As has been alluded to before, the term ”ultraterrestrial” originates from the works of Jacques Vallee. In Passport to Magonia Vallee presents the case that UFO sightings and encounters with alleged aliens are in fact merely a new form of an ancient phenomena. This phenomena has taken different forms across the millenia, appearing to humanity in forms that fit their cultural context. In ancient times people would report contacts with angels, demons, elves and spirits (youkai!) and literal flying ships.
The advent of the technological age seemed to change the way the phenomena manifested. People started seeing things that seemed to be just out of reach of current technological capabilities. First it was mysterious airships which were seen in great numbers in the late 19th century. Then it became strange aircraft, ”foo fighters” and ”ghost rockets”. Then came the flying saucers, and then the black triangles, then the drone-like ”tic-tacs”.
It should be noted that this phenomenon has never quite fully adhered to this pattern. The reports of strange glowing orbs, monsters and spirits never went fully away, and people probably report these more than ever before in known human history. Conversely, one can find reports of ”flying shields” from the Roman era, and the earliest recorded instance of an anomalous flying black triangle is from the 19th century. There have also been reports of objects and entities that completely defy any cultural expectation and human understanding, from entities looking like metallic broccoli to flying objects that looked like a haphazard collection of metal pipes fused together. At times the phenomena also mimics humans or human constructs such as airplanes, helicopters or even cars. These ”humans” or ”aircraft” or ”cars” never look quite right though.
The phenomena treats humans in ambivalent ways. Sometimes people have transformative spiritual experiences or even become healed of injuries or chronic illnesses after such encounters. Sometimes people who come in contact with the phenomenon have nightmarish experiences. They might get harassed or tortured. Sometimes people end up injured, sometimes it appears to not necessarily have been malicious but rather a side-effect of being exposed to something that radiates great amounts of thermal or ionizing radiation. Sometimes deaths and disappearances are associated with the phenomena. Sometimes the phenomena shows strange interest in human sexuality. Sometimes this manifests in more sinister forms, sperm or eggs are simply taken intrusively. Sometimes this manifests as a romance that can become a lifelong obsession. And often, the experience is just baffling, nothing good or bad per say happens and the experiencer is simply left confused over the numinous encounter. Such themes repeat themselves throughout human history in surprisingly similar ways.
Origins of the ultraterrestrial hypothesis
Vallee became interested in ufology after witnessings tapes containing anomalous recordings getting destroyed in an observatory he was working in. Initially, he tried to explain the phenomena as ”nuts and bolts” spacecrafts of extraterrestrial visitors, but something happened to change his mind. He started to see the phenomena as being endemic to Earth, and that these ultraterrestrials as he was now calling them came from some kind of a parallel reality. Vallee's knowledge of European folklore could have contributed to this change of perspective. The titular ”Magonia” of his book is a place in French medieval folklore, a realm high above the clouds. Fearsome thunder-mages would occasionally descend from there on flying ships.
Around the same time, the American journalist John Keel, who had become interested in the UFO phenomena, was coming to very similar conclusions. Keel had started tracking the phenomena, and soon noted that it correlated strongly with other kinds of paranormal phenomena such as reports of poltergeists, hauntings, extrasensory perception, prophetic dreams, cryptid sightings and so on. He himself reported many strange occurences during his investigations, and also adopted the term ”ultraterrestrial”.
It's also of note that the initially very sceptical UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek eventually started believing not only in the reality of the phenomenon, but also that it was of non-extraterrestrial origin. In 1973 he explicitly stated that ”The physical plane is not the only level of existence. The hermeticists speak of an 'astral plane.' The spiritists talk about materializations ... ghosts that go through walls.” The very explicit reference to Western esoteric thought here is quite fascinating.
Since its inception, the ultraterrestrial hypothesis has had a mixed reception. Many find the idea of some kind of an ”ultraterrestrial” parallel dimension existing very difficult to accept, and if one is willing to accept the reality of the UFO phenomena (many aren't), the extraterrestrial hypothesis is much easier to accept within the materialist, scientific paradigms. However, the defenders of the hypothesis point out that many UFO reports contain absolutely baffling elements such as reports of telepathy, associations with cryptids and behaviours that are hard to explain for technological devices or biological life. The ultraterrestrial hypothesis indeed seems to have won quite a bit of ground in modern times, as people are more aware of the stranger side of UFO encounters and their connections with other anomalous phenomena. Sadly this has of course also manifested in the typically Western way of seeing everything numinous that is not explicitly Christian as ”demonic”.
Keel had a very dismal view of the phenomena, seeing it as manipulative and reinforcing erroneous belief systems. Vallee had a more mixed view, pointing out that the phenomena's later tendency of adapting manifestations that hint at future technology might be an attempt at provoking humans to advance their own technology. It should indeed be noted that the history of humanity is full of spirits and deities that inspired human development and culture. The cult of Thoth in Egypt conducted one of the first systematic attempts at information-gathering which Hermeticism inherited, alchemy manifested and material science, chemistry and physics perfected. The Taoists keenly observed the world, developed technologies that were phenomenally advanced for their time. Kekule dreamt of Ouroboros and made one of the most significant discoveries in organic chemistry. Niels Bohr placed the yin-yang on his coat of arms, seeing something similar in the quantum physics he was doing and Taoism. Seymour Cray, inventor of the supercomputer would dig tunnels beneath his house and get ideas from ”elves” while there. And it's probably not a coincidence that there is a statue of Shiva at CERN or that the Japanese chose Kamioka as the site for their neutrino detector.
Evil tricksters or something else?
Both Vallee and Keel thought that the phenomena could intentionally change its appearance. However, Western philosophy, cognitive science and esotericism hadn't in the 1970s quite yet caught up to the extent that human perception consists of projection. Therefore, the phenomena might not be choosing its appearance out of its own volition, but perhaps it has to use the contents of human cultural patterns, expectations and perception as the construction material of its manifestations. This of course opens up the unpleasant possibility that certain parties who would be in the know could try to manipulate the public perception in order to make the phenomena manifest in more negative, frightening ways...
But even without external manipulation, I have to admit, there appears to be a side to the phenomenon that is hostile to humans, or at least very aggressively territorial of its surroundings. After all, many of these beings might be the spirits of specific places such as forests or mountains. Nonetheless, reports of demons, spirit entities hostile to humanity, are as ancient as humanity itself. But so are reports of beneficial, helpful entities. Even more there seem to be entities that are of ambivalent nature or simply inscrutable. Thinking that they all are hostile is simply not the way to go.
And if they would at large have something against humanity, it's not hard to think about reasons why. By the 1950s when the ”ufonauts” started making dramatic appearances and delivering pleas of peace of ecological conservation, humanity had been through two devastating global wars and was well on its way to deplete Earth of its resources and to spoil all of the biosphere with pollution and the noosphere with pain and hate.
The detonation of nuclear devices would have also drawn great attention. They would have sent reverberations throughout the astral just by the force of their cultural impact alone, let alone the fact that they are a borderline impossible constructs, requiring exquisite finesse in order to turn nature against itself in the most destructive alchemical operation humanity has ever devised. Every successful nuclear device is a magical working of immense potency. Humanity casually detonated hundreds of such in a pathetic dick-measuring contest during the Cold War era ”nuclear tests”. The chemical composition of the very Earth itself was changed via radioactive fallout. It's not unreasonable to think that such would attract some negative attention!
The moon landings would have been another landmark event that would have been very much noticed by the denizens of the astral world. It's absolutely not a coincidence that the successful NASA program was named after ancient deities. While I don't know what the ultimate meaning behind sending out the surrogates of a Sun god (Apollo) to meet the Moon was, it's no doubt one of the greatest, if not the greatest large-scale ritual that humanity has conducted. Such an endeavour would have required the blessing of the higher powers invoked as identification is communion. The fate of the Soviet efforts are quite telling of what happens when no such approval is sought. Their brilliant rocket engineer Sergei Korolev died a most disgraceful death via complications of a hemorrhoid surgery. His inept successor developed a rocket that failed to take the Soviets to the moon, but resulted in the largest non-nuclear detonation ever recorded.
It really is just spirits, isn't it?
Things indeed start to click into place if one simply goes back to the past and labels the ultraterrestrials as our ancestors would have – spirits. Deities, elves, angels, demons, elementals, monsters, kami, youkai... The parallel dimension where they live then becomes the ”spirit world” and the mechanism of interaction with humanity becomes indeed that ”astral plane” that the hermeticists spoke of. The mechanisms of changing appearance become exactly the same as how ”egregores” change their manifestations.
There is much evidence to suggest that what we perceive to be spirits and the ultraterrestrials are one and the same. There have been reports of people successfully banishing what have appeared to be ”aliens” with prayers, just as people have banished unwanted spirits with prayers and rituals throughout the ages. The menagerie of paranormal events that follow each other is something that is well-reported among the occultists, who very commonly think that rituals in itself attract all kinds of astral entities and energies.
Power spots manifest spiritual experiences, extrasensory phenomena, UFOs and reports of ghosts of monsters precisely because there is something in them that makes it easier for spirit phenomena to manifest. At the same time, things like telepathy, apportations or the ability to influence or manifest events in uncanny ways are not restricted to just these weird ”fluctuations” of the spirit world, these strange apparitions, these ”youkai”. Humans have been also reported to be capable of such. This too makes sense, if you keep in mind that we also are spirits.
This of course doesn't entirely discount the idea of ”extraterrestrials” either. The idea of planetary intelligences and spirits is very well established in spirituality, religion and magic, after all. As we do not know if the spirit world is subject to the laws of physics the same way material reality is, something of such power as the nuclear detonations and the Apollo ritual might have caused reverberations in the spirit world that could have reached other inhabited worlds, truly alien intelligences at superluminal or instantaneous speed...
Spirits indeed seem to be quite able to travel from place to place. Some are probably more bound to certain places than others, and some can appear everywhere on Earth. Somehow, the possibility of spirits using the internet to spread awareness of them, creating links, in a sense using it for travel has gone largely unexplored. There seems to be some ideas within the occult circles that modern electromagnetic devices harm spirits, and that might be part of it...but what if they can also utilize them? Such would certainly contribute to popular intuitions about the internet being ”haunted” or ”full of demons”...
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Now that we have established that spirits exist and adjust themselves to human cultural perceptions, let's look at what kind of inhabitants of the spirit world might have found their way into Touhou.
