Strange Light
On My Encounter With an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon and Making Sense of a Complex World
Here’s what I know. Several years ago now—before any of us had had children, and so still had the luxury of taking off into the wilderness at our relative leisure—I was backpacking along one of the most beautiful mountains in West Virginia, North Fork Mountain, a long anticlinal ridge whose western escarpment is lined by soaring and almost continuous cliffs of Tuscarora quartzite, craggy hard rock laid down along the Silurian coastal lands as the Taconic orogeny pushed up great mountains (today’s Piedmont, vastly reduced). We camped for the night behind the cliffs, which look out over a valley to the even higher Alleghany Front and the Dolly Sods—a high altitude plateau of spruce forest, heath land, and old unexploded ordinance from Second World War training exercises. It’s an utterly sublime place, one of the grandest landscapes this side of North America. As night fell and the stars appeared, two of my friends and I were sitting atop the cliff, having already eaten dinner, enjoying the quiet and the gathering dark, real dark, not the hazy glow we’ve become sadly accustomed to in our urban centers. Then we saw it—all three of us, at the same time. A white orb of light moving erratically along the escarpment of the Alleghany Front a few miles opposite us across the valley. It appeared suddently, dropped down, moved slowly along the ridgeline, then zig-zagged and abrubtly shot up into the sky and disappeared.
We didn’t know what to think—our first reaction was to check with one another to make sure that we had each seen what we thought we saw, and weren’t simply imagining things. All three of us had seen the same luminous phenomena, and the three of us were stumped as to what it might have been. To this day, we don’t know. I have never seen anything like it before or since. Could it have been a drone, we wondered? Maybe, but the sudden upward trajectory and speed did not seem like anything a drone would be capable of, not then and not now, nor did it make sense why it would be so bright (or why it would be there at all!). Some kind of military technology? Again, maybe, and not utterly implausible (the military had used this region before for testing and training, after all), though the same physical constraints would seem to apply. Could it have been—we all felt silly with the suggestion—a craft or a being from another world? Again, probably not—but still…
I do not have any strong stance or opinion on the possibility of life—intelligent or otherwise—on other worlds beyond ours, nor on whether the strange phenomena, including the weird light I saw creep and speed above the Dolly Sods, might be evidence of such life visiting our sublunary realm. I don’t think the object, or phenomenon, or whatever it was, that my friends and I saw was a being or a device from another world, mostly because it just seems so utterly absurd that such a being would be doing wild manuevers over a lonely stretch of the Alleghany Front. But then if such a being or a probe from another world had indeed been out observering us it might have struggled to comprehend why several beings from an advanced urban civilization were out sleeping in the wilderness when they could be at home in comfortable beds in temperature-controlled spaces.
So perhaps it is not so absurd that the aliens would hang out in strange and out of the way places. Perhaps they’ve observed our cities and like many of us ourselves are not all that enthusiastic and prefer the company of the wild country. Be that as it may, it makes resolving my experience no easier—I have no good explanation from known earthly physical phenomena nor particularly good reason to suspect an extra-earthly cause. Perhaps it was not material at all.
More interesting to me, and perhaps more ultimately insightful, is to think about what a pre-modern observer might have made of a strange light hovering and rapidly plying a lonely crag at nightfall, and how we’ve gotten to where we are in terms of our own thinking about such things (the debate over similar sightings having now gone entirely mainstream—hence in part my willingness to write about the topic here!).
The simple fact is that for most of human history the idea that other intelligences and other sentient beings existed was not just not controversial but was a given of life, and was manifest in a great diversity of ways. Humans were not alone in the universe, not by a long shot, but rather were simply but one—perhaps the most important, but perhaps not—community of intelligent beings among many. Not just our world but all worlds were inhabited in some sense, and the world below—the world of the dead, of the past that wasn’t past—reached into this one, and this one stretched back into it and above and beyond. And lest the reader misunderstand, I am not simply describing tribal peoples, those supposed refugium of the ‘childhood of man,’ but describing the intellectual and spiritual world of the typical educated Muslim or Christian of the medieval or early modern periods, for whom time and space were suffused with other presences and beings.
The margins of the earth were spaces of increasingly strange human-like creatures and intelligent beings only remotely akin to ours; a few of these, such as St. Christopher, even made it into our sphere and became saints—such were the strange ways of God in a strange and teeming world. Spiritual intelligences, from the angelic powers to the jinn to the presences of the saints, permeated this world below even if they were proper to the spiritual sphere and its interface with the physical world. To look to heavens was to see worlds full of life and intelligence. To fall asleep and to dream was to cross into the potent space of the Barzakh, the Dreamtime-like isthmus of the spiritual world. Muslim saints folded earth and time into other ages and other worlds, worlds beyond and above and within ours stacked manyfold. An Irish karstland might open up into an underworld of Purgatory and Hell. If an intelligent being from a planet beyond our own system had showed up I am not entirely sure it would have registered as particularly exceptional, just one more curious and perhaps holy being under God’s sovereignty.
What happened to make the skies empty and other intelligences a cause of debate and speculation? Why do we tend to imagine today that first contact would somehow send religious verities into tailspin? In short, we may point to the intellectual and cultural transformations, going by various names—the rise of science, the Enlightenment, the birth of modernity—that, for a time at least, made the world much smaller in many ways and brought it into rational and imaginative order, largely pushing aside the older and wilder world that had marked medieval and earlier early modern imaginations. (And of course what I’m describing was for a long time geographically confined, to be sure, and was never genuinely total anywhere—but that’s another story.)
As it turns out, the world was rationalized and legible for a rather short while, really it seems to me only for a stretch of the eighteenth into early nineteenth century, with much of the groundwork laid in the seventeenth. As a non-expert in this period of Western European intellectual and cultural history I’m not doubt over-simplifying and am certainly occluding many communities and intellectual and cultural modes and ways of life that continued in the old ways, both in Europe (and its increasing number of outposts) and certainly beyond Europe. But for the educated man or woman of the eighteenth century it must have surely looked like the universe was a beautifully ordered and clean place, with all beings in their place along the great chain, the weird and the disturbing largely effaced. Yet even as the laws of nature were being discovered and nature’s creatures (and nature’s God) were being neatly categorized, a new weirdness and richness of the world was being uncovered. Strange beings from past ages were rising from the earth’s recesses. The stability of biological categories was being questioned, the old world of lively interchange and transformative instability was being reasserted albeit with few or no genealogical connectivities. In time even what had appeared to be fundamental laws and principles of physics would be weirded and transformed. Much of the story of cultural modernity has been one of tension between the tendency towards a sort of sterilization and reduction of the world, literallly and imaginatively, and opposite tendencies towards weirdness, wild discovery, and complication. The latter sometimes rests within conventional scientific pursuit and culture, sometimes manifests as fringery and radicalism, the very underlying dynamics generative of instability and unpredictability. Debates over extraterrestrial intelligent life display this tension in particularly marked relief.
So what then, returning to the question raised above, might have a medieval or early modern interlocuter have thought about my strange West Virginia light? He might have supposed it to be a spiritual intelligence, perhaps an angel—or a jinn or a demon—or the working of a saint, or a sign from God. He might have tried to situated it within what he knew of the heavens and the intelligences and powers operative there. He might simply have noted that the earth and the heavens are full of wonders, and, in the end, God knows best. Of course extraterrestrial life and supposed technology such as we imagine it would not have entered into his equations, though I doubt they would have been particularly disturbing once the basic cosmological and technical details were understood, simply a further expansion of a thick and wild world with humans somewhere in the midst, wondering at it all, even—especially when—we do not and perhaps even cannot understand just what it is.