Tag: UFO

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….

Course Correction: on Limina’s Inaugural Symposium Part II (i)

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 7 Comments

The first main division of my extended report on Limina’s Inaugural Symposium can be read here.

Part II: Engaging with… (i) Greg Eghigian

As remarked above, the symposium opened with a bang, historian Greg Eghigian’s keynote address, “The Flying Saucer Chronicles: Reflections on the History of Our Fascination with UFOs and Alien Contact”. I can’t hope to do justice to Eghigian’s sustantive and eloquent discourse, but I can cobble together some its striking, salient points from my excitedly scribbled notes.

As a historian, Eghegian is concerned not so much with the being or nature of whatever might be said to be the cause of witness reports but the entire Flying Saucer/UFO/UAP phenomenon considered culturally: in his words, society’s “collective response makes up the phenomenon.” From this point of view, a history of the UFO is “the [hi]story of the story of the phenomenon,” the phenomenon, “a mirror to society” (however much it is itself part of that society…). As long recognized, flying saucers appear first in the context of the Cold War, the earliest reports of meeting their pilots relate they had come to warn humankind of the dangers of nuclear energy and atomic war, and, later, anxieties about developments in reproductive technology find expression in the abduction reports of the 1980s, an historical inflection probed in detail in Eghigian’s address.

A contentious if germane consequence of Eghegian’s self-consciously historiographical stance is that the phenomenon begins strictly in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting report and the journalistic coinage of ‘flying saucers’. This thesis caused no little chatter in the margins, a running conversation that consistently failed to grasp that understanding is radically temporal, historical. That is, Arnold’s report is a Ground Zero for the phenomenon, whose shock waves extend into the past and future. The flash of interest ignited by Arnold’s report and its journalistic and social echoes illuminates those earlier tales—about Ghost Rockets, Foo Fighters, Phantom Airships, or all that “damned data” recounted by Charles Fort—such that only then in retrospect do they come to be taken up into the phenomenon in general, as part of its [hi]story. This historiographical sophistication of Eghigian’s discourse was refreshing. The implied insight that, as Eghegian put it, experience always falls upon a “never barren imagination” enabled him to nimbly explain and dismantle the on-going facination for “ancient astronauts”.

Not only is the phenomenon historical but it is discursive, textual, so much so, part of its enduring appeal can be interpreted with concepts borrowed from literary criticism, a thesis dear to our hearts here at the Skunkworks. The drama of Disclosure is a melodrama, pitting heroic, selfless truthseekers and -tellers against evil manipulators intent on hiding the Truth, terrible or wonderful as it is. Moreover, its open-endedness gestures to its episodic seriality. Like any beloved television series, it has no preordained series finale, but the latest instalment can always end with the tantalizing words “Stay tuned for the next episode!”.

Finally, the phenomenon has always been political. Not in the facile party-political sense, but in the more radical way its being disputed cuts to the quick of questions of legitimacy, the ways that what counts as knowledge are constructed and defended in society, a topic taken up by Prof. Babette Babich. This is a matter that has been taken up here, too, and, of course, broadened and radicalized in ways passed over, if at least for the moment, by Eghigian’s address.

The next part (ii) of this second main division of my report can be read here.

A Short Take on Ryan Eslinger’s UFO

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

Most movies inspired by the UFO phenomenon have been and remain B-grade, generic science fiction or horror (not that such artefacts aren’t without their abyssal significance, either), but recently, at least in my media bubble, richer, more thoughtful films have appeared, among them some that have received publicity, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, and others, less celebrated, that have slipped under the radar, namely Jason Stone’s At First Light and Ryan Eslinger’s UFO, which is understated, smart, and dramatically complex.

[I’m writing about Eslinger’s film from the point of view of someone who’s viewed it, so, if you haven’t and don’t want the whole plot revealed, read no further!]

The film begins with a UFO sighting over Cincinnati airport, inspired by the famous O’Hare International Airport sighting of 7 November 2006, which catches the attention of the film’s protagonist Derek (who witnessed a UFO as a small boy) and an FBI agent Franklin Ahls, who seems a one-man UFO investigations desk with the entire agency’s resources at his beck and call.  The plot is driven, at the narrative level, by Derek’s (primarily mathematical) investigation into the sighting and the social fall-out of his actions and Ahls’ parallel investigation and suppression of the event, while, thematically, by the question (in its many senses) “Are we alone?”.

Despite the impression left by the trailer, the plot is much more cerebral than cloak-and-dagger, dealing for the most part with Dereck’s efforts to decode the message from the film’s titular UFO that he discovers in recordings of air traffic control communications during the sighting. One of the most delightful moments in this narrative arc is Dereck’s debunking of an official debunking of the sighting, which identifies the observed object as a small drone:  the audience witnesses the process, diagrams, numbers and all, by which Dereck calculates the approximate diameter of an object “about the size of a dime held at arm’s length” hovering at about two hundred feet below that day’s cloud ceiling. The plot doesn’t have so much a heart as a brain, one cracking itself over the complex mathematics of the numerical message sent by the UFO’s pilots, the solution to which ultimately involves considerations drawn from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and physical constants of, e.g., hydrogen. This is a gambit as daring as satisfying, evoking as it does some of the real, hard problems of putative communications with a technically advanced, nonhuman species.

Mathematics and physics do not lend themselves to the run-of-the-mill UFO cover-up movie, frustrating viewers with an insatiable appetite for that same old same old. Eslinger’s script is both more daring and more complex than that, delving into Dereck’s character as a way into even more profound thematic depths. Derek’s obsessiveness and mathematical genius render him a bit of a sociopath, causing him to betray his friends and inspiring his wearily understanding mathematics professor Dr. Hendricks to compare him to Thomas Edison at his worst. By the end of the film, the attentive, reflective viewer will likely be struck by the manifold irony in Dereck’s wondering if “we are alone.” At least twice, through brief flashbacks, Dereck’s lonely, if not traumatic, boyhood is revealed: his mother refused to believe him when he told her that he had witnessed strange lights in the sky, and it is suggested he was the only child of a single parent whose lives were materially precarious. He is able to attend university only because his high intelligence secured him a prestigious scholarship, but his selfish single-mindedness alienates him from those around him. Little wonder someone so isolated should wonder about being alone in the universe.

But the real thematic pay off of the film comes at the end, which has mystified or disappointed some reviewers. Franklin Ahl’s investigation into this and other UFO sightings is driven by a growing anxiety about the fate of humanity. Invoking a certain strain of SETI speculation about different levels of technical civilization, at one point during a meeting with a panel of scientists, he wonders out loud if “the eerie silence” SETI has met with is not caused by all civilizations’ self-destructing as they approach the threshold ours is. If, however, the UFOs he is chasing are indeed spacecraft from distant civilizations, then these have solved the problems that threaten to snuff ours out and learning to communicate with them might win us access to this direly needed information. When Dereck does decode the aliens’ message, which reveals the location of their next appearance, he witnesses the UFO and is immediately taken into custody by Ahls. The agent reveals that the aliens have been communicating in this way for some time and in increasingly complex ways, presenting problems whose solution seems to be leading along a path of research and discovery that imaginably leads to that know-how that saved them from the self-destruction that threatens us. Ahls recruits Dereck, who learns that we “are not alone”, in the literal sense that the universe is indeed (perhaps) inhabited by other technological intelligences, but also, unconsciously, that he is not alone in his obsessions, that finally he has found a place in this world.

But such an emotional resolution would be cheap if larger stakes were not in play. The Fine Structure Constant plays an important role throughout the film, right from its very beginning. At one point, discussing the constant with two scientists, it is suggested that the constant may in fact be the same throughout space, but not time. That the constant might be variable proves important to possibly solving the much more complex communications received from the aliens, which, in turn, suggests, though this is never spoken by any character, that the aliens are not from a distant point in space, but in time, namely our own future. Dereck, then, is representative of today’s youth whose ingenuity is required to solve the questions that lead to solving the problems that threaten our future. But not only that:  that mathematicians make their breakthroughs only in their youth is a cliché invoked at least twice. However, when Dr. Hendricks gives him this spiel, he immediately contradicts her, supplying as many examples of older mathematicians who have made important contributions. Thus, the intelligence of all generations is presented as being up to the task of facing down the world-threatening problems that loom before us. None of us are “alone” in this world or what threatens it. Young, old(er), and even future generations have a stake in the game and a role to play.

Eslinger’s is a sly sleeper of a film because of how, like Villeneuve’s Arrival, it deploys the UFO as a material, weaving it together with emotional and social matters to address larger but no less related concerns. The result is, from this point of view, an original, refreshingly pleasant and emotionally satisfying movie. Within the larger context of the UFO phenomenon, however, it doesn’t quite escape one of the central and most compelling suppositions in the reception of the phenomenon, that our technical ingenuity, which got us into this perhaps suicidal mess, will be what gets us out. It does, nevertheless, leave one with a sense of hope.