So JFK, JFK Junior, Bobby, and whomever else the Q-Anon crowd were expecting in Dallas last weekend didn’t show. Undeterred, and unfazed, the Q-folk didn’t go away, but hung around in Dallas seeing visions that supported their deep belief in the resurrection of a bunch of dead Kennedys (apologies to the band).
Yeah, it’s funny, yeah, it’s kind of pathetic. Mass hysteria usually is. It reminded me of another burst of mass hysteria that occurred in Iceland in 1993. I lived in that country for most of the 1990’s, and got to witness it from a reasonable distance.
In the late 1970’s, an Englishman named Michael Dillon started having visions of what he later recognized as Snaefellsjokull (pronounced SNY-fells-yo-kull, or Snaefell Glacier in English). He came to believe that he was being contacted by benevolent aliens who wanted to come to Earth and bring lasting world peace. They planned to land on Snaefellsjokull in the fall of 1993. It’s a nice sentiment, and it got a lot of support from the community of alien believers throughout Europe and some in America. One self-described abductee claimed that she had been told bythe aliens that were coming, and corroborated Dillon’s prophecy.
Snaefellsjokull is a large, dormant shield volcano topped by a glacier. It has a prominent place in Icelandic folklore, and is considered to be very heavily haunted, even sacred to some. It is a place where mystics claim to sense some kind of supernatural energy, holiness, or other unworldly presence. Jules Verne used it as the entrance to the planet in his book, Journey to the Center of the Earth. Throughout the last half-century or a little more, it has also been a place where people have seen, or believe that they have seen, aliens and UFOs.
It’s easy to see why. The Icelandic landscape is pretty intense. Icelanders say that they know Iceland was created on Sunday when God was resting. Why else would he have made such an improbable landscape except that he was playing?
The communications Dillon had from the aliens were remarkably specific. He broadcast to his followers that the aliens would land on Snaefellsjokull on November 5, 1993, at 9:07 in the evening. In early November, believers began to gather in the tourist town at the foot of the volcano to await the aliens’ arrival. The weather was cold and nasty but the believers would not be deterred. As the aliens’ arrival time approached, an estimated 500 people had gathered, and were beginning to put on quite a party. There were fireworks, loud music, the booze flowed, and people danced and sang in eager anticipation.
Icelandic state television had nonstop live coverage of this event. Most of the nation tuned in. The reporters were apparently under orders to treat this seriously but it was hard to miss the smirks on some journalists’ faces as they tried to interview true believers about something that they, the journalists, thought was pure hogwash.
9:07 PM came and went, but the crowd was unfazed. In my decade in Iceland, I never met anyone who expected that kind of punctuality. The thinking was, they’ll get here when they get here. But then 9:30, and then 10:00, and no aliens. Finally late in the evening the crowd began to disperse. Some were pale, some in tears, many simply disappointed. Some, however, claimed to have seen the space ship, and a few claimed to have seen the aliens.
A TV reporter interviewed Michael Dillon. I have never seen such a broken, sad man. Gamely he said that the aliens must have been turned off by the loud party, that they were not prepared to land in that kind of hullabaloo. Maybe if we were lucky, they could be encouraged to return the next year. The reporter almost lost it but with massive and obvious effort at self control he was able, barely, to keep from laughing in Dillon’s face.
In the years since, Dillon has virtually disappeared. I couldn’t even find him with a pretty good google search. The day the aliens failed to show has been forgotten everywhere except in Iceland, where it has been the subject of a news retrospective every few years. Those are all in Icelandic, though, and not available to most of the rest of the world.
What happened in Iceland was an almost classic example of millennialism: a belief that something very special was going to happen around every thousand years of the current era. In previous centuries and millennia, the special thing usually had to do with the End Times, the Second Coming, or some such Christian mythology. The promoters of these prophecies usually don’t worry about being dead accurate as far as the time goes, somewhere within a hundred to a hundred fifty years of a millennium will do nicely.
I don’t know if the Q-Anon people are engaging in some kind of millennialism. We’re too close in time to even make a guess. But the aliens who never got to Iceland do underscore how people can succumb to true belief to the point that they will deny what their own senses are telling them.
Here are a couple of English language links to summaries of this event, and one in Icelandic:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/12/the-time-an-alien-welcome-party-was-held-at-a-glacier-in-iceland/
https://www.soulask.com/aliens-and-iceland-when-ufos-almost-came-to-snaefellsjokull/
https://www.dv.is/frettir/2018/08/25/geimverur-bodudu-komu-sina-snaefellsjokul-utsendarar-djofulsins/