Phenomecon 2022 - A Review (Part One)

 

Flying into Utah from where I live in Los Angeles for Phenomecon 2022 was like going from the Earth to Mars. In this case, not only was the landscape alien (but wickedly beautiful—arresting even), so was the crowd. Or at least, to me—someone who has only ever really attended strict academic conferences. Phenomecon was a funky paranormality fest packed with speakers from a broad range of intellectual, academic and professional backgrounds. Everything from bone fide scientists and academics, to your run-of-the-mill “paranormal investigator” whose profile is fairly predictable: either former military or police, with some training of some unknown quality in some kind of investigative methodology (CSI and forensics seems to be common), often with just an undergrad degree in something (not necessarily relevant to paranormal studies or investigation). Many are just self-created, sui generis “investigators” and “researchers” (and therefore “experts”) who’ve devoted their lives to the strange, the bizarre, the fringe and the kooky. (And I mean it gets kooky: the comically passionate Bostonian James Vieira, oddly unlisted in the accompanying booklet of speakers, events and activities, gave us a wild tour of his inner psyche with a talk on Giant humanoid creatures and—if I am remembering the talk I so wanted to forget entirely correctly—androgynous extraterrestrial visitors possibly mating with humans now or in the distant past … or some such thing.)

Of course the highlight of the whole event was the presence of, and talks delivered by, the current crop of Skinwalker Ranch researchers (although I should benight the word with quotation marks), with supporting cast members (the “Dragon”, the cowboy-hat-guy, the security dude, and so on, real-life families in tow). Out of all, and by a long shot, we had the most vociferous of the SWR crew: the inimitable Dr. Travis (The Incredible academic-degree-wielding Hulk) S. Taylor—the now-infamous “principal investigator” (at least for a time) for the since re-named, re-branded, shuffled, shaken and stirred UAPTF, which the USG, somewhat haphazardly, cobbled together hurriedly in 2020 in response to a Congressional mandate. For a certain additional fee (the basic conference package was about 90 bucks), one could dine with the cast (wedding-banquet style, with the guest of honor placed on a dais above the crowd), as part of the lower caste. It was 75 bucks a pop for special lunches or dinners with the SWR crew (or someone else to your liking—maybe the Bigfoot or demon-hauntings guy?). And, to top it off, 100 bucks gets you driven by tour bus out to the perimeter (the pearly gates) of the famed Ranch, to chat through the (locked) black iron gate with one or more cast members. No unauthorized visitors allowed—not even for your cool 100. Yeah, I demurred and stuck close to the civilized encampment which is Vernal City, far away from Skinwalkers, wolf-men, shadow forms, luminous orbs and the mighty march of the UAP high overhead. (Why didn’t Jordan Peele think to film Nope in Utah—or did he?)

We will have occasion shortly to revisit the Skinwalker crew and then get down to the brass (or iridium) tacks of their talks: Erik Bard (principal scientific investigator, Masters-degree holder, curiously enough) and Dr. T (vociferous backyard experimentalist and science fictionalist extraordinaire). I was not impressed, despite the ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the two “scientists” that permeated the rooms where they manifested (first in the general assemblyroom—the “Ballroom”, where an actual costume ball was held one night—and the second in the “insiders” only conference room where paying members of the burgeoning realtime media-feed Empire got to see the crew up close and personal).

I will admit that my attendance at the conference talks and other sundry events was spotty. There’s only so much crappy, imprecise, vague or shallow thinking one can tolerate in a day, and so I therefore spent much of my time trying to get to know the UAPx team, who managed to strike quite a contrasting note of actual scientific sincerity regarding a topic so easily consumed by the true-believing “woo” denizens that the core enigma—which stubbornly remains so—quickly and frequently gets exorcised in favor of so much ambiguity of indeterminate quality, authenticity or relevance. I mean surely there’s some there to all the paranormality, but with this cast of characters (showmen, con-artists and plain kooks) thrown at the problem, we enter into a new world medieval with little hope of gaining some modicum of knowledge about that there. You ain’t finding it here…

Let’s talk about this Greg Lawson character for a moment. His was the first talk/presentation I stumbled upon as Dr. Kevin Knuth and I arrived late to the paranormal party, having traversed the hundred and fifty odd miles from Salt Lake City to Vernal in just under three hours of amazing high mountain and desert views—mesmerizing to the point of spiritual quietude. Leaving Salt Lake, a relatively normal (if oddly antiseptic) American city behind, you enter into this magical landscape of mountains, reservoirs, occasional rolling hills, mesas and canyons with cattle and horses lowing about. At one point I am struck, almost dumb, with a profound sense of connection to the land, the place, as if I’d started to arrive home after having taking a long hiatus some unknown time in the past. (And that was about the only dose of possible paranormality I can, sadly, report; everything else was thoroughly this-worldly—most especially the delicious Mexican cuisine, the most delicious I have ever had.)

Lawson was concerned about “the evidence”. Oh no, I thought. This should be good. He provided a list of its types: physical; latent; trace; associative; circumstantial; testimonial; historical … a decent list and certainly epistemically interesting if we were to dive into each one and starting thinking more deeply about what each is, and when it comes up. But here was a kind of expert—in forensics it would seem (at least that’s the bio we got on the web: 30-year law enforcement officer, SWAT team member, 10 year military vet, and so on … no stranger to the act, art and maybe science of forensic investigations). Not an academic by any stretch. So for his bone fides, he spreads the whole range of investigative techniques and categories out before the audience. We have to know he’s a serious guy about the paranormal. It gets boringer, of course, since the paranormalist if often confined to the archival research carrel, working through newspapers, magazines and the whole lot of paper materials that haven’t (yet, at least) made it into the all-encompassing, all-consuming Uber-Archive in the Cloud which is the omniscient Internet (although in a more sober and serious moment, we should pause to note that it is not knowledge that is present there, but rather mere information—knowledge-in-waiting).

It suddenly struck me in a flash of realization: I had figured it all out (perhaps conveniently, so that I could move on to the delicious Mexican cuisine calling for me). Paranormal investigation turns out to be a concatenation of various professional disciplines or trades not concerned with the paranormal as such, but with the investigation of events of interest—a reconstructive art in which, by some forensic methodology, you attempt to flesh the bones of the reports of what happened. You’re always arriving to the scene too late (much like philosophy, as Hegel once wrote: “The Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.”), or trying to coax back into existence something which has receded into the mist of the possible (or, as Kripal might put it: the impossible). The paranormal investigator vacillates between conjurer and collector, ending up with a curiosity cabinet of tales to chill the soul during the night—possibles, and maybes taunting the mundane-minded to dip out to the reaches of the inner and outer cosmos of whatever is. And the fuel for this fire of the possible is, of course, the very limitations of human knowing that keep us wondering. After all, we just don’t know very much, do we? Do we?

And that’s the point, really—isn’t it? Knowledge. Or at least, coming to know something about the world which we didn’t really know (or couldn’t honestly say we knew). But then, what is knowledge? I don’t think you can answer that without also relating what you say to control or mastery—or at least consistent and controllable interaction with your epistemological object (that which you desire to know). Science, as distinguished from religious faith-based traditions, seeks controllable, consistent, predictable and reproducible repetitions from nature—a structure of activity or behavior amenable to law. Science wants engagement with nature in ways that elude other intellectual traditions, other thought-systems. A religion is not necessarily to be excluded from this category of knowing, but its work is often in inner and not outer space (as it were)—a domain science unfortunately has grown to be uncomfortable with. But the paranormal is precisely that: phenomena that seem to persist in this scientifically hazy nether-region in between matter and mind (so to speak). And it is this nether-region that, in my view, is what originates religion and the religious: religions spring from this slippery region of neither-quite-matter, nor-quite-mind—a region that makes us feel that we’re not who or what we might think we are when all we focus on is the outer space of things subject to the laws of constant change. We get a sense of a beyond as we contrast it with what the materialistically-inflected sciences are all about. And this sense of a beyond is something peculiar to our historical moment, for cultures past had an easier time reconciling the nether-world to the world as such. We, so-called “moderns” have this difficulty with the strange or uncanny. Even so, science (in very practical ways) struggles with it, and only by a slow progression of concerted and systematic thought will we be able to entertain a more sophisticated intellectual system capable of not only comprehending the full range of what there really is (from the normal to the paranormal), but also of potentially interacting with paranormality in ways that, for now, seem purely ridiculously fictional.

What’s the goal for the paranormal researcher? Not, seemingly explanation—for the typical researcher in this field (and let me be clear: in the field dominated by the entertainment-types: the Taylors, the Lawsons, … the roster of Phenomecons) has neither the temperament nor the intellectual training or discipline to work out something like an explanatory framework within which to situate their curiosities. It remains, frustratingly, mere compilation, collection, collation, aggregation, and archival research. But we must ask: what would explanation look like? Since science dominates the conceptual terrain in this regard, but yet paranormality by its nature eludes science (for reasons we must seriously investigate—and are scientists the best suited for this task, we wonder? Perhaps not…), paranormal research is doomed to circle in the abyssal whirlpool of incredulity, incapacity, indeterminateness and ambiguity.

Perhaps then the question is even more fundamental that all that: what is ‘research’? What is ‘evidence’? And who can authoritatively conduct the research, gather the evidence, and pronounce on the results? Again, the nature of the phenomena—which are not even generally accepted as real features of nature (and yes ‘real’ is a fraught category screaming for deeper critical scrutiny—but where would this leave us?)—is such as to cripple a scientific explanation that isn’t guaranteed to be reductive: show that this or that paranormality is in fact a misidentified natural phenomenon that is already understood, a pure fiction, or—when it’s accepted at all—a mere extension of something we already understand (electromagnetism, say). Ghosts, hauntings, spirits, apparitions … all of it part of nature, you say? Indeed, that has to be right. But discarnate entities manifesting what seems like a form of consciousness, able to somehow interact with the “material” world with which we interact as incarnate beings? It all seems so unlikely—but is that because of our categories, or because the phenomena are simply nonexistent? It would seem you don’t need to be possessed for your head to start a’spinnin’…

Surely the whole phenomenon of Phenomecon is one of the breaking through—and breakdown—of evidential standards, scientific criteria of demonstration, and the whole range of conventional epistemic structures that keep the business—the work—of science (and so-called rational explanation) in play. It ends up being somehow rogue in a very conventional way, for it is short on bone fide science and long on the tallest of tales. Yet, we wonder: what if? What if there’s something here in the rubble (willfully created) of conventional epistemology?

Yet, all the same, we have to recognize that this kind of a thing has its place after all—in the great dialectic of knowledge; and that this dialectic mightn’t be aimed toward anything like a recognizable explanation of whatever phenomena are targeted here (and exploited). This kind of thing may just be the padding on the walls of our wagon driving towards a new age of quasi-scientific experience-mongering, an age not unlike the prior Middle Ages, where faith mixes with practical know-how in a confusing sea of phenomena we know little about. If we end up abdicating our role as knowers to the designs of artificial intelligence of all kinds, at the same time that governments the world over tip towards self-serving authoritarian monarchies unkind to fact, then this is the kind of world we may very well end up inhabiting, where we sleep for a while on the concept of “fundamental principles of nature” as the basis for explanation and understanding. Who knows?

The speakers with the inner circle of invitees and paying-to-play hoi polli retire on this Day One of the Phenomecon to dine at their banquet, watched over by the speaker/guest of honor at their raised dais of dignity. For that cool 75, I could have lunched there with Lawson or Taylor or “Dragon” Bryant Arnold, or Erik “The Bard”, but alas, I found sustenance elsewhere that late afternoon.

As is obvious, I opted for the cheaper option. The 90 I paid got you access not just to the conference itself, but to at least one opening reception—an oddly middling soirée (for the mostly non-soirée types) given an absurdly bounteous cocktail spread of somewhat random foodstuffs arrayed neatly, with great care but lacking in the finer accoutrement of a more civilized affair: I mean, we got neither napkin nor utensil. (But we did get beer: my poison was a Coors—not a CoorsLite, but the real deal, brewed with that deliciously cold mountain-spring water from Colorado … or at least that was the tantalizing admission on the pounder can I got for free with my single blue ticket.) The reception was indeed rather odd. It opened approximately 12 minutes before the “Film Festival” where about 100 of us settled into an amphitheater of sorts, nestled (as much as possible—for there’s little nestling in Utah country) behind the main conference venue (Vernal City has a real conference center!). Though poorly conceived as a whole (totalities aren’t the caterers’ thing, apparently), individually (and we’ve got lots of individualism on offer in America, don’t we?) each selection was quite delectable. Cheeses, breads, crackers, pickled things, hummuses, dips, salads, sliced meats (charcuterie would be going too far, but sort of) … it was a Boschian delight. It was abundant. Having neither napkin nor utensil lent a strange sense of the pathetic to our foraging. Almost like we were left behind, and the real action was elsewhere—in the banquet hall with the guests of honor (none of whom stepped out of the palace to deign make their appearance at this our plebian festival). While we foraged, the repast was held elsewhere, and it conflicted—oddly, again lending an air of the pathetic to our little thing—with the cinematic fest (so I suppose the elect couldn’t come: was this a design flaw?). Well I wasn’t about to pay to play, so I stuck it out—until I could tolerate it no more.

As I dined, the smell of unseen chicken (or horse?) manure and urine wafted my way, drawing across my effete plate of hors d’oeuvrs (some loudly protested the idea of this French offense, accordingly refusing to eat it). Clearly, our dining area (peppered with curvilinear benches enwrapping circular concrete tables) was somewhat ill-placed. But I pressed on with not one, or two—but with three overloaded dessert plates-full of goodies. That was my (free) dinner. I was satisfied.

I can’t quite bring myself to do a review of the films shown; I honestly tuned mostly out in honor of the incredible landscape and sunset/moonrise on display like a forgotten treasure. I can provide the photo of the adverts for each of them: two Bigfoot flicks, one “alien contact” reel, and the customary ghost flick (a lá BlairWitch). They seemed to be well-done, documentary-style—in HD and all that. Well … ok, maybe a bit of a (mottled) review, just to say I was there…

The first film, which I admittedly arrived late to (having been absorbed in my finger food a bit too long—I did use a piece of bread and one of my empty plates as a makeshift napkin, which confirmed to myself my astute improvisatory abilities as a true homesteader) was the usual BlairWitch mock-up, perhaps worse in this case for the realistic pretenses as a true ghost-hunting saga. OK, Witch had those realistic pretenses too (but it wasn’t about ghost hunting per se); nonetheless, every subsequent version of it could no longer keep the question (is this “real”?!) suspended, and so suffer from being the imitator—thus collapsing the pretense altogether. Accordingly, every post-Witch flick could only be worse: they want me to believe it’s “real”—yet Witch didn’t want anything from you but your engagement with the scare of it all. Ghosts, spirits, demons, premonitions, clairvoyance … it was all there (if only notionally), and therefore present in the subsequent Q&A with the film crew. I continued to sip my authentic Coors-non-lite.

Surely, all ironic chiding aside, there is some phenomenon (or phenomena) here which is not entirely a notion, fabrication, mistaken perception, fantasy or wishful thinking (driving constructed perceptions—we can, let’s not forget, be fooled by our own designs in the moment, of course). But what is the nature of the phenomena beyond the stories, beyond the alleged experiences? It is elusive by its nature, dealing, as it does, with that nether-region of mind/matter interactions. Science is comfortable only with one-half of that divide (and this divide does remain, as I have remarked elsewhere and as is well known in the serious scholarly literature that cares to tackle the issue head-on), and so it looks for only what it can see (that “matter” side). There is plenty of “matter” going on, but it all just seems so absurd—necessarily so, since that other half (the “mind” part of the phenomenon) goes absent or ignored or (more fairly stated) unanalyzed in a coherent explanatory framework encompassing both matter and mind. Nothing like the latter exists, because whenever an attempt is made, either mind is reduced to matter, or matter to mind. (The more neutral position—the “monism” about which we’ve written previously—is just not generally accepted and, consequently, remains un- or underappreciated as a potential way of resolving, or at least beginning to resolve, the puzzle.)

So there is a missing element here: the element that everyone wants to discount because of its apparent conventionality: that these paranormal occurrences (from apparitions, hauntings, and ghosts, to the so-called “psychic phenomena” of PK and telepathy) are indeed a function of someone’s (or of some) state of “mind”, and/or the emotional context within which these phenomena are encountered. Stephen Braude tried valiantly to expound on this possibility—it could be you, not “them”. Maybe it is a (paranormal) projection from out of the misery or darkness of your own being that is the “cause” of a whole range of paranormality. Maybe it’s us after all. Without a more sophisticated—and accurate—theory of the mind/matter relation, in which neither matter nor mind theories are taken as fundamental to every empirically established fact of paranormal occurrence (if such there be—an admittedly controversial and unavoidably tendentious claim), we will never have a good grasp of the phenomena, and won’t really know what we’re experiencing. Just that we’re experiencing it. And that’s not an explanation so much as an assertion of what needs explaining. (And here the chill of medievalism drifts towards us.)

The bright full moon now rises strikingly behind the self-illuminated HD movie screen parked before us. It is an eerie benediction to the world we ignore as we peer into the filmmakers’ worlds…

In the ensuing discussion of the film, breathless, it’s all about “energy”, “it” feeding on it, from it, out of it. What is ‘energy’, though, but a mere term to cloak our ignorance of the nature of phenomena we only encounter without being able to master? The trajectory of knowledge moves along a decisive course, does it not? Encounter, engaged interaction, control, then, finally, mastery: bringing it forth at will. Very little of our world material can we do this for—but we can do it. True knowledge, then, is had for little but it is had.

The moon, bright, is consumed by dark clouds—witches’ clouds. The show, the real show, is elsewhere. In the now darkened outdoor amphitheater, I look around me at the crowd, which has achieved its critical mass for the evening (numbering maybe 75?). All seem sincere. Yet on the stage I wonder: disingenuous? The crowd: hungry, even after their hors d’oeuvre, for phenomena. The filmmakers: ready to supply the repast.

The second film, served up shortly after the conclusion of the first’s Q&A, was about—Bigfoot. The title is wonderful: Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed. Now we’re talking art films…

… And I had had enough, exiting, quietly, in a flash …