For eighty years, we have been calling them crew members, occupants, humanoids, extraterrestrial biological entities. And for eight decades, none of those labels has fit quite right with what witnesses report. That is why I proposed a new term to define those strange creatures and beings associated with flying saucers.
The invention
blends UFO with Oz, in a clear reference to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, and also includes a nod to an earlier term coined by researcher
Jenny Randles. The reference to the book is not a literary whim. In the novel,
the great and powerful Oz turns out to be an elderly man hidden behind a
curtain, pulling levers to appear as a terrifying deity. The suspicion raised
by this new term follows the same line: that a large part of what we call UFO
crew members is also an imposture set up using the cultural materials of each
era—spaceships, silver suits, diving helmets, ray guns—so that people see
precisely what their time expects them to see.
A ufoznaut,
to be more precise, is that real or perceived entity that appears linked to a
sighting or an encounter with an unidentified object—which also includes lights
and flashes—and whose nature is not fully resolved by the traditional
extraterrestrial hypothesis. What is interesting is that these beings show a
very clear continuity with figures that were already there long before anyone
talked about spaceships: fairies, daimons, Marian apparitions, incubi,
beast-men, spirits, ghosts. The proposed term does not force one to decide what
these beings are made of; it works equally well whether one believes they are
projections of the witness's mind, prefers to think of other dimensions, or
leans toward the archetypal realm handled by Jung. Rather, what it does is
change the question. Instead of asking where they come from, it invites us to
ask what function they serve and under what disguise they reappear time and
again throughout history.
If you strip
any account of an abduction or close encounter of its modern stage
props—spaceships, astronaut suits, weird technology—what remains is strikingly
similar to what shepherds, monks, and peasants have been telling for centuries.
Lights that appear and disappear without explanation, figures uttering
disconnected phrases that lead nowhere, beings that enter and leave our reality
as if stepping through a door only they can see. The aesthetic changes with
each generation, but the underlying pattern remains fixed.
This is
neither an isolated idea nor something fresh out of the oven. Ufologist John
Keel, the same man who investigated the Mothman case in West Virginia during
the late 1960s, reached a similar conclusion and coined his own term,
"ultraterrestrials," to talk about entities capable of shape-shifting
and disguising themselves as whatever each culture considers supernatural at
any given moment—now demons, now men in black, now flying saucer pilots. A few
years earlier, Jacques Vallée, the French astrophysicist who inspired François
Truffaut's character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, published Passport
to Magonia, a book that carefully compares accounts of UFO encounters with
old fairy kidnappings from European folklore, finding the exact same
ingredients: abductions, tests, physical interactions, relationships with these
beings. Neither Keel nor Vallée thought the phenomenon was pure fantasy. They
thought it was real and that, precisely because it was, it did not fit inside
the astronaut suit we had placed upon it.
British
writer Patrick Harpur went even further in his book Daimonic Reality,
where he argues that fairies, UFOs, Bigfoots, Marian apparitions, and ghosts
belong to the same sphere that the Neoplatonists called the World Soul (Anima
Mundi)—something that is neither entirely objective nor entirely invented.
Harpur points out something that anyone who has read comparative folklore
notices right away: that the old fairies who appeared as small humanoids in
green coats have transformed, generation after generation, into humanoids in
silver astronaut suits.
This is where
the ufoznaut enters as something more than a traveler from another planet: an
inhabitant of that borderland between the real, the dreamlike, the imaginal,
and the supernatural—neither fully physical nor fully imaginary—moving through
that murky terrain where the psychological, the religious, and the Forteana
step on each other's heels all the time. Some even go further and speak of
these beings as genuine psychopomps, mediators between two worlds that have
been colliding forever. One does not need to swallow the most mystical part of
the argument to recognize the underlying issue: we remain determined to solve
through biology and physics a phenomenon that perhaps belongs, at least in
part, to the realm of human consciousness and how it processes what it does not
understand.
The morpheme
"OZ" is not inserted into the word by accident. It points directly to
the mechanism by which a manifestation presents itself with an aesthetic of
authority or high technology tailored to what the observer of the time expects
to see, while hiding its true nature beneath. Viewed this way, the ufoznaut
ceases to be merely a traveler from another planet and becomes a form of
otherness that, depending on the era and the cultural framework in which it
appears, puts on whatever disguise that context offers as the most credible or
terrifying.
This scenic
imposture points to a broader underlying problem: the role of the perceiver's
consciousness in decoding and—more than likely—interacting with the phenomenon.
It is not merely a matter of the interpretive bias inherent in any human
experience—an obvious factor already assumed in all observation—but something
of greater significance: the possibility that the phenomenon itself adapts to
the sociocultural parameters of the witness, actively assuming that
personalization in the way it manifests. In other words, the phenomenon would
not be limited to being interpreted differently depending on who observes it,
but would seem to show itself as malleable to the presence of the witness,
adjusting its aesthetics, its symbolic content, and its mode of communication
to the frame of reference of the person perceiving it.
JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA
