Alien Abduction and Old Stories

Jenni Diski, reviewing The Myth and Mystery of UFOs by Thomas Bullard:

Aliens who whisk innocent sleepers off to their spaceships and give them medical examinations or impregnate them are only doing what fairies and hobgoblins have been doing since long ago and far away. Perfectly ordinary people in folk stories the world over are regularly stopped on the road and taken away by mischievous or sinister Others. In Western European culture, mermaids drag sailors to the depths, Oberon and Puck do a number on Bottom, Rumpelstiltskin demands a human child of his own in return for a magical favour, the witch entices lost children into a gingerbread house, the inscrutable Pied Piper, dressed half in yellow and half in red, seduces away rats and then, when the citizens of Hamelin prove incorrigible, whisks off the younger generation. In the Bible there was a time when giants walked among us and sons of God or angels mated with fair-faced human females, or appeared to individuals to tell them that they were pregnant with a changeling, or to deliver a warning of things to come and save the world from itself. These stories of underground and parallel worlds have comforted or terrified human beings for centuries. Why wouldn’t we include the space above our heads in our narratives, and why wouldn’t we update the stories? Bullard describes a Zimbabwean sighting at Mutare in 1981. A brightly lit sphere was seen by 20 workers coming back from the fields. It rolled along the ground and then burst into flames. Clifford Muchena saw three men standing observing the fire. They were ‘tall and luminous, they wore silver suits, and a power from them caused him to fall to the ground.’ He told the investigator, Cynthia Hind, that they were the spirits of his ancestors. She pointed out that his ancestors would ‘wear hides and crocodile teeth instead of silvery suits’, to which Muchena replied: ‘Yes, but times change!’ Investigators have cultural limitations as well as witnesses.