Our trail is that of the grey hare, The dark wolf is our servant, The honking crow is our incarnation, The Hoto eagle is our envoy. On the summit of Bortoi mountain, Having turned into dark wolves, Curving our backs we ran. Whose son did you see there? On the summit of Tarsai mountain, Having become five geese, Crying out, we came in to land. Whose son did you see there? Western Buryat shaman's song (after Humphrey 1995: 155).
Contact with Colliding Worlds
On 14 August 2022 I was alerted, via the Paranthropology Facebook page, to this youtube video, ‘Contact With Colliding Worlds Part 1 Synchronicities of Silence’, uploaded just three days before by Professor Wham (aka Dr CS Matthews). Described in this tweet by Stephanie Quick as a ‘deep look at the cultural/historical meaning of UFO encounters from a non-western, anti-colonial perspective’, it is a digressive but no less interesting review of the book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, by Jacques Vallée and Paola Leopizzi Harris, in conjunction with David Roberts’ book, The Pueblo Revolt. Trinity is the account of an investigation into a UFO landing witnessed by two boys in 1945 which, in the words of Vallée, demonstrates ‘the existence of levels of reality science has failed to recognize’ (2022: xix). Part of the synchronicity identified between the two books was that the location of the boys’ encounter with ‘insectoid’ entities in August 1945, who appeared to have been transported in a metallic craft which crash-landed to earth, was in the area affected by the uprising of indigenous Pueblo people in August 1680 against Spanish colonial rule.1 Particularly striking was the fact that the encounter, on August 16th, 1945, had happened just 25 miles from Ground Zero, the Trinity test site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, exactly a month before. It also happened within two weeks of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the light from the blast at Trinity awoke the entire family of one of the witnesses and permanently blinded a relative in one eye. Of course, no one was warned. The devastating effects of the so-called test persisted in the proliferation of illnesses, cancers, premature deaths, infertility and birth defects in the ensuing years, negative impacts seen also in animals, wildlife and stunted plant growth.
Professor Wham draws a strong parallel between the insectoid occupants of the craft – described as seeming ‘almost like praying mantises’ – witnessed by two young boys2 and stories concerning the origins of kachinas, each cultural group having their own origin stories. Most striking, in regard to the boys’ encounter, are Navaho and Apache stories. White Painted Woman, the being who gave birth to the Apache people, descended to earth in a white shell, while in a Navajo account, the ‘insect people’ are the among the first beings to emerge into the world.3 The insectoid occupants of the egg-shaped craft seemed to be uttering cries of distress, which had a profound emotional effect on the two boys, even when they recounted their experiences decades later, and put pictures in their minds about the distress of the occupants, via some sort of telepathy. Altogether, there is a curious confluence of people and events, lent some significance perhaps by the site of the crash being once a watering, gathering and ceremonial area for Apache bands who regularly migrated through the region. A meditation by Vallée on the personal and social effects of traumatic events, ‘whether by our own hands in the form of nuclear power unleashed or at the agency of some kind of intelligent force that seems to live here with us on earth’, resonates in its evocation of an ‘intelligent force’ with Barton Wright’s identification of the central theme of kachina beliefs and practices as ‘the presence of life in all objects that fill the universe’ (Wright 2008: 4). Everything ‘has an essence or a life force, and humans must interact with these or fail to survive’ (ibid.). Vallée asks, what if the crash of the object was not an accident? What if the crash and the distressed creatures from the craft were the message? What would account, continues Professor Wham, for the distress of insectoid-like creatures who seemingly crashed to earth? What would the message be from entities who arrived not long after a matter-altering bomb was exploded and then used to destroy two cities, close to both the location and anniversary of one of the most successful revolts against a colonial invader? Fascinated by the video, I placed both books on a wishlist, but didn’t commit to getting them straight away.
My engagement that evening with such thought-provoking ‘wandering tangents’ coincided with the much-anticipated arrival of a book I’d actually ordered the day before the ‘Contact with Colliding Worlds’ video had even been uploaded, André Breton in Exile: The Poetics of Occultation, 1941-1947, by Victoria Clouston. Unable to retrieve the book immediately, as it had been delivered elsewhere, but dimly aware that Breton had been in New Mexico around the same time as this weird encounter, I searched online for any indications of this. I soon found the following link to a 2018 talk, Surrealism and the American West: André Breton’s “Hopi Notebook”. It was startling for its contemporaneity with the events of August 1945, casting unexpected light on discussion of Pueblo and Hopi kachinas. Dr Katharine Conley’s talk considered ‘the founder of the surrealist movement’s practice of collecting in light of the notebook he kept on his trip to visit the Hopi reservation in August 1945, the month the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. His belief in the liveliness of repurposed things, haunted by their former lives, ‘was particularly pertinent to the Hopi Katchina dolls he collected on his trip to the American West’. I was intrigued, startled even, to feel the synchronicities Professor Wham spoke of now impinging on me.
Oppenheimer
I have my hunting camp in the ruling pine-tree
I have my quarters in the huge pine-tree
I have transformation in the lightning filled sky
I have my hunting camp in the thundering sky.
Daur shaman's song for the dolbor ('night road') ritual
(after Humphrey 1996: 231).
On 23 July, 2023, I went to see the film, Oppenheimer. What became evident in watching it, was the disjuncture between the desire within the ‘scientific community’ to impose ethical limits on the monstrous power to destroy that their research had helped to unleash, and the sociopathic realpolitik of those in power, ready to destroy all obstacles to American or so-called ‘Western’ hegemony. Parallels with the present political class of functionaries serving economic imperatives severely detrimental to life on earth were inescapable.
Another effect of watching the film was to impel me to finally order Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret when I got home that evening…
Reading the early pages of the book in the days that followed its arrival on the 25th, prompted a vague memory of being told, in a mountain cave in Buryatia, near the border with Mongolia, of a UFO landing nearby. The informant was Nikolai, the primary guide in the field for a joint expedition of the Department of Archaeology of the University of Southampton, the Buryat Institute of Social Sciences, and the Ministry of Culture of Buryatia, in search of rock art in August-September 1995. I was a second-year undergraduate at the time and had enthusiastically signed up for the compulsory international fieldwork in Buryatia, aware of the ex-Soviet republic’s history and culture of shamanism, a subject close to my heart. After rummaging through old papers and searching online I eventually deduced that the mountain cave was the Gorodovoy Cliff, situated on a sacred mountain called Khugtei-Khan (Buryat: Хугтэй-хаан). Retrieving the diary I had kept of the expedition 28 years before, I could tell from the entry I had made for the last day of work in the field, 13 September 1995, that I was exhausted after a very busy three-week schedule, travelling hundreds of miles to visit and survey different sites. Complaining of heading off at 8am to a mountain near the Mongolian border, I noted, ‘Passed thro’ a village where a flying saucer had landed. Three short silver people and one tall black one. They took off again.’ Doing an online search for UFOs in Buryatia, I found that the incident had happened on 16 May 1990, five years and four months before, in a village called Kudara-Somon, about 22 km as the crow flies from the Gorodovoy Cliff.
According to an account on this website, May 16th, 1990, was an unseasonably hot day in the village of Kudara-Somon, with not a cloud in the sky and temperatures reaching 34° C. By midday the village was bathed in a strange yellow light. After 14.25, from the direction of Mongolia in the south, an unidentified object appeared in the sky. Described variously as a fireball or an object coloured crimson silver, it hovered over the village before zigzagging and landing on one of the Kudarinsky Hills overlooking the village. Villagers ran out of their houses to view the spectacle, some bringing binoculars. Witnesses described seeing four anthropoids stepping out of the object, one of them taller than the other three by a head and wearing dark clothing, while the others were dressed in silver, orange silver or silver-crimson clothes. The quartet appeared to stride purposefully down the slope towards the houses, as seen by hundreds of witnesses in the village. Two people, a local resident and a policeman, raced up the slope on a motorcycle to meet the four visitors. At this the four anthropoids hastily retreated to the object, which then soared into the sky and immediately disappeared from sight.
Kachinas, Ongons and ‘Vegetal Revelation’
Of the ‘crash landing’ of ‘something’ in New Mexico, at a place 25 miles from the site of the world’s first nuclear explosion, Vallée asks why weird telepathic creatures were deposited in a vehicle – characterised by him as possibly both physical and ‘psychic’ – at an ancient traditional site, ‘one month to the day after mankind’s first large-scale, historic liberation of the Atom?’ (Vallée and Leopizzi Harris 2022: 308). One could also recognise in the burning bushes surrounding this crashed vehicle an echo of the ‘vegetal revelation’ in Exodus. Was the crash a direct answer to the discovery of nuclear forces? An opportunity to listen to other forms of consciousness, ‘so we could be clearly presented with the flimsy parameters of our survival?’ (ibid: 308). Put in these terms it encourages interpreting other instances of such otherworldly interventions in similar terms, in the collision of the apocalyptic and traditional geographies. Perhaps significantly, one of the young witnesses to the event in New Mexico, Jose Padilla, is the great-grandson of ‘Mama Grande’, Maria Amada Chavez (1856-1940), a local Chiricahua Apache leader and a wise and powerful woman recognised as ‘the community authority in the area’ (ibid.: 13). Hence the turn to the shamanic landscape of Buryatia, scene of a UFO landing witnessed by a whole village. Just as Professor Wham draws attention to the relevance of kachinas and the mythology surrounding them in interpreting the possible significance of what happened on the Padilla Ranch in 1945, can one look to the ongons of Buryat and Mongolian shamanism for analogies?
According to Caroline Humphrey, Buryat ongons are ‘a series of models or representations of spirits which are thought to have magical power in specific circumstances’ (1971: 271), made from a variety of materials such as cloth, wood, feathers, metal and beads.4 However, the ongon is more than a representation, for it is ‘both the spirit and the representation of the spirit’ (ibid.), consecrated by the shaman in that they make the spirit enter it (ibid.: 272). Indeed, the verb ongulakh, ‘to make into an ongon’ is used for the shaman when the spirit enters his or her body, or of an animal that is possessed by a spirit (ibid.: 271-272). The ongon could also be painted on multicoloured silk cloth (Heissig 1980: 13), these paintings being ‘always executed in red’ (ibid.: 14). This invites considering red-painted motifs on rocks and cliff faces in Buryatia as forms of ongons. It became evident that some rock art sites were still respected, judging by cloths tied in the branches of adjacent trees and emptied bottles of spirits, as were some burial sites of shamans, with some overlap between these sites.
Such a congruence of biographies of individuals and places is evident in the red cliff which features in a ‘shamanistic legend of origin’ in the book of the history of the Onghot, ‘The Black Tutelary Spirit’, discovered in the Chahar region of eastern Mongolia (Heissig 1953: 501). A dying father instructs his son, Ingdaqai, to find the right place to inter and worship him, promising to ‘perform things in later days which are of benefit’ to him (ibid.: 503). After his father’s death Ingdaqai carried the body away, laying the corpse on the top of a boulder at the south-eastern declivity of the Red Cliff. Over the years the son returned regularly to the cliff, making offerings of tea, water and brandy to the ‘Protecting Genius of the Ancestor’ (ibid.: 504). In time, the spirit of the father allied itself with the master spirits of the place, his power increasing as the years passed. When the mother of Ingdaqai died, she too was interred south of the Red Cliff and given offerings. Allying herself with the other spirits the old woman too acquired a powerful nature. The local population, much troubled by the dreadful harm the spirits did, made propitiatory offerings at the Red Cliff. Thereupon the spirit of the dead father entered a man, who began to tremble, while the spirit of the dead mother entered a woman, who also began to tremble convulsively. These two were now able to fly while they were possessed by their protective spirits, flying to the Red Cliff where they found drums and feathered head-ornaments, handed on to them by the spirits. Striking their drums they flew back, to request the people to offer the libations of tea, milk, spirits and water so that they could protect them. The people called them boge (male shaman) and idugan (female shaman) and made offerings as requested (ibid.). Later they made images of them, referring to them as Onghon (Heissig 1980: 10).
Healing the Metabolic Rift?
Having drifted on my own tangents, at this critical juncture I’ll conclude with an acknowledgment of what has been spoken of as the metabolic rift, ‘the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence’ (Foster 2000: 163).5 This element of social critique has become a point of departure for more ecological readings in response to the continuous and escalating ecological catastrophe of fossil and extractive capital which threatens earthly life along with the nuclear weapons that loom so large in Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. I’ve only recently learnt of the the huge mine at Oyu Tolgoi, in Mongolia, one of the largest mines in the world (larger than Manhattan, and 2 miles deep), ‘upsetting not only the gods, but the herdsmen who live in this area who can no longer get the water they need’ (link here). Concluding Trinity, Jacques Vallée warns that we ignore ‘at our peril’ the ‘pressing enigma’ that undeniable cases like the Trinity UFO crash present (Vallée and Leopizzi Harris 2022: 313).
- As Professor Wham emphasises, Pueblo is the Spanish term used to designate all the indigenous communities under their colonial rule, obscuring the diversity of multiple communities, among whom are included the Hopi and Zuni ↩︎
- That the two boys had been looking for a missing cow in calf and heard the impact of the strange object moments after their discovery of the cow and her newly-born calf lends an interesting slant on the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, a location for sightings of strange lights. ↩︎
- I’m presuming that, at this point, Professor Wham is referring to the origin of kachina dolls, as the kachina concept has three different aspects: the supernatural being, the kachina dancers, and kachina dolls (small dolls carved in the likeness of the kachina, that are given only to those who are, or will be responsible for the respectful care and well-being of the doll, such as a mother, wife, or sister) (Colton 1959: 1-3).. ↩︎
- In the context of manipulating organic and artificial materials to make ongons and other ‘magical objects’, I thought of Reme Baca and Jose Padilla picking through the detritus left by the crash landing of the object in 1945, retrieving strange bits of metal and filling bags with clumps of fibrous material they called ‘angel hair’, which was used to decorate Christmas trees because it glowed in the dark. ↩︎
- I’ve written elsewhere on Buryat shamanism here and in this edited volume ↩︎
References
Colton, Harold Sellers (1959) Hopi Kachina Dolls: with a Key to their Identification. Revised Edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (Reference found on Wikipedia 5/8/2023)
Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press
Heissig, W. (1980) The Religions of Mongolia. Translated by G. Samuel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Heissig, W. (1953) A Mongolian Source to the Lamaist suppression of shamanism in the 17th century. Anthropos 48: 493-536
Humphrey, Caroline (1996) Shamans and Elders. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Humphrey, Caroline (1995) Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia. In E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.) The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 133-162 (A nice pdf of this essay here. Photocopies of it were handed to each of us as we prepared to journey from Southampton to Buryatia in 1995).
Humphrey, Caroline. 1971. Some Ideas of Saussure applied to Buryat Magical Drawings. In E. Ardener (ed.) Social Anthropology and Language. London: Tavistock Publications, 271-90
Vallée, Jacques F. and Leopizzi Harris, Paola (2022) Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. Starworks USA. Second Edition
Wright, Barton (2008) ‘Hopi Kachinas: A Life Force’, in Hopi Nation: Essays on Indigenous Art, Culture, History and Law. University of Nebraska Digital Commons (Reference found on Wikipedia 5/8/2023)
The Grammar of Matter 
