Perhaps I Am Indifferent About Whether I Want to Believe

Shouldn't there be slightly more interest in the UFO Question?

The video is even better.

Scouring the UFO classifieds

One strange thing about the high-profile discussion of the now-so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs)¹ within the past few years is how little anyone seems to actually care. It is true that for those who are deeply enmeshed in the world of UFO/UAP sightings, the recent Congressional hearings on the topic must have felt like a boon. After decades of speculation about government involvement, one sees that the House of Representatives has recently had earnest discussions of the U.S. government’s research into unknown flying craft — reported in no less an august medium than the New York Times!² This coming on the heels of Navy pilots going public with their experiences with observing craft that seemed to move in physically impossible ways in 2017 and 2018 would seem to be the sort of thing that raises eyebrows. This is not someone sitting on a camp chair on vacation who said they saw an illuminated cylinder.³ On the contrary, these are highly-trained specialists who know what it is like to be tens of thousands of feet up in the air and have to watch out for your mind playing tricks on you. Putting your reputation at stake in the Paper of Record is high-stakes enough that it makes the UFO Question seem like the sort of thing that might be worth thinking about a bit more, even if you have been skeptical of whether it is worth diving into UFO research in the past.

Here’s my question: where is the fervor in the reaction to all of this on a popular level? By popular, what I really mean is, “people who aren’t already tapped into the questions of what, exactly, is going on with UFOs.” Of course Ufologists (if I may) have been dedicated to any governmental acknowledgment of official curiosity in unusual sightings going back at least to Project Blue Book. What I’m thinking about here are people who are not scouring Reddit UFO boards or the Enigma Labs app, but who still see the most mainstream of mainstream outlets discussing UFOs in deadpan language. I would have expected widely-accepted sources (i.e., legacy journalists, not the 4chan /x/ board — nothing against the /x/ board, but we are talking about broad public perception) seriously taking up the question of UFO existence and government disclosure to sway people who otherwise would not be interested in such things. Has this actually happened? Has there been an upsurge in UFO interest and UFO devotee groups as the U.S. government has edged towards full disclosure? Or, has there been a retreat into cliché, in which apparent UFO disclosure becomes coded as yet another newsworthy event, and those have been happening for eight-ish years, just another week where decades happen, on and on?

I will allow that it is completely possible that more people have taken up the burden of doing their own research (as it were) about the possibility of extraterrestrial life forms, ultra-secret military technology, or every potential UFO hypothesis in between, as a result of the New York Times reporting. The rates of this sort of hobbyist activity are difficult to know. That said, and bracketing some well-known past examples for the moment, part of me had expected more religious movements cropping up following the media recognition (soft disclosure?) of serious governmental interest in UFOs/UAPs. What I am curious about is an apparent lack of widely-recognizable devotional religious activity in response to the public discourse running through a, “those UFOs sure seem to be real, in some sense” cycle. If we assume the tic-tac UFOs are extraterrestrials as opposed to a fun new U.S. Navy technology, surely this would be one of, if not the, most significant moment in human history since, well, the development of consciousness?

There are some proximate examples, but they don’t quite land in full-fledged UFO Religion territory. The Love Has Won movement and the dialogues of Amy Carlson certainly involved UFO elements, though these strike me as representations of a particularly-fluid syncretism which is often fostered in New Age circles.⁴ There is also the fact that the appeal to intergalactic entities was not a central part of LHW, which I would view as one part prophetess religion, one part bodhisattva devotionalism, with the Mother as compassionate guide for her children in their journey to the Pure Land.⁵ What I am thinking of are movements where the UFO experience is absolutely key to the religious experience: the Michiganders frustratedly awaiting being swept off to Clarion,⁶ the desire for detachment from the sensual desires of the flesh in embracing a new, extraterrestrial body.⁷ I’ll certainly allow for the possibility that some of these movements have been operating on a slow burn, away from media attention, cultivating a group of 10-20 acolytes but never attracting significant enough attention to make headlines. And yet, that is what I would expect in normal times — not after a moment of institutional validation of the UFO question.⁸

Two pertinent questions. The first is what people think the UFOs actually are, which is still an open debate among the people really devoted to this stuff. The second is to what extent it matters how you actually experience exposure to a phenomenon you do not, and possibly cannot, understand.

Reflecting the internal states

It would be a mistake to think that what we might think of as the more “fringe” UFO movements — who not always terribly sophisticated in the way they are imagining the phenomenon — are representative of all UFO research. In fact, quite the opposite is true: plenty of people have asked what, exactly, is going on with all of these sightings who are not also leading a cult of personality in Tuscon.

You could take the example of one of the most prominent 20th century UFO researchers, Jacques Vallée, as a case in point. Vallée is not only notable because of his academic pedigree, though he has worked in an official capacity as a professional astronomer and contributed to ARPANET. It never hurts when investigating something that many people would consider unusual or fringe to have a highly-intelligent and institutionally-connected individual asking similar questions. Vallée is also worth mentioning because of how much of his work is involved with a typology of potential UFO causes.

Let’s say one of your close friends who is writing a short essay about UFO speculation corners you in a bar at the end of the night and, wild-eyed, asks you to say what you think is the true source of a vast historical record of UFO sightings which have been noted across centuries of human history (hypothetically!). You might come up with some of the most common lines of thought:

1. A natural cause which has been misinterpreted as constituting a piloted craft or paranormal phenomenon: swamp gas, astronomical events, etc.;

2. Testing of cutting-edge governmental technology which is so advanced as to appear to be extraterrestrial;⁹

3. Yes, actual extraterrestrials, but given that we can’t exactly ask them what they want at our leisure, it’s pretty hard to confirm or deny.

Where Vallée comes in is the idea that we don’t have to necessarily accept any of these as the complete answer. What if the key part of a UFO experience is not an odd natural occurrence or an actual, physical ship with small gray fellows who are curious about our biosphere, but rather, the mental-psychic state of the observer? I do not mean a state of mental illness, because on the contrary, many individuals who experience unexplained phenomena are sane, lucid, and conscientious of how bizarre their account may sound. What I mean, and what Vallée argues, is that there may be a psychic element to the generation of what we now call UFO phenomena, and what we once may have referred to as angelic manifestations or fairies.

To let Vallée put it in his own words:

What does it all mean? Is it reasonable to draw a parallel be­tween religious apparitions, the fairy-faith, the reports of dwarf­ like-beings with supernatural powers, the airship tales in the United States in the last century, and the present stories of UFO landings?

I would strongly argue that it is—for one simple reason: the mechanisms that have generated these various beliefs are identical. Their human context and their effect on humans are constant. And it is my conclusion that the observation of this very deep mechanism is a crucial one. It has little to do with the problem of knowing whether UFOs are physical objects or not. Attempting to understand the meaning, the purpose of the so-called flying saucers, as many people are doing today, is just as futile as was the pursuit of the fairies, if one makes the mistake of confusing appearance and reality. The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleon-like char­acter of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they arc projected.¹⁰

To summarize: what we have often thought about as disparate phenomena — fairies and dwarves, flying saucers, perhaps even various cyptids — may actually be manifested expressions of the same base phenomenon. This does not technically mean that it is not alien, so much that it is not a series of distinct alien nations running sorties to Earth to grab our genetic material. Rather, there is some sort of hard-to-pin-down “control system,” which also allows for “two interesting variants,” namely, an “Alien intelligence, possibly earth-based,” or “the human collective consciousness…projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is necessary for our own long-term survival.”¹¹

I would isolate as the key point not the first-principle question of what might be causing the experiences, but the follow-on issue of the fact that they seem to mirror human experience — that the object appearing in the sky or in the bushes directly reflects the cultural signifiers which have been imprinted onto the neurons of whoever happened to be seeing it. This does not technically preclude the source of the phenomenon being extraterrestrial, or at least not human. But it does suggest that UFO encounters are themselves a pseudo-reflection of the human mind and soul, which is quite a different argument than an alien race coming to explore Earth for scientific research or sightseeing. The idea that many currently unexplained phenomena might be ultimately sourced in this same control system would seem to have serious implications for those who are interested in investigating things which, for the moment, are considered fringe (though fringe ideas have a way of abruptly making themselves the accepted social consensus, don’t they?).¹²

Waiting for U-F-Godot

What if one of the challenges of the digital age is that our current media consumption habits make significant disclosures easy to wave away as yet another set of X.com (can we still say Twitter, since everyone understands it that way?) posts? You have an issue like apparent UFO disclosure, and the primary means through which people experience this are canned social media posts — which by definition are not exactly going to encourage a review of the sources. What I am curious about is if, say, similar New York Times articles were published in 1993 instead of 2023, would they encourage more independent research into Unexplained Aerial Phenomena? Does the exposure through TwitterX.com standard discourse fracture what would otherwise be highly-discussed social phenomena?

It’s an interesting question, really: does the medium through which you experience something as disorienting as UFOs then affect how much you care about them?

A couple other things that come to mind:

1) A frequent, and not unreasonable, skeptical position regarding UFOs is the fact that vast numbers of people now have phones with video capabilities with them at all times. Shouldn’t there have been a huge upsurge in recordings of UFO activity compared to the past, given how many new citizen journalists there are across the world? I think this might have some power against the bone fide Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (they can only hide so well against an army of iPhones), but it doesn’t actually carry much weight when it comes to other hypotheses. If the occurrence is natural, then it might be constrained by, say, meteorological or electromagnetic properties which, yes, are measurable, but which are the product of so many complex variables that it is (for the moment) hard to tell when the perfect circumstances will come together and a ball of light will hover frighteningly over an innocent bystander in Little Rock. Though they have their own logic, the natural processes behind these events may just still be unpredictable enough that they are not subject to an excellent smartphone camera.

Let’s be fair and bracket for a moment any skepticism we might have about the natural occurrence theory (ephemeral natural lights causing people to believe they were abducted for hours and subjected to physical tests, with apparent forensic evidence at the abduction site, huh?) to turn back to Vallée. If the instance of seeing a UFO — which in this schema is not a purely natural phenomenon, and is not a case of an actual extraterrestrial craft hovering over your backyard — involves a sympathetic relationship between the phenomenon and the human psyche, then it would make sense that UFO sightings would be stable. Why would it be otherwise? The constants are whatever is actually causing the manifestations and the human brain, both of which reflect back upon each other. In this particular case, that the visionary reflection is something beyond the realm of what would usually be physically possible is not really shocking in the least — the human mind is more than capable of conceiving of such things, even if they usually only happen in dreams. The point is that rather than a set of starships out there waiting to be videotaped, the phenomenon would necessarily be attached to the human experience. The constants over time, then, have been kept.

On that note: maybe it is just difficult or impossible to get good footage of these strange happenings as they occur. If the prime mover behind this stuff is purely natural, photography and video might just not be the best way to measure it anyway — we don’t, you know, photograph the wind. If we follow the Vallée thesis that it may be “natural” in a certain way of speaking, but it is certainly not purely physical, then the interaction between the psyche of the individual and the phenomenon could mean that the shift in attitude from experience to observation ironically closes off the phenomenon from being observed. Is it really so hard to swallow? Unless you have really been working at it, lucidity in a dream tends to end the dream. Does that make dreaming less “real?”

2) Speaking of the technological intermediary, one might assume that given how much communication goes on via internet fora or social media posts, what once would have been physical-world movements are now just Twitter group chats. The interest is still there, then, but the tendency of religion-by-phone to have a tension of isolation despite constant communication might mean the days of proper UFO cults are over.

I suspect it would be premature to write off the internet-based religious movements, at least for the moment. It is certainly true that searching for information and community through a smartphone can often be atomizing — no matter how many comments you leave on a compelling article, it is still you, alone, in your room reading it. That said, we now know quite well that you can form a community online and it can break into the non-digital space. This might be grabbing coffee with someone you were once arguing with on Reddit, it could be dating someone on Twitter after each of you replied to each others’ posts for awhile. Think here of the Twin Flames movement, which was itself (like many new religious movements) discussed at length in a Netflix documentary. Curiously, this was a religious entity organized almost entirely via videochat.¹³ And yet, one of the final steps of the movement mentioned on said Netflix documentary was the effort to buy physical property for the movement in Michigan. Even groups which may have been previously known only as internet organizations may suddenly burst forth as physical-world religious movements. Maybe the difficulty in seeing relatively recent UFO religions is simply that they haven’t yet put in bids for the buildings that would best serve them.

One last thought. There are many reasons people would join a new religious movement — sense of belonging, newfound purpose, a group of new friends who are sacredly bound to be nice to you. My gut feeling, though, is that people follow their Mother God or seek out their Twin Flame from the past 20 lifetimes is in order to have a chance at experiencing the numinous.¹⁴ What if the UFO phenomenon, to put it crudely, doesn’t do it for people anymore when it comes to inspiring such awe? This could be a function of the legacy of serious UFO research in the United States as a 20th century phenomenon likewise giving it the feeling of being slightly passé. As noted above, the fact that Ufology is now often filtered through the medium of frictionless scrolling might mean that it is made less momentous, and thus less of an opportunity to be felt as encountering the sacred — something briefly seen as highly-discussed on news feeds before washing away for all except the most devoted to finding the Truth.

Curiously enough, this social explanation can accord easily with the Vallée thesis. Recall again the quote above: the phenomena appear as “a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected.” In other words, if the attitude of the collective unconscious has shifted with regard to what UFOs are and if they are significant as curious/otherwordly/potentially sacred, then so, too, wouldn shift the reflection generated by the feedback loop between the base phenomenon and the collective unconscious. The part that makes it difficult to determine is that there is a push-and-pull, chicken-and-egg element to this relationship. The phenomenon is culturally coded, and yet its observed appearance will naturally leave a residual impact in the culture, which then generates more discussion and interest, which then reinforces the idea within the collective unconscious, which then, which then, which then. Vallée again:

…aerial phenomena very similar to our UFOs had been reported in the 9th century in the form of vessels in the sky, as airships in the days of Jules Verne, as ghost rockets in 1946 and as spacecraft in more recent times, as if they mimicked human expectations. Everything works as if the UFO phenomenon remained consistently one step ahead of human technology.

Set aside the implications of what such a situation would mean about a logic behind the progress of technological advancement. Wouldn’t we expect that what we think of as the unified para-psychological phenomenon behind UFOs would continue its development in mimicking our expectations as our own technology continues to rapidly develop?

Maybe we are just waiting to see what it comes up with next.

1. Though UAP is gaining a certain bureaucratic approval, I think there is no fighting the internalized meaning of UFO when it comes to talking about this stuff, and I will use them interchangeably.

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/us/politics/ufo-hearing.html

3. If we are being frank, though, the person in the camp chair who sees something that they cannot possibly rationalize, and then chooses to go public with that knowledge, is not an inherently untrustworthy source. What exactly are they aiming to get — fame and fortune? Has that ever happened after you tell your local investigative journalist that a skyscraper-sized pyramid hovered over you during your camping trip? Unless you truly have a flare for showmanship, it’s more likely that putting yourself into the public sphere as a Seer Of UFOs will permanently affect the way almost everyone you know speaks to you and thinks about you. You’ll also attract attention from people whose interest in UFOs ranges from the curious to the, well, strident. There’s not exactly a lucrative endgame built in for most viewers (or supposed abductees), beyond maybe a tell-all memoir with a small press if your story is particularly salacious. This is all to say that when the mild-mannered couple down the street say they saw something really weird, it seems reasonable to think they aren’t prima facie full of it. What’s in it for them, otherwise?

4. This may come across as dismissive, but I don’t intend it that way. One can imagine someone gesturing at the manner in which the New Age movement may combine elements of the vibrational powers of crystals, speculations about an historical Atlantis, the sefirot of Kabbalah literature, and a curiosity about potential occult properties of the Pyramids of Giza, and wave this all away with an arched eyebrow and a pursed smile. (You may have seen, for example, this video going around on social media, which is entertaining if for no other reason than the efficiency with which it rips through half a dozen different New Age concepts in 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nEpt8HzOStU ) Luckily, we can, ourselves, ignore such obvious philistinism. It is neither a new, nor a particularly unsophisticated belief that there may be an objective, capital-r Reality; that while human religions may capture part of this Reality, religious dogma is a human (and therefore limited) attempt to define and categorize the more expansive Reality; that there may be capital-t Truths which exist outside of your particular religious background, united by their concordance with Reality despite their conflicting with human typologies. One does not need to be convinced by Perennialist or Theosophical arguments to take them seriously and weigh their merits with an open mind.

5. Consider, as well, the incorporation of certain Christian salvific visions: “Ms. Carlson is believed by her group to be 19 billion years old and to have birthed all of creation…They believe she exists at a “higher consciousness level” than normal humans and will eventually lead a group of 144,000 people into the “fifth dimension” in some sort of ascendant journey.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/love-has-won-cult-amy-carlson-b1969246.html

6. Festinger is likely the go-to here, in large part because of the extensive discussion of religious belief and cognitive dissonance: Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

7. Also worth noting the palpable biblical undercurrents throughout: Benjamin E. Zeller, “Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics and the Making of Heaven’s Gate,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 14, no. 2 (November 2010): 34–60.

8. Could the institutional validation have hurt as much as it helped? Is it less fun to be on the cutting edge of visionary human experience when the Senate staffers and mainstream journalists are also in on it?

9. Corrollary 2a) is, of course, that the government is doing highly covert tests of aircraft which themselves incorporate alien technology, either due to the recovery of a downed craft, or a diplomatic arrangement. If you’re already on board with the idea that UFOs are actual alien life forms, it really isn’t much of a jump.

10. Emphais mine. This is from pages 148-9 of the 1993 printing of Passport to Magonia. It really is worth reading the whole thing to see the concordances in the way people experience what are supposed to be completely different unusual occurrences.

11. Jacques Vallée, “Five Arguments Against the Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 4, no. 1 (1990), 115-16.

12. See again footnote 4 about not casually writing off those who see a single origin behind what we have usually understood as disparate, paranormal phenomena.

13. Given some elements of the Twin Flames organization that people might find less-than-savory, one might argue that the participants should have never fallen into a”Zoom Cult” in the first place, as they could have simply turned off their laptop at any time. The first issue is around being able to just turn off the laptop at any time: can you? If you just turned off your devices for awhile, would you still be able to hear from your friends and family on a regular basis? Second note: if all of your friends are frequently checking in on the same Zoom chat, is it actually just a question of closing the window if you hear something you don’t like? Or are you at the risk of then losing a bunch of close friends, which is really not so easy to do?

14. That is, a sort of intense and supernatural religious feeling when exposed to the holy. You can find a discussion of the numinous and its characteristics in Rudolph Otto’s Das Heilige, translated by John Harvey with the title of The Idea of the Holy. There’s always more to be written about the social-versus-internal function of religion; whether that’s even a dichotomy; whether something can be “religious” without it matching the signifiers that make something Religious as opposed to Not Religious — far be it from me to write off Durkheim. Without re-litigating collective effervesence, in this particular case, I am talking about the seeker who makes the intentional decision to become closer to the sacred. As such, I think Otto is going to be more helpful from a theory of religion perspective.