Sightings Friday 11 August 2023

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.

Sightings Friday 4 August 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 12 Comments

The Grusch Affair continues to suck up the air in ufological space. The usual suspects continue to keep the story spinning (see this “roundtable” with George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, Ross Coulthart, and Bryce Zabel, for example). In the mass(er) media, News Nation (…) isn’t much better, bringing together “experts” Sean Cahill, Steven Greer, and Avi Loeb for a yack. At least PBS for its part went to a journalist author of a forthcoming book on the matter, Garrett Graff. Even more serious thinkers are scratching their heads: Bernardo Kastrup (in a not very informed or profound manner) and Mike Cifone more scrupulously.

Those who swallow Grusch’s tale do so, it seems, for the most part, because they want to believe or on the grounds of the man’s credentials. Anyone who watched to the end a recent conversation between Mick West and Steven Greenstreet, however, would have been treated to a link that waves five red flags with Grusch’s story. The one that should catch the eye of everyone interested in the topic is that “in accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose.” Nothing Grusch has said is considered secret by the U.S. Department of Defense. So, is he blowing a whistle, or smoke?…

Some, such as those I’ve noted here earlier, Luke Harrington and Caitlin Johnstone, are able to look awry at the matter to consider its societal implications aside from the question of the factual truth of Grusch’s claims. Günseli Yalcinkaya, too, insightfully raises the point that “In this new and uncharted era of disinformation, it’s easy to see how stories of technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplained phenomena can fan the flames of cover-ups and conspiratorial thinking…” Thus, “it’s hard not to question the motives behind how this information is being fed to us – and why.”

Yalcinkaya is informed enough to recognize that the suspicion of cover-ups goes back to the beginning (however much she points to Roswell as the watershed event…). In fact, it’s in 1950 Frank Scully publishes tha archetypal crash-and-retrieval tale Behind the Flying Saucers; Donald Keyhoe publishes The Flying Saucer Conspiracy five years later, a title that underlines suspicions he’d been voicing from the start, in The Flying Saucers are Real (1950). In this regard, she quotes Mark Pilkington: “This UFO belief is intrinsically tied to notions of a government and military cover-up, and is powerful and pervasive within society,” a society wherein (as Yalcinkaya writes) “social media chips away at any notion of a consensus reality,…which amplifies fringe beliefs and makes it harder to distinguish what’s real or not.” Cannily, she observes that “Even the positioning of UAP sightings as classified information plays into this narrative, with officials capitalising on our collective distrust of mainstream media to uncover hidden truths,” this skepticism toward mainstream media further eroding a shared sense reality. “It’s important to consider why these conversations are entering the mainstream now” she goes on to write, “and it’s not a coincidence that it’s during a time when space tourism is on the rise and conversations around AI and non-human intelligence are reaching their peak and posing very real existential threats.” However much I find there to be more pressing concerns than those Yalcinkaya remarks, we would surely agree that The Grusch Show serves to keep “us distracted from anything more shadowy beneath the surface.”

Aside from distracting from graver problems (I’ve remarked Tim Burchett’s and Anna Paulina Luna’s skepticism about global warming…) and further dissolving consensus reality, the Grusch Affair stirs a deeper, troubling current, a particular, bipartisan suspicion of government. The roots of such distrust go to the very founding of the Republic, and, unsurprisingly, sprout after the Second War, one flower of which is precisely the myth of a UFO cover-up as articulated by Keyhoe. More acutely, “Big government” has been the target of Neoliberal attacks: Ronald Reagan famously stated that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This overt ideology has been behind the drive to rollback those gains made by working people after the war, particularly in the institutions of the welfare state. The consequences of such thinly-veiled laissez faire capitalism have not been for the best. And, at a time when then nations of the earth need work together over decades to mitigate and adapt to climate change (and other threats to life on earth), such a distrust of public institutions is, to say the least, counterproductive.

There is, morever, a blindness at work in this suspicion. “If there’s not a cover-up, the government and the Pentagon are sure spending a lot of resources to stop us from studying it,” Burchett told The Hill. His Republican colleague, Luna, adds, “We know that enormous sums of money are being spent on UAP-related activity, whether it’s retrieval/recovery, research and reverse-engineering, or just security for whatever the government is hiding.” This exclusive focus on government is curious, given that Grusch claims that “recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors” [my emphasis]. The private sector, therefore, is no less guilty of a cover-up than government. Indeed, corporations have shown themselves no more transparent, when quarterly profits are at stake. Big Tobacco lied about nicotine’s being addictive, Big Oil knew about global warming, Boeing’s cutting corners crashed several 737 Max aircraft, and, more recently, Johnson and Johnson ignored research that linked its talcum powder to cancer. Ironically, it’s only via public institutions, such as the courts, that such corporate malfeasance can be brought to justice (not to mention the role of the much-maligned mainstream media in investigating corporate deceit).

Ideology (in the sense I use the term here) is revealed in such contradictions and omissions. By these same fissures and silences, UFO talk, as a social phenomenon, can’t help but betray, too, the “necessary fictions” that keep in place and reproduce the present order. “Disclosure,” therefore, is a mere distraction, from the true cover-up, of what’s at work in social reality, a reality of which UFOs/UAP are inescapably a part.

Talk of “nonhuman biologics” doubtless to many brings to mind “extraterrestrials” (however much the more informed might as much think of cryptoterrestrials, extradimensionals, or extratemporals). Wade Roush, in the excerpt from his book Extraterrestrials, surveys ideas about “the plurality of worlds” from the ancient Hellenic philsophers Leucippus and Democritus on down to the present day. Leucippus and his student are often credited with founding Atomism, “the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.” Atomism, later, grounds the ethics of Epicurus and orients the great, scientific-epic poem of his follower Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Roush quotes a telling passage from the poem:

If store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale …
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.

Surely striking is how much the thinking here resembles that of contemporary astrobiology. The spatiotemporal immensity of the cosmos and the universality of the physical laws that govern it imply a likelihood of “Still other worlds, still other breeds” of life, sapient and “wild.”

I’ve proposed that the line of thought that posits that chemistry gives rise to life, which evolves to awareness and intelligence, which in turn develops technology is metaphysical, Platonic. And the deep, historical roots of the basic astrobiological schema, as evidenced in Lucretius’ poem, suggests, possibly, a no less deep, subterranean inheritance of related ideas in the sciences that are part of today’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). One could as well recognize in the thinking at work in Lucretius and SETI a version of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, that the churning of matter over vast periods of time gives rise to the same patterns, especially if the universe is thought to be in a state of constant creation. The important question, in this regard, is if the thinking here is merely probabilistic or if this strictly statistical thinking is not, at the same time, however unwittingly, determined by a stubborn, metaphysical residue. Interestingly, Henri Poincaré posited that “certain dynamical systems, such as particles of gas in a sealed container, will return infinitely often to a state arbitrarily close to their original state.” Surely a matter for further research…

Sightings: Saturday 29 July 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

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….

“Surely some revelation is at hand”: a note on the Grusch affair

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 8 Comments

The whistle blower side show around the recent revelations of David Grusch is telling.

Some, agog, have swallowed his tale whole, on the basis of his credentials. Those who’ve been around the ufological block sigh and roll their eyes at his threadbare yarns, including one well-known hoax about a UFO crash and retrieval avant le lettre in Lombardy in the 1930s, a story peddled by Luis Elizondo, as well…

An index of the power of the UFO mythology is not only the stir Grusch’s words have caused among those interested in the topic, but that they have found credibility in the U.S. government, resulting in new legislation and funding for new initiatives. An example of the credulous is Congressman Tim Burchett, for example, who only recently having come around to admitting the reality of global warming has nimbly jumped on the Roswell bandwagon.

This ignorant credulity reminds me of a story, perhaps apocryphal (but let’s not let the facts get in the way of the truth…) that the collapse of the Soviet Union took some elements of the American defense establishment by surprise, because, being fundamentalist Christians, they believed Russia to have been the Gog and Magog in The Book of Revelations…

Complementing (if not opposed to) Jacques Vallée’s conjectures about how the UFO phenomenon might be an engineered drama performed to guide human culture is the sad, undeniable reality of how the mythology is at times weaponized for penny ante con games…

Addendum: Careful readers will discern I make no claim regarding Grusch’s honesty; he may sincerely believe what he claims he was told and shown, or he may not. In the former case, at least, the function of the stories he conveys and the conditions of possibility for that functioning is what’s significant, which is my concern…

Presumed Immanent redux

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Theology Professor Stephen Bullivant essays a delightful thesis on the belief (or fascination) in “ancient aliens” as an inflection of atheism in his recent article for Big Think.

In doing so, he draws, however unwittingly, on a central premiss of my and Palmer’s article “Presumed Immanent” concerning UFO religions and the ideology they share with “advanced” society. Bullivant cannily observes that “While we might tend to think of aliens as being paranormal beings, they are not supernatural ones,” underlining the more-or-less unconscious naturalism or physicalism or materialism that underwrites much thinking in the disenchanted societies of the earth (not that such notions are far from controversial…).

This reconfiguration of religion-as-ufology has its modern inflections, too. The recent whistleblower revelations of David Grusch (which already have their own Wikipedia entry!) with their threadbare rumours of good and evil aliens, the crimes of the latter and the agreements entered into with them by various earth governments, rimes with the discourse around fundamentalist interpretations of the End Times that first emerged as such with no little gusto in the 1970s and fundamentalist Christian takes on UFOs and their occupants. Indeed, Nick Redfern described this mindset in certain governmental elements in his Final Events, a volume at home beside the more recent Skinwalkers at the Pentagon…

The matter is thought-provoking. On the one hand, the Flying Saucer has inspired a religious response. The Ancient Alien Hypothesis underwrites the dogma of the International Raëlian Movement; Theosophy and its Ascended Masters and doctrine of reincarnation find a ufological inflection in Unarius; and even the Nation of Islam has its mythology of the extraterrestrial origin of the white race and the nature of the UFOs. In all these cases, the UFO phenomenon is spiritualized. In a similar manner, a fundamentalist Christian perspective “abducts” (in the sense of Peirce’s semiotics) the UFO. On the other, a scientific, secular mindset is teased into dimensions more paranormal, the case of Jacques Vallée’s renunciation of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in the late 1960s being the locus classicus. Most recently, astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani has admitted (in part) “what emerges from my thoughts is that the UFO phenomenon is not much different …from ghost-like apparitions… So: why not from “other dimensions”, including the after-death realm?”. And it would be remiss not to mention, among the younger generation of researchers, Joshua Cutchin, who recently published a two-volume study on the phenomenon and death…

I hesitate to posit, as more rash thinkers have, that the phenomenon is a site where a binary opposition between the paranormal and the supernatural or between the secular and spiritual deconstructs (in the rigorous sense) but the theme surely possesses, as Walt Whitman said, “vista.”