Tag: Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation

Sightings: Saturday 8 November 2020

~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

Production continues slow here at the Skunkworks, due to personal reasons, the fact that the facility is still in the process of settling in to the new digs (thanks to the way the pandemic slows everything down), and, most pointedly, that, despite a lot happening in the field, very little has in fact changed or developed (more on that, below). To remedy the relative dearth of postings, here, therefore, I’ve resolved to try to post, more-or-less regularly, short takes with little commentary, less demanding to write, of what’s caught my attention the past week or so.

What strikes me first is the aforementioned present steadystate of ufology or of the phenomenon and its mytho/sociological import in general. On the one hand, I’ve speculated that the UFO as a vehicle of meaning, a sign, is as endlessly suggestive as any work of art, or even, more extremely, essentially mysterious. But, for a sign whose signifier never lands on its signified, the UFO’s significance seems little changed since the advent of flying saucers more-or-less post-1947.

Ufologically, no developments I’m aware of present data that has not been on the record since the phenomenon’s earliest days. The recent furour around the topic’s appearing in the mainstream media and its being taken seriously by the American government that has given rise to excited rumours about “Disclosure” are hardly unfamiliar to the cognoscenti with Donald Keyhoe’s oeuvre (well-thumbed) on their bookshelves. Exemplary is the second season of History’s Unidentified, which, in terms of the topics it addresses–UFOs near nuclear and military facilities, black triangles, sightings by commercial airline pilots, etc.–is as eye-rollingly dull as Elizondo & Co.’s speculations are risible, e.g., that black triangles observed flying slowly back and forth over the American back country are conducting a mapping operation, when we, with our relatively primitive technology, have been using much less obtrusive spy satellites for decades. Even the suggestion that UFOs (now UAPs), whether foreign or extraterrestrial, may pose a threat to national security is hardly new and is all-too-easily understood as an expression of America’s anxiety over its waning influence in a world that has moved on from its brief moment of monopolar power following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist Bloc, even if it’s more likely an unimaginative bid to inspire drama and interest in the series.

Even culturally there is little that strikes me of note. Reviews of the recent documentary The Phenomenon (for example, here and here) hardly move me to rent it, seeming as it does to be a somewhat introductory review of the well-known story pushing the “reality” of the titular phenomenon and (uncritically) its possible extraterrestrial origin. On the other hand, 2018’s The Witness of Another World at least focusses on a single, compelling close encounter case not within the border of the United States, probing more its meaning for the experiencer than seeking to uncover the material “truth” underwriting the experience. In this regard, the documentary is in line with two academic books of note, D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic and David Halperin’s Intimate Alien. Both develop lines of inquiry into the religious and collective psychological significance of the UFO, respectively, but neither in a way that introduces any new findings, none new to me, anyway. Pasulka’s work proposes to trace the links between religious sentiments, technology, and the UFO, but doesn’t add to or extend very far the existing literature. Likewise, Halperin develops Jung’s theses about the UFO’s expressing human, all-too-human anxieties and aspirations in a modern guise, but neither presents a reading of Jung’s views in this regard much less a grounding defense of why we should take his approach seriously, merely assuming its applicability. I have addressed these misgivings, in general and more specifically, here.

One development of especial interest here at Skunkworks has been the appearance of three ufologically-themed books of poetry (reviews forthcoming!). First is Judith Roitman’s 2018 Roswell rewardingly read in tandem with Rane Arroyo’s earlier (2010) The Roswell Poems. Though these works went under the literary radar, two more recent books have earned a higher profile. Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars, framed in part by a New-Agey exploration of the imaginative implications of Star People was a finalist for 2020’s National Book Award, and Tony Trigilio’s treatment of the Hill abduction Proof Something Happened was chosen for publication by Marsh Hawk Press in 2021 by no less than the esteemed avant-garde American poet Susan Howe. UFO poetry, seriously!

The one other datum that caught my attention of late was an article from The Baffler shared by a member of the Radio Misterioso Facebook page, “Donald Trump, Trickster God”. For my part, I am unsure just how to take the author’s contention that Donald Trump is a “personification of psychic forces”, namely one of the faces of the Trickster archetype, Loki. The article’s tone, ironic and hyperbolic, suggests it’s as much a satire of the failure of the conventional wisdom to explain the rise and enduring popularity of Trump, or, at least of those who represent the failure of such wisdom (“political reporters, consultants and pundits”, “sober, prudent, smartphone-having people”) as an explanation of his demagogic power. Corey Pein, the author, marshals Jung’s explanation of Hitler’s rise to power (set forth in Jung’s essay, “Wotan”) to shore up his own analogous attempt to understand the advent of Trump. Jung famously essayed the UFO phenomenon using the same approach (and that Halperin and Eric Ouellet have since developed), a labour I find of creative if not explanatory value. On the one hand, one needn’t invoke myth, either in its inherited or newly-minted guise, to understand, e.g., the rise of Hitler: a passing acquaintance with German history and a viewing of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will should suffice. Where Germany suffered a humiliating defeat, the Nazis offered the Germans pride in their culture and new military might. Where the populace had suffered terrible unemployment and want due to the postwar hyperinflation and the Great Depression, the Nazi regime gave it work and food. Where the nation had drifted aimlessly in the rudderless chaos of the Weimar republic (Germany having been one country for less than a century and having had little to no acquaintance with democratic institutions), der Führer offered it leadership and focus. Finally, the distraught and desperate Germans did not side with the international Communists but with the nationalist socialism the Nazis represented because of the atavistic sentiments the Nazis revived and cultured, and, most importantly, because the German corporate class, fearing Communism, sided with the Nazis and bankrolled them. These conditions, combined with the Nazis’ still unrivalled evil genius for propaganda, offer a more down-to-earth, compelling, and useful illumination of a very dark moment in European history. Of course, such explanations go only so far; there remains an obscure, singular residue of irrationality that resists explanation, but, if one is seeking a theory that might offer some praxis, better to take a materialist rather than a metaphysical or mythological approach. Happily, as I write this, the day after Joe Biden seems to have won this year’s election, with luck, the joke is on the Trickster…

What’s money got to do with it?

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 7 Comments

Over at UFO Conjectures, Rich Reynolds gets ye olde brain juices flowing, where he fires off a barrage of squibs at the oft-heard refrain that ufologists are “just in it for the money.” However well-taken his intended point, his rhetoric gets the better of him, when he claims, inspired by the Muse Hyperbole, that “No one makes or has ever made real money by exploiting the enigma to make big bucks…”

As long as his thesis concerns ufologists or journalists and writers who produce strictly ufological material, then, I think, there’s little to argue with. On the other hand, to claim that no one has profited off the UFO phenomenon (“the enigma”) will surely inspire a wry grin on Chris Carter‘s face and an urgent anxiety on the part of the producers of History‘s various UFO-related shows to conceal this fact from their overseers. If the arts can contribute billions of dollars to a nation’s GDP, it would be an interesting exercise to determine how much money UFO-themed books, films, television, and sundry commodities have generated in even only the United States since 1947.

But, then, a related and more provocative question concerns how monetization, the profit motive, the commodity form—in a word, capitalism—might be said to determine the social form of the phenomenon, i.e., how “the enigma” appears in the public sphere. Here, it’s possible only to sketch in a few offhand examples; a proper answer would demand a short, dense treatise that would give the editor of D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic a blinding migraine.

Reynolds points to, for example, “the prolific writer Nick Redfern” for whom “[money] is not his motivation for writing but a meager means of economic survival; his books just keeping his head above water.” I take it Reynolds sees Redfern’s very impressive output as an index of a somewhat impractical fascination (rather than a need, to keep his head above water) harnessed to a disciplined work ethic, i.e., despite his impressive labour and productivity, Redfern can hardly claim to have made a bundle on the UFO beat, which is all well-taken.

However, it’s no less true that as professional writer Redfern (like journalists Leslie Kean, Helene Cooper, or Ralph Blumenthal) has to pitch his articles and books and write them a certain way so that his publishers, in whatever media, will feel assured of sufficient clicks if not sales. His writing must be produced in a predetermined manner (German critical theorist Theodor Adorno would say “schematized”) ultimately out of his control for it to be accepted and published by those who own the means of (book) production and distribution, digital or otherwise. However meagre his wages, he still exchanges the product of his labour for money, an exchange that occurs under conditions not entirely of his choosing, but dictated by (what his publishers make of) the market.

Pasulka’s book, mentioned above, is another example. Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professional scholar, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. American Cosmic:  UFOs, religion, technology (Oxford University Press, 2019) addresses a germane topic, the religious sentiments the UFO phenomenon inspires in the otherwise worldly and secular in confluence with their (equally religious) fascination with technology. No less impressively, she brings to bear Martin Heidegger‘s thinking on the essence of technology.

Pasulka’s promising study, however, underwent a thorough editing. As the author remarks, “it got edited about, oh, I don’t know, a million times and a lot of stuff taken out.” Whatever was academic or scholarly is shorn away, diction, argument, analysis, critique, even a bibliography or works cited. So, instead of a solid, potentially groundbreaking work (that would have sold likely all of hundreds of copies to fellow scholars and university libraries), Oxford University Press (for cryin’ out loud) published a book with a popular appeal, a kind of travelogue that creates a story within which moments of watered-down learning and reflection appear as rest stops, about as interesting and as deeply explored, which attained a much more profound market penetration. In a word, Pasulka’s labour had to subject to be schematized as a condition of its publication and distribution.

What is true for Redfern and Pasulka is true for the producers of UFO documentaries, whether History’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation or Jeremy Corbell’s 2018 Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, which are both shaped (schematized) by the demands of being produced, distributed, and consumed in a social space determined by the profit motive (regardless of their ultimate, unforeseeable profitability…). One could easily extend this analysis to the dominance of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in UFO-themed entertainment…

Those obsessed with UFO fact (ufology), if they are motivated by the entrepreneurial spirit, like those behind To The Stars Academy, are very likely to have their dreams of untold lucre dashed. Those who aspire to be the next Chris Carter can at least harbour more realistic hopes. But, in either—and in every—case, where the producer (the writer) must sell their work to an owner of the means of production and distribution subject to the profit motive, that work must be revised and repackaged (schematized) to maximize sales as the very condition of its appearing in the world at all.

Banias, Adorno, and UFOs in the news

~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

Among the few ufophiles I engage with, the one easiest to talk to is M. J. Banias. He, like me, is less concerned with the nature, truth or reality of UFOs than with the kind of thinking that goes into that question and with the people who do that thinking (hence the title to his latest book, The UFO People). We might, at times, fundamentally disagree, but at least we’re on the same page.

One thinker we both engage, as far as possible, is Theodor Adorno (if you’re at all acquainted with Adorno’s thought, you’ll know what I mean). Banias brings to bear Adorno’s notes on astrology as it appeared in the American press during his exile in the United States to the analogous case of UFOs in the news today, whether History, Fox, The New York Times, or The Washington Post.

Check out what he’s got to say on the matter. I’ve already registered some of my reservations in the comments. And if what he has to say piques your interest, subscribe to his YouTube channel:  he’s aiming at 1,000 subscribers before the end of June and, last I checked, he’s nearly there.

Anyone with the nerve (or gall) to bring Derrida and Adorno into the conversation about and around UFOs is worth a listen.

1ad86-adorno

The Message of the Medium

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 15 Comments

It wasn’t that long ago that those long intrigued by the UFO mystery were tempted to declare the phenomenon and its study (ufology) moribund if not downright dead in the water. Yet, today, they’re blogging on the edge of their seats and even, when their breath isn’t bated, whispering the word “Disclosure”. Their excitement has been resurrected by recent revelations in print and television (History’s series Unidentified) concerning apparent encounters  with classically super-performing aeroforms in 2014 and 2015 by Navy pilots in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This about-face got me thinking.

As early as 1965, Jacques Vallée grasped that “The phenomenon under study is not the UFO…but the report written by the witness” (Anatomy of a Phenomenon, vii). However, a variation on this methodology, one adopted by John Keel (and many others) as recounted in his Operation Trojan Horse (1970), is the collection and collation of reports of witness reports from the news media. The example of Keel’s practice suggests the possibility that waves of interest in the phenomenon are not directly related to any patterns in the phenomenon itself but are mediated by patterns of reporting on the phenomenon in the media.

In a media environment governed in the final analysis by profit, as in the case of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets that have recently carried these sensational stories and op ed pieces on them, it is tempting to attribute this sudden, revitalized excitement not so much to new developments in the field (after all, the sightings recently on record bear all the hallmarks of pilot encounters from the late 1940s to today) but to patterns of demand and supply.

If we begin at the crest of a wave of interest, UFO stories will sell well. However, public interest can and will reach a saturation point and interest and sales will fall off. After a sufficient time, however, the potential interest in the phenomenon will again be ripe for stimulation, and reports appearing at that time will swell another wave of fascination and the market for stories, journalistic and fictional. Consciously or not, the media might be said to employ a kind of rotation method (as in agriculture) when it comes (at least) to the UFO topic because of the nature of their customers’ attention spans.

These recent dramatic encounters may well be nothing more (again) than, as astrophysicist Leon Golub opines, “bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, [or] neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.” But, like those pilots spoofed by their new, unfamiliar instrumentation, those surfing this most recent swell of excited interest may, as well, be merely taken for a ride by the code running the media.

 

Addendum:  Since my first attempt at articulating the reflections above, Chris Rutkowski has made public his own, not unrelated, thoughts on this most recent media furor, worth a gander.