2023-06-14, 10:36 PM
Quote:...It was 1974, and a twenty-seven-year-old Bertrand Méheust was rummaging through the library of his family’s loft when he came across an old science-fiction novel, Jean de la Hire’s Roue fulgurante (The Lightning Wheel). The cover featured a flying disc-shaped machine surrounded by a halo of light. He opened the book. The story began with the heroes being lifted into the humming sphere by a beam, losing consciousness, and awakening to find themselves in a brightly lit room. This was by no means a great work of literature. Indeed, the few pages Méheust read in the attic struck him as rather incoherent.
Then he saw the publication date: 1908. This stunned him. The date was so shocking because it was (and still is) widely assumed that the “flying saucer” did not appear on the cultural scene until 1947, when American pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted his nine silver disks. The first widely publicized abduction, we might also recall, did not occur until 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill reported their experience of “losing” two hours on the road and later remembered, under hypnosis, being abducted by aliens on board a spaceship. But here was a set of strikingly similar images and an abduction story in 1908, and in a forgettable science-fiction novel no less. How could this be?
...The focus of the work is a series of elaborate demonstrations of the historical coincidences that appear to exist between the narrative and visual frames of the UFO experiences of the second half of the twentieth century (1947 to the present) and the science-fiction stories of the first half of the twentieth century (1880–1945). Flying discs accompanied by buzzing noises, harmful or healing beams of light zapping people, abductions via levitation or teleportation, large-headed dwarves or humanoids, physical examinations on board a spaceship in a lighted room—point by point, detail by detail, Méheust demonstrates with texts and glossy pulp-fiction art how the later encounters “realized” or reenacted the earlier sci-fi scenes, and this down to astonishing details. Rhetorically, Méheust is mischievous here. So, for example, he will present three encounter stories without telling the reader which ones are “fictional” and which ones are “real” until a few pages later. Through techniques like this, he shows, over and over, that it is simply impossible to tell the difference between fiction and lived reality within the two sets of stories.
Kripal, Jeffrey J.. Authors of the Impossible (p. 208). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Quote:He can also juxtapose a few panels from a French comic book from 1945, this one involving an odd globe-shaped spaceship with little men hopping from its portal, and a strikingly similar drawing based on a real-life UFO encounter from 1967. To employ the language of the British psychical researcher Hilary Evans, what we appear to have here is neither exactly fiction nor pure fact. It is “faction.”
Kripal, Jeffrey J.. Authors of the Impossible (p. 208). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Will try to dig into the details here. From what I gather the experiencers would be unlikely to have read the fictions Méheust is looking at...but that might be possible. Also there could be lose commonalities, or perhaps there have been cases that were less publicized that inspired some of the science fiction.
Or perhaps Kripal is correct that the "neighbors" or "visitors" are clothing themselves in fictions from an earlier time...also maybe the fiction is precognitive?
I suspect we may just not get a clear answer, just as the visitations by a Harlequin figure by those on DMT have not to my knowledge ruled out the DMT users already knowing others on the drug saw such entity/entities.