The Invisibles, Grant’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece, was my first exposure to the idea of UFOs being real.
Grant’s work is dense and complicated. It contains elements of the psychedelic era of magic and mysticism, via Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. It goes further back to Crowley, Jung, Swedenborg, Eliade, and numerous other mystics and philosophers who were interested in the paranormal.
It’s clearly influenced by Valleé and Hynek, with the titular Invisibles also referred to as the Invisible College. It also conforms to Valleé’s ideas of a deceptive entity, which guides humanity towards a hazily understood purpose.
It touches on nearly every conspiracy theory one can imagine: FEMA Camps, Dulce base, the death of Princess Diana. In this way, it is a total product of the ‘90s. I believe that it is as important or more important than The X-Files or Twin Peaks.
It was the inspiration for The Matrix, but I’m not sure that the Wachowskis actually understood what Grant was trying to get across. The Wachowskis made a science fiction film with spiritual undertones; The Invisibles emphasizes mysticism and philosophy in a similar but vastly more complex way.
The Invisibles is a work of a neo-gnostic wonder, a spiritual successor to PKD’s VALIS. The UFO is not what it seems. It is a screen memory for an undefinable experience, which contextualizes itself in the cultural lens of the observer. Jack Frost meets grey aliens, while Lord Fanny encounters Aztec deities.
I have read this series probably a dozen times since 2009. As I grow and learn more, not only on the subject of UFOs, but life in general, it takes on new shades of meaning for me. Grant’s work, and my personal experience, echo for me a Crowley quote that I will paraphrase: Experiment, explore, record the results of what happens, but never assume that your experience was objective reality. This also echoes Jung’s theories about the UFO, mainly that we must approach it first from the perspective that it does not exist physically, and therefore must be understood through the human psyche.
The final component I think ought to be discussed is that Grant claims to have been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu. According to Grant, writing The Invisibles was an attempt to understand what happened to them. It is worth noting that Grant’s vision of the two dimensional reality of graphic fiction, and the human ability to interact with it, may be similar to the dynamic that higher dimensional consciousnesses encounter when attempting to interface with our 3D reality, if such entities exist. Grant also claims that harm done to a character based on them, within the comic, resulted in a similar experience in reality.
Comment below if you’re a fan! With there being a lot of discussion recently about the connections between UFOs and human consciousness, I think now is a great time to read it for the first time. The woo factor is off the charts, but for me, it’s an astounding and compelling read.
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