JELLYFISHES, SQUIDS, AND AMOEBAS
The first report that I am aware of dates back to July 2003, where a man reported seeing two "jellyfish" shaped UFOs over the skies of Northamptonshire in the United Kingdom. This was reported in the Internet version of the local newspaper. Nothing particular came out of it.
Then, in November 2007, in Kent (again in the United Kingdom), several witnesses saw three objects having the shape of a jellyfish. The ufological website ufoinfo.com has a short report on this sighting. Although this sighting was recorded into an ufological website, ufologists did not appear to have pay much attention to it.
In January 2008, in the now famous Stephenville, Texas, a witness saw something looking like a jellyfish. This was recorded as part of the Stephenville UFO wave, but beyond that it does not appear that it attracted any special attention.
In October 2008, near the town of Empire in Ohio, a truck driver saw a very large UFO that he qualified of "organic":
"When I saw it, I was trying to take everything in and that's immediately what I thought when I saw it - that it was organic. That's the feeling that I got. I didn't think it could be anything else. It just came across as something organic."
A few days later, in the town of Midvale, Ohio, another witness had a very similar sighting that was qualified this time as looking like a giant amoeba. The conjunction of these two sightings attracted the attention of a few ufologists, particularly Steve Hammons who reported on them on the Internet.
Once again in the United Kingdom, an octopus-shaped UFO was sighted in Lincolnshire in January 2009. According to the witness, the sighting started with a ball of light:
"John Harrison, a resident of nearby Saltfleetby, said he looked out of his window on Saturday night to see "a massive ball of light," and "tentacles going right down to the ground" over the site. "It was huge" he said "At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles - it looked just like an octopus."
This story acquired some momentum in the British and American press as the UFO was at first blamed for destroying a windmill turbine. However, it appears that if the witnesses saw the UFO in the same vicinity of the windmill turbine, they never saw the UFO touching the windmill turbine. This time, the organic UFOs "insisted" enough to be noticed.
Steve Hammons wrote another interesting article where he is asking if indeed there is a new trend emerging in the ufological scene, in a web article posted in February 2009.
PARASOCIOLOGICAL LOOK AT THE ORGANIC TREND
The limited interest shown so far by the ETH ufologists on this issue is not at all surprising. These UFOs sightings are challenging directly the technicist "nuts-and-bolts" fundamental assumption of ETH ufology. The mutation from flying saucers to other shapes, particularly the triangular one, could be accommodated by ETH ufologists, as we are still dealing with what appears to be manufactured crafts. But jellyfishes! This is more akin to crypto-exo-zoology! From a purely sociological perspective, it will be interesting to see how long they will continue to ignore them, and then how the ETH ufologists will integrate these sightings into their narrative (while protecting the "nuts-and-bolt" core storyline).
There is another sighting that needs to be mentioned here because it is likely to be ignored by ufologists, as it is most likely a fake. An octopus-shaped UFO was observed and filmed in Brazil in April 2009. The fake nature of this sighting should not lead us to ignore it, quite to the contrary.
From a parasociological standpoint, this is significant because a fake is used to imitate the new trend in UFO shapes. As Batcheldor (1984) and other parapsychologists have found, real psi effects are oftentimes accompanied with trickery, to unconsciously boost the belief in their reality so that the phenomena can continue to occur. This is a common practice among shamans (Heath 2004), and a key feature of the Trickster archetypical dimension of the paranormal, brilliantly described by Hansen (2001). It is not to say that the individuals who orchestrated the fake were consciously thinking along those lines. Instead, one should see this event as an illustration of the collective unconscious in action (i.e. taking a sociological standpoint rather than a psychological one). The fact that someone, somewhere, felt compelled to use new shared knowledge about UFO and to make it into a fake sighting, highlights that such shared knowledge resonates at an unconscious level too. The verification of this hypothesis can be done by the emergence elsewhere of other fakes taking the biological form of the new trend (which will truly make these sighting as social facts, as defined by the founder of sociology 'Emile Durkheim).
This new trend is also fascinating because it represents a gradual shift from the "nuts-and-bolt" UFOs, rather than a radical mutation. If we are to follow M'eheust's (1978) approach to the UFO phenomenon, then we should look in the recent past to see if the biological trend in the Sci Fi literature was significant. There is an interesting blog on this issue, which considers that "Science fiction isn't just about rocket ships and ray guns. Many science fiction books, movies and TV shows are based on the biological sciences. This blog discusses cloning, genetic engineering, mutant monsters, longevity treatments and all the other biology behind the fiction."
One can also think of Canadian David Cronenberg's films on the theme of horror-biological sci fi that he produced since the early 1970s. As well, there has been a number of books published on this issue, like Leonard Issacs' Darwin to double helix : the biological theme in science fiction, published in 1977 (London: Butterworths). Clearly, this is not a new issue, but how significant it is?
This is quite difficult to assess. Certainly, environmental issues are more prominent now than before, mostly because governments and large enterprises have now officially espoused the "green turn" in most Western countries. Is the "greening" of UFOs, by way of biological shapes, a sign of time? Are we entering a liminal zone where great advances in genetic engineering are now clearly on sight, but not yet a reality? And that the worries about their danger had time to "cook" since the early 1970s, thus translating into a hybrid high tech-organic shape, for which organic UFOs represent an ideal compromise? These are interesting questions and hypotheses to explore, but a more solid methodological framework to explore them is required.
Another issue to keep an eye on is whether the close encounter narrative will also mutate, as discussed in a previous post. Will the "aliens" coming from the organic UFOs be different from the "nuts-and-bolts" aliens? Historically, UFO sightings have preceded reports of close encounters by a few years. This appears logical as people and ETH ufologists' unconscious need some time to process the information at a deep mystical level. For that to happen, however, I think that a full-fledge organic UFO wave (i.e. many sightings over a limited geographical area over a few days or weeks, duly reported and ridiculed by the mainstream press) will be first required to get the ETH ufologists engaged in "nurturing" this aspect of the phenomenon.
