"I gazed in complete amazement as a series of white lights climbed up from the Irish Sea. These lights then spiralled in unison in an organised formation, into the clouds and disappeared from my sight. The lights were separate from each other and incredibly bright. The whole experience left me with a sense of wonder and amazement."
People see strange things. Lights in the sky, mysterious phenomena, visions and visitations - things they can't explain but know they saw. Susan Hiller had been collecting stories of these sightings for years. Some of them were prosaic and descriptive, like legal testimony. Others were visionary and marvelling. All of them were facts...
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Susan Hiller is constantly collecting - not so much objects as contemporary rituals and patterns of thinking and feeling. This is the raw cultural material, the social fact, from which she forms her work.
One consistent area of interest for Susan has been the paranormal, and she had begun to collect testimonies from around the world from people who had seen or felt that they considered to be extraterrestrial presences or apparitions. She gathered an extraordinary range of this material over a relatively short period of time, classified both by origin but also by species of apparition. We then gathered together a group of willing accomplices to help read the witness statements in their original language or dialect. There were several hundred witness statements: in over 30 different languages.
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