, and even visions – usually within altered states of consciousnesses – of objects being inserted into the body. And secondly, there followed a moment of inner transformation, in which the abductee – or visionary shaman – was ‘born again’, with heightened faculties of occult perception. In each case a unique vision of another universe is provided for the witness; and each urge us to re-examine our too-fixed theories of the nature of reality and the purpose of our lives.
But, following my leads, and the insights that cases and studies in ufology provided me, I felt the best possible way of approaching it was to treat it as a lesson – even, as a whole, a communication from another type of consciousness that, by its very nature, abides by different laws of physics, and more importantly, meaning. The symbolic, the metaphorical, and so on, then becomes a unique insight into the type of mind working behind them.
Take, for example, the phenomenon of synchronicity – an apparently miraculous event in which a coincidence becomes ultimately meaningful. I’ll provide one of my own examples.
One afternoon I was walking down Stourbridge High Street with my friend, and I was discussing Rudolf Steiner – the Austrian mystic who is more famous for his Steiner Schools –, and as I knew little about his philosophy, which he called the tongue-twister, Anthroposophy, I asked aloud “I wonder what the fruits are of anthroposophy?”, meaning what were its essential advantages. A minute later I turned into a charity shop with a pitiful collection of books, but out of its small collection one jumped out. It was entitled, The Fruits of Anthroposophy.
What are the chances? But more importantly, what do they mean – if anything at all?
As it turns out, the synchronicity is closely tied to the UFO phenomenon. Colin Wilson, while writing Alien Dawn, said that he often saw triplet figures of numbers on his digital alarm clock: 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, etc. In her recent book, American Cosmic, Dr. Diana Pasulka explores various high-level UFO ‘believers’, such individuals who work within the biotechnology industry and with NASA, who rely on synchronicities to ‘guide’ breakthroughs in research and technologies. What this seems to suggest is that there is a deeper level of reality informing our everyday consensus world, and more importantly, investing it with meanings outside of time.
The long-time UFO witness and abductee, Whitley Strieber, also bridged the synchronicity with the acts of the so-called dead in his latest non-fiction book, The Afterlife Revolution (2018). Life, for Strieber, works on a completely different level, with synchronicities – what were once called omens – becoming an everyday part of his daily existence. And also convincing him of the soul’s immortality after the death of the physical body.
Trish and Rob MacGregor in their fascinating book, The Synchronicity Highway (2013), say that the trickster element – closely related to the alien abduction phenomenon – “seems to be driven by … the archetypal Self, which pushes us to expand our boundaries, overcome our limitations” and that in moments of transition in one’s life they grow, with our “unconscious … eager to help out.” In each of us – or through our psyches – another dimension, not only of reality but of ourselves seems to be oddly connected to a deeper level of space and time; and through this interaction, we, in a sense, become magicians – unknowing occultists.
I can only scratch the surface of some of the insights that I managed to nail down in Evolutionary Metaphors. But by reading and saturating myself in the strange, liminal world of ufology and occultism, I came away with a solution to my own existential dilemmas that had plagued me throughout my early twenties. When you begin to see that the world around us, and our very psychologies, as so richly layered and varied – and so strange – there is a sense of thrilling vertigo; of a sense that life itself cannot possibly provide enough time to actualize the full truth of this inestimably vast cosmos.
Evolutionary Metaphors is my own attempt to bottle it, as it were, and provide a means by which we can begin to understand the logic, the deeper thought processes, that underlies many such strange phenomena. The book offers my own philosophical and spiritual attempt to stimulate the imagination, to lead it into what the great and late ufologist John Keep called the super-spectrum, or, as I attempt to explore in my book, the dimensions – and techniques – for activating levels of our mind’s upper layers, the super-consciousness.
After all, when the flame of consciousness is burning bright, the highest truths often do converge with the absurd. And that, in a sense, seems to be what the UFO appears to be urging us to do – to evolve and widen our sense of the possible. But it is up to us to transform these new possibilities into evolutionary ones; taking the metaphors and symbols and turning them into realities.
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