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.

On Herodotean Disclosure

A lightning bolt of sorts.

Regarding UFO disclosure, it is interesting that the opening gambit of historiography in the West (in Herodotus I mean) is precisely the word: "apodeixis" or disclosure. This word means the making manifest of something, or showing forth of something! History begins with disclosure. The current impasse in Ufology finds an echo in the past, but at the beginning not the end.

There is a whole nexus of possible ideas here. The absence of a final "apodeixis" by the governments of the world may at root to be a problem in how we are approaching history itself. There is confusion. How we want things to end is in fact how it all should begin. We make a mistake, perhaps, if we expect disclosure at the end of a process. Disclosure should really show an innovative new relation to how things start as a process. That is the Greek example.

Endings versus beginnings. There is something Hegelian about how we await disclosure at the end. Like the way we await a final apocalypse (which would change the categories of existence), we await disclosure. Between the ancient and the modern concepts of history, there is a displacement, such that "apodeixis"/disclosure necessarily makes no sense, and is broken. Disclosure, I have written before, is the detour of politics into religious language, a dis-empowering manoeuvre. It is, it seems, also vexed in a secular sense too. It is a garbled concept in many ways.

Herodotean apodeixis implies that things are not self-evident; an inquiry into things requires some exposition. Perhaps UFO disclosure is a hidden wanting in us to find something primal about the universe. In a world where rights and the right direction of history are seen as self-evident, disclosure is a concept in a kind of identity crisis. It wants UFOs to be a matter of self-evidence too, yet surely it will be the result of deeper work than that? Won't it be - like Herodotus - a new civilization beginning? There is power in the Greek concept that the modern one misses. Let us live as seekers of apodeixis not disclosure.