In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Queen Hippolyta asks King Theseus if he believes those stories that lovers have told about seeing fairies and nymphs in the Athenian forest. And Theseus says, No, not for a minute.
People who come back with those stories are of three categories. They are either lunatics, lovers or poets. They suffer from an excess of imagination, whereupon Hippolyta says, “Well, you know those four lovers, they all seem to have the same story, and their account was extremely vivid and extremely consistent.”
Well, this exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta is, in fact, one that speaks very, very, very strongly to me. I myself have never seen a ghost and I have never seen a UFO, and I don’t really believe people who say they have. On the other hand, their accounts are so vivid and so consistent that I think they must have seen something. Something is going on. And so I am left with a quandary.
This is Tom McBride, and that’s my perspective on Shakespeare and UFOs.