ENTAUS

I had occasion to comment, elsewhere on the little “social media” I use, on my initial encounter with the rather erudite and thoughtful writer on matters occult and esoteric, Mitch Horowitz, who maintains a lively Medium blog which I follow. As I study what he’s written on the subject – something that I have variously engaged here in these pages, and which currently occupies my mind in relation to the UFO experience, to which this blog as a whole is devoted – I wanted to record my initial impressions and thoughts about Horowitz’s work. On the science side of the question, I think there’s a lot to say – that is, regarding the facticity of those phenomena around which the Occult and Esoteric traditions (perhaps arguable) orbit. (There’s a thesis here that needs to be defended in more detail, viz., that these traditions of “hidden” knowledge have been motivated or inspired by an awareness of, and focused engagement with, a certain range of phenomena within the purview of human experienc...

S o, it’s been a minute as they say: I’ve finally landed back home after having been abroad for about four months, from Europe to the Middle East, and then back again. I realize that I still owe my readers my concluding review of the SCU’s July online conference, which I will indeed be posting soon, but I thought that, in the interim, I really owe interested readers (and now I think I’ve gained one more, bringing the total to four) something to chew on. So, here is that something…   About a month or so ago I wrote up a response to this piece that appeared in the ostensibly radical rag, Jacobin . I thought the article (to which I am responding, below) rather well written but poorly reasoned—but not for lack of trying. My estimation of it is that it draws on the well-entrenched institutional prejudices that are still, well, rather entrenched. UFOs (and even UAP) are still a “hard sell”, it would seem, to many academics—that there’s a real something to UFOs, quite despite the Grusc...