An interview with Lynne McNeill, associate professor of folklore in the English Department at Utah State University and Chair of the Folklore Program. She is also a regular cast member on the Travel Channel's Paranormal Caught on Camera.
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Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D Audience for full exposure, listen with headphones. Lynn McNeil is an associate professor of folklore in the English Department at Utah State University. She serves as the chair of the Folklore Program. She is also a regular cast member on the Travel Channel's Paranormal Caught on Camera. We had a wide ranging conversation about contemporary folklore, the paranormal, and much more. I'm Lynn McNeil. I am a folkloreist at Utah State University. I run the folklore program there. I teach folklore there. I work in the folklore archives that we have there, which are really incredible. We are a great hub of folklore studies. We have for a offer a master's program and folklore and undergraduate minor. It's a good place to be a folkloreist. I also am very lucky and that I get to be a folklorist um in the media fairly often, so I get to be a folklorist on podcasts like this, on the radio, on television, and mainly what I like doing is bringing the concepts of folklore studies to a really broad audience because people don't always think in terms of what folklore is doing in a culture. We hear the word folklore, we tend to think untrue stories, old stories, maybe rural, rustic, peasantee stories. We might have sort of a brother's grim model in our minds of folklore. And the reality is is that folklore is are really contemporary form of cultural expression. Yes, it comes from the past, but the whole point of it being folklore is that it keeps itself relevant by adapting and changing dynamically so that when it was relevant in the past, it can adjust to be relevant now. So, yeah, folklore dies out, folklore disappears. For a long time people thought of folklore as the survivals of a past age. And what we now know is that it's not so much that it's dying out, it's that it's changing its face in order to keep up. So the term actually that folklore has use for this, which I love, is eco typification. It's borrowed from botany, basically the study of plants and the way that they emerge differently even though it's the same species in two different climate and geological and geographical environments, because it's being responsive to its context. And so folklore is seen as operating in that same way, you can have the same story, the same legend, the same fairy tales, show up in two different places, and it's going to be morphologically distinct because of the context of those two different places. It's going to be meeting the needs of a different time, maybe a different culture, and if region, a different language, family, all those sorts of things. So it's it's not that folklore is old. It's that folklore is continuously adapting. That's what makes it relevant, and that's not how people think of folklore. So that's what I like to talk about with people, is that it's it's this way more sort of psychological, communicative, symbolic form of interaction, more than just the old stories model that we often have exactly I mean, which you know is And it's interesting too to think about the awareness people had of stories like that. If we look at the Brothers Grimm's um early draft of their eighteen twelve volume of Stories, that story Hunsel and Gretel, the woman who's mean in the story and pushes the kids out of the house and sends them out into the woods to get rid of them is originally their mother, and the grim brothers themselves were like, oh, you know, we're collecting these stories to be a reflection on you know, German culture and spirit. That doesn't make us look right, Let's make it a step mom. And it's sort of like, hey, Alex, guys, but we we read into that so much and we now are left with this incredible trope of the wicked stepmother, and it's like, yeah, that was a real conscious decision made we assume so that German moms didn't look bad by the editors of these stories, who, in their call for collecting folklore, were like, hey, scholars of the world, don't change anything about the stories you collect, because the way they emerge from the mouths of the people is the way that they are meant to represent culture. And then here they are editing them the leaders. You know. Oh wow, that's funny. I'm just thinking about trends in folklore since like past World War two, you know, because I'm kind of looking starting in moving forward. I guess what are the major trends are are there? Yeah, It's it's hard to say because folklore is so big and so encompassing that there's so many different genres of folklore. I mean, we have the narrative genres of folklore like stories. We also have the customary genres of folklore like holiday practices and gestures and ritual and and greetings and leave takings and all that sort of stuff. And we have belief based folklore, which might be entirely conceptual or steeped in folk religion, or come out of superstition or the supernatural or something like that. All of these things are so big on one scale and then manifest so individually within families, within communities, within cultural groups, that it can be hard to point to big trends other than the fact that folklore on the whole, especially the most up to the minute contemporary genres, which interestingly are usually urban legends and jokes. Those are two forms of folklore. Um so stories that we tell as true and you know, humorous anecdotes that we make as commentary on things. Um those forms of folklore are really really representative of the time that they come from, and so there's some of the most adaptable. We actually have studies of urban legends that go back to ancient Rome, where we can see the same legend type being told in like the first century a d that is still being told now but just about things relevant to us now rather than things that were relevant to us then, and knowing that folklore does equal work reflecting a culture and shaping that culture, we see a lot of the same themes that we're cropping up in, you know, post war, not just America or the West, but the world. Um an increase of visual media was a huge thing that was happening there. Obviously DEO stayed big, but television was booming. So we start to see people think in terms of images more than words, and that of course has only grown thanks to the Internet and our ability to now combine images and words in all sorts of new ways. But we see folklore reflect that. We suddenly start getting genres of folklore that scholars referred to as xerox lore and facts lore, and we get things like visual legends, so instead of telling a story, we just get an image of something. And you can see how something like UFOs, something that's relying on visual input or photography or you know, mapping and things like that. The ability to share that information, the ability to pass around that evidence just gets that much stronger. And we're also entering this period of time where you know, where politics are booming, and there's bipartisan support for anti communist efforts and the Cold War and all of this, and we see that as well. We see people develop this new relationship with the military with their governments where, you know, we don't have an ongoing international conflict to worry about, so we worry about what we can't see. You know. The Cold War is it's called cold for a reason, right, It's this freezing out of each other. It's not hot, it's not engaged, it's not blood boiling anger. It's silence. It's secrecy. And we start to wonder, well, what are the secrets? What is it that we don't know? And this fixation on things like conspiracy and um the information that's out there that we might be getting glimpses of an unsatisfactory explanations for any time there's a vacuum of knowledge, things like legends, things like superstition just rush in to fill that void. We want to understand. There's actually a really cool, old old study that was done by some psychologists looking at rumor and how rumor works and folk cours know that rumor and legend are really similar, and they came up with what they uh called the rumor equation. And no, this is not deeply scientific, but it's pretty revealing when we think about it. What they said was that the reach of any rumor, the power of a rumor, the spread of it, is equal to the topics importance multiplied by its ambiguity. So if we have a topic to us that's incredibly important, but we have all the info, but we're gonna talk about it. There's gonna be new stories about it, but we're kind of gonna rest easy. We're gonna be like, Okay, really important, Thank goodness, we know everything. If we have a topic that's incredibly ambiguous but we don't really care, then we're sort of like whatever, I don't need to know, it doesn't matter to me. The minute you start that multiplying, exponential growth of something that is both unbelievably important. So of course we can use this as a barometer for our culture. Right what has always been important to us? Our military security, the lives and safety of our children, our personal health and die violence, anti crime, things like that, plus or multiplied by this question of ambiguity. I don't have the answers. I don't know the answers. It's possible someone is trying to keep the answers from me. You put those things together and you are just asking for a wildfire spread of rumor of legend of conspiracy theory. So what would be an example of that sort of apex? You know, I think um one of the most recent examples that we have a lot of good data on a lot of good folklore data would be nine eleven. It's sort of a peak example where if we think about the rumors and the legends that spread immediately in the wake of September eleventh, two thousand and one, we saw people hinting at the idea that there were people in this country who knew this was going to happen. So one of the most popular legend cycle is that we saw was that someone, usually a white American, would do some sort of kindness for someone of Middle Eastern descent, would be just a maybe a titch above normal levels of thoughtful or tipping someone a little bit extra, helping someone out in a way they didn't need to. And then that person says to them, hey, you keep yourself and your family away from the World Trade Center on September eleven, and that person is like, whatever, WEIRDO, Okay, thanks, you know, and then they go on and then after the event they realized what had happened. Um, and that legend type among folklorists is known as the grateful terrorist. It's horribly xenophobic and racist, obviously, but it it does that thing folklore does where it just encapsulates people's anxieties, people's fears, the tenor of the moment, where what we see is this suspen Asian and and these are I mean, it sounds now, however many years we are out from September eleven, twenty years almost um, it seems ridiculous. It seems like, oh wow, that's an awful story to have told, Like it almost seems like a bad joke. But at the time when this thing of unbelievable importance and also just unspeakable ambiguity, nobody had any idea what was going on. I remember that morning, the general thinking was that it was an accident, right, there's no way this happened on purpose, until there was a second airplane involved, and suddenly that vacuum opened up and all of these stories just got sucked into this explanation and you could see that multiplication of importance our personal safety and national safety and ambiguity. Who the heck is doing this to us? What is happening? How can we make sure it doesn't happen again? Who can I trust? Who can't I trust? Leads to just this, like you know, conflagration of rumor and legend, where any story that seems to give me a spec of control, who I know to trust, who I know not to trust, is going to latch on because we want to start a signing blame. We want to start constructing a future where we're in control of this not happening again, or if it's going to happen again, I'm not going to be there. Um. So yeah, so we get these stories that I mean and think we we can think about so many more stories of people claiming to have witnessed um people of certain ethnic backgrounds celebrating in the September eleven. Yeah, and there were a lot of That was another one where the legends were very visual. There were photographs that circulated. Every one of those photographs was traced to an event that had nothing to do with that date or that moment. None of them were true, but they seemed to provide sense, not good sense, not sense we liked very racist and xenophobic sense. But it seemed to make sense out of the the comprehensible, and that drive to make sense of things is really what what pushes a lot of rumor and legend in arenas like this. You know, one of the things I'm kind of interested in is why do you does UFO folklore seem to have this staying power? Yeah, this is an awesome question, and the answer exists on several levels, because there's staying power and then there's staying power. If we want to look at the legend type of the UFO visitor, where we have odd, often vaguely humanoid, sometimes a little extra tall, slender creatures descending from the sky or perhaps emerging from another dimension to interact with humans, often to kidnap them, often to interfere with their bodies in some way. We've just described centuries of fairy lore, you know, other creatures, slender, humanoid, mysterious, powerful emerging from the mists, taking us away. Being kidnapped by the fairies and taken by the fairies is a longstanding tradition. Um So if we want to call that UFO lore, we could very very easily. But taking a shorter view of it, where UFO really takes on these sort of technological pseudo scientific ideas of space and space travel and extraterrestrial life. The question of the staying power of that, I think is really multifaceted just on its own, because we know that belief doesn't stick around for no reason, and we know that one straightforward, if hard to accept answer is perhaps people keep talking about UFOs because people keep seeing them, because they're there, they're real, people are having encounters. That is a possibility that it does us no service to discount when we wonder, wow, why do people keep talking about this? It's like, wow, why do people keep talking about Bigfoot? Maybe because they keep seeing him? You know, that's one answer that we don't need to erase. But let's say that we cannot confirm the existence of UFOs. We don't have one that most of us know of, right, We don't have one to look at to take apart to dismantle, to analyze with what tools are available to us? Why do we keep telling the story? Clearly there's some other beneficial not meaning always positive, but meaning it serves us in our psychological and you know, social needs. Some beneficial outcome of believing in this possibility. I'm going to make a quick detour just because I think it's important to point out that legends, as a genre of folk narrative are a legend about possibility. For a long time, legends were defined by folklorists as stories told as true, whereas fairy tales are stories told as fiction and myths our stories told sort of as sacred revelation. Right, Legends are the ones that we're told as literally true. We've nuanced this since then to talk about the idea that what legends do is they allow us to symbolically discuss possibility, and the possibilities of reality are a thing that human beings love to discuss. We really want to chew over the potential boundaries of reality. Could this be? Could this not be? Could this happen? Is this real? And UFOs are something that clearly there's both ambiguity and importance in this. It matters to us to not be alone in the universe, and we aren't sure if it's going to be a good thing or a bad thing when we get that answer. So we see that combination of social and cultural import there, and then we also see something that simply starts to make more more sense I mean, it is an accepted scientific principle that there's probably a planet out there in our infinite universe that can sustain life as ours can. It does not make sense that we would be unique. Um. Then we start adding in not just the narratives, not just the stories, but this digital additional media that comes to us from this particular time in our culture, where there's more everyday people out there with cameras, there's more visual media than just textual. We're able to capture things and share them with each other in unprecedented ways, and that changes how we talk about this stuff. It's one thing to trust your neighbor when he's like, I saw some weird lights over my farm and then I lost three hours of my day. I don't know what happened, but I woke up in a ditch and I had all these bruises. You know, you tell me what that means. It's another thing when your neighbor tells you that same story and then shows you a photo that he took, and you're like, oh, yeah, I can't explain what those lights are. They don't look like an airplane, they don't look like anything I'm familiar with. You know, we just start to start to get that that word of mouth culture is now being bolstered by additional things, which of course sort of conveniently takes us to even that next level of authenticity or validation, which is, hey, this isn't just your neighbor now, it's the government. Now, it's an institutional element of our culture who we know isn't joking around, and they're taking it seriously, and they're producing documents and they're gathering photos, and you start to go okay, wait, hey, wait a minute, Like like the authority that institutions lend to the already powerful word of mouth consensus of folklore is really something that you can't underestimate. I brought up Joe Nichols Roswell syndrome framework for the dynamic. The UFO stories sometimes go through the thing that happens sort of again and again in uphology is that like a case will occur and it will pretty quickly be explained, and then it will go dark, and then it will come back a little while later, sort of armored. So in the retelling, like these objections are sort of like pre you know, you have a pre planned explanation for it, and now everything can kind of make sense. Yes, absolutely, and that that is part of that dynamism that we see all folks are happening. Right. If someone had written a book about this and published it, and it were a copyrighted piece of work, it's it already exists. It is what it is. You know, the novel, that book, that newspaper article. Doesn't get to be updated. It's still exist. You can print a new version with new information maybe or something, but it's not dynamic in the way folk culture is dynamic. And one of the things that folk culture often does, especially in the genre of legend and belief, is that there is a developing performance of rationality. People know that being seen as a believer can automatically cast doubt on people's stories. You know, we we talk about belief in the supernatural or the paranormal as sort of this black or white proposition. Do you believe in ghosts? Yes? Or no? The average everyday person knows the correct answer is no, because that makes you a rational, scientifically minded person. For most people, though the real answer isn't necessarily yes. The real answer is something along the lines of a story. The real answer to do you believe in ghosts as well? No? Of course not. I mean who would. But after my grandpa died, there was like this one Christmas light and it was totally the one that he was always into, and it just started blinking like the day after he died, and it never stopped blinking, and we all just sort of knew, like that was Grandpa, you know, letting us know that he was still there with us for the holidays. So no, I don't believe in ghosts, but I mean, my Grandpa's in that Christmas light, like that very paradoxical, very contradictory answer, And that's never on the survey, you know, when we send out the survey of do you believe in ghosts? That's not an option, so everyone checks no. But the truth is that when someone wants to speak about a supernatural experience they've had, they grow I like the word armor over their story in anticipation of people who are going to say, okay, weirdo. You know I you clearly are an irrational thinker. So we see this performance of rationality, this intentional reality testing that takes place that hums a part of the story to say, now I thought it could be this, but then I realized it couldn't. Because of this, And I also thought that maybe it could be this, but that doesn't make any sense because of X, Y, and Z. And what that tells us is that people are actually being surprisingly rational when they talk about the paranormal or the supernatural, and that's not something we want to grant people always. When people are talking about things that we, in particular don't believe in, it's very easy to be dismissive and assume that they've jumped to supernatural conclusions. Oh, this person wants it to be a UFO. Oh, this person wants it to be bigfoot. And the truth is is that most people are going through this process of elimination and starting with well could it have been the lighthouse, No, the lighthouse is over there, it's over here, Or you know, well, could it have been a bear? No, I've seen bears, I've hunted bears, I know what bears look like. That wasn't a bear, And then they end up at this supernatural or paranormal conclusion that, for all that it might not be scientifically testable the way that we think of the scientific process, it's a rational thought process that they've gone through. And this is something that any folklorist who has done ethnographic work with people on the subjects of belief in the supernatural sees right away is oftentimes these are incredibly thoughtful, observant people who themselves don't want to have to have drawn that conclusion, and yet there's no other conclusion for them to draw. Sometimes the first episode of Strange Arrivals, like the first like three minutes or five minutes or whatever, is to be telling the story about how, you know, my best friend and his wife and me and my wife, we're having dinner out on a porch on this on this island, and we saw these lights, these red lights up is ways away. They were just there and they're moving a little bit. We went down the dock watching them, you know. We watched them probably for twenty minutes, and then they kind of disappeared. And for the first season of Strange Arrivals, what I was kind of interested in was how our our memories of it kind of differed and how something that happened like five years ago, we can like get into like knock knockdown, drag out arguments about how certain things happened, you know, But it also seems to me that you know, the way you interpret that which is something that like my friend and I, you know, don't know what it was, but we're like, also, don't think it was aliens um, whereas our wives are like, uh yeah, if that's like, what else would it be? So what part would sort of preconceived notions play in that process that you just talked about what you've hit on is one of the reasons that legends are this genre of debate, this genre of possibility, because you don't have to agree, you don't have to believe. Someone can tell a legend that they don't think is true to someone who thinks it might be, and that legend becomes this this central point around which a discussion of possibility can happen. Right folklorists in the past have looked at because folklore is under the purview of everyday people. It's not something that only those with access to publishing houses or you know, executive producers are able to make. We all get to share folklore. It's all equally genuine when we do. There's no single right version. My story about a UFO is just as legitimate as your story of a UFO because we're all in charge of it. There's these different dynamics that go into shaping it. So at the very far back end there's our shared worldview. You know, any any story that is collectively circulating in the United States is going to have its background some awareness of the basic large scale cultural structures of the United States that will be reflected in that folklore. And you can see that when you look at the folklore from a different culture, it seems exotic and strange and different. It's common and familiar to those folks with their cultural norms. So we can see those big scale norms reflected in folklore. But because everyday people are in charge of the dissemination and sharing in the shape of folklore, we also get much more small scale, individualized things. So we get me, my personality and my motivations and my intent, and you and yours. So when I tell a story, I'm gonna tell it differently than someone else's. What I think is significant or key or important is going to say one a lot about my culture because it's that larger cultural milieu that the story is coming from in the first place. But my telling of it's gonna say a lot about me too. Am I going to play up the potential alien elements here? Am I going to tell those down. It's also gonna be affected by who I'm talking to. Am I talking to someone who's standing there with their arms crossed, you know, giving me a real skeptical face, Or am I talking to someone who is like wrapped and listening and being like yeah, yeah, no, no, I've seen that too. I've seen that too. Whole different story emerges discursively between those two different people, right, And so all of these elements. As a folklorist, we're looking at these small scale, performative, emergent elements as well as those larger structural worldview things that that come from a culture, which means that any two iterations of the same story could be wildly divergent, you know, very symbolically different in what they're communicating, while still technically being recognized recognizable as the same story. So another thing I don't I don't really even know how to ask a question, but maybe just to get your reactions. So one of the things things. A couple of days ago, I ended up talking to this guy named Richard Doty who was in Air Force Intelligence, and his thing was too to basically muddy the waters in the UFO community by giving them misinformation and basically saying, look, uh, he kind of had this deal where it's like I want to I want to find out what's going on in the UFO world, and I will let you in on secret. Said only I know about, you know, as being an Air Force uh insider. And this is during the Cold War, and they're they're worried. Was that enough UFO people were actually seeing you know, special projects and stuff, and that they didn't want the Russians to be in the UFO community and be finding out stuff that might somehow help them. Um. So his thing was, I'm you know, I muddy the waters. So I was trying to get him to reflect a little bit about and I must say unsuccessfully, but I was trying to get him to reflect about how what he was doing was. It was it was sort of taking in like an already established narrative or set of ideas that would be consistent with those things, but but sort of have his own you know, he's doing it for his own purpose and uh, and he was just he was not willing to engage really on that beyond like I had a mission. You know, this is my mission. It wasn't hard to do. Like when you get people who believe it like that. You basically if you just kind of nod um, you know, and encourage them, they'll they'll like they'll do all the work themselves. But that was a little disingenuous because he was he did spread a lot of like super super weird stuff, so like an intentional culture jammer of the there's some of the stuff that you still see today is stuff that he spread, like back in the early eighties, like he was passing to people and then you know they're still around today. When people talk about, you know, the secret government programs, Wow, it makes me think of the fake news that you know, we've been dealing with since sort of the it's like it's like an intentionally weaponized version of legends. You know, someone who's trying sitting behind a desk trying to come up with what's going to stick. Because the difficult thing is this folklore moves almost on an evolutionary or a mimetic in the sense of Richard Dawkins memetics um model, which is survival of the fittest. You know, all this dynamism that folklore has that it everyone gets to tell their own version and shape it their own way. Also means that the elements that that last are the ones that work for the most people. So we see this communal shaping, this communal evolution of folklore, and as it moves through a population, it grows more and more generally applicable, so that I'll still tell it in my unique way, but if I add or play up an element that really resonates with a lot of people, it's going to become a part of it. And if I try and add an element that doesn't really resonate and it's just sort of it's going to drop out. I mean, by this principle, folklore is self correcting in how it is crowdsourced like Wikipedia, something that doesn't fit's gonna fall by the wayside. Something that really speaks to people's anxieties or curiosities, it's gonna stay. That is incredibly hard to fake, and it's incredibly hard to do it in one go. The best example we have contemporarily of this, interestingly is slender Man, who was wholesale, almost perfect as an have been legend from the minute of his creation. There is absolutely crowdsourcing and where we ended up with Slenderman, and he absolutely has already evolved almost to an unrecognizable character from what he started off as initially as that whole communal process of dynamic folklore shaping has happened to him. But with something like this, with like a disinformation campaign, with fake news, or with someone who is attempting to muddy the waters, it's gonna be a uh, you know, shotgun blast of attempts, and of them are going to fail. People don't believe things for no reason. It needs to click, it needs to resonate, It needs to work for them. What percentage of the you know, mud that got spread around they're stuck. I don't know, But it's only gonna stick around if it seems to work, in which case, yeah, it might confuse things. But if anything, it's working, and it's just going to continue to promote that stuff more than necessarily poke holes in it or deflated interesting. I should have, you know, having this conversation, I'm realizing that the first season of Strange Arrivals, I probably should have talked to to you because like the second, you know, there's twelve episode. Eleven episodes probably the last four are really about how the alien abduction story changed over time to incorporate new elements and and I kind of sort of argue that it it kind of collapsed under its own weight, and that it's just like it kept becoming more and more extreme until it was like, well, millions of people are being abductive, but most of them don't know what it is, and they're making hybrids who might walk among us. And then it's like, well where do you go from there? You know, it's like you've kind of reached the apex of of insanity as far as that goes, and it just kind of collapsed. Well, And the more the more specific and elaborate story gets, the smaller the population that accepts it usually gets, you know what I mean. It's like there's a happy medium of there are probably aliens, they've probably messed with us, that really seems to resonate with people on a very broad scale, and we can start getting into specifics of that and watching those specifics resonate in different ways with different people, depending upon again their worldview, their cultural background as well as their own personality, as well as the small you know groups that they do the majority of their communicating within um. But when we look at that you know, lowest common denominator, we get the clear idea that a lot of people think UFOs are a possibility. We get the clear idea that a lot of people think some people have seen him. We get the clear idea that a lot of people think our government knows more than they're telling us, or the governments of the world no more than they're telling us. And when we start to see any sort of institutional acknowledgment of that, like the declassified reports that have come out from the U. S. Military of we caught these things on camera, what are they? We don't know, that sort of admission from that level of authority, and just bam, suddenly a whole slice of people who previously were maybe on the skeptical side are now just like, whoa. That was what was missing for me. That was the resonant piece that's going to get me to take this seriously again. And so it's a it's an ever shifting landscape, but one in which we can stand back and see really big themes, but we can also zoom in and seem really see really really specific, small scale, symbolic moments that are generating that that larger theme. So so this has been awesome. This has been super interesting. Yes, I agree, this has been super interesting. I appreciate all your questions. Thanks so much. Hey, thank you, Okay, take care, bye bye. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D Audio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Same, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at grimm and mil dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.