Mothership Connection

Nathan Connolly:
And now, it’s time for something completely different. The last interview I wanted to share with you comes from the show Close Encounters: UFOs in American History. In it, historian Stephen C. Finley explains a unique, the little known UFO tradition. This is one of those segments I almost always talk about when people ask me, “What exactly do you do on BackStory?” Now, I love this segment, because it’s a great example of how black knowledge and black futurism represent an important and little known expression of sci-fi culture in post World War II America. You can hear the energy between us as we talk about the larger question of UFOs and their existence, and really pose big questions about evidence, archive, and how we know what we think we know.

Nathan Connolly:
Ed, Brian, citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to claim the pyramids, partying on the mothership.

Stephen C. Finley:
Party on, Nathan. Thank you.

Nathan Connolly:
Those are actually the lyrics from a 1975 Parliament concept album, Mothership Connection, and according to our next guest, it had some heavenly inspiration.

Stephen C. Finley:
George Clinton said that he and Bootsy Collins were on the way from a concert, when they encountered what he describes as a UFO.

Nathan Connolly:
This is Louisiana State University scholar, Stephen Finley.

Stephen C. Finley:
When they were brought back to themselves, it was several hours later.

Nathan Connolly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephen C. Finley:
Right? And their watches weren’t working, right? They were stuck a few hours early, and knowing that he and Bootsy Collins are musicians, George Clinton is really clear to note that they were not drinking, and they were not under the influence of substances, right? And he’s really clear about that, because he’s serious about this, and he wants to be taken seriously.

Nathan Connolly:
Clinton isn’t the only famous black musician to describe this kind of experience. Charlamagne tha God, Prodigy, and poet and jazz musician Sun Ra, claim to have had close encounters as well.

Stephen C. Finley:
Sun Ra also claims to have made sort of a trip to have been taken somewhere, which for him, was near Saturn. For a Sun Ra, black people are a part of this angel race, which is cosmic. As with many of these groups, blackness sort of is the originary state of the universe.

Nathan Connolly:
Finley says this idea of cosmic blackness is not just found in celebrity narratives. Texas-based twin sisters Earlene and Shurlene Wallace described being taken in the 1990s, by friendly aliens called Galactics.

Stephen C. Finley:
But when you get them to describe the Galactics, they say that the Galactics appeared to them as beautiful black women.

Nathan Connolly:
He says these stories collectively form a distinct and separate African American UFO experience, one that’s often left out of mainstream ufology, or the study of UFOs. Now, most of the narratives share similarities. They’re often tied to religion and spirituality, the aliens are usually black, and evoke Africa or a symbolic homeland.

Stephen C. Finley:
There are certain things that I see that show up in the narratives of African Americans who have claimed to have had UFO experiences, or what others might call abductions, including not using terms like abduction, that’s not an African American UFO tradition term, for example.

Nathan Connolly:
So what are some of the component parts of those narratives? If they’re not talking about abductions for instance, what are some of the words that they are using?

Stephen C. Finley:
So for Earlene and Shurlene, i.e. the UFO Twins, they used the term trip, and they mean that in a positive way because in the African American UFO tradition, these accounts are not seen as adversarial or terrifying. In fact, they’re almost universally described as friendly, and that’s one of the primary differences between the African American accounts and the white ones, which are always, almost always terrifying, right? The scenes of abduction and-

Nathan Connolly:
Experimentation.

Stephen C. Finley:
Experimentation, sexual surgeries, all those kinds of things, you don’t find those in the black accounts.

Nathan Connolly:
Now, I have to ask this, is that perhaps because the African American tradition also includes actual abductions, mass abductions, experimentations, certainly violations of one’s sexual autonomy by way of the Middle Passage and the slave trade, is your sense of these narratives about unidentified flying objects, are in a way, a departure from what’s already a set of dominant themes within African American history?

Stephen C. Finley:
You’re making the same connection that some scholars, including myself, make. Think about Africa during the slave trade and all of a sudden, here come these beings from these ships who have come across the ocean, and all of a sudden, they capture you and whisk you away to a new land where you become the alien other. And so, it could be that that’s one of the reasons why these narratives get described the way they do, but the other reason is because these UFO traditions are also closely related to black supernatural traditions.

Nathan Connolly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephen C. Finley:
For African Americans, generally, the supernatural isn’t spooky, right? Ancestors hang around, they help us, they participate and break into this reality in sort of a regular way.

Nathan Connolly:
So it’s possible then what you have are a set of ideas about paranormal activity that African Americans, that African descended people, certainly different peoples on the continent itself already have a language for describing, and that by the time you get to the 20th century, the language about becomes part of that tradition. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Stephen C. Finley:
Well, yeah, that’s part of what I’m suggesting. I mean, this is how traditionally African Americans and Africans engage the world. I mean, the supernatural isn’t something so holy other and spooky, it’s a part of the sort of natural metaphysics. I mean, it is part of the real world, right? And so, there’s not this, again to use the term holy other, that the supernatural is this realm that’s so distinctly different from this one, it’s all part of the world in which we live.

Nathan Connolly:
Well, give me an example of an early account of an African American encounter with a UFO.

Stephen C. Finley:
Well, what I’ll give you is what I think is the most famous one. So the Nation of Islam starts around 1930. It’s unclear that they’re talking about UFOs that early, but by the early 1950s, they clearly are. One of ways then that UFO show up in one of the present iterations of the Nation of Islam under Minister Louis Farrakhan, is that on September 17th, 1985, he claims to have been taken into what he calls the Mother Wheel, an identified flying object, and those are his words. This vehicle came down and there were three lights from it, and took him into that particular vehicle, where he says he encountered his former leader, Elijah Muhammad, inside the craft. And so, that account is really important for the Nation of Islam. One cannot properly understand the Nation of Islam without giving serious theoretical attention to the role that UFOs play in the religion.

Nathan Connolly:
And part of the power of these narratives is that they’re actually based in religious texts and holy texts, correct? It’s not just about science fiction literature, or even Cold War era science fiction television, but that there is actually a biblical basis for many of these narratives that African Americans are sharing.

Stephen C. Finley:
There is, but I also think it’s all of that. I also do think that it’s science, it’s science fiction, it’s biblical texts, and then I would say that they’re either used to sort of inaugurate what I call a sense of transcendent blackness, or to deconstruct notions of race.

Nathan Connolly:
Right, right. Now, this is really an important point because so much of what in the mainstream society gives blackness meaning is of course, people of African descent encounter with the institution of slavery, with Jim Crow, with different forms of racism, that there’s a relationship between the way that African Americans form their identities as human beings and as communities, and the realities of discrimination. And by using the phrase transcendent blackness, you’re actually talking about a kind of blackness that derives its meaning outside of the parameters of white racism. Is that correct?

Stephen C. Finley:
You got it. I mean, I don’t even have to explain it. You’ve clearly said it.

Nathan Connolly:
Okay.

Stephen C. Finley:
And so, it seems to me that part of why that’s so significant is because the world is seen as so completely and almost totalizingly anti-black, that the structures here cannot support anything but anti-blackness. And so what do they do? They look out into the heavens to give them a sense of meaning in the concrete world, right? In a way that allows them to reenvision who they are, to empower themselves in a world that they see as against them, as negating, as anti-black, and so on. So it’s all about this world, but the other world, and the imagination, and the narratives, and the symbols gives them the strength and power to live in this world.

Nathan Connolly:
Stephen C. Finley is a religious scholar in African and African American studies at Louisiana State University.

Nathan Connolly:
That’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me in this look back at some of my favorite moments from BackStory. I’d love to know what you thought of these segments, or what some of your favorite BackStory moments have been. You’ll find us at backstoryradiodot.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio.

Nathan Connolly:
Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 10:
Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities, and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.