Possible & Impossible: On the Second Edition of Archives of the Impossible. Part One.

Over two-and-a-half days on the beautiful campus of Rice University, just near downtown Houston, Texas, I attended iteration no. 2 of Jeff Kripal’s international conference centered on not exactly the Archives itself, but rather the idea from which this very physical collection of tens of thousands of documents has arisen. There was indeed, a deep-dive into the archives—the story of one, rather major (we might say monumental) addition to this ever-growing expanse of documentation of the seemingly “impossible” (more on that collection later)—but the bulk of the conference was devoted to working out the stated subtitle of Year Two of what is perhaps fast-becoming an academic phenomenon all on its own: “Transnationalism, Transdisciplinarity, Transcendence”. Lots of trans—gression, was perhaps the thought…

As with any conference or symposium (like with my own), the stated theme is one thing; how it actually unfolds within the content of the presentations and discussions themselves is quite another. But, on balance I think that the conference did manage to say on-theme. Except, perhaps, in the very first talk that kicked off the event—one given by the eloquent historian of (medical) science, and now historian of ufology and the very human fascination with UFOs, Greg Eghigian of Penn State University. I’ll get back to Greg’s excellent (if interestingly incomplete) presentation in a moment.

This first talk was followed by one more on-theme, delivered by Rice alumnus and now Chair of African and African-American Studies at Louisiana State University, Prof. Stephen Finley. Prof. Finley, a brilliantly animated and engaged speaker, gave a talk that was well-positioned within his research homeground—religious studies—but which is also quite clearly itself rather a transdisciplinary pursuit, as his subject (for this talk, his recent book In And Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam) quite clearly crosses into African and African-American Studies.

Both of these talks were engagements with different sides of the UFO phenomenon, but of course were much more than just that. Both provided a view of the interiors of the phenomenon—the human interiors, both cultural-historical (which in a way is a kind of “exterior” view) and intimately personal (even if situated within a specific cultural-spiritual milieu, as with Finley’s subject). Whatever the UFO itself (from its own side) ultimately turns out to be (and as I’ve stressed again and again, there is not one single “phenomenon” but rather a wide array of phenomena that, in terms of pure surface appearances, present as a kind of singular event-class which is frustratingly difficult to penetrate taxonomically), it has meaning and significance for the human beings who encounter it. Taken as a pure phenomenal object of fascination and intrigue, of speculative wonder and eerie ontological disturbance or disruption, impenetrable to the convenience of ready-to-hand categories and compartments of human comprehension (whether ultimately justified or not—sometimes we are struck with unknowing just because of our laziness or lack of diligent post-sighting follow-up—and many of these phenomena turn out to be, as object-cause, rather mundane) … even so, the sky-bound wonders inspire sentiment, fervor, fear, terror, … even transcendence and transformation (not all of which is positive, of course). So, it is quite well possible to “bracket” the question of the inner reality of these specula—to withhold, or indeed suspend, the ontological question which seeks to know what these phenomena are. Which is a question of positioning within an ontological constellation that links them to the other phenomena of our (accepted) lifeworld. But this we cannot yet do—at least not yet in a way that we can position viruses, planets, stars, sand and sailboats within a world of reasonable ontological transparency (requiring, for some of these things of course, the intermediation of the sciences—theoretical and experimental). The UFO can be treated from afar, its “being” bracketed in favor of its meaning. Such a standpoint allows the scholar to ask after the human meaning, of course—and this is precisely the default setting of (much of) the humanities (I mean, they are the “human-ities” after all—a question to which we’ll have occasion to return with Kripal’s recent attempts at an intervention, with his concept of the “superhumanities”). Rather than entering into the question of the “being”, we shift to the (perhaps easier or more comfortable) standpoint of the meaningful experience of some “object = X” (to borrow somewhat vulgarly from Kant) which a human being has with this unknown—or better, with the uncanny. For the first two talks, they might have then been given the theme Chronicles of the Uncanny, with the UFO and the Extraterrestrial as the form that that uncanny takes for the purposes of the talks.

Alleged Triangular UFO Military Sighting, 2021

And this brings us to perhaps the very core of the conference as a whole, which was a kind of romance story—a romance of experience, and “experiencers”: those who have had (or allege to have had—when do we get to discharge the allegations?) an encounter with either an uncanny aerial phenomenon of one sort or another; a seemingly nonhuman but intelligent (perhaps tool-using) being (entity?) of some kind; or those who’ve just been privy to (or otherwise even been the source of) some profound (sometimes mundane) paranormality of one kind or another. Everything revolved around experience, and the “experiencer” of the uncanny—dubbed the “impossible” (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I might add: we’ll come back to an evaluation of this concept of the “impossible” which was in play, under the (super)humanistic direction of Prof. Kripal). And the one thing—conveniently—that is hard to critique, of course, is experience.

So what began to disturb me throughout the whole conference was this retreat to the safety (and immunity) of the experience. Surely in some sense experience is where everything, including a science that might then inspire a critique of it, begins. Surely one mustn’t falsify experience in favor of one’s a priori notions of what the world must be like, which inspires the illicit axiom “it can’t be, so it isn’t” that refutes the seeming evidence of experience that this-or-that paranormality actually happened. Thus these Rice archives are an attempt to document what is otherwise ruled out—but by what ontological authority?, is the question loudly begged by these “archives of the impossible”. Hence the “transcendence” part of the conference’s theme: by collecting and collating and finally archiving document after document that recounts human tales of what should not be possible—what is excluded by authoritative ontological fiat—the metaphysical orthodoxy might burst. And then what? We transcend paradigms? Are the “materialist” sciences (which comprehend only mundane causal relationships, and which frustrates the mind by containing it to only the material brain) the boxes (or provider of them) that are “broken” (to paraphrase one theme of Prof. Kripal’s opening manifesto of the impossible)?

It all seemed (if I might be permitted to generalize for a grumpy moment, before we return to Eghigian and Finley, who are really outliers here) to slip all-too-easily into a kind of de-politicized (“transnational”?), perhaps rather vulgar, idealism or anti-materialism, excluding materiality altogether as it seeks to overcome it as an inhibiting factor for acceptance of the “being” of the uncanny, the paranormal. Indeed, the humanistic “brackets” around the question are themselves a convenient illusion, avoiding an ontological commitment that always lurks nearby. And commitment there was: either to some form of idealism which has “mind” or “consciousness” as the root of all being (and there was the necessary genuflection to the current proponent of such, Bernardo Kastrup—by turns celebrated as “brilliant”, “original” and so on and so forth), the salvific next step to the impasses and foibles of “materialistic science”; or, less metaphysically, to a somewhat inchoate fetishism of paradigm shifts (the likes of which few care to attempt to carefully work out in any detail—and no, Kastrupian idealism, or the current fascination with reality as simulation, won’t cut it).

I suppose I’m a kind of “materialist” after all. In another register, sometimes I say I’m a “mystical atheist” (a term I get from cultural critic and historian of ideas Morris Berman, whose work deeply influenced me as I was myself exiting the straightjackets of academic specialization). Perhaps here it’s more relevant to say that I’m a “spiritual materialist”, but whatever it is that my (still-forming) philosophy is, it is definitely concerned with what we should call the logic of the specific (that’s a term I get from the greatest 20^th century Japanese philosopher Nishida, a complicated figure to be sure). Science arose out of a very specific confrontation with—a decidedly frontal assault on—the reigning paradigm of the day, given by (in the main) a conjunction of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology (itself processed through a richly complicated tapestry of Greco-Roman and Islamic thought). But the change happened not only because of abstract arguments decrying paradigms (though there was that too). It happened partly because of a more subterranean shift in the powers of human productivity that brought new forms into being—a material determination of what begins as a conceptual innovation. This dialectic between the ideational and the material, which entails a process that itself cannot be overcome or transcended, is the essence of those cultural changes that induce at the same time existential dislocations, yielding new spaces and new possibilities. The problem with idealisms of various sorts is that this process is conveniently overlooked, untheorized and superseded prematurely by the vulgarity of ideological romance. The turn of idealisms of these “transcendent” kinds, their romance, is towards that of the future. Yet, the future is unwritten—because neither we nor anything else is a “text” (a poor yet persistent analogy that haunts philosophy and the humanities more broadly). The future must be produced—it isn’t just there.

Gilles Deleuze

I am therefore attracted by a spiritual materialism (that guides my empiricism—a supporting philosophy in need of patient rejuvenation; I sometimes invoke the “transcendental empiricism” of Deleuze) that understands that what is essential about “reality” (I hate this word these days) is that it is profoundly incomplete. Perhaps so incomplete that the past, as well as the future, remains radically open. And yet ‘materialism’ isn’t quite right here, either. Whatever it be, I know that I am decidedly not an idealist: there is no Mind, no all-encompassing Narrative to be told, no grand Artificer, no Cosmic This or That. And “consciousness”, whatever else it be, isn’t “fundamental”. To alleviate my philosophic indecision here, I take refuge in the noncommittal philosophy of Spinoza, often portrayed as a “dual aspect” theorist, positing that there are two “aspects” of fundamental reality (do we need this?): a “mind” aspect, and a “matter” aspect, neither of which is fundamental or primary. Yet, Spinoza actually posits that we abandon this duality altogether, in favor of something much richer, much more subtle, much more (in my view) openly pragmatic and metaphysically deflationary—that there are an infinite number of “aspects” beyond our favorite two (favorite since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution which purchased empirical clarity at the expense of the very real—now materialistically intangible—experience of “mind” … indeed, as it posited “matter” as fundamental, it called into being “mind” as a necessary metaphysical counterpoint, which then haunts the sciences forever thereafter).

But I suppose all these metaphysical “isms” are here to stay, and I certainly can’t exorcise them in a single blog post (perhaps not even in a book, or series of books—or ever). So let’s return to the first two talks, before I conjure into being a very evil editor who will hack my prose, with much justification, into much less than what one’s intellectual self-indulgence would demand…

Prof. Eghigian delivered the first talk of the event: “UFOs and Alien Contact in the Shadow of Deception”. What I really like about Eghigian’s presentations is that he makes his historical study more methodologically self-aware, and about demonstrating a particular historical thesis about his subject matter—rather than a simple chronicle of events, as if there was no interpretive intervention by the historian himself. Which there most definitely is! What makes such an inquiry “objective” isn’t that the historian pretends to delete themselves from the study—the demonstration of an historical thesis by the characteristic presentation of the subject matter chosen by the historian is simultaneously an insertion and participation of that historian in their subject matter—but that they attempt to reveal what principles or theories or methods have guided them, and what thesis there is which they want to demonstrate with the material. The act of revealing the “subjective” dimensions of the historian’s work is a mode of its objectivity—its honest scholarly objectivity. “What happened” is based on fact and date, but its meaning and the historical picture go well beyond that—and this will differ based on the historian’s predilections, preferences, and theoretical assumptions. That’s what makes a good historian produce interesting, meaningful history. It provides a rich sense of what happened as we turn our gaze back through time to recover the meaning of what all of it was about. But, like human memory itself, for every backwards gaze there will be a change, a difference, a reconstruction. And that’s what it means to make sense of what happened, after it happened. The historian’s effort, then, is only slightly different from the philosopher’s. And perhaps it’s we philosophers who’ve been less genuine than the historian about the realities of time, change, and difference and memory (that’s a whole other discussion for another time, as we pass over our unfortunate indebtedness to Plato).

In a sense, Eghigian’s talk was about memory and recollection—what Plato, in connection with the nature of learning, somewhat mystically referred to as ἀνάμνησις: “anamnesis” or “unforgetting” (indeed, he dubs truth “a-lethia”, the negation of Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness). But this isn’t particularly shocking, since all history is in some sense an exercise in memory and recollection. All accounts of UFOs and “alien contact” are supplied only as a matter of recollection, the experiences themselves having receded into the past. For the phenomena of astronomy and astrophysics, even though only confined to observations, they can be actively seen through various instruments, received as if present to us. In experimental physics like experimental (and something called intriguingly “phenomenological”) particle physics, conditions can be created under which the phenomena under study are actively produced (or at least, in an experiment proper, should be produced according to theoretical calculations—the experiment will or won’t reveal them, which is quite the point). As many ufologists have pointed out, we do not deal with UFOs themselves or even alien contact itself when we study these phenomena; rather, we’re dealing primarily with reports of them. And reports are by their nature historical documents. Ufology is already historical, its object the nub of a story whose inner reality, because of its inaccessibility (so far) to accepted channels of observation or experimentation, remains an ontological toss-up: maybe this, maybe that. And the range is empirically unconstrained (again, so far), since there are always three possibilities that remain in play (at least in the minds of the ardently skeptical—the warrant for their skepticism another matter altogether): (1) misperception or instrument error; (2) natural; (3) covert advanced human tech … and of course a fourth: other.

This leads us to a fundamental realization: that the human who has encountered UFOs or the beings (presumably in association with them—though not always of course) constitutes a kind of veil, through which we attempt to perceive the thing itself … THE phenomenon in question. And it’s this “thing itself” we seem to want to understand—the phenomenon or phenomena behind or before the human who then recollects on all this, supplying the historian (and the rest of us) with the stories that constitute what we, somewhat frustratingly and always belatedly, try to study. Except when we have that rare thing—a non-first-person, instrumented observation on record (radar, cameras, and so on), corroborated by human witnesses—we never get to study the thing itself, only its image as encountered personally (in the first-person) or narratively (in the stories told to us by those with the first-person experiences). It’s a fundamental and longstanding problem in the field. And yet, the allure of the thing itself persists, and continues to puzzle. And on it we frequently stumble.

As I understood the talk, Eghigian ultimately wanted to look at how deception plays into the stories that are told about UFOs and alien contact, and curiously he sets up for the audience a conceptual or thematic triad, with the “UFO Phenomenon” at its apex, as if to signify that this is “the real Thing” which cannot yet be named, but which (whatever it is) is the object-cause of the flood of stories that emerged (with exponential increase) starting in 1947, time zero for the “modern” UFO phenomenon. “Deception” and “Our Handling/Dealings Of/With The Phenomenon” were the other two vertices of the triad, buttressing the Thing Itself. Part of the story here is that the object-cause is a function not entirely of a “thing” objectively considered (for I suppose Eghigian, like anyone else who’s honest, must operate under the proviso which admits we don’t really know what we’re dealing with); it’s rather our making something of an encounter with something which can’t readily be identified, engaged with or otherwise stabilized within the lifeworld of the sciences. Unlike with phenomena like gravity, oxidation or DNA, when Eghigian goes to give an historical account of “UFOs”, since we don’t have an accepted sense of what the hell they are (there are some good guesses, but guesses is all), all we have are “our dealings” with a something the nature of which cannot be decided. The history, then, is somewhat necessarily lopsided: all we have is the human dealings which cannot be factored out in favor of something on which we can agree there is even a consistent history (not even with the pretenses of the objectivity of the sciences—of course the human is never factored out of the doings of the sciences; it’s just overlooked, suppressed or ignored, if I may be permitted a slight hint at a tendentious philosophical thesis).

So to some extent we’re already dealing with a kind of deception when dealing historically with UFOs because, well, we’re not really dealing with UFOs are we—we’re always dealing with the stories people have spun from their encounters with them (whatever the ‘them’ turns out to be, beyond a phenomenal appearance, a manifestation of an unidentified or unidentifiable object or, more ambiguously, an unidentified aerial ‘phenomenon’). What, then, are we dealing with? I think this is actually a really pertinent, and important, question, since if we’re not really dealing with UFOs in Eghigian’s historical account (or in any other historian’s for that matter—the problem would seem to be endemic), then what?

Other historians have had this question bother them. Rummaging around the internet, as I sometimes do, for articles on UFOs that I have not read, I found this 2012 piece (now slightly dated) that thought the reality question worth pondering, if only to move on to their particular treatment of it (in this case, the author wants to position the whole UFO fascination thing within a broader “astroculutre” that emerged in the post-war years, alongside and with the Cold War). Let’s quote the author (a Prof. Geppert, who lists himself as affiliated with NYU/NYU Shanghi) at some length, as his analysis is rather pertinent and illustrative (keeping in mind that it was written in 2011-2012, just over a decade ago):

By their very characteristics and the reactions they have incited, UFOs unsettle traditional historical analysis. The subject necessitates a careful self-positioning as to what counts as facts and how they are situated culturally. Although the phenomenon has given rise to a global, socioculturally heterogeneous and still active UFO movement, scholars in the humanities have generally shied away from comprehending the genesis, development and societal impact of such an unconventional subject, one that constantly oscillates between fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion. The topic is as fleeting, glistening and controversial as UFOs themselves. The handful of previous academic studies, mainly authored by sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of religion, is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the USA. As non-historical studies, they tend to lack historical depth, awareness of geography and contextualization. Historians themselves, for whatever reasons, have been even slower to engage with the topic, despite its historical dimension and the fundamental questions posed by its sudden rise, widespread popularity and, since the summer of 1947, unbroken persistence as a contested, cultural phenomenon. The unclear ontological status of UFOs – ‘Are Flying Saucers Real?’ astronomer J. Allen Hynek bluntly asked in the title of one of his publications – may explain some professional restraint and the widespread belief in the subject’s inherent illegitimacy. Political scientists Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall argue that there may be an actively reproduced social taboo on taking UFOs seriously. According to their analysis, inquiring into the nature of UFOs constitutes a threat to the ‘ongoing historical project to constitute sovereignty in anthropocentric terms.’ The mere act of inquiry invokes the taboo. ‘The UFO can be “known” only,’ Wendt and Duvall deduce, ‘by not asking what it is.’ For historians, then, the sole possibility is to do what they typically do in such situations: to cautiously circumnavigate this blind spot or Leerstelle. A direct confrontation would only perpetuate the discursive deadlock between believers and skeptics, proselytizers and debunkers, and amateurs and scientists reached within a few years after the 1947 incident and persisting to date.

The resulting shortage of academic literature – here understood as that without active investment in the object of its investigation – is in stark disproportion to the sheer mass of source material that is available and steeped in controversy. In Western Europe, several specialized UFO journals were established in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a reliable and fully annotated bibliography, covering the four decades after 1947, lists no fewer than 1093 English publications in book format alone. Almost all of them, however, were written in order to intervene in contemporaneous controversies and are therefore often partisan. Believers and debunkers alike frequently based their accounts on the same anecdotal and oft-repeated evidence; pursued overt, often conspiracy-theory driven agendas; and usually chose to attack either each other or address themselves, rather than operate within and relate to larger intellectual debates.

For what reason have UFOs proved academically so perilous? Is it apt to describe them as a ‘sociological untouchable’? What, then, are historians to ‘do’ with the ‘rumours of round objects that flash through the troposphere and stratosphere,’ as C.G. Jung sketched the situation in 1958? The present essay attempts to meet such a challenge, charting a viable path along which to historicize UFOs. As the 1947 founding myth and subsequent US-government investigations to solve the riddle, culminating in Congressional Hearings in April 1966 and July 1968 [remember, this article was penned in 2012], are far better known than most other aspects of UFO history, this article sets itself three alternative objectives. [pp. 336-337]

For completeness, let’s just paraphrase the three “alternative objectives” he’s set for himself with the article:

1. The article “intends to internationalize the history of the UFO phenomenon.”
2. The article “comprehends and analyzes UFOs as an integral part of what” the author “describe[s] by the term ‘astroculture’.”
3. The article, finally, “asks what issues, especially those contrasting with professional technoscience, were at stake in the periodic international controversies on UFOs.”

These aims are not altogether incompatible with those of Eghigian, who wants to look specifically at the role deception had (or has?) in “our handling of the phenomenon”; but, unlike for Eghigian’s analysis, Geppert’s wants to subsume UFOs (or the fascination with them—which is different right?) under a broader sociocultural rubric: “astroculture”. Fine enough.

So, OK, surely we are then dealing with “UFOs”: we’re dealing with unidentified flying (aerial) objects, or more generally even (which is why I prefer this acronym), unidentified aerial phenomena—the “UAP” in today’s parlance (despite what Geppert observed in 2012, ‘UAP’ did manage to stick around). Emphasis here on the “unidentified”. And many people who’ve witnessed them, or who claim to have witnessed them (and there’s a difference), want to tell their story. And in the main what this history is is a history of the stories people spin from out of their experiences of UFOs (or the encounters they allege to have had with them).

Perhaps this is where the theme of ‘deception’ enters Eghigian’s historical study: where and to what extent is deception an element in the stories people tell of UFOs and alien encounters? But what is ‘deception’, exactly, and who’s guilty? Is it intentional? Malicious or unsavory? How has deception (or the various forms of deception that are relevant) played a role “in shaping the UFO phenomenon as it has been understood over time?” That’s the basic question of the whole talk.

In any case, there are the obvious moments of what can only be seen as deception in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Adamski, with his Venusian scouts—the “space brothers” who come to preach the gospel of intergalactic peace and harmony, perhaps an early Flower Child moment—is one figure that comes to mind. But what about the Hills, with their (now famous) UFO sighting and subsequent alleged abduction by the beings onboard? This case would be more complicated, surely—especially if we have to consider the layers of interpretation and reconstructive fabulation involved in hypnotic recollections. For even our most mundane of memories, there is a constructive element as we try to recall the events that have happened to us—memory simply isn’t a faithful representation engine, like a movie camera just recording and preserving what “was there” (not even cameras do this: they always carve something out of the lived, situated experience of who or what was involved in the events of the film—cameras are not objective!). But, unlike with World War I, or the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with UFOs there always lingers this question: “yes, but despite what was said, was there a there there?” And this ontological ambiguity or incompleteness (or just indecisiveness) makes the historical account all the more complex.

So, unlike with the typical events of unproblematic facticity which we’ve just mentioned, the UFO presents the historian with a weird kind of impossibility all on its own: the UFO itself cannot be chronicled, so much as our attempts to convey our encounters with it—we are stuck at our own history-making out of the phenomenon. So, with UFOs, it’s a(n) (hi)story of the stories told. And it’s precisely because of this inherent ontological indecisiveness that an element of almost necessary deception can enter into the (hi)story at a more fundamental level, for since we have no grasp of the UFO as “factive” (if I’m permitted a neologism), nor even do we have access to its own inner reality as part of the structure of nature more generally (as neither “natural” phenomenon nor manufactured object of some intelligent and possibly nonhuman technological design), we cannot really say what is a real as opposed to a deceptive account of the UFO in the stories told of them. We can say that someone like an Adamski is probably fabricating their tales; but how much of it really is a fabrication, and how much is grounded in an actual experience he had? Thus the problem of there being potentially good data from bad (i.e., unreliable) sources. Perhaps Adamski’s fabulations are in fact rooted in some UFO experience? I myself have seen, on a few occasions, aerial phenomena which I could not readily explain. However, except in perhaps one fleeting instance (dots of incredibly maneuvering light my colleague and I saw after a delicious Vietnamese dinner one night in Lancaster, PA), the sightings weren’t so arresting as to be the basis for a dramatic story, or so I felt. I suppose I could have made something out of the sightings; but I thought it wouldn’t be genuine, since I felt they really didn’t merit such retellings. But that’s me. Someone else, with a wholly different psychological profile might have made much more out of these sightings. And so perhaps that’s part of the history of the phenomenon of the UFO. Except when you have multiple witnesses saying they saw something that would seem to be objectively shocking: like a 200-foot hovering triangle. Should the historian, then, try to pare down the stories accordingly—separating the more substantial and robust accounts from all the rest? Should this vetted set provide a measure of authenticity, giving a methodological foundation for their study? I don’t know, but it seems like something to consider, for then we might say that there’s a degree of confabulation within the external, cultural/social fascination with stories of the UFO. We wouldn’t be confusing the real thing with the way that that reality percolates (for whatever reasons) up to the cultural and social level, where in turn the UFO transforms into this cultural thing called “flying saucers”, where it then finally makes it to Hollywood (that great marquis for our cultural consciousness).

Prof. Finley’s subject was a kind of microcosm of what we encountered at a more general level in Eghigian’s opening talk (we’re still only working through day one-half!). Finley was concerned with the very historically and culturally specific—but the specific and local as a means of approaching the universal … or at least as a means of interrogating it, searching it out through the specific. We’re talking about the ufological and alien contact aspects of the American religious phenomenon of the Nation of Islam (commonly referred to as “NOI”). It is a complex religious phenomenon that is perhaps very much about America (the U.S.) as it is about UFOs and alien contact. The Nation of Islam preaches a kind of liberation theology all of its own, one that is deeply problematic in terms of its specific content. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League both list NOI as (to quote its Wikipedia entry) a “black supremacist hate group that promotes racial prejudice towards white people, antisemitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric” with the group repudiated by most mainstream Islamic practitioners as inauthentic. So theorizing the group, understanding its theoretical religious and philosophical significance in connection with UFOs and alien contact phenomena, will be necessarily tricky. As I haven’t engaged Prof. Finley’s new book, which provides a theoretical engagement with the group, my sketch here is going to be inadequate—based only on my initial impressions.

What was particularly remarkable about Finley’s presentation was that on each and every slide, a horrific photo of a lynching was included—intentionally without comment (as Finley would later go on to say in subsequent conversation about it). For the Nation of Islam, the UFO and their alleged contact with the nonhuman intelligences associated with them, represents a moment of freedom from the white-dominated power structures that had enslaved the Black population of the United States, still reverberating even today in the post-Civil-Rights era. Indeed, “post” is an important—and sadly ironic—modifier here, as we can see that what Finley incisively termed “slavery’s afterlife” can still be found throughout the U.S.: various forms of racial discrimination still persist, both structural and immediate (structural if you look at differences in mortality, access to nutritious food, generational wealth; immediate if you look at the persistence of racial profiling in law enforcement, and the hate crimes that are still pervasive). In his talk, Finley avoided the “reality” question (it was essentially bracketed) in favor of a look at the symbolic importance of NOI’s appropriation of the UFO/alien contact narrative—whose tellers and discussants have been mostly white (a perhaps understudied fact in and of itself; very few make mention of this odd imbalance, like Dr. Luis Cayetano of the “Ufology Is Corrupt” blog).

In my impression of Finley’s talk, it seemed that the general thesis was that the UFO and alien contact experiences gets refracted through the historical, cultural and racial particularities of the human, factors which cannot be deleted or bracketed without doing violence to the meaning and significance of those experiences for the experiencers, and that through these particularities the experience emerges into a space of universal conceptual possibilities for what it means to be truly human: emancipated, liberated, free—freedom from oppression, and liberated into a space of the free conduct of one’s own life and culture. The ideals of democracy, however, require that this liberation into a space of unoppressed, free conduct of life and culture not impinge upon the equivalent freedoms that must (through the larger civic space within which this freedom exists and is supported) be afforded to all human beings as such. Given NOI’s documented history of supremacist bigotry, it’s not clear that we can keep all of their particularities (i.e., this particular culture) intact in a democratic space of radical inclusion. Indeed, this raises the much more difficult question of how expansive inclusiveness can be in a democratic society which is founded on the (in principle) neutral, secularized values established during the Enlightenment: universal brother- and sisterhood, liberty and equality (the Holy Trinity of the French Revolution, for example). I personally believe that this is possible (though it is an obviously difficult dialectical process). The rhetoric of hate and supremacy must be deleted everywhere; if so, what remains? And what exactly does this process of rhetorical (and conceptual) deletion entail—evangelization? Proselytizing? What form should this (dialectical) process of the elimination of hate and supremacist bigotry wherever it is—both of which constitute illegitimate specificities and particularities in any cultural or social group—take? Can we disentangle the hate and supremacy from the universal values of liberty, self-determination and freedom from oppression as manifested by NOI, and still preserve the distinctiveness of the movement as a specifically black form of liberation theology? (Surely it is possible.) What do the specific issues of the UFO and alien contact add to this analysis, moreover?

There is, I think, clearly an act of radical appropriation going on in NOI’s UFO/contact narrative, rendering it a specifically black experience, and reshaping it into a story of emancipation. In this way the UFO gets situated, localized. But does this not show that, whatever the underlying reality of the UFO experience is, it is an experience that is universal precisely because it is a kind of blank canvas on which we find our own struggles and trauma drawn and then transformed? The UFO in itself may be symbolically mute, or rather symbolically multiple because of its uncanniness, because it intersects our canny world with strange sides and angles and manifestations which can’t be easily categorized. Like a supernova, it has its own inner details which (unlike for this stellar apparition) remain radically opaque to us even as some have fleeting contact with it (or them). And yet, its symbolic import for us operates independently of that inner nature. Or maybe not, as Vallés’s thesis seems to suggest: perhaps the meanings we want to make of the UFO themselves partly constitute what “it” is; maybe we participate in its reality in ways that we can only dimly perceive. If some UFOs really do represent an intelligence of some sort on a par with or more advanced than human intelligence (though we might want to be critical of this interpretation), then we are locked in a nonlinear dance: as we interact with it, it is thereby modified and responds to us, like any subject would. Of Being, Hegel noted that it is subject before it is substance. The same might be said of beings (our subjective existence precedes our substantial essence, to butcher Sartre a bit).

I think there is a lot more to say here, but as I am not yet conversant with Prof. Finley’s specific analysis, I can only offer this superficial commentary. I let it stand for now.

As I am now just over the 6,000 word mark for this entry for day ½ of the two-and-half day event, I think I should draw these reflections to a close. I will compose a separate entry for the rest of the conference, as I can condense my reflections considerably considering that a good bulk of these days were devoted to something called “flash talks” where speakers got about 20 minutes apiece, with no Q&A until the end of the set (between three and four talks in each set, with two sets per remaining day).

We’re in for quite a ride, it would seem, as the talks ran the gamut from Indian philosophy, and alternative rationalities as found in Chinese thought (I’ll be calling on the lecturer, Prof. Dr. Lackner, in Germany next week so I can get to dive deeper), to the (mis?)adventures at Skinwalker Ranch (conveyed by none other than Colm Kelleher himself, in person). Of particular note will be two talks: Tearful and very powerful personal recollections by noted medievalist Barbara Newman, who had a decades-long friendship with a kind of mystic who was prone to having a number of “impossible” experiences of their own (to which Newman was, sometimes unfortunately, privy). And then another emotionally powerful presentation by Karin Austin on the John E. Mack archives, which were donated to Rice by his Foundation (the John E. Mack Institute, affectionately known as “JEMI”). Karin is herself an experiencer (of what should certainly be called an alien abduction, as the experiences she reported on with Dr. Mack, as now documented in his books, were quite harrowing, even if transformative for her personally—at least in the end); she is now the Executive Director of JEMI, and has worked tirelessly to get the documents scanned and sent to Rice’s crew over at the Woodson Research Center (in the final phase actually driving, with a U-Haul, hundreds of boxes of documents from Boston to Houston, from the ice and cold of Massachusetts to the Texan heat and humidity).

So, I now leave you for the moment while I prep for the next phase of my ufological odyssey, first over to Germany, then (hopefully via rail, strikes permitting of course) to Paris (where I may get to meet Jacques Vallée himself), then to Porto in Portugal … then probably over to England for a bit (possibly meeting with a Korean researcher at Oxford). It’s a full schedule, and all the while I’ll have to keep up with a number of my duties. And try to relax a bit as well.

We shall, as they say, see about that.