In 2001, Paulist Press published as part of its “Classics of Western Spirituality” series a volume of Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings, translated by me and with an introduction that provided the first biography of Cardozo since 1707, the year after his death. Cardozo (1627-1706) was a magus, theologian, and cult leader, brought up in Spain as a Catholic and converted to his ancestral Judaism in his 20s.  He was also a “Sabbatian,” a follower of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, with a distinct wrinkle: Cardozo thought he was also a Messiah, partner to Sabbatai in his redemptive w ..read more

“Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945?” the august New York Times demanded in a headline last January 13.  The newspaper’s answer, based on a respectful interview with UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, is a qualified yes. On the basis of the brilliant, meticulous investigative research of Douglas Dean Johnson, published on the web this past month, it ought to have been a thundering NO!!! The second edition of Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris’s “Trinity.” The extraordinary fact, of the nation’s “newspaper of record” endorsing such a wild–and, it turns out, baseless–claim, is a cultural datum of the gre ..read more

She was 13 when she, her brother, and a neighbor boy were overflown at close range by a flying triangle.  She was 16 when the UFO appeared in her dreams, and drew her and her mother together before it drove them apart.  Her name is Bella Clarke and she’s a forensic investigator, a woman devoted to science, reason and the “preponderance of evidence.” In her scientific world, how does a UFO fit in? Ezekiel’s vision, by Matthaeus Merian (from Wikimedia Commons). “As I was among the captives by the River Chebar … I saw visions of God.” Bella and I explored these questions together on “Cl ..read more

First there was one–the Chinese balloon first tracked over Alaska, making news as it drifted over Montana, then finally shot down off the coast of South Carolina.  Now there seem to have been three more, genuine “unidentified flying objects” since they were airborne and we don’t know what they were or what they were doing in the skies of North America.  Not “UFOs,” however, in the sense that the word has acquired. The balloon over Montana, 2023 (photo by Chase Doak, at Wikimedia Commons). Probably not.  Almost certainly not.  But General Glen VanHerck won’t rule it out, and ..read more

“When Scott Lerner returned from Israel, he stayed in a YMCA.  He did not particularly want to stay in a YMCA, but he had no good alternative. … Once he had friends in this town, but that was three years ago.  In between had come the war, in between had come the oil embargo.  He did not know how many of his friends were still here.  He did not know how many were still his friends.” Scenes from the Yom Kippur War – include Egyptian soldiers raising a portrait of then-President Anwar Sadat, an Israeli soldier praying beside his tank. From Wikimedia Commons. I wrote these line ..read more

(This is the conclusion of a two-part series.  For the first part, click here.) To say that the Sabbatai Zevi messianic movement of the 17th century was a personality cult would be an understatement.  It was surely a great deal more than that–just what, historians are still debating–but Sabbatai Zevi’s highly distinctive, not to say weird, personality lay at its center.  Without him, the rest wouldn’t have been possible. Abraham Cardozo: the ablest and most independent-minded of Sabbatai Zevi’s defenders. (My translation of a selection from his writings, published by Paulist Pre ..read more

“Tell me, dunce: are you quite certain you will have a blessed afterlife for believing, without any sign or miracle, in a man insane?  Who perpetrated, moreover, one lawless act after another?  In Izmir, for example, he spoke the sacred Name of God in the city streets; he taught the rabble and the children to do the same; he smashed his way into a synagogue on the Sabbath day to kill the rabbis who did not believe in him. … He offered Passover sacrifice outside the Temple, ate its forbidden fat, and made his companions eat as well. … He cavorted with attractive married women.” — Rabb ..read more

(This is the second part of a two-part post.  For part 1, click here.) Barbara Cerminara is a psychotherapist in Norwich, England.  Her perspective is heavily Jungian.  She’s Jewish and Italian, and her family bears the collective tragedy of  twentieth-century European Jewry: in 1944, her grandfather was deported from Florence with his brother and their aged mother.  All three perished in Auschwitz. “International Journal of Jungian Studies.” Cerminara’s article “The Jewish Complex, Whose Complex Is It? A Relational Perspective” appeared in the latest issue of the Inte ..read more

Call this a preliminary report, sketching out lines of research I want to pursue. On the evening of November 1, I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting with a wonderful class of graduate students taught by my colleague, Professor Yaakov Ariel of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The course was on “Religion and Race,” specifically in America, and I was there to talk about UFOs. Joy DeGruy, “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.” More exactly, about my views on the role of the African slave experience in shaping the myth of alien abduction as we’ve come to know it in the late t ..read more

Ralph Blumenthal.  The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack.  High Road Books, 2021. (For the first part of this post, click here.) Ralph Blumenthal, “The Believer.” “It is also possible that some of the affective energy which is displaced onto the UFO controversy derives from the unconscious concern with death and immortality … that for some of those who vehemently defend the extraterrestrial hypothesis it symbolically represents a denial of the finite nature of life.  On the other hand, those who have a need to deny that there is any anxiety a ..read more