Rising Sun In The UFO Firmament: Reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium. Part One of Two.

Celebrity and showcase usually don’t mix well with knowledge and the pursuit of truth. When you throw into the mix both money (a lot of it) and power (in this case, of the Silicon Valley sort) you’ve ordered up for yourself a potent brew both seductive and intoxicating.

The following paragraphs are written in the wake of my experiences—my encounter, if you will—at the new Nolan-inspired “Sol Foundation” inaugural symposium. It must surely be the new talk-of-the-town, exploding on Twitter/X and everywhere else on the blogo/vlogosphere, which I personally tend to shun. What I am about to recount is only impressionistic. Why it is so (at least for me) is in itself worth remarking upon. Let’s begin the story, which is surely an excellent set-up for a science fiction plot.

For a few days leading up to the event, which was to take place in Silicon Valley, at none other than Stanford University, over two days in mid November (a Friday and a Saturday, the 17^th and the 18^th), weather forecasters were predicting something of a rainstorm at the California coast, from LA up to San Francisco. Not exactly wanting to drive into the mountains in such conditions, I opted to leave a few days early so as to avoid the travel treachery. Because of an annoying mix-up with a terrible online travel accommodations clearinghouse (Agoda, which should be avoided like the plague—more on plague later), I had to get one night at one motel (yes, nothing fancy—whatever was a bargain), and then begin my stay of 4 more days at another. Ironically I ended up nearer to the venue at my first motel in Palo Alto (which happened to be right across the street from this exquisite hotel/restaurant, “Delilah’s”, or something like that); at the second, which happened to be literally behind NASA Ames Research Center (ground-zero for the U.S.’s mainstream space science program, of course), I was about 20 minutes away (in good traffic) from the spot on the beautiful campus of Stanford University where the Sol Foundation’s kick-off gig was to be held.

Well, it turns out that the weather in Palo Alto/Silicon Valley was exceptionally beautiful, with just brief and more-or-less inconsequential bouts of rain here-and-there. Down in LA was another story, so I probably did the right thing—except that on night #1, being right across the street from such culinary delights (“Delilah” indeed), I succumbed to the Temptations of the Valley: a $200 dinner (at personal expense), preempted with a smoking bourbon drink (which included a cinnamon stick alight, which almost burned my nose the more I imbibed), followed by a NY strip, lobster rice thingy, and a glass of Valley wine. What was I thinking? (I’d intended to do $30 or $40 at an Indian or Mexican place, maybe with a nice house margarita. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what the hell is the Road to Silicon Valley paved with, one wonders?) In any case, I got to chat with two businessmen, talk some about the event with them, and recount my own foray into the world of academic seriousness regarding UAP. (As many of you may know, I’m the founder and current president of the Society for UAP Studies, a kind of professional association for the advancement of serious scholarship on the subject—which makes this review somewhat awkward to write, for obvious reasons, I think.)

For Day One of my trip, I headed over to Motel #2 (the one behind NASA Ames) but not before I got some coffee at “Clocktower”, where I was able to do some work. There amongst the morning coffee crowd was UAP-interested journalist (formerly of Politico) Bryan Bender, awaiting (as it turned out) a visit from someone he wanted to interview (I think it was Tim Gallaudet—the guy whom you might recall from my still-incomplete SCU AAAP conference review gave a particularly bad talk—but I didn’t get a clear view, so I can’t be sure; and, I’m not on a spy mission, so I really didn’t care all that much who it was).

Checking on the location of this coffee house (in the typical American strip mall, oddly dank and architecturally or aesthetically uninteresting as they usually all are), I realized I was smack-dab right in the heart of tech country (no shit, of course—but really smack-dab in the middle here), not only with NASA Ames nearby but all the giants: Google, Microsoft, you name it. The heart of the American soft-power techno-economic Empire, the New Worlders blazing those happy trails into technoscientific oblivion, while the planet writhes and bakes, nations continue to war and colonialize, while America The Beautiful treads along, eyes-wide-open, with its foresworn pledge of allegiance to powerful regional actors hell-bent (now evermore) on genocidal mania.

Later whilst we listened to famed scholar of ufological religion Dr. Diane Pasulka (whose name has apparently changed—I guess a new marriage?), who mused on the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus (rather ambiguous of a musing, as it turns out—more on that later), and its many retellings (and multiple valences), one couldn’t help but get a sense that the UFO phenomenon really was, for the many gathered at this symposium, a soteriological event of world-historical importance, a kind of millenarianism (quite overdetermined) that could bring to humanity humanity’s much-needed self-abnegation: renouncing the stupidities of its money-monkey ways, teaching us of the wonders of free energy, and rapid travel, of morphological transformations of matter and mind, reminding us of an animism which we technoscientific moderns had stupidly forgotten or erased or eradicated as we (and I suppose that means “Westerns”) colonized and crushed the indigenous whose thought-systems we’d do well to recall as the UFO befuddles modernity: our intellectual categories and the sciences and technologies configured with them. Were we ultimately being asked to stop worrying and embrace the religious, perhaps archaic pre-modern or anti-modern, dimensions of the UFO phenomenon?

Back to the story…

I had my coffee (a rather tasty vanilla latte), did my work, packed up and headed over to Motel #2, where I’d remain until I left (a day early—fortuitous I guess, which I’ll explain later). Later that evening I was to have dinner with one of the speakers, which I did, and we talked about various things in anticipation of the event. It was then that I got a sense of the great expense of the whole thing. Speakers (and maybe some others) got their expenses covered, in grand style, as befitting an event sponsored by one of the Valley’s most celebrated academic scientist-entrepreneurs, Garry Nolan. Sponsored, as the flyer tells us, by the “Garry Nolan Laboratory”, speakers were treated to accommodations at the exquisite Japanese-styled Hotel Nobu, which, as its website writes, “blend[s] modern cool luxury and minimal Japanese tradition into the concept of a lifestyle hotel.” It continues, confirming your assumption that it’s a $500-$1000 per night affair:

Nobu Hotels, Restaurants, and Residences interact together to provide Nobu products and services that share the common characteristics of unique Nobu food experiences. Each provides a local experience with a modern design and stunning spaces. Helming from world-renowned Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro, and Meir Teper, the Nobu Hotel concept is a curated experience where every property is different.

Well, I suppose that says it all. Indeed, how apropos of a hotel choice, given the Sol Foundation’s sun-suggestive logo (and one can only imagine that this location was itself intentionally symbolic, given the co-director’s formal sociocultural anthropological academic background): they’re setting themselves up to be the “rising sun” (as in the Japanese national iconography) of the academic UAP research world. And for Sol, it seemed to be (as many of my European colleagues pointed out to me) a world very much that must be centered in the U.S.—as if to say that, while it’s open to the “rest” of the UAP research continuum (i.e., Europe), the sun very much circles around America the Beautiful, where the whole modern UFO craze began (well, “began”—as it’s indeed a world phenomenon with origins well beyond the 1947 Arnold case). (I mean, one can run wild with the symbolic overtones here…)

I don’t mean to dwell too much on form (we should really move to the content), but we can’t overlook the manner in which the Sol Foundation presented itself to its invitees—and this was supposed to be an invite-only affair—as the form was supposed to communicate something to the rest of “the community”. That this isn’t your typical UFO Congress of yesteryear: a half-brained mixture of amateur and academic which reaches for the fringe before it settles on demonstrable fact. But that’s the rub: fact, as in: publicly-accessible information on which one can form an independent assessment, and then render a reasonable judgment. Money and prestige and power and so on can set you up well, as can a solid inaugural event, but then what happens the day after the party? Substance is determined in and with time, who eventually shows you the truth.

One potential problem for the Sol Foundation that was immediately clear to me was its throwing itself whole-hog behind David Grusch (apparently pronounced “Groosh”, but I’ll stick to “Gruh-shh”) and the other whistleblowers and insiders (like Hal Puthoff, one of the many UFO celebrities in attendance, or Eric Davis, who was slated to give a talk but who couldn’t—leading to Kevin Knuth’s), whose testimony seems impervious to independent assessment—necessarily, since it’s mostly classified. They call themselves a “Foundation”, and so it might be worth thinking about foundations for a moment.

Given the reliability of a number of eyewitness accounts and other corroborating data on UAP, it seems fairly clear that we’ve crossed a kind of Rubicon: UAP are “real” phenomena, and many UAP encounters suggest the operation of some kind of intelligence controlling some kind of technology (yes, we might want to problematize the concept ‘technology’—more anon) which easily outperforms any human tech (on a number of metrics, not the least being flight kinematics). The evidence, it must be admitted, largely derives from what the Galileo Project has called the “grey literature”. And let’s get over its fraught nature: that lit is not determinative; it’s indicative. That is: it shows us what we need to look for, and how we might want to look for it. Like the venerable tradition in medicine of taking seriously claims of the existence of this-or-that medical ailment, we put our confidence in the best grey lit cases to indicate where and how to look for evidence (or “proof”) of the anomalies this lit suggests UAP manifest. We set up the relevant research program (the equipment, etc.) and we go about trying to generate the body of data which might establish beyond reasonable doubt that UAP are indeed anomalous (not just “real”) in precisely the ways that have been suggested that they are (we can use the “five observables” as a good list to start with). That’s all fairly reasonable, and increasingly more people in academia and in the mainstream scientific community (which now ostensibly includes NASA) accept as much: accept that these phenomena are “real”, that they deserve careful scientific investigation and research, that UAP research programs ought to be both well-funded and trans-generational (like any good academic research is: passed on from one generation to the next—something Jeff Kripal brilliantly reminded the audience of in his talk, which closed the event on Saturday afternoon). If only just that were to have been established, we should be celebrating. (But wait, there’s more!, as the late night TV ads like to shout to your bobble head drifting off in bed in a cheap motel in Paradise.)

This is, I trust, the foundation of the Sol Foundation: solid epistemological street cred. It’s something the wider scholarly and scientific community can accept, and can be helped to accept as Sol, with its twin aims of professionalization and legitimation, both proudly and boldly announced at the very commencement of the event on Day 1, parks itself within the heart of mainstream American Ivy League Academia, at no less an institution as Stanford University (one with its own interesting history of flirtation with the subject of UFOs—let’s not forget where the great Sturrock was based). But wait, there’s more! Sol goes further than these laudable sociological and methodological aims, placing its full, unconditioned confidence and trust behind a number of individuals (destined of course to become if not already high-profile public personalities) who claim either first or second-hand knowledge of the actual existence of material, high-performance UAP in possession by the U.S. government, agents and agencies of which are, they claim, engaged in clandestine “reverse engineering” black projects (or worse, government non-projects outsourced to private-sector contractors and thus troublingly beyond the pale scrutinizing light of government oversight—hence the whistleblowing).

For a number of reasons, its attachment to such individuals is not only risky and dubious (and though I have critiqued his overall argument, I must accept here Ben Burgis’ thesis on gov’t trust in a recent Jacobin article); such an attachment and backing by an ostensibly serious and academic research and policy Foundation threatens to reproduce the same old fraught logics of credulity, intrigue and conspiracy which has beleaguered modern UFO studies since the Arnold “saucer” days. Add to this the draw from the Valley (high-net-worth individuals, HNWI, who are looking to exploit ideas and maybe alien tech if it exists) and this is a recipe for a descent into past UFO madness. Depending on the nature of this supposed evidence Grusch has spilled to the relevant OIGs, this could all go very, very badly. So far reputations are intact, but the Loeb Sagas (with which the talks formally began, ironically enough) are perhaps a cautionary tale...

We should, then, spend some time unpacking all of what went down at this Sol Foundation kick-off event. And let us take up the story from the very beginning of my personal encounter (having had the undeserved honor of being invited personally by the Sol team).

Day 1 started off oddly. I arrived somewhat early, hoping to catch a cup of coffee and mingle some whilst securing my badge and finding a seat. On arrival, I was greeted by a $36 all-day parking lot (fine I thought, just park me nearest the event). After a short trek from the parking structure, I found the event venue (details all conveniently linked for us in the email program we received days before): an engineering building smack in the middle of campus (quite a beautiful campus I hafta say). We were to be on the 3^rd floor. Seeing people milling around, I thought it wasn’t opened, but, as cattle like to congregate unknowingly, even if such congregation means their death, I followed the herd only to discover that the doors were open and we could mosey on in. Which I did. Getting to the third floor I was greeted by a bit of a crowd who, as it turns out, were queuing up for entry. Queuing—at an academic conference (or rather, “symposium”)? I thought, how annoying. Ignoring what looked to eventually be the throngs, I sought out my badge on the registration/sign-in table, only to find that they weren’t quite ready. “Eight-thirty, sir, we’ll be ready at half past eight”. OK, but I was interested in just getting a coffee, so did they have some. You can guess the reply; so, I, along with a few others, asked after the nearest café on campus to acquire the drugs. That was at the opposite end to the courtyard where the venue was located, so I, along with a few others, made my way over to the place. I got everyone coffee, and we returned—to find, as expected, that the throng had indeed flocculated into a line as more and more waited for entry. I was super annoyed. After being repulsed twice more for wanting to retrieve my badge, I finally found it—only to discover that neither my academic degree nor my institutional affiliations were listed thereon. Did I mention I was annoyed? I’d already cut into the line, thinking that it started at a point that, apparently, it didn’t. Now, I got a badge with just my little ol’ name. But who are all these people, I thought—some have affiliations and degrees listed, others (who I knew to be academics) didn’t. Confused, I just gathered the badge, complained, and said “uh-huh” and went to find a seat. They were quickly filling up. Further annoyance. I wondered if they’d put enough seats for the actual invitees, or what the meaning of my personal (I thought) invitation was, when apparently you could submit a request to be given a spot (at no charge, thankfully) and, if deemed ok or worthy or whatever, granted entry. I mean, were the seats for whomever?

At some point, a guy with what I think was an Australian accent (can’t quite recall now), stepped up with a roving wireless mic and took the role of the MC. He was a particularly dickish guy—exactly the right type you want to be “working the crowd”. We were duly informed that there was an overflow room where you could watch the event, livestreamed, should you fail in your endeavor to score one of the unreserved seats. Watch it livestreamed on cc TV!? Um, but I was invited, I thought, so what if I was unlucky and moral, and I had actually stood with the rest of the n-number of folks at the back of the line (academics and non, all), I’d not have gotten a seat, which would have consigned me to the flames—sending me to the back room with the rabble? Wow, I thought. What the hell is going on? Is this an academic symposium or a circus (not that I’m suggesting there’s a sharp distinction between the two)? Media seemed to be all ‘round me, especially those high-pull, high-follower, high-views, pleasant-on-the-eyes YouTube types (like the Theories of Everything guy and Jesse something or other, who seems to know everyone, hobnobs with the rich and famous, and gets Grusch to spill all the non-classified beans he’s always spilled everywhere else for everyone and anyone else—I think I shook hands with Jesse the night before at the swanky reception at the Nobu, whose details I leave tantalizingly absent; but I can’t recall clearly. I suppose I’m not phased much by these people. God I love to hate on media.).

In any case, back to the Dick and Mic show: after letting us know, smilingly and smarmily, that we had a cozy padded room awaiting us if we were without seats in the banquet hall, where the VIPs will be holding court, we were seated and the event began. Mr. Mic then proceeds to let us know our Miranda Rights, and what rights we’d yielded upon entry to the event. Was this, finally, our Faustian bargain? I began to shudder, with fear and trembling as the sun began to rise: no filming or recording of any kind (LOL for all the media, I thought—so why the hell invite them if you clip their little mediatic wings?). And especially no clicking pics of the slides anyone presents—there goes my note-taking and good record for my blogger’s audience of 3, I thought. Great, so I have to take actual notes? Is even that allowed? (I mean, technically it’s a kind of recording, and if I sketch well enough using my own eyes, it’s kind of like a camera recording, right? Oh, but they let sketch artists into closed courtrooms, so surely this is allowed as there’s plenty of precedent in our democracy to protect me if we litigate.) And absolutely 100% don’t post anything to Twitter about anything going on here (not until it’s over)!! That was Garry’s particular pet peeve, as one can easily detect by his frequently vitriolic responses to most of those who attempt snarky pot-shots at the man and his ufological tweets (or X-rays, as we might have to denominate them now; but X-rays are weaker than gamma rays, so go figure on the next social media name rivalry).

But those required and commanded abnegations were nothing compared to what would follow, once the suavely academic Dr. Peter Skafish took the center stage as co-host and co-director of the rising Sol in the new firmament of UAP legitimacy: there will be no classified information shared during this symposium, and no one should share any classified information with anyone at this event. What a wholly bizarre and overly-dramatic announcement to make before you get into the Sol thing itself, I thought. Why the hell and on this good Earth would one think that they’d have to actually say something like that? I mean, if you had actual factual classified information then if you were a responsible agent of the government (or whatever organization gave it to you), you’d both be fully aware that you shouldn’t do such a thing, and that if you did, bad things might happen. I looked to the left and to the right and everyone with whom I locked eyes had the same expression: WTF was that all about?! As that oddity lingered in the air like an uncomfortable fart, things finally got underway.

It was about legitimation, about serious research, about writing policy recommendations—doing the work that needs to get done for UAP to not only be taken seriously, but for there to be real headway in the understanding department. But then there was the Grusch thing: that he’d risked all to go public as a whistleblower, and that there were to be and in fact are others so bold, brave and intrepid; those who (will and do) stand with David. And David was on their Board (I think). I already knew this alignment going in; but now it’s whole-hog and official. You can’t uncross the Rubicon. Julius, from this point, will be Caesar. The Republic is over. And so welcome to the desert of the Real…

Or of the myth, the mystery and some kind of a reality of the UAP which has yet to actually be settled on the basis of un-classified, publicly available evidence and information, and on which an independent assessment can be founded. None of which can be said for the Grusch stuff. But here it is, and here we are: at a Symposium to inaugurate an ostensibly well-funded Foundation, backed by the wealth and power of Silicon Valley types and their friends (but let’s not dis or dismiss the importance of patronship, which supported lots of things we value which find little state or private backing: the arts, and even science in its very inception during the Renaissance … the risky, frilly stuff that, at the time, seems like um, whatever, pass me my bedpan, and what’s for lunch tomorrow?).

Let’s quickly run through the lineup of talks and panels so we don’t loose our focus on, well, the evental nature of the event (to borrow a horrifying term from academic philosophy).

Working from my arguably contraband notes, on Day One—

We found the inimitable Prof. Avi Loeb once again reviewing for the n-th audience his dealings with UAP, technosignatures and ostensibly interstellar exploding bolides (which apparently are supposed to somehow be made of really anomalously tough iron that still needs to explode a little bit), depositing their possibly alien-manufactured remnants into the ocean, for later magnetic dredging. The trouble with the whole presentation, as I saw it, was that he was heavy on the complaining and poo-pooing of his (many) critics (while simultaneously trying to put himself on a par with a Galileo—to which I lol’ed … but hell, who knows?), while very light on the analysis of the best arguments his critics have offered against his claims. As in, not a single critical argument of his rather stretched hypotheses and theories was presented for the audience to make their own assessment of the cogency of his claims. But maybe we’re not intelligent or educated enough, so we’ve been spared. Uh-hmm. The talk was entitled “The New Frontier of Interstellar Objects”. On to the next one…

Loeb was (fortunately) followed by a scientist of a rather different stripe: the careful, cheerful, rigorous, and original observational astrophysicist Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, whose “VASCO” project uncovered rather intriguing UAP on very old astronomical plates dating back to before there was any anthropogenic flotsam in orbit. Instead of looking deep into interstellar space, or under the oceans for dredgeable ejecta, Dr. Villarroel takes a middle ground, hunting for anomalously vanishing-and-appearing reflective sources that might be ET probes of some kind. Why not? Whilst SETI looks afar (stuck on EM signatures), and ufology looks anear (fixated, with justification, on impossibly-moving radar targets and other suggestive manifestations on Earth), Beatriz just looks around the neighborhood, not too far and not too close. In ancient terms, she’s scouring the reaches between the outermost heavenly spheres and the lunar and sublunar domains. And doing so by using the reflectivity of a potential ET structure (a “probe”—one can only guess). The talk was entitled “Multiple Transients and the Search for ET Probes”.

On the schedule, which at this point I don’t recall whether we stuck exactly to it, we were slated to have a coffee break. Which I took, and quickly got myself seated for a talk, besides the previous one, I was looking forward to hearing. Rather excitedly by Garry Nolan, Dr. Kevin Knuth was introduced as someone working on the physical science of UAP—the physics of “UFOs” (which is Kevin’s favorite term). Before turning the mic to Kevin, Nolan lamented that a few brilliant turns-of-phrase by Kevin weren’t his own. Hmm, I thought, a curious way to introduce someone you seem to admire (a curiously inverted and ambiguous phatic signal of admiration, I must say; but that’s an academic—a rather impressively successful one—for you. I do the same shit.). What was profoundly interesting about Dr. Knuth’s talk (a former NASA research scientist who worked for some years at NASA Ames, where my motel, synchronistically enough, was located) was that the clarity with which he presented the physical observations and measured (well, estimated) characteristics of UAP suddenly made it made sense: that there was, indeed, a certain, only now barely discernible but definite structure to the empirical data—the observations—which suggests that, with further more precise measurements and observations, a kind of theory could be offered. The kind of theory that, while stuck at the phenomenological level, is no less fundamental in its significance. After all, that’s how all physics begins: with phenomenological descriptions of the law-like regularities of a certain class of observations and measurements. Indeed, what I saw in a flash was the makings of the basis for writing down basic empirical relationships—empirical equations relating various observables—which would in turn be the basis for the discovery of the more fundamental laws of phenomena, laws that systematically link the seemingly disconnected observations together. We have kinematic data. We have luminosity estimates (thanks to Vallee, who was, of course, present in the audience and whom Nolan considers a close personal friend—well, there’s that venture capitalist, Silicon Valley thing after all). We have power estimates (Knuth’s seminal 2019 paper shows that something like 1 terawatt of power is on demand for the famous “tic-tac” objects to do their thing—but where does the energy go?, he asked, if not in a radically explosive irruption upon stopping just above the ocean). We have a thermodynamic signature (usually very cold rather than very hot, as one might expect from conventional propulsion). We have indifference to trans-medium movement. We have no sonic atmospheric shock. We have what look like Faraday rings around UAP observed with diffraction grating. And so on and so forth in the “grey” literature (which, to remind us, as Watters et al. did in their seminal 2023 paper, is not determinative or definitive but only suggestive and indicative).

In other words, we have a cluster of phenomenological characteristics that suggest we look for a systematic relationship at a more fundamental level of analysis. Indeed, it’s likely due to the particular means of propulsion or movement in spacetime employed by some object-like UAP. But with neither craft/object nor precise measurements and observations, we’re confined to guessing. But at least we can start there. And that’s precisely what one rather perceptive comment (by a Stanford professor of energy science) suggested. Take the “tic-tac” calculations (rather elementary, as Knuth admitted—so elementary that his critics, like Adam Frank, failed to undertake them): we’re looking at about a terawatt of energy that has to go somewhere. Since it didn’t rupture or otherwise annihilate the object itself, this suggests that there is an unknown variable—an unaccounted for parameter let’s call “x”—which we must introduce into our basic kinematical equations which somehow modifies the basic Newtonian schema. By adjusting this parameter, one can bleed away (turn off? negate? redirect? convert?) vast amounts of kinetic energy that would otherwise pulverize objects moving with such extreme kinematical properties. Perhaps this x-factor is related to the Higgs field, this ubiquitous thing that’s supposed to be where all mass comes from. If so, it’s looking like whatever these objects are doing, they are engineered with a knowledge of the physics of the relationships between kinematic (i.e., spacetime) and atomic or subatomic goings-on about which we have very little understanding. Indeed, this seems to be coming from exactly where we are most uncertain about the physics of the material world: the quantum gravity regime, where gravity, spacetime and matter are all supposed to be grandly related in a unifying theory of some sort. We don’t have that theory, and very little inkling about what it would even be (since there are interpretive hurdles, like for quantum theory itself, that seem to interfere with coming to good conclusions about even the very form of the theory here—let alone its specific content). In any case, all’s it will take is something like what Dr. Knuth is doing, and hopefully what other scientists like this Stanford professor in energy science can help Kevin do, so that we can begin to proffer realistic possibilities that could help steer future researchers. A little observation, a little experimentation, and a little theory. Rinse and repeat and that’s the physics. Trial and lots of error. There’s no other way—even if we did have actual crashed UAP materials. There’s no getting around the science, which is always (even on a good day) fraught and underdetermined and ambiguous and tenuous and searching and uncertain and all that good stuff they don’t give you the details of in the many hagiographies of science on the market. (Just take a real history and philosophy of science course to find out the nitty-gritty of what real science is like.) The talk was entitled “The Physics of UAP, with Some Clues about Their Detection, Monitoring, and Engineering”. Oh, and we were treated to a brief announcement of his colleague’s patent pending on a clever new hand-held nuclear power plant, using lithium as fuel. If there’s anything to the studies (by SCU recently, for example) demonstrating a link between nuclear facilities and UAP sightings, then here’s a way to test that—which would have the added advantage of being a kind of fly trap (or fly attractor) for UFOs: the device would be a source of neutrinos, which is probably what piques the UAP’s interest. So, while providing some power for the other observational instruments, you’d have a UAP attractor as well! Interesting suggestion…

Following this we had our “morning speakers panel” which is essentially a chance for the audience to ask their questions. (That’s when we got the really brilliant question from this Standford professor—and it’s for exactly these moments that’s worth the cost of entry, in my opinion.) Then lunch: moderately good sandwiches and chips, with some cookies and the usual dessert spread that acts to spread the waist. (Thanksgiving being around the corner, I got two rather than one cookie. What the hell, right? If you don’t live once, you at least ditch the mortal coil for a new one—hats off to Kripal’s final lecture which we’ll get to below.)

Before we got to the part of the conference that was supposed to be where I ought to pipe up intelligently (and I did, sort of—I remained mostly silent until then, when I opened my mouth and removed all doubt), the “Humanities at the Limit: Nonhuman Intelligence” lineup, we got the centerpiece talks for the day: the one—“The UFO Phenomenon: A Genuine Scientific Problem”—by the grand doyen of ufology, the honorable Dr. J. Vallee (it’s “Vallée” goddammit—the program got it right, finally!); the other—“The Material Science of UAP”—by distinguished Standford Prof. Dr. of Immunology (and soon-to-be prof of ufology, if not already effectively so) Garry Nolan (and goddammit there’s two r’s already). But Garry went first, with Jacques, introduced rather tearingly emotionally by Nolan (himself outed not too long ago as an “experiencer”), following him. (Given the apparent health troubles Vallée is going through, having variously had to cancel a number of in-person gigs, the choked-back tears from Garry were understandable.)

Nolan’s talk was really admirable, if a bit ambiguous or lacking in some basics. The purport of the talk was simple: to simply demonstrate what exactly a materials science of UAP ought to look like, and to provide his own foray into this realm as a case-in-point. A couple of years ago he published the results of his own testing of some alleged UAP samples. (Oh and we found out that there’s a physical sample from the legendary Socorro/Zamora incident! At least, if there was a physical sample allegedly left behind by the craft, which I think might have been the suggestion in the talk, I had no idea. And I didn’t know ufologists knew this, either, if they did.). And while curious, none showed, as he himself pointed out, definite nonhuman or even non-terrestrial origins of any kind (at least in terms of isotopic ratios). What was intriguing, however, was the structure of some of the materials he looked at: both the inhomogeneity and the layering of the materials was interesting. And at the purity levels of some of it, quite bizarre for the time in which it recovered (again, from alleged UAP): purity is expensive, and so why would such pure materials be dumped where they were found, and for no obvious reason? Just for fun? For a hoax? Seems unlikely. But then there’s the atomic-level analysis of the actual positioning of the atoms. Nobody could really examine the stuff at this level of detail, because the instrumentation wasn’t really around. Until now: Nolan has pioneered once again techniques of materials analysis that provide unprecedented levels of fine-grained probing of how stuff is structured. And, following the axiom in the bio sciences that says you can read function (i.e., purpose) from (physical) form (i.e., structure), if we can now see the structure, we now have a way to work to an understanding of the function, the purpose, of the materials we’ve retrieved. (But we should note that function should not necessarily be read in terms of purpose.)

What wasn’t so clear, however, was what the hell we were looking at when Garry put up his cleverly-made slides disclosing the specific atomic structure of some alleged UAP materials (which his handsome grad student assistant actually did the night before, we were told). Garry seems to want to argue that there’s something interesting about the layering or the positioning of the materials at the atomic level; but, as this observational technique is new and innovative, we don’t have much in the way of a reference class (an observational control, as it were) against which we can compare the present observations in order to gauge just how interesting (or odd or unusual) the materials are at this atomic scale. But the work is brilliant, important, and indeed fundamental. Conceptually, we might wonder just how well we can deduce (and how justified we’d be in that deduction of) function from form, since with biological structures on the Earth we have an evolutionary context within which to make the function-form relationships meaningful (indeed, this would be a required presupposition of any such deduction). With something that is decidedly not biological but is (as Garry himself asserted) apparently manufactured (which is to say technological) we have the added complication that the structure is an artefact presumably embedded in a symbolic system about which we haven’t a clue as to its nature or origins, to say nothing of comprehending those symbolical relationships which contribute to the meaning of the structures and how and why it was put together. The thought perhaps is that there will be some physically basic (nonbiological) purpose (or function) deducible from the form. Perhaps; but if you stop and think about how Newton might try to reason with an Apple iPhone that happens to bounce onto his head, you might have second thoughts: Newton might, after some labor (and perhaps out of desperation in consultation with his alchemical compadres in the dark of the night) figure that the purpose of the iPhone is to light the way in the darkness; but he’d probably never reach the conclusion that it’s ultimate purpose is telecommunications. Until, that is, his own technoscientific context reached a point of similarity such that the “alien” object could be inscribed within his own field of understanding. And yet, he’d never really be sure, since the coincidence of this object with his own symbolic field would forever be, well, coincidental, which is to say: a contingent matter, always ambiguous. In any case, these more philosophical-conceptual matters aside, the talk was a real high point for the day. He is indeed a luminary in his field, and is admirably attempting to translate that to physical UAP studies. We need much more of this kind of hard, careful and intelligent—and sincere—work (don’t forget Garry will tell you when something isn’t working out in the evidence to be that alien stuff you wanted it to be).

Well, after a kind of review of his decades-long work, which went over the various levels of UFO strangeness, and their characteristic sociology of reporting (there’s a drop off as they get more weird, with most cases falling in the middle of the strangeness scale—yes, that word has to be, and was, defined), Vallée, as he’s wont to do, reminds us that our smart tech and algorithms won’t save us from the hard work of manually examining cases that pass some reasonable criteria of UFO authenticity—drilling down to the recalcitrant residuum, you gotta have the humans come in and look more closely. It’s not a particularly original point, since he made it himself time and again in the past, but it’s worth being reminded of given all the hype over A.I. and friends. Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on anyone in the crowd, coming from the Valley: he himself was an early A.I. creator and user, so it’s been with us for quite some time—just get over it and do the hard work of human cogitation. Don’t be lazy, I guess. Fair enough.

Now the pre-lunch panel (Nolan and Vallée), questions, then lunch. I was hungry.

Following this we were treated to another ufological luminary (though I’m hesitant to put her in this category): Dr. Diane Pasulka. It was time for the religion thing, and time for her new book, hot off the presses: Encounters. It’s a mélange of them, with “nonhuman others” (I think) being the unifying contact presence. Aliens are in there, ostensibly. The theme, which I thought was clever enough, was Prometheus, the ancient (Greek) tale of how fire was stolen from the gods and the price paid for that theft. She wants to rewrite that myth—or point out how current circumstances are conspiring to rewrite it for us (which it would be our scholarly duty to record and report, it would seem). But I couldn’t quite figure the thesis itself towards which the talk was aimed, using this myth as the theme. Perhaps there were a couple of ways of going, and that she was exploring them. The multiple valences and corresponding interpretations that go along with them. After all, she did point out that there were multiple retellings. And so this is perhaps what we need to keep in mind. In any case, the more general story she wanted to tell was on the convergence between “four research traditions”. As I took somewhat scattered notes; am a shitty note taker when I’m stuck at the beginning of a talk, trying to get the first slides and primary thesis; and was prevented by decree (on pain of administrative banning from all future Sol events—Nolan announced a ban on some unfortunate X-Twit who couldn’t keep their fingers from their phone and eeked out a photo—but then this seemed to be a misunderstanding, since this person came late to the party, after Dr. Dick had requested rights be given up) from taking any photos of the slides; … well, I don’t recall all the research traditions. They seemed to me to be somewhat arbitrary or messy. I can’t recall at all the first one. The second had to do with public institutional scholarship of UAP. Then there was the academic research traditions, where she wanted to put both Mack and Steven Dick. But I thought: what the hell do either of them have to do with UAP? I mean, Mack cared about contactees and abductees, not all of whom are talking about UAP associated with their experiences. Dick doesn’t really dwell much on classical UAP/UFOs, so much as he’s concerned with chronicling our interest in ET life. Again, what’s that have to do with UFOs—aside from the ET hypothesis about what they are and where they come from? In any case, I suppose it’s all good, and that I’m just being cranky—setting me up for a very unfortunate encounter with Person #2 of the whole event (which I’ll get to momentarily). Finally, she talked about an “emergent” tradition. What that was she couldn’t quite say, since, well, it’s emergent and we have to wait and see. Maybe it’ll be some combo deal where the others get put together in a Frankenstein’s monster of a tradition. We’ll wait and see.

Oh—and now I remember: I think the first tradition was the invisible one. I guess it’s all making sense. So, in each case, what’s going on is something (I guess) Promethean. Or maybe not. If what each tradition concerned itself with was contact or relating or some connection with ET, and if (it’s a decent ‘if’) they’re more “advanced” then it’s like the stealing fire from the gods thing. And it’s also like the Plato’s Cave thing, which she’s all about of late (having listened to about half an episode of the Engaging The Phenomenon podcast where she chatted with a host whose enthusiasm for his subject somehow makes the show less interesting—at least for me). You got Socrates escaping the chains, having been confined to shadows, climbing out of the darkness of the cave to see the Light outside (it’s the sun—our Sol), only to go back and try to tell the others, the permanent spelunkers—who want only to either imprison or kill him (they did both, of course). Contactees (or their scholarly analysts?) are like Socrates: they (at least for them) want to tell of a transformative truth, but nobody wants to hear it, and even less accept it (except for Socrates there’s this whole reason, the “giving of accounts” thing that kinda makes it a downer for the traditional religious—but that’s another story that really wasn’t ever touched upon: the epistemology of belief and rationality of Socratic-Platonic argumentation, the logos v. mythos dichotomy that Socrates and Plato each inaugurated with their then innovative dialectical philosophy—and we note that dialectics of a much later philosophic epoch would come back to bite me during my unfortunate encounter with Skafish—and that’s coming up).

In any case, I can see the point: in many cases the contactees or abductees seem to come back with this knowledge, a “gnostic” knowledge that’s like a cookie eaten rather than merely conceived (I think that was Pasulka’s analogy, which she uses with her students when trying to teach them about “Gnosticism” and “gnosis”—hopefully they get food for their reward). And they want to tell it, but they’re considered crazy or mistaken or whatever. So this creates the set up for a kind of gnostic experience, for a kind of religion around “the phenomenon”. The “others” are like the gods, then, that were poeticized in the ancient myths. Except that maybe these sky-bound “gods” are, just maybe, somehow ontologically, or effectively, the same as the supposed nonhuman “others” piloting or managing or controlling “UAP” (at least those that seem vehicular—a kind of interpretation, the technoscientific one that’s the predominate interpretive assumption going in much ufology, scholars like Knuth included, that will be curiously problematized by the anthropological-cum-philosophic talk that was upcoming from Sol Person No. 2). That’s why a scholar of religions can work on UAP. There’s a distinct family resemblance going on here. The talk was entitled “Rewriting the Myth of Prometheus” (though in the event booklet we received it was supposed to be a typical colonated title, with an entirely differently theme: “Transcending Timeliness: Uniting Science, the Humanities and Intelligence in UAP Scholarship”), delivered by a scholar who seemed to me, when I was introduced, a bit stunned, as if caught in wonderment or bewilderment over just how they got into this whole mess in the first place. Probably the mess found them, as it did me…

And I would end up in a bit of a mess when I made the utterly foolish mistake (hey, some mistakes aren’t) of stepping up to the mic and directing my personal first (and decidedly last public) question (characteristically somewhat cranky, admittedly) to the man, the mystery, the new (and quite accomplished) mainstream humanities scholar-on-the-UAP-block, Dr. Peter Skafish, whom Nolan has designated his Person No. 2 at Sol. Skafish is someone with whom I’d had some pre-symposium professional/personal interaction (always amicable) over the past couple of months, so his reaction (which I thought rather crass—only the kid from the blue collar family, namely me, is allowed to be that crass) took me utterly by surprise (some of the audience, as I later learned, were equally aghast).

But first the talk.

It was a fairly typical talk in the style of your run-of-the-mill academician in the humanities: a typed-out affair (I, too, value the security of the prepared text—though I always end up extemporizing as I do the tell-them-what-you’re-gonna-tell-them thing that philosophers especially love to do, and perhaps this out of unconscious belief in Plato’s thesis of the soullessness of written text, found in his famous Seventh Letter). In a section of Day One of the Symposium entitled “The Humanities at the Limit: Nonhuman Intelligence”, wherein we found Pasulka and Skafish working two corners of the same street, we were poised, I thought, for some preliminary epistemological exercises in examining just what those limits were, how they themselves emerged, and perhaps what it would mean to traverse or overcome (etc.) them. Perhaps this precisely was the intention (partially, maybe) of Skafish’s talk, but as his discourse is embedded in this interesting confluence of philosophy (or “theory” as they like to say, eschewing the classical descriptors) and “sociocultural anthropology” (the latter of which I only have a dim sense of what it involves, aside from the anthropology bit—and even then I’m afraid to ask, as it seems to be a descendant of the theoretical post-mortem of “postmodernity” and all that kaleidoscopic expressionistic inquiry), the best I could tell was that the thought behind the thesis was very much about radical engagement with what for so-called “modernity” (something I’ll get to in a moment) is its uncomfortable other: “indigenous” thought—or what in days past was designated “primitive” (the new term perhaps not fully discarding the condescension of the earlier). (Here I’m reminded of famed Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s provocative gestures against the “radical” leftist intellectuals who want to use the “appropriate” PC terms when talking about those who, even in their radical (and celebratory) discourse, remain distantly other even for them the woke. No, the Slovenian philosopher Zizek says (and I paraphrase his comedy): my Native American friends tell me that they prefer the old, stupid term “Indians”, since it lets everyone see that the Europeans fucked it all up and confused us for another people altogether! I’m not sure how many conference goers realized this, but the No. 1 Man of the whole event at one point actually said “Indians” (!), when referring to who Skafish more properly called “indigenous people”. It was an interesting, deeply ironic, juxtaposition—especially given the theme of Skafish’s own talk.)

What Skafish wanted to do was to problematize the predominate technological (or technoscientific) gloss on all things UAP: as if they simply had to be technological machines, or inert plasmas, … the usual suspects in the ontological firmament of “modernity”. Indeed, it is “modernity” itself that’s challenged by phenomena so elusive and liminal as UAP. But that’s only an optical illusion (as it were)—an effect of inadequate figuration by conceptually limited categories (so yes, even the real UAP are illusory in a certain technical sense!). Failure to perceive the immanent limits of the dichotomous categories of modernity (living v. machinic; technological v. natural; animate v. inanimate; intelligent, animated life v. unthinking, inert matter) we are doomed to force the UAP into Procrustes’ Bed, missing its truly radical valences, a moment of radical critique for the cage (perhaps the clichés) of modernity itself. While it is often lamented that our categories tend to anthropomorphize, especially when the phenomena are quite beyond the categorial pale, as the genuine UAP are, (we reach for anthropomorphism where we don’t understand, projecting rather than simply resting in unknowing—although there is that strange mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, which might be read as a kind of paean to just that sort of intolerable epistemic suspension), Skafish admits: well, that’s just tough teats, for what options do we have for escaping ourselves, for overcoming the anthropos of our intellectual categorial matrix? Here it seemed as if Skafish was just doubling down on the human-centric here, ironically, as we query this horizon of nonhuman intelligence (“NHI” in current parlance).

And that’s what caught me totally off guard: usually humanists want to complain of anthropomorphisms. But Skafish seems to say, just live with it—but there are better and worse forms. Or at least, advantages and disadvantages, respective merits and demerits, of different anthropomorphisms. Perhaps modernity’s are exhausted and by now quite overdetermined (by a few generations of science fiction, and other art reproducing the cliché of the technological, the inert-inanimate machinic world of manufacture, steel, and industry). But there are other anthropomorphic interpretative fields—like those of indigenous peoples, whose “animism” (his terms) is of a world filled with living souls and entities at every turn (a veritable plenum of spirit)—to which we might do well to turn, as we struggle to understand what UAP are (I’d say: to grasp their haecceity—their not-so-primitive thisness, to borrow and slightly corrupt the technical term from medieval Western philosophy). And saying what they are puts us squarely into the theoretical territory of “ontology”: the theory of being—in this case, of the being of the UAP. Or was that what we were talking about? Here again the slide between UAP and some kind of intelligence behind them was dancing about, distracting me as I tried to get the point, which I suppose is that if we reach for the “animism” of indigenous peoples (admittedly but inescapably anthropomorphic), we need not think in such dichotomous terms as the machine vs. the intelligence controlling it. Maybe whenever UAP display seemingly intelligent behavior (like when the “tic-tacs” dashed off to Cmdr. Fravor’s classified rendezvous point during the Nimitz encounters), the ontological dichotomy between UAP and the controlling intelligence (a staple distinction in modernity), would collapse.

Well, as sympathetic to this problematization of “modernity” here as I am (a thesis which of course isn’t original in ufology: most recently my brilliant interlocutor Bryan Sentes has made essentially the same point quite eloquently in a number of his blog posts at Skunkworks, going back to at least 2019), I found a number of things problematic about it, not the least of which was the lack of the attempt to actually demonstrate the thesis in and for specific cases. Perhaps this is a penchant for the abstractions of “theory” which has overtaken these forms of humanities, but it was clear that theory came before the details of any one UAP case—so I was struggling to work through the question as to whether this “theory” works to aid one in puzzling one out of the interpretive quagmires that, presumably, persist for those who haven’ yet reached the proper level of self-critique of one’s embeddedness in “modernity”. That’s the one difficulty I saw. The other was with the very dichotomy between “modernity” and the “indigenous” presupposed by Skafish’s entire talk. As I pointed out in my unfortunate public question (posed amidst a room full of former and perhaps current spooks, YouTubers and podcasters and journalists, and some academics), internal to modernity itself one can easily find such kinds of attempt at categorial nuance. Along with “modernity” (which I can’t recall whether it was very clearly defined, because we were banned from recording anything audially or visually—and we have no text from which to work, so I’m working with my swiss-cheese ADHD-ridden memory), there were always counter traditions—ways of thinking and being that ran counter to but still within modernity. (For all its problems, which I reviewed in the blog post before this one, just read Mitch Horowitz on Occultism.) “Alternative” (especially animistic) traditions abound. The nineteenth century is particularly riddled with them, both here and in Europe. In other words, one need not immediately reach for something called “indigenous” thought before one looks internal to modernity itself for a repudiation of what was in any case a somewhat late development: the so-called “disenchantment” of the world Weber tried to theorize in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (in sociology, but it was widely influential intellectually in Europe more generally). We might define “modernity” as what resulted from the confrontation between the “New Scientists” and the ancient Aristotelian-cum-Christian ontology of the Middle Ages, and between that and the persistence of a kind of “animistic” and “magical” view of things practiced by, say, the Renaissance alchemists (who generally accepted a Hermetic worldview) during the same period. In other words, the conflict (such as it is) is not between modernity and indigenous animism, but between modernity and mechanism—internal to the discourse of modernity itself. Animism never died in the West; it just went rogue, underground, and indeed was more-or-less repressed. That’s how I would nuance the analysis, and eschew this hagiographical embrace of indigenous peoples. The question there should have been: not what can they teach us about UAP; but rather, how is it that they themselves receive these phenomena and make sense of them.

I personally don’t think we can “learn” much there, for I claim there’s no going back to animism or any “premodern” standpoint. Rather, the point seems to be to overcome modernity, to overcome the animism v. mechanism dichotomy by showing the insufficiency of either one. Indeed, I’d turn the point round backwards: mechanism taught the ultimate form of spiritual and ontological alienation, and so therefore was already the secret logic of immanent upheaval, the preparation for inhabiting an alien world where we don’t have the old comforts of the gods or the spirits—the human all-too-human comforts of being at home in a world of animistic vitality, or mechanical efficiency and clarity. In other words, the problem is that perhaps we haven’t learned the true depths of the alienation which technoscience, in its increasingly remote explorations into unfathomable depths of nature, still yet proposes as we attach ourselves to our machines and off-load our spiritual life to them. No, we needn’t abandon modernity or seek alternatives; there are no such alternatives realistically speaking. The only way around is through the unfinished score of modernity itself. Science, I claim, was precisely this process of radical alienation, mechanism (the mechanical philosophy unsophisticatedly modeled on the cliché of the clock) only its first naïve articulation. Science decenters the human—the Copernican Revolution only one moment in a series of such “humiliations” (as Freud was to put it centuries later). I fail, therefore, to see why it is not possible to escape the anthropomorphic—unless maths be nothing but. If there is something nature is teaching us (and Garry Nolan cautioned us, rightly, to listen to nature), it’s in the utter silence of the UAP—not in the whispers of supposed nonhuman intelligence, but in the mute uncanniness of the experience. The greatest essays on the destabilizing inhumanity of these phenomena (which reconfigure the human so that we become alien to ourselves, in the end—the theme taken up in that brilliant text Kant in the Land of the Extraterrestrials), are cinematic: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessey; Tarkovsky’s Solaris; and Peele’s Nope. These texts (and they are readable) show an alterity in its refusal to be appropriated, to conform. And in that refusal we’re changed. The thesis that we are stuck with different anthropomorphisms seems, then, to be a trap, a theoretical seduction that sees variety and celebrates plurality and diversity, but which is in fact swallowed up by the monolithic cliché of a preordained ecosystem of human cultures, just as they are. Science—not entirely an invention of “modern Europeans”—perturbs this comfortable narrative. In its apparent repudiation of animism, it rendered human beings both free and de-spirited (dispirited, yes), cut loose from the world and free to remake it (an irony perhaps best theorized by Hegel—against whom, it seems, Skafish has real professional animosity, as he made obvious in his rebuttal to my public question). In doing so, human beings both alienated themselves and are alienated. It’s a double gesture. And yet, what have we done with UAP but to attempt to reinscribe them into the cliches of both modernity or animism, the categories of science or religion or indigenous peoples or whatever. Both are stupid—and this Jeff Kripal very beautifully pointed out.

In any case, when I stepped up to the mic following the Skafish talk, to comment (that (i) it seems like spinning wheels to move from one anthropomorphism to another—though I mistakenly said “anthropocentrism”, which Skafish was quick to make a point of, suggesting that I didn’t know the difference, LOL—and that (ii) one needn’t reach for the logics of “indigenous peoples” before one appreciates the rearticulation of “animism” within modernity itself … to paraphrase the Dalai Lama: don’t reach for alternatives before you give your own traditions a chance!), well, things pretty quickly went downhill, I thought. Aside from the condescending remarks about the differences between “anthropocentrism” and “anthropomorphism” (though to be tedious, and Socratic: surely the former concept contains the latter as it is the more general and inclusive), which seemed meant to just cut me down, he had an objectively bizarre reply to my mention of the whole Hegelian tradition (or German Idealism), which was a massive attempt to reject the stupid mechanism of Newtonianism and reinfuse the world with “spirit” (or “mind”)—to say nothing of the whole Romantic tradition more generally, both of which were constitutive of modernity. This was my attempt at demonstrating that the “animism” Skafish seeks in the indigenous is already part of the dialectic of modernity, to which he wished to oppose the indigenous. When I mentioned Hegel, it was as if a nerve was smashed: I was informed (did anyone else in the audience find it condescending?) that “nobody here is going to care about Hegel” and so it would be pointless to have included a consideration of that philosopher; besides, Skafish continued (bafflingly), Hegel is the arch-enemy of pluralism—and I should do well to make mention of James on that point (to which I said, “well, I like James”). I’m not sure what Person No. 2 was thinking, but clearly not about the point I was making. I mean, was I saying anything about pluralism? In any case, it seemed to go badly, which is sad since I thought this is what a “symposium” was about: to have some good old debating.

This brings me to a much more general observation about this event, and others like it on the increasingly packed UAP events calendar: nobody seems to want to countenance any real challenges to their positions; and nobody wants to stand up and ask harder questions, possibly uncomfortable ones. Or to comment in ways that are critical and which offer alternatives that may not accord with what one’s assumptions have been (maybe ones around which a career has been comfortably established). It’s a weird and unfamiliar and alienating atmosphere of non-debate, always-friendly questioning. Off camera, as it were, at least half a dozen attendees came up to me and applauded my effort to challenge—and half of them didn’t agree with me, and challenged my take (without necessarily defending the Skafish line)! The point is not that I was correct because I challenged; but that there can only be truth in challenge, in opposition. And, perhaps for interesting sociological reasons, groups friendly to or outright “believing” in the reality of human-NHI contact (and plenty just take it for granted with little analysis) are really sensitive to argumentation. But more generally, I get the feeling that it’s seen as hostile even just to attempt to offer an opposite view, or just to point out a flaw in someone’s reasoning. I guess we’re so informationally stressed out, we can’t take a bit of push-back. Maybe. But my own philosophical training, in the “analytic” school, was somewhat brutal: we didn’t hesitate to try to overturn someone’s point of view, or reveal a fairly serious flaw in one’s reasoning—and the whole point is that we sought to unearth the reasoning, or if unclear to charitably reconstruct it before offering as trenchant a critique as possible. I witnessed plenty of intellectual bloodbaths in my time—not all of which were particularly friendly, though in many cases the opponents would get a drink together, and continue the beating in more jovial circumstances, with libations flowing. I still operate with this framework, and expect to continue to hash and duke it out, ideally with a few drinks in hand. I was hoping, therefore, to do just that. But, alas, such was not to be…

Well, Day One concluded with a “Roundtable on Science, Politics and UAP” (which ended up being in reality two soliloquies) featuring Hal Puthoff (who needs no intros) and Larry Maguire, who is currently a member of the Canadian parliament (as many in the UAP world know). We were supposed to be treated to a dose of Lue Elizondo, but he was in absentia. The thing was moderated by famed UAP journalist Leslie Kean (I believe that’s how it went, but I have no audial record so can’t confirm offhand). After the Encounter at Skafish, I was still rather stunned, with a sour taste in my mouth, so as fascinating as Maguire might have been, and as much of a luminary as Puthoff is supposed to be (I’m utterly nonplussed and unimpressed by him—he’s in that zone between quackery and genius that requires a more refined knowledge of Einstein’s Field Equations and Quantum Chromodynamics than I have for me to make a final determination on the matter), I’ll admit to having tuned things out, hoping to move quickly to the Day One reception in the bowels of the Engineering Rotunda thingy in which the UAP throngs had gathered to do a bit of sun worship. (Well, at the least we were paying tribute to the pursuit of scholarly and scientific truth in matters UAP—very much a worshiping that the Freemasons could jibe with, being all up on Reason, Apollo, Light of Truth … we surely don’t need UAP up there as an aerial swirl on high, flying close to our own earthly Sol, magnate of the gods, to get all cozy with the religious; even Kant had a touch of religious enthusiasm in his rationalism—and offered “religion within the limits of reason”. One wonders what it really takes to escape, finally, the religious dimension altogether. Can it be done? Or is it like philosophy itself—always sticking around, even when you repudiate it.)

I looked on, as real, actual, factual rainbows took shape through the dissipating mists of late-afternoon Northern Californian rain/sun showers, arching over the golden campus that is the Crown Jewel of the Golden State and the Land of the (Tax) Free Silicon Valley tech moguls, who always love a good script—especially if it promises high reward for that oh-so-easy risk (you only gotta buy in to the pitch of a few new credible people in high places with seemingly incredible tales of crash and craft and corpses—but when didn’t some in the Valley succumb to a good cash-prone long sell? Only the ones you don’t remember.). Maguire seems eminently reasonable, a stable, staid statesman working for a relatively sane Nation State up North. And he brings an equally staid, reasonable, above-board concern for UAP to the Canadian political table. Puthoff, of remote viewing and “zero-point” energy fame (the former of which I’m more keen to accept as factual than the latter—just because I’ve been unhappily ensconced in many a distractingly speculative physics talk), rambled a bit around his personal history combating the stupidities of government and academic dissemblance and deflection of the issue that now has come to matter so much to so many. It is even, as one fellow symposium-goer confided, up to become a major political issue in the next election cycle (which we’re fast approaching in the U.S. Yikes.) Hard to believe and far harder to accept that this even could be a thing. But, in 2023 (and definitely in 2024) it is plausible that it could be. Quite a shocking statement.

As soon as I could, I high-tailed it out of the Upper Room, and found my way over to the Chafing Dishes of Bliss. And quite a spread awaited us downstairs folks: delicious Middle Eastern cuisine, prepared by nameless folks somewhere in the Valley of Every Flowing Joy. Filling up a plate or two, getting a bottle of sparkling, accompanied by a Napa white (in plastic, of course—go Team U.S.A.!), I planted down, like a scared nerd, in the thicket of tables farthest away from anyone. A fool’s errand, of course, as like a Noble Gas, all of us filled every possible space rather quickly. As we equilibrated, I found the forces of affinity kicking in, and saw some compatriots—Wes Watters, one of the stable foundational core members of Loeb’s Galileo Project, huddled with some of his GP colleagues. I was flagged over, and, happily and enthusiastically, I was introduced to an assortment of team members—including the delightfully authentically eccentric inventor/creator of the SkyWatch unit that’s fundamental to their optical observational array. We all had quite a blast chatting. In fact, I chatted it up so much that later in the evening, as I tried to get some sleep, I found my voice had evaporated into a seasoned rasp. I was ready for late-night AM radio. (C2CAM anyone? George, I’m ready to do the voiceovers…)

Night drew on. I ended up back at the ranch, nestled in bed in my spacious room. The light of the motel TV flickered whilst I distracted myself with YouTube reels on criticality incidents and radiation sickness, or watched streamers game on, or checked emails, or did some writing. I wondered how the speakers’ dinner was (held at an undisclosed location), and how, later on, their sleek Japanese toilets would titillate and sooth, a perfectly automated bliss in the bathroom. I chewed my fiber gummies, eyeing my own American-installed Chinese-made bathroom accoutrement—in my room my sink was not far from the bed, with toilet and tub fortunately secluded in another room. Somehow, consciousness left, and I exited the mortal coil for a field trip through astral dreamland, finding a satisfying indigenous experience of my own. As Laozi once wrote, you needn’t travel 10,000 li to go a vast distance. You don’t need ‘shrooms to have a trip. All you need is your own mind just as it is. And that’s what I had. And all the bliss I could ever want came to me as I slipped into that dreamless sleep which Socrates found to be so deathlike but so restful all the same.

But that only lasted about 4.5 hours, so I awoke dreamless and groggy, having whiled away my time online doing this-or-that. You know, I need some more sleep, I said—so I slept in a bit. Which didn’t really work as intended, just causing me to miss at least one talk as I moseyed on over only to find there to be no seats. For my sins, standing room only…

We ought to call timeout here, so that I can get this published as Part One of Two, which I will now do.

Unlike my still-pending SCU review, I will publish Part Two anon.