“Which Presidents Have Seen UFOS?  Yep, It’s More Than one,” a Politco.com article by Garrett Graff that ran last month, described how most U.S. presidents since Truman have been interested in UFOs and some had experiences with the phenomena, including Ford, Reagan, and Carter.  My family has a legacy of observing UFOs, beginning with my grandfather in the late 1940s, and when my parents moved onto the Navajo Reservation in the 1970s, they saw mysterious things in the sky.  My father was hired as a guidance counselor for the Kayenta, AZ Bureau of Indian Affairs school and replaced a woman who’d made a hobby of collecting descriptions of scores of UFO encounters among the Dine people and other reservation residents.  The Reservation’s where my wife and I saw one, too – a huge object with circling red lights that went from one far horizon to the other in about a few seconds.

            Was it science or fantasy?  That’s as hard to determine as it is to explain what we, and thousands of others have witnessed.  Fortunately, it’s possible to distinguish between science and fantasy in literature.  There are two basic difference – plausibility and setting – according to “Science Fiction vs. Fantasy: How Are Science Fiction and Fantasy Distinct?”, a MasterClass.com article.  “A science fiction story generally extrapolates elements of the modern world and attempts to predict how they could possibly develop. Fantasy, on the other hand, uses supernatural elements that have no link to our contemporary world,” and “Generally speaking, science fiction stories often take place in a dystopian, hyper-technological future. Fantasy stories are traditionally set in worlds populated by mythical creatures and supernatural events. The world itself can look quite similar to our own, but it has fantastical elements.”  For instance, compare two favorite novels from my youth, Andre Norton’s “Star Man’s Son, 2250” and Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian.”  The former’s an example of “hard science fiction,” which GameRant.com says “deals with stereotypical scientific fare such as math, computer science, chemistry, and biology. The language in this type of sci-fi tends to be more technical … hard sci-fi leans more into realism and attempts to base the ‘science’ part of its science fiction in as much fact as possible.”  Fantasy “stories are traditionally set in worlds populated by mythical creatures and supernatural events” and they have “supernatural elements that have no link to our contemporary world.”  However, “the fantasy “world itself can look quite similar to our own, but it has fantastical elements.”  

The Conan stories take place on a recognizable Earth, but Howard created a “mythopoeia” (an artificial or fictionalized mythology) he called “the Hyborian Age” set in the distant past soon after the fall of Atlantis.  Conan’s main attributes (barbarity, strength, wanderlust etc.) are well-known, unlike his innate and counterintuitive chivalry when it came to the various princesses, sorceresses, and tavern wenches he invariably encountered.  These kinds of elements can (and did) have strong appeal to young male readers.  However, re-reading them as a cranky adult has revealed considerably less charm.  But I likely wouldn’t have gotten into Conan if it hadn’t been for an outstanding choir director named Jack Glover.

What made that director special?  First, he taught singing in dusty West Texas, yet  auditioners for his high school choir had to first spend a full school year in his sight-reading class.  We warmed up every day creating vocal harmonics, and we won every choral competition except one when Jack had recently defeated two of the competition’s three judges for the presidency of the Texas Choral Directors’ Association, and to retaliate they scored our choir down a notch for being “too professional.”  Jack enjoyed teaching us difficult atonal pieces that university choirs had messed up in their competitions and taking us to visit those schools and performing the very songs they couldn’t handle.  Jack was a close friend of my dad and passed along to me his copies of the Conan books and “The Hobbit” in my teens as well as a slew of great sci-fi writers’ best works.  Nonetheless, I likely wouldn’t have been as interested if my 7^th grade school librarian hadn’t already introduced me to Andre Norton’s sci-fi written for boys.  At that callow age I avoided women writers, and it was many years later that I learned that Andre was the penname for Alice Mary Norton, who used that moniker to break into the male-dominated sci-fi world of the 1940s (she later changed her given name legally to Andre Alice),  She  began writing books while a public librarian in Cleveland where she successfully defeated efforts to ban “The Hobbit”  and was prolific, writing over 300 novels of sci-fi and fantasy.   Along with promoting Tolkien’s novels, she was fittingly the first woman named the Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and inducted into their Hall of Fame.  But, like the Conan stories, her tales of daring young star travelers makes pretty turgid reading for grownups. 

Nevertheless, Norton and Howard’s books did introduce me to deep reading.  A friend recently recommended a fascinating NYTimes podcast about how reading alters our brains titled “This Is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading’.  It’s Pretty Magnificent.”  In it, journalist Ezra Klein interviewed UCLA professor Maryanne Wolf, author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.”  Wolf pointed out that “we need to understand what different kinds of reading do to our minds. And then we need to develop in ourselves and our children what she calls a biliterate brain.”  Her research has revealed that there’s “nothing in the brain, not a single gene, not a single region that was specifically there for reading. That’s very unlike all the other processes that are actually incorporated in reading: language, vision, cognition, affect.  If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago.”  The more we read, the more capacity we add to this new deep reading circuit, and in reading deeply, the more background knowledge we have enables the circuit to grow “in ever more sophisticated ways.”  

Wolf distinguishes between “reading for information,” – quickly skimming what we’re reading for key words and phrases without much ruminating – and deep reading, which involves critical analysis and insight through close attention and empathy.  Reading by skimming is a much more primitive development, and that’s what you invariably use to some degree when you read a digital screen.  She notes that digital screens do “help us skim the extraordinary voluminous nature of information that’s out there. Skimming is a defense mechanism that’s very useful. We can handle [only] so much information …. But how we are reading it will change the nature of what we have absorbed.”  Digital reading enhances speed and permits multitasking, which is fine for covering a lot of what’s written and for being entertained, but “that actually takes away from the ability to use the [brain’s] full circuitry — the full circuitry which includes using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, to understand a completely different perspective.”

It’s a long podcast – the transcript runs to 18 pages – but it’s worthwhile for its insights.  In it Wolf related how once she realized she was having trouble getting into a favorite book, Hermann Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game.” She spent so much time at work interacting with screens at work and home that couldn’t concentrate long enough.  “What I had to do is slow myself down. I thought I was reading online and in print with the same immersive qualities as I had as an English major, but I had lost that. I’d lost my most beloved home, and I hadn’t known it. So, it took about two weeks before I could get the pace necessary that would match the book. I found my home again …. But it took real work to recover that …  I had not realized how far I had strayed from that form of reading myself.”

A lot of screen time’s required of librarians, and I experienced the phenomena Wolf described, intended to read a book at home and struggling to focus without my concentration quickly drifting away.  I found my deep reading stride after a fortnight of effort, but it would have been much harder if I couldn’t trust what I was reading.  It’ll be hard to take Sports Illustrated seriously after learning how that magazine has been using artificial intelligence to compose articles by made-up writers, and when they were caught, lied about it.  CNET and even the Associated Press has been secretly publishing AI-generated articles.  As Francisco Goya noted, “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”