Philosophical Preliminaries of the UFO/UAP Situation

There is something happening—we don’t have a good handle on what it is, and our current ways of thinking about it are doing more harm than good.

[Jase Short, 6/25/2023, draft introduction to broader research project in academia concerning Extra-Terrrestrial Organisms or the UFO/UAP/“Visitor” Phenomena]

For most of our existence as a species we inhabited this world with a firm conviction that we were not alone. Woodland spirits, ancestors, lesser and greater gods, and more recently angels, demons, saints, djinn all proliferated across our shared worlds. These fellow sentient beings stubbornly clung on as the all-enframing cluster of social logics we call “modernity” passed from mere scaffolding to the very exoskeleton of our civilization. Materialism manifested as the dispeller of dreams, the inoculation against the bogeymen—and the angels—of our daily lives. As Carl Sagan put it, science has been a candle in the darkness of our “demon-haunted world.” Rightly so for our sakes, as medicine and the ethics of care have forever changed what it means to be an individual.

We question if the enframing has gone too far—the debates centering around the qualia of consciousness certainly seem to be the last vestige of defensible anti-reductionism—but we ultimately are proud of what we have achieved. Even the most skeptical revolutionary mindset, if it is to escape mere romanticism, must agree with with V. Gordon Childe that when our cultural adaptations facilitate the survival and multiplication of our species, this is a kind of progress. It is better that fewer women die in childbirth, that more children make it to their fifth birthday, that astonishingly creative souls do not go into that good night as a result of a staph infection, and that we simply know more about each other and our world than ever before. Social scientists are quick to point out that childhood as understood in the “West” is a novel cultural formation which emerged only in the past two centuries—but this is not a reason to deny that it is preferable to the alternative. That the social arrangement of production and reproduction is exploitative, that it is despoiling the Earth, that it is divesting us of cherished spiritualities, is all true—but the realization that these catastrophes experienced currently by our species are also accompanied by great progresses is the beginning of wisdom. This is the contradiction at the heart of capitalist modernity.

If we drop the moralistic discourses of “free will” in our diagnostic of ourselves, we can see the ways in which these catastrophes can be turned around. Abstractly we know that we as a species must establish a new form of political command over our economic and social relations which somehow avoids the trap of authoritarian abuses while asserting control over the vast economic apparatus that has been erected on a global scale. We are beginning to appreciate just how absurd “nation” is as a concept; we have a global economy, a globalizing society, and we need a global political order that is effective and responsive. Such an order will put an end to the last vestiges of faux spiritual objections to progress in reproductive care, individual liberty, and the like, while simultaneously putting an end to the fossil fuel energy regime that is choking off our very life-world. We do not know how to achieve this reassertion of political control—but we know it can and must be done.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves in a quarter of the way through the 21^st century. But surprises are always around the bend, and the recent years have been full of them. While revolutions in information technology have been occurring in our very palms, a revolution is underway in our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Aside from a period of brief excitement after our initial journeys into space (accompanied by an incredibly under-appreciated cultural shift evidenced by numerous sightings of strange craft in the sky), we’ve gone on with the assumption that there is effectively nothing out there. We’ve silenced the voices on Earth—if the gods exist they were long ago absorbed by the all-silent One Gods—and we’ve relegated the voices from outside the Earth to nothing but fairy tales and pulp fictions. The great horror we contemplated was that of an empty cosmos, bereft of life, at best a place to refill our tanks once we’ve finished despoiling all that we might render productive on our mother world.

Things are not quite so simple now, however. A good representation of this is the resonance of Liu Cixin’s Three Body, itself a sign of the global shifts underfoot as the first Chinese science fiction to achieve global notoriety. As Brian Merchant and Claire Evans put it in their collection of near future science fiction Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, “straight out of science fiction” has moved from the realm of cliché and is now “something more like an intuitive part of how we process the world.”

And thus the 2017 New York Times article, the subsequent revelations in 2020, and the impending case of the whistleblower David Grusch. Together with the more thoughtful sectors of the “UFO Community,” these seem to offer us a series of confident starting points for beginning an investigation into the reality we now face:

-there are craft—or something like we would call craft—regularly in the space around our planet, our skies, and our seas, performing maneuvers suggestive of gravity drives, or what appears to us as gravity manipulation and/or higher spatial dimensional traversal;

-materials from these craft have been recovered and studied in secret by governments and, crucially in the case of the United States, defense contractors who are able to maintain a greater degree of operational secrecy and continuity of personnel over time due to their unaccountable and authoritarian forms of organization;

-research has barely cracked the surface of these materials, perhaps due to their impossibly “advanced” technology, but perhaps more crucially due to the nature of “compartmentalization”—nobody knows what the others are working on and nobody is permitted to gain a “global” picture of things as they stand; thus there is the likelihood of wildly different interpretations of the same data set emerging from different departments, Special Access Programs, individuals, research teams, and the like (itself a plausible condition for the contradictory and bizarre statements coming from whistleblowers and leakers);

-there is a biological aspect of this as well, poorly understood, which is suggestive of entities who share many of the morphological characteristics of ourselves;

-there is an unfounded connection suggested by circumstance between these craft and encounters with “visitors” by ordinary people across the globe on an astounding scale;

-encounters with “visitors” are highly suggestive of breakdowns in our ready-made categories of self and other, consciousness and reality, dream and waking life, the spiritual and the material, studied most thoroughly in the works of Jacques Vallée;

-the phenomenon as a whole is quite old, as demonstrated by numerous studies into the historical record going back to antiquity and even, perhaps, prehistory;

Beyond this, there are a number of what I regard as contingent problems attached to this entire situation which have to be confronted by scholars, scientists, and other concerned parties:

-there is a tendency for this phenomenon to be collapsed into the larger realm of “^[1]conspiracy theory” thinking, itself a product of the attempt by individuals to explain large, complex social processes in a manner compatible with narrative logic, complete with good guys and bad guys and hopeful resolution of conflict at the end;

-as a consequence of this, there is significant overlap with racist ideologies^[2], such as Antisemitism;

-many of those who have had the most consequential impact on the “community” are either current or former military officials, and so there has been a bias in favor of interpretations of the phenomenon, and world events, which are framed according by “National Security” thinking;

-there is another layer of troublesome muddling engendered by popular culture, a decades long game of telephone in which encounters—such as the 1947 Mount Ranier sightings, the Roswell incident, popular stories of abduction like Betty and Barney Hill as well as Whitley Strieber’s Communion—all of which result in a degree of intermingling “truths” with outright fantasies, the most compelling example of which is the persistence in popular culture and in “visitor encounters” of the image of the “Gray Alien,” as well as some other common phenotypes;

-there is an interpretive problem^[3] at work among many who study the phenomenon as well as those who have “encountered” the entities: we are always the products of our social system, we are cultural creatures, and thus we tend to see things according to frames which make sense to us in our current cultural configuration (e.g. from chariots in the sky to airships to flying saucers/from spiritual abductions to alien abductions, &etc.) and we tend to think through them in terms that are sensible to us;

-leading figures in the community, from researchers to current and former military personnel, thus have an outsized role^[4] in setting the parameters for interpreting these phenomenon, and speculation undertaken by outside researchers often is colored by these interpretations’ framing of events;

With these concerns at the forefront, we can build a scholarly project which aims at carefully combing through what has been disclosed. We can also anticipate future disclosures and develop lines of speculation that follow from what we know, or at least what we think we know. It is never possible to extricate yourself entirely from social context—and perhaps in this case, the biological context of living as the kinds of entities we are within three spatial dimensions, existing across our extra temporal dimension—but as scholars we are trained to do our best to let the objects, the world presented to us, change us and bring in novel and insightful ways of thinking about these objects of study. This “unselfing”—to borrow a term from Iris Murdoch—is also at work via the peer to peer relationships of researchers, the larger network behind “peer review” in empirical studies.

For myself, the role of philosophy in this is central. Philosophy is a discipline not like other disciplines in its antiquity, its historical role as the social-organizational “source” of later disciplines. As David Wallace argues:

It is often said that philosophy makes no progress, but to a large extent the creation of autonomous disciplines is how philosophy progresses. Mathematics in antiquity; physics in the Renaissance; biology after Darwin; logic in the early 20^th century; computer science in the mid-20^th century; cognitive sciences still more recently; in each case, so much progress was made, so many controversies resolved, so many confusions clarified, that a self-contained subject was created and equipped to progress further. The philosopher Daniel Dennett defines philosophy as what we do when we don’t know what questions to ask; when we understand enough to work out what the questions are and can start answering them, a new science buds off from philosophy.

(David Wallace, Philosophy of Physics, 1)

Philosophy is precisely what is needed to step back for a global view. We are best when we are interdisciplinary, when we refuse to respect the internecine and petty politics of academic division—especially in the modern neoliberal university with its race to the bottom for the humanities coupled with its race to excise all critical thought from scientific work. From Anaxagoras and Plato to contemporary thinkers, the question of non-human intelligence and its relationship to humanity has foregrounded much of our thinking. Whether it is artificial intelligence, “animal” intelligence (as if we aren’t animals), or extra-terrestrial/non-Earthly-as-we-know-it intelligence, philosophy has the tools needed to ground our thinking and prune the tree of cultural knowledge of unnecessary baggage.

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^[1] We therefore require, at the outset, a careful understanding of what “conspiracy theory” thinking is, why it is pernicious, and the psychology it engenders (and attracts) from would be researchers.

^[2] Hence there is significant overlap with forces such as QAnon and their belief in an all powerful elite who harvest the blood of children—a modern day blood libel multiplied by a modern day Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

^[3] A number of witnesses and researchers are quick to note their religious orientations, or to make statements of commitment to and adulation for the United States from a “National Security” perspective. Furthermore, there are those who will interpret various entities according to these familiar forms, resulting in distortions. This is a problem on the “materialist” side as well: assumptions about interstellar travel, comparisons to our own ideas of how we would handle “first contact protocols” with alien species, all inflect our interpretations of the phenomena we witnesss.

^[4] Luis Elizondo will make a comment in an interview about the entities not coming from “outer space” and everyone latches onto it; Jacques Vallee will argue that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is unsound and many will begin from that interpretation; they might know more, they might not, but what is key here is that much of what they conjecture from limited knowledge then comes to determine how we start off in our investigations.