To Go Where No One Has Gone Before: the SCU “Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena” Conference (AAPC) 2022 - Day Three (Part Two of Two)

 With Col. John Alexander’s talk “UFOs/UAPs: Enigmas and Complexities” the SCU’s AAPC 2022 effectively concludes—except for a final panel discussion (which will not be covered in my review). I will admit that I found it rather hard to make sense of Alexander’s presentation as a whole, because, quite literally, there were approximately half a dozen presentations somehow stuffed into one giant, all-encompassing Magical Mystery Tour of a talk. If up to this point the SCU’s conference had gingerly avoided the woo-woo and the “high strangeness” that frequently is attached to the UFO phenomenon, well, here it was—and back with quite a vengeance. Was this a kind of Freudian return of the repressed? It’s hard to resist such a theory (and I think a theory of some kind is needed to help us bring the enormous complexity of the talk under control)…

Where to begin? Well, Alexander certainly did so with quite a bang: a rather bombastic (and dated) video introduction to Col. John Alexander The Man, The Mystery, The Psi Guy at the Pentagon. As many readers of this blog doubtless already know, Alexander was many things during his tenure at the Pentagon and in the military, but he is especially known for his participation in that somewhat dubious flirtation the U.S. government had with research into so-called “psi” phenomena back in the 1960s and 1970s (spilling into the Reagan Years), when this sort of thing enjoyed widespread popularity. I say “dubious” not because psi-phenomena (or what we might refer to as parapsychological and paranormal phenomena: things like “psychokinesis” or PK, ESP, mental mediumship, telepathy and so on) ought to be considered inherently dubious (although we ought to be especially careful when considering such reports); rather, I say “dubious” because of the motivations driving the USG’s involvement (though Alexander in part pursued psi for ostensibly noble purposes)—a factor that, arguably at least, had a negative impact on the integrity of any attempted “science” of the phenomena. (This is a whole other story worthy of a future blog post unto itself.) Yes, it was Alexander and colleagues (Hal Puthoff being one) who were the inspiration for that odd little flick that appeared a number of years ago entitled The Men Who Stare At Goats (and Alexander informs us that goats did die—but not apparently from psi), and the journalistic book a few years before that of the same name (penned by Jon Ronson). It was also Alexander who founded the “Advanced Theoretical Physics Project” or ATPP (though his PhD is in education), which in some sense was the forerunner of the now-infamous AATIP, where all manner of fringe science (or should we say physics?) was pursued.

In slide one of approximately six hundred and fifty, Alexander gives us a sense—however futile—of “where” (if that’s the right concept here) he’s going in his talk overall, a talk which covers everything from remote viewing, entheogens/hallucinogens, animal consciousness, alien/entity encounters, consciousness consciousness, to séances and … oh, yes: UFOs as well. It’s truly the Magical Mystery Tour Summer 2022 Extravaganza—a kind of conference all unto itself. Bravely I have to say, Alexander is the woo-woo guy. In a sense the original (or at least his military/Pentagon brand of it).

All joking and irony aside, at the core of Alexander’s enigma-overload of a talk is a sincere question, and if we were to actually boil this unruly presentation down to one thing, it’s just that: it constitutes a very long but basically simple question. And the question is this: is it possible that consciousness, in some fundamental way, is the unifying principle of every paranormal, parapsychological and ufological phenomenon human beings have ever experienced? He tells us that “all of these phenomena go together—somehow”, which he calls his “bias”. That is, he is biased towards the belief in what he goes on to call “integrated presentations”: that all these phenomena are integrated with consciousness being the “key component”. It is a very rough hypothesis, a suspicion really. But it suffers from being just that—a suspicion, a suggestion. What makes Alexander’s presentation so frustrating, therefore, is its lack of theoretical cohesion. It is really a jumble and, because he insists on forcing every possible kind of paranormality into his talk, he ends up having to ramble through any number of topics that, had they been isolated and focused on, could have made for a rather interesting talk. It is really a classic case of putting the cart before the horse: he suspects a theoretical unity but, not having actually worked out that unifying theory, he begins with only the desire for it driving everything else he wants to unify. We are left simply baffled by the jumbled complexity of it all. Maybe there’s something there, but if so, Alexander certainly has not articulated it for us. This is the problem of the woo-woo meisters in general, of course: too much speculation, too much unconventionality, too little original theoretical incisiveness. This is indeed what makes it woo-woo in the first place…

What remains of my review of Alexander’s talk must content itself with a list-like rundown of the really disconnected series of points Alexander proceeds to make throughout his talk (transitions from one slide to the next appear almost like the quantum discontinuities of electron orbits in the atomic nucleus, without the benefit of there being the same theoretical object—the electron—in transition from orbit-to-orbit). It would seem that not even consciousness can save us (maybe only a god—as the German philosopher Heidegger famously once quipped in a rare newspaper interview with Der Spiegel).

In the few slides (although “few” is highly relative: for Alexander’s talk, “few” means about a dozen) devoted to the actual subject matter of the conference—UAPs—we don’t really learn very much that already isn’t fairly well known (and much more systematically presented elsewhere). Although, to Alexander’s credit, he was one of the first to have either received or reviewed many of the cases in UFO history that are now canonical and well known in the ufological community (like the Iranian fighter jet dogfight case of the late 1970s, in which the pilot’s launch control system went dead precisely as he attempted to fire his missiles at a UAP). So whatever one’s opinion, Alexander is indisputably an important figure in ufological history. That’s not to say an uncontroversial figure. He surely is controversial—and not just for the goat-staring stuff either.

If one didn’t know some of the history surrounding Alexander’s engagement (or disengagement) with the UFO community, one could easily miss the controversy flowing like lava out of one or two of the hundreds of Alexander’s slides. And it has to do with the very, very fraught question as to whether or not the USG has in its possession any UFO crash materials—any materials of that sort whatsoever. The assumption among many has been that almost assuredly there is. I don’t have to mention Roswell—but there, we did. This is taken to be in a sense the original sin of ufological-government cover-ups: with a newspaper article first announcing, then later denying, that crash remains of a “saucer” were recovered. Tens of thousands of pages of ufological study and journalism have been devoted to the matter. (Did I mention it’s a fraught topic?) I won’t bother adding anything to that, except to note here that Alexander is perhaps infamous not just for goat-staring, but for his denials that the USG has any such UFO crash materials (for Roswellian dogmatists, there’s a whole intact craft). Such was one theme of his 2011 book UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities.

What is perhaps most curious of all is his denial (here at the AAPC and in his 2011 book) of any conspiracy of coverup within the government—something unlikely to be convincing precisely because, well, to us civilians anyway, he is (or was) the government. The paradox is that he implicitly disavows being government, like many government officials do—the government is always other (witness the absurd line Pres. Ronald Regan popularized: “government is the problem”, uttered by the chief executive of the US government itself, and repeated by many a government official of a certain political leaning). To our incredulity Alexander offers a platitudinous deflationary theory, one that has become a kind of trope in ufology: that the right hand of the government doesn’t really know what the left hand is doing—that all conspiracist thinking, when applied to government machinations, rests on the false assumption that “the government” is a coherent and internally consistent organization (to which, Alexander further explains, we attribute near-omniscience). Which it is most definitely not, of course. And so, we are supposed to draw the comforting conclusion that conspiracies are just not possible in government.

Well, as a matter of logic and critical thinking (a 101-level college course), that’s just a bad argument—more of an affect than an argument, really. It is perhaps no wonder that Alexander was jeered by a MUFON conference audience a decade or so ago (no doubt jeered because he was throwing water on the fire of the MUFON crowd’s misplaced mystery, not because of his fallacious logic. We should point out that Alexander’s denials do tend to stretch the plausible: despite what he claims, the USG is notorious for their dissimulation, disinformation, harassment and attempted silencing of some UFO witnesses). In any case, I am not going to pursue this toxic, fraught issue any further. It really amounts, in my opinion, to a cesspool of distraction and poisonous thinking. As with a lot of what Alexander flew by in his sweeping presentation, there is some real issue here (or issues: having to do with accountability, transparency, over-classification, dark budgets disappearing tax-payer dollars, and so on), but the retired Col. Alexander doesn’t seem to be too much concerned to systematically argue for (or even explicate) anything. It seems that his presentation would have been better presented as a media collage—more like an elaborate poster-presentation than a talk per se.

Towards the end of the Magical Mystery Tour we’re treated to a few (!) slides on the interesting case of one Chris Bledsoe. It was a winter’s night, January 7^th 2007 when, sat at Cape Fear River, Bledsoe (and his son, along with a couple of chums) have a UFO encounter that also became an episode of “missing time” and an entity encounter. (Oh and yes, there’s plenty of media to digest on this case.) Alexander meets up with Bledsoe, who reports having intermittent contact (telepathic, naturally) with whatever it was he is supposed to have encountered. One evening during Alexander’s site-visit, Bledsoe announces that he thinks “they’re here” and, low and behold, Alexander, along with Bledsoe himself, sights a UFO flying high in the sky. Alexander at this point repeats the appearance of shock he perhaps experienced that night; he certainly came away from the whole thing convinced Bledsoe wasn’t fraudulent. After Bledsoe’s initial encounter, where he and the group were allegedly harassed by some sort of “creatures” (although from Alexander’s account it wasn’t quite clear whether these were Bledsoe’s alleged abductors, or cryptids, or just plain ol’ earthly forest creatures), we’re told that Bledsoe experienced a “healing” (he had suffered from Crohn’s Disease for years) and that the telepathic connection he would go on to speak about was established. By 2008, naturally, Bledsoe is featured in “UFOs Over Earth”, a TV series which portrays MUFON investigators doing their thing (not without a measure of incredulity regarding the Bledsoe case).

“‘It’ is in control”—whatever “it” turns out to be, Alexander announces. Before running through every (and I mean every) remaining sort of paranormality out there (and the truth, presumably, is out there), we’re left with the Vallée-style thesis, which Alexander asserted in a recent “Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch” episode: human beings are not in control but are under control. Joking and irony aside, there is, again, another serious point to consider here, one made succinctly by the cultural anthropologist Ryan Cook in a brilliant essay (largely unknown to ufology) he delivered in conjunction with a media exhibit at the Arizona Museum of Anthropology in 2007, called “Trust No One: UFOs, Anthropology and Problems of Knowledge”. It is a deep question, by turns ontological and methodological (and Cook’s essay is particularly informative and brilliant here). “If we take seriously,” writes Cook,

the claims of our ufological informants … it would seem that both ufology and anthropology have agentive, interactive objects of study. This has a profound effect on how they can be approached and what tools can be used to understand them. How do we study something that we must assume is able to study us back? or is at the very least in some kind of feedback relationship with us? (2007, unpublished, p. 18.)

Anthropologists can be of immense value to ufology here, Cook concludes. Over the decades they developed methodologies to deal with precisely this problem (whether they have been successful is quite another matter; but maybe ufology and anthropology together, as I think Cook is suggesting at the end of his essay, can enter fruitful dialogue on exactly this methodological point). Rather than stick with a strictly information-theory or “meta-logical” point of view, which theorists like Vallée seem to prefer, we may well do better by bringing to the table exactly those humanistic sciences which are geared towards the “agentive”, the reflexive, the mutually interactive. Such meaning-systems are—and this is essential—nonlinear. The nonlinearity means that as we interact with “them” (“it”?), we introduce a necessary disturbance into the system such that we cannot factor out our engagement as subject (for we are as much subject to their study as they are to ours) or isolate the object we wish to study (for the object is responsive to our own attempts to render it an object of study, much like with any human culture an anthropologist would like to study). In this sense the object is also subject, but we are also object to the other subjects we are attempting to study. This Möbius-like enfoldment of subject/object is the fundamental problem inhibiting the confident development of any future science of UFOs. And yet, we somehow have an anthropological science of cultures housed within mainstream academia—something long denied to the study of UAP. (Perhaps this returns us back to an important theme of one of the most interesting talks of the AAPC: the assumption of anthropocentric sovereignty, structuring even what kinds of academic disciplines are minimally acceptable. To admit a science of UFOs into the academy would be to admit a science that admits that human beings themselves might be the subject of a nonhuman “science”—that part of the structure of the objects studied includes a subjectivity that takes an interest in humanity itself.)

Alexander’s talk, however, did not attempt such a sincere and sophisticated reflection on the deeper methodological, epistemological or ontological questions that are foundational to any serious academic study of the phenomenon (let alone a science of it). But I guess that’s not the guy Alexander is. His pioneering is to be found elsewhere.

With this, we will conclude our reflections on the SCU’s Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference 2022, an overall satisfying (if at times frustrating) experience. We await SCU’s future work (hopefully to be presented at next year’s conference). If what executive board member Peter Reali indicated were the projects either in the works, or being planned, ufology is in for quite an important infusion of hard, serious study in the coming years—likely to become yet another standard-setting set of papers. Yet, we can expect the problems of paranormality and of high-strangeness to continue to haunt such study, and for the deeper, and more challenging methodological, epistemological and ontological complexities of subject/object enfoldment to persist. We can only hope SCU can bring to bear some more sophisticated response to such problems, if only to be able to justifiably segregate them.

I only hope, personally, that next year, at least one philosopher gets a seat at the table.