Book!

I have just written an art book based on my UFO contact experience. You can read about it here. The book is available on Lulu.

Soft Landing

Here is an interesting piece of local knowledge. It is on a UFO sighting reported to Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.

This shows that a whole other history is available to us.

Regarding the continuity of UFO sightings over time, I have recently wondered if that is not a cushioning strategy? A sudden appearance of UFO reality might lead us to abandon our past. As it is, a re-investigation and re-reading of history will be possible instead.

Evidence shows this could run as far back - per the ancient alien hypothesis - as antiquity, even prehistory. The phenomenon exists at the periphery of our oversight, to minimise the sense of loss and ontological shock we might experience. Prior history will not be rendered meaningless, but continuous in a new reading.

It would be like the way the Christians reference the Old Testament afresh. The book is not rendered obsolete by the new believers, but re-interpreted and made relevant in a new way. Subtexts are brought to the surface and explained.

In that sense the UFO phenomenon is currently an unread subtext awaiting exposition.

Book Review

This is an engaging book. It is a classic for the psychedelicists, recounting an expedition into the rainforest in search of novel hallucinogens, but it also touches on Ufology. It is in this volume that McKenna first develops his theory that hallucinogenic mushrooms may be understood as a seeded alien technology. Their longevity as a feature of life on Earth makes them a vehicle for interstellar contact suited to evolutionary timescales.

It is not as daft as it sounds. Jung after all considered the UFO to be an archetype of the soul. In particular he saw the saucer, in its roundedness, as a symbol of wholeness that compensated for man's broken psyche in the age of war and destructive technology.

Insofar as the mushroom opens up an archive of hidden subjective knowledge, it may - McKenna argues - also open us up to the UFO as an ultimate transcendental object to be found at the end of time. Dependent on the social maturity of the subject experiencing the hallucinogen, knowledge may be revealed by the mushroom. Where the shaman finds community medicine, future man may find the blueprint for stellar travel, itself - following Jung - a form of medicine for contemporary man.

Like I say, the book is engaging and stimulating.

What Are We Waiting For?

Here's an idea.

It is very difficult to square the UFO field. Between the apparent willingness of the visitors to work behind the scenes with advanced contact groups in the US government, and the willy nilly, seemingly random abductions, contact experiences, sightings or appearances and other general strangeness in the wild, aka the public domain, what is the connection or unifying narrative?

Is it that the advanced nature of the visitors means there is no perceivable difference to them between the two groups? Is it a double pronged, inscrutable, strategy? Well, I said, here's an idea. And that idea is that the visitors work both with a government and a demos *in waiting*. Those in the middle - everyone else - represent a middle class way beyond Marx's imaginings.

The interest to me here is the transfer of the idea of "waiting" from the theological sphere to the political one. It may be that contact evinces an impossible politics, one that mirrors the theological predicament, but is not essentially religious. The strangeness of humanity's doubleness - its indecision between the theological and the political - may be something that the visitors actually have no choice but to *encounter*.

It all looks difficult to unify into a coherent narrative, because *humanity* (rather than the phenomenon) is not, in itself, one.

THe Highly Strange Human Spectrum

 

Here is a good article on the alien abduction phenomenon by Ralph Blumental of the New York Times:

The Cultural Rise of the Abduction Experience.

It raises an interesting opposition.

 

On the one hand, there is government slow-footing on research into lights in the sky, with the ET hypothesis and so-called disclosure receding ever infinitely into the distance; on the other hand clear testimony from the wider public of ongoing "highly strange" interactions with seemingly alien entities. It is an odd, unsquared, circle. 

 

The phenomenon would seem to manifest in a spectrum, with government a distorting lens on what is patently inexplicably there, the individual seemingly a more open receptacle to what is outrageously anomalous. Governments just don't like to do strange do they? As for the people, hey, the strange is just common knowledge, common experience. Hell, government itself is strange sometimes! 

 

Is the UFO revolutionary technology - pun intended - that hopes we see that? That government is an inefficient filter for a true phenomenology?

 

Why the insurgent folklore?

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!