Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience (Archaeus, Volume 5)

This volume is both an anthology and Volume 5, 1989 of the journal Archaeus. The import of the views expressed is pointed out in the Editor's Preface. "Cyberbiology concentrates . . . on consideration of the psychic reality involved in the UFO experience and of how that psychic reality affects human actions and behavior. The imaginal experience of the UFO, arising as it does out of the structure, dynamics, and current condition of our psyches, reflects back to us, in symbolically coded form, not the key to its reality, but the key to our own" (p. 2).

There are nine contributions with four provocative "Intermezzos" by Stillings. The papers and their authors are "Believing the Unbelievable: Child's Play or Con Game?" by Hilary Evans; "UFOs: Ultraterrestrial Agents of Cultural Deconstruction" by Carl Raschke; "What Did Carl Gustav Jung Believe About Flying Saucers?" by Dennis Stillings; "Ufology Considered as an Evolving System of Paranoia" by Martin S. Kottmeyer; "Signals of Transcendence: The Human-UFO Equation" by Peter M. Rojcewicz; "UFOs and the Myth of the New Age" by Michael Grosso; "Quicksilver in Twilight: A Close Encounter with a Hermetic Eye" by Tony Nugent; "A Testable Theory for UFO Abduction Reports: The Birth Memories Hypothesis" by Alvin H. Lawson, and "The `Visitor' Experience and the Personality: The Temporal Lobe Factor" by Michael A. Persinger.

In his Afterword, Stillings introduces the term metafact in reference "to the general characteristics of the particular body of evidence that has been accumulated in relation to a given anomalous phenomenon" (p. 173). He points out that the evidence characterizing ufology is similar to that of parapsychology, cryptozoology, and other types of anomalies research. He suggests that these "metafacts provide more guidance . . . toward the real nature of the phenomenon as well as to the human nature that observer them, then do the so-called `facts'" (p. 173).