UFOs, True or False?

A common idea in the UFO literature is that the UFO phenomenon is deceptive. See e.g. John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception, (1979), and George Hansen's more generalist The Trickster and The Paranormal (2001). 

 

I think this idea is false, or at least inadequate.

Why say deceptive? To mark something as deception implies one has knowledge of the truth. Do we know what a true close encounter would say or do? There is no counter-evidence, so I say that we do not. The phenomenon may be mystifying, frustrating, or just plain not understood - but about what is it deceiving, if we have no model of what truth in this circumstance might actually be?

This modelling of encounter as a deceptive phenomenon - it says something about our own expectations of what an encounter *should be*. The parallel seems to be religious encounter, in which our belief is very much invested in the idea that truth is being communicated, or perhaps meeting someone with a map when one is lost, where - again - truth is key and the expectation.

We *do not even know in which mode close encounter is being presented*; if it is presented in the mode of a novel or poem, where is truth suddenly, for there to be deception? What even *is* an alien novel or poem or religion or map? Are there such things?

Hold a Bible upside down, or read it backwards, or with its truths inverted. Suddenly one has the Devil's Bible, or nonsensical gibberish, or at best something whose goal is to teach you the teleology of primordial chaos and regression. Is Satan not the first deceiver? If one holds a map upside down, and sees the map explaining North as South, then one will walk in the wrong direction and find the theatre where the museum should be.

We do not know if we are even reading close encounter the right way up, to say so confidently "it deceives, it lies!" - in what dimensionality or orientation was the message intended? Do we know?

Lying is typical in human societies. We arrange whole democracies around politicians for whom it is a truism to say that they lie. Tyrannies even more so, where the watchword can be that 2+2=5 is true. People may lie to themselves, lovers to each other, poets systematically by definition, to attain ... truth. All this is given, and we find it an inoffensive way to live, the natural, inescapable order of things. Lies are our normal surrounding before we even get to the mystics, who say reality is illusion and deception.

Is the human being the lying and lied to animal? How would the truth if presented to him as it actually is - and directly - be perceived? As distortion? As lie? Would it not in fact be *polite* to deceive such an animal on first meeting? The close encounter experience may otherwise be a mirror, a lens, a diplomatic imitation of the other's protocol as when a Westerner bows in Japan, or a love letter with a portrait of the recipient.

What does love or a curse mean to an alien anyway? We may have it all backwards and upside down, as Marx said of Hegel, who thought he was telling the truth, as Marx did also, if Plato hadn't refuted him, and so on and so on, backwards and forwards in time, ad infinitum, forever:

“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought … With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Capital Vol. 1

The UFO spins round and round, inverting inside and out, telling the truth, telling the truth?

Disclosure: The Natural Apocalypse

The whole key to how we live may lie in the UFO question, but nobody cares, nobody notices. As to why nobody cares, that is an intriguing question in the realm of the Meta-.

 

If healthcare was run by Al Capone and a criminal gang, people would show concern. If welfare was run by a criminal gang, people would show concern. In a way they are, and people do. Let us say the Earth *has* been met by alien intelligence (there is in Greer's words an embarrassment of riches when it comes to evidence of that). All official information regarding this issue, however, is controlled by a criminal gang, if the Wilson leak is true for example, or by compartmentalized confusion, if only the official situation is the case. 

 

So: We are in reality a Type 2 civilization, but "Al Capone" (or Mr Magoo) keeps us living in a civilization that is Type 1. Unlike health and welfare, no-one bats an eyelid. There is only one published essay in a peer-reviewed journal as to why this situation might subsist. 

 

The whole thing sits as a silent scandal. 

 

Not only is there general scepticism and disinterest in UFOs, it seems to be impossible to persuade anyone who is not already persuaded that there should be. That is to say, *there is a general rhetorical failure in UFOlogy that seems to be essential*. That is interesting. Being the type of person to be persuaded or not seems to be a natural selector (based on innate predisposition), rather than one subject to the artifice of rhetoric and reason. The absence of rhetoric argues for nature being the issue. It may even be that disclosure will depend on the slow process of evolution by natural selection rather than any political means. If disclosure is a natural process, we might have to wait billions of years.

On the other hand, if - as Leo Strauss says - political philosophy is first philosophy (that ontology is understood through politics), then when we say that the UFO deception constitutes the political frame as a crime and a lie, then an error is made to determine the political realm *essentially*, as if *by nature*. It all begins to look like the problem of original sin. We begin to see how the political frame of disclosure can be squared with the theological claim of apocalypse and another world being possible. In Hebrew this other world is called Olam Ha-Ba, or the future world. It is the world of redemption; in Christian eschatology, it is the Kingdom. 

 

If the state of affairs in the UFO question seems, in constructing politics as a variant of sin and false consciousness, to be written by the same hand as theology, then disclosure would seem to be a natural variant of revelation and the ultimate negation of sin in apocalypse. If disclosure depends on natural selection, it would also apparently depend on *election*. That is quite interesting too.

There is of course no real need for secrecy, and the phenomenon should be the domain of civilian rather than paranoid military and private agencies. There is no need for secrecy and militarization because the phenomenon is common to all nations, transcends all known science, and in that sense is a universal problem common to all. The drive to exploit these technologies is the mistake, and any defence technology fetish, for example, is a part of the problem. It is only insofar as this universal commons seems to be impossible for us that the type of equation drawn above applies. The Enlightenment - at this horizon - sheds no light.

 

The UFO question is really a complex *political and spiritual* problem, not a scientific one, which is strange, if the problem is just "natural".

A Painting of a Memory

I occasionally have contact experiences of my own. Nothing major or earth-shaking, but personal to me and therefore of significance ... to me. Perhaps that is all the contact experience is, a private letter, a secret email or text, trivia that seems more important than it is only because it is odd and different. The strangeness is a magnifying glass, but the true image is just what it is, small, minor, ephemeral. A love letter saying sweet nothing can seem to touch the eternal. A personal slight or insult can be remembered and distort a life for decades. Nonetheless it is trivia, ephemera. 

Sometimes I paint my encounters, as a sort of personal diary. It allows me to both record and forget. This particular episode dates to early Spring 2019. I painted it from memory a few days ago:

In a way the extraterrestrials (I am old fashioned and see them this way) have done little more than teach me to find a visual language for myself, a style I am happy with. Also, a language, a way of thinking about myself in space and time. It is pleasurable, like a love affair, but there is little profound insight to come from it. One could call it an Education in Nothing. That is, I suppose, quite a serious topic!