Professor to Offer Course on UFOs at Duke University
November 27, 2018 (digitaljournal.com)
• David J. Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will teach a course early next year on “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth.” The course will be offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke University.
• As a professor of Judaic studies at UNC, Halperin’s specialty has been religious traditions of heavenly ascensions and otherworldly journeys. He has authored five books on Jewish mysticism and two on UFOs, both fiction and non-fiction. He claims that “UFOs are a myth,” emerging from the depths of our unconscious and bearing vital messages. “And myths are real,” says Halperin.
• The OLLI course will study the UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1966, the myth of the “Men in Black”, the experience of alien abduction, and the enigma of what happened near Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. The concluding session will analyze the new respectability that UFOs have attained since the 2016 election, and what it means.
• [Editor’s Note] The good news is that this could be a crack in the academic world’s refusal to treat UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence seriously, particularly at the university level. The bad news is that a religious devotee is teaching it from a theological point of view. Will this professor’s students walk away from the course believing that UFO’s are some sort of figment of the imagination in order to validate a narrow religious perspective? Or will it cast aside preconceived religious paradigms and view the extraterrestrial influence on earth as a reality with serious consequences to our civilization if we don’t wake up, accept the truth, and utilize our mass consciousness to protect our sovereignty as a species before it’s too late?
DURHAM, N.C. — David J. Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will teach a course early next year on “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth.” The course will be offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke University and will run from January 7 to March 25, 2019. All interested persons are welcome.
“UFOs are a myth,” says Halperin, “and myths are real.” Like collective dreams, they emerge from the depths of our unconscious, bearing vital messages for us. The question to ask of them is not “Where do UFOs come from?” or “How do they fly?” but “What do they mean?”—for us as individuals, as a culture, as a species.
Halperin was a teenage “UFOlogist” back in the 1960s. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1977, and from 1976 until his retirement in 2000 he taught Judaic studies in UNC’s Department of Religious Studies. His area of special interest has been religious traditions of heavenly ascensions and otherworldly journeys. He’s the author of five books on Jewish mysticism and messianism and a novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, published in 2011 by Viking Press and translated into Spanish, Italian, and German. His non-fiction book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO will be published in 2020 by Stanford University Press.
The OLLI course will begin with a case study: the supposed UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1966. It will explore the myth of the “Men in Black,” the experience of alien abduction, and the enigma of what happened near Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947. The concluding session will pause to notice the remarkable new respectability UFOs have attained since the 2016 election, and ask once more: what does it mean?
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