Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces how paleoastronautic concepts appeared and evolved in Hungary during Communist times, and how UFO culture gained neo-nationalist characteristic after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Paper long abstract:

According to the concept of paleoastronautics, the evolution of human civilization occurred as a consequence of alien visitations to the Earth (Pauwels&Bergier, Däniken, Sitchin, Temple, Icke). Only few know that the concept appeared not only in the “West”, but also independently behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s, where it gained popularity in certain subcultures. In the countries of the Socialist bloc, the initial phase of the UFO-culture followed a somewhat different path from that of the “West”. Here the living conditions and the atheist cultural policy represented a major obstacle to any kind of spiritual movement. Such movements were regarded with suspicion and opposed as much as possible.

Nevertheless, belief in extraterrestrial astronauts did exist, and in certain periods – mainly for political reasons – it was even allowed to appear openly in the media in the late 1950s and 1960s. Accordingly, the directors of Soviet-style cultural policies allowed the spread of the ideology, but only as long as it remained on the level of popular science. Any attempts to give

it a religious character or to institutionalise it were firmly opposed. This way, paleoastronautic concepts had their limits, and from the 1970s, they spread mostly underground. In spite of these, paleoastronautic today has a Hungarian sub-stream that shows significant neo-nationalist features too.

My paper addresses the question of how folklorists can investigate these narratives. How do these Hungarian paleoastronautic myths fit into a more general frame and how do they correlate with basic transformations of our culture?