Drone Hysteria, Alien Cultists, and the One-Armed Prophet of Cosmic Enlightenment
My guided tour of the everyday impossible.
UNMANNED DRONES HAVE BEEN SWARMING New Jersey; patriotic defenders of the homeland have been zapping them with laser pointers to scramble the hostile visitors’ plans. It turns out many of the alleged drones are normal planes whose pilots have been getting their retinas fried by this ad-hoc home defense, but their accounts of frustration and potential injury are doing little to calm the drone hysteria. The intuition about a deeper, hidden reality is too strong.
Just ask any lawmaker involved in this fall’s congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena—UFOs, in the slightly outdated parlance. In November, the Pentagon released a report documenting hundreds of new UFO sightings, including “several particularly interesting cases.” Officials claim there remains no evidence of alien activity. But Americans remain fixated on the sky, confident that they have watched portents zip across the horizon.
Intuitions like this are something of a hobbyhorse of mine. I have always been fascinated by extreme, idiosyncratic, or otherwise discomfiting forms of spirituality. It was in the hope of seeing something new in the spirit’s modern domain that, in the fall of 2016, I attended a public meeting of a UFO cult in downtown Toronto.
The Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien, or FIGU society, is based in Switzerland and exists to spread the peace-and-freedom–focused teachings of “Billy” Eduard Albert Meijer (occasionally styled BEAM by adherents), a man who claims to have spent two decades under the personal tutelage of an interstellar traveler who revealed to him the secrets of the universe. (At one point he made available photographs of two of his later alien contacts; the images turned out to depict members of the Golddiggers performing on the Dean Martin Variety Show.) His transition back to terrestrial life was harsh: Soon after the period of his initial cosmic reveries concluded, he was maimed in a bus accident in Turkey, which left him a one-armed man.
I went to the FIGU meeting with a colleague—a gruff Romanian named Pavel1 who sold luggage at the department store where I sold ladies’ shoes. Pavel had a reputation for fits of esoteric and vaguely hostile logorrhea. He said he invited me to join him and explore the teachings of his group because I “have an open mind.” He found this remarkable because I am also religious, and religion, like war and pet ownership, is something FIGU takes an unequivocal stand against. Two other acquaintances who were supposed to join us bailed at the last moment; they were spooked.
Pavel led the way through a naturopath’s shopfront with salt-crystal lamps in the window, up a carpeted hallway, and down a set of narrow stairs. In a dreary basement room, he and I joined his fellow cultists for a brief, intensive study of a passage from BEAM’s book, which is printed with German and English side by side, as if it were a bilingual edition of Goethe or Wittgenstein. A couple hours into the textual study, a phone alarm sounded, at which point someone got up from the table, walked to the only door in or out of the room, and turned out the overhead fluorescents.
Then, in the dim ambient light from the hopper windows near the ceiling, the FIGU members began an activity timed to take place in chapters around the world simultaneously: the intoning of mantras in a pseudo-mythical language around an antenna-like assemblage made of brass or bronze. (But not in true unison “like the Mohammedans,” as one participant told me before starting: Each person offered a droning rendition of his or her own unique spiritual theme, creating an anxious and quietly discordant soundscape.) The function of the apparatus, which the group leader had assembled and then oriented using a compass before the meeting started, was to join the energies being conveyed through the group’s chants to those not only of other members around the world, but also to those of the billions of other sentient beings throughout the universe, who had presumably scheduled their own chanting on the cosmic rhythm of the earthly month.
EXOTIC SURFACE DETAILS LIKE THIS are not in short supply, but the problem I have found with discussing or writing about this event is that when you dig into the FIGU society, you discover the work not of a band of spiritual adventurers, but spiritual actuaries.
BEAM’s philosophy is a rehash of the core themes of New Thought, theosophy, and their numerous successor movements. The spiritual, in this imaginative tendency, simply names that part of reality we have not yet developed sufficiently advanced technologies to record and analyze scientifically, but make no mistake, there will someday be an objective science that corresponds to it. The avant-garde disciples of BEAM, and of Mary Baker Eddy and Madame Blavatsky before him, have arrived first to guarantee the conceptual space by means of something like—but which is emphatically not—faith. (In one of many FIGU glosses on this theme that read like parodies of ideas common within American evangelicalism, it’s not a religion, it’s a “relegeon.”)
It’s all a bit dull, is the thing. I think here of something the English author and critic Adam Roberts wrote in 2010 of the late novels of Philip K. Dick, which could be repurposed here: The elaborately codified precepts of FIGU, documented across hundreds of webpages of unrelenting text, represent an achievement of “prodigious, almost heroic tedium” for their belabored domestication of the supernatural. As Roberts writes,
For every Tasso, Christopher Smart, or William Blake, whose madness generates art of visionary beauty and power, there are countless thousands whose madness generates screeds of barren verbiage, monotonous regurgitations of leaden “spiritual” or paranoiac fantasies that lack for us precisely the one thing—the shine of genuine transcendence—that make them so compelling to the sufferer.
Memorizing life’s answers, not contemplating its mysteries, is the goal of FIGU, as far as I was able to surmise. At one point during the textual study, a middle-aged man in upmarket activewear argued that one of the numbered lines from BEAM’s stultifying book, properly analyzed, amounts to an exhortation to avoid “surrendering your power” to other people. I found it remarkable that so tortuous a path would still deliver him to such a banal destination.
EVEN SO, I AM GLAD THAT FIGU exists, and that my colleague Pavel, a former gym teacher with the build of a walking mailbox, took me to their meeting. That’s because the society provided both context and occasion for a remarkable act of gallantry on his part.
Most of the local chapter members I met that day appeared to be upper-middle-class professionals in their fifties and sixties. (Apart from Pavel, the primary exception to this rule was an adolescent novice experiencing the first throes of enthusiasm for the Germanic aspects of the FIGU paradigm; he praised BEAM’s prose for being klaar und Deutschlich, much to the delight of the elders around the table. I hope that in the intervening years he has found his way to Kant.) Pavel, the burly and somewhat uncouth Romanian, was an awkward inclusion for the group, which opened its proceedings during my visit with a science lesson about distilled versus mineral water from one of its other members, a haughty German engineer.
FIGU’s core text is BEAM’s Goblet of the Truth, a product of telepathic dictation that BEAM, amanuensis to the stars, claims to have received from seven alien races. The book has been published in an enormous 700-page blue clothbound hardback—the pages as large as normal printer paper—with “title and goblet symbol hot-stamped in matte gold” on the cover. It costs around $100 USD to purchase and ship; import fees would raise this amount further when shipping to Canada. The high price might explain why Pavel, on his part-time luggage salesman pay, had printed and stapled the day’s readings from Goblet at the library. Everyone else at the meeting had carried in his or her own huge, lavish hardcover.
I mistook the conceptual object of the book itself, at first, locating it under the same heading I would use for a copy of the NIV at an evangelical Bible study: a neutral vessel for holy writ. For proponents of BEAM’s teachings, though, the book is better understood as something like a sacramental, or, going further afield, a talisman.
In part, that’s because FIGU doctrine stipulates a concept akin to auras, pseudo-materialistically conceived. To illustrate, one of the members testified that each of us has an energy trail like a comet’s tail, which is why other people walking behind us as we enter a building might experience the onset of unexpected memories; they have glided into our spiritual wake. The man leading the meeting, a fellow in a beard and draw-string safari hat, explained that the liquid metaphor is apt: These outflows of energy create viscous, invisible ties between us and the material furniture of our lives, like the web strung between your face and your hands after a too-generous sneeze.
That relationship of “fluidal energy,” as he called it, has special uses in the spiritual economy of FIGU, but it can be compromised by the interactions of others—even a glance can disturb the connection. This I discovered when I tried to read the day’s selection from Goblet of the Truth over his shoulder during the textual study. He first raised his shoulder to block my view, and when I failed to grok his meaning, he informed me that he was protecting his relationship with the object, the text, by shielding it from my intruding gaze.
I sat back in my chair, miffed and a bit perplexed. Why was I here, anyway? Because, I told myself, I am a “thought-diver” of Melville’s type: I had come to see what the spiritually adventurous were up to in a time of vast, uncomprehending complacency. But instead of encountering the sort of passion that carries people into parts unknown of the spiritual world, I was watching insecurity and preciousness being made into principles of a tidy, false morality. Nietzsche would have raged at this betrayal of aspiration.
Annoyed, I looked around the circled folding tables in the bleak little room. It was then that I noticed across from me big-chested Pavel, with his ragged printouts spread in front of him. He was staring at me, his guest, with concern as others absorbed the insights of BEAM’s Goblet.
“He can have mine,” Pavel said then. He gathered his papers and passed them, over a swelling and then receding murmuration of objections, to me. I eagerly polluted them with my attention.
Pavel later explained to me that membership depended on paying monthly dues in an amount determined in each case by local chapter leaders. I was not sensitive to their opprobrium, and I hope it escaped Pavel’s emotional register, as well, in spite of his knowing infraction. What special deference does a group of metaphysical accountants deserve from a searcher of the old school like him?
PAVEL LOST HIS JOB AT THE DEPARTMENT STORE after becoming irate with a customer; the real reason, I think, was that he was the unknowing victim of a complicated imbroglio wherein a salesperson favored by the store manager showed several coworkers private photos that Pavel had posted to a dating site, images the salesperson had solicited using a fake profile; firing Pavel was the easiest way for the manager to get rid of the problem. I don’t think Pavel himself ever actually found out what had happened. I also don’t know where he went after he was let go. The store has since closed; without a new tenant, its cavernous spaces remain empty and unlit, years later.
I would be remiss not to mention that FIGU had twisted Pavel’s mind. Or perhaps the group’s teachings were a natural fit for his mind’s twists. On our way back to the subway that day, he would entreat me with disturbing arguments for eco-fascism and radical population control measures up to and including forced sterilization for people born in certain years. But in his act of compassionate transgression that afternoon at the FIGU society, I saw a vision of him from another world, as it were—a version of him far in excess of the luggage salesman and former gym teacher and alienated devotee of alien phenomena. He was briefly a man willing to trespass the conventions of his superiors for the sake of offering hospitality to a stranger—or, translating it back into my own religion’s idiom, to recall that man was not made for the sabbath. Here was an unexpected glimpse of life that I hadn’t been trying to find.
The meeting that day concluded after some further textual exposition. The shiny apparatus was disassembled, its parts put back in translucent plastic tubs. Pavel and I left through a basement hallway lit by an orange crystal plugged into the wall. As we left, we whispered to avoid disturbing the meeting of another esoteric society in an adjacent, closed room.
Not his real name.