Is Belief the Enemy?

“Otherworld: ” Acrylic painting depicting the little lights in the trees by Barbara Fisher. 2018

John Keel is famous for having said “Belief is the enemy.”

He explains in his most famous book, The Mothman Prophesies, “Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.”

I think Keel is right,. Although, it really is hard to go through life—especially a life where you are in the midst of a nearly constant barrage of strange experiences—without beliefs.

Humans like to believe in something. It helps keep us balanced, though many others besides Keel himself would point out that some people take their beliefs too far and end up as fanatics, which really isn’t a good thing. And currently in the US, we are awash with people who, like the White Queen in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, are not only practiced in “believing six impossible things before breakfast,” but who most certainly believe many more improbabilities all day long, to the detriment of the social contract in our country.

I’ve decided that it is easier to believe than it is to not believe.

I mostly stand firmly in the middle road between belief and disbelief—rather like an obstruction, as George Carlin would have said.

I usually occupy the wishy-washy wibbly-woobly middle ground of being agnostic on all of the impossibilities which see fit to confront me on a daily basis. This middle ground might infuriate some friends and colleagues, but for the longest time, it seemed the most logical standpoint for me to have.

I can’t claim the mantle of a skeptic, because I have so often seen and been confronted by inexplicable things that I just cannot say that they didn’t happen. I was there, so I know they did.

But I can’t truly say “I’m a believer,” because I don’t want to become a victim to confirmation bias when I stare the impossibilities in the face and ask, “Who or what are you, and what are you doing here?”

However, for the past year, I have been trying something new.

I have been attempting to -not- believe in things., while also not being an annoying skeptic who tries to debunk everything including the evidence of my senses.

This is a precarious path to walk.

Let me give an example: the little lights I see dancing around in the woods around Athens fairly often.

I first started seeing them in the early 1990’s, and it wasn’t just me who saw them. It was in fact, a couple of friends who were first plagued with brightly colored, small balls of light dancing in the woods behind their house, right here in town. They experienced it, and then the phenomena also happened to another couple who lived slightly out of town. Friends, including myself., hanging out at the first couple’s home, saw the lights,. Even the young man’s father who most certainly didn’t believe in impossible whatsits flitting about in pretty colors in the woods at night saw them.

When he asked his son what those lights were outside the window, merrily dancing around like a rainbow of fireflies in every wrong color of the rainbow, my friend answered, “Um, nothing.”

So we started calling them the “Umnothings.”

My husband Zak refined that to the “Umnoughts,,” which is a more elegant way of stating that these little lights were a whole lot of impossible wrapped up in a shiny, blinking, prettily-colored package.

Then Zak and I moved into a house slightly out of town and the Umnoughts really liked the piece of land the house was on, and so were constantly appearing outside the house in the woods and fields, as well as coming up to windows and finally, invading the house itself.

And that’s when I began to firmly believe they were somehow related to the fairy realm.

Which is not a bad thought, really, because fairy lore warns us of the Will-o-the Wisps who will lead you far off the path into the forest or a marsh to either fall off a cliff or into a swamp never to be seen again. And I had already come to that conclusion much earlier, but by the time I lived in the “Falling-Down-the-Hill House,” as we called the rickety little hovel that was sliding off of its foundation, it was cemented into my brain that I was dealing with fairies.

But once I began to truly believe that and treat them like fairies, giving offerings and following “the rules” that fairy lore teaches us, the phenomena really began ramping up and manifesting more often and more clearly in the shape of the fairies.

Just like John Keel reported in The Mothman Prophesies, every time he formulated a theory about some aspect of the UFO or Mothman phenomena, and -didn’t- make that idea public- the phenomena would manifest proof that his theory was correct in a prompt and pointed manner.

Decades later, I read about little lights appearing in the Ural Mountains, (around the same years we saw them in Athens) in a book by Dr. Jacques Vallee called The Cosmic Samizdat, which was about his trip to the USSR to learn about the UFOs sighted and studied there. The witnesses of the phenomena of the tiny lights in the Ural Mountains took them to be part of the UFO phenomena, which was also manifesting itself heavily in that time and place.

Later still, in Ardy Sixkiller Clarke’s book, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica, she experienced the exact same phenomena of little brightly colored balls or orbs of light dancing around in the jungles of Central America, only this time she and her guide took them to be ancestral spirits.

Three different interpretations of the same exact simple phenomena.: little balls of light dancing around in a wild place at night.

So, who’s right? Whose belief system is the correct one? Are they fairies, tiny UFO’s or the spirits of dead humans?

Facing that question, when the lights came dancing back into my life starting in the winter of 2019, I decided to try and just describe what I see whenever I experience something impossible, and not put it into a belief system.

That is really hard to do.

Because as Morganna wisely said, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, dammit, Mom, it’s a damned duck.”

Naturally, I had to be a twit and say, “But what if it’s a shape-shifting duck?”

After more than a year of this, I admit I haven’t done very well at not putting those lights into a belief system, just as I am failing to keep a belief system from invading my thoughts when strange stones or pieces of iron appear in my house.

Human brains like explanations for something, even when that explanation isn’t super-rational. Our minds just like to have a context into which to put all of our experiences, but I find this to be especially true when it comes to the weird stuff.

Because when we deal with impossible things like little lights bobbing around in the trees in our back yards, we need -something- even if it’s folklore- to explain it. Even if we don’t rationalize it away, we need something to wrap the impossibility up in because it helps us cope with its impossible, implausible and damned peculiar nature.

Belief is comforting.

So, I’m back to walking well worn middle path betwixt and between belief and disbelief. Belief, while comforting, has its perils—I don’t want to become too rigid in my thinking and miss a valuable insight or bit of evidence because it doesn’t fit into my preferred paradigm. And disbelief is just plain too uncomfortable for me to maintain when nearly every morning before breakfast something weird manifests in my vicinity.

I don’t think Keel meant you couldn’t believe things, especially if you use belief as a shorthand, or a convenient label for something mysterious. When you lose your wallet in your house and after looking for three days, find it in the first conspicuous place you looked three days previously and say, “Oh, the pixies stole it,” it doesn’t mean you believe literal pixies stole your credit card and were out on the town—it means something weird happened and you chose pixies as a shorthand for it.

What he meant was, don’t believe something and hold onto it to the exclusion of all other information. Don’t believe blindly. And for the love of Gaia, don’t believe everything you’re told, especially by non-human intelligences who are out on tear in their UFO. You can’t trust those guys.

So, no belief isn’t really the enemy, at least, not casual belief. And neither is disbelief.

But neither are they perfect allies when one is confronted with impossibilities.

So, I stand in between. Between the shadow and the light.

This all said, which paradigm (fairies, UFOs or ancestors) do I think the little lights are best fit into?

All three. They are all related, and the core phenomena, the little lights, has to do with all of them.

And, none of them. It both is and is not those things.

It is those things because those paradigms are the clothes with which we enrobe the little lights when we engage with them, and it may be the only way the individual who sees them can engage with them productively.

It isn’t those things, because it is by its nature not human and protean and it changes shape and meaning the way we change our clothes.

And I’m pretty sure John Keel would agree with me on that score.

I used to have a video of one of his talks at either a Fortfest or Mothman Festival where he described standing in a field in Mason County, WV, where he was surrounded by a group of these very small bobbing lights. He was interacting with them, using his flashlight to flash at them, and thinking directions of where they should fly next at them, and he said they responded to both of those communications. He said they acted both telepathic and intelligent. I saw that video decades after I first started seeing the lights in Athens, and his close-up encounter with them was so similar to my own from years before that I nearly fell off of the couch.

Whatever they are—the little lights—the Umnoughts— are intelligent. They are sentient.

I don’t believe that.

I know it.