Christianity and the Paranormal, Part I

While I admit that I haven’t had much time to look more recently, I’ve thus far found that many Christian responses to paranormal phenomena are lacking. In my own experience, the stereotypical Christian reactions fall into at least three broad categories, each of which falls short of the mark, I think. (I could probably come up with more, but this is more than enough to get on with, I think.) For purposes of classification, we’ll call them a. the Pagan-Wannabe, b. the Hyper-Literalist, and c. the Spiritual Materialist.

With apologies in advance. I don’t intend to offend, but I’m sure I’ll manage it somehow. I also want to reemphasize that I don’t think this classification is exhaustive. There are surely as many shades of belief as there are believers.

The Pagan-Wannabe: The Worst of Both Worlds

This position is for all of us who really don’t like taking stands or who are terrified of being called “right wing” or “fundamentalist” (Angels and ministers of grace defend us!). Essentially, it argues that one can, at the same time, swallow the random tripe currently associated with paranormal studies and yet still remain a dedicated, thinking Christian.

The problem here is that, as Christ said, no “one can serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13). One cannot be a Christian without being fully dedicated to the person of Christ, constantly striving (though not necessarily perfectly succeeding) to bring ourselves into closer alignment with Himself and His Will. The simple fact is that much of what passes today for paranormal “research” will pull you in precisely the opposite direction. The Bible has laid down some pretty clear guidelines about what you are and are not supposed to participate in, and we ignore them at our own peril. Any observer of popular paranormal culture need not think long before coming up with multiple examples of what I am talking about here: witchcraft/Wicca, spirit channeling, various forms of non-Wiccan magic, summoning of spirits, even willfully opening yourself up to invasion by various entities. Like it or not, there is an inherent spiritual contradiction here.

And that is why this particular position ends up failing: it is neither here nor there. It is impossible to dedicate one’s life to true Christian spirituality and at the same time embrace philosophies that undermine it. The effect is somewhat like asking someone to somehow train for both the sumo ring and the long jump at the same time. Anyone so engaged will do neither well.

I tend to think that’s what happens to most Pagan-Wannabes. They sell out the things that they claim matter most to them, but in return they can achieve only mediocrity.

Sending the message that there is nothing that sets Christianity apart from the rest of the world not only compromises one of our missions as Christians (namely, to draw others closer into a saving knowledge of Jesus), but it also serves as a disservice to the paranormal community. How? By failing to provide it with anything more than bland Christianese translations of existing theories and jargon. Fields of study are most often moved forward by bold (preferably polite and honorable) original thought that critiques the status quo. The best the average Pagan-wannabe can offer all too often resembles the stereotype of contemporary Christian music: Whatever the world did five years ago modified with Christian lingo. Worse, it also involves serious danger to the participant’s immortal soul.

So why do I say that this is the position for anyone afraid of taking a stand? Because (and I could easily be wrong here) I tend to think the ultimate origins of this position are emotional. Intellectually, we have a number of mutually exclusive propositions (mentioned above). The result is that one cannot arrive at the Pagan-wannabe position by logic and coherent thinking. It means, essentially, that in order to believe it, we must turn off our brains at key points of conflict. That only happens through the emotions. The feeling most likely to produce these results is the desire to be liked by both Christians and non-Christians, to be able to move with both sets and never have to face any uncomfortable questions or discrimination.

I have two thoughts in reaction to this, and then we will be done with the Pagan-wannabe:

For us to expect that we can avoid persecution in general is clearly unrealistic. Christ Himself said that the Gospel is offensive and that we will face tribulations. Period. To compromise on our message just to obtain and then maintain some warm fuzzies is a first rate betrayal of Christ and the Great Commission. If you find yourself constantly shirking your identity as a Christian to avoid nasty looks, taunts, or even ostracism (which is all I hope we would face in the field of paranormal studies), you need to re-examine your commitment to Christ and try to ascertain precisely how serious you are about it.

So, do I think we need to take the paranormal world by storm, beating random people over the heads with pulpit Bibles? Of course not, and that has to do with my second point.

Paul himself said that he tried to be “all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22) I take that to mean that Paul tried to reach out to people where they were, not self-righteously wait for them to come to him. I think we can take a similar tack in our studies of the paranormal. I have no problem befriending a Wicca practitioner, a medium, or even a Satanist. That is what we are called to do by the Great Commission. Once the door was open, I would not see any point in demanding that they suddenly abandon their beliefs on the simply because I had entered the room. A jack-ass is still a jack-ass, even if he/she justifies it with Christian rhetoric.

But it doesn’t follow that I would simply drop my own beliefs for fear of offending someone. The courtesies I would extend to them, I would expect in return. If I were forced into a corner (i.e. compromise your witness in order to be a part of the group) I would recognize my priorities and be willing to politely walk away. At least that is the way I hope it would work.

In all, it calls for quite a bit of tact, but I think it also has the best chances for seeing results. The hardcore paranormal believers I have seen have studied more than enough religion to know the basic facts about Christianity. They don’t need a sermon; they need to meet Christ personally, living in you. That introduction will bear more fruit than all the denunciations in history.

In the end, it may be that the study of the paranormal (in general, but definitely as part of a mixed group) is best left to mature believers, secure in their faith. Many of the pitfalls I’ve discussed here are elementary mistakes made by people who, for one reason or another, have not yet “put away childish things.” We’ve all been through that stage (I’m not confident I myself am out of it), and there is nothing wrong or shameful about it. One might as well scold a baby for liking milk. The problem comes when we arrogantly bite off more than we are prepared to chew.

Whatever happened to discipleship, eh?

Up next: The Hyper-Literalist.

Green Fireballs, Part III

Then Who?

When it comes to trying to assign blame for the fireballs, we obviously enter into realm of pure speculation. Of course, that can make it all that much more fun! It is, however, worth remembering that everything you read about this part of the unknown, whether from my proverbial pen or that of another, should be taken with a salt block.

So, let us suspend our disbelief for a moment, temporarily banish our doubts, and presume for the sake of argument that the fireballs cannot be explained as a purely natural phenomenon. Again, we can break down the possibilities into some basic, logical categories and then consider the pros and cons of each based upon the limited evidence we have available to us.

For our purposes, we can break down the possibilities thusly: The Natural World (private citizens, governments—foreign and domestic—and standard conceptions of extraterrestrial biological entities [EBEs]) and the Realm of the Supernatural (beings that in some way transcend the closed system of the natural world—conceivably angels, demons, or [to adapt a designation from John Keel] intelligent ultraterrestrial entities [IUEs]).

Naturalistic Possibilities

Frankly, if the fireballs have an intelligent origin, I tend to think it is a natural one. Anyone who has seen a holiday fireworks display knows full well that mankind is more than capable of producing pyrotechnics very similar to what observers describe and I know I saw. In fact, a determined hoaxer could probably purchase most of what would be needed from a hardware stores (though he would have to be either very brave or very stupid to start fooling with explosives in the quantities required to produce the fireball I saw). It is certainly well within the capability of even third rate governments.

Still, there are a number of definite problems with this interpretation.

• There is the issue of motive. Why in the world would anyone—either a government or a private citizen—waste time (not to mention risking life and limb) launching gigantic green sparklers across the sky over the course of 60-70 years?
• Hoaxing would make sense if the fireballs provoked a crop circle-esque media circus that set the world to gabbing. While the fireballs do attract attention, they’ve never even come close to becoming a “major” attention getter.
• While some private citizens might enjoy setting things off like this, one might expect them to get bored with the same thing over and over for six decades. Why not some purple fireballs, or perhaps blue or red every now and again?
• And why in the world would you haul these things all over two countries to shoot them off? Perhaps Mexican green looks different from Texas green. If not the same people, we would then need to address how we can have sixty years of copycats who somehow produce identical results but leave no clue as to how they communicated their methods to each other.
• The lack of physical evidence is another problem. Standard fireworks would need some kind of launch point and people to do the launching. Like the crop circle hoaxers, it is more than likely that something of this sort (or someone) would have turned up by now. Also, many conventional explosives would leave some kind of physical trace (i.e. the picture found here).
• The fireballs’ trajectory is an issue too. If the fireballs all basically fly parallel to the ground, they must either be launched that way (from a plane perhaps) or their unexploded form must include control surfaces of some kind that would allow the projectile to transition to horizontal flight after reaching the appropriate altitude. While both are physically possible, they only complicate matters further when it come to explanations. Aircraft launching what amount to missiles in the vicinity of nuclear facilities and large metropolitan areas would be likely attract attention, and traces of significant control surfaces capable of surviving the speeds the fireballs reach would almost certainly be found by investigators (and a number of well-funded, determined attempts to solve the mystery have been made).

All of these problems make it difficult for me to fully commit to any of the standard, comfortable explanations.

And what of the EBEs? Jerome Clark mentions a statement from Project Bluebook (more about my discussion of Bluebook with the Chief Historian of the CIA in the future) head Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, who claimed that at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility “scientists theorized that the fireballs were projectiles fired into earth’s atmosphere from an extraterrestrial spacecraft” (Clark, 263). My current problem with this idea (aside from general issues regarding physical visitors from planet Morpholon in the Alpha Zeta Tau cluster) is that to the best of my knowledge, no one has connected the fireballs to other, more standard UFO phenomena any more than they’ve connected them to a terrestrial aircraft or naval vessel. Unless perhaps the Los Alamos scientists had access to information that I do not (entirely possible) it seems a first rate leap of logic to bring aliens into this discussion.

Supernatural Possibilities

While I tend to favor supernatural explanations to many paranormal phenomena, I run into the same issues with IUE participation that I do with EBE: I have seen no clear evidence (beyond plain weirdness) to suggest that there are any connections between the fireballs and the supernatural. I could only arrive at that sort of explanation by “wanting” it to be true hard enough to believe it is there. On the other hand, there is one distinct possibility that might, with further research, provide that connection. If Clark is correct in arguing that the fireballs are related to the smaller, odder southwestern lights he discusses in The UFO Book, then IUEs might be brought back into play. These lights tended to be very small, often were only a few inches across, were less than twenty feet off the ground and seemed to be under some kind of intelligent control. “Most of the slow-moving lights changed color from red to green. One was white with a red blinking light and one had …[a]…’cone shaped affair’ on its rear” (Clark, 259). These descriptions bear at least a superficial resemblance to the light observed at the infamous “Skinwalker Ranch” researched by the National Institute for Discovery Science in Utah. Those lights did all sorts of interesting things like chasing cattle and even vaporizing dogs.

So, it would take two strong evidence streams (one to connect the fireballs to the “Killeen Lights” and another to establish that the Killeen Lights are fundamentally similar to those at Skinwalker Ranch), but that door might still be open a crack. While I don’t think it likely, neither do I think we can categorically rule the supernatural out as at least a vague possibility. We simply do not have enough evidence.

Final Thoughts on the Fireballs

The Green Fireballs seem to be as much—if not more—of an mystery today as they were in 1947. As we have seen, they do not seem to fit comfortably into any of the ready-made categories humanity has manufactured to try to box up the paranormal into handy packages. Based on the currently available evidence, no single explanatory paradigm can theoretically answer all the difficult points connected with the phenomenon. The resulting see-saw effect as one teeters back and forth between theories is definitely unsatisfying.

One good side to the fireballs is that they do not have the same unsettling effect that some other aspects of paranormal might. Unlike ghosts, fairies, angels, demons, aliens, etc., I do not believe that there is even the slightest chance of a fireball “coming to get you” or “going bump in the night.” It is one of those nice, impersonal questions that, while I wouldn’t mind getting to the bottom of it, I am perfectly content leaving unanswered.

Up next: "Christian Attitudes Towards the Paranormal"

References:

• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Visible Ink, 1998.
• Kelleher, Colm A. and George Knapp. Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah. Paraview Pocket Books, 2005.

Images:

• Rawree. "Green Fireball" FXhome. http://media1.fxhome.com/plugin-images/1408/thumbnail
• "Green Fireworks for the 4th?" http://gothamist.com/2007/07/03/green_fireworks.php
• Photo of Strange Lights at Skinwalker Ranch. Utah UFO Hunters. http://www.aliendave.com/files/Photos/Ranch/Ranch16002anominserts.jpg
  

Green Fireballs, Part II

Theories on Origins

At the most basic level, there are only two, obvious possibilities that can explain the fireballs: Either they are the result of natural phenomena or they are due to some intelligent source. Let’s consider the options for both:

Nature

The fireballs by themselves seem to occur randomly and without warning. An intelligently controlled (or at least initiated) phenomenon would presumably follow some pattern. While some have argued one seemed to emerge in their nearness to nuclear facilities, we really can only arrive at this correlation by ignoring the fireballs that occur elsewhere (i.e. the middle of Ft. Worth). Unless we take a step of blind faith and presume that there must be a pattern, from what I’ve read, we cannot arrive at this conclusion based on the evidence.

Next, one would be justified in asking, "If the fireballs are anything more than randomly occurring natural events, what would their purpose be?" Presumably our own citizens and government, foreign nations, demonic or angelic entities, and hypothetical extra-terrestrials all have better things to do than shooting off gigantic green flares at odd hours on weekends over the course of at least six decades. Again, unless we presume in advance that there must be some purpose, we have no direct evidence to suggest that they are anything more than pretty (strange) fireworks.

Also, there is at least a precedent for naturally occurring green colored meteors. A number of astronomy websites make mention of green tinged examples from the Leonid showers. The picture above and the one to the right show two examples. All of this, at least, would seem to point to the fireballs being some sort of heretofore unidentified natural phenomena.

Intelligence

But the arguments for nature do not have it all their own way. There are a number of points in favor of the fireballs being a result of something more than run-of-the-mill causes.

The fireballs do not seem to really fit any known natural phenomena. They behave unlike anything standard science can currently explain. Their trajectory is almost always parallel to the earth, like an aircraft, while “shooting stars” usually enter the atmosphere at a sharper angle. The fireballs never leave the long trail or dust cloud associated with meteors. They have appeared and disappeared at altitudes ranging from 2000 to more than 60,000 feet. While they move fast, they are definitely slower than standard shooting stars. Anyone who observes one—including the present author—would say that they could never mistake one for a standard meteorite. The green Leonids pictured above look nothing like what I saw in the sky that night.

Another problem facing naturalistic origin theories is the complete lack of an impact sites or significant remnants. I know that the example I observed was huge and not very high in the air. It was large and low enough for me to be able to discern the individual sparks coming off of it as it sailed past. Something like that should make some kind of impact, somewhere. Had it been a standard meteor of that size, still intact at that altitude, we could rightly expect Ft. Worth to be sporting a very large crater the next morning. And yet, nothing.

The fact that copper traces have been found in connection with the fireballs might make sense at first (powdered copper burns green and is a common ingredient in fireworks), but it might actually deepen the mystery. While virtually every paranormal site or book I’ve consulted remarks on the near impossibility of copper meteorites, according to one scholarly source there are some types of meteorites (Chrondritic) that contain significant amounts of copper. Also, some iron meteorites contain trace amounts of copper that might burn off (though it’s doubtful that “trace amounts” can account for the sheer size of the average fireball. Still, copper meteorites seem to be rare, at least, as several alleged specimens have been listed as “discredited” and “disproved.”

The fireballs’ initial appearance at lower altitudes and standard flight path result in a particularly knotty problem for the space-object interpretation. Are we really expected to believe that an object from space made up of rare materials enters earth’s atmosphere at a high rate of speed, somehow manages to slow itself, and then levels off its flight path at heights as low as 2000 feet before igniting itself into all of its sparkly green glory for one to five seconds? Accepting this involves as much, if not more, blind faith than presuming the fireballs have patterns and purpose.

Two more items, dealt with quickly, on the side of intelligent origins:

• Jerome Clark, in his article on the subject in The UFO Book lumps the green fireballs in with other, stranger lights that also appeared in the southwest. These lights are smaller and behave in ways that virtually preclude natural explanations (interaction with observers, radical and repeated changes in direction, etc.). Unfortunately, he never draws a strong connection between the two phenomena. The correlation seems to be merely that they all occurred in the southwestern states and Mexico. If someone could find evidence to fully and completely link the two, the case in favor of intelligent origins would be strengthened notably.
• One possible explanation can be dismissed quickly: the idea that the fire balls are nothing more than human-made space junk making random re-entries into the atmosphere. While this might account for of the presence of copper, there are a number of obvious problems with this idea. First, the fireballs were observed as early as 1947, a full ten years prior to Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite. Also, this theory does not address any of the problems raised by the fireballs’ odd flight paths, slow speed, and (at times) low altitudes. Whatever the explanation, it isn’t that simple.

If we accept the idea that the fireballs are of some kind of intelligent origin (and I am by no means certain that I do), then other questions quickly present themselves. Someone (or something) must be responsible. But who? That is indeed “a three pipe problem.”

To be concluded in Part III….

References:

• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Visible Ink, 1998.
• "Green Fireballs." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fireballs
• “Green Meteorite (??) spotted North of Toronto.” http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread311869/pg1
• Kenkman, Thomas, Friedrich Hörz, and Alexander Deutsch.” Large Meteorite Impacts III. Geological Society of America, 2005 p. 294. http://books.google.com/books?id=QMwt9iaYA9gC
• E's..ARN's History of Meteorites. © 1996,2006 Astronomical Research Network. http://www.meteorites4sale.net/MET_E.HTM.
• First Image from: “Blink and you miss it,” Flotsam and Jetsam, http://thetomzone.vox.com/library/posts/tags/astronomy+geek/
• Second image from: Lodigruss, Jerry. “Leonid Fireball and Persistent Train.” Catching the Light. http://www.astropix.com/HTML/F_COMETS/LEONID1.HTM.

Green Fireballs, Part I

A Personal Experience, and an Interesting Discovery

I thought I might start things out with one of my own firsthand experiences. I was living in Ft. Worth, Texas in the Fall of 2001. I lived in one of the many apartment complexes that clog the Hulen Street area, south of Interstate 20. It was the evening of Monday, October 15, and I was watching a football game. I was camped out on the couch. (The Cowboys v.s. the Redskins. Both teams were 0-4, and the resulting game was one of the worst—and funniest—I’ve ever seen.) Our apartment patio, which I could see from the couch, more or less faced east/north-east, towards Interstate 35, leading towards the center of Ft. Worth.

At some point during the game, I was vaguely staring out the sliding glass door into the “darkness” (it is never really dark in a city that size) when I saw, very clearly, a huge green fireball shoot across the sky. It was parallel to my line of sight, which means it would have been moving from south-southeast to north-northwest. I could judge neither its size nor its altitude with precision at the time, though it looked huge, far bigger and slower than any meteor or shooting star I’ve seen. It threw off showers of green and (to a lesser extent) golden sparks, like a giant sparkler. If I were forced to guess, I would put it somewhere in the vicinity of I-35.

Given the proximity to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, my first thought was “They’ve shot down an airliner!” I rushed outside to the patio, but could see nothing more.

Obviously, no airliners had been shot down, but I later learned that I was not the only observer. A number of people mentioned seeing it, particularly a secretary I knew from work. She was out in her front yard in Burleson, about fifteen miles south of Ft. Worth when she saw the object shoot directly overhead, heading straight for Ft. Worth. Her observation would confirm my impression that it was somewhere near the I-35 corridor.

It was some weeks later when I visited the Half-Price Books on Hulen and picked up an paranormal encyclopedia by Jerome Clark. I was very surprised to learn that these green fireballs are nothing new, and, despite decades of sightings, no one seems to have the foggiest idea what they are. Dozens of sightings have occurred in the southwestern United States since at least the 1940s. They seem to appear most often in New Mexico (Clark stated that the farthest east one had been seen was Lubbock, TX—I think I can revise that a little farther east), and had a nasty tendency to show up in close proximity to secret nuclear research and design facilities. No fireball had, to the knowledge of researchers, ever reached the ground. The only physical evidence of a fireball’s passage was the presence of tiny particles of copper in the air, something almost completely unheard of in a normal meteorite.

Recently, I picked another encyclopedia by Clark, this one devoted entirely to UFOs, where he provided more detail on the history of the phenomenon. There, he quotes from a 1949 Air Force Office of Special Investigations list which described the fireballs’ “common characteristics” as:

"a. Green color, sometimes described as…yellow green [inapplicable colors omitted]. b. Horizontal path, sometimes with minor variations. c. Speed less than that of a meteor, but more than any known type of aircraft. d. No sound associated with observation. e. No persistent trail or dust cloud…"(Clark, 257).

This describes my sighting with such accuracy that had it not been for the fact that I am positive that I had never encountered a description of the phenomena before I saw it, I would wonder if I was somehow constructing my sighting subconsciously.

Given the sheer number of observed and recorded occurrences, I would think that the existence of the fireballs should be established beyond reasonable doubt. Having seen one, it certainly is for me. The question then becomes, of course, where do these fireballs come from?

Continued in Part II....

References:

• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998.
• "Green Fireballs." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fireballs
• Image: Painting by Mrs. Lincoln LaPaz based on her own sighting, http://www.project1947.com/shg/articles/lifemag52.html
  

Wading in the Shallows...

This is a blog that purports to provide an intelligent, educated, Christian perspective on the various aspects of the paranormal. It represents a personal quest for answers to questions that I frankly haven’t even fully formulated yet. It is more of a vague yearning for knowledge of some of the deeper things of God’s creation, things that humankind has yet to understand or even, in some cases, to admit exists.

I believe that in this reality we “see through a glass darkly”, as Paul said in 1st Cor. 13:12. I also think that C. S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he described the places outside Aslan’s country as the Shadow Lands. We move somewhere in between different worlds, some of which cast shadows into the realms of the others. What many describe as the “paranormal” are just fleeting glimpses of these shadows of a much larger, universal reality.

I think another (less tired) analogy might be to call our current world the “Shallow Lands.” Like someone wading in the shallows of a lake, we are in two very different realities at once. We see everything outside the water clearly. Looking past the veil and into the water we observe things with increasing degrees of difficulty. The deeper we look, the darker, and more difficult understanding what is there becomes. They are shadows in a darkened pool, strangely close and yet frustratingly elusive. Hence my choice of a name for this blog. It's not perfect, but hopefully you'll get over it.

This blog is intended to catalog my own journeys and studies. As I progress, I will record my insights, thoughts, and personal experiences here as a form of on-line journal. It isn't intended to be final, fully documented, or even necessarily completely consistent (though hopefully it will be). It is mainly a snapshot of my wanderings of the moment and so I reserve the right to change my mind whenever its necessary.

I use the term "paranormal" in a broad sense, and expect to read and comment on a wide variety of phenomena: ghosts, fairies, angels, demons, spirits, UFOs, conspiracy theories, as well as large, more abstract questions like the relation of paranormal studies to religion and the Bible, and the overarching theories of the nature of the phenomena themselves.

Also, please note that I see it as my role to judge what I learn through a Biblical worldview. It is not my purpose to cram in verses of scripture at inappropriate moments or to use this blog as an explicit tool of evangelism. Don't expect me to cram my beliefs down your throat; neither expect me to make any apologies for them. Take this for what it is: A Christian applying the critical faculties God has given him to a series of difficult questions.

Hopefully, someone will find my efforts useful.