What do UFOs and Thunderbirds have in common? Scott Benesiinaabandan is finding out

Winnipeg-based artist Scott Benesiinaabandan has always been interested in mysterious objects in the sky. As a child, he learned to read from books about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

"I read those Time-Life books, the Mysteries of the Unknown," he says. "They were these white bound books. That's how I learned to read, reading these sort of paranormal mystery books. It was always something very, very innate within me."

But Benesiinaabandan's interest runs even deeper than that. The die-hard X-Files fan is Anishinaabe from the Lac Seul First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. His Anishinaabemowin name is Benesii, or Thunderbird. Thunderbirds are a very important spiritual being in the Anishinaabe belief system, and manifest in this reality as unidentified flying objects in their own right.

"You see them as little black birds way, way up at the very upper stratosphere," he explains.

His new work, "Thunderbirds are [not] UFOs," explores the links between the two, as things that exist between the known and the unknown in their respective cultures. The augmented reality piece will project both a hovering UFO and a Thunderbird, and will be displayed at Mel Lastman Square in North York as part of this year's Nuit Blanche Toronto on Oct. 1, 2022.

How did you start doing AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) art?

I did a VR piece called "Under a Blueberry Pie Under Martian Sky" in 2016 for TIFF. It was part of three commissions of new VR works. Before that I hadn't worked in VR at all. I'd done a lot of video work, things of that nature, but not that fully created world of VR. So we did that and toured all over and it was accepted really well.

I found some real good value in it as a medium — the democracy of the medium, how easy it was for people in northern communities or small communities outside of big centres to access contemporary art.

So, for those of us who aren't familiar, what is a Thunderbird and what is its significance to Anishinaabe people?

Thunderbirds are one of the main ontological beings in the Anishinaabe framework, along with being one of the most powerful beings in the world. That's without getting into the weeds.

Oh, get into the weeds by all means. 

So there's an ontological fuzziness as to what the Thunderbird is in this world and this reality. It kind of crosses over with what eagles are. It's like the grandfather of an eagle. Eagles are top of the food chain in terms of the spiritual hierarchy. Thunderbirds are even above that.

One of the main stories is that there's the Thunderbirds and the Mishibijiw, which is the water serpent — it's a water cat that lives underneath major bodies of water. The Thunderbirds and these water cats are in this forever battle or forever war, and that sort of brings life. It's sort of a cycle or a yin-yang kind of thing. Like every spring, the Thunderbirds come back and they go to war again, and they bring the good rains. Thunderbirds sort of have that sort of life-giving property, you know?

How do they relate to UFOs, in your mind? Why did you bring these two phenomena together for your piece?

I really wanted to just do some work around what those things [are] and how that situates within my own sort of ontological framework as an Anishinaabe artist. I came up with this idea. There's some reference to The X-Files, but also looking at how in the Western ontology, these things — like Thunderbirds, like UFOs — are dismissed or put off to the margins of what is accepted as reality. There's still these conversations within our own [Indigenous] communities… you have people swear to God that they've seen these birds flying, just like UFOs, and [other] people who are like [sarcastically] "Oh yeah, sure. You've seen the Thunderbirds."

Have you ever seen a Thunderbird or a UFO?

I have seen both, actually. I thought I was going to go through my life never having seen a UFO, but because of the pandemic, I was spending a lot of time outside in my backyard last June. At about 5:30 on June 28, I was reclining in my gravity chair and I was just chilling listening to music and I swear to God, this chrome orb — if you see the piece itself, you'll see this chrome work within the Thunderbird, that's really what I saw — this brilliant chrome orb that just sort of passed over, maybe about 500 or 600 feet up.

It didn't move like anything I've ever seen. It was just moving in this smooth, straight line thing. And then it puffed up these sort of vapours in this perfectly circular way behind, behind it. So yeah, I've seen both. I pulled out my camera and I have a photo of it, but it just looks like a little speck of dirt or something.

Was this 5:30 in the morning or in the afternoon?

In the afternoon. It got my attention because it stood out so hard against the sunlight. It was just a clear sky and the sun was just straight up, so you could see some detail on the side of it, like a ridge or rivets or something, because it was glinting in a certain area. Just the way it moved — I think humans are very good at knowing what physics are of things — how cars move, how planes move, how birds move. So when you see something that doesn't comply with your intuitive understanding of the physical world, it stands out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.