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12: The history of ufology in Spain
130 Plays7 months ago
In today’s episode we explore the intriguing history of UFOs in Spain. Over the past seven decades, UFOs have captured the imagination, spawning diverse interpretations ranging from religious devotion to scientific exploration. Amidst conflicting government narratives, the allure of UFOs persists, blending confusion with fascination.
My guest, Ignacio Cabria, an esteemed authority on the history of Spain’s UFO history, leads us through the intricate tapestry of Spanish ufology. From esoteric contactee movements to formal research groups, Spain's UFO landscape is rich with varied perspectives and beliefs.
Together, we focus on a pressing question: How do societal frameworks shape our understanding and perception of UFO phenomena? Join us as we unravel the layers of ufology's cultural significance in Spain and beyond.
More on Ignacio Cabria’s work: https://independent.academia.edu/IgnacioCabria
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Transcript
Introduction and Support Requests
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Speaker
you
00:00:14
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Hello and welcome to European UFOs. My name is Sebastian. And if you liked this episode, then please leave a review on your chosen platform. It really helps with the algorithm. Also, if you want to contribute to this podcast staying out free for listeners, then please go to buymeacoffee.com where literally for less than the price of a coffee, you can help me keep the show up and running out free. So please do support the podcast if you feel it's worthwhile.
70 Years of UFO History
00:00:42
Speaker
In today's episode, we enter the difficult but fascinating terrain of UFO history. Over the last 70 years or so, UFOs have received many different meanings from different groups, each with their own agenda. For some, UFOs and their occupants have become a new religion. For others, they are thought experiment in physics, with little impact on society at large.
00:01:05
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Add to this the often conflicting statements of governments from across the world and you have something that's perfectly confusing and fascinating at the same time.
Spanish UFO History with Ignacio Gabriel
00:01:15
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My guest today Ignacio Gabriel is an esteemed expert on the social history of UFOs in Spain and has written extensively on the historical complexities surrounding UFOs in that country.
00:01:27
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from esoteric contactive movements to more or less formalised research groups, Spanish ufology has had many drivers, each with their own sets of ideas and beliefs. Essentially, the question we explore in today's episode is one that deserves way more attention if ufology is to be saved from its own acrimonious tendencies. How do we, based on our replace in society,
00:01:52
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construct, appreciate, and ultimately determine what UFOs mean. Hello, Ignacio. How are you doing today? Fine. Thank you for inviting me to your program.
Ignacio's Childhood Fascination with UFOs
00:02:06
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So, Ignacio, you've had a very interesting and varied career, and I'm very much interested to learn more about
00:02:17
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how you got started in the UFO subject because you've been at it for quite a while and what got you interested in it? Well, I got interested in the UFOs at the same time with astronomy and astrophysics when I was a child, no? Perhaps you must think that I was a weird child, no? I was 10 or 11.
00:02:44
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I used to draw maps of Mars, the planet Mars we knew in the 60s, because I was born in 1955. So my first interest as a child was in astronomy, astrophysics, and then I discovered the UFO subject.
00:03:08
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some program in television, but mostly in 1974. I was already 18, 19 years old. When I read Antonio Rivera's book, Antonio Rivera was a pioneer in the UFO subject in Spain, El Gran Enigma de los Platigos Volantes, the great mystery of UFOs, of flying saucers, as was called still at that time.
00:03:38
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And then I met a group of young people of my age, 19 years old in Santander. A little later we started in Santander radio program, one of the first local radio programs on UFOs. And then I joined the theory, the group
00:04:08
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one of the pioneer groups in Spain.
Early UFO Research Groups in Spain
00:04:12
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In fact, it was after, say, Barcelona's say, Theobe from Santander was the first one starting in the wave of the 60s in Spain, not the new generation, the second generation of researchers. That generation of
00:04:34
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people from 17 to 20 years old, you know, that they were starting in 1967, 69, studying the field of UFOs. So I joined the second part was 76, 77, I joined the theory and we made a
00:04:57
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Well, a great career, I would say, about the diffusion of the UFO subject from the traditional point of view, the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But my background in astronomy, for me, was a matter of trying the subject from a scientific point of view.
Cultural Impact of UFOs in Spain
00:05:23
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So my first occupation was methodology.
00:05:26
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not even in that junk age. Soon, with the crisis of the UFO field internationally from 1980, I was going to the humanities and anthropology and then my focus changed to
00:05:56
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other aspect of the UFO field, not that it was UFOs in social history and anthropology. And then I changed from being a nephrologist to be an anthropologist of UFOs and the Stratostreas.
00:06:18
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I think what's very interesting about your research is, and also the age group you fall into, is that what you sketch out in your social history of UFOs in Spain actually is reflected in your
00:06:33
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in your own probably way of thinking and in what you experienced. So because in your book, and we're going to get into that later on, perhaps, you sketch out these three main episodes in Spanish ufology from the early beginnings in the 1950s, then the formalization of ufology in the 60s, and then the fragmentation. And so it's very interesting to have someone with that breadth of experience
00:07:00
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this oversight of what was going on in the community.
Media's Role in Extraterrestrial Myth
00:07:05
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Did you yourself ever have any sort of close encounter? Did you ever see a UFO or was it really for you just an academic pursuit to begin with? No, I never had a sighting or any kind of experience. In fact, in that group,
00:07:28
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quite rational in their way. I would say a little skeptic of those people who used to go to the mountain in the weekend and saw a dozen UFOs in the sky. Because of my interest in astronomy, I knew how to interpret certain things in the sky, satellites and artificial satellites, et cetera.
00:07:58
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I never had a UFO sighting. My interest, my approach to the subject, then went to the solar field of interpreting the UFO subject from the culture of the time. This is why in the 80s,
00:08:26
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I studied the social history of ufology and social history of UFO subjects in general in Spain. For example, for me it was very interesting to research how flying saucers started in Spain. You know, in that time the dictatorship of Franco
00:08:50
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was very close to the information in general, so very few things arrived to the press and radio. But that was innocuous, no? The observations of Kenneth Arnold and those things between 1947 and 1950 were quite innocuous for the dictatorship, no?
00:09:14
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So at the beginning, it was very interesting. At the beginning of 1950, we received the news of Keiho's first book of flying saucers. So those phenomena in the skies that were first interpreted as meteorites or whatever mysterious,
00:09:42
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In February and March they received a new meaning according to the book of Keiho, that was that the Martians were visiting the Earth. And then suddenly on March 21 of 1950, the first news of sightings of flying saucers, Platygios Valentes,
00:10:07
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in Spanish, arrived to the press. And then in the next days, a lot of news from everywhere in Spain were being published as a fever, not information.
00:10:27
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It's a very interesting point you mentioned there, because it's very different today. What role did the traditional mass media have in Spain during that period in spreading the news of UFOs and the 1947 wave in the US?
Martian Myth in Spanish Media
00:10:47
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Yeah, the role of the media was fundamental to the creation of this new myth of the Martians, starting with the Martians. We don't know exactly how the radio influenced the public opinion, but we have the press of that time that reflects exactly what was being published or broadcast in radio.
00:11:15
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And those first news were always under the interpretation of Keiho. That was not original to Keiho. In fact, it was an interpretation that was already a myth in the science and philosophy, et cetera, from centuries ago, but mostly from the end of the 19th century, you know, that the communication with Martians was a
00:11:45
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something of very public interest at the beginning of the 20th century. And then the broadcast submission of wells in the radio that created the panic in New York, supposedly. Well, the merchants were a myth well established. And the media were a fundamental tool for the creation of this myth.
00:12:16
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very soon as well as soon as we knew that Mars was a desertic planet in the 50s and early 60s then the first researchers were following their theories to the extraterrestrial, the ET hypothesis so the origin of flying saucers were further and further
00:12:45
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first to other planets of the solar system, then to other stars, to other galaxies, etc. So the frontier of our knowledge was reflecting what we thought about flying saucers.
00:13:06
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Was the original interpretation in the Spanish context once the 1947 sightings became transmitted through the global media institutions, was it always right from the start? Was the hypothesis that this is mass potentially extraterrestrial in origin?
00:13:27
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Or was there also a hypothesis that this might be secret Russian technology, natural phenomena? Because what I'm really interested in is you start out with a set of interpretive opportunities. So it could be this or it could be that.
00:13:45
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And then in the course of time, through different actors, it gets cemented into a kind of narrative thread. So if we look at the very beginning, which is a fascinating thing you did, are there different theories in circulation, or was it always in Spain the extraterrestrial Martian hypothesis? As we really knew the subject of UFOs at the beginning of the 50s, a little late,
00:14:13
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compared to other countries, even in Latin America and Europe. So we were very influenced by Donald Keigho, that first book, Scali, later, very early also in 1950. And the press reflected these theories, but also some speculation about the Nazi inventions of flying wings
00:14:44
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whatever, or even the ingots that disappeared in a hidden realm in the mountains where they were thrown flying saucers, some weird theories in that time, just to speculate, to give more business, not to the press. But for us, the Martian flying saucers
00:15:14
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the theory that was imposed since the beginning. Just because the period of 47 to 50, we knew practically nothing about the UFO. So that speculation about Russians or Soviets were the early theories.
00:15:31
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Very interesting. So you kind of already got a ready-served interpretive package from the US, so to speak, which you then handled in your own context. Very exposed to the American information.
00:15:48
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And what role did different researchers play in the early fifties in promulgating this notion in Spain that UFOs are from Mars and potentially extraterrestrial?
International Influence on Spanish Ufology
00:16:07
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Initially in the fifties, the pioneers of the flying saucer research
00:16:16
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were very isolated from April, no? Eduardo Huelta in Barcelona, Manu Tedrajo in Santander, Ray Brea in La Coruña, they were incommunicated among these few three or four people studying the subject in the 50s and they knew practically nothing of what was
00:16:44
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going on in France or France was our main influence at that time because we studied French in the school. It was with Antonio Rivera in 1959 that we opened our eyes to what was being written in other countries, mostly France. It made me shout.
00:17:13
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for example, was a big influence for Antonio Rivera. But Antonio Rivera was a very classic researcher. He believed in the Martian hypothesis initially, but mostly in the ET, the extraterrestrial hypothesis in general, with different origins, et cetera.
00:17:39
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And it was only with the generation, the second generation of young ufologists, already called ufologists in 1970, approximately, that we were open to other views with the influence of Jack Ballet, for example, with the passport to Magonia and the others. And so the initial movement, the pioneering movement by Eduardo Buelta,
00:18:09
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Can you characterize him a bit as a person? Because I think he was quite a notorious character in Spanish ufology, right?
Eduardo Buelta's Role in Spanish Ufology
00:18:18
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Yeah. Eduardo Volta was a personality. Bigger than life, no? They say. He was a very imaginative researcher.
00:18:36
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A little oophologist of the old school of the of the 40s, that people like Khadamsky, who were first a sotarist than oophologists. Also Ray Brea from La Coruña, they believed in Theosophy, Theosophy's theories, quite mystical.
00:19:04
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But Boulta gave, for the first time, a scientific approach to the subject, and Revere also from La Corunia independently, studying the statistics of the apparition of flying saucers, making statistics by month by month. And they found a supposed biennial cycle of UFOs
00:19:32
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that coincided initially in 1950, 52, it seems that coincided with the opposition of planet Mars. So the connection between the Marshall hypothesis and the statistics looked clear. But later Eduardo Volta realized that this was not fulfilled
00:19:59
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in 1956 and 1958, and he abandoned. But we were talking about his personality. He was the first one to receive magazines from abroad, et cetera. He was the director of the first, he created a first center of studies, Centro de Studios Interplanetarios.
00:20:29
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interplanetary studies. This was in 1958, but his personality, he was a little dictator in that group. So the crisis, an internal crisis in 1959, 1960, finally broke up the center of the studios interplanetary and was then
00:20:59
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when Antonio Rivera, who spoke French and English, something very important for the internationalization of the subject, came up with the first series book because I thought the world of publishing
00:21:16
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in the year 54, a book still in that vein of the theosophical theories about the future revolution of the human race in relation with the Star Terrestrials. But Antonio Rivera was the first one that in 1962 published a book, let's say with an objective
00:21:46
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forecast on the subject. Did this have a huge impact on the Spanish popular opinion on UFOs or were the drivers in the media someone else? I think it was definitely the media that influenced the public opinion because until
00:22:15
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That first book of Antonio Rivera had very little influence. It was only in 1966, 1967, when he published the extended version of that book, El Gran Enigma, that was Platigio Volantes. That the subject, that this book
00:22:42
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but really got to the main public opinion. But until then, it was the media that was fundamental for this. What about the role of the church? Because Spain was, and potentially still is, a very religious country. Did the church have anything to say about this incipient phenomenon in the 1950s?
Catholic Church and Extraterrestrial Life
00:23:09
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Well, it's interesting because there was an intervention of religious people, the friars, at that beginning in the year 50s. Perhaps because of what I said before that for the regime, Franco's regime, the flying sausages were something in occurs, was not something that had nothing to do with
00:23:40
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with a religion or ideology. So it was allowed for the priest to opine about the subject. And the opinions were like the international opinion of the Catholic Church and Protestant churches, that the Holy Scriptures, that the Bible said nothing against the possibility that other
00:24:09
Speaker
beings existed in the universe, you know, and they were interpreting the scripture so they were interpreting the banjilist, no, according to this, no, that there were other ships in the universe, I don't remember exactly how it says, no.
00:24:31
Speaker
But that the Bible was open to the possibility that the redemption was reaching every part of the universe. I think it's very interesting to have this historical perspective also in the role of the church.
00:24:50
Speaker
Because I think a lot of UFO circles or the common narrative always says that if UFOs were real and if in inverted commas disclosure were to happen, religious systems would completely break down. But as far as I know, the Catholic Church has never
00:25:08
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claimed that it would be an ontological inconsistency of having non-human intelligences around. It's very interesting. I think it's a mistake to say that the Catholic Church has always been opposed to the idea of alien entities. Interesting. Some priests were speculating
00:25:36
Speaker
whether there had been Jesus Christ in other planets, and it was allowed to do this. Perhaps they left this priest a little margin of the mainstream church, but anyway.
00:25:58
Speaker
Were miracles ever interpreted in that vein? Because about a year ago, I did an episode on Fatima in Portugal. And obviously, you know, that's still I think the jury is still out what exactly happened there. But were miracles ever interpreted in Spain in the vein of UFOs? Or is that something that has always been kind of seized by the Catholic Church and said, hey, this is only a miracle?
00:26:28
Speaker
Only in the final 60s, there were some books with the hypothesis that some miracles had something to do with extraterrestrials. But at the end of the 60s, the regime was slightly opening to the international ideas. So it was already
00:26:56
Speaker
allowed already to speak in these terms. So it never created, I remember that, it never created a crisis in ufology or for the regime. I think the 1950s, I think now we're kind of
00:27:18
Speaker
the period from the 1950s and then starting with the 1960s and later on is quite interesting. So we're entering the second period you've sketched out in your book, which is, and I think a fundamental role there can be attributed to contactee movements.
Emergence of Contactee Movements in Spain
00:27:34
Speaker
I think today you would probably call them experiences, but let's call them contactees. So what happened in Spain during that period?
00:27:45
Speaker
We have also our own Alamski. Alamski was the pioneer in fame as the first famous contactee. Interestingly, in 1953 the experience of Alamski was published in the press in Spain.
00:28:13
Speaker
And a little later at the end of 1954, a person was a man, a nurse in a hospital in Spain, came up to the press telling a weird story that late in the evening, in the night, walking in the outskirts of Madrid,
00:28:42
Speaker
he encountered a man like Orton, like the extraterrestrial of Adamsky, very similar to Orton, with an overall jacket, who was directly saying to him,
00:29:08
Speaker
I don't know if there was a word or no, there was just some signs. Some signs that he was coming from up there, no? And the witness interpreted that he was coming from other planet. But the most interesting of this story is that the supposed extraterrestrial gave a stone to
00:29:37
Speaker
to the witness with some signs in it. Some simple signs that later were interpreted like a Saturn, a circle, a line, et cetera. And that was the main subject of talking in debate
00:30:07
Speaker
in a cafe in Madrid for several years. La Valena Legri was that debate. That is the starting point of the mystery Umo. Maybe you know that
00:30:25
Speaker
Umo became an international of international fame. Exactly. I think it's fascinating because it's one of those huge UFO contact tea movements. I mean, at the moment I've been doing quite a lot of reading on the 1960s, 1970s.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I think what we fail to understand nowadays from a kind of fragmented approach in ufology is that what fundamental role these contactee movements had in earlier decades. And Umo was obviously a very, very big one. But yeah, so there was this individual who received the stone from a non-human entity. And what then had these,
00:31:11
Speaker
secretive meetings in a cafe with other individuals, but what happened then? How did this kick off the Umo story? My interpretation of that story is that the conversation about the stone, the symbolic interpretations of that
00:31:39
Speaker
the leader of those meetings, Fernando Sesma. Fernando Sesma was also a kind of a mystic character and contactee at the same time, who used to go to the outskirts of Madrid to look for signs of the presence of extraterrestrials in the trees, et cetera. Everything for him was
00:32:08
Speaker
symbolic of something, some intervention. My interpretation is that those funny, sometimes funny discussions in the meetings were taken for some clever character to make jokes with
00:32:32
Speaker
with Sesma and some of the other naive characters there. The main character in this sense is Hordampena. Hordampena played a double role. He presented himself in the meetings as a scientific and a skeptic mind.
00:32:59
Speaker
But we later discovered that behind this face was a trickster. He was playing with the people. He was obsessed with the control of public opinion. He made experiments with people. And maybe those experiments were going out of hand
00:33:28
Speaker
when his telephone calls and his letters and et cetera were going, being more popular and spread in Spain and after in abroad. Jack Ballet divulged that subject in one of his first book.
00:33:56
Speaker
related to the system of control, et cetera. Jourdan Peña then played that role of the experimenter, or he tried to be an experimenter, but actually the people like me who knew him, we interpret that he was an obsessed
00:34:26
Speaker
person obsessed with the control of the opinion of small groups. Finally, there was nothing really scientific in this endeavor. Maybe something psychopathologic, but of course, this had to be a psychologist to give a professional opinion about this.
The Umo Letters and Technological Ideals
00:34:50
Speaker
No, absolutely, but perhaps just to reiterate what Umo did,
00:34:56
Speaker
I think Umo claimed to be an alien race, if I understood correctly, right, at some point in orbit around Earth. And they claimed to communicate with various, you know, partly prominent individuals in Spanish society via both mail and even telephone calls. This was the distinctive
00:35:26
Speaker
trait of the Spanish contact in that time, it was a male contact. People received letters, letters and reports, scientific reports, that people like Antonio Rivera, who received several of them and others, they were scientists. So they interpreted that the level of scientific literacy of those
00:35:53
Speaker
letters were of enormous importance. There were scientific discoveries there. Well, the people who have studied later on the report say that it was just the level of what you could read in that time in the scientific magazines in the stands.
00:36:20
Speaker
But Hordam Pena, who was the author of that, recognized by himself years later in 1993 and 94, was a person with many interests. He had a background in psychology, although he was not a psychologist. But at the same time, he was well trained in physical sciences. So it was not difficult for him
00:36:50
Speaker
to make not only pretended scientific reports, but also reports about the utopian Umo society, the Umo planet. But a utopian society that when we read it from our time,
00:37:15
Speaker
It looks like a dystopia of the religious dictatorship of his time. So what were the desires expressed in that utopian view? After what kind of social models was it modeled? Was there anything fittingly distinctive in it? It was a scientific utopia, supposedly. Everything was controlled by science.
00:37:44
Speaker
and by gadgets. It was the Jorda Pena ideology. I mean, Jorda Pena was also obsessed with gadgets, you know. He was devoted also to parapsychology at the same time. So he plays also a double role in this sense, umphologies and parapsychologists. And always working with his gadgets to interpret paranormal phenomena, et cetera.
00:38:15
Speaker
Did he have any followers or was it kind of a formalized quasi-religious group or was it really just this slightly crazy individual going on this rampage and sending out letters? This was practically an individual endeavor by himself.
00:38:44
Speaker
But at the beginning, he utilized, he used a person or two people to just for some individual phenomenon. For example, the photographs of San Jose de Valderas. San Jose de Valderas is in the Oscars of Madrid. And in June 1st, 1967,
00:39:13
Speaker
some photographs arrive to the press, photographs of a very clear flying saucer with a sign of like an H or like a sign of the Cyrillic script in Russia. And those photographs we knew later
00:39:37
Speaker
that were prepared with the collaboration of a friend of him. Also, to send letters to the ufologists, because all the letters were received by a small group of ufologists or people related with the UFO subjects in Madrid, Barcelona, and some other cities, practically Spain, most of them.
00:40:06
Speaker
And these letters were sent, many of them, were sent by a girl who was used by Hordan Peña using a kind of religious sect that he created to manipulate a couple of women. So this is the dark side of Hordan Peña is the manipulation of people to his goals.
00:40:36
Speaker
But practically all the time, Ummo was his particular and individual obsession. Does Ummo still have any repercussions on Spanish ufology or when did it start to go away?
Persistence of Umo Myth Online
00:40:52
Speaker
You already mentioned that in 1993, he basically owned up to it being a fraud. But are there still people who... Is it still a subject of debate or has this died down?
00:41:03
Speaker
Well, it's funny that after Hordampinha was discovered, he had to admit and declare that he had been the author of the Umo subject. It's interesting that with the internet era after 1995, the subject was spreading more than ever.
00:41:28
Speaker
and new people starting researching or publishing or speculating about Umo. And in the last decade, several books have appeared with some of them trying to maintain the mystery of... Nojotampena was used by some extraterrestrial intelligence or
00:41:56
Speaker
intelligence agency or whatever. The speculation is free. And the internet is also a host of some web pages with documents and et cetera. So Umo in some ways is livelier than ever. When we knew perfectly critical people, we knew that there was nothing
00:42:30
Speaker
Again, what I think is sociologically really fascinating is that this idea of being in contact with non-human intelligences in previous decades was something that had sort of a social momentum behind it. So it was formalized in contactee groups, people would go on a mountain and try to
00:42:51
Speaker
conjure up these entities, much like in the early 20th century, late 19th century with seance and so on. It's just a different manifestation of the same topic. But these days, it's more fragmented. So you have the abduction phenomenon
00:43:09
Speaker
But it's mainly an individual phenomenon where people report being in contact with these entities. Often it's a violent encounter. It has nothing really to do with this.
00:43:22
Speaker
social aspect of conjuring up entities and being in direct contact with them at will. I think there are a few notable exceptions like you've probably heard of it as well the CE5 movement with Stephen Greer in the US who now claim that they can you know through various meditation techniques get in touch with different entities
00:43:48
Speaker
But largely, from my opinion, based on whatever I've read, I think the idea of being in contact with non-human intelligence has largely become an individual phenomenon. And I think this idea of fragmentation is something that now, as we enter the third period in Spanish ufology, is also something that is quite characteristic.
Decline of Contactee Movements and Ufology Crisis
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah. In fact, the time the movement, the contactive movement in Spain,
00:44:18
Speaker
The real contactive movement started in the 70s internationally as groups who used to make contact through Ouija boards or meditation, channeling, etc. receiving messages from higher levels of evolution, etc. I studied in my doctorate
00:44:48
Speaker
studies in cultural anthropology. I studied a group, a group at the land of Madrid, who was the most important and the most influential in the contactive movement in the 80s and 90s. I think they were very sincere in their looking for answers, individual and societal.
00:45:17
Speaker
answers to the evolution of mankind and individual evolution of the self. But finally, that movement disappears at the beginning of the 2000s. Perhaps in the wake of the crisis of the UFO charges and the contactive movement in general, because they said that they had
00:45:47
Speaker
achieved the goals they had. They achieved messages that completed, I think they are four books with messages from different extraterrestrial guides. Well, it's like a teaching in the personal evolution.
00:46:16
Speaker
And the most important for them is the evolution in the small group as a seed for a new humanity. Well, in the last two decades, the conducting movement practically has almost disappeared internationally. Also in Spain, perhaps we are seeing this atomization of the oophology
00:46:46
Speaker
I think ufology is in a crisis that we don't know if it is going to disappear or it will become something else. I said 30 years ago in my first book, Entru followers, cregientes y contactados, among contactees, believers and ufologists, I said that I was foreseen the future of ufology
00:47:15
Speaker
I said that probably ufology was being too disappeared in favor of studies in anthropology, sociology, in the sciences, human sciences mostly. And in the other side, the traditional ufology just linked to the professional media, et cetera. But the ufology, as we knew,
00:47:44
Speaker
in the 70s, a social movement of groups, of studies, publishing small magazines, that was disappearing. I think 30 years later, this is what we can see. In Spain, we have a forum composed by 100 people from different points of view. This is the most interesting is that this platform,
00:48:13
Speaker
Anomalist is composed of, for the first time, of people from the old skeptics, the scientific ufology, the media professionals, etc. And for the first time in Spain, there is a dialogue between these different groups.
00:48:40
Speaker
I am the moderator of this platform, so I can say good things about this. But I think ufology is a debate between different fields that has nothing to do with the old ufology.
00:49:00
Speaker
Indeed, so this atomization of different researchers with different interests, of people who've been abducted, who haven't been abducted, etc. Do you see anything in this third period that you said started in the 1980s, 1980, up until probably the present?
Alignment with European Trends in Ufology
00:49:21
Speaker
And do you see anything that's particularly Spanish?
00:49:25
Speaker
Or is it just that it's kind of the same as in the US? I'm just curious because in reading up on what was happening in Spain, to be honest, I found it quite difficult to find anything at all. I mean, there's also a language barrier and so on. But it always is the situation that ufology
00:49:50
Speaker
has and still is largely defined by currents in the U.S. And so I'm just wondering if there is anything nowadays distinctly Spanish happening with ufology in your country. I would say that the Spanish ufology, just to give a real name to this movement, is very in line with the European ufology.
00:50:18
Speaker
But you know that there is a big split between the American nephrology and the European nephrology in the last two decades. While the Americans have followed their pursuit of the extraterrestrial hypothesis by other means, the Europeans, we have taken advantage of our experience in the subject in a more objective and a skeptic view.
00:50:48
Speaker
but also in the human sciences. Well, particularly, I defend the idea that the UFO subject must be studied from anthropology, psychology, et cetera. And there is a field where I'm interested lately, that is the cognitive science of religion, for example, an inspiration for what our studies could be.
00:51:17
Speaker
that we could make science in human sciences, more or less. I mean, we can try to not only interpret the symbolism of the extraterrestrials in our time, but we can search how we can interpret the process of the formation of the UFO case from the perception
00:51:47
Speaker
the sighting, how the perception is altered by beliefs and the spirit and culture where the subject is. And how this goes to the media, et cetera, and the process of communication is very interesting to the creation of the UFO case.
00:52:16
Speaker
I think all these subjects offer us space to research in the next years.
Spanish Government's Stance on UFOs
00:52:26
Speaker
So since 2017, with the breaking of New York Times article on UFOs on the Nimitz encounter, et cetera, the role of government involvement, at least in the US, has taken a very prominent role in ufology on the debates surrounding UFOs. What is there, if at all, is there any opinion in the Spanish
00:52:56
Speaker
ufological community about what the government has to say about UFOs? Is there an official Spanish position by the government on UFOs? Or is that something that's lacking? Well, the person who has the experts in the subject of the official records and the official reports of
00:53:26
Speaker
sightings from the military, aviators, et cetera, is Bicente Juan by Esther Olmos. He has published a number of papers that he has also in academia that edu, like mines. All these documents are a register of the evolution of the Spanish position, the official Spanish position of the Ministry of Defense and the military.
00:53:56
Speaker
You know that the Spanish declassification of the secret of the UFOs was made at the beginning of the 90s. 1992 was this declaration. In a number of years, practically all official reports and cases have been disclosed. So they are published in the internet, etc.
00:54:25
Speaker
And I think the most rational investigators recognize that the Spanish government or the military has no interest already in maintaining any secrets or maintaining our research on the UFO subjects because they know that it's irrelevant until now in terms of security. So I don't understand all this mess
00:54:55
Speaker
in the American Congress, et cetera. The military know that there is nothing that has involved the national security or the security of our skies. And then, only since the year 90s, only a small sector of ufologists and journalists, professional journalists have made a mess of
00:55:23
Speaker
trying to, the conspiracy obsessions of some people maintain that there are still secrets, that they are colliding with by just at all most of the apologies or whatever to maintain a secret or the manipulation of the UFO cases. But all this is an absurd
00:55:52
Speaker
really the Spanish position is quite open in that moment.
00:55:57
Speaker
No, I agree. I mean, secrets sell well in the press and everyone likes a good secret. So I think that plays a big role in these conspiracy theories. But is the Spanish military saying, OK, there's no national security aspect to it, so we're not investigating it actively? I can kind of understand that. But are they at the same time saying that, OK, we have anomalous things happening
00:56:24
Speaker
But yeah, they're just not really of interest. Is that a fair characterization, or are they even saying, look, there's nothing to see here, there's no anomalies in We Can Detect? Well, a couple of people who studied objectively, they realized by yesterday Olmos, John Planner,
00:56:52
Speaker
another expert in the matter. And they realized that if we could say something about what military knew about the UFOs was that they knew less than the ufologist, no? And they had to ask sometime what the ufologist knew about that case or what was the interpretation of that. This collaboration between, by yesterday almost,
00:57:21
Speaker
and the military created in that time in the 90s all speculations of manipulation. Well, I think there is nothing of that sort. What we know is that the military knew absolutely nothing about the UFO subjects and this is why several cases
00:57:47
Speaker
They are still not interpreted, not explained because there is little information or there are conflicting hypotheses.
00:57:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's also, you know, kind of what came first, the chicken or the egg kind of thing, because if there's no national security aspect to the data, the military has absolutely no interest in engaging with it. And so it's, you know, the entire question of, Oh, why are they not engaging with it? Well, because they're not studying it is kind of a bit tautological, you know, it doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense. But yeah, very, very interesting. So
00:58:27
Speaker
To come to a conclusion then, where do you see personally, you've seen a lot of things, you've had a lot of experience in the field, where do you see ufology heading? You've already alluded to that your hypothesis 30 years ago, that your research becomes more and more fragmented, the community becomes more atomized has turned out to be true.
00:58:54
Speaker
Where do you see the next five to 10 years heading, especially with what's going on in the US?
Future of Ufology as a Field
00:59:02
Speaker
In the US, well, in the US it's difficult. I would like to do a field of research as a cultural anthropologist with anthropologists, you know, to know exactly what's the mentality of those, you know,
00:59:24
Speaker
still in the 70s, the groups like Mufon or Kufos were represented quite rational point of view. But in the last times, there is a, as I said, no, a split between the objective and the scientific follows here and those clubs and people like those influencing the
00:59:53
Speaker
the arrow subject, not that people who were behind the curtains to trying to manipulate the conclusions of the official study. Well, I don't think perhaps related that with the idea that the United States is a very religious country. This is something very strange for a democratic country.
01:00:22
Speaker
that there is no religious crisis in the United States. And I think this religious idea permeates the field of UFOs. They look for something with power and ever, have to say,
01:00:47
Speaker
Well, it's in a religious idea. The UFOs represent for them in some way a religious idea linked with their ideologies. I think this different evolution in Europe leads us to a different future. As I said, the difference between 30 years ago and now and in another 30 years, I think
01:01:17
Speaker
Ufology is going to disappear as a serious camp of studies. There will be, as I said, anthropologists, sociologists, et cetera, of the UFO beliefs of the 20th century, like spiritualism, something equivalent. Spiritualism was a very influential
01:01:43
Speaker
at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, came in crisis in the 20s and 30s. It's almost the same one century of difference. Devolution is similar to that of ufology. And then in the 30s, that people
01:02:08
Speaker
starting, the spiritualists started the contactive movement. They came from spiritualism. So the ufologists, 30 years on, maybe they will start a new movement of spirituality of other way. You know that UFOs have been always in the threshold of our knowledge. They were in Mars when our knowledge was in Mars, then in the stars.
Evolution of UFOs in Societal Understanding
01:02:38
Speaker
maybe in the future there will be in the mind or the threshold will be in the artificial intelligence and there there will be a mystery there will not be a UFO or maybe yes we don't know yeah i'm very glad i'm very glad you mentioned us i think it's absolutely true and fascinating at the same time that what we're seeing is kind of this
01:03:05
Speaker
way of human society is trying to grapple with the, you know, age old debate of how does materiality and consciousness intersect. And it is a big mystery. And it has taken different facets from fairy folklore to UFOs. And so only time will tell what other
01:03:29
Speaker
cultural guises, this exploration will take place. However, I would say that even though we're entering probably an era where digitization and artificial intelligence plays an ever-increasing role,
01:03:50
Speaker
The physical aspect of this enigma will still play a role to a certain extent, because I think this has always been the tension in ufology up to the present day. There is a perceived material aspect of it. People study debris. There are entire books on crash retrieval operations. But at the same time, there is this spiritualist idea that it's, you know, space brothers living on the outskirts of human knowledge.
01:04:18
Speaker
And so I think that if we look into the future, as my personal opinion, I think we will still have remnants of some sort of material mystery. But this idea that human consciousness and artificial intelligence, they will become more and more prominent. So that's at least my forecast. Definitely. I agree with you.
01:04:39
Speaker
Perfect. Well, it's been absolutely fascinating. Thanks a lot for taking the time today to give us an insight into a very fascinating social history of UFOs in Spain. Where can people find your work? I have two books published in 1993 and 2002. They said
01:05:05
Speaker
the social history of UFOs in Spain, that I put already in academia.edu. And another book, that is Obnies y Ciencia Sumanas, UFOs and Human Sciences. Those are in academia, just writing Ignacio Cabria Academia, you'll find it there. And I
01:05:32
Speaker
published in the last years, two other books, different. That is the cultural history of Uefors in Spain. It's a broader view from my first book. And the second is, Asi Creamus' Monsters. How we create monsters. When I dealt with another closed subject, that is the creation of the legends of monsters, from the monster of
01:06:02
Speaker
Loch Ness to Yeti, etc. It's also a cultural history and anthropology that I find very related to the creation of the UFO subject. Absolutely, yeah. I'll put a link to your academia page in the description of this episode.
01:06:25
Speaker
And yeah, and is there also a link to the group you mentioned where you are involved in a managerial role? You mentioned the... The forum, Anomalies, is a closed group by invitation. It's a group in Spanish, but there are people also from Brazil, Portugal and Italy
01:06:56
Speaker
participating. It's a form in Spanish, but the people who are collaborating in Spanish also can participate. And, well, if there are listeners who can read Spanish, we will be open to their participation also. Perfect. Great, Ignacio. Thanks a lot for your time today, and it would be great to have you on the show again at some point. Have a lovely Saturday. It was my pleasure to participate. Thanks, bye-bye.