By Timothy R. Olsen, ’09, M.B.A. ’18

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For millennia the eyes and hearts of humanity have been drawn to the stars.

In North America the Crow Nation, or Apsáalooke, whose historical homeland covers parts of Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, tell stories about a young orphan boy who was adopted by a group of seven bison. Eventually, those seven bison are killed protecting the boy, but he brings them back to life.

After this, the boy decides he wants to give living with people a try, but the bison still wish to watch over him. They decide to become stars so they can watch down on him from above. Eventually the boy decides living with people isn’t all that great and elects to return to his bison family, joining them in the sky.

Thus, the Big Dipper and North Star were born.

“There’s so many interesting things in that story; this is not a biological family. Yet these are his people, or his bison, as the case may be,” reflects Jeannie Thomas, a folklorist and English professor at USU. “It’s interesting to unpack. It’s about finding those people who really matter to you, who then become, literally, your guiding stars. It’s also about how good nature is to us.”

Grant Bulltail, a member of the Apsáalooke tribe and former Utah State student and adjunct professor (2011–2013) relayed several stories and Apsáalooke customs, such as this story, to Thomas. The Grant Bulltail Apsáalooke (Crow Nation) Stories Collection can be found at the university library.

In South America, a Peruvian tale recounts the journey of fox and his friend mole as they attempt to get to the moon using a rope of braided grass. Their animal friends try to help them hook the moon with the rope to no avail until condor finally succeeds. Fox scrambles up quickly without looking back, but mole is hesitant and falls. He is saved by condor and returned safely to the ground.

“You get all these stories about animals that wanted to try to make it to the moon, like the humans wanted to try to make it to the moon, and they’re often stories of precarity,” Thomas explains. “Maybe there’s a beauty on the other side. Maybe you must risk precarity to find beauty. I think that story is also about finding your place.”

Signs from the Sky

As time advanced, humanity continued to look toward the heavens. Not only did they find purpose and meaning of a religious nature in the stars, but also information important to daily survival. Sailors used the stars to navigate and the color of the moon to note impending weather. Farmers looked to the heavens for the best time to plant or harvest.

Some of our biggest holidays today, such as Easter, even have direct ties to the heavens. Unlike most religious holidays, which have fixed dates, Easter moves from year-to-year. Specifically, it falls on the first spring Sunday after the new moon.

“Before the past 100 years, [space was] not hunks of rock or gas. It was 100% interconnected with how you’re going to live your life and who you are as a person” explains Lisa Gabbert, an English professor and director of Utah State’s Folklore program. “People would read these signs for gardening and planting and harvesting.

“And obviously, they’re looking for signs of when is a good time to plant, when is a good time to harvest; when is a bad time to plant, when is a bad time to harvest? Because their fate depends on whether they’re going to make it through the winter and have a good crop.”

Along with crops, travel, hunting, and myriad external things, humanity also ascribed cosmic meaning to events internally. The Zodiac Man, a figure showing the influence of constellations on the human body, first appeared in the 11th century and was a fixture of medical astrology through the 16th century.

These astrological signs, and the parts of the body they correlated with, were used to determine things such as the best time to administer medication, bloodletting, surgery, and various other procedures of the time.

“This developed in the Middle Ages and so now we’re looking at not only the planets, but now we’re thinking about the Zodiac system and about constellations and all the stars too,” explains Christine Cooper-Rompato, a professor of English and member of USU’s Religious Studies program. “You would start at the head and then move over your body down to feet.

“Pisces are kind of in control of your feet and Leo is the one in control of your heart sometimes it’s the belly, sometimes it’s the sides — and you can kind of see which one of those is influencing which [part of your body].”

In the Middle Ages, the prevailing belief also placed Earth as the center of the known universe, with the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn each embedded in rotating, transparent orbs all surrounded by a sphere of fixed stars.

Cooper-Rompato, who published a book titled Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons, says the understanding of astronomy was important at the time as it provided geographical context as the Christian religion spread.

Many texts and sermons of the time include calculations of the distances between Earth and the firmament. For example, one text talks about the distance from Earth to the moon being “500 winters” or, rather, it would take 500 years for a person to walk to the moon.

“That is just such a really cool way to educate an audience who may be illiterate and may just be listening to this text being read to them,” Cooper-Rompato says. “It was pretty common to imagine the distance between something in terms of length of time. To imagine a medieval person sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, if I walked every day for 500 years, that’s how long it’s going to take me to get there.’”

Legends that Land

While humanity has always looked to the stars for meaning — coupled with a desire to reach the heavens — there are equally as many myths, stories, and legends about visitors coming to our planet out of the vast expanse. 

From the building of the pyramids in Egypt, to how or why the Nazca Lines were created in Peru, to old Scandinavian and British stories of fairy abduction and not-so-old stories of alien abductions, humans fixate on the idea of visitors to Earth possibly even more than a desire to get off it.

“I think in a lot of ways, any time human beings are trying to speculate about something that our institutions can’t answer questions for us on — things that would tip into what we would call the supernatural, or the paranormal or anything like that — folklore comes in and fills in the vacuum,” says Lynne McNeill, an associate professor of Folklore and Chair of the Folklore Program at USU.

While UFO folklore has been around for centuries — search up utsuro-bune or the air battle of Stralsund, amongst others — right now may be the apex. Stories are coming to us from the military, through the news, and across social media, and many from authoritative sources. As of this printing, the state of New Jersey has a page on its Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness website dedicated to the drone sightings in the state over the last couple months of 2024.

McNeill, who, due to her research, spends a portion of her time as an industry expert for paranormal activity caught on camera, says she gets to review a lot of UFO videos and admits they’re often the least exciting.

“It’s just like three lights in the sky and then I have to come up with things to say about that,” she says with a laugh. “‘Well, you know, formation implies intent,’ which I’ve said so many times on TV. I’m waiting for the day it’s revealed that there’s this giant triangular ship watching us that has lights on three corners. And I’ll be like, ‘That’s right. I was right. It did have intent!’”

McNeill, who authored the popular textbook Folklore Rules also focuses much of her work on cryptids — creatures whose existence is reported but not scientifically proven — like Bigfoot. One of her favorite cryptids, though, has a UFO origin story.

While many in the Western U.S. associate the chupacabra with Mexico, the famed “goatsucker” traces its roots to the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo devastated the island, leaving the forest closed to the public for four months.

Depending on which chupacabra origin story you subscribe to, the forest was actually closed because a U.S. government genetics experiment had gone awry and an animal had escaped, or because a UFO had crashed and an unknown animal was on the loose. Whichever you prefer, sightings of the animal began in 1995.

“Kind of like we could imagine a little dog of ours crash landing on some planet and killing whatever creatures it finds, perhaps the chupacabra has done that to us — which I love,” McNeill says.

Another classic cryptid with ties to the skies, albeit in a different way, is the werewolf.

With its appearance directly tied to a full moon, it is yet another example of cosmos playing a role in life on earth. While not all legends are rooted in reality, Thomas says this one likely emerged from people encountering rabies.

“If you encounter a rabid person, it’s terrifying, it’s a horrible way to die,” she says. “It wasn’t curable, and rabies was something you could definitely encounter. So, you’re going to narrate that in a pretty dramatic way.”

That narrative, combined with pre-Christian hunting cultures using the full moon to hunt along with a dose of human-animal shapeshifting lore, really lends itself to the creation of folklore. Full moons are still surrounded with a bit of awe and mystery, even today, with rumors they cause crazy things to happen and emergency rooms to fill.

The Enduring Unknown

The sky has always been both stage and storyteller — and humans its audience and authors. Throughout the centuries and across the world, whether it’s constellations we apply Earthly meaning to or cryptid sightings in moonlit forests, the sky has always offered us something more than stars. It has also been a mirror. 

Even today — in a world where we have successfully managed to leave its surface and land on the moon, and telescopes allow us to see the edge of the known universe — we still tell stories about what might be out there.

Whether in the form of myth, omen, or science fiction, our stories are attempts to understand not just the sky, but ourselves. We assign meaning to constellations, build narratives around comets, imagine gods in the sun and monsters in the shadows. We want to know why we’re here, and we often look outward for those answers to inward questions.

McNeill suggests the people of the past are actually more like us than they are different, and there’s comfort — and something informative — in understanding that connection.

“I think there is a strong human drive for wonder in people, and the more we learn, which is so incredible and beneficial to us as humanity, it also sometimes runs the risk of closing doors as it opens others,” she says. “I think this drive for mystery, for wonder, to have unanswered questions, is just incredibly strong. I think in a lot of ways, it’s a better world that we don’t know everything about, and where there’s still that possibility that we could find out something fantastic.”

The Fermi Paradox, which emerged from a conversation between physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, highlights the contradiction between the seemingly high likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence and the lack of evidence for its existence. Maybe that evidence exists, and through folklore we’ve been recording those stories all along. Or maybe our obsession with the cosmos is humanity’s way of processing what’s happening down here.

Our myths, mysteries, and meanings may evolve, but the questions stay the same: Who are we? Are we alone? And if not, who — or what — is watching?

In the end, the folklore of the stars isn’t about answering these questions. It’s about being part of an ancient, ongoing conversation. One where the sky still speaks, and we still look up, listening.