On the enigmas of UAP theory (part one)

What is most conspicuous in almost every UAP-UFO tract, text, treatise, debate, discussion, blog and YouTube bomb is a profound lack of sound theory devoted to either an understanding or an explanation of the UAP phenomenon as a whole, including all of its anomalous layers (a desideratum nicely laid out in a remarkably interesting paper by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis, published, Vallée tells us on his academia.edu website, in 2005 by the journal Consciencias: Actas do Forum Ciência, Religião e Consciência, but originally archived on the somewhat legendary “NIDS” website of Bigelow fame—something now only to be found in the dusty recesses of the Internet Archive). We are not even given anywhere a sound explanation and understanding of the most obvious, most prominent anomalous layer: the measurable flight characteristics of UAP. What little theory there is, as you become familiar with the rather monotonous terrain of existing UFO literature (a rather frightful morass of work varying wildly in quality and intellectual integrity), is almost universally tendentious, proceeding from one or more undemonstrated premises. What high-quality work has been produced on the subject is either contained in academically fraught journals, or in journals that couldn’t be sustained due to the taboo nature of the subject (or just plain lack of funding). There are few exceptions. Like Kevin Knuth et al.’s paper of 2019 in Entropy, which I consider to be the seminal mainstream paper on at least the physical aspects of “UAPs” (I actually find it worth a meditation on the name now preferred).

But let’s be clear: save what skepticism there still may be (a topic we have addressed in the previous post), the reason why there is no sound explanation or understanding of the phenomenon is because it is and remains profoundly anomalous. Let’s consider this (historic) situation for a moment.

Science was born from philosophy (and never really escapes the concerns of philosophy, despite the occasional attempt by some to disavow science’s essential connection to it—a rather sadly ridiculous display when it happens), and both are born from pure wonder. Plato theorized it as “thaumazein” and Socrates, like those before him, was constantly struck by it. It is a mood, but it is one generated by the spontaneity of things, by a confrontation with a world to which we do not seem to have immediate access. Or at least, it’s access we need to deliberately undertake, by involving ourselves in the whole confusion which is nature. We are intimately related to the world, but we are not deliberately gifted with understanding it, because there are choices we have to make as we reflect on it.

The world we confront is a good deal grander than we are. Some (including myself) are keen on theorizing it as infinite, with we onlookers (as intimately related as we are) being stubbornly finite beings climbing into the infinite. We get a handle on “Being” by conceiving it, giving it notions, and testing those out as we move about in the world. I think that’s the magic of language: a grand experiment with hooking up concepts (as ways of negotiation), ideas, to everything around us. A concept gets “hooked” when it works out in practice: when it affords you with a successful strategy to do this or that (or it becomes neutral, or dysfunctional—but nonetheless meaningful because of that). We can certainly philosophize a good deal more about this (which philosophers of course love to do), but let’s pass on to the main point here: science can’t really be understood if we don’t put it in a real context. I want to call that context science’s “existential” situation—the fact that it is, at a primal level, a product of the magic of human language. It is not only a linguistic affair for being primally that, but that’s because language itself, I think, seeks to escape itself: it is always about something else, about going beyond the word to the things (even thing-izing itself). Language is the garment of our intimacy with the world around us.

We have of course forgotten how challenging the philosophy of language (I mean this in a primal sense, not in the sense of an academic discipline) is, because we no longer have a kind of existence in which language is a problem—where we must utter sounds for the great many things with which we are involved, even our own selves. We are born into a language already up and running, and therefore, into a real history clothed in the word. We are historical beings, because we are linguistic ones. But—are we not continually, if perhaps subconsciously, always encountering the primal level of linguistic creativity?! Think about the depth of your emotions, the depths of you as you—your unique selfhood or “subjectivity” as philosophers like to call it. Finding the words to bring out what is a felt implication of my being—is this not a daily and never-ending challenge? Are we not, to some measure, anomalous to ourselves? In light of this we should consider how profoundly anomalous nature is or can be, as we have had to confront its various aspects. Sure, we become inured to its grandeur, its power, its many varied phenomena—until we are not.

So, we may look at the history of science, as it is primally a linguistic affair, as the history of confronting a world (which includes ourselves, reflexively) that easily becomes strange to the language of concepts and theories that we have given it—both of which come with no guarantee for how well they will work, because we’re usually just concerned with them working well enough. But how much is enough, and when is it not enough? Aristotle’s system of the world, which provided European and Islamic cultures with an all-encompassing intellectual framework of understanding most aspects of “Being”, worked well enough for a millennium and a half—at least for educated elites, to say nothing of how it stamped itself upon the people in general (through astrology, medicine and zoology). But then, beginning in the Middle Ages (the High Middle Ages) with bold thinkers like French scholastic John Buridan, we had close attention being paid to the doctrines of Aristotle, and cracks began to appear. Was Aristotle’s theory of “impetus” really so plausible after all? Was it really a metaphysical necessity to demand the Earth be centrally located in the cosmos? Centuries later it was clear: there is no principled distinction really justifiable on purely empirical grounds that separates the heavens from the terrestrial globe, as Aristotle’s doctrines entailed—especially if the Earth is nothing but another planet (“wanderer”) going ‘round the Sun. Enter Galileo. Look into the new telescope, and you now see wonders to freeze your Aristotelian soul. With this blow, Aristotle’s system crumbles. Now what?

We had a choice: either persist in the Aristotelian ways of thinking, which can be indefinitely maintained despite the new observations (but which meant introducing ever-more complicated circles-within-circles to accommodate the complicated motions of the planets supposedly moving around the Earth), or work out a new philosophy of nature from the new observations we are getting. It is a subtle point. As we like to say in philosophy of science: all observation is “theory-laden”, that is—there are no “pure”, theory-free observations. We’re always guessing, imputing, supposing—and doing so with our favorite theories or pet hypotheses. When a theoretical framework—a “paradigm” to introduce Thomas Kuhn into our reflections—becomes embedded in the cultural Zeitgeist, is becomes part of our conceptual apparatus coloring our perceptions of the world, and, in certain crucial respects, obscuring what things are doing. If it is true that all observation is theory-laden, it is also true that no theory is absolutely perfect in what it can accommodate and explain. There are gaps. There are failings, places where the concepts or claims or hypotheses simply cut awkwardly against things. As our concepts or theories fail—as they become overly complicated, or increasingly ad hoc … as they feel somehow inadequate—a moment of insight occurs to us that maybe, just maybe, we’re getting things wrong. Or at least that we’ve skewed our perceptions in ways that can’t easily or naturally accommodate new observations, new things. It is a dance, a dialectical back-and-forth, and at some point, you just have to break out of this endless hermeneutical circle of interpretation. This break comes as a supposition, a new hypothesis—and then you see where it leads. Copernicus did it (though he famously hedged his bet with a caveat-ridden preface penned by a sympathetic but apologetic cleric). Kepler did it, as well as Galileo. And Newton formalized the deal, and determined a unifying mathematical-physical framework within which it would all be expressed.

It all begins, though, with things turning anomalous. Yet, the anomaly is never absolute, of course. We always have the option of kicking the can down the explanatory road, and try extending existing theory to accommodate the anomaly. The Aristotelians did it for centuries—witness the baffling complexities of the Ptolemaic cosmological system, which Copernicus simplified with heliocentrism, using the intellectual convenience it afforded as alibi (forestalling his Inquisitors). Hardened skeptics (which we should really call debunkers) do it today for the UAP phenomenon, in defense of their nebulous ideas of what constitutes scientific respectability. But again, if there really is an anomaly (is there? it is a really tricky question, as I’ve suggested), then the anomaly doesn’t get lifted in favor of existing science (which operates according to some main conceptual “paradigm”—currently some concatenation of materialist philosophy guiding it towards certain restrictive explanatory forms, which is something we’ll entertain in a later post); rather, the science is changed to accommodate the anomaly. Sometimes, as with Kepler, Galileo and Newton, you just find yourself stumbling (very carefully and thoughtfully) into an entirely new paradigm (one that might not be entirely understood until this new thing itself starts to falter—enter Einstein, Planck & Co.).

This, dear reader, was a very unbelievably longwinded way of prefacing my explanation as to why there is no sound theory of UAPs today: neither of its physical aspects, nor indeed of its other, more pronouncedly anomalous aspects, like the “psychical” effects and phenomena that are sometimes associated with a UAP encounter (more on this psychical stuff later), neither can unproblematically be accommodated into existing science. And certainly not both aspects, the physical and the psychical. We are, then, perhaps at what Kuhn would call the “crisis” stage of “normal” science, when scientists are busy working out the various problems and potentials of the existing (the dominant) paradigm (in this case: materialistic, more-or-less causal-mechanical explanation of all phenomena, from mind to matter). But what is very curious is that our most fundamental science—physics—is, and has been since its modern inception, in crisis. Contemporary theoretical physics is in a profoundly disputatious state, with much agreement on what theories work, but little agreement on whether they can all peacefully coexist (the reader is no doubt familiar with the problem of “quantum gravity”—something which doesn’t really yet exist, except as fanciful hopes for numerous researchers). We think we have a solid biological theory, and a secure understanding of its genetic component, and how that plays out under exogenous environmental conditions (or how the two form a kind of nonlinear unity), but we only have one instance where that biology is true: Earth itself, so we therefore have no idea as to how truly universal what laws we think we’ve found really are (whereas we have a decent idea of the universality of chemistry, as we do of fundamental physics). Along comes the UAP phenomenon…

As I have stressed, it is a profoundly liminal phenomenon perhaps unique in the history of science. When Galileo was peering into his new telescopes, he was looking at objects he could form a relatively decent idea of, but even if not, Galileo didn’t think he was examining the behavior of an object someone like him could have fashioned (with only a bit more understanding of nature). Perhaps he thought he saw the Hand of God at work (and certainly thought he was reading the Book of Nature written by the Divine Hand in the language of maths), but during Galileo’s day nature itself was starting to be comprehended in terms of blind forces and spiritually devoid corpuscles of matter with no guiding intelligence behind them (except in theologia abstracta). With the UAP, not only are we witness to extraordinary physical flight characteristics that seem to defy physical law or even principles of engineering which we can comprehend (even if you think you know the physics of UAPs, you can’t possibly know the tech—if it’s technological, as we pondered in our last post), and so therefore: we are quite possibly witnessing the use of a technology by a form of intelligence about which we know nothing. This is a stark realization. It’s worth letting it sink in.

Can we allow this situation to persist—can we allow ourselves to persist in patient, agnostic ignorance, but of a phenomenon that, being liminal in nature, is nonetheless a known unknown? (Agnosticism here, by the way, affords us with the bare minimum: we know it as what it appears to be, but, given our recognition that even our phenomenology of the object is likely tainted by the going theoretical paradigm of our times, we cannot be certain of even this phenomenology. Even so, we posit its technological being as a working assumption, to be tried in the court of future observations and (let us only hope) experimentation.) There have been some who have dared advance beyond this liminal agnosticism, who have, perhaps brilliantly, dared to speculate. Some, like Jacques Vallée, worry that we are not grasping all of the relevant layers of the phenomenon, and are only reducing it down to fit within the narrow channels of existing science, or thought. Perhaps that is right—no, it must be right, since how could we do better? Vallée’s answer (which was also John Mack’s answer when he went down the abduction phenomenon rabbit-hole, as chronicled by Blumenthal): change the paradigm of explanation. After looking through Galileo’s telescope, how can you not?

But what Vallée had (and has, since he’s still with us) to offer in connection with the theme of paradigm-change is a subject we will have to delay until next time, in Part Two of this series on UAP theory (since I am right now working to clarify what I want to say about it—not a very easy task I can assure you).