When the reports of UFOs are surveyed broadly, they are seen to resemble stories from traditional folklore that have been recounted in cultures all over the world since time immemorial. Jacques Vallee illustrates this point with the following story from ninth-century France:
One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and a woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out they were magicians and were sent by Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, Charlemagne’s enemy, to destroy the French harvests. In vain the four innocents sought to vindicate themselves by saying that they were their own country-folk, and had been carried away a short time since by miraculous men who had shown them unheard of marvels, and had desired to give them an account of what they had seen. The frenzied populace … were on the point of casting them into the fire, when the worthy Agobard, Bishop of Lyons,… having heard the accusations of the people and the defense of the accused, gravely pronounced that both one and the other were false [JV, p. 19].
The story refers to the “miraculous men” as sylphs, a class of beings thought by Paracelsus to inhabit the earth’s atmosphere and to have the power of appearing or disappearing at will before humans.
In medieval folklore, such beings were thought to coexist with ordinary humans in this world and to inhabit invisible abodes, sometimes associated with lakes, mountains, or subterranean regions (EW). They were thought to interact with people in ways that were sometimes beneficial, sometimes sinister, and sometimes mischievous or trivial. Similar patterns of interaction are to be seen in the UFO literature.
According to the Vedic literature, interactions of this kind occur between humans and a variety of near-human beings, including Yakṣas, Kiṁpuruṣas , Rākṣasas, Vidyādharas, and Gandharvas. These beings occupy Bhū-maṇḍala, the lower planetary systems, and the upper system of Bhuvarloka. They are to be distinguished from the demigods and ṛṣis of Svargaloka and the higher planetary systems ranging up to Brahmaloka.
Such beings are frequently described in the Vedic literature as possessing aerial vehicles called vimānas. This is illustrated in the story of Śālva from Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. There it is described that a king named Śālva engaged in severe austerities to please Lord Śiva and thereby obtain an airplane that could be used to attack Kṛṣṇa’s city of Dvārakā. Lord Śiva granted the benediction and arranged for the airplane to be manufactured by the demon Maya Dānava, an inhabitant of the lower planetary system of Talātala in bila-svarga. The airplane is described as follows:
But still the airplane occupied by Śālva was very mysterious. It was so extraordinary that sometimes many airplanes would appear to be in the sky, and sometimes there were apparently none. Sometimes the plane was visible and sometimes not visible, and the warriors of the Yadu dynasty were puzzled about the whereabouts of the peculiar airplane. Sometimes they would see the airplane on the ground, sometimes flying in the sky, sometimes resting on the peak of a hill, and sometimes floating on the water. The wonderful airplane flew in the sky like a whirling firebrand-it was not steady even for a moment [KB, p. 649].
We can compare the appearance and disappearance of Śālva’s airplane with the “blinking on and off” of the UFO observed by the crew of the RB-47. The observers on the RB-47 also noted that their UFO sometimes generated two signals with different bearings on their electronic monitoring equipment.
We have argued that the domain of Maya Dānava can be reached only by higher-dimensional travel, and we suggest that even today, people of this earth may be interacting with beings originating from higher-dimensional regions of the universe. In Vedic times, people in general could directly see such phenomena as Śālva’s airplane. But they presumably had little direct access to Maya Dānava’s abode and could learn of the existence of such places only through hearing from higher authority. It can be suggested that we might be in a similar situation today.
In the Bhāgavatam it is described that the inhabitants of Maya Dānava’s abode have excellent material facilities, including cities with beautiful architecture and attractive gardens. There is no fear of the passage of time there because the distinction between day and night does not exist. The inhabitants are highly atheistic and materialistic. They are expert in various mystic powers and are free from disease and old age. However, they must all meet eventual death in accordance with the strict arrangement of the Supreme Personality of Godhead (SB 5.24.10-14).
The Vedic literature describes the universe as having a hierarchical organization, with a graded series of domains occupied by beings with different levels of consciousness. As we described in Section 4.a, these domains can be divided into the lower, middle, and upper worlds, whose inhabitants are characterized by the respective modes of ignorance, passion, and goodness. Beyond the material world lies the transcendental domain of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, which is characterized by pure goodness (viśuddha-sattva).
Given this hierarchical structure, one would expect interactions between humans and higher beings to be characterized by a variety of psychological modes, ranging from ignorance up to pure goodness. This seems to be the case, and it is interesting to note that cases of interaction on an apparently higher, sattvic level provide some of the best-attested evidence for the existence of higher beings and realms.
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