In relocating events to Rendlesham Forest, the recent BBC podcast adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness makes effective use of the Rendlesham Forest Incident by way seemingly reframing and contemporising Lovecraft’s classic tale of horrific extraterrestrial contact in terms of modern ufological lore.
However, insofar as the Rendlesham affair is commonly explained as a genuine encounter with an extraterrestrial craft, this standard ufo trope is subverted in the new rendering of Whisperer, which reinterprets the Rendlesham incident as the consequence of an occult ritual (possibly derived from the pages of the Necronomicon) employed for the purposes of calling forth extradimensional entities (in this instance, possibly Nyarlathotep). In this respect, the modern retelling appears to place a unique and revisionary spin on ‘accepted’ assumptions regarding the nature of the ufo phenomenon.
Except that is not entirely the case: the reconfigured narrative of Whisperer - in first linking the tale to the Rendlesham ufo incident, then reframing that event as the result of occult activity - closely follows the trajectory of more recent ufological speculations regarding the nature of ufos. And it appears that the writers/producers of Whisperer have done their homework here in mentioning Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons as part of their retelling: key figures in the recent history of Western occultism, both Crowley’s and Parson’s presence has been keenly felt in ufological circles in recent years. This, it seems, is in part due to Kenneth Grant who, in his Typhonian Trilogies, has suggested that Crowley’s Thelemic system of magic was primarily a means of contacting extraterrestrial entities, whilst also positing a connection between the appearance of the ufo phenomenon and the work of rocket scientist and Thelemic magician Jack Parsons. In brief, Grant infers that both Crowley and Parson’s ushered in the modern UFO era, via the use of ritual technologies for opening interdimensional portals. Importantly, Grant also avers that the extraterrestrial forces which Crowley contacted (specifically in the form of the proto-grey alien entity, Lam), and the widespread appearance of UFOs from the late 1940s onward, are part of a unified phenomenon which originates with ‘ultratelluric’ (or in John Keel’s terms, 'ultraterrestrial') forces identical with Lovecraft’s 'Outer Ones'.
Whilst these occult-inflected notions did not gain traction within the ufological mainstream during the 1970s, they have, since the early 2000s, become more influential; specifically, such ideas are prominent in the recent shift away from the classic ‘Extraterrestrial hypothesis (or ETH, which posits UFOs as materially-real vehicles which are the product of the advanced science of one or more extraterrestrial species) as an explanatory model, to the Keelian ‘Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis’ (UTH), wherein UFOs are viewed as manifestations of a very different reality to the one we inhabit. Importantly, the UTH often ties the appearance of UFOs and alien abduction experiences to encounters with Bigfoot and other cryptids (sightings of which have, according to paranormal investigator Nick Redfern, been reported in the vicinity of Rendlesham Forest), to poltergeist activity, and to an extensive range of even weirder paranormal activity - all perceived as being part of a unified phenomenon, and the product of some kind of extradimensional interaction with human consciousness. Diana Pasulka’s recent American Cosmic offers an excellent academic overview of how some of these ontological and epistemological shifts have impacted upon the understanding of the ufo phenomenon in recent North American ufological circles. Alternatively, Nick Redfern’s offers a much more sensationalist (and bleakly Lovecraftian) view of the matter in his Final Events.
However, whilst Grant (and to a lesser extent, Keel) represent one of the more clearly defined points from which occultural and Lovecraftian elements have come to inform contemporary ufological narratives, in my next post I also want to suggest that an earlier substratum of ufological speculation also laid the initial foundations for a shift towards more Lovecraftian and hyperdimensional explanations of the ufo phenomenon.
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