On the enigmas of UAP theory (part two)

 

In part one of this series on UAP theory (or lack thereof), I provided my “explanation” as to why there is absolutely no sound (which is to say uncontroversial) theory of UAPs, which was, as I wrote, because

“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.”

However, the attentive reader will have noticed that I merely asserted this; I did not attempt to demonstrate it. By way of an introduction to our preliminary remarks on the UAP theory (or theories, depending) of famed ufologist Jacques Vallée, let’s do precisely that. In this way Vallée’s “theory” will be comprehensible as a kind of attempt to decisively overcome this lack of theory.

The problem as we know is complex. If we take stock of the literature on UFO encounters as a whole, one quickly sees that there are at least two major aspects of a UFO encounter that are very much profoundly anomalous. In the first place, we have those encounters which are by now well documented (some of which we have already reflected on at length) which present to us a primarily physical anomaly. We looked at the now-famous “Gimbal” video, but the modern UAP case that perhaps lends itself to the most exacting theoretical description of the phenomenon witnessed by multiple individuals, corroborated by multiple independent radar systems, and taking place over the course of several days, has to be the Nimitz encounter.

It occurred about one hundred miles off the coast of San Diego in 2004. (You should familiarize yourself with the details, if they are not yet known to you—they are, quite frankly, arresting.) Before we outline the physical anomalies of the Nimitz case, you should pause for a moment and work through the logic I outlined in “Transcendental Skepticism” so that, as we proceed, you will at least be willing to entertain the notion that what we have here is, almost certainly, a “real” event about which we can, as it turns out, say some very specific things. 

At one point an object, later, in a bizarre fighter jet interception event, described as looking like a “tic-tac” candy, was observed on at least two radar systems (once of which was a high-altitude radar tracking incoming ICBMs) dropping down from a height of eighty-thousand feet, and then, in around three-quarters of a second, down to about fifty feet above sea level. (Later one radar officer would comment, in disbelief: it was “raining” UFOs—dozens were at one point dropping down.) In a paper that can only be described as a tour de force in scientifically precise phenomenology, Kevin Knuth and colleagues would calculate that the instantaneous velocity this object would have reached during its descent maxed out at around forty-five thousand miles per hour (or sixty times the speed of sound), which implies an acceleration on the order of five thousand g forces experienced by the object during its descent (and we should note that the object came to a dead stop, hovering at the surface of the water). Making a rather conservative estimation for the object’s mass, which was of course unknown (its dimensions were roughly deducible, and it was approximately the size of the intercepting jets, leading to a reasonable but extremely conservative guess of one thousand kilograms—whereas the jets are over fourteen thousand), Knuth et al. were able to estimate that, if the object was under conventional propulsive control, the power required in order to accomplish these amazing kinematical maneuvers was something on the order of eleven hundred giga watts. For comparison, the total nuclear energy output of the US in one year is about one hundred billon watts—this is over ten times that, in three quarters of a second. In another instance, pilot David Fravor (who has recounted his story numerous times—with exacting consistency—and whose account was corroborated by several other witnessing pilots) said that, upon arriving at the coordinates where radar systems had located what Fravor would call the “tic-tacs”, they appeared to be moving like “ping pong balls” in a glass jar, zig-zagging somewhat erratically down at the surface of the water (which was variously described as churning or being disturbed by some unseen forces). In other words, the objects were moving as if their masses were kinematically irrelevant. Like there was no such thing as inertia. It was a profoundly disturbing scene, and Fravor and his co-pilot simply could not believe their own eyes. Yet, this is what they, and others, report having seen. (And for the skeptics: remember, if you don’t like the overplayed “tic-tac” videos, and want to explain them away, that explanation also better be able to account for what the witnesses all saw—sometimes at close range.) Can such (apparently physical) behavior of these UAP be explained? I would like to say that an explanation is inconclusive, and an understanding is completely absent. Here’s why I say that:

In order to account for the clearly anomalous flight characteristics (what I’m calling the “kinematics”) of these UAP (indeed, it’s these very anomalous flight characteristics which establish them as prima facie “unidentified” in the first place, even though we can describe their basic shape and how they move), we need to provide a theoretical account of how such velocities, accelerations and g-forces could be achieved by some know physical theory—by some set of accepted physical principles, for example. What is interesting, and telling, is that the behavior of these objects can at least initially be described using plain old Newtonian principles. Indeed, that’s exactly what you see being done in Knuth et al.’s paper: it is a provisional description, from the observational (which is to say purely phenomenological) data obtained in this case. We can state what the velocity has to have been; what acceleration it was to have experienced; and what power was needed if it was propelled by conventional (that is, Newtonian) forces. For our ordinary experiences of relatively medium-sized objects around us, our understanding of force, energy, acceleration, power—all these things are provided to us by the theory Newton established in the seventeenth century (more or less). Thus, our very phenomenological description, when it comes to conceptualizing what we see in physical (quantitative) terms, is given to us by the elementary concepts of Newtonian physics. For our ordinary experiences of things moving around us, Newton’s physics works well. So, from at least this first level of description of what we observed, these UAP are in a sense, it would seem, perfectly consistent with a physical description in Newtonian terms. (We might contrast this with what happened when we started tinkering with matter: there, the phenomena that were measured could not be adequately described in Newtonian terms—something else was needed, and thus was the quantum theory born.) The only problem is how could this possibly be happening? Surely, as the object, as Fravor saw it, was erratically zig-zagging around as if its mass was irrelevant, this would seem to be a technological impossibility, not a physical one. Strictly speaking, since we are able to describe the motions with Newtonian concepts, the kinematics alone are not impossible. If there is an impossibility, it must rest with something which we cannot immediately observe about the object. And we have an indication as to what that will be—we have to think about the power this object would need if we made Newtonian assumptions (which Knuth et al. did make in computing the power). How could such power be harnessed in three-quarters of a second? Since there was no obvious source of propulsion (no exhaust, no nothing), something internal to the object itself must be enabling its magnificent kinematical feats. Here, as we contemplate what could be the source of its power, we are beginning to enter into, finally, the object’s true liminality: for beyond its appearance, we are now trying to probe its more exact physical character, for power must have some source (or in general some cause), and we see none—thus it must be hidden from us. We are losing our grasp on the object, the “what” is now slipping away as we wrangle about the “how”. It is at the point where we question its power source that we begin to enter into the truly anomalous nature of the object. But even here we have some theory to guide our understanding—but, at the same time, here is where our grasp becomes speculative at best. What are the possibilities here? Since I am not a physicist, I can only sketch this in general. (But our purpose is, once again, to chart the course of the logic of the situation, and leave it to the experts to fill in the relevant technical or conceptual details—assuming that is possible.)

We have, in general, two theories which we might bring to bear on the question. The first, relativity theory, affords us the concept of what is called “metric engineering”—an example of which is the currently-fashionable “warp drive” theory first clearly articulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in a seminal paper of 1994. Perhaps the object is capable of manipulating, as describable by relativity theory, the surrounding spacetime in which the object appears to move. For this theory to be plausible for this particular case, we would need to find evidence that this is, indeed, happening (and so one question that arises is: what evidence could this be?). Another possibility, first suggested to me by my own physics mentor, is that, somehow, the object is capable of manipulating the matter of which it is composed at the nuclear level. Most of the mass of objects we can see around us is contained within the nucleus of the atom—and this is what is meant by “nuclear”: manipulating the mass found in the nucleus. The point is simply that, now, one can begin to imagine—to speculate—on any number of possibilities. Each speculative possibility would, of course, need to be justified, if it’s to apply to this “tic-tac” case or to any other UAP case, justified on the basis of some evidence that would seem to confirm it.

As I said: explanation is inconclusive here—we have no solid theory to explain the dynamics of these objects, only guesses—and, without a solid theory, we have no physical understanding either. It follows that, while we might at one level describe the flight characteristics, they are, nonetheless anomalous when it comes to understanding how the objects could possibly be doing what they are doing. At one level the objects are knowable, but at another, they most definitely are unknown. They are in this precise way liminal—transitional objects partly grasped in the realm of the conventional, partly not but subject to any number of speculative possibilities as to what their specific physical character really is. I would argue that, in this sense, what we have before us is again rather historically unprecedented, or at least something that, for science, hasn’t been seen since the time of Galileo: a macroscopically visible object that constitutes a physical anomaly for known theoretical physics. I would also go so far as to say that, if physics can’t explain the behavior of these objects, then these objects are, like the discoveries of the first atomic scientists, cause for entirely new physical theory.

But the physical side of the phenomenon is just the beginning. In some other UAP cases, we have far more troubling things to explain. Let’s talk about the school students of Ariel, in rural Zimbabwe…

In 1994, at a small rural school in Zimbabwe, dozens of school children were witness to an incredible scene. Sometime during their recess, strange noises were heard overhead, and an object—what could be described in classic UFO terms—was seen to descend and then to land in an adjacent field some distance away from the schoolhouse. What was described next is nothing short of eerie, even alarming: beings of some kind were seen around the landed craft (variously described as having the classic “saucer” shape). What makes this case (what Hynek was to have called a “close encounter of the third kind” as we all know from the Spielberg film of the same title) so remarkable is that not only were there dozens of witnesses to an encounter that occurred in broad daylight, but that all of the witnesses—young children ranging in age from 6 to 12 years old—gave the same basic account (although, as to be expected from any eyewitnesses, and perhaps especially from children, the exact details of what the beings looked like or what exactly they were doing, vary). The most significant aspect of this encounter was that those children who managed to approach the beings more closely claim to have had some kind of inner, mental “contact” with them, experiencing all manner of adventitious imagery, they claimed, “put into” their minds—mainly of a dying planet Earth, conveyed to them with a sense of profound urgency. One of the children reports having been “locked” in a gaze with one of the beings while receiving this adventitious mental imagery. What is curious about this case is that the children were independently interviewed by several people (later to include the famous Harvard psychiatrist John Mack), and, upon comparing their independently recounted stories, they were remarkably consistent in the basic facts of the encounter: that something landed (an ovoid craft); that there were “beings” present; and that those who were closest to the beings had some kind of mind-to-mind connection with them. Even long into adulthood, the children recount the same story, with little significant variation.

The UAP phenomenon would seem, then, to have another anomalous component to it: a “psychical” or psychological one.

Witness another interesting fact about the 2004 Nimitz encounter. After having attempted to intercept the “tic-tacs”, Fravor at one point thought he was engaged by one of them, which zipped up from sea level to investigate him—or at least that’s how Fravor experienced it. But as Fravor tried to go in closer, the object suddenly dashed off in the blink of an eye—estimated by the original scientific study done by the SCU to have possibly been traveling on the order of over one hundred thousand miles per hour. Fravor was eventually radioed by radar officers: the object had flown exactly to his prearranged, and classified, “CAP” rendezvous point—exact to the GPS coordinates (which might make you suspect that we’re dealing with a foreign adversary’s technology—until you ask yourself if it’s really plausible for, say, the Chinese to have produced a large, propulsion-less cylindrical drone capable of traveling in excess of one hundred thousand miles per hour, requiring thousands of billions of watts of power).

But how are we to think about these two alleged events? Let’s work carefully through the logic of each one in turn.

In the Zimbabwe Ariel School case (now the subject of a long-anticipated documentary, to be released in the coming weeks), everything we think we know about the world is challenged. Not only do we have a UAP (already hard enough for many to accept as a genuine phenomenon), we have one that, allegedly, lands in front of dozens of school-age people, after which beings of some kind emerge and then interact with some of the children. That is, we can distinguish at least four aspects or layers of anomaly here: (1) the physical object, (2) which lands, (3) with beings exiting, and (4) interaction between them and some of the witnesses in ways that suggest immediate “mental” connection. As we have already established, (1) and (2) would not seem to be all that difficult to accept—on the grounds that the existence of these two phenomena can be well motivated on the basis of what credible evidence we already possess on UAP encounters: we have evidence of apparently structured craft, and ipso facto, such things can land. Why not? Thus, (1) and (2) are fairly believable once we accept the overall credibility of the account given by the children (something we must examine in a moment). What about (3) and (4)? Well, here is where the skepticism is likely to return with a vengeance: really? beings and “mental contact” between the kids and these creatures? It simply sounds like the kind of tall tales kids would spin, perhaps from some small yarn of truth (maybe they did see a UFO?), adding in some spice to a blandish event (a UFO whizzing around, then heading into the woods, and disappearing out of sight).

We should note at this point that some of the adults in charge of the kids did say they saw a craft of some kind—but beings? That’s where, for the adults, the story ends, for it seems none saw any beings; only some of the kids did. But then again, no adults were present where the children who claimed to have seen the beings were present. However absence of evidence from the adults is not evidence against that provided by the children in their accounts.

So, it all comes down to how much credence we put in the testimony of the children, for all the evidence we have, as with many a UFO case, is eyewitness testimony: he/she said X, Y and Z. We have little to no independently corroborative non-first-person evidence. The continuing testimony of the eyewitnesses, as documented now in the film Ariel Phenomenon (in a wonderful pun), is rather compelling (if sometimes inelegantly articulated). What we are looking for here is to establish a matter of unimpeachable fact from which we can reason. But in this case, it is hard to do that, so (because this post is not meant to very deeply engage this specific encounter) we must remain, again, cautiously agnostic. Surely something anomalous occurred. But the whole point I wished to make was really to introduce the much more troubling dimension to the UAP phenomenon, which is that dimension of “high strangeness” which is, perhaps, better appreciated from the curious detail of the Nimitz encounter—an unimpeachable case if there ever was one—mentioned just a short time ago. Let’s turn to that as we set the stage for our initial approach to the major focus of this series on UAP theory: the thinking of ufologist Jacques Vallée (certainly no foe to “high strangeness”).

The puzzle is deep in the Nimitz encounter: we have verifiable evidence of the presence of profoundly anomalous craft operating with impunity (even kinematical impunity!) over the course of several days, during a complex strike group combat preparedness mission off the southern California coast. At one point, as we have already mentioned, the object with which Cmdr. Fravor was engaged, dashed off miles away in seconds to his classified prearranged rendezvous point, sitting at an exacting set of coordinates. How is this possible? We now move away from a strictly physical anomaly, to a kind of anomaly in communications or even just plain knowledge: as in, how could this object know to be there, at precisely this position, which had meaning only for Fravor and the other pilots? We must make a number of assumptions in order to generate a plausible account.

It is possible that these objects, over the course of a few days, were able to determine a pattern to the fighter-jet activity, and, with some sophisticated number crunching, deduce the coordinates—assuming the jets would return over and over to the same position (this is a question that I do not believe has actually been asked or answered as yet). This suggests that we are dealing with a very sophisticated intelligence of some kind. Another, more direct, scenario would be that the objects were simply able to intercept the information about the CAP point—but how? Presumably they would understand that our communications are being mediated via electromagnetic radiation, and could tap into that, and glean relevant information. But the CAP point, being classified, would not in an unencoded manner be communicated over open radio channels. Some measure of encryption would be involved—and so the objects would also have to be able to decrypt any coded messages. Again, evidence of very sophisticated technology-using intelligence at work. But there is, perhaps, a more sinister possibility: that the objects (or their pilots or engineers—what do we say here?) somehow could get this information simply from the fact that Cmd. Fravor and the other pilots had been briefed on what the coordinates were to be, and thus carried that information with them—in their minds. Perhaps the objects are able to access that.

I will admit that I have tried to lay out the logical possibilities in order of believability; but we might want to reflect on what determines this order of believability. It surely has to do with what we know (or think we know) about ourselves, and how we would determine the relevant information. As we progress through the possibilities, however, we arrive at the threshold of conventional knowledge: the final possibility I outlined is inadmissible—but why? On what grounds? Because it is theoretically inadmissible, and, we might think, lacking in independent evidence. But what’s the ground of our skepticism—are we, again, skeptical because it’s doubtful that a mind-mind interaction is possible without the mediation of a “physical” medium? (By the way this isn’t strictly necessary in this case: these objects or their engineers might have a technology or a biology that does employ some physical medium for purely intellectual information exchange, mind-to-mind as it were—it’s just that here, like with the power source enigma, we simply have no idea what it could be.) Or is this doubtful just because we’re skeptical? Here, though, the skeptic does seem to be on better ground: neither experience nor theory admits this as a possibility. Except that that’s only half true—at least according to some very sober-minded philosophers who have entertained the problem of so-called “psi” phenomena. Our ultimate purpose (even if not here) is to entertain such problems—problems which are deeply fraught (and perhaps overdetermined at this point). We will have occasion to meditate much more deeply on this issue, but the point we wish to make, simply, is that, finally, the UAP phenomenon quite easily encompasses more than the purely physical anomalies we’ve noted, for example, in the Nimitz case: there are psychical or psychological anomalies that must also be accounted for—if you accept the relevant repots as veridical (an issue we have not yet, in these pages, settled, or even theorized with respect to the psychical dimensions of the problem). But it is this which Vallée wants us to appreciate: the many layers of anomaly we find when we examine the totality of UAP/UFO reports. What Vallée intends to do is what we want to clarify here, before (in part 3) moving on to the much more subtle question of how he does what he intends to do. So, let’s turn to what his goals are, and then we’ll look at how he tries to realize them.

Vallée at some point in his ufological researches stepped back from them, seeing that this phenomenon was recalcitrant: after a decade or so studying the phenomena of UFO reports (never, he reminds us many times, the thing itself!), he realized something fundamental about the manner in which the phenomena behaved: they behaved very evasively, eluding investigators and befuddling the eyewitnesses themselves—sometimes even interfering with their lives in sinister or just benignly annoying ways. Vallée therefore would like to study not necessarily the reality—the being—of the UFOs in and of themselves (getting caught in the impossible task of trying to account physically for what the objects are, and so on—the sorts of questions we are making an approach to). In fact, this position is eminently honest, if you think about it: Vallée admits, as we noted, that all he has are reports of something; not the things themselves! Therefore, he is immediately in the position not of a conventional scientist, but, rather, effectively in the position of a phenomenologist—one who is studying how it is that something appears (in this case, to the witnesses, as recorded in the ufological case reports). So Vallée does not take the case reports as really containing information about what it is that exists; it is a record of a kind of effect on people as objects and events occur to them (objects and events about which we cannot know anything, Vallée admits). He is therefore interested in the effects, not with the specific character of what might (or might not) have brought those effects about (although he variously speculates that some kind of technology is at work). But what is curious—perhaps even brilliant—is that Vallée does not deny the existence of the object-cause of these effects. In fact, he accepts that there is some reality here—just one whose specific character he offers no hypothesis about.

Vallée’s move here is subtle, and important, and if we don’t understand it properly, we will not really understand how it is that Vallée accomplishes what he sets out to accomplish (which is to finally explain and understand the UAP/UFO phenomenon). Let us state this carefully. What Vallée accepts are two things. In the first place, he accepts the physical reality of UAP/UFOs: there are these objects that are seen. We don’t know what they are, but they are real perceptions (or “percepts” we might say, slipping into the philosophical jargon). There really are these things there! In the second place—and this is key—Vallée simply accepts that there are real psychical or psychological effects/phenomena associated with, or directly connected to, the UAP/UFOs. In other words, when the Ariel school children say they saw beings and those beings sent them adventitious imagery, in their minds, he accepts this as a datum. We cannot explain how such mind-mind interactions occur, Vallée would say, but we simply accept that it has happened. It is a fact—if only at the phenomenological level of describing what is actually happening. We must realize that Vallée is relying on the fact that really when a skeptic denounces these “psi” phenomena (which many report are actually real) they do so from an ideological not an ontological or existential standpoint: they are operating with the principle that says “it can’t be, so it isn’t”—that is, all of my theories and what I think experience allows for say it can’t be, so therefore it isn’t. This is a case where the theory would be driving the experience, rather than the experience calling for (new) theory. This, in any case, in my gloss.

It is in this way that Vallée, much to the consternation of almost every disciplined academic specialist who may lay eyes upon Vallée’s (shall we say) “post-conventional” work, proceeds to attempt a kind of “morphological geography” (this is his method) of the landscape of all anomalous experience, finding in many cases morphological similarities to modern UFO encounters in comparison with many, many strange and fantastic encounters from the past—from Ezekiel’s “Chariot” in the sky, to the flaming sky-bound shields of ancient Roman times, to the various faeries, goblins, dwarves and other mysterious creatures recorded in countless folk tales throughout the ages all over the world. Vallée, in short, recontextualizes the UFO phenomenon, by means of his morphological geography, so that, seen against the relief of all anomalous phenomena the world over, the UFO phenomenon is just the latest (“modern”) edition of a much larger phenomenon that has been with humanity since (perhaps) the dawn of the species. The similarities and resonances between modern UFO phenomena and other anomalous encounters with strange creatures or flying objects (and beings) in the sky are just too powerful to ignore, he believes. The UFO phenomenon of today has to be understood historically, but historically in the context of the right morphological-geographic landscape of phenomena.

So, now, with a new concept (and organizational structure for the phenomena) determined, we may ask different questions—because we are now able to see the UFO phenomenon is an entirely different light: as manifestations of an ongoing interactive process of engagement, that between human beings and whatever it is that is the source of these appearances. In this way Vallée is led to his first conjecture (of sorts): that there is a source of the phenomena as they appear to human beings—and that it is not human beings themselves (we might call this rejected thesis, with somewhat curious resonances, the Feuerbachian Thesis). Notice, that since Vallée has committed himself to accepting the reality of the appearances—they are themselves real phenomena!—he cannot simply then reduce their reality to some fact about human beings. Nor, since he is accepting the equal reality of the psychical component, can he reduce the psychical to the physical. Either move would just result in a kind of reductionism—the first psychologism, the second physicalist materialism. Neither explanatory strategy will do, as it really can’t explain the reality of the phenomena as such. Remember: the phenomena are independently real. At least, Vallée is curiously committed to this thesis—but as an entirely “abstract” one, since he has no idea (or theory) as to the specific character of their reality. Vallée is simply not wanting to deny that the psychical effects have really happened, or that the objects seen were really there, and so on. His position is derived from denying a reductionist stance, which would force a choice in ontological account of the specifics of the “being” of the phenomena (is it just mind, or is it just matter?). That is something he refuses to do.

And with this, we are well on our way to a statement, finally, of his grand “Unified Field Theory” of the UFO/UAP phenomenon—what he calls the “Control System Hypothesis”. It is a hypothesis that aims to explain this new phenomenon which he has been able to conceptualize in the ways that I have attempted to expound upon in this now absurdly long opening treatise.

*Correction (05/31/2022): a previous version of this post mistakenly had eight-thousand feet for the altitude to which the tic-tac UAP was first observed to descend from, having first been tracked in low-earth orbit; the correct figure is eighty-thousand feet. (Thanks to Robert Powell!)