Borderlands
Author: Mike Dash
reviewed by Theresa Welsh
True tales of the strange, from UFOs to religious apparitions to monsters and fairies;
Mike Dash walks a line between objectivity and skepticism.
Mike Dash tries to do lot in Borderlands and I applaud his attempts to be objective and
look for the common threads among a huge collection of reports of unexplainable experiences. He
succeeds in this to a great extent, but the skeptic part of him seems to be mainly in control.
He searches for explanations for UFO abductions, Near Death Experiences (NDE), visions of the
Virgin Mary, and the Loch Ness Monster that do not call for these to be physically “real.” By
looking at phenomena over a long historical period, he traces the influence of culture on how
people interpret what they see or experience. Ghosts from the Middle Ages were sometimes flaming,
having come from Purgatory while ghosts of a later period were more likely to be wearing white
robes. Fairies once rode horse or flew with wings on their backs, but Dash tells us of more
recent appearances of wee folk who drove wee cars or even flew a wee airplane.
He attempts to carry this cultural influence idea into the Near Death Experience (NDE),
noting that what people see in the afterlife seems to be a product of what their culture says
it should be. This is where I found myself in the biggest disagreement with the author.
Of course the afterlife is what people expect it to be! If our soul or spirit creates its
own reality in the spirit world, then there will be great variety in what souls experience
after death. Read my review of Robert Murray’s The Stars Still Shine. Michael,
the spirit whose story the book is about, encounters a Middle Ages burg in which all the
spirits are living as they did during their time on earth. This “spirits make their own reality”
theme shows up in other writings as well and easily explains the disparity found by Dash,
who also noted another thing that reminded me of Murray’s book. He says both reports from NDEs
and people taken aboard UFOs report rooms or spaces that are much bigger inside than they looked
to be from the outside. In Murray’s book, Sonny Bono is setting up a restaurant, but the
building he is using is too small; he is told by his architects that the outside dimensions
don’t matter -- the inside can be as large as he wants. So he creates a spacious restaurant in
an outwardly small building.
Cultural influences are also at work in the manifestations of mediums. The spewing of ectoplasm
and rattling of tables and levitating of people and objects seems to have gone out if style.
While there are many known cases of fraud in the séances of old, that does not invalidate the
idea of communication with spirits. The “cultural” explanations are always going to be there,
but they do not answer the question as to whether the phenomena is real. The brain has to process
visual information into something understandable (it has to be like something we already
know about), so interpretations of visual stimuli vary with culture. But because someone in
the middle ages sees a “comet” in the sky and someone in the late nineteenth century sees an
“airship” and now we see “space ships” only means they have described something in terms
meaningful to them.
Dash explores a theory that some people are “fantasy-prone” and their sightings of angels,
aliens, or monsters are hallucinations they have mistaken for reality. He tells us about
research into the hazy period before sleep (“hypnagogic” state) and how scenes can be vivid
and mistaken for reality. He discusses research into the unreliability of witnesses and how
expectations shape what we see, but even Dash does not think these kinds of explanations can
cover everything. His book is saved from being just another debunking rant by his careful
consideration of all the phenomena he examines and the way he always drags himself back to
those stories that don’t fit the simpler explanations. He leaves a lot of these events in the
“unexplained” category, with a willingness to acknowledge that we just don’t know what they are.
He takes apart a number of cases that seem good, showing how witnesses actually disagreed or
had motivation to say what they did. He is particularly hard on the Loch Ness monster believers,
reducing the known sighting and pictures to a few that might be credible but probably aren’t.
He is ambiguous about UFOs and covers the topic only superficially. His best contribution on
UFO discussion is showing how eyewitness testimony can be influenced by expectations and how
multiple witness events can be contaminated by witnesses talking with each other before they
talk with a researcher. Sometimes the stories from the past that seem solid turn out to have
been repeated and embellished over time. He also is not convinced that there is such a thing a
s a “trained observer” since there are many instances of pilots mistaking the moon or Venus
for a UFO.
I was especially intrigued by his discussion of religious phenomena, including visions,
stigmata, bleeding statues, and blood that liquefies. He reviews the visions of Mary at
Fatima in 1917, showing how the three desperately poor children who saw her would have
motivation to “see” such a vision and enjoy the notoriety it brought them. There was
supposedly a “miracle of the sun” where the sun seemed to move around in the sky, but
according to Dash, not everyone saw it. The famous “three secrets” which have since become
a target of conspiracy theories, kept the Fatima story of interest to the public for all
these years. Dash suggests there was no real reason to keep any of the “secrets” from the
public for so long other than to heighten the mystery and keep Sister Lucia, who was one
of the three children, as a celebrity of sorts. He says her own mother once called her a “liar.”
Dash is similarly disparaging of the appearance of Mary to Bernadette, which he also discusses,
along with numerous other sightings of Mary. The vision which appeared to Bernadette told
her “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This was remarkable because the church had just
decreed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (this is the doctrine that Mary was
conceived without sin) and this utterance coming so close after the pronouncement by the
Church seemed a bit too tidy, especially since Bernadette was insisting Mary wanted an
expensive chapel built on the site.
In addition to religious visions, he also discusses the stigmata, in which the wounds of
Jesus appear on believers’ hands and feet. The stigmata originated with St Francis of Assisi
in 1224. He notes that the wounds of early stigmatists were on the palms of the hands until
more recent times when it was discovered that the nails used to crucify offenders in Roman
times were actually put through the wrists; once this was known, the wounds began appearing
on the wrists. He says one of the most famous of those with the stigmata, Therese Neumann,
was widely considered a fake. He does not attempt to explain a more interesting phenomenon
of Neumann -- that she apparently did not need to eat! Dash postulates a combination of
suggestiveness, culture, and fakery to account for the stigmata. He also tells us those
who have it suffer from extremely low self-esteem and he compares them to people who
deliberately cut themselves, apparently through self-hatred. In many cases, stigmatists
have been found to have inflicted the wounds on themselves.
Dash is not disbelieving in everything out of the ordinary. He feels that Fortean “showers of
animals” are real and there is no explanation. He pretty much rejects the explanations that
have been put forth by others; for example, that these fish and frogs that rain down fall
from airplanes or waterspouts. There are enough well-documented cases, complete with the
physical evidence, to show frogs really do fall from the sky and they don’t come from airplanes.
He also finds “out of place animals” to be a real phenomenon. Dash is English and many of his
examples are from England. He tells us about many sightings of large cats in areas of Britain
where they should not be. In many cases, the cats have been captured, proving their reality.
But other animals are seen by witnesses but never captured, and some sightings prove to be just
unreliable stories, like the “lion” who turned out to be someone’s pet, a large orange tabby.
These stories had a personal ring; a few years back there were multiple sightings of a large
panther in the area where I live. Stories about sightings were on the nightly news for months,
but the beast was never captured, then the sightings ended.
Many of these strange phenomenon involve our deepest fears. The “men in black” appearances
which involve menacing-looking figures wearing black hats who interact with those they visit,
delivering frightening threats. He ties this in to other “flaps” where a kind of shared
hysteria sweeps a geographical area and involves authority figures threatening honest citizens.
In England, there was a series of stories of social workers coming in pairs to peoples’ houses
and threatening to take away their children; this caused panic among parents, even though no
actual cases of children being taken away could be found. He also recounts flaps involving the
belief that children were being taken and used in Satanic rituals. In one case, a prolonged
police investigation into allegations of Satanic practices with children turned up nothing.
One can add to this the McMartin Day Care case in which the owners and attendants at the
center were said to have carried out the most terrible and bizarre abuses on the children
in their care. A three-year trial produced no convictions. Are these mass scares just
manifestations of deep-seated fears?
After a long look at many kinds of strange phenomenon, the book leaves us with only a few
new ideas about what might be happening. Dash does not make a case that UFOs, for instance,
are not physically real. I doubt that he thought could accomplish that anyhow, nor was it
his purpose. There are simply too many UFO reports of too many types to be able to sweep
them all away by saying they are culturally-induced hallucinations. I think he wanted to
show the possible connectedness of these events and provide some insight into possible
explanations. He deliberately includes many of the most bizarre incidents that you don’t
find in other books that are written to convince the reader of the reality of a type of
phenomena. If you want to take an honest look at what goes on in the “borderlands,”
you must consider the lady who saw a giant shrimp in her basement along with someone who
had a classic abduction by a “gray” aboard a silvery space ship. There are many strange
stories in the “borderlands” and the lady who saw the scary shrimp was frightened enough
to move away.
We cannot simply dismiss such people as “crazies.” Like Mike Dash, I would like to know
why some people see these things. Could these entities be from other realities that sometimes
break through into ours? If they are from the spirit world, they could represent our hopes
and fears manifested through culturally understandable forms. Other parallel universes might
contain entities that are different from our world and if they have a way to break through
the barrier between our realities, they might appear in bizarre forms to us. This is just
speculation on my part. We know there are hoaxes (and Dash gives us some great stories about
hoaxes for us to ponder), but it also seems certain that people who see aliens and monsters
are not always making it up. The question which remains unanswered is this: are these
manifestations “real?” The question leads you back into an examination of reality itself
and you end up no wiser than before, unless having more questions is a type of wisdom.
Borderlands is a good round-up of the strange and unexplained, covering much more
territory than any other book I’ve read. It is well-written, full of interesting examples,
and the author remains objective enough to make you feel like it is still your own call as
to how you choose to interpret these stories of strange and seemingly impossible events.
Buy Borderlands at Amazon.com.
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