As in the past weeks, the Grusch Affair continues to send out ripples and froth that obscure the more profound depths of the phenomenon.
Ballester-Olmos, et al, published their relatively down-to-earth review of the recent U.S. National Security Subcommittee’s hearing on UAP:
We don’t know whether to label it as ridiculous or shameful. Under the guise of a bipartisan initiative, the real scenario is a group of mostly Republican politicians seemingly trying to undermine the Democrat administration, using the tenuous pretext of UFOs this time around.Whether they are naive, misinformed, driven by ideology, or simply gullible remains unclear
Nevertheless, the appetite for the matter unsated, The Hill has organized a panel, We Are Not Alone: UFOs & National Security for 17 August 2023, with three of those “Republican politicians” and, finally, someone who knows something, historian Greg Eghigian. The Hill‘s own Marik Von Rennenkampff and Baptiste Friscourt at UAP Check have both recently published articles, more interesting for their logic than their content….
The most turbulent development was the paranoid reaction to The Intercept‘s revealing Grusch’s history of PTSD and related mental health issues, Grusch’s defenders impugning that his records had been leaked as part of a smear campaign (they weren’t: “The records were not confidential, medical, nor leaked. They are publicly available law enforcement records obtained under a routine Virginia FOIA request to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and provided by the office’s FOIA coordinator”). Logically, Grusch’s mental health history can hardly be said to discredit his testimony (that would be a very weak ad hominem argument), no more than his being autistic. More concerning is his business affiliation with Gary Nolan’s Sol Foundation, whose director is Chris Mellon, which associates Grusch all the more glaringly with those most prominent in promoting the UFO (rebranded as UAP) mythology post-2017….
Friscourt in his article for UAP Check invokes a common, ufological / astrobiological argument: “Statistical studies show that we can’t be alone;” if we have launched space probes, “others probably did it, as we are statistically unlikely to be special;” “Once you consider the amount of possible life out there, extended over billions of years, statistics make it simple: the existence of [extraterrestrial spaceships piloted by] non-human bodies actually makes sense.”
I have posed here the question as to whether an argument for life on other planets, let alone so-called intelligent life, let alone “technological” life, can be made on purely statistical, probabilistic, mathematical grounds. And it is a question. The further the argument moves from the question of mere life on other planets, it seems to me less compelling. And even if such an argument can be validly made, it can still be asked if it isn’t oriented, guided, or otherwise “determined” by ideology (an unconscious affirmation of the universal naturalness of the social formation of the so-called “advanced” (capitalist) societies) or what I have called “a metaphysical residue,” an inherited idea of “essence” or Eternal Recurrence.
Ideas don’t fall from heaven. At birth, a human being is “thrown” into a time and place not of their choosing, one wherein they take up mostly unconsciously what German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “Tradition”. Human beings’ being historical in this radical sense explains how it is certain notions orient, guide, and otherwise determine their actions, perceptions, and thinking. This “throwness” helps explain, further, in one regard, how ufological and astrobiological thinking can be seen to be guided by distantly-inherited ideas, such as a dim echo of Plato’s Forms.
A recent Big Think article by Prosanta Chakrabarty suggests another such guiding idea: the Great Chain of Being, “still how many people understand (or rather misunderstand) evolution — that is, as a linear process with bacteria and plants at the bottom as ‘primitive’ and a straight line from fish → amphibians → reptiles → mammals and then humans as a distinct category at the top.” The fetishization of instrumental rationality (what is seen as giving us “technology”) let alone human intelligence is a case in point: it surely sets (technoscientific) human intelligence above all others. Moreover, the linearity of the Great Chain harmonizes with the “Platonic” idea that intelligence is measurable on such a linear scale, such that we can imagine aliens or A.I.s “more” intelligent than present-day Homo Sapiens (a linearity that gets in turn extended to technological sophistication, equally supporting, e.g., Maitreya Raël’s fancies about his alien teachers’ being “25,000 years ahead of us,” European explorers’ belief in their superiority to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or even the Kardashev Scale).
That ufological or astrobiological thinking might well be said to be possessed by this scheme is an index of its being ontotheological, an inescapable consequence of its arising within the horizon of modernity, one in the grip of the Platonic-Christian inheritance, that fateful confluence of Greek ontology and Christian theology. It’s only once this “ufological / astrobiological unconscious” is revealed that that grip might begin to be loosened. Perhaps the nascent science of UAP studies (let alone the ufologically-minded) needs undergo a kind of conceptual psychoanalysis to free it from this perverse narrowness of vision before it is mature enough to join the family of full-fledged sciences.
Skunkworks 
The last 200 words of this essay is a supremely pithy and cogent analysis (“the fetishization of instrumental rationality” – “American Cosmic” in five glorious words!) that Ufologists and Fermi-Paradox-ologists should all carefully consider the next time they invoke “the vast cosmos” in their arguments. Watching Québécois Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” a few times might also help, based on Ted Chiang’s novella which contrasts humans experiencing events sequentially with aliens experiencing all events at once. As a brilliant observer of the human condition once observed, there are more things in heaven and earth than we have ever dreamt of in our philosophies.
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Glad you found the last part of this post pithy, and thanks for saying so.
I do need to walk a fine line with what I’m up to here, between criticism and critique, that is, between finding fault with an argument’s validity or soundness (claiming it is in some way “false”) and probing the limits, assumptions, and implications of a position or line of thinking (which strictly is not about its being true or not). That line, of course, wanders and sometimes isn’t very clear!
As to _Arrival_: for all its “science-fictionality”, I’ve always taken the whole premiss, the aliens and their language, to be a literary device for developing the story’s theme, _amor fati_: even though the protagonist _knows_ her future holds loss and heartbreak, she chooses it anyway…
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I do not possess enough knowledge about the current state of epistemology or teleology to offer a worthwhile comment about the line you walk. But you drew me in with pedestrian “news of the day,” then took me to sublime levels I had not considered. Many have recently pondered the SETI preconceptions of radio astronomy (e.g., “will aliens have progressed to telepathy, rendering radio wave searches obsolete?”) but few have integrated such mundane technological questions with the underlying construct of Western philosophy (Pasulka mines the issue from a more theological perspective). As for the impact of “Arrival,” like your prose, the alien plot drew me in, and then took me to other places I had not considered. But I agree the emotional impact of the film is what makes it so memorable. A last thought. I consider you and Greg Eghigian to be oiseaux d’une plume (leveraging my high school francais, s’il vous plaît) by considering the phenomenon from a perspective enriched by your historical/ philosophical insights. Merci encore!
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Wow! Glad I could draw you in! Some (many?) find my style offputting, and its being often high-flown if not downright high-falutin’ is in part an intentional stance (in part I just can’t help myself–that’s how I think!). And great to lumped in with Eghigian, a top notch scholar! Here’s hoping I can I can continue to chance to write something interesting sometimes, at the present pace…
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“downright high-falutin’” –> Insert laughing emojis here! Makes me think of Québécois Robbie Robertson and the songs he wrote for The Band, filled with Americanisms…Much on my mind since his death on Wednesday (I was a big fan). A phrase of the common man (“Whom God must have loved since he made so many of them” – Abe Lincoln) which I use all the time because it is at once evocative and so disarming. And self-effacing, just like you, monsieur. (I will shut up now so you can get to work on your next post…although I am almost compelled to think of your thoughtful, respectful, never-crude posts as AMC – Anti-Matter Corbell).
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Actually, the matter of Grusch’s autism is relevant: there is scientific evidence (see below) that ASD can make someone less able to discern whether others are lying to them. That is, they can be easier to manipulate. This is surely an important consideration when questioning the provenance of his extraordinary claims and the extent to which he was able to exercise proper discernment as to whether his sources were being truthful to him. His PTSD and problems with alcohol may also be relevant, albeit in a more indirect way (perhaps apart from the fact that Grusch, in his interview with Coulthart, seemed unaware that PTSD indeed a mental disorder/illness when asked whether he’d ever had any kind of mental illness, and seemed to vacillate between saying he’s “had” PTSD vs “I am” [suffering from it], suggesting these issues could be ongoing): they could cause his superiors concern about his mental stability and therefore capacity to continue with the job, the security of the intelligence entrusted to him, susceptibility to exploitation by foreign intelligence, etc. Grusch was able to keep his security clearance despite these issues, but of potential interest is whether his boss at UAPTF – Jay Stratton, Skinwalker diehard and believer in parasitic poltergeists, and described by a former colleague as a “nut job” – was part of any such decision. That, in turn, could speak to institutional dysfunction within the American intelligence apparatus, an important question in its own right.
Steve Cambian of Truthseekers asks in a recent podcast (https://www.youtube.com/live/55MOAg6jW-4?feature=share) whether there could be an element of exploitation by the motley core of ufodom (Knapp, Stratton, Corbell, Taylor, and Elizondo), people who Cambian sees as leaning on Grusch to produce the stories they want to hear (or at least infusing him with ufological items of their own – such as the garbled Magenta story, though I don’t think Cambian refers to it directly – to then be assimilated as part of his overall narrative (and, it could supposed, feeding into Grusch’s predisposition to believe such stories)).
(Cambian also talks about the study pertaining to autism, though he reads from the Science Direct summary in the video. Here is the reference to the actual study: David M. Williams, Toby Nicholson, Catherine Grainger, Sophie E. Lind, Peter Carruthers. Can you spot a liar? Deception, mindreading, and the case of autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 2018; DOI: 10.1002/aur.1962
And the summary from Science Daily: “A new study shows that the ability to distinguish truth from lies is diminished in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) — putting them at greater risk of being manipulated.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180522114817.htm)
I’ll also add something that I find rather odd: in his CV, Grusch refers to the Sol Foundation thus:
“The premier center for research in the natural and social sciences, engineering, and
the humanities…”
This obscure organization is being touted as “the” premier center for research in these fields? I would have thought that the RAND Corporation, MIT, DARPA, or any of a number of other American and foreign institutes with a far longer and deeper academic pedigree and scientific output could more justly lay claim to such an accolade. Maybe he was just pumping it up for the sake of self-promotion, as is often done in a CV, but this just strikes me as off (and maybe potentially touch upon his powers of discernment). Maybe I’m reading too much into it.
Great article, Bryan!
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Luis, you raise some very solid points here.
Autism is a sticky question (can/does one even use that expression anymore?). There are some people in my social sphere on the spectrum, along with the occasional student; my impression is that neurodivergence is a developing story. I don’t doubt that some degrees of autism make someone easier to manipulate, but I am just not up on the literature.—That Grusch was allowed to keep his clearance despite his mental health challenges does strike me (for whatever that’s worth) as unusual, indeed.—What I wanted to take exception to was the focus on the messenger (either by detractors or defenders) and all the increasingly complicated disputes such a focus has already inspired.
The question of whether Grusch is being used by “the motley core of ufodom” seems more on point…
As to Grusch’s pumping up the Sol Foundation, it _is_ hyperbolic, as much eyebrow raising as brow furrowing…
Here’s hoping Greg Eghigian’s being thrown into the mix might clarify matters a bit. But, really, what a circus, eh…
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