Tag: climate emergency

Pennies from Heaven: UAP in Light of the Climate Crisis

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

As is well-known, Carl Jung related the appearance of flying saucers to the social anxieties of the day, the splitting of the world into two hostile camps, a division unconsciously healed by the mandala circle of the saucers. Eric Ouellet applies a similar approach to accounting for the Belgian Wave of triangular UFOs at the time the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were breaking down and the European Union was forming. Is our own time not beset by a no less grave concern, climate change and the environmental crisis? How do UFOs / UAP appear against this latest horizon? Jeremy McGowan essays this matter in a somewhat incoherent and repetitive (if no less telling) way in his Medium article “You can’t be an environmentalist and support Coulthart, Elizondo, Corbell, or Greer.”

On the one hand, McGowan does “not fully subscribe to the prevailing notion that humanity alone drives global warming,” while seeing “undeniable value in any truly advanced technology — alien or otherwise — that strengthens our capacity to stabilize the climate, restore the oceans, and reduce the global dependency on fossil fuels.” This position is not incoherent in itself, but troubles a mind informed by climate science. A ” technology…that strengthens our capacity to stabilize the climate, restore the oceans, and reduce the global dependency on fossil fuel” is, if climate change is not driven by the emission of greenhouse gasses, capable of geoengineering on a breath-taking scale, and, if it can stabilize the climate and restore the oceans so, then, it seems to follow, there is no need for the global economy to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

As the title of his article reveals, McGowan targets, somewhat mysteriously,

self-proclaimed environmentalists, liberals, and progressives, who parade around under the banner of environmental activism, yet applaud figures like Ross Coulthart and Lue Elizondo [who] brag about secret alien technology — technology with the potential to upend dirty fossil-fuel dependence — only to hide behind non-disclosure agreements or flimsy “source protection” excuses.

I am quizzical of McGowan’s aim here, as that constituency of “environmentalists, liberals, and progressives” who lionize Coulthart, Elizondo, et. al., is not imaginably very large. Moreover, McGowan overlooks a long and troubling history of environmentalists who are neither “liberals” nor “progressives” but reactionaries and fascists. Indeed, the wording of the passage above suggests just where on the political spectrum McGowan likely places himself. Nevertheless, he charges these environmentalists with hypocrisy, because if they believed the claims about concealed and withheld nonhuman, advanced technology, they would demand “full disclosure” instead of defending those who “hide behind non-disclosure agreements or flimsy ‘source protection’ excuses.” As McGowan writes

Activists may hold protest signs (made of paper and requiring the killing of trees) about oil pipelines and deforestation but remain silent about possible extraterrestrial technology that might end oil dependency outright while supporting the silly comments of UFO talking heads waxing poetic about alien egg-shaped craft recoveries and UFOs so large a building had to be constructed to hide it.

What is telling here is not so much the targets of McGowan’s vitriol, but what is assumed in his whole discussion, that the solution to the environmental crisis and global warming is essentially technological, a position known as ecomodernism. Coulhart and co. claim to have knowledge of “advanced” technologies capable of revolutionizing our own technologies and economies and in turn resolving the problems those technologies and economies have produced in the forms of pollution, biodiversity loss, etc. What McGowan fails to imagine, likely due precisely to his political leanings, is that even if such technologies existed, their being made known would occur in a social system that would monopolize those technologies for profit, not the universal good. As I observed concerning an interview with A. M. Gittlitz

since [for, e.g., members of the Frankfurt School ] material scarcity is economically unwarranted, its persistence must be due to other factors (for the Marxist, social ones). Gittlitz is especially insightful when he puts his finger on the fact that any suppressed free energy technology would be immediately monopolized upon its being disclosed, regardless of its human or extraterrestrial origins. That such utopian technologies would be spontaneously governed by the capitalist order in this way seems lost on proponents of disclosure such as James Gilliland and Foster Gamble. What’s very compelling is how the belief in and drive to reveal suppressed technologies implies a cognitive dissonance in the believers in disclosure. Gilliland, Gamble, et al. tend to be politically reactionary, in Gamble’s case, vaguely libertarian. However, the general distribution of the technologies they believe suppressed would undermine the economic base that supports capitalist social relations. In this way, those pressing for disclosure are bourgeois reactionaries dreaming of a socialist utopia!

What our UAP Disclosure ecomodernists fail to grasp is that the ecological crisis is at base social, it has to do with the very raison d’etre of economic activity under capitalism (profit through the exploitation of other human beings and nature). The answer to the crisis lies not in any technology fallen from heaven but in a radical reorientation of society, here, away from the stars to our place and home on the earth. Any imaginary solution to this all-too-real problem is the very definition of ideology-as-false-consciousness.

Addendum: Synchronicitiously, the day I post the above remarks, I receive word of a new book, How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change by Jens Beckert, which argues

Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years….

Sightings: Sunday 4 July 2021: The Great Divide, the Climate Emergency, and UFOs/UAP

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

One fairly consistent observation among American UFO people in the frothing wake of media attention to the recently released Preliminary Assessment on UAP is how the topic is now not only taken relatively seriously but how this interest is shared across the Great Divide in American politics and culture (Republican vs. Democrat, Conservative vs. Liberal), both among politicians (e.g., Marco Rubio (R) and Harry Reid (D)) and television networks (Fox and CNN). Now, Marik von Rennenkampff, an opinion columnist for The Hill, proposes an even stronger possible role for the topic in his piece How transparency on UFOs can unite a deeply divided nation.

Von Rennenkampff argues that “the UFO mystery could ultimately transcend the deep polarization of the post-Trump era,” regardless of what Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) ultimately turn out to be. On one reading, the Preliminary Assessment leaves it open that, as President Trump’s final director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe claims, “there are technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against” or, that as Chris Mellon, et al. maintain, these technologies may be extraterrestrial. “If Ratcliffe is correct and analysts ruled out mundane explanations or advanced U.S. and adversarial technology, the government’s high-level assessments would fuel a remarkable discussion, drawing in Americans from across the political divide,” thinks von Rennenkampff. Alternatively, “if a thorough investigation, driven by intense bipartisan interest, ultimately determines that balloons, drones, birds or plastic bags explain the most extraordinary UFO encounters, the upshot is that America will [still] be less politically and culturally fractured,” precisely because of “the intense bipartisan interest” this latest iteration of “the UFO mystery” will have inspired.

Von Rennenkampff seems caught up by an enthusiasm for the phenomenon that has clouded his reasoning. On the one hand, one has to wonder how serious the public interest in “the UFO mystery” is. Surely, some believe UAP are “real” as fervently as they do the earth revolves around the sun or the earth is flat, but many, imaginably, even among the roughly half the American public who will say “that UFOs reported by people in the military are likely evidence of intelligent life outside Earth” do so because there is nothing at stake in entertaining the idea. On the other, Rennenkampff is correct to posit that should a large majority of the American populace get taken by the question of the nature of UAP America will be less culturally fractured…on precisely this one point, but it hardly follows that the country will be less politically divided on questions of, e.g., reproductive or labour rights, race relations, gun control, the division of church and state, the environment, taxation, or foreign policy.

At the end of his column, von Rennenkampff writes something that can be read as his dimly realizing the vacuousness of his own thesis: “As large swathes of the country face a drought of ‘biblical proportions’ and all-time temperature records are demolished, an unlikely shot at uncovering ‘breakthrough technology’ is worth eroding the deep fault lines dividing America.” Von Rennenkampff’s very rhetoric undermines his proposal. A drought of “biblical proportions” would, in a country with as many fundamentalist Christians as the U.S., make a profound, urgent impression on just that populace keyed to perceive it, a demographic more likely to respond to such a sign from heaven than lights in the sky. Furthermore, to “erode” a fault line would be to deepen it, unless the author has in mind some biblical deluge that would wash away the earth on either side. His very language testifies against the spuriousness of what he intends.

Moreover, the contrast between the gravity of undeniable, sustained drought and killer heat and the flight of fancy of that “unlikely shot” is stunning. Von Rennenkampff’s wager seems to be that UAP are “real”, that they represent either an earthly or unearthly “breakthrough technology” (at least aeronautically), a technology that can be harnessed to practically address the climate emergency, and that the public might be tricked into uniting to tackle this undeniable existential threat by the fascinating lure of a seemingly mysterious technology (ours or theirs or theirs) when it fails to acknowledge what in fact is right in front of its eyes wreaking death and havoc. And if he and we lose this wager, and “a thorough investigation, driven by intense bipartisan interest, ultimately determines that balloons, drones, birds or plastic bags explain the most extraordinary UFO encounters,” what then?

The bitter irony is that Americans are unable to come together in the face of a relatively concrete public health emergency, to agree on and follow the public health measures, e.g., masking and vaccination, to bring the present pandemic under control, much less to come to terms with the reality posed by drought, dangerously high temperatures, and increasingly powerful and destructive tropical storms and hurricanes. If Americans can’t unite in the face of such immediate, dire threats, the political potential of UAP is a will o’ the wisp.

In a not unrelated vein, some readers of last week’s Sightings may have been mystified or miffed by my linking and referring to a leaked draft of the latest IPCC report in the context of and in contrast to the big ufological news of that week, the release of the ODNI Preliminary Assessment on UAP. The comments on a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, “Canada is a warning: more and more of the world will soon be too hot for humans”, however, included some very telling and pertinent remarks that are more assured of the assessment’s implications: “We now know that humans or non-humans have objects that can move around at very high speeds without giving off a significant heat signature”, and

The US govt just confirmed the existence of UFOs. They are either human or non-human (i.e., not swamp gas, ‘system errors’ etc). These UFOs move in ways that defy currently known technology…. ‘States and businesses’ could get on with researching this now known direction of technological travel,

and most tellingly, in light of the “recent UFO disclosure…We now know for sure the technology exists [to mitigate green house gas emissions]—time to see what it can do and how it might reduce the environmental footprint of humanity”.

Here is a demographic convinced that humankind has either developed or encountered “a breakthrough technology” adaptable to solving its energy and environmental challenges. But its seeing this technology as a way to solving the climate emergency is as muddle-headed as von Rennenkampff’s wager. If the technology is nonhuman, then the possibilities of our exploiting it for our own ends are vanishingly small (the claims of Michael Salla and Steven Greer notwithstanding); if the technology is human (which the Assessment is far from affirming), it doesn’t follow it is even applicable or scalable to solving global warming. Both fanciful hopes are akin to the more mundane if speculative technofixes proposed by geoengineers: they all fixate on development’s solving the problems that attend development when the painful truth of the matter is that we already possess immediately deployable ways to reduce both green house gas emission and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (e.g., the hundred plus solutions set out by Project Drawdown) whose primary obstacle to being implemented is political, namely those parties with vested interests in maintaining an ecocidal status quo from which they profit (and who are among the first to promote technofixes that leave social relations favourable to their flourishing untouched): they are, in a word, ideological.

What’s remarkable about these two instances of “the UFO imaginary” is how their intended touching down on real world concerns is in actuality a flight into fantasy. The overwhelming, seeming intractability of urgent, real world problems makes some of us, understandably, avert our gaze heavenward, seeking answers that cost us nothing to these problems that seem to threaten everything.