Varieties & Trajectories of Contemporary UAP Studies: Reflections on the most recent Society for UAP Studies’ Annual Conference

[N.b. Due to WordPress’ incessant fixing features of its platform that aren’t broken, early, incomplete drafts of this post inadvertently appeared. As of 14h00 Sunday 1 September 2024, the more-or-less final version of this post here appears. Only inadvertent typos that have escaped my tired eyes need be corrected…]

The weekend of August 16-18 2024, the Society for UAP Studies (SUAPS) held its annual, online conference. This year, unlike last, I attended only those talks, keynote and plenary, that touched on the work here at the Skunkworks: Dr. Brenda Denzler’s “The Discovery of OIL [Other Intelligent Life],” Maya Cowan’s “Observatories and Experiencers,” Dr Bertrand Méheust’s “The Problem of Elusiveness,” Professor Travis Dumsday’s “Understanding UAPs [sic]: Surveying Some Non-Naturalist Ontologies,” Dr. Kevin Knuth’s “Simulating the Characteristics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations that Encounter Earth,” and the sessions presenting the results of the concurrent workshops in the humanities and social sciences. (The abstracts for the talks can be accessed by clicking on the hyperlink to the conference’s webpage, above). And, unlike last year, I won’t be commenting on each talk; rather, I want to address a set of concerns these talks and the discussions around them raised about and around the nascent field of UAP studies.

First, it was refreshing to hear in Ted Peters’ contribution to the report of the Humanities Workshop an explicit critique of what Peters termed the “mythologies” around technoscience. Peters fingers specifically the conflation of (biological) evolution and (technological) progress, the belief, assumption, or presumption that the longer a species has been around the more technologically sophisticated it will be (a conflation echoed reflexively by Kevin Knuth who referred to the evolution of technologically-advanced societies in my brief conversation with him after his presentation). Moreover, the belief that technoscience will solve the problems industrialization and technology have unleashed and that, therefore, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations will have solutions for our most pressing environmental problems is subjected to scrutiny and found wanting. Peters (and, I guess, the workshop’s participants) stops short, however, in pursuing the more general, social and “spiritual” (geistig) implications of this critique of “technoscientism,” implications with social, postcolonial, and ecological import. The workshop’s reflection was truncated in this way, I think, because of the near-exclusive concern of the conference (if not the majority of the Society…) with the nature (“being”) of UAP, neglecting the implications of how UAP are being thought for how we think of ourselves, society, and world….

Most of the central concerns I have were raised in Brenda Denzler’s talk, an avowedly personal take on the matter. Basically, Denzler laid out her version of the Interdimensional Hypothesis, the contention that UAP and encounter experiences ultimately stem not from an extraterrestrial source but from one originating in another dimension. She began with consciousness’ being an epiphenomenon (mental states, though not identical with physical states, nevertheless arise from and depend upon them), and, from there, speculated that if consciousness evolved on earth (as it clearly has), then it is imaginable it might have evolved in another dimension, as well. Aside from her uncritically adopting the very notion of “other dimensions” (a deeply-complex topic in need of much elaboration and reflection, see, for example, Martin Kottmeyer’s brief essay “Does ‘Interdimensional’ Mean Anything?”) Denzler seems to take at face value much of what I (and others) term the “UFO mythology.” She references, without comment, the Schirmer abduction case and seems to accept Vallée’s and Harris’ yarn concerning the 1945 Trinity Crash, as well as maintaining that “the phenomenon has always been with us,” as evidenced by stories of “UAP” and encounters with nonhuman intelligences worldwide and throughout time. She ended her talk, urging researchers to study these Nonhuman Intelligences not as mere stories and beliefs but as real entities, arguing that if we only ever studied whales in terms of their effects on culture, as merely cultural phenomena regardless of their reality, we would never have learned what marine biologists have about them.

As I remarked in the question-and-answer following the presentation by the Humanities Workshop, the topic of “consciousness” and “mind” has become a hot one in the field, but, from the point-of-view of someone acquainted with the philosophy of mind and the reflections on “consciousness” since Kant down to the phenomenological movement and the critique of reductionist theories by Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank, much of the discussion seems frustratingly muddled. Case in point: too often, “consciousness” and “mind” are conflated and thought of as things, following, I imagine, in a rough-and-ready fashion, Descartes’ distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, things or stuff in space and thinking things or stuff. In the wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the subsequent concern with the nature of self-consciousness, Fichte was the first to mock one critic for thinking of consciousness as a thing. Phenomenologically (more-or-less, phenomenology being a variegated school of thought) consciousness is a relation, being always intentional. One would wish, at least, that all interlocutors had read Gilbert Ryle‘s The Concept of Mind, however dated, not to mention Markus Gabriel’s I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century, for a start, however much the matter surely transcends its philosophical treatment, as Jeffrey Kripal, Dean Radin, and the folks at IONS would likely observe. Happily, the response to my comments confirmed that, at least, the complexity of, if not confusions around, the topic had been a matter of discussion in the workshop.

Falling more within my personal, professional purview is the belief that cultures throughout history and around the globe have stories about visions of what today are termed UAP and encounters with Nonhuman Intelligences. The question I posed to Dr. Denzler was how we could be certain we understood the stories this belief depends on, why, for example, we should read the story of the vision of Ezekiel as an account of an actual experience, whether in an ordinary, waking state (in which case others could have witnessed what Ezekiel is said to have witnessed), an altered state of consciousness (in which case only Ezekiel would have been privy to what he is said to have witnessed, i.e., he would have had a religious experience), or whether the Book of Ezekiel is a monumental work of religious poetry (which the symbolic content of his vision strongly suggests), Ezekiel, like Dante or Blake, for example, turning to poetry to communicate his urgent, compelling religious message. Scholars of Ezekiel and Merkabah mysticism which his writings inspired are in no agreement on this question. Denzler’s response (admittedly offhand) was less than satisfying, which was that, because literacy was at a premium throughout most of world history, the literate would not waste their elite skill on merely fanciful matters. Her answer is, of course, one steeped in European Enlightenment prejudices, and one hardly confirmed by the historical record. But my query is more general: how do we read texts linguistically, culturally, and historically distant? I pursued the matter with a simpler example: in many of the prophetic books of the Bible, the author claims, generally, “the Lord spoke to me.” How do we determine whether these words report an actual experience or are merely a rhetorical formula intended to secure an audience and authority? Denzler could offer no answer. I expanded on this topic in the question-and-answer following Professor Travis Dumsday’s presentation, that explored, in part, the implications of Animism for the epistemology and ontology of UAP and attendant phenomena. My contention, there, was that to impute “epistemologies” let alone “ontologies” to ante-European cultures risks committing an interpretive (if not colonialist) violence to the cultures swept up in a concept as general as “animism,” one whose contemporary sense goes back only to Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1871 book Primitive Culture (n.b. the utterly outmoded title). A most interesting if brief conversation ensued… This matter is a common one at the Skunkworks: a preliminary articulation of the argument can be read, here, which, I contend, deeply problematizes if not undercuts the belief in the universality of the phenomenon.

Finally, a more general problem haunts UAP studies, formulated quite pithily by historian Greg Eghigian: “In this field, there are no authorities.” Throughout the conference, I was increasingly irked by the repeated invocation of certain authors, whose works, though cited, were not even summarily subjected to the slightest, vigilant scrutiny: Michael Masters (referred to for his Extratempestrial Model), Jeffrey Kripal, D. W. Pasulka, and Jacques Vallée, among them (I even seem to recall the Sol Foundation being mentioned…). (Interested parties are invited to click on these last three names for what I have written on them here at the Skunkworks). One is tempted here to invoke the slogan from the X-Files: “Trust no one.” On the one hand, surely, in so nascent a field, bold, creative thinkers are needed, such as Vallée and Kripal; on the other, every thesis need be subjected to the most rigorous reflection and scrutiny. The field of UAP studies, if it is to find firm footing must follow the example of Husserl, who, himself, followed all the more radically that of Descartes (a foundational thinker, along with Francis Bacon, for the emergence of science-as-we-know-it), thinkers whose methodical bracketing and questioning of all inherited knowledge were the conditions for what breakthroughs they might be said to have made. I would go even further, that a no less scrupulous unearthing of determining and guiding presuppositions needs be undertaken, whether in the manner of the Destruktions carried out by Dilthey or Heidegger, the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida, or the desedimentations of Adorno. Only such a vigorous back-and-forth, leaping into the unknown and freeing ourselves from the supposedly known, will be sufficient to begin to catch a glimpse of the object at the focus of UAP studies.