On the Latest Crest of “the Psychic Tide”

Things have been quiet here at the Skunkworks, not because of any decline in research (Bernard Stiegler’s three-volume Techics and Time just arrived, I’ve been chewing over and savouring Matteo Pasquinelli’s revelatory social history of AI The Eye of the Master—essential reading!—, and Gary Lachman’s biography of Madame Blavatsky has served as bed- and leisure time reading…), nor has there been a pause in reflection, but, rather, recent “developments” have been prima facie eye-rollingly silly (e.g., UAP as being demonic…) or demanding more probing scrutiny to disclose their cultural roots, conceptual foundations, and ideological investments; here, I’m thinking of, among other things, Dr. Kimberly S. Engels’ online course on the phenomenology of UAP and the recent Sol Foundation symposium.

Among those books that prompt today’s reflections areYeats and the Occult (ed. George Mills Harper, 1975) and Demetres Tryphonopoulos’ The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1992). In the former it is Kathleen Raine’s “Hades Wrapped in a Cloud” with its discussion of Yeats’ Neoplatonic interests and research into what Evans-Wetz termed “the fairy faith in celtic countries” that reveals the deeper roots of our post-2017, Skinwalker-Ranch-haunted talk around UAP and related matters. And Tryphonopoulos’ exemplary chapter on “The Occult Tradition” in its late Nineteenth-, early Twentieth-Century manifestation could be as much about the present.

A telling case-in-point is Jeffrey Kripal’s talk delivered at the aforementioned Sol Foundation Symposium. Despite his characteristic, conversational, cagey delivery (an endemically American style of academic presentation that warrants a study all its own) one can—charitably—distil a number of positions, if not, strictly speaking, theses. One of these concerns is “what our sciences are and can do and what they aren’t and cannot do.” Kripal’s position seems in line with that resistance to the growing hegemony of the natural sciences in the Nineteenth century, that upsurge in interest in “the occult” in response to the ebbing of religious orthodoxy. As Tryphonopolous writes: “It is an axiom of the occult [as he uses the term] that presently mysterious phenomena may be understood or explained in the future. However, there are other phenomena, said to be intrinsically occult, inherently unknowable to scientific reason, but still accessible to occult modes of cognition…” (25). These unknowable phenomena Kripal tends to term “impossible,” which includes “the physics of mystics,” levitation, bilocation, clairvoyance, and, imaginably, other parapsychological phenomena (which are sometimes reported to accompany UFO or UFO entity encounters), such as telepathy, poltergeist activity, Out-of-Body experiences, and UAP and encounter experiences themselves. Such impossible phenomena Kripal posits mark a limit for at least our present, physicalist (“materialist”) sciences, just as was maintained by those occultists of more than a century ago.

Other statements by Kripal strongly suggest his position is motivated by that desire to preserve a “religious,” “metaphysical” domain of experience and reality, much in line with his Victorian and Edwardian forebears. His argument is a “comparative argument,” grounded in his background as a Religious Studies scholar. He readily conflates our modern UFOs and ufonauts with all those tales of gods, angels, and demons and their interactions with humankind: as he says “This thing has been around as far as we can see back.” Here, Kripal might be said to twine two threads of that earlier iteration of “the occult.” On the one hand, this fusing UAP and related phenomena with the global religious tradition arguably takes up that project to preserve certain religious beliefs (the separability if not immortality of the soul or reincarnation, for example, or the reality of what Kripal and cadre term “Nonhuman Intelligences,” traditionally gods, angels, and demons). On the other, his position might be said to imply (though this is a shakier proposal), in its positing a perennial, global, transhistorical phenomenon, an affirmation of a perennial philosophy, occult knowledge, or gnosis concerning such matters, another characteristic of that “psychic tide” of over a century ago, as set forth most famously perhaps in Helena-Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophy (among others), an essential fiction of such movements at least since the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Fifteenth century.

Aside from Kripal’s talk, at least two other examples come to mind. Joshua Cutchin, an “amateur” scholar to be respected, will be giving a course The Near-Death Experience under the auspices of the Kosmos Institute (whose self-description as concerning “mythology, esotericism, archetypes” seems to include it in the kind of discourse here under discussion). The course description suggests it develops matters addressed in Cutchins’ recent Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal (2022). It is not immaterial that this work references both Yeats and Evans-Wentz, for the former had already formulated a kind of General Theory of Apparitions, drawing from the Neoplatonist Porphyry, identifying Fairies and their ilk and the souls of the dead materialized during séances, both made of “soul stuff,” a manner of “subtle body” (remarked, also, by Kripal), the substance, by extension, of our ufonauts, indeed, of all those “nonhuman intelligences” that present themselves in different forms throughout human history, or so our modern occultists’ story goes. (That is, perhaps we are not dealing with a variety of entities but with one Other that manifests in this variety of ways…). Nor is it any less accidental that Jacques Vallée, too, references Evans-Wentz in his Passport to Magonia (which, too, proposes a deeper root shared by so-called “Nonhuman intelligences” said to interact with human beings) and, though I cannot find the title indexed in any of his published volumes, I swear I’ve read him refer to Lodovico Maria Sinistrari’s De Daemonialitate, et Incubis et Succubis, a volume familiar to those occultists a century or so past, both in North America and England; nor is Vallée’s “Rosicrucianism” unknown (Rosicrucianism an inflection of the occult tradition examined by Tryphonopoulos, which, he reminds us, finds its origins in a Seventeenth century hoax (what today we would term a “psyop”)). Nor should one overlook the influence of Whitley Strieber (a collaborator of Jeffrey Kripal’s) in this regard, a self-confessed adherent of Gurdjieff, another figure in the earlier occult foment discussed by Tryphonopoulos.

Believers in the views put forth by Kripal, Cutchin, Vallée, Strieber and others will likely see the case I make here as a vindication of those views, as if they were the most recent inflection of a perennial, universal story of human interaction with the supernatural. My contention, however, is more critical. For, however “comparative” the studies of Kripal and Cutchin (and Diana Walsh Pasulka…), for example, they strike me, as far as I can determine, remarkably blind to history, or, more precisely, historicity. What I mean is that comparative studies always demand a moment of philological labour and scrutiny sensitive to how temporally- and culturally-distant artefacts can be understood, a sensitivity to the insurmountable difference of the Other (which, at the same time hardly precludes the possibility of what Hans-Georg Gadamer termed “the fusion of horizons”), a case I have often made here. Kripal et al. who maintain “the phenomenon has always been with us” hardly represent an unbroken line of gnosis (as if that claim would not be unproblematic in itself!), but rather, again, articulate an “absolutely modern” response to modernity, the epoch determined by the advent of the natural sciences, enlightenment, and technoscience, which themselves are more profoundly determined by the rise of capitalism, within whose horizon “all that is solid melts into air.” Little surprise, then, that we should witness a repetition (which is always different) of ideas that were themselves a reaction to an earlier iteration of the same circumstances. As things stand, this position that “the phenomenon has always been with us” rests on little more than comparative folklore, mythology, or religion, comparisons that, in turn, rest upon a semiotic and hermeneutic naivety at least.

That being said, I need, at the same time, remark a funnily apropos synchronicity. The morning I would finish this post, I sat down with my breakfast and turned on our television, which, somewhat mysteriously (I couldn’t’ discover the channel that was broadcasting it on the channel guide) was tuned to Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, his film about Jung and Freud, precisely the scene linked here:

Another not an Other

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A friend recently shared this meme of “What-the-Dalai-Lama-told-John-Mack” (which I haven’t fact-checked), which, along with the recent publication of Diana Pasulka’s Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences prompts this post.

As readers here will know, one engine of thought here at the Skunkworks is the thesis that the very idea of technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilizations is ideological, that is, treating a profoundly contingent cultural formation (namely, that of the earth’s so-called “advanced” societies) as if it were somehow natural or universal. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) for the origin of UFOs/AUP merely projects “First World” humanity as a paradigm of “intelligence” and “technology” onto the cosmos.

However, recent reflections on “the Phenomenon,” taking their cue, arguably, from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia combined, sometimes, with more recent, original research, depart from the conjecture that UFOs/UAP hail from an extrasolar civilization. Following Vallée, it is proposed that the mind-boggling variety of entities encountered in relation to flying saucers, UFOs, and UAP are part of a broader, human tradition of interaction with nonhuman intelligences. As Pasulka writes in the introduction to her new book (in her characteristically breezy style): “Traditional religions, including Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as Buddhism, and Hinduism, in addition to Indigenous communities, include some recognition, in parts of their histories and traditions, either acknowledging or pondering the existence of extraterrestrials or nonhuman intelligence, or do not discount it” (8).

In this notion of “nonhuman intelligence” there seems something unreflected, and that is the very (reported) fact of human/nonhuman interaction, an interaction that is more like human-to-human interaction than that between different species. If these entities are not of the family Homo (and even within that family mutual recognition is restricted), then the grounds of the mutual recognition between human and nonhuman beings is mysterious (if not downright mystical). I have argued this point with regards to intelligent extraterrestrials: there is no obvious reason why They should recogize Us as their technologically-advanced, intelligent Other. The same reasoning is arguably applicable to the nonhuman intelligences posited by Vallée, Pasulka, et al.

Within the context of the Abrahamic religions, the interaction between humankind, angels, and demons is not suprising, however, given that they all spring from the same Creator, Man being made in His image. Just how an analogous thinking is operative in the traditions Pasulka lists above, she—the religious studies scholar—would know better than I, but my hunch is this analogue is present in one inflection or other in them all. It follows, then, that myths, traditions, stories, or reports of “face-to-face” interaction with nonhuman intelligences, at least within the context of a Darwinian understanding of life, intelligence, and consciousness, betray an anthropomorphism if not an anthropocentrism. In our average-everyday reality, human-to-human interaction differs from interspecies interaction, and interaction between human and nonhuman “intelligent” beings would be an instance of the latter, not the former.

This reflection reveals a deeper, unquestionable anthropocentrism. The very idea of “nonhuman intelligence,” as it is deployed in talk about “the Phenomenon,” excludes out of hand the “intelligence” of all other forms of life on earth (which is ironic given the way that non-Abrahamic traditions—“Buddhism, and Hinduism, in addition to Indigenous communities”—think of nonhuman beings in ways markedly more empathetic). As I have argued, there’s no such thing as intelligence. That is, the concept of “intelligence” denotes not some quality or characteristic in-itself, but is a piece in some language game (e.g., that of various fields of psychology, artifical intelligence research, etc.) possessed of significance only relative to its particular use. Just as the concept of technology is unreflectively inflated and projected onto the cosmos by the thinking that goes on in the ETH and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, too often in ufological talk, even in this latest inflection, “intelligence” appears blindly applied only to human, all-too-human (so-called) Others.

Retrieving and Reverse Engineering Trinity: The Best Kept Secret

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Kevin Randle neatly sums up the recent crash of Vallée’s and Harris’ Trinity: The Best Kept Secret. He adds some of his own criticisms to those amassed by Douglas Dean Johnson along with Johnson’s recent release of an old interview with one of Vallée’s and Harris’ star witnesses, which should be the final nail in the coffin of this case. Nevertheless, having been in the field for decades, Randle understands and wearily admits that “Although this should be the stake through the heart of the tale, I know, from experience, that there are those who will not accept the evidence.”

When news of Vallée’s and Harris’ book broke, I had already observed their tale’s potential, one quite independent of its factual truth:

As Jimmy Church observes in his recent interview with the authors, “This could be another Roswell!”. I suggest here that Church’s words are prophetic, not in the sense that Trinity and Roswell are analogous, real world events, but that the former, with the publication of Vallee’s and Harris’ book, stands to become another seed for an endlessly branching and proliferating story, like that of the latter, regardless of what kernel of truth each might possess. Indeed, the Trinity case, both in itself and its initial reception, seems more grist for a sociological mill, another example of the genesis, development, and elaboration of a visionary rumour, if not a new religion.

The book, at least in its first iteration (I declined purchasing the second edition) was a sorry mess. Nevertheless, precisely the character of that messiness prompted me to attempt a “retrieval and reverse engineering” of the book, which, in light of recent developments, seems timely to reshare.

The “debate” about the case and Vallée’s and Harris’ book continues. Such is the character of “the UFO people.” As I’ve remarked, one shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of the truth. For all its vacuity, the case can still provide grist for the philosophical and poetical mills. You can read my re-engineering of Vallée’s and Harris’ book, here.

Concerning critique and criticism

August 15, 2022August 16, 2022 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

In a recent thread over at the UFO Updates Facebook page unwinding under a notice of Jacques Vallée’s and James Fox’s having recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, I chimed in in harmony with one commenter who drew attention to the grave flaws with Vallée’s and Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky, adding Vallée’s and Harris’ Trinity: The Best Kept Secret was as bad if not worse. Another commenter took exception, remarking: “Why build up when it’s so much easier to tear down?”

I found this comment discomfortingly unfair. Anyone who takes the time to read what I have written about Trinity in particular and Vallée’s work in general will, if they read attentively and with a modicum of understanding, percieve I am at all points charitable, at all points straining to present Vallée’s views as accurately and fairly as I can and, only once I have presented them as I understand them and as strongly as I can, do I then venture to either remark their implications or flaws in reasoning. I challenge anyone interested to find passages here at Skunkworks where I depart from this practice and to leave a comment specific to the substance of my discourse.

Some readers here have conflated criticism with critique, destructiveness with Destruktion (deconstruction). Criticism, at its most excessive, descends to fault-finding, and one unconcerned with grasping the criticized’s position accurately or at its most persuasive. Debunkery is an example of this kind of criticism, an approach I have defended, for example, Vallée’s writing against. Nevertheless, when Vallée’s writing has been less than accurate, I have criticized it on those grounds, but far more respectfully than others. But much more often what I engage in here at the Skunkworks is critique: the probing of the presuppositions and implications of an author’s position. A most recent example of the latter is my essaying a particular blind spot in Vallée’s Control System Hypthesis, especially its implications when read in combination with some passages from Passport to Magonia. Who sees this argument as merely destructive or dismissive fails to either grasp the argument or take it seriously.

And if there is anything at work here it’s my taking the authors I engage—Jacques Vallée, Diane Pasulka/Heath, Jeffrey Kripal, and George Hansen, among others (and, yes, even Avi Loeb…)—seriously. I challenge my critics, anyone who finds the thinking here at Skunkworks merely destructive, facilely dismissive, to find any other reader of these authors’ works as scrupulous or charitable. As I have observed, in some circles these authors can do no wrong; in others, no right. Neither stance does their conjectures, thinking, and labours justice. Only a painstaking, vigilant reading that is dialectical, i.e., that both discerns and uncovers the truth of their positions while at the same time the conditions, limits, and troubling implications of that truth can be said to do their work justice, to take it seriously.

As I responded to the commenter whose remark spurred this post: it’s not easy to tear down—something solidly built. Of course, such wanton demolition is not what we’re up to here at these Skunkworks…