According to Jacques Vallee, the French-born astronomer and co-author (with Chris Aubeck) of the hypnotic new book “Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times,” these stories are important not only because they show that flying things have been capturing our imagination for centuries, but because of what they say about our most cherished beliefs and deepest fears. In the book, Vallee and Aubeck list 500 claims of sightings, in chronological order, between the years 1460 BC and 1879, and argue that the commonalities — references to light, round shapes, erratic flight and terror in the observer — offer us real insight into human behavior and our need to find explanation for things we cannot explain.

Salon spoke with Vallee from his home in San Francisco about our religious connection to UFOs, the controversy surrounding his own work — and our endless cultural obsession with flying objects.

Your book calls “alien contact” humankind’s oldest story. How so?

I’m not the only one saying that. If you look at the body of scholarship in anthropology and the history of religions, they talk about the idea that the soul is a human space capsule. Certainly the “Book of the Dead” in Egypt, the Bible, the writing of the mystics, in poems of ancient China, and the “Vedas” in India, the contact between man and creatures, entities, divinities, who travel from space is the main story. This includes humans traveling with them and humans being “abducted,” to use a modern term. There is a very rich literature exactly about that; it’s the oldest story.

Why is the idea of ancient UFO sightings a controversial one?

Most UFO believers believe the phenomenon began in 1947, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw several objects that he described as behaving like saucers skipping on water. And he saw them from his plane flying over Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington. And that was the beginning of the flying saucer era in the media.

I came to a point where I wondered when the phenomenon had begun, and I found a lot of material describing objects that seemed to behave the same way [as UFOs] and entities [resembling aliens] that dated back to the Middle Ages. At that time they were called angels or demons or leprechauns or elves or fairies and so on. So I published a book called “Passport to Magonia” that caused something of a scandal with the believers, because I was shaking that idea that UFOs were a recent phenomenon.

Why did you cut off your research at 1880?

We wanted to cut off the chronology at a point where the modern world hadn’t happened yet, ideally at the Industrial Revolution. And we couldn’t quite do that, but we got to 1879 which was a time when there were no dirigibles, no airplanes, no CIA, no Air Force, no SR-71s, no secret prototypes, no Area 51 and all of that. I mean, people could certainly be fooled by meteors and comets: They didn’t know what comets were; the Aurora Borealis hadn’t yet been explained. Some of the cases where people describe a serpent in the sky that destroys villages, we suspect, were tornadoes. But those are fairly easy to screen out. And what you’re left with is something very consistent from culture to culture.

What were those consistencies?

One of the things that resonates very well is that witnesses are thunderstruck, awestruck and puzzled. Again and again, they say, “I saw this and am reporting it to you, my Lord, but have no idea what it was and I wish someone would tell me.” That’s what you find in China, what you find in Medieval France and so on. The other thing that is striking is the objects behave in similar ways. They are seen for a fairly long time, not seconds but minutes or dozen of minutes or hours. In most of the cases, they are described as round and moving not on a continuous trajectory, but coming and going, landing in some cases and taking off again, giving off heat, suddenly giving off light of different colors.

Stephen Hawking has discounted reports of UFOs by suggesting they only appear to “cranks and weirdos?” Why don’t you think these ancient witnesses were just delusional?

Because delusions have their own pattern, and these don’t seem to fit them. A delusion is usually single-witness and there are many multiple-witness cases in the book. You also have authority figures, astronomers and well-known people making claims. You have Michelangelo seeing a triangle with three lights of different colors in the sky and making a painting of it. It’s staggering when you hear modern scientists saying only idiots and crazy people report UFOs. The consuls in ancient Rome made a law that they had to have an annual report on any unexplained aerial phenomena. They were not looking for UFOs, they were looking for astrological warnings of famines, or revolutions and wars and death of emperors and that type of thing. Many of them were copied by historians, and they have survived.

As you mention in the book, the Roman Catholic Church has traditionally been fascinated by these sightings. What’s the connection between mystical sightings such as Fatima and Guadalupe and the sightings of unexplained aerial objects?

Unexplained aerial phenomena have played a major role in the imagery of every major religion. Whether it’s Islam, the Bible or even Mormonism, with Angel Moroni appearing [to Joseph Smith and other early Mormons]. There’s a long and rich history of that imagery being linked to things in the sky or from the sky. When witnesses are confronted with the phenomenon, very often the reaction is one of awe and sometimes terror. Because the sightings seem to transcend our reality, they try to resolve their terror through reference to a spiritual or religious solution.

There was a case in the Air Force files in 1964 where the main witness was a highway patrolman from New Mexico and the Air Force asked Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was their scientific consultant and my mentor at the time, to go there to investigate. The patrolman asked to talk to a priest before he would talk to Dr. Hynek. That shows you, even now, people have that reaction.

When people are close to the phenomenon, whatever it is, their reality changes. I’ve had cases where people claimed that when the object came over their car they were driving north, but everything shows they were driving south. Given the perceptions I had at the time, they were sincere and they were truthful. It’s no wonder the closest witnesses would put things in a religious or mystical context.

That speaks directly to a key conclusion you make in the book, that all people interpret these phenomena in their own terms. Often, in the past, those terms were religious. Is there a typical interpretation for these encounters in modern times?

Well, if you go to your local library, you will probably find UFO books — sometimes including my own books — in science, or New Age, or occult, or in religion, next to books about apparitions of angels or apparitions of the devil and so on. The libraries and bookstores don’t quite know what to do with this subject. It will be interesting to see what they’ll do with this book.

You make some interesting distinctions in the book between sightings that can be labeled as myths, legends or hoaxes and those that cannot be easily explained away. Where did you draw the line?

When we didn’t have a date, where we couldn’t determine if there were comets or meteors, we excluded them. And then there were hoaxes, that took us a long time to track down, because some of them were really good. Then there were cases that were borderline, because they were describing something, but completely in a religious context. Even if there is a date, there is a witness and a description, we don’t have anything to say about things that are, from the beginning, in a religious context.

There seems to be a very common visceral reaction to the issue of UFOs, whether people believe in them or don’t believe them, the reaction tends to be fairly certain. Why do people have such strong reactions?

Especially in journalism, the typical reaction is ridicule. It’s a human reaction to ambiguity, because it’s a big challenge [to explain] and what people describe is, in many cases, terrifying. Given that you don’t have an explanation and there aren’t people doing really good research, humor is one way to react. The other way is to jump to some conclusion and become a believer. Or a skeptic, which is another form of irrational belief.

Just in time for Day of the Dead, we wanted to take a closer look at what this alternative funeral industry says about the way we perceive, commodify and experience that most potent of life’s mysteries: death.

“The funeral industry is changing,” said Nick Drobnis, founder and president of Angels Flight, the cremains-in-fireworks company. “More and more families are beginning to see final services as a way to gather together and celebrate their loved ones’ lives rather than to mourn their passing. They want to remember something beautiful, not a somber graveside event.”

These options detailed in this slide show aren’t cheap, but then neither is a traditional casket funeral, which runs about $4,000 at minimum. But cost aside, why would anyone take such bizarre measures? At first glance, shooting the dearly departed off in a firework, or wearing them as a piece of jewelry, may seem disrespectful, creepy, even unhealthy. But according to R. Benyamin Cirlin C.S.W, grief counselor and executive director of the Center for Loss and Renewal in New York City, these individualized funerary rites can be a helpful way of getting through the grieving process. “The major issue when anyone loses someone is really about maintaining a relationship with the memory of a person. If doing something creative with cremains is a way of doing that, well, that’s fine. It’s not about one particular thing. For someone who gets stuck this might be very useful.”

But doesn’t wearing someone around your neck, or using him as walking stick for your daily hike, prevent you from getting over the loss? According to Cirlin, the concept of “letting go” is actually a very harmful one. “There’s no need whatsoever to let go of the person’s memory if you are able to let go of hopes for life to be exactly as it was,” he says. “The well-known grief therapist term of ‘letting go’ or ‘closure’ is somewhat of a misnomer. It’s really about, how can you take the relationship of a loved one and have it inform your life, and still find a way to manage the pain of the loss of physical presence and still have an ongoing relationship?”

In light of Cirlin’s assertion that no two people deal with a loss the same way, the rise of these specialty products and services starts to make sense. Western funeral customs are quite limited and homogenous, especially given the rich, diverse history of death ritual across cultures. “There’s just a deeply unsatisfying feeling to burying or spreading the ashes, for some people,” Dean VandenBiesen of LifeGem says. “There’s a loneliness there that we think our products address.”

So are these products in fact healthier coping strategies for the grief of losing a loved one, or are they just plain weird? Click through to decide for yourself.

View the slide show

We recently spoke with Fishman over the phone from his home in Chicago about how America treats its seniors, the “Silicon Valley of aging” and whether immortality is really possible.

You have a section title in your book called “Why We Don’t Like Old People.” Do you really think we don’t?

I think it is true. In general, we don’t like them because for people who are not in late life yet, late life remains a mystery. And it’s a mystery fraught with danger. Lots of things start happening to people at age 60 and the people who are on the young side of that divide see those as frightening and threatening. But there’s also another divide: We think very differently about people in our own lives who are above that age than we do about the general population above that age.

There’s a notion that certain cultures do better by their elderly than we Americans do. You looked at this as a worldwide phenomenon. What did you conclude?

One of the really dumbfounding truths of the book is that very often the places that insist that they are the most loyal and faithful to their families are the places that do the most violence to them. As soon there are geographic distances, the things that once bound the family break up very rapidly. Almost all these very traditional places have driven down birthrates to among the lowest in the world. I think there’s a relationship between the mythologies — and expectations of people to be bound to their families — and the desperation to escape those bonds.

What do we mean when we use the word “old”?

That depends on who we are and the age we are. When I spoke to people late in their career, they were talking about people who were retired as old. Then the early retirees would talk about the less-active retirees as old. There’s ageism at every age. And it works in reverse, too. I was at a senior center where they were telling me about a dance where the 70-year-olds were dancing and a 90-year-old was on the balcony looking down. The senior center director said, “Why don’t you go join in.” And he goes, “Oh, those aren’t my people.”

As baby boomers start to approach the age of 65 in large numbers, do you foresee a civil rights movement for older adults, given that generation’s history of activism?

There might be a civil rights movement, but people won’t recognize it as a civil rights movement. They’ll see it as an economic turf war. When you get the resources of a society, you get the respect. You can see this in Europe right now, where the population is somewhat older than it is here. The debt crisis has really caused a huge and quick reckoning with the crisis in pension funding and hundreds of thousands of people are coming into the street. They made promises to themselves and now they find that they can’t keep those promises. In some ways, they’re battling their past selves.

But they feel like they are fighting a younger generation.

Yeah, I think that’s right. But in the long run the battle will not be for who gets what share of the public financing. It will be a more traditional civil rights issue, which is: Evaluate me on my abilities and my skills, not on my weaknesses. The older population is a hugely diverse one. If the image of an older person is going to be exclusively that of an enabled, sharp, cognitively with-it, older person who can work into their 70s and 80s, then we’re ignoring a huge part of the population that will need our help.

You call Sarasota, Fla., the Silicon Valley of aging. How so?

Sarasota is the oldest large metropolitan area in the United States. I wanted to see how a community works that has an age demographic profile today that the rest of the country will have in a few years to come. There are all kinds of businesses devoted to giving people in late life the very best, most active, challenging, pleasurable social life they could possibly have. And it’s not done for the older people, they are doing it for themselves too. They start endeavors to give their life new meaning. And all of these things are great tonics for longevity. But at the same time, a lot of the best things that happen to people in Sarasota happen to people who have means.

You argue that when wealthy nations started to age, that actually sped up globalization.

Right. Aging economies — Japan and Europe and the United States — are shopping the world for youth. The traditional workplace is changing to drive older people out — the cost of healthcare and pensions weighs very heavily on global companies — and places such as China have a population that it could send to the cities unburdened by age and the cost of age. Globalization really is a function of demographic change. When you go into beat-up, industrial towns you can feel it. You can see that older workers who used to be on the factory are now doing minimum-wage work at big-box stores on the edge of town. And then China has factories that contain tens of thousands of workers, without a single soul that’s over 25 years old. And you think, the only important thing about these workers is their youth.

Well, that brings us to the primary tension of the book. On the one hand, we humans have become very effective at prolonging life. On the other hand, these prolonged lives are placing pressures on our resources that will become critical. So the question is, which should win, our prolonged lives or the resources?

I think the hands-down winner there is longer life. Especially longer, healthier life. So if you add up all the misgivings we have about a society that has far more older people and the challenges of age and ageism, they don’t even compare to the gift of living longer and living healthier. This is what humankind has been devoted to since we could first mix a few herbs together. And we’re there. So our challenge is to apply this kind of brilliance to the result that we’ve created, which is being an older society.

Our life span averages have leaped in the past century, as you point out, and I wonder if you think there’s a point where we’ll hit a ceiling. Now that you’ve read the science, is there really a possibility for immortality?

I only read the science as a layman and I can only tell you who I trust, which is based on emotional signals as much as empirical ones. I do think maybe eventually we’ll be able to reengineer the human body so that it’s some mix of mechanization and biological miracle and we live forever. But in the lifetime of anybody who’s reading the book, I think there are big limits to the expansion of the human life span. Our genetic makeup is such that the genes that help us grow when we’re young tend to turn against us as we get old.

You show there might be some incremental ways to extend our own lives.

My absolute favorite finding in the whole book is the life-prolonging effects of Spanish ham and other nitrated meats. I can’t swear it’s true, but I want to believe it.

That’s your emotion getting in the way.

Right. Italians and Spaniards live a long life because they eat salami. I want to believe that. That would be a dream finding and there’s some evidence. I’m sure some day I’ll come upon contradictions, but I’m going with it for now. Actually, the truth is the things we do as individuals are important but they really pale in comparison to the social efforts we make on longevity, which are improving public health initiatives and literacy. Both of these things are such powerful prolongers of life. I think the other factor, which we haven’t done a super job with, is sociability. A lot of the world’s longest-living people live in places where society is very, very social and people can stay active and in social networks deep into old age.

That’s more important than antioxidants?

I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. But looking over all the places where longevity is more common, sociability is a telling characteristic. Antioxidants might be very promising, but this is the cycle of all promises of anti-aging — hype and debunking, hype, debunking. But we do know what the sure things are. Public health, sociability and literacy.

You created a list of how aging works in general, when the body breaks down, and you begin at the age of 30. Why so young?

Thirty is when some things in the body start changing. You can see this with professional athletes. There is a winnowing out at key ages.

How old are you?

I’m 52.

Where does that put you in this continuum of young to old?

I’m still young enough to deny a lot of things about old age. When I do look in the mirror I am shocked that I don’t look 15 years younger. But working on the book did make me pay attention to the ticks and tocks quite intensely. Now when I walk down the street I really do see a different unfolding of the people around me — about their ages. Actually, working on the book has confused me a little bit about how old I am. Once you start seeing it, you start having affinities with people at every age.

We have this ideal of aging gracefully. Your mother is in the book and she is a delightful representation of this ideal. What can you learn from your mother?

Well, my mom is on the lucky side of the dependency divide. She took care of my father, but he was ill and dependent for 16 years after a long and brilliant and vital career. She was his primary caregiver. She stayed upbeat, found purpose in his care and then when he died, she embraced life as fully as she could. When she was out with her friends in Chicago, she would say, “Look at us, aren’t we terrific? We’re in our 80s and we’re still going.” That’s a very wonderful woman to have as your mother.

How is she doing now?

She’s doing great. She’s nearly 84 and she’s getting on a plane to Italy tomorrow.

Dad believed – still believes – that he wrote the lyrics to “Lady Madonna,” which reached Number 4 on the Billboard Music Charts in 1968. “Believes” is actually too weak a word. He knows; he remembers. He says to strangers, “You know the Beatles stole my song, don’t you?” It is a fact to him, like his shoe size, like his hometown. This is a hallmark of his life, and my inheritance.

There were early signs that the claim was not, indeed, true. For example, my dad also says that he wrote the theme to the 1966 television show “Batman.” Mind you, he doesn’t read music, he only writes lyrics, and here are all the words to that song: Batman. He has claimed authorship of songs by Three Dog Night, Elvis and the Romantics. He also invented many things, he says, including wind surfing. I don’t believe any of that, but “Lady Madonna?” Maybe.

My dad says “Lady Madonna” is a song about his mother. About working to keep a family together as a single woman with five children. It’s about life’s never-ending grind, about each day flowing into another. All that fits my grandmother’s story. The song itself came at a transition time in the Beatles’ career, released right before they left Capitol to start Apple Records. It came out as a single but never appeared on any album, sandwiched awkwardly in the middle of their career. Was it possible my father wrote the song? Stranger things have happened. And because it seemed to cost me nothing, I let the threads of Dad’s story hold.

This proclivity to reserve judgment pervades my life. I am at once skeptical and credulous – a brain filled with opinions that are sharp but wavering, especially when confronted by someone else’s passionate belief. This is the direct result, I think, of having been raised by a man like my father. I either had to believe the world is filled with treachery and can’t be trusted or that the primary male figure in my life is delusional. I grew to realize those are not mutually exclusive.

But lately, at the age of 40, I have grown tired of magical thinking. Weary of a story that has pestered me for 30 years. And so I did what I probably needed to do years ago: I confronted my dad.

He lives near Branson, Mo., a Las Vegas for Christians and country music. Driving through you see theater, theater, buffet, theater, Walmart. Yakov Smirnoff, Oak Ridge Boys, Golden Corral, Presley’s Country Jubilee, “Noah the Musical.”

Off the main drag are the hollers and hills of an earlier Ozarks, where palatial estates are a quick minute from trailer homes. My dad lives in an apartment not too far from Table Rock Lake. He moved to the area from Denver 12 years ago to get away from a gambling problem and try to sell a country song he has worked on for 40 years.

He doesn’t stick out in a crowd, physically. Dad is 68, medium height and build. He slicks back his hair, now cloud white instead of jet black. He wears a thin white mustache, dress slacks and an oxford shirt, which gives him an air of credibility. But when he talks, everything changes. He’s got the rhythm and speed of a hustler. In fact, he is a salesman — he has sold everything from coffee to family portraits to neon signs. He sells advertisements for a restaurant guide these days and he’s good at it. As we drive through the hills of West Branson to the Strip, he says, “I didn’t know you were interested in this.”

“I want to know the truth,” I say.

“You know the truth, man,” he says.

“Well, tell it to me again.”

In late 1963, at the age of 21, Dad hitchhiked from Omaha to Downey, Calif., to live with his only sister. When he got there, it was clear he was not welcome, nor was his brother Bill, who had been hanging around for months. “So we stole a car and went to Oakland,” Dad tells me. “Well, it was your aunt’s car, so it wasn’t really stealing.”

When they got to Oakland, they needed money and, as my dad obsessively points out, Bill is lazy. So they did the obvious thing – started writing hit song lyrics to sell to major recording artists. According to my dad’s story this time (it’s rarely the same) they went on a most amazing run. “Lady Madonna,” “Eight Days a Week,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and others. They stayed in Oakland until the summer of 1964 and then Bill got restless. He asked my dad what he should do with the songs. Dad told him, “I don’t care — send them to the Beatles.” Bill hitchhiked back to Nebraska. He got nabbed for shoplifting there and was sent to jail for breaking the conditions of his probation. After serving a month in jail, Bill was assigned a parole officer he trusted. He gave his P.O. the original lyrics, because he thought they would be safe there and sent a set of copies to Capitol Records. The P.O. lost the originals. Bill corroborates much of this story. Then again, Bill believes he’s Elvis Presley’s cousin.

While Dad talks, my wife sits in the back seat and Googles the songs he mentions on her smart phone. There’s a problem, she texts me: “I Saw Her Standing There” was released in March of 1963. I’m not ready to bring this up yet.

We eat at McFarlain’s, a very good home-cooking restaurant in the IMAX Entertainment Complex on the Branson Strip. Dad skips to the part where he and Bill were together again, in another car of dubious ownership, when “Lady Madonna” came on the radio. It was early 1968. They heard the song and immediately knew it was theirs.

Dad tells me, “I said, ‘What did you do, Bill?’ ” This is an important part of the story for Dad: It’s all Bill’s fault. They found the closest record store and looked for the sheet music.

“That’s how I know they stole it,” Dad says. “Instead of saying McCartney and Lennon on it, it said Anonymous.”

As we drive back to his apartment, he mentions that the Beatles played “Lady Madonna” too fast; he had a slower song in mind. I realize, with excitement, that it never occurred to me to have him sing it – what was the tune he had in his head?

“Sing your version,” I say.

“Lady … Madonna … children at your … feet,” he sings. It’s the same tune, just much slower, and I’m a little disappointed.

When we get back to my dad’s apartment, I get up the nerve to tell him one of the songs he claims to have written came out before he moved to California.

“So they’re saying ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ came out in 1963?”

“No, they’re not saying it, Dad. It did come out in 1963.”

“That’s strange,” he says, his voice growing instantly sad or tired, I’m not sure which.

“Do you think you might be misremembering that song? Maybe you just wrote ‘Lady Madonna.’”

“I know I wrote it,” he says. “

“You must have written it before you left for California. If you wrote it, you must have sent it, not Bill.”

“No,” he says, quietly. “Bill sent them.”

“So, maybe you just don’t remember correctly.”

He’s silent.

“Dad? Maybe?”

He’s asleep.

I sit on the couch, staring at my wife, who is sitting on a kitchen chair about five feet away. We don’t talk. I think of a Christmas four years ago, when my father asked me a rare question.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.

“About the Beatles?”

“Yeah.”

I had a half-brother whom my dad adopted when he married my mom. They didn’t get along, and my brother didn’t speak with my dad for 20 years. In 2005, my brother took his life and I had to deliver the news to Dad. He didn’t cry, but he’s never mentioned him again. I am his only son and I guess I have been for years. If I don’t believe him, what does that mean?

But even though he didn’t write it, I also do believe him in a strange way. I believe that he believes this. He is lying, but he is also telling the truth. This happens: We become ensnared in our own myths. There’s always a little room, somewhere, for lies to live.

There was still room for me to believe it, too. The truth about this story hinged on one piece of evidence for me: the original sheet music. I decided to track it down, and if it said, “Anonymous,” why not trust my dad? After searching libraries, music shops, eBay and Craigslist, I found an autographed version of the original sheet music on an obscure website. The cost: $1,499, but there were multiple images, including one shot of the title page. I clicked on it. On the top right side of the page, it read:

By

JOHN LENNON and

PAUL McCARTNEY

Recently I watched “Nowhere Boy,” a movie about John Lennon growing up in Liverpool. He and my dad had similar childhoods. They were both raised without a father, both rebelled and did poorly in school, both obsessed about their mothers. Both created larger-than-life mythologies about their prowess as fighters and lovers and writers. It’s interesting how Lennon’s mythologies drove him to become a living legend: it fueled him to learn guitar and start a band with someone more talented than himself, someone who could actually write at the time. It fueled him through the media attention and the madness. But my father’s mythologies just left him aggrieved and disconnected, further from the rest of us, stuck in his own tales of loss and defeat, over and over again.

I wish my dad’s stories could have inspired him to do great things instead of simply believing he did them and feeling cheated. He should have done great things. He is a survivor. He is a good father in many ways. That’s why I held on to that story for so long, too — not just because I love him, or because I don’t want to disrupt his delusions. But because I wanted that greatness for him, too.

My father and I talk on the phone soon after I find the sheet music. He tells me about his old country song he’s still trying to sell and some children’s books he’s written. This is our usual pattern – he recites these projects each time, then he asks, “What do you think?”

And I say, “It’s good.”