Ufology and H.P. Lovecraft

I’ve recently run across a group of blogs, like this one, which investigate the modern phenomena of UFO sightings in a frank and interesting way. But the whole fascination with aliens of the slanty-eyed, big-headed, Little Green Men variety seems misguided. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind as much as the next guy, and the whole stellar jam session vibe was fine, but it all seemed a bit too cute and fuzzy for me.

If indeed there are aliens “out there” (and judging by what we are starting to know about the plethora of planets “out there”, it seems likely), they are probably so far away as to be irrelevant. And if they aren’t, it may be a cause for concern. For any creature or being capable of travelling through the interstellar wilds is going to be trouble. They would be, in all likelyhood, horrifying, mind-bendingly weird and well beyond the grasp of the humble human psyche. Unimaginably monstrous.

This was the view of the neo-Victorian weird and horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft. Through his famous Cthulhu Mythos stories written in the 1920s and 30s, Lovecraft developed a cosmology involving ancient alien gods with eternal and ageless lives awaiting a cosmic alignment of some sort to come out of their long, sluggish slumbers and drive everyone mad. There was Cthulhu, with his hundreds of tentacles, essentially looking like a giant upright standing cuttlefish, who slept under the ocean in the ancient ruins of the great city of R’lyeh. Other less famous Lovecraftian creations include Nyalarthotep, a being of pure chaos, and many more lovable ones to boot.

Lovecraft was ahead of the curve. Years before the discovery of the planet (or whatever…) Pluto, Lovecraft, then a young man, wrote a letter to Scientific American about the importance of searching for a Planet X beyond the orbit of the known outer planets. Pluto became Yuggoth in Lovecraft’s tales, tales which dealt with the unknown and unnameable. In his bizarrely wordy Anglophilic manner, he attempted to describe the indescribable.

What Lovecraft tried to capture in his writing was a feeling. It was the momentary sense of being truly insignificant one gets when contemplating the vast, unending, dark and eternal universe out there. His is an exploration of human frailty in the face of the truly, transcendentally malevolent.

These days, UFO sightings and reports of alien encounters always have the sharp, clean air of scientific precision and objectivity. Either that or a post-psychedelic Raelianesque quality — picture lots of blond people in little silver outfits stroking crystals (or each other) and waiting for the big orgy in the sky. Lovecraft, admittedly a bit of a prude, might have had a better take on the real event of alien contact. In his short story “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) strange lights from the sky make people very, very mad. Not just a bit loopy, but catatonic. Some of Lovecraft’s other forays into this realm are even more disturbing and mind-bending…

The point is, the universe out there is a very big and probably very inconceivable place. We should be happy that most UFO sightings turn out to be pretty fraudulent or lame. I, for one, am perfectly happy that the Old Ones don’t make their presence felt openly. We’re better off, believe me…