Living Legends. . - book review - Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live

Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. By Bill Ellis. University of Mississippi Press: Mississippi, 2001. ISBN 1-57806-325-6. 272 pp. Hardcover, $38.

Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, by Bill Ellis, reminds us that legends surround us, and much of the time we don't even know it. Ellis should know; he's an associate professor of English and American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. The book is divided into three parts. The first discusses the characteristics of legends: what makes a legend, when a legend is considered traditional or contemporary, and the different ways one can approach and analyze legends. The second section, tided "Life as Legend," examines a ghost seen at a Pizza Hut (!), a variant of the "vanishing hitchhiker" urban legend, and accounts of alien abductions as legend. "Legend as Life," the third and most fascinating section, discusses how people engage in ostension, the acting out of legends. This includes playacting horror campfire stories, ritualized teenage rite-of-passage trips to "haunted" sites, and, Ellis claims, even murder.

The first quarter of the book is at times technical and somewhat academic, as Ellis explores the finer points of legendmaking and narrative. Discussions of narrative structural theories and folkloric terms such as metonym and sjuzhet are unlikely to open many doors to those not familiar with folklore. Yet readers who allow themselves to be put off by the technical discussions will miss a good book.

In the third chapter, Ellis points out that though many people tend to think of urban (or, as Ellis prefers, "contemporary") legends as fairly recent, they can be quite old. One example is "The Gang Initiation," the subject of Jan Harold Brunvand's March/April 1995 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article "Lights Out: A Faxlore Phenomenon." In this legend, innocent people are killed as part of a horrific gang initiation (usually by a group of social outcasts). In the "Lights Out!" version, motorists were warned not to flash other cars whose lights are out. If they did, the helpful motorist would be followed to his or her destination and killed as part of a gang initiation. This version of the story began circulating in the early 1990s, but Ellis traces variants of this legend back to 63 B.C., having been around in ancient Rome. Only back then it was Christians who were the "gang," and the initiations were ritualized child sacrifices. These motifs linger to this day in legends surrounding satanic cults. Ellis's discussion i s lucid and fascinating.

Richard Dawkins's concept of memes comes up, and, though intrigued by the theory, Ellis chides Dawkins for not consulting folklorists in the development of his ideas. A chain letter Dawkins sees as an example of a "mind virus" Ellis regards instead as a legend. He writes, "I will from this point on call 'memes' by their proper name, which is folklore, and 'mind viruses' by the more objective and academically established name, which is 'contemporary legend'" (83).

Some of Ellis's analyses, though thorough, seem a little muddied and somewhat belabored. The eight pages he devotes to a transcription of an interview with a former manager of a supposedly haunted Pizza Hut, for example, seems excessive. I understand the need to read the comments in their proper narrative context, but it might have read better had it been presented as an appendix.

In chapter eight, "The Varieties of Alien Experience," Ellis examines the case of Whitley Strieber, a novelist who claimed to have had contact with aliens. Strieber wrote about them in his 1987 best seller, Communion, and Ellis examines the text from a folkloric perspective. Writes Ellis, "[I]t is difficult to see Strieber's account for exactly what it is, because many readers see the details he represents in the light of their own belief-languages" (142). He criticizes several reviews of Strieber's book, including one in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER by Ernest Taves (12[1] Fall 1987), in which he claims Taves dismisses Strieber as "either mentally ill or he is consciously perpetrating a hoax" (143).

A reading of the original review, however, tells a somewhat different story. Taves does not write that Strieber is either hoaxing or mentally ill. He writes that "we need to consider the possibility that the book is a hoax" (an appropriate and logical possibility given the book's fantastic story), and in fact Taves finishes his review with four hypotheses regarding Communion, the first two of which conclude that "Strieber's experiences are 'real.'" He does not favor them, but he does offer them to readers as possibilities. This flies in the face of Ellis's depiction of dogmatic skeptics who reject Strieber's narrative out of hand as a lie or delusion.

The real difference here is that Ellis is a folklorist, and Taves a psychiatrist. These are different approaches, with different standards of evidence. As Ellis himself notes (quoting a colleague), "The folklore scholar is fortunate inasmuch as he need not concern himself with the question of the existence or nonexistence of paranormal phenomena." From a folkloric point of view, urban legends are descriptive narratives and as such are neither correct nor incorrect. But at the point in which the legends (e.g., Strieber's claims) make verifiable, real-world claims, the skeptic is justified in taking the claims literally and investigating whether they occurred or not. Without proof, concluding that Strieber's experiences were "subjectively real" is fine, but it leads nowhere.