Regions of Untamed Thought: An Interview with Olga Drenda

olga_drenda_az181206_002_3_-2.jpg, default, Regions of Untamed Thought: An Interview with Olga Drenda, Olga Drenda, 2018, photo: Albert Zawada/Agencja Gazeta, center, #000000

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Why don’t UFOs come to Poland as much as they did in the last decades of the 20th century? How does folklore help expose contemporary conspiracy theories? We spoke about aliens in Polish culture, the explosion of paranormal phenomena around the time of the transformation, and urban legends with Olga Drenda – a writer and cultural anthropologist.

Patryk Zakrzewski: I hope this conversation won’t trigger unpleasant flashbacks for me, because as a child, the thing that scared me the most about paranormal phenomena was that UFOs would kidnap me and experiment on me...

Olga Drenda: Was it influenced by a specific story or film?

PZ: I do not remember exactly whether it started with this, but I was watching the television programme 'Na Każdy Temat' (On Every Topic), hosted by Mariusz Szczygieł, and on it there were people saying that aliens had conducted research on them as well as inserted implants inside of them.

OD: I should rewatch that episode. That show, by the way, captures the spirit of the era very well. It showed various peculiarities – an attempt to satisfy the curiosity people had back then about the world. The deeper I dig into the press and television programmes of the early 1990s, the more I see that people were very curious about everything that was different. Paranormal phenomena were no exception.

Thumbnail — Mariusz Szczygieł for the show 'Na każdy temat', 2000, photo: Rafał Meszka / Studio69 / Forum

PZ: A popular opinion among ufologists claimed that the hyperactivity of unidentified flying objects over Polish skies preceded breakthrough historical events: 1956, 1968, 1980. Now we also are living during interesting times, but nothing... Why, in your opinion, are UFOs no longer coming to Poland?

OD: This is a global trend; there has been a marked decrease in the number of UFO reports worldwide. This is most often explained by a higher image recording quality. With digital technology, satellite images, and modern cameras, UFOs fell off the radar. A large part of the fascination with paranormal phenomena was due to the fact that one could add a lot to a blurred photograph. This applies not only to UFOs, but also to Nessie and Bigfoot.

Indeed, the largest wave of sightings in Poland of Unidentified Flying Objects, including the infamous one in Emilcin, took place in 1978. It was an important moment in Polish history; the end of the Gierek era, the election of the Pope, and just before the rise of Solidarity. Let us not forget, however, that Poland wasn’t completely isolated from global trends. Especially in the 1970s, reports from Western correspondents were available, so the average citizen was able to stay up to date with the phenomena being discussed around the world, including the post-hippie interest in paranormal phenomena. Also, it was not only UFOs that had their moment.

Lucyna Winnicka w filmie "Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny", reżyseria: Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1957, fot. Studio Filmowe Kadr / Filmoteka Narodowa/www.fototeka.fn.org.pl — Lucyna Winnicka in 'The Real End of the Great War', directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1957, photo: Andrzej Gronau/Studio Filmowe Kadr / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

Lucyna Winnicka founded the Academy of Life, where she taught about alternative medicine. She also published reports about healers in Przekroj. In his memoirs from the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, Miron Białoszewski mentioned how his friends, including the famous esotericist Lech Emfazy Stefanski, became interested in yoga and attended meetings with the healer Clive Harris.

PZ: I was surprised by the scale of these meetings after seeing photos – they were huge, mass events.

OD: Yes, and interestingly enough, these events were often organised in churches. Today priests explain it by saying that they trusted the wrong people, but back then it was treated more as part of a spiritual awakening of society. It was the time of papal pilgrimages, among other things, so people had a need for great spiritual experiences, regardless of where they came from. Besides, the specificity of all Polish esotericism is that it does not conflict with the Catholic faith. A fascinating study on this subject was conducted by Dorota Hall.

PZ: And has this memory of UFOs and other supernatural phenomena been repressed because it’s considered an embarrassing memory of a time when we were too irrational, naïve, and open to strangeness?

OD: I disagree. Look at how many magazines on divination or paranormal phenomena there are on newsstands, aimed at different audiences: for regulars at esoteric fairs, as well as for readers who just want to read incredible stories. It is quite common to believe in the power of candles or the power of crystals, all the things I remember from the 1990s.

There is great interest in natural medicine and, finally, in what exploded during the pandemic, namely belief in various conspiracy theories. I think the focus has moved in a completely different direction and UFOs have gone out of fashion, but the category of shame because of your own naivety is completely out of place here. When someone claims to see such extraordinary things, it is usually correlated with a sense of knowing more and being a more astute observer of reality – researchers at Mainz University have done some very interesting research on this.

PZ: Or perhaps we needed these cosmic civilisations to act as a mirror in which we could see our own human faults? In Andrzej Kondratiuk’s film ‘Big Bang’, which tells the story of a UFO landing in a village in Mazovia, the aliens leave the message: ‘People, come to your senses’. Also, in the accounts of people who claimed to have had contact with aliens, the aliens left them a message for humanity, e.g., to end the arms race and to destroy nuclear arsenals.

OD: Here we can see an analogy with apparitions, which also increase during important historical moments. For example, just before the thaw of 1956 there were many Marian apparitions.

Screenshot of Jan Wolski on TV, speaking about what he saw, photo: Youtube

Still, the most interesting thread regarding an actual human seems to be the ufological debate that developed around Emilcin after many years. A revealing book by Bartosz Rdułtowski came out, in which he claimed that the whole intervention of the ufologist Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar was a hoax. It claimed that the ufologist put the witness of the alien landing, Jan Wolski, under hypnosis and that he omitted many facts to create a version of events that suited him. Blania-Bolnar's supporters hammered the book. Tadeusz Baranowski, a famous comic book writer who participated in a research expedition to Emilcin at the time, strongly objected to such an interpretation of events. For my own purposes, I prefer to assume that Wolski came in contact with a UFO – it may not be true, but I like the story very much.

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UFO Monument in Emilcin, photo: Monkpress / East News

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PZ: Ufological themes then began to resonate strongly in pop culture. Even the kind-hearted Edmund Niziurski wrote ‘Tajemnica Dzikiego Uroczyska’ (The Mystery of the Wild Sacred Spot) about a young boy who meets a cosmic civilisation, and Zbigniew Nienacki wrote ‘Pan Samochodzik i Człowiek z UFO’ (Mister Automobile and the Man from the UFO).

OD: Books by Lucjan Znicz, a journalist who popularised the topic of Unidentified Flying Objects, also had great reach. This entered pop culture very quickly. Grzegorz Rosiński, the creator of Thorgal, drew a comic book called Przybysze (Newcomers) about an incident in Emilcin, printed in the magazine Relax. Bogusław Polch drew comic strips from the Gods from Outer Space series, based on Däniken's ‘paleo-contact’ and ancient astronauts hypotheses. These stories hit a fertile ground; after all, those were the times of Star Wars and the expansion of New Adventure Cinema.

PZ: It is interesting to see how these cosmic fascinations have changed. In the days of sputniks and the moon landing, the universe was of common interest to people, but from a scientific perspective. At the time, Tyrmand wrote in his journal that space rockets had entered the repertoire of café conversations. After, people started exploring the dark secrets of space, spotting UFOs, but these were not niche phenomena either. The ‘UFO Video’ Warsaw UFO Research Society operated at the Museum of Technology, and ‘Przekrój’, ‘Ekspres Reporterów’ and ‘Skrzydlata Polska’ wrote about alien encounters. I have the impression that today, space no longer moves the mass imagination as much as it did then.

OD: This is an interesting twist, because actually the space race is still going on, although in a largely privatised manner. However, it seems to me that today Elon Musk's Martian projects are not treated as utopian ideas and the potential salvation of civilisation, but as castles in the air and the whims of a millionaire.

Sometimes there are still reports in the press like ‘NASA expert confirms: We have come across traces of an extraterrestrial civilisation’, only they no longer elicit the sensation of the past. It is not something that has its own mythology. Other mythologies concerning supernatural phenomena have taken over, such as reptilians.

Certainly, parahistorical programmes such as Ancient Aliens are popular, so perhaps people are now more interested in palaeoastronautics, the world of alternative histories from the past. Such as Däniken’s rather embarrassing theory about Great Lechia. It's a similar mode of thinking; there was a great civilisation, the memory of which has been eradicated, but we know the truth. From the same root come attempts to relativise the age of the Earth; the search for archaeological evidence to prove that the Earth is much younger.

People who promote such theories do not question science as such; they do not use the language of fairy tales or myths, but are convinced that they are the representatives of real science. We often know such people personally, but in conversation it turns out that we are living in parallel worlds. It is as if we lived on different planets: we have a different timeline, different space, different history, a different belief in the origin of various phenomena. This is interesting, but also dangerous, because when such theories get into the hands of a charismatic manipulator, the danger of a sect or an apocalyptic political-religious movement can quickly get out of control in such a person’s hands.

PZ: In one of your texts, you mentioned a phrase from Christopher Hitchens, who claimed that conspiracy theories are the ‘exhaust fumes of democracy’.

OD: In my opinion, this is a region of untamed thought; a situation in which the circulation of information takes on a life of its own. And you don't need the internet for that. A very useful science for researching and explaining conspiracy theories are folkloristics. We often have to deal with clichés that the folklorist knows by heart – they already appeared in the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century.

There was an exhibition on this subject at the Museum of Art in Łódź entitled, The Earth is Flat Again. It’s about how the world of conspiracy theories is easily discredited as irrational or thought to be superstition; but in this world, an alternative world of science is created. It is parascience, of course, which has nothing to do with science based on verifiability, for its aim is different: to create the largest theories of everything possible, which would bind everything together into a seemingly logical whole. The rhetoric used by conspiracy theories is analogous to scientific language; it uses terms from Latin and Greek, it refers to the discoveries of physics and chemistry, but most often starting from a true premise, it reinterprets it by combining it with other false theories – so that a Theory of Everything is created.

The most important link with the world of science, however, is that also in the world of conspiracy theories there are experts. This is not the type of knowledge that prides itself on being based ‘on a simpleton’s reasoning’. When the first theories emerged questioning the existence of coronavirus, who propagated them? A doctor who was allegedly silenced in the States for telling the truth about coronavirus. It is a classic conspiracy theory scenario: a renegade who opposes the great Babylon, a lone avenger, a fighter for the truth. You don't have to be a folklorist here – it's enough to watch science fiction films to notice this thread. For this reason alone, it should arouse our suspicion. But there is one catch: conspiracy theories also stem from an excess of suspicion.

PZ: Such social fears are also hidden in urban legends. What, in your opinion, is the most emblematic urban legend for the times of transformation?

OD: I was most impressed by the legend of the ‘Klimczok’ department store in Bielsko-Biała, which was very specific to its time. At the time, it was the most modern shopping centre in the entire region. There is a video of its opening, with a huge crowd pressing against the entrance and buying up Yugoslavian jackets. In the early 1990s, the legend associated with it spread that drug addicts ride the escalators and smear the handrails with blood. The story strongly referenced the greatest fear of the time, which was HIV.

Dionysius Czubala, a researcher of urban legends, traced the mass intensification of this HIV panic. He found that it lasted exactly a year and a half. A sense of danger gripped people's minds; they were afraid to shake hands or use public toilets. Czubala said this was a fairly typical scenario, as the most powerful urban legends and rumours are health-related. They are able to get people into such a state of insecurity that it can end in pre-emptive violence. This was the case in 1992, when people attacked the ‘Monar’ Youth Centre in Głosków. Despite the fact that the Centre did a lot of work with people for whom there were no other forms of organised help at the time, it was also subject to a lot of hate. Some people claimed, for example, that those at the Centre promoted drug addiction.

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UFO, 1960s, photo: Mary Evans Picture / East News

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PZ: New religious movements and sects were phenomena that also caused social unrest and moral panic in the 1990s. There, too, we could find traces of belief in UFOs, as in the case of the Raelians transplanted to Poland or the followers of the Polish Antrovis, which in a bizarre way combined apocalyptic and ufological beliefs with convictions about the historical role of the Slavs and anti-Semitism.

OD: The preachers of Antrovis even had the slogan ‘Beware of the Grey Man’, referring to the alien figure common in American UFO mythology. Some of these organisations were truly dangerous; they were based on psychomanipulation, and on scamming and exploiting people. But in other cases, it was moral panic based on an excess of belief in the power of symbols and magical thinking. For example, if you wore a pendant with the ‘Eye of Horus’, a fashionable symbol at the time, it meant you could be possessed by a demon and were susceptible to brainwashing.

It was such a strange moment, during which the actual threat of various shady organisations was mixed with moral panic in the style of the American 1980s. In the Reagan era, the so-called ‘satanic panic’ prevailed. TV preachers and secular psychotherapists, who claimed that there was such a thing as repressed memories, entered an alliance from hell. There began a gigantic wave of testimonies from alleged victims of Satanic violence which, it turned out, never existed, and no harm had actually been done to these people. False memories had built up in their imagination – so strong that the power of autosuggestion even convinced the court, and this led to the conviction of several innocent people. In Poland, this never took place on such a large scale, but at that time we did receive, with some delay, videotapes of speeches by preachers in clothes and hairstyles that were no longer fashionable.

PZ: I remember such films from religion class.

OD: Exactly. At that time, Poland really idealised America. Professor Bartłomiej Dobroczyński, who was interested in new religious movements from the beginning of the 1990s, also wrote that some Catholic priests were fascinated by this evangelical approach in two respects: exaggerating the role of the devil and combining faith with business. That is, on the one hand, motivational tapes that proclaimed that if you prayed enough, you would get a lot of money. And on the other hand, cassettes with lectures warning of the demonic effects of listening to Metallica. Today it may seem comical, but we still see cases of finding symbolic horror in seemingly innocent content. I guess this comes from the need to see the underlying logic of events. People want it so much that, at some point, they actually start to see it.

Interview originally conduced in Polish, translated by Agnes Dudek, Nov 2021

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