The believer, p.24
The Believer, page 24
Loisann clarifies, for my benefit, that this person was transgender.
“In our minds, something like that, coming from our insulated culture, is just disgusting,” Anthony says. “I do believe it’s wrong, but does that mean I just look in contempt at that person?
“She came to the church a few times,” he continues. “In my opinion, in looking at her, it was a confused person looking for love. The cultural revolution, sexual revolution, that’s going on in today’s world—we don’t like thinking about that. But we need to have answers for people too. If we do believe it’s wrong, I’m not going to—In relating to her, this is something that we need to—Our natural instinct is just to avoid people like that . . .”
Hearing Anthony talk about this is like hearing Anthony think about it, furiously and to himself, in circles.
“How did we get on her from the coffee shop?” Loisann asks gently.
“Talking about people coming in for pie that might not have any interest in . . .” Anthony says, drifting off once more. “I don’t know if ‘hip’ is the right word. The people that are postmodern, college-educated, far-left, liberal—I mean, just the whole progressive agenda that we look at with scary eyes. It’s those kind of people I would like to interact with. Give them the opportunity to see not all Christians are bigoted, far-right, gay haters, or whatever you want to call them.”
I no longer understand what Anthony is saying. It started at the sentence level. The fragments that disappointed themselves into retreat. The mismatched tones of tender vulnerability and flinty conviction that blurred like off-register printing.
I am beginning, though, to understand what it might feel like to be Anthony. A not insubstantial amount of frustration, dissatisfaction, resentment, but mostly: conflict. Anthony’s conflict comes from the fact that the certainties he received instead of education are poor tools for daily living in the particular kingdom in which he and I and Loisann are currently sitting. His training does not serve his human desire to concretize his feelings into thoughts, his thoughts into words, his words into dialogue, and from there into meaningful action.
“We’re studying Genesis in Sunday school right now,” Anthony continues. “There’s so much in the first couple chapters that are foundational for the way everybody lives life. Seven-day week, the concept of marriage. And a lot of that has been—single-parent homes—dysfunctional homes—evolution versus creation. When you start reciting what the Bible says with all that other stuff, it just opens up a world of—Yeah, if you believe you’re the descendant of a monkey or something, it doesn’t hurt to believe that I was born a girl trapped inside a boy’s body. But I mean, if you can grasp hold of the fact that there’s a God that made you—What I’m trying to say is, don’t try to convert a transgender person or a gay person to a straight person until they understand the foundation of how God made us and what sexuality’s all about. Rather than just saying, ‘You should think like I do,’ give reason to believe that.”
Loisann interjects firmly: “We have to give our message and show them compassion, but they need to be taken to truth.” The light filters in through the window and over their children playing on the floor between us.
I ask how theological disputes are settled and Anthony, reaching for the anchor of Loisann’s hand, explains that some things are decided by individual churches, others at a conference level. “Theology always scares me because it takes the things that seem simple and makes them complex,” he says. “I hate saying this is definitely the way it is because then you might meet somebody who seems to be living a very Godly, Christian lifestyle who actually believes something a little bit differently. What do you do with them?”
Occasionally Anthony will take his binoculars and drive out near the airport. He loves planes. Last year he saw an Iranian jet landing. Also one painted in green and white for the Jets football team, and a yellow one for veterans. Because he maintains a list of the registration numbers of planes spotted or traveled in, he knows he has been in the plane that was shot down over Ukraine and that he saw—at Amsterdam airport on a stopover to a mission in Kenya—MH370, the Malaysian Airlines plane that disappeared. “To be a good plane spotter,” he explained to me shyly, when I inquired about his hobbies, “your goal is to catch everything that is painted a little bit differently.”
41
Theories of Flight
Ben
Say you were driving in the dark and a great orb of light suddenly appeared over your windscreen, pure luminescence like a star descended and emitting a strange energy that you felt shake your car.
Would you report such a thing? And if so, to whom?
In 1994, the Royal Australian Air Force subtracted itself from the task of collecting or investigating UFO reports from the public. As Wing Commander Brett Biddington informed the Australian UFO groups on behalf of the Chief of Air Staff: “The number of reports made to the RAAF in the past decade had declined significantly, which may indicate that organizations such as yours are better known and are meeting the community’s requirements.”
To put it another way: should you experience such a phenomenon, those grassroots groups of self-educated enthusiasts would be the closest thing to institutional support for you. They would not ridicule you. They would listen to your story with gravity and respect. And that is not nothing.
The history of these groups in Australia dates back to the early 1950s. There are many of them and they are known—by those who know them—according to their acronyms. The groups operate independently and with their own differences and cultures. For instance, where AUFORN (the Australian UFO Research Network) “believe there is enough circumstantial evidence to prove the existence of UFOs,” VUFORS (the Victorian UFO Research Society) emphasizes that they have “held a dispassionate attitude on UFOs, claiming it is a scientific problem deserving closer attention.” And it is UFORQ’s (UFO Research Queensland) official policy that “there now exists, and has for many years, a large body of well attested sightings that are so unambiguous the only reasonable inference is that extraterrestrial vehicles are flying through our atmosphere, landing on the ground and entering our oceans.”
Driven by a belief that a lack of government transparency and/or engagement with the topic has created an unwise vacuum, the various groups share a concern with DIY UFO research: not only data analysis, but direct data collection by providing an avenue for anyone to report a sighting. They are also a supportive space for those who have been affected by a UFO-related experience. That was what led me, eventually, to VUFOA (Victoria UFO Action): a short comment by an older woman on a Facebook page that simply thanked them for respectfully listening to her husband. It made me look again, that grace which was the twinkle of something appearing from the dark before receding back into it.
ARE WE ALONE? ARE YOU ALONE? Had a sighting or experience you just can’t make sense of? Fear of ridicule from friends and family? Afraid? Confused? WE MAY BE ABLE TO HELP!
Victoria UFO Action’s flyer continues:
Well, rest assured there’s peace of mind knowing that we are here for YOU. VUFOA’s dynamic is that it has a great team including investigators, Counsellors, Industry specific professionals, including Chemists, Photography experts, Aviation experts and some of our very own members have had their very own sightings and experiences. You are NOT ALONE.
Sightings can be reported on VUFOA’s twenty-four-hour hotline or via a form on their website. This form is comprehensive, with both free-text and pre-populated options, the latter speaking to accumulated experience with sighting accounts as well as commonalities in those narratives. So, for example, if the object you saw changed shape, or was shaped like a cigar or a circle or a cone or a cross or a cylinder or a diamond or a disk or an egg or a fireball or a flash or a formation or an orb or an oval or a rectangle or a saucer or a sphere or a teardrop or other/unknown—you are not alone.
Before I met Ben Hurle, the president of VUFOA, I saw him on YouTube being interviewed by Sheryl Gottschall, the president of UFORQ. He wore a black T-shirt that said Seeking the Truth and sat in an armchair against a wall of books.
Sheryl asked how he got into the UFO subject.
Ben replied that UFOs have always been part of his consciousness. “As a child, and to this day, I spent all my time looking up,” he said. “I’m always studying the sky, the clouds—because they’re beautiful anyway—but in the back of my mind, I’m also looking for anything that might be unusual in the sky. Sometimes somewhat hopefully.”
The first books Ben read at school were UFO books and certain films influenced him as well.
“For instance,” he said, “when I saw Star Wars as a child, that blew my mind. It absolutely blew my mind. The cantina scene where you’ve got all those different aliens hanging around the bar, having a drink, to me, made so much sense. I thought, ‘There must be places in the universe out there where that actually happens and it occurs and humans aren’t at that level to be able to partake in that yet.’
“The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, that type of thing, from a very young age got me interested in other possibilities, other realms, and that there must be other creatures out there in this great wild world and that we’re not living in some unique little bubble here. I personally believe that the universe is teeming with life. And because it’s so spread out—perhaps it’s a good thing—the ability to interact can only be achieved once you achieve a certain level.”
Ben lives one hundred and seventy four miles east of Melbourne. This means that by four-thirty in the afternoon, a winter afternoon, the light will be dwindling as I wave goodbye to him and steer onto the country roads—some just paths between farms—that should deposit me back home three and a half hours later. The feeling of excitement adjacent to anxiety this provokes in me is partly due to Ben’s warning about animals jumping in front of the cars, one of which is now mine, that move at speed down these unlit roads. But mostly it is due to the accounts he has told me of things seen in this quickly dimming slab of sky and a specific landmark—key to the rich UFO history of the area—that I will be passing just after sunset.
“First of all, I don’t have any scientific training,” Ben said when I sat down with him in the office where he works selling recreational vehicles, his small dog, Ivy, resting on his lap. “I am a person who from a very young age had an innate belief that there has to be something other than what we see here, and a whole host of things really point to that in a true and real and tactile way, I believe.” Ben has brown hair and large brown eyes; his gaze is intense and seems, at times, unblinking—perfectly suited to his preferred position of looking up. He has one of my favorite conversational habits: finishing the other person”s sentences almost, but not quite, along with them. He is articulate and expansive on UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena, a subject he refers to in conversation as “the phenomenon.”
In terms of his own encounters, Ben told me that he once glanced up from a Saturday-morning game of basketball with a feeling like he was being watched and saw a dark shape glide around his car to the back of his shed and disappear. “It had sparkles around the edges,” he explained. “It was like someone had taken a sliver of night and put it into the daylight.” On another occasion, sitting on his back patio on “a silver moonlit night,” Ben watched a ball of light wheeling across the treetops, illuminating the upper branches as it went off into the distance over the Great Dividing Range. Once, returning from a sky-watching excursion, he saw a tube of white light over his car. And he has had the frightening experience of waking up in the middle of the night to find the silhouette of a hooded figure peering over his bed and feeling like energy was, somehow, being sucked from him. “It was a bright silver moonlit night,” he remembered, “and I had the curtains open so the moonlight could come streaming in.” If darkness figures strongly for Ben, it must be said that so too does the light, and this is one of the things I like about him.
Ben specializes in the phenomenon as it manifests in Victoria generally and East Gippsland specifically.
“I wanted to know what was happening here where I live,” he said about his decision, ten years ago when he turned forty, to become more involved in UFO research. He found that the information-sharing role formerly played by the UFO groups had diminished by this stage. “The internet killed the old ways of connecting with people. It wasn’t so necessary to go to a meeting to find out anything. It’s all online.”
The educative function of the groups, however, is still relevant; perhaps more than ever, he explained, because of “the amount of white noise and junk and uncritical information that’s out there now.” In the old days, the UFO groups would have investigated directly—spoken to witnesses, taken photographs, looked at the land—which had a quality-control effect. “But now you can hop on Facebook, and I can post a photo of a streetlamp in fifteen different groups and everyone would be ooh-ing and aah-ing over the lovely UFO.”
UFO groups are struggling in this environment, not helped by “the fact that the phenomenon is very fluid, it’s everevolving.”
When I asked him what that meant, he spoke about changes in how UFOs have been described over time: “We could go back to the late 1880s, where people were seeing mysterious airships,” he explained. “Over North America, they were seeing these dirigibles floating around, with seemingly human occupants. They would shout down, talk back. And then through World War II we started seeing foo fighters appearing, the balls of light that would follow the bombers on both Axis and Allied bombing raids . . . Back in 70 BC, they were seeing flying shields in the sky. We’ve always interpreted it in the context of the times in which we’ve been living. Moving into the new millennium, I reckon it’s quite fragmented now.”
You can’t google the stories that Ben collects. He’s dug through yellow local newspapers to save them from oblivion, knocked on doors to concretize what had previously existed only in the memories of moms and dads, farmers and truck drivers and train drivers. He’s collated what can be salvaged of the original VUFORS files, some of which came from a filing cabinet covered in bird shit (from the cage long kept on top of it) that he rescued from going to the tip after its owner died.
“There’s so much stuff to go through,” he explained. “Really great encounters that no one’s going to really know about.” Ivy crossed the floor to hop onto my lap as he got up to make us tea. Her sister died recently of a snakebite. It was like losing a child, said Ben. In the office she is safe.
He returned with two cups, saying, with an urgency I recognized, “We need to find all these little stories. They build up into a big matrix of stories . . .
“These beautiful encounters that people have had—whether they’re scary or mystifying or puzzling or uplifting—they disappear. They don’t get recorded in any way for other people to be able to say, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ Maybe there’s some commonalities there, some relationships we can see between things.”
“When I think about what the phenomenon is,” Ben said a little after that, as we sat there in the late light, “it’s the fact that we’re not just stuck on this little rock in our boring work for fifty years and then dying. There’s bigger things out there. We’re a part of some multifaceted system of things called the universe and the universe is a very dynamic place. It has a lot more depth to it than we understand currently . . .
“For all the vast volumes that have been written, for the documentaries that have been made, for all the UFO experts that are out there, we still have very little. No one can tell you what the phenomenon is. No one can tell you where they’re coming from. These are basic questions. No one can tell you how the craft operate. No one can tell you why they’re here. No one can tell you anything. It’s all still unknown . . . You’re afraid of what you don’t know. You’re afraid of what you don’t understand . . .
“We interviewed a high-ranking Victorian policeman about a UFO encounter that he was involved in and he said, ‘I needed it to be something that I could explain but we couldn’t explain what it was. I still to this day live with that, not knowing what it was that we encountered on that particular evening.’ I hear that all the time.”
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, wrote the astrophysicist Martin Rees. In 2018, I saw Rees interviewed by Claudia Dreifus, science writer for the New York Times. Rees is Astronomer Royal—a position, he explained, smiling at the small crowd, whose duties are such that he can continue to adequately fulfill them after he dies. Dreifus asked Rees to give a quick rundown on some current issues in cosmology. For instance, she said, people rightly want to know what are the odds on life elsewhere? Illuminated up on stage, they were both thin, dressed in fine, dark materials; each crowned by a full head of luxuriant silver hair that glowed under the lights.
“Well, of course, that’s a difficult question,” Rees answered. “It’s a biological question. One of the exciting things in astronomy over the last ten or twenty years is that we’re realizing that most of the other stars in the sky have planets orbiting around them, just as the sun has the earth and the other familiar planets. And so in our galaxy there are billions of planets and quite a fraction of them are like the earth orbiting a star rather like the sun. And that of course raises the question: life started on earth, so did it start elsewhere?”
While it was not currently possible to answer the question, he continued, in the next decade there would be two strands of progress. The first strand concerned the nature of the origin of life. “Because we don’t understand how life became here on earth. We understand how simple life via Darwinian selection led to the biosphere that exists now that we are part of. But the transition between complex chemistry to the first metabolizing, reproducing entities we called ‘alive’—that transition is not yet understood.”
