Sightings: Saturday 29 July 2023

The one story that took up all the air in the room this past week was surely that of the U.S. National Security Subcommittee’s hearing on UAP. To anyone familiar with UFOs before the latest watershed moment of 2017 what was presented was of little interest (a “Nothing Burger” in the words of Luis Cayetano…). The ignorant (West and Greenstreet have some words on that….), believers, and world media, nevertheless, gobbled it up. Those a little more informed were less than impressed, Jason Colavito in his deliciously derisory manner, Mick West and Steven Greenstreet delving into what is left out of the story, and veteran Kevin Randle weighing in….

Some commentators have thought a bit more deeply, probing past the tiresome question of the factual truth of these latest, post-2017 UFO/UAP stories, taking into account their historical context and possible social function. Like myself, Caitlin Johnstone is unpersuaded, for example, that the “securitization” of the UAP in recent months is part of a ploy by the defence establishment to secure even more funding. As Johnson goes on to observe:

what really stinks about all this UFO stuff is the timing. Here we are in the early stages of a new cold war which features a race to militarize space, and we’re hearing congressional testimony about mysterious vehicles posing a threat to US airspace which have the ability to go up and down between earth and space very quickly. That smells off.

I mean, does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?

Johnson remarks that the U.S. Space Force was inaugurated the same year that UAP reappeared on the radar of the journalistic, public consciousness, 2017. As Johnstone says,

it just seems mighty suspicious… how we’re being slowly paced into this UFO narrative (or UAP narrative for those hip to the current jargon) right when there’s a mad rush to get weapons into space. I can’t actually think of any other point in history when the timing of something like this would have looked more suspicious.

These suspicions prompt Johnstone to wonder “Are we being manipulated at mass scale about aliens and UFOs to help grease the wheels for the movement of war machinery into space?”

As much as I appreciate Johnstone’s more down-to-earth conjectures, I don’t find her case very compelling. The American drive to “Full-Spectrum Dominance” begins before the turn of the century, and its role in American defence strategy, spending, and development has been well-noted by those attending to such matters for as long. Moreover, given the very real and palpable security threats of China, among others, I find it unpersuasive that the best-funded military on earth need restort to propaganda invoking far-fetched stories of aliens, crashed flyings saucers, and their reverse-engineering to legitimate its weaponization of space. More persuasive are the points brought forward by Luke Harrington in the article linked above and remarked here last week. As West and Greenstreet observe about the hearings, no one involved was very well-informed on UFOs; here, the U.S. government, at least, failed to be “critically-thinking.” This absence of intellectual vigilance opens the doors to an “infiltration of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory into the halls of American government,” which “unscrupulous defense contractors could seize [as an] opportunity to pilfer the national security budget,” a much smaller-scale scam than the one Johnson proposes, and one for which Harrington provides a real-world example…

Unsurprisingly, the “Grusch Affair” with its claims concerning nonhuman entities prompts reflections on “First Contact.” A characteristic line-of-thinking is that such an encounter between humankind and an extraterrestrial civilization would be profoundly disrupting and potentially even catastrophic for human culture. Ed Simon trods this well-worn path:

As Sagan wrote in his 1985 novel Contact, an awareness of extraterrestrial life would serve to inculcate the “power of the planetary perspective.” It would, as Sagan told Studs Terkel in 1985, “de-provincialize” humanity. In other words, we’d experience ontological shock.

This ontological shock would be different from mere discovery or invention; it’s not even synonymous with what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift,” when scientific consensus is amended by some revolutionary new theory. Rather it’s an apocalypse—in the sense of the word’s original Greek meaning of “unveiling”—whereby the true nature of reality is radically altered. In light of the reporting in the Debrief and the steps toward disclosure being taken in Washington, it’s reasonable to say we should prepare ourselves for the possibility of that very experience.

“That very experience”, happily, is one that has been increasingly scrutinized, not from the perspective of the STEMcentric cultures of the “advanced societies” of the “First World,” but from that of the colonized, an example being a recent article in The Conversation by scholars Shorter, TallBear, and Lempert. Here, Shorter et al. take to task the colonialist unconscious (ideology) at work in SETI, unmasking the biasses and prejudices underwriting its “scientifically-objective” thinking about listening for alien life and managing First Contact and its fallout.

Both stances, however, make a number of assumptions, determined by the analogy that governs their reflections. Aside from the whole matter of the very idea of a technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization (…), there is the assumption that human beings and the alien Other would immediately recognize each other as their respective Others. Such mutual recognition was already not so simple in the encounter of Europeans with the inhabitants of Turtle Island. In anthropological hindsight, surely, each culture recognized the other as “human” if foreign; however, Symbolically, we know, at least from the European side, those they encountered were quickly dehumanized and instrumentalized, e.g., in Columbus’ gold mines in the West Indies.

But what warrant is there to assume an analogous mutual recognition in the case of interspecies contact? On the one hand, the case of interspecies relations on earth does not hold out much promise; on the other, the science-fictional assumption of SETI is that that recognition would be underwritten by both species’ possessing mutually-recognizable technology. This is to assume a lot about “technology”: would the aliens recognize our artifices as technology, especially once the idea of linear, technological “progress” has been demystified? Could we recognize theirs? My favourite example is the Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home, wherein Cetacean aliens come to earth to search for their whale-kind long since left in earth’s oceans, utterly oblivious to all Homo Sapiens so proudly (and vainly) believes to be the marks and wonders of its technology on and off the surface of the earth.

The contribution of the perspective of scholars such as that of Shorter, et al. is its serving as a site of critique for the entire instrumental, technoscientic foundation of SETI, ufology, much of science fiction, and the ideology of the “advanced” societies. In harmony with the work that goes on here, the value-free neutrality of STEM, especially in its material institutions, is called into question, along with the ideas of being more-or-less technologically-advanced and those of “intelligence” and even life. As I have argued here at length, the alien Other is in reality an unconscious and impoverished reflection of the human being, but no less revelatory for all that….