One Calgary anthropologist has found that the search for the little green men might look less like science fiction and more like a meditative retreat.
What started as a semi-public lecture at a campus bar became an 800-word article and, come this December, will soon be an academic essay exploring what Shayne Dahl, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, has called “techno-shamanism.”
Dahl was first inspired to study the intersection of religion and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in 2017 after coming across an article in The New York Times. Years later, he had the opportunity to teach his findings to patrons of UCalgary’s Last Defence Lounge.
He didn’t shy away from making light of the topic when he played music from The X-Files to accompany his speech. But beneath the jokes and clichés surrounding the subject, Dahl said that his research has uncovered a real religious movement.
Whether UFOs themselves exist is something he cannot confirm or deny, given the lack of evidence available. What Dahl has established, however, is that there is a growing global phenomenon involving attempts to connect with extraterrestrial beings.
He explained that members use laser pointers to send signals into the sky. Afterwards, they’ll do a group meditation called “coherent thought sequencing,” in which they’ll envision themselves ascending from Earth to finally communicate telepathically with extraterrestrials.
From an anthropological perspective, Dahl said that this act of connecting with a non-Earthly entity resembles rituals in some religious sects and, for this reason, is slightly less abstract in practice than it appears on paper.
Where the socially accepted and stigmatized intersect
Dahl cited the 1972 book by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who was hired by the U.S. Air Force to research UFOs, which identified five types of encounters: sightings, physical traces, direct contact, abduction, and human-initiated communication.
The last is what Dahl’s research has focused on. This is called Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, or CE-5 for short, and is defined as contact with those who operate otherworldly vehicles such as UFOs.
Dahl said that North and South America are hotspots for the behaviour, especially in places like Peru. He said that CE-5 could be considered a form of religion due to the parallels it shares with shamanism.
“What they’re doing looks very similar to what I’ve observed in the anthropological record in the literature associated with shamanism,” said Dahl.
“Because these kinds of ceremonies where people get together, there’s altered states of consciousness involved, and actually there always has been a technological element because it could be the technology of a drum, a rattle, in some societies, psychotropic plants.”
Shamanism suggests communicating with ancestral spirits, nature, or other supernatural powers. One key difference in the practice of CE-5 is that members are trying to communicate with aliens instead.
Without evidence, Dahl said he cannot discern whether transitioning through CE-5 is real or fantasy, but he hopes to research this further by conducting case studies of existing groups. What he can say for sure is that the act is religious in essence, since the existence of God in traditional sects is also questioned by the scientific community.
“Similar to somebody who has faith in a supreme being — they don’t necessarily have the hard evidence to say whether ot not it’s really real,” said Dahl.
“But for some reason, the UFO subject is stigmatized, but then research into all these other forms of religiosity is not stigmatized.”
The social stain surrounding the topic, undoubtedly created by the media and government campaigns, almost stopped him from releasing his findings for fear of professional repercussions.
But since publishing his Aug. 10 article to The Conversation, Dahl said that a majority of the feedback has been positive, leading him to believe that his research has come at a time when people are ready to have the conversation.
“As an anthropologist, what I am trained to do is study our response, human responses, to the possibility that we are not alone,” he said.
“We want to belong somewhere, and I see in the CE-5 communities a desire to have a cosmic belonging — some people could scoff at it…but I see it as kind of poetic.”
