Encounters With The Fantastic: The Transformative UFO Paradigm (1995)

Encounters With The Fantastic: The Transformative UFO Paradigm

Presented by SMiles Lewis to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference at UC Berkeley in 1995.

In 1995 I traveled to the University of California, Berkeley, to present a paper to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference. I’d never spoken in front of a large audience at that time, and while it wasn’t a huge crowd, I was incredibly nervous. I even made a joke about this before I began speed-reading my essay. Each presenter was only allotted 20 minutes and I wanted to be sure to finish everything I’d written. The presentation was well received and I thankfully was able to obtain audio recordings of the talks. Below you will find links to the original raw audio recording as well as a recently “enhanced” version. Among the audience members of anthropologists and other attendees were my then new friends, Robert Larson and Greg Bishop – two of the 3 co-founders of the Excluded Middle magazine. They’d driven up from Los Angeles to see me speak. After my presentation they drove me around the San Francisco area – you can see a photo of us below sitting in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

During this time period, I was prone to making audio-video mashups on VHS tape. Some of these ended up airing on ACTV / ACAC (Austin Access Austin Community Access Cable / Austin Community TeleVision). Since I had the audio of my and other presenters talks from that Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference, I made such a mashup using the Chariots of the Gods (film) as the video base, adding the lecture talks as well as some background music. Sometimes the music is a bit overpowering but, there you go. You can watch that video below.

You can also read the abstract and the essay in its entirety below.

– SMiles Lewis