‘Irritability’: The capacity of being excited to vital action (e.g. motion, contraction, nervous impulse, etc.) by the application of an external stimulus: a property of living matter or protoplasm in general, and characteristic in a special degree of certain organs or tissues of animals and plants, esp. muscles and nerves.

During a recent Society of UAP Studies (SUAPS) reading circle, one participant brought up the Vision of Ezekiel as a premodern UAP sighting, which induced, in me at least, an eye-roll. (I refer interested parties to my response, A Note on the Vision of Ezekiel). In a similar vein, reading Red Pill Junkie’s review of Disclosure Day, however much I very much agree with his take (and, let’s be clear, I’m a Patreon supporter of The Daily Grail)) I was bothered by three ideas he brought to bear—hyperreality, repressed memories, and metalogic (as High Strangeness)—ideas not uncommon and needing, I think, some comment if not clarification.

Hyperreality, as a philosophical concept, a little like its cousin ‘deconstruction,’ has suffered a crippling domestication since the poster-boy for French postmodernism Jean Baudrillard coined and developed it in his Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). The late Robbie Graham most famously applies the concept to the UFO phenomenon in his Silver Screen Saucers (2015). Red Pill Junkie (Miguel Romero) applies, in turn, Graham’s application to Disclosure Day. In this regard, Romero first observes that “Spielberg and his scriptwriters showed they did their homework,” weaving in the ufological tales around Roswell, “the Kecksburg crash of 1965, the alleged Holloman UFO landing … or even the urban myth that Hollywood actor Jackie Gleason was once taken to see the preserved alien bodies at some highly secured military facility, by his longtime buddy and golf companion Richard Nixon.” Citing Graham, Romero writes that “this approach renders [Disclosure Day] into an exercise in ‘hyperreality,’’” “the accepted reality of known UFO cases” framing the primary fictions at work in the film: a powerful, covert organization zealously guard[s] the UFO secret—which even includes the recovery and reverse engineering of crashed craft—and (b) that [secret’s being] directly related to human consciousness and psychic abilities.” Somewhat head-scratchingly, Romero goes on to write (spoiler alert!) “Even more to the point of the hyperreality treatment, [the film] ends up solving the Disclosure debacle by resorting to one massive ‘data dump’ of videos directly into a live news TV broadcast,” including “a bonafide in-your-face live alien no one could deny—even more so, because it was shown on TV, ergo it has to be real.” Romero concludes “That is how hyperreality works: by how our perception of what is real or not is heavily influenced by mainstream media—including movies like Disclosure Day.“

Romero’s understanding and application of ‘hyperreality’ is less clear than that of Graham (which I have probed, here). At the very least, he seems to take it that the hyperreal concerns how “mainstream media” “influences” “our perception of what is real or not,” which is a most dissatisfactory formulation. That “influence” seems to hinge on the notion that if something is “shown on TV, ergo it has to be real.” But it doesn’t take much reflection to come to the realization that something’s being shown on TV is by the virtue of the medium dubitable. Baudrillard was writing before the advent of the internet and Graham before generative AI and deepfakes and both before the idea of “fake news” corroded trust in “the mainstream media.” Were “a bonafide in-your-face live alien” shown on national television, the broadcast would be widely doubted: at the present moment, hyperreality is drained of its (potential) spontaneous truth value (if we insist on conflating the real with the true). It seems truer to say that Disclosure Day has merely drawn on the UFO mythology, the way Chris Carter and company did in The X-Files and pretty much every flying saucer movie has done at least since The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), whose flying saucer famously hums and buzzes as the real thing was said to have done. One wonders just who Romero imagines in the audience, many of whom will (and have!) point(ed) to the fictional world of the movie as a depiction of reality, recognizing all the ufological motifs Romero remarks. In so far as the fictional representation is seen to verify facts one might say the film functions hyperrealistically, for the normal relation of fact to fiction is here reversed (normally the factual grounds the fictional, but here the fictional verifies the factual). At any rate, just how much further ahead one’s understanding of the media and the ufulogical is invoking the hyperreal remains an open question.

With regard to my second concern, repressed memories, Romero remarks that the movie’s protagonists

Margaret and Daniel are both ‘experiencers’,” and, as such, have both experienced ‘screen memories’, … how experiencer/abductees consciously recall odd encounters with animals like deer, foxes, raccoons or owls …which are largely assumed by many in the UFO field—and mentioned as such in the movie—to be a mental concealment … used by the aliens as to not alarm the individuals they choose to interact with.

He goes to reflect concerning these screen memories that his

own personal interpretation is that screen memories are not the result of alien intervention (be that technological or otherwise) but are fabricated by the abductees’ own minds as a defense mechanism to safeguard their fragile psyche; the same way a rape victim would not be able to consciously remember details about their traumatic experience, because those are repressed by their subconscious and not a sophisticated ‘neuralizing’ beam.

Here, Romero invokes a psychological phenomenon at the heart of alien abduction literature, from the regression hypnosis undergone by Betty and Barney Hill on. The blithe way he invokes “repressed memories” is an index of how commonplace the idea is in ufological talk. However, as Freddie deBoer recently reminds us, “Recovered Memories Aren’t Real.” I leave it to the reader to consider the evidence and argument mustered by de Boer. The point is that the model of the psyche that underwrites the very idea of repression and the recovery of the repressed is deeply untenable, a point that bears repeated repeating in this regard…

In one of his journals, somewhere, Jacques Vallée writes that he encouraged Spielberg to abandon the extraterrestrial origin of the UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind for a more mysterious source (which he does avail himself of in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the ETs there being interdimensional). In the same way, Romero takes Disclosure Day to task for taming the phenomenon, observing that

one shouldn’t be too harsh on Spielberg and his scriptwriters, because the truth of the matter is that the *real* UFO phenomenon is not governed by logic—not even Hollywood ‘logic’. The phenomenon floats in the murky waters of ‘metalogic’—what students of Forteana call High Strangeness. And high strangeness does not respond well to test screenings and target audience.

Here, it seems to me, Romero understands “metalogic” the way skeptic Robert Sheaffer has done, mocking (without understanding or charity) Vallée’s deployment of the term in The Invisible College. Sheaffer seems to (mis)understand ‘metalogic’ to be il- or trans-logical, which Romero seems to, too (“the *real* UFO phenomenon is not governed by logic”). Now, it is so that experiences with UFOs or Alien Others are marked by “High Strangeness” (what researcher Jenny Randles long ago termed “the Oz Effect”), a departure from the “normal,” waking world as to sometimes cause an “ontological shock” (to speak with Lacan, one might say that “average-everyday” reality is disrupted by a Real). However weird or irrational such experiences may be, for Vallée, at least, they are not translogical but metalogical, “meta’-,” I take it, in the same sense as “meta-language,” i.e., the experiencer is not to take the experience at face value (an alien spaceship landing, disengorging alien astronauts on an exploratory mission) but to be deflected by the alien strangeness of the phenomenon to what it might mean. In this way, the self-revelation of the phenomenon, a kind of performance, not being what it appears to be, is an attempt to communicate.

And just here is a striking irony (despite the many observations of the review that strike home): Romero seems to have taken the movie, however consciously, like many ufophiles in the audience and commentariat, hyperrealistically, not as a work of (commercial) art but as a fictional representation of the truth, as Disclosure. It’s precisely the way the film fails to do justice to the facts of the phenomenon that Romero criticizes, criticisms whose very purchase depends upon the film’s seeking to fictionally represent facts. Romero seems to have fallen for the artistic gambit of the film, constructing a fiction from putative facts well-known to a certain audience to strengthen all-the-more the film’s verisimilitude, to, as it were, cast a kind of glamour on the audience that induces it to suspend its disbelief, a necessary condition for entering the fictional world conjured by the film. One wonders what a review of the film as work of cinematic art—which it is— might conclude.