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.
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?
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