Encounters, p.6
Encounters, page 6
3
THE GRAY MAN
The problem is that we have no idea what to make of the bonds between humans and the spirits really present to them within the limits of our critical theories. Further theorizing along these lines is simply deflecting attention from the challenge of understanding how people meet their gods and how their gods meet them.
—ROBERT ORSI
I just wish I could stop walking through the darkness.
—GRAY MAN
ENCOUNTER
Gray Man works for a major research agency and is head of a laboratory. More than any other scientist with whom I had worked, he was most careful about what he could share, and what he could not. He edited his contributions to this book more than fifteen times.
Since the beginning of my study, I have met hundreds of scientists and technologists who believe in UFOs. Do they know something that other people do not know about the topic? How do they reconcile their scientific pursuits with their belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials? What I learned from this community is that, contrary to the common assumption that scientists do not entertain such ideas, some of the best of them believe in extraterrestrials, nonhuman intelligences, and angels and demons—not as metaphors but as real beings. And sometimes these nonhuman entities, they believe, are not mutually exclusive categories. Gray Man related his experiences, and they reveal how these categories of beings overlap.
“I woke up to see a being hovering above me. His face was about four or five inches from my face. His eyes pierced me, I felt, and he seemed to look directly into my heart, as if he was assessing me, but it wasn’t unpleasant. As I felt this kind of assessment taking place, I felt I could also see into his soul too. I felt that this being was pure, full of righteousness and incredibly powerful. His hair was long, about shoulder-length or slightly longer, and it shone pale but bright yellow to gold and looked like it was made of light. His face was so close to my face that I didn’t dare move. I was completely and utterly overwhelmed, as much as a person could imagine being overwhelmed, by the idea of literally coming face-to-face with an angel or God.1
“This initial shock and fear were momentary. It turned into a feeling of love, peace, and joy, and the breath had been taken out of my lungs as you might experience from a huge adrenaline surge. The room, which had been dark, was lit bright with light that radiated out from his body. His body was luminous, like looking at a light bulb through a thin lampshade. His clothing was white, and he appeared to have on a sleeveless gown that could be opened at the front.
“The feeling of adrenaline soon passed, and a feeling of peace and calm came over me, and a realization that if this thing wanted me dead, I would have already been dead. I felt love and a strong connection to this being, like the love and connection you might experience with a once-in-a-lifetime best friend, the type of friend that knows you far better than even your parents. At this point I asked if I could hug this being, but he told me, “No, I have a sword, you will be injured.” I did not immediately notice this sword, it was hidden; it was held vertically with the tip pushing outwardly against his clothing so that once noticing this, it became obvious that it was a sword. I wondered why he would have a sword. It was confusing to me. This being was so incredibly powerful—I did not doubt for a moment that it could easily vaporize me just by willing it.
“Time seemed to blur, and I was transported to another place, this one very dark. I felt strongly that this being was indeed sacred, holy, and pure, an angel, however it then proceeded to give me armor and weapons. This is not what I ever imagined an encounter with an angel would be like. He gave me a sword. It made no sense to me. How was this going to help me? A dark, shadowy, three-dimensional black figure appeared. It was like thick dark smoke but completely opaque. The figure was of a being that morphed and changed shape, not completely, but it did not have a fixed solid outline; it moved and flowed. I could feel it was evil. I knew the angel intended me to fight this figure, and so I did. It seemed strange to me that I was not afraid; in fact, it gave me joy to at least attempt to put an end to this dark entity not knowing whether I would perish or defeat it. For some reason, I just knew what needed to be done and so I did it. During this carnage, I was calm. This was a very unusual experience, but it felt normal, like how you might feel participating in a personal hobby. That’s the feeling I got. I felt that I should be terrified, but I wasn’t at all. I eventually defeated this evil being using the sword. The sword went straight through this being like swinging through air; there was no feeling of hitting something solid, but the sword seemed to disperse this dark, opaque, smoke-like matter. I sensed that the angel was pleased with me.
“I then woke up at some point soon after this. It was like waking up from being knocked out or unconsciousness, not waking from sleep. I didn’t really know what to think. I felt sure this was not a dream, but what was this? I said to myself repeatedly, ‘What just happened?’
“How could this be real, but it seemed so real, and what would be the purpose? I was trying so hard to make sense of it all, but I wondered why an angel would need to have a sword. Angels can be seen or not seen and are powerful. I imagined that if they were real that they could kill a demon without a sword. Was the sword for show? I didn’t get it.
“Regardless of what this was, I felt overwhelming gratitude for that experience. It gave me incredible comfort at a time when I was making some big life-changing decisions. There are no words to describe the relief I felt.”
Gray Man described what happened to him. He emphasized that it was not a dream. Upon looking at him, he seems the least likely person to report such an event. He’s a surfer, and if you didn’t know he was a scientist, you’d expect to see him on the beach with a surfboard, or with a skateboard zooming down the street. Even after two years of knowing him, I had never seen him deviate from his chosen uniform: black Vans, faded saggy jeans, and a Billabong T-shirt. His dark brown hair is buzz-cut style. He once called himself the Gray Man because he despised social media and anything that brought attention to himself. He did not allow photographs. Anything that smacked of self-promotion made him cringe.
Gray Man reminded me of another scientist surfer and UFO experiencer I’d met. In 2017 I spent four days at a small conference in California with Dr. Kary Mullis and his wife, Nancy. I had invited him to the conference because I was interested in learning about his UFO experience. Mullis had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the polymerase chain reaction, which was a revolutionary technology that impacted innumerable industries. He disclosed his UFO experience and his meeting with a small being that he described as an “electric raccoon” in his cabin in the mountains of Northern California. Mullis was a controversial genius who posed for photographs with his surfboard on California beaches near his house and whose views on various topics, from UFOs to climate change, did not conform to the expectations that the pubic had about scientists. Except for his disdain of being photographed, Gray Man reminded me of Dr. Mullis.
What Gray Man described to me, however, did not sound like a UFO experience.
“This being you saw sounds like Saint Michael,” I said.
Saint Michael the Archangel is a divine agent portrayed in the sacred scriptures of the three major Western religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The angel is known to be a demon slayer and a psychopomp, which is a being that leads the souls of the dead to their afterlife destinations. He is also the guardian of children. At the time we had our conversation, Gray Man wasn’t aware of this iconography, or he wasn’t consciously aware of it. When I mentioned that this sounded like a dream about Saint Michael, he didn’t comment, but later he told me that he wondered why I had brought it up. What would a saint have to do with an angel with a sword? He was confused about the angel he believed he saw and why it had a sword. He didn’t know of the tradition of Saint Michael as an archangel and demon slayer. I had assumed that he was aware of the tradition. Yet he wasn’t, and how he found out was curious.
A week after Gray Man told me about his “encounter,” which is what he called it, another scientist I knew who believed in UFOs, Tyler D., sent me a few pictures of paintings that a friend of his had done of Saint Michael. I hadn’t told him about Gray Man’s story. The paintings were beautiful, and Tyler said that his friend, who didn’t know me, told him that she thought of me and wanted me to see them. They were painted to look like frescoes, and the angel stood within a halo of blue beams with his sword in hand. The same week I noticed that a local church had placed a statue of Saint Michael in their garden. I often frequented the garden and brought my children to play and climb the trees that lined its paths. I noticed the statue but can’t remember having seen it before. The statue was tall and big, taller than an average man, about six feet in height. Generally, paintings of Saint Michael represent him as being a soldier in armor with the sword, but this statue emphasized his masculinity more than any painting or prayer card I had seen. His muscles were barely contained by his armor. His face, which was calm, reminded me of how Gray Man described his angel. I was both taken aback and amused by this portrayal. Nobody but a demon would think to cross this character, I imagined.
The week began and ended with encounters of Saint Michael. At the end of the week, I was scheduled to have an interview with a pediatric therapist who partnered with my university and provided internships to our students. Her focus was on children in crisis, and she worked with my university’s undergraduates as a mentor and helped them learn to support and guide children through situations that involved trauma and suffering. She was well respected for her work. As I sat across from her in her office, my eyes were drawn upward to a statue of Saint Michael prominently displayed on a shelf behind her desk. She spoke to me about her work, but I was distracted by the ominous winged presence peering down at me.
“I see you have a statue of Saint Michael,” I said, after our interview was over.
The therapist looked surprised that I noticed the statue. The statue was so large that I thought it was impossible not to notice it.
“Yes, I do,” she said. Then, with only a brief pause, she continued: “Saint Michael is a guardian and protector of children. I speak to him on a regular basis about my work. He counsels me about my young clients.”
Her eyes squinted as she searched my face, probably looking for a reaction. I was surprised by her bluntness, and I hoped that I didn’t show it in my expression. My work involves talking to people about their extraordinary experiences, so I’m used to hearing about them, but not during my off-hours. I considered this my off-hours even though I had been speaking to her about routine work concerning my university and training students. It had nothing to do with my research in religious studies. I was not interviewing her about her beliefs in otherworld beings.
As she spoke about her correspondence with Saint Michael, I was struck by the number of coincidences I’d experienced that week that had involved pictures or statues of him. This was the third one. I’ve written about synchronicity—uncanny and meaningful coincidences—and my position has been to disregard them as metaphysically meaningful. Instead, I tend to observe synchronicities as they happen and, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggests, savor the appearance of these coincidences as what they are—striking plays of chance. Nietzsche wrote of the meaningful and shocking impact of these events but cautioned his readers to avoid attributing them to God or to a divine intelligence. Instead, he recommended that we “leave the gods in peace” and admire the work of chance in our lives and laud our ability to recognize it. So far in my research into synchronicity, I’ve taken this position, as it seems the least laden with assumptions. Synchronicity is often the engine of spiritual and religious belief as it seems to confirm practitioner’s own religious or spiritual tendencies. Even as I resist the temptation that Nietzsche suggests, I am still undecided about synchronicities. The more I study their place in people’s lives, the more I’m convinced that they represent a structural component of everyone’s reality, but especially of those who are naturally inquisitive about life and are open-minded.
Scholar Tyson Yunkaporta’s description of what he calls “extra-cognitive” processes speaks to uncanny coincidences as part of the knowledge practices of indigenous Australian Lore. In a passage that is curiously reminiscent of Nietzsche’s description of “personal providence,” or synchronicities, in the philosopher’s book The Gay Science, Yunkaporta explains this process:
Some aspects of consciousness, knowledge, and knowledge transmission have not been explained or proven scientifically and are therefore avoided in cognitive science. I’m calling these aspects “extra-cognitive” for want of a better word. They include the messages that land and Ancestors bring to us—a bird or animal behaving strangely, a sudden wind gust, a coincidence that highlights a deep meaning or revelation, a burst of inspiration. These are the things that make knowledge processes sacred and magical.2
I thanked the therapist for her time and left the office.
At the end of that week of synchronicities involving Saint Michael, Gray Man called, and he was almost upset.
“Okay, something happened,” he said.
“I decided to investigate what you mentioned about Saint Michael,” he said. “Up until this point I had disregarded your comment. I didn’t think that was going to be of any help to me, but a feeling inside of me urged me to at least learn who this Saint Michael person was. Was it an apostle? I wondered. I had no idea. I’m not one for reading, so I turned to the internet and typed in Saint Michael. I was immediately shocked by what I found. A video I clicked on described the being exactly! I got another adrenaline surge; I couldn’t breathe and my heart pounded. I had to call you immediately, you were right. This is honestly freaking me out.”
I could tell Gray Man was troubled and on the verge of being upset. His explanation of his physiological changes—heart beating fast—prompted me to try to calm him down. I was also confused, because I thought that he already knew about Saint Michael when I had told him. Apparently he didn’t. He thought that I was trying to placate him about this experience, that I was “being nice” because I had not outright dismissed it. This information was a lot for him to handle, and he didn’t know how to make sense of it.
“It’s okay. People have these experiences. I agree that it is weird that you had a dream or vision of a being that looks exactly like Saint Michael,” I said.
A week later he called me again. He was in the process of organizing his trip from Australia, to fly out to the United States to meet with me about the research.
“I can’t believe what just happened,” he said. “I went to get my passport out of the small box I had it stored in and I discovered this card at the bottom of it. Guess what it is? I will take a photo and send it to you.”
He sent me the photo. It was a prayer card featuring Saint Michael. This one was probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and shows Saint Michael dressed as a young Roman soldier. He stands on the head of Satan. In one hand he holds his sword ready to pierce Satan, and in the other hand he carries scales to weigh the souls of the dead. He looks calm. Satan is immersed in flames, and although he is defeated, he also looks calm.
“I have no idea how it got there,” Gray Man said. “In fact, it took me about two hours to remember how I even came into possession of it in the first place. I got this thing twenty years ago and hadn’t even looked at it once. The only reason I would have kept it was because a friend gave it to me as a gift. How it found its way into that box I have no idea. I feel speechless, in shock. This is all too incredibly weird.”
These events impacted Gray Man. He interpreted the event of finding the card and many other weird things that were happening as confirmation that his experience was more than just a dream.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to make sense of it, either, but I listened to him and asked a few questions for clarification. His answers made the series of events even more uncanny.
“I can believe that you didn’t know who Saint Michael was, or that he is a sword-wielding demon slayer, but how then did you get this card? It’s a prayer card, by the way,” I said.
“My friend gave it to me. This was more than twenty years ago. He was one of my mates, but he was very troubled. He was in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital on prison grounds, actually. This is where they put severely troubled people who are too violent to keep anywhere else. He was in there. He hadn’t spoken in at least two weeks. His mum called me; she was desperate. She wanted me to pray with him. I felt terrified to do this even though I knew I had to do it. Because his mum asked, I went.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s sad.” I could feel that he was hesitant to tell me what happened. It was okay with me if he didn’t, as I probably didn’t want to know the story. He told me anyway.
“Yeah. It was.” After a pause he continued. “My friend’s mom drove us to the hospital. The hospital was on the prison grounds in Sydney. As I said, the hospital for people with serious health conditions that are too violent to be held in a regular psychiatric hospital or for prisoners with severe mental health disorders. At the entrance was security. It was kind of like going through security at the airport. I had to open my pockets and leave behind anything that could be used as a weapon. The prisoners who were there had been violent, with psychiatric conditions, not necessarily murderers, but whose behavior is disturbing, and a court determines that they need to be there. My mate did some things like run through a very thick glass door like it was nothing and did not get hurt. Stuff like that. I think that it was because of this escape from the previous hospital that he was upgraded to this new one.
