Zenith: Final Reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium. Part Two of Two.

At the end of the day (which might not be until 4:30 am, like last night—I’m a bit of a night owl and a morning bird, so I split the difference), I’m an intellectual. I am in pursuit not quite of Wisdom (I’m not stupid, I’m just post-post-modern), but of some sense of all of what nature has to offer us before we beg for that late checkout from our motel. I want to know what’s there. And here. I’ll take some hooey if it means that I get to glimpse what’s real. I don’t despise the religious and I do think we’ve come upon the beginnings of the end of science in a certain (classical) sense (and a philosophical sense, too). My eyes roll equally at the dogmatism of a physicist as they do the occultist who thinks they’ve pierced the veil of Isis and comes bearing the knowledge by acquaintance of the gnostic. In my professional writing (such as it is—I’m laughably under-accomplished by the standards of the great many gifted scholars which graced Sol’s mainstage during this two-day kickoff event), I consider myself to be a certain kind of empiricist (post-Kantian, post-Hegelian … post most things in our European philosophical vernacular). And that means that I take experience to be key. And yes, to follow up on Skafish’s recommendations: I do think highly of the philosophy (and the genuine philosophical explorations) of William James. It’s about the varieties of experience. But, perhaps unlike the sociocultural anthropology of Person No. 2 at Sol, I think that human cultures, while venerably variegated throughout the ages, and recently bulldozed-over by the arrogance of European/Western hegemonies of one kind or another, are mostly the confused repositories of attempts (mostly haphazard, failed and unconsciously—and therefore stupidly—organized towards immediately practical ends) to appropriate what is strange, uncanny, unfamiliar and downright alienating. Culture is our attempt to find a place where none exists, as we’re thrown into this mess (kicking and screaming, as I’m reminded by the baby who likes to cry just at the moment when I have my best thought. Goddammit. That’s my personal hell.) I mean, nature is downright terrifyingly unpleasant, when you get down to it—which is to say, when you start doing that thing that self-aware species start to do, which is to try to survive with that self-awareness that hey, you’re just about dead as soon as you’re born. Experience is our opening to the world just as it is. We gotta make something of it, and that’s where culture, like the brain itself, fills in the gaps, passing on a museum of hows and whys that pretty much mostly miss the mark, except for providing some comfort that you can survive for a time past your expiry date. That after you find warmth, food and the comforts of being with others like yourself, there might be something more over the horizon—another life, another corpse to inhabit, further realms to chill the soul or titillate the body. Those questions, the ones that take us beyond the here-and-now, push us to think outside the confines of experience—or seek to expand them. That’s where religions, philosophies and the arts come in: they move us up, back, beneath, and beyond, asking us to look harder, feel stronger, examine more closely. Science is the odd one on the cultural block.

It’s a cultural thing, to be sure. But it got us to connect with something not transcendent but transcendental: a kind of determinate structure of the peculiar freedom characteristic of nature’s own ways of being (which includes us with our cultural delights). It got hooked, though, on trying to disclose the matter side of things—but what about the “mind” side? What about that fact of experience itself (that experience is something we have)? That’s the hard part, and trying to get at that structure is where the story becomes complicated by the kaleidoscope of cultural musings, teachings, systems—attempts, all, to disclose this structure of freedom which Hegel called “Spirit”. We are, then, at the point where our science meets our subjectivity, the fact that we’re not just objects but subjects too, with an experience that’s the bedrock of the science which discloses the freedom characteristic of nature. She is free, and we’re learning what the rules are. The mind part, however, is different than the matter part, because as we mind nature’s ways we realize that the freedom we see her display might be the kind of freedom we ourselves possess but can’t quite master. That’s the dilemma of reflexivity, of self-reflection—the dilemma of subjectivity. Art is the pure joy of creation within the bounds nature sets. Philosophy is contemplation of those bounds. Religion is the trembling in fear over the absolute freedom just over the horizon of our mundane experiences. Science, however, works the middle of the three: creation (getting stuff done that we couldn’t before we knew nature’s rules) within the bounds, while asking after what the bounds are, and the thought that those bounds might change—that with our knowledge we might change nature herself, making us even closer to her than we might have thought possible. The 17^th century philosopher Spinoza got it right, in my view: the final formula is: “God or Nature”. As science edges towards the mind part, it gets suspended because it fears its own subjectivity. Science, indeed, is in search of a self. To think of itself means to embed itself and get coiled back up into nature, when it thought it had popped up above the depths and mastered them. The closer you bring the mind part to modern science, the more it loses its way in a thicket of views which culture has deposited in religion, philosophy and in art. It just doesn’t know what the hell to do with itself. And so we’ve got this unfortunate split in our contemporary academic discourse that turns on these fears and operates out of this ignorance: the sciences deal with (as it were) the material world while the humanities deal with the mental, the cultural, the spiritual—all that other stuff (the kind of freedom peculiar to us and not the preserve of nature alone). Yes, we need to problematize this dichotomy that drives the set-up to the problem I’m trying to articulate. But how do you do it that isn’t more speculative “theory”—more talking past each other, and resuming your corner sales?

That’s the crossroads we’re at today. The UFO phenomenon had landed, when it did, right in the middle of this mess. As Brenda Denzler pointed out beautifully, carefully, and masterfully, the study of UFOs was destined to have, therefore, “religious valences”. Because they just don’t seem to fit anywhere as definite, well-defined objects of study—or even worship, for that matter. What are they? As they fly, they fly through what we think we know, scientifically, about nature. But then the UFO experience had by some percipients is often so uncanny or arresting or perturbing that it can’t help but be what the German scholar of religion called “numinous”—so religion is reached for as a convenient, ready-made system for making sense out of it. And then there’s the alleged entity encounters, edging any attempt at a science of these phenomena even closer to the brink of madness. “As ufologists tried to analyze the evidence with all of its mystery and oddity, they slowly began to admit,” Denzler wrote 23 years ago, “that the reported observations of UFOs and their occupants were not easily assimilable to the extant scientific worldview.” She continues:

“Investigators found themselves confronted with a series of observations that seemed incomprehensible without a new and more imaginative approach than traditional science could muster. As one abductee observed, ‘Even when ufology does becomes accepted as an authentic and necessary subject of study, I am afraid that mainstream science as it currently stands does not possess the pioneer vision to fully establish a concept encompassing the entire scope of the UFO enigma’. Under these circumstances, the path of inquiry that seemed to hold the most promise for illuminating the mystery of UFOs while remaining at least somewhat in touch with the scientific world was parapsychological.”

But that was a can of worms whose scent was just vaguely perceptible amidst the scientific and humanistic musings of the speakers on Day One. Nobody seemed prepared to go fully there yet, or to fully undertake a head-on confrontation with this “numinous” aspect. What we got from the humanists was a museum tour of the artifacts of cultural possibility, alternative (i.e., “indigenous”) ways we could think about these things (Skafish), or a romp through different “research traditions” that seemingly converge like a chemical crystallization around multiple retellings of the Promethean myth (Pasulka). While from the scientists we got a survey of possible physical characteristics from the observations and from alleged materials. Nobody wanted to take up the far harder question of working that other, more treacherous, street corner: the one worked by the psi mafia, where a more practical (if not also theoretical) convergence is attempted—that between mind and matter, the psycho-physical.

That’s the problem in UFO studies today, of course: we each are planted down within a research tradition with very thick boundaries, and we don’t know how to talk each other’s lingo, and don’t know how to use each other’s conceptual tools to bring about a new science that works both sides together, at once. That’s likely because we have to give something up if we were to do this. Neither Skafish nor Pasulka know the Schrödinger Equation or how to puzzle out the kinematics of UAP using Einstein’s Field Equations. Neither Nolan nor Knuth worry much about indigenous animism and how exactly that might help in an analysis of the physical details of how UAP present themselves, to say nothing of what this might mean for entity encounters. We’re each caught up in our own professional traditions, which is where we shine and where we can be the expert. UAP cut across all of it, it seems, as as Denzler chronicled in great scholarly detail; but nobody wants to join the two—because we don’t know how the hell to do that, or what it means, or what it would look like, exactly. And the problem, the 1000 kg tic-tac in the room, is that it might have to look like parapsychology, as Denzler suggested decades ago. It’s already a stretch just to get mainstream science on board with the UAP thing, as they are now doing (in the U.S. this is thanks in part to the independent study team NASA commissioned, which, in no uncertain terms, fully recommended a muscular scientific research program to tackle the issue—using the science and the equipment for doing it that we already have). Then to add the whole range of the strange (as depicted on Vallée’s slides in his Friday talk) and expect it to be happily picked up by mainstreamers? Yeah, no. So, Sol’s got to start with what mainstream academicians do, which is to work the block they’ve been given. Yet there’s much more to the story. Everyone knows this, of course. But then the big question is: what do you do about it? How do you engage this part of “The Phenomenon” and not immediately purchase for yourself a ticket to mainstream madness, the hell of quackery and unconstrained, wild speculative abandon?

The First Seal has already apparently been broken by the First Angel—Sol stands with Grusch and has put him on the High Command. For them, there are crashed craft and corpses of “the others” (and in a creepy dream I recently had, I was taken into a room where I was to be shown the bodies—and the spooks kept shouting to me, “though they’re dead, the corpses are still psychically active!” which woke me the hell right up in a sweat). Now, there are three ways this could go, logically speaking. There may be crashed craft (and/or NHI corpses) held by the gov’t (some agency or other), or by their private-sector contractors, and a network of legacy reverse engineering black projects trying to figure what makes the discs or tic-tacs fly. In this case Grusch’s testimony is confirmed and Sol wins the prize for being the first academic foundation to say it was so, for backing what is the actual, factual truth of the matter: that they’ve had them all along. Then the hard work of understanding it all would begin. However (and this isn’t a Bayesian analysis of what’s more likely than what—so please keep your priors to yourself for now), it’s also possible that Grusch, and the lot of other whistleblowers, for whatever reason, were misled or are otherwise just plain wrong: no crashed craft, no bodies—just tall tales, counterintelligence psi-ops, careful gov’t national security-based “signals management”, or speculative fancy, … or some (not necessarily nefarious or immoral) concatenation thereof. In this case, we’ve got egg on the surface of the Sol which can’t so easily be burned away by the bright shining light of their sincerity: if there’s not much of a there there, then credibility tanks, shares are down, investors pull out, and there’s no Fed to come bail you out. The Academy will drop you like a hot potato. You might carry on, but with whom? (I can name a few but then there’s too many crazies running their ufological racket to choose from.) The further problem following from this scenario, of course, is obvious if it’s not devastatingly worrisome: that in the wake of disconfirmation, the whole UAP kit-and-kaboodle is tossed out, baby and bathwater and all. NASA could politely drop out, the Schumer legislation burned black with potassium perchlorate and anthracene in the heraldic papal stove, and the media resume with their X-files tracks as any more mention of UAP is received with a big ol’ LOL. Of course this would be completely illogical, as from the fact that the Grusch allegation proves wholly or even mostly false, nothing of much importance follows for the prima facia factual existence of UAP themselves. There’s plenty of independent evidence to still provide a solid case for there being a serious, muscular, scientific research program devoted to the phenomena. So, given this epistemological independence, and that Sol’s decided to attach itself to a very definite belief about testimony for which there is as yet zero independently-accessible evidence on which to base a reasonable and reasonably independent judgment as to its cogency or veracity, they’ve placed (unnecessarily in my view) a bet. They’re playing a win/lose game they needn’t play.

But there is another logical possibility—one that I find actually more likely, all things UAP considered. And that’s this. Let me explain my reasoning: We do have pretty good suggestive and indicative (not definitive and conclusive) evidence, corroborated in many very good witness cases, of kinematically and energetically anomalous UAP, under some kind of intelligent control. (I mean, do we really have to keep questioning, tediously, the visual acuity of Cmdr. Fravor, or the veracity of the almost daily sightings of Graves’ elite pilot’s team? No, we do what the medical field does: we take note of the anecdotes, accept the testimonial evidence at face value, and proceed to look for the stuff ourselves using chains of evidence whose provenance is beyond a reasonable doubt—which is the minimum we ought to be all about in the scientific study of UAP. But I guess we’re not always satisfied with minimums.) Granting this, then, supposing that there is a sufficient volume of such objects on Earth over time, it clearly follows that some of these things will, well, crash-land. What is up can and often does go back down. Sure, your amazing flying discs or cigars might be able to manipulate mass and/or the gravitational field of anything, but shit happens. Even for NHI. I can’t see how this isn’t plausible, if you grant the first premise. Now, granting these two premises, it’s also plausible that a crash or two was witnessed by someone—here in the U.S. or anywhere else (I mean, these things might love American nukes and desolate rural environs, but we don’t have a monopoly here. UFOs aren’t an American thing, though we’ve made ‘em Red, White and Blue with our soft-power cultural influence, that’s for sure). And that some of the witnesses called the authorities. And that some of the authorities, getting spooked, called, well, the actual spooks. And if this happens a few times, there might just be an internal system of spookery where at some point they (the gov’t) send out recovery equipment and yes, retrieve the remains—whatever they are. But what are the “remains” we’re dealing with? Well, here’s where the story gets interesting: either there are intact remains, or shattered and scattered bits-and-pieces, like in your run-of-the-mill catastrophic air disaster. At the speeds these things are observed to have moved, if there’s a fail in the propulsion system, well, then, what remains is likely to be rather fragmentary, if even discernible as a definite something. So it’s possible—and this is my third category of possibility: not nothing, but not exactly a definite something either—that there are remnants of UAP someone (in the gov’t or in the private sector) possesses (maybe even “biologics”), but that the state of the materials is such as to render it utterly ambiguous. Maybe some biologic sludge was found at a site, that could have been a body at one point, but which is just an uninterestingly terrestrial-like something, with some collection of fragments which have curious but no dramatically anomalous properties—like the samples Nolan and his lab are looking at. It could just be that. If the inorganic Nolan samples from alleged UAP are ambiguously interesting, it is possible that even organic samples (from alleged UAP) are equally so (hell, maybe protein structures and the base molecules of non-terrestrial life are all very similar to what we have down here, or just only slightly askew but not enough to be dramatically anomalous—well, just how would we know ET life if all we had were charred potential samples?).

Yes, I know this is edging it a bit at the precipice of the abyss, but this, strictly speaking, is all perfectly logically possible—and that’s all we’re doing at this point is the pure logic, with no fancy business (i.e., problematizations of conceptual categories and the like). At this point, many are wont to reach for the safety of their Bayesian priors, so we can really dispatch—logically, reasonably, it seems—much of this stuff as yes, logically possible but not really likely. Sure but once you grant the strength of the anecdotal evidence (and we’re not lol’ing here), those priors start to have to be updated. That’s the whole damn point with Bayesianism: at some point the priors are no longer, well, prior: according to Bayes’ Theorem, you’re given the opportunity to update them based on new information, which in turn changes the calculus of the probability—the weights you now assign possibilities with new information. And if we’ve finally crossed the Rubicon and have to update our priors, we have to consider the scenarios I’ve adumbrated here—for better or for worse. That’s just the rationality of the decision tree (so don’t blame me!).

In any case, what I find to be most likely is that there is something that’s been recovered, and maybe even under study, but it’s probably just goo or fragmentary charred junk that nobody has any damn clue about, in terms of structure or function (until I suppose Garry applies his new atomic-level observational techniques, with Sol as the foundational support for such a venture). And that it’s like the Nolan samples: alleged UAP-associated materials, and nothing more. Of course, the claim on the table is that we’ve got the real full-bodied McCoy: craft and corpses (well, hopefully they’re dead, since then we’ve got to worry about some serious and uncomfortable ethics). But it’s plausible that in the game of gov’t agency telephone (especially when the line gets connected to SAPs and skunkworks and black ops, and the like), the message got garbled and Grusch, the young sport still somewhat early in his perhaps prematurely-aborted career, is honestly conveying what others think or speculate rather than what they really “know” in a meaningful way. I don’t doubt there’s photos of discs or HD video of hovering craft we haven’t yet seen (from which closed-door committee viewing Burnett emerged, saying “I just watched 45 minutes of science fiction”), to which Grusch has himself been privy in some way. But it’s likely that what’s there is as ambiguous as what has already been publicly witnessed or (allegedly) recovered (i.e., the Ubatuba, Council Bluffs, etc. materials). And as such, will be neither dramatically confirmatory nor clearly disconfirming, but something that just, well, means we have to carry on with the science we’re trying to get going in a serious way.

Day Two began for me groggily. I’d stayed up way too late into the night, which easily and unfortunately became early morning—unconsciously conscious in my addiction to my phone and the ‘net of useless info-reels (I’m especially fond of late of the ones about nuclear criticality incidents). Dragging myself out of bed, onto the toilet and into the shower (all painfully unautomated), I got ready and headed over to the logjam on the 101. But—and I haven’t checked my FastTrack account to see if I was fined $490-a-pop for a violation, since I haven’t yet worked out what the rules are on the HOV thing in the Valley—I hopped into the left fast lane, the pay-for-express side of the highway that shaves off about 15 minutes from the commute from Mountain View over to the golden Stanford campus in Palto Alto. As I arrived, campus was a’run with already-slim & fit morning joggers working off that Friday-night hedonistic abandon (shit, I didn’t know hedonism could be so goddamned ascetic until I moved to the California Coast; I guess they’re not all going about it for the sex-body thing.).

To my delight, my parking app informed me that “parking at this facility is not allowed”—which works out in this case to be A.I. for “it’s free, stupid”. Since I came to the party late, and had myself hedonistically abandoned the night before, I had to work through some penances. In the parking structure, cars filled all the decent near-the-exit spots, so I had to find one annoyingly far in the back and up one level. Finding it, I walked hurriedly down and over to the venue—but not before I realized I might get a nice coffee whilst I’m already near that café I thankfully found on Day One. Oh, but it’s Saturday, and you’re on c a m p u s, so that means that things are actually closed for lack of foot-traffic (lack of demand means nobody will supply). Alas. The second penance: no latte for me. On getting to the Upper Room in the Rotunda thingy, I was greeted by my final penalty: standing room only, bro. So, I found some nice wall space as I settled in (by Leslie Kean, as it happened) for the morning’s talks that I’d managed not to miss (in reality, I only half missed one). Now I can’t take notes until I sit down (though Leslie, being the reporter that she is, seemed to perfect standing note taking, quite impressively; however this was somewhat beyond my skillset), so I don’t have potentially contraband notes from which to work for the first couple of talks, until I got to seat my ass somewhere decent to ride out the rest of the gig, in relative comfort. But I can still give you some names and some titles. So, on Day Two—

We first had slated on the schedule retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D. as it turns out, and former director (or “administrator”) of none other than that other agency you’ve heard of, after NASA: NOAA. The Hurricane, Blizzard and Tornado people (and they’ve got lots of useful satellites—hint, hint). Tim’s about the oceans, however: He’s an oceanographer by training. Now, as I recall, I didn’t actually end up missing all of this first talk. Yay! Rather, this was the one I’d walked into as it was in process. I picked it up in media res. It was entitled (fortunately this time eschewing the pretenses of the philosophy of science of paradigm shifts, which was supposed to be the theme of his SCU AAAP talk back in July, but which was anything but on-topic): “How the U.S. Government’s Apparent UAP Apathy is a Case of Misplaced Priorities”. A suitably bureaucratic, sober talk from a bureaucratic insider. We need those. Lots of those to counteract the indigestion one gets from all the gov’t conspiracy B.S. (which usually turns out to be a conspiratorial nothingburger of ignorance compounded by incompetence or, yes, indeed: apathy. Bob, why don’t you hurry up and file those UFO photos in that binder over there marked beyond ultra top secret so we can forget about this shit and get over to Ben’s Chili Bowl before they close?—20 million dollars of taxpayer’s money later.)

This morning’s opening theme, I should mention, was curious—as if the Foundation was announcing its guiding spirit, or rather the demon that will haunt them in their scholarly-cum-scientific pursuits of discs, disclosure, discovery and government-civic deconfliction: “Fraught Relationships: Government, Democracy, and UAP”. The 10000kg tic-tac in the room was obvious—even to the supposed arch-enemy of scientific uapology, Dr. Edward Condon, who himself warned that government and science don’t and should not mix (let’s not forget that he was a—gasp!—leftist socialist). Whilst the contemporary governments tend to adopt (as in the U.S.) the pretenses and trappings of “democracy” (not so everywhere), in practice it can’t let “the people” really do their thing, or to know and see and have access to all; hence it has embedded itself within a rigged system of, what shall we call it, “mitigated” (or “managed”) democracy. It is constrained (strangled perhaps) by not only those practically necessary economic considerations (themselves, however, embedded in and governed by various ideologies—our current favorite being something called “Capitalism”, no less a reality because of this) that keep a modern nation state afloat (roving from one economic crisis to another), but also by the demands of “national security”, forcing the State (amongst other treachery) to take action to limit and manage all information (presumably so that no other competitor has a strategic advantage that isn’t already anticipated by the State). You kinda can’t do the science thing under those conditions (where someone gives a real shit about the “national security implications” of your research; or, if you do, as with the Manhattan Project, you need to form a tenuous, closed ecosystem of secrecy while you depend on knowledge from anyone and everyone independent of national state affiliation (irony, anyone?). In time, of course, this is absurd for knowledge and scientific discovery (or breakthrough) is always only a temporary differential advantage by any one State. For discovery isn’t had by the State itself, but by the free play of the imagination (to borrow from Einstein) of individual human beings contingently located within them (here the conflict between the individual and the social collective is particularly acute: whilst of course science is conducted within and supported by a social body which anywhere has a particular national/political identity, the discoveries don’t and therefore can’t be claimed as the preserve of any of social body: as soon as the knowledge is found it is the free preserve of any human being anywhere).

There, then, is a kind of incipient democratic philosophy embedded in science, which takes its knowledge not from man but from nature (if I may be permitted a scholarly anachronism or two). Knowledge is not the secret preserve of one individual or even a collection of them, but is taken from Nature herself (who may have hidden it) and opened up thereafter to all; all scientific knowledge and understanding is destined to be the preserve of all human beings anywhere and everywhere. This concrete universalism is the great enduring legacy of the sciences of nature, one of the great triumphs of “modernity”, much maligned for a few decades in certain academic circles. Science in principle is inimical, therefore, to the informational closure of the modern national security state which subordinates all to the principle of the preservation of “national security interests”. Inevitably there is and always will be a tension here between the operation of the sciences (unconditioned by political, social, or even moral requirements) and the demands of a sociopolitical formation (i.e., government) organized around definite ends (which Nature would not seem to give much of a damn about). At some point the science gets tainted by political-governmental ends. In light of this, civil agencies not specifically tied to worries over national security are formed as a kind of half-way house where the sciences can be funded by the public coffers, seen from afar by the national security monitors, and allowed to do its thing—so long as it doesn’t specifically encroach on the territories of interest and concern for the national security state. But then there’s the very fraught logics of securitization: when something (an event, a thing, a phenomenon) gets converted into a matter of national security, when the government might have cause to move in and put the kibosh on the free flow of information and the unconditioned exploration of nature by the sciences.

I was very, very, very impressed, then, with the next talk by Prof. Jairo Victor Grove (Director of the Hawai’i Research Center for Future Studies and Chair of the Department of Political Science). Dr. Grove attempted to take up this very fraught topic of the gov’t and its dealings with UAP/UFOs in the very touchy contemporary, very international sociopolitical context of risk management in an “age of uncertainty”. The latter is likely a reference to the American social-democratic economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s book (and BBC-produced TV mini-series) of the same name, published in 1977 (just as the so-called “neoliberal” paradigm and the “Washington Consensus” was taking shape in the U.S.-led political-economic order, leading to the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, as Carter famously lamented the American spiritual “malaise”, getting him quickly replaced by the Morning in America presidency of the two terms of Ronny Reagan, with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the Thatcherite Conservatives the pro-business answer to Regan and Reaganomics across the pond in the U.K. Ahh, the tolerable insanity in the good ol’ days before Trumpism.). As economists (especially the Marxist ones) had come to realize, for all its high-flying glory, fast-paced growth, competitive vitality, and vaunted “progress”, by virtue of its very internal dynamics (an intricate system of dialectical relationships between material and social forces, as Marx theorized it with masterly sophistication at the end of the 19^th century in Das Kapital), it was inherently unstable, prone to upheavals (the logics of competitive “innovation”) and never-ending crises always threatening to bring the house of cards down. It was a system that really thrived, paradoxically, on the contradictions between capital and labor, exchange and production, buying and selling and the rest of the fun conflictual divisions characteristic of the System (which is very much a “world system” as the great pioneering Yale theorist Immanuel Wallerstein and his school understood it). The neoclassical economists wanted to treat the crises as somehow temporary or exogenous—alien threats to an otherwise “rational” system (alien here being very much Earth-bound). What Marx and later theorists who accepted the basic dialectical analysis he pioneered (of course following Hegel) realized, though, was that the “irrational”, contradictory and conflictual was what made the system so energetic, dynamic, and yes: revolutionary. Thus the late centrist economic historian Joyce Appleby would write a book called The Relentless Revolution, her masterful history of capitalism penned a decade or so before she died (in 2016) which shows that history constituted by a series of crises precipitated by revolutionary economic upheavals, as inefficiency is replaced by innovative solutions, destroying the old and moving on to something new. As such, from a meta-historical standpoint, this means that capitalism is perpetually on the edge, systems and the governments invested in them always on the verge of economic and therefore social collapse. Welcome to the “Age of Uncertainty”, with neoclassical economists playing perpetual catch-up since they don’t care to look at the system political-economically: that there are social (and psychical forces) driving the economic structures and processes—which cannot be theorized, therefore, as abstract formal systems with no subjectively engaged agency constitutive of them (what another economic theorist would call “Adam’s Fallacy”—the very thing Marx sought to overturn as he marshaled Hegelian philosophy against the lingering spiritless mechanical philosophy of Newton that the economists of the day, and still now, try to imitate—as if it’s all nothing but matter-in-motion + rational agents engaged in strictly economic decision-making, or whatever).

Dr. Grove was not so much concerned to situate the whole UAP issue within a political economic context, as he was concerned to look at the political alone from the standpoint of his own disciplinary matrix: International Relations. (One academic not somehow present at Sol, or much mentioned, was Alex Wendt, who is himself an International Relations theorist widely cited and widely recognized around the world—though I know Alex doesn’t like to travel much, so perhaps he just said thanks but no thanks.) Grove focused on UAP as a liminal, very ambiguous kind of phenomenon which, because of its inherent epistemological uncertainties, is a curiously difficult thing for the national security state to effectively handle. It’s a something that gets mixed in with the rest of the aerial clutter that might give the national security state the jitters, especially when it seems to be a real unknown: if it’s not us, not birds or drones, is it advanced spy tech from a hostile state actor, or what? How does the national security apparatus deal with something like that? Well, logically UAP can be dealt with effectively only if they can somehow be resolved beyond a mere unknown (which, while troubling, does not in itself pose a national security threat—this has been the consistent conclusion of a number of gov’t studies and reports, with Condon offering the clearest example: the conclusion the Committee came to was that there was no obvious national security concern with any of the unknowns, once one explained the others—but from this they somehow derived the further conclusion that there’s nothing here for science to study so please move on already. Quite a ridiculous non sequitur as many, like James McDonald in the months following the report’s release, noted in spades.) So, in order to proceed, we have to undertake an examination of the possible ways that this epistemological resolution could go, even if UFOs remain scientifically recalcitrant to concerted efforts to understand them (that recalcitrance would itself be interesting all the same from a national security standpoint: kinematically bizarre but no less real aerial somethings evasive and enigmatic to those who encounter them, perpetually suggestive but never etiologically clear). It’s a fair question: how would the national security state respond to the discovery that some UAP are (as many pilots and other sound witness testimony suggests) intelligently-controlled, highly advanced “craft” that easily outpace all human tech? Grove works through it all, quite brilliantly, quite carefully—and above all, soberly.

If UAP have religious significance, that’s all fine and good. (Though you surely don’t need UAP or their pilots for that; yet if there is a longstanding historical interaction going on here, there’s a much more complicated story to tell—Däniken be damned to hell. I mean, maybe many religions are, to some extent at least, a product of trying to make sense of the crazy shit in the sky, as well as on the ground and in those trippy moments when you field trip to the astral realms after you slip into dreamland following that $200 meal you couldn’t afford in the Valley?) The fact is that encounters with UAP or their alleged piloting occupants (or just your run-of-the-milled contact with nonhuman “others”) haven’t universally entailed a religious or even a “numinous” experience, to borrow the term from the great German scholar of the religious Rudolph Otto (read the book). (Hell, if I’m ever contacted or run into UAP or the pilots, I’m expecting to be met by the “would you like some pancakes?” or “we’re from Italy” types. Although, as I pointed out in my previous post on my “book encounter” with occultist Mitch Mindpower Horowitz, all it takes for me to fall on my knees is some really trippy mountains on the I-5. Seriously, they were then and were on this trip arrestingly stunningly spiritual bumps in that otherwise stark landscape. A whole library of wonder was there. But I had to stick to the road.) Whatever else they may be for this or that experiencer, witness, or militant atheist struck dumb in numinosity, UAP will also have, more importantly and more exoterically speaking, potentially (at least) very real practical sociopolitical implications (which nobody wants to talk about in polite company, lest ye be thought a “believer”); such can’t be ignored, and we ought to be prepared for it (if only theoretically). Dr. Grove’s talk—perhaps the best from any of the more humanities-grounded scholars in attendance—was entitled “Crowded Skies: Atmospheric and Orbital Threat Reduction in an Age of Uncertainty”. I can’t stress how brilliant this talk was. It was a real delight to see an academic do their thing with sensitivity and subtlety for such a fraught subject. It was an eminently balanced, sober-minded assessment of the situation which revealed as much about the politics of ambiguity that surrounds UAP (or would, even in some supposed post-disclosure world) as it did the ways governments do and likely would deal with ambiguities that edge their way uncomfortably into the affairs of state and national security.

Despite the emergence of a lovely headache (well, I did only get 4.5 hours beauty sleep, and got showered from a boiling spigot-in-the-wall—talk about criticality incidents), and still a bit stunned by the Encounter at Skafish, I had to suck it up, whilst standing the penance for my sins (oversleeping, tardiness, and maybe my petulance) and yet somehow still remain both vertical and somewhat cognizant of you know, stuff, whilst our next speaker—bureaucrat no. 2 from The Inside—stepped up to the mic. I seem to recall that that Dick guy with the mic (or was it Skafish, maître d’ and master-of-ceremonies—can’t recall since I didn’t get my damn coffee this whole time … the fourth penance) stepped onto the stage to issue another moratorium on pics, clicks, tweets and x-rays from the peanut gallery (I will admit to looking over to the TOE guy and Jesse Somethings to see their reaction: mute indifference, since they’d get at it like a bat out of hell once the clock struck fin, you could bet). Apparently, what we were about to witness was the real stuff, the inside scoop from the spooks. Pure Gold. It would under no circumstances be transferred to your phones or made into tweets! Did I say no pics?!

I will admit, after that admonition, I felt like when someone shouts “don’t think of pink elephants”—what do you do but think of those wonderful abominations? I had multiple phantom vibrations in my pocket, coaxing and tempting me to draw out my Max and click. But I was a good academic, compliant and respectful. I didn’t click it. I sinned in thought but not in action.

Who was going to speak, I wondered, now rather intrigued? Even after hearing his name, seeing his visage, his earthly form, I still had no idea who the hell he was. But as it turned out he was a very well-spoken retired colonel from the U.S. Army: one Mr. Karl Nell, listed in our booklets as “former Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Africa Command”. Seems like a big deal, the middle kind that’s still VIP enough for us civilians. My little black notebook is, unfortunately blank so I can’t really give you a decent overview. But I did warn the reader that this was mostly impressionistic, so maybe some slack can be cut. In any case, I was eyeing up the first and last talks of the last full session of the whole symposium, the one with this fascinating “space psychologist” of extraordinary human experience (and just being in space is damn extraordinary—quite an accomplishment for the space monkeys, we have to all admit!), and the closing talk by well-known scholar of comparative religions, Dr. Jeff Kripal (an eloquent writer-scholar whom I’ve come to know personally over the last few years, and with whom I’ve gotten to rather cordially and productively dialogue this year on the related problems of mind and the paranormal—themes softened, understandably, at the event, but important and pertinent and conceptually difficult all the same. I’ve variously had a go at it in these pages. And in the book I’m doing on UFOs, I’ll try my best.).

Well, my impression of the Nell talk was that he had everything UAP & gov’t (anything that would be legislated into being, at least—and that means we’re talkin m o n e y) very neatly organized into different bureaucratic chains of administrative evolution if and when the subject becomes administered. And administered it would seem to have to become, given the Schumer Legislation that’s moving to the docket, that has everyone agog (a piece modeled on, of all damn things, the Kennedy Assassination Files Declassification Legislation of yesteryear. Does anyone else shudder at the ironic resonances here? I mean, let’s take one conspiracy-laden subject and put it together with another. Optics anyone?) In any case, the “controlled disclosure” was a curious thesis, but entirely sensible from a government bureaucracy standpoint: let ‘em have it slow, managed—an informational soft-landing of the UAP on the back lawn outside the entrance of subbasement no. 5 at wing no. 3 ½, nearest Bob’s watercooler. That is, if what the whistleblowers are saying (and there’re sure sayin’) is true—or rather, if we have a goddamned intact saucer to study. Let’s hurry up already…where’s the beef? So I suppose the Legislation is to be read not as having been crafted with knowledge of hot’n’spicy specifics in mind, but in such a way as to be administratively vague and all-encompassing enough in its language so as to accommodate all possible outcomes either predictable and anticipated, or unpredicted and unanticipated. It’s legislation after all, so it has to be edging on the cusp of the vacuous, an empty vessel to house the great plenum of contingency with which modern law must bed down. (I believe in cultural anthropology they call it “planning depth” and we space monkeys are really good at it when it comes to the paper sort.)

Well, it’s all good to get your ducks lined up, and set up the administrative workflows, so that the money, when there, can start flowing and the understanding department can get its s**t together, but then there’s this eminent domain thingy buried somewhere on page xxx. As a July article in The Hill casually noted: “The Schumer-Rounds amendment would give the federal government eminent domain over any recovered technologies of unknown origin or biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence now held by private individuals or organizations”. Well, maybe it’ll all turn on the meaning of “now” (as in: we maybe can like pull a Bill Clinton and wrangle over “is”?)

So let’s see if we can get this straight: let’s say I have a UAP fragment like from the Ubatuba or Council Bluffs incidents; and let’s suppose the material evidence is clearer than it is, that these materials are both clearly technological and of non-terrestrial origin (we’ve got consistent and reproducible sigma 5’s and 6’s for the isotopic ratios, plus the Nolan atomic positioning analysis that demonstrates a structure unambiguously indicative of some technological function). Then whenever this becomes clear and present to (?) some relevant set of officials/individuals/analysts (whomever), it immediately falls under this eminent domain clause and therefore becomes the property of the U.S. government. Did I get that right? So, that’s a lol and a wow moment. Nell just casually incorporated this prospective legislative factoid in the Grand Scheme he was adumbrating (with numerous well-designed slides that begged me for pic-taking), without batting an eye or breaking a sweat. (What was that stuff about the “banality of evil” of the bureaucrat “just doing their job”?) The ever-intrepid and forthright Jacques Vallée, in the subsequent Q&A, with a now somewhat sheepish Col. Nell (tail-between-legs) looking stunnedly at the spectacle of Vallée’s prolix criticism and commentary, which broke through the otherwise congenial atmosphere like a thunderbolt of no-shit common democratic sense, … Vallée stood up right from where he was seated, bulldozing immediately to the front of the very long questioner’s queue that had formed fast after the last slide vanished from the screen, and proceeded to read Col. Nell the Riot Act After the Reign of Terror. A Frenchman, who knows his French Revolutionary History, throws it right back to the government bureaucrat and basically says what has to be what’s on everyone’s mind: eminent domain my stinking ass. We can’t seriously be contemplating legislating that any current (“now”) UAP in possession by anyone is de facto gov’t property, thank you very much and step aside ma’am—we’ll take that now. (The Bill Clinton in me wonders: yeah, well they say “now”, but what about after the legislation gets passed, if it does at all—maybe it won’t be “now” anymore and we can keep the stuff, right? I mean, if we can question “is”… I’m just sayin’). After this earnest soliloquy by the aging gentile ufologist-cum-Valley VC, nobody else’s comments or questions seem to have any umph. There was a good one or two, I think, but again, I have no mechanically or digitally produced visual or audial record, and as I was still standing in the back with Leslie Kean, seeing again these unbelievably breathtakingly stunning actual factual rainbows fade sharply in over campus at the end of a brief rain-mist shower, I can’t quite say what the hell they said. But coffeetime was nearing—I was precognitively 100% sure of it, so I eyed the capacious canisters and sought to take advantage of the least action principle, so I could get that cup sooner than later. Finding the shortest path, I cravingly did my ablutions putting sugar, cream then coffee into the cup and s a v o r i n g it. Only then did I suddenly wake up and realize I was actually at the Sol Foundation’s inaugural symposium on Day 2. The closing day, which would end in that very Zen unceremonious way that Jeff loves to end the events he ends (and he got to end this one—hopefully not quite the “sprinkles” on the scientific cake of UAP Studies, as he will sometimes lament the fate of the Humanities).

There was to be a panel of the folks doing the “Fraught Relationships” talks, so that meant that we had Gallaudet, Grove (via Zoom) and Nell rounded up for the wind-up. It might as well have also included Vallée, given his essayish commentary (much-needed pushback on the spooks). Gallaudet I think I get—he’s at heart an ocean nerd, an academic like many of us. Grove is a young super-smart professor of international relations—very much with it from a theory’s eye point of view. And a consummate academician all the same. Nell was the odd man out, it seemed: obviously talented at what he does. Super confident-seeming, a give-it-to-‘em-straight kind of a guy, who could probably sharp shoot a waving alien at 800 yards if you gave him a chance (the Fr. Gill case, like it or not, is quite inexplicable—he should be seeing angles of the Lord, not waving NHIs, right?). But a gov’t insider, all about the organizational workflows, all neat and preemptive. He seems reasonable, and fair-minded, giving sway not just to the hard sciences, but to humanities—philosophy and the religious dimension too. It was a really impressive, information-rich talk I hafta say. No complaints there, but when you start diving into the details of what exactly this Schumer Legislation really entails, and how open-ended or vague it turns out to potentially be (at least in terms of the actual or theoretical scope of the many categoricals stuck in the UAP X-mas pudding), concerns abound. Thus did Vallée rebound and recoil with a vigor that was a bit surprising, given his composure (and possibly failing health) otherwise.

 

Look, at the end of the day why do I try (maybe failingly and ineffectually—I’m not an accomplished academic, but an intellectual with an academic job that pays (most) of my bills) and push back hard and somewhat crankily? Well, I love the subject. And I actually love the people doing it. I love The Nolans, the Skafishes, the Vallées and Kripals, the Streibers (he was there and I shook hands with him, although he’d totally forgotten that Kripal had virtually introduced us a few weeks back.) I’m trying to put forth as trenchant of a series of criticisms as I can possibly muster. I want everyone, I want the field, to succeed. I don’t want us to merely succeed at reproducing the discourses of our respective professional academic disciplines—although we all gotta start there. Like we have to worry about whether we’re going to end up learning more about “indigenous thought” or radical pluralism and the foibles of (Western) Modernity, or about the psychology of extraordinary experience, or funky gravity-matter relationships that get you really flying, than we are about the subject. After all, nobody present really asked about what the subject (which might sometimes be a subject) was or how we could possibly come to an agreement on it. Yes, yes, we should problematize the “essentializing” gestures here and all that fun theory shit. But really, lest we simply fall back on the comforts of a recalcitrant (and all-too-easy) discursive-conceptual relativism, we really hafta worry about the fact that there can be no progress, no headway in the understanding department, unless and until we just get clear on what the subject here really is. If it should be called (as I and my colleagues at the Society have considered) “UAP Studies” (rather than “ufology”), then what is that? Does it include the contactee thing, and what about so-called “experiencers”—is that even relevant? If so, why and how? We face a very practical dilemma: either “UAP Studies” will end up falling into a kaleidoscope of interdisciplinarity with each of us simply parking ourselves well within our existing disciplines, and the field  “UAP Studies” as such is just a Frankenstein’s monster of syncretism (hey, maybe that’s ok?), or else we are being moved towards a sui generis field—a radically new field that constitutes itself out of the fragments of others. I find the latter more interesting and much more challenging, both epistemologically and methodologically (to say nothing of ontologically).

The formation of a new field is scary; it is troubling; it is disturbing; in itself, it’s uncanny—even untimely. Think about the emergence of science itself in the 16th and 17th centuries: it required a scary and dissident repudiation of an existing way of thinking (and being). It required some cuts to be made (“mind” from “matter” being of course the most tendentious of them all—the one we’re still living with, and which I think is the itch that needs to be scratched as we work towards a sui generis field of inquiry called “UAP Studies” … but that’s my personal take). Some positions had to be definitely staked out at the epistemological, methodological and ontological level. And maybe that’s what we’re all afraid to do: to collapse the wave-function of possibilities. The problem with humanities, in its “theory” modality, is that it’s too enamored with the possible, the rich landscape (a plurality) of differences and divisions and problematizations and divides and conflicts and so on. The danger is that it simply enshrines this constellation as a kind of dogma, such that there can be no serious challenging of any supposed “alternative” ways of thinking (which we immortalize and beknight with the condescension of “indigenous” or “non-Western”) that might suggest that, well, maybe they’re wrong, stupid, partial, incomplete, and so on, and that there might be a better way to go about things—while recognizing the partiality and incompleteness of that which is taken to be the predominant way of thinking with which these alternatives are contrasted. I mean, maybe everyone has got it wrong. Maybe “UAP Studies” is a unique (academic) opportunity to leave it all behind for something new, something not subordinate to anything in the existing intellectual-academic firmament. This is what made science so unique, even unprecedented in intellectual history, being a mixture of the revolutionary and the conservative. If it was historical, it attained a level of universalism that could not quite be articulated as such (as historical). If it was contextual, it was also alienating such that the comforts of the human were perturbed—even repudiated. It was decentering, a distinct challenge to, even an overcoming (überwindung) of, the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic tendencies of thought up to that point. It subordinated all to the creative power of nature. Spinoza, the great radical (very alt) Enlightenment thinker (shunned in his own time—being also, uncomfortably and confusingly a Cartesian) put it exactly correctly when he used the formula God or Nature, staking out a field of understanding that was both monistic in a sense but all the more radically pluralistic all the same—for which the philosopher Deleuze was to coin the paradoxical descriptor “pluralism = monism”. (Deleuze died by jumping out of his apartment window in the mid 1990s, a fate with which some in the UFO field can unfortunately empathize, for here there be monsters to ravish the souls of the feckless.)

On the science side of the problem, we have the longstanding mind/matter thing to get over, and that science is in fear of its own position as a subject—that it is in search of a itself as a subject. That at some point the very fact of its own subjectivity and positionality within the objects it studies cannot itself be thematized, on pain of becoming merely subjective. It is a fear. Many of the theoretical gestures in the humanities, post-Kant and post-Hegel, have been reminders of this ongoing problem, this gap or blind-spot. That at some point that blind spot becomes a plank in the eye of science, and that it constitutes science’s immanent limit, a horizon it is incapable of recognizing and which therefore constitutes its decisive end. We also have this problem, not unrelated to this other (more fundamental and more meta-theoretically challenging) one, of science’s own passage into dogmatics, getting caught, as Prof. Knuth would likely well put the point, at its comfortable local optima—forever circulating around what has come to work and which existing experiment seems to confirm. Getting to something new always entails a moment of the radical rearticulation of the very “subjective” constitution of the sciences, as the passage from one paradigm to another can never be a fully “rational” one: that an element of plain, naked, free imagination is required to make the leap across the divide. There is no possible way to rationally develop one paradigm into another; they’re just abandoned (as Borges said for writing: at some point you just stop, and give it up). Change is exogenous here, an “externality” that can’t be internalized, let alone “proven” from within one paradigm. How could it be? The repudiation itself must come from somewhere else—the anomaly is always uncannily whispering from this liminal zone of indeterminateness, both inside and outside of the categorial tool-kit. It’s the Gödel’s Incompleteness thing (which turns out to be as much of a spiritual problem as it is a practical and theoretical one). Thus, science (or any other system with which we’ve grown comfortable and gotten accustomed to) has a problem changing its tune.

It is out of love, then, that we seek harsh, trenchant critique everywhere and for everything (and here I follow the 20^th century philosopher Deleuze, who offered the axiom of love as the initiating moment of authentic critique). Yeah, and the pivot on which it turns isn’t itself going to be subject to this critique, for that’s the point at which we have to make a judgment call, to make a leap, to accept a (motivic) premise, putting the shovel down somewhere specific and concrete, and moving on. If we also call this into question, we collapse back into a relativism of the mere possible, and secure for ourselves the cushy job of mere museum curator, putting (in radical distanciation) objects all ‘round us which titillate and soothe (so what’s for dinner Marsha?—wow, isn’t that thing hanging on the wall over there interesting? Wait, why am I yawning so much?). Truth, method and the whole thing with intellectual (both practical and theoretical) work is always at some point engaged. It’s “subjective”. That’s what many fear: “engaging the phenomena” (which sadly is becoming this stupid cliché out in the mediatic spheres of influencer exploitation) … a little too much engagement. Really. It’s a special fear, I think, for academics in particular, for to engage—what is this but a kind of involvement that hearkens a subjective wrapping up of oneself in something from which we we best remain apart, detached, distant, persisting in estrangement? Part of what it means to be an academic (thoroughly embedded within modernity) is to determine an object of study based on principles and methods one has been trained to employ—things not wholly constituted out of one’s own concrete, particular (peculiar and idiosyncratic) subjectivity, one’s own personality. But one must stand apart—one cannot be so subjectively engaged as to identify with that object of study from its own side.

Here, then, is the real lesson (if only learned obliquely, from a sideways glance) of the Encounter at Skafish: “modernity” is characterized by this odd gesture of distanciation or estrangement—stepping back from an “object” (this backwards movement constituting the object as such), to look at it somewhat from afar, as if one does not participate in it in any relevant way in one’s capacity as thinker. (The philosopher Gadamer reminds us of the curious etymology of ‘theory’, with origins in the ancient Greek theorein—a stepping back, or away from. Is there a whiff of fear here? Or, of safety—thanks the gods I’m not part of that!) As Heidegger realized as well, the gesture of modernity is this gesture of re-presentation, of setting up something out there such that the thinker stands over and against the “object” with their thinking in here. It’s the Cartesian gesture, which in many ways was the opening shot across the bow of what would thereafter have to be called the “premodern” (the line of demarcation between subject and object being the line in the sand constituting the point at which modernity begins). The theme of the premodern was identification not distanciation or estrangement: standing essentially with, rather than apart from. The formula that typified this way of thinking was “as above, so below” (the formula of ancient “Hermeticism”, a theme which has thankfully emerged in the comments to part one of this groggy UAP romp up, like Daedalus, near to Sol): you, and each part of each division of the cosmos, are (is) but a microcosm. In Foucault’s eerily beautiful imagery (which echoes the Indra’s Net scene in the forgotten but hugely influential Buddhist text Avatamsaka), pluck on one filament of the web of the “order of things” (the structure that changes form as modernity comes about), in the premodern cosmos: and all things vibrate and resonate. To anthropomorphize, then, is to draw that which is outside apart to a point very much within and part of, to recognize that what is outside is already really an extension or implication of what is in here (though not, of course, thematized as such): the other is really the self, or rather, that like for the Homeric cosmos, there is no sharp distinction between the two and hence no division (self/other) as such.

Besides this (Hermetic) resonance, the all-in-all standpoint of the premodern, resemblance was the order of the day—yet another standpoint disrupted by the modern. “At the beginning of the seventeenth century,” writes Frederic Jameson, “Foucault [shows that] during the period that has been termed … Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer no longer the form of knowledge but the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions.” (The Marxist philosopher Jameson is quoting here from Les Mots et les choses, Foucault’s Order of Things, and this in Jameson’s own illuminating study of modernity: A Singular Modernity—Essay on the Ontology of the Present, p. 58.)

Modernity, that is, served to invert and reverse these relationships of Hermetic resonance, resemblance and similitude, finding (in its earliest gestures in the 16^th and 17^th centuries) first a self in alienation from the rest of the order of things (if only an alienation built on doubt): the gesture of Descartes, with “I think, I am,” was to posit first a lonely atomic self standing apart from and before everything else in skeptical ponderance on all other things (even, paradoxically, God—although the great Paul Tillich has a wonderfully existential reading of this that almost brought me back into the fold of the religious; but that’s another story which at some point we should. Tillich’s the guy, btw, who actually coined the now-frequently-and-overly-used term “ontological shock,” as Jeff Kripal patiently reminded us at the end of Sol). Or (and this was Foucault’s point of departure, rather than his own countryman Descartes) the metaphysics of suspicion of the imaginal—perhaps the specters populating and haunting my experience are just the imagination, the all-too-human going out for a walk, tripping me up as to what’s real (the human faculty for imagination now counterposed to the real)? Yet, if we don’t first atomize the self or the “thinking being” as Descartes does at the point he ushers in “modernity” (in a philosophical-scientific register), then we can see that “animism” (but the word is a very modern invention, no doubt) is inescapable. As Feyerabend and many others have pointed out, in the Homeric world what we call the psychological “ego” was a very much rather permeable thing, with no absolute boundaries. Like when you fall drunk with spirits or strike bliss with the herb: boundaries evaporate, and a kaleidoscopic abundance arises (in my toking I found a synesthesia of musical resonances accompanying all things, like an audial aura that creates symphonies where there were things, people, words and voices—was this “the world” which in my mundane life I was too “drunk” to see? Had I with the entheogen seen the chaos that evolutionary programming holds at bay? I wondered on that night as the ‘60s hippies passed on masterful joints which joined me with the cosmic.) With no metaphysics of suspicion from which to wonder whether “it’s all in the mind” you got to wonder whether the drunkard then actually moved towards a place the modern could consider “sane”: if the cosmos was populated everywhere with spectral resemblances of imagination, similitudes that ambiguated self/other, then intoxication could produce a break of a different sort, the “schizoid” world of Descartes as a drunkard’s dream (“schizoid” is how the existential psychiatrist R.D. Laing, part of the “antipsychiatry” movement, described Descartes’ world, the disorienting cosmos of modernity—though of course for us, it is very much our orientation). From this standpoint of identification and egoic permeability, what, then, does a “god” mean? Spirit? Life? Were the ancient Greeks, with their pantheon of gods, anthropomorphizing? That would be a falsification of the internal standpoint adopted by them (or by the indigenous, for that matter)—for the very term presupposes the kind of estrangement and distanciation which is utterly alien (!) to their mentalité. Yet, it is complicated since ancient figures like Euripides (with the gesture of theorein, of removal and commentary in the “chorus”) or Socrates (with his counterposing truth or logos to myth) laid the groundwork for modernity (one of the themes developed by Nietzsche in his kaleidoscopic philosophical-historical interventions).

Is this not, then, the real problem the more “skeptically” minded have with some (maybe all) “ufologists”: that they are “believers”, which means: those who so thoroughly identify with their subject that they are incapacitated, they are no longer properly “modern” in the sense that they cannot maintain a neutralizing and objectifying distance, keeping passionless and lacking in that “enthusiasm” which debilitates the mind because, when “enthused,” one is subordinated, yielding to a supposed reality which one now no longer has the capacity to see from a standpoint not already presupposing its truth? But to then reach for the “animism” (as an inescapable anthropomorphism—something we’re stuck with) of the indigenous would be too easy, for “they” are already allowed to identify with their subject in ways that circumvent the usual channels of the acceptably religious for us moderns. It’s only in religion that this logic of identification gets to persist as a valid epistemological and ontological modality for moderns—valid in the sense that one affords to the religious the freedom to believe, but so long as that belief doesn’t become (or threaten to become) the basis for law or social governance for all (in our Western liberal democratic systems, in any case). Yet, then, if we allow the religious to believe, and practice their belief, then why not the UFO “believers”— scientists perhaps among their ranks? Ah, there’s the problem! Can scientists be in a position of subjective belief and still be scientists? Can we count scientists among the “believers”? Hell no, because they bed down in an illicit domain of overlap, a nether zone of illegitimate, unholy, obscene coincidence: belief (UFOs are real and present) plus “science” (let me objectively inquire as to what there is to believe before I “believe”—and then maybe not!). Suddenly, the scientists cannot have a subjective engagement with that which they study.

One wonders here, however: is the gravitational theorist forbidden a “belief” in gravity, lest in their study they fall into the irrational encumbrances of enthusiasm for their subject—a belief that tarnishes their scientific productions, their “objectivity”? Was it not precisely because of their subjective engagements with gravitation (as a phenomenon) that the great scientists of it were led to their theoretical endeavors—that gravity came to interest them enough to look into it more closely? The apple falls, after all, and hits you where you think—and one accepts that it does. One “believes” before one studies (to butcher St. Anselm somewhat: credo ut intelligam—I believe in order to understand, and therefore to know). Ahh, but isn’t “belief” in something like gravity itself obscene—for what is there to disbelieve? Isn’t it simply given in a way that the UAP are not? Or is there an even more uncomfortable fact embedded in this torturous logic, which in fact provides the passage from objective scientist to subjectively engaged “believer” after all: that all belief is provisional, an as if procedure that is allowed until further notice: gravity isn’t really “known” theoretically before the phenomena, accepted on the faith of one’s own experiences of some collection of phenomena grouped in something like a systematic fashion, are subjected to closer analysis. After analysis, revisions and updating are possible—a reevaluation of the original image with which one began their theoretical endeavor to know. So, there is the pre-scientific “image” of things; then there is the post-scientific determination of their structure. And when one moves from the one to the other, there is no longer the guarantee of a coincidence between the two: what one had thought to believe in, so as to study more closely (“gravity” or “matter” or “UAP” … or whatever the f**k you want to focus on) vs. what one comes to know on the basis of closer analysis. But here, belief is no longer relevant, or even particularly functional. There is a sense that gravity is still unknown, perhaps more so after it is studied more closely—at least in terms of what it “is”. We just have to learn to live with some combination of hand-waving and structural (spacetime) analysis (for gravity, that is). Whether it’s a particle like we think is the case for the other “fundamental forces” of nature, or some kind of ontological beast called a “field” (or whatever): there’s a sense in which we don’t really know. Does it matter? What about matter? The same combo deal is in place: maybe this, maybe that. The “scientific image” (to borrow from Wilfred Sellars for a moment) dissolves the “manifest image”. From the standpoint of the scientific image (insofar as there is one), we have to learn to stop worrying and just love the structure, always until further notice (if we allow for scientific change—the historical dimension, which is something the physical sciences are still uncomfortable with and which poses yet another challenge as we fumble around in modernity looking to go beyond it).

Wow—I’ve forgotten where I am in my review, as I allowed (no doubt to my readers’ collective and exasperating chagrin) this digression to run impressionistically wild (perhaps it’s the haunting force of Bach’s organ works which I’ve set as my music of choice as I struggle to draw my travelogical reflections to a close). Well, finding my place on the map given to us by the Sol team (the star chart as it were), I see that I had veered off into a discursus on the valences of (pre)modernity (there’s a title for a paper that’s probably been written a thousand times already) at the precise point where, tired, grogging, standing for my sins, we had taken a short break from Saturday morning’s journey through the reaches of government bureaucracy and the ways the shit could hit the fan in the disclosure moment where all is revealed—or not, as the considerations of Dr. Grove so wonderfully complicated for us. After the “fraught relationships” panel, and break, we got two curious ends of a disclosure spectrum—the one exploitative and corporate, the other an exercise in cautious (but very eloquent) bureaucratic flourishes in puzzlement over just what the f**k happens “if an ET presence is confirmed”.

My notes are somehow utterly blank here—perhaps because I drew a blank, looking on in confused awe at what the first speaker was actually, factually saying (if I heard him right): that he (a Jonathan Berthe, described in our missals as an “AI Entrepreneur and Robovision Chairman”—now also board member with Sol) was excited by the prospect of “exploiting”—his words, thankfully cutting to the goddamned chase, already—the funny business UAP seem to be up to with inertia (which I’ve elsewhere described as that some UAP seem to move as if their mass was kinematically irrelevant). Again if I heard him correctly, he was thinking aloud as to just what extent these inertial tricks could increase the efficiency and productivity of the manufacturing of things like computer chips—how all sorts of industry could be benefited quite radically by such a technology of inertial manipulation. All I thought was, “lol—at least he’s honest about the exploitative possibility here; I mean, someone’s gotta make some real dough out of these UAP at some point”. What about the space brothers thing? Isn’t capitalism, and the exploitative impulses that keep the whole thing in motion, supposed to be undermined, dang it? Where is that old time the religion thingy, too? And then I realized that I’m just being naïve: Weber wrote Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic (the Protestants apparently showed that greed and God go really well together), so we can imagine a future sociologist looking on the titular religion that grew up around all things UAP, seeing a too-easy alliance—Tic-Tacs to Microchips: Post-Greed Exploitation & The Uapological Work Ethic. Or some suitably monstrous academic title awaiting its future composition.

I guess what Berthe’s talk demonstrated was that it’s all here: capitalist exploitation meets scientific exploration meets incipient uapological religion meets theoretical problematization of modernity meets bureaucratic management and “controlled” disclosure meets … was this landscape the one which Sol wishes to coordinate or organize, for which it wishes to be the center of gravity (as it were)? So, while working the government disclosure and “transparency” angle (which was Mellon’s characteristic focus, in an agile and personal and probing essay he’d penned a night or two before, after scrapping his original talk in light of the presentations up to that point—Saturday afternoon, which saw the reappearance of these brilliant rainbows); the scientific methods and instrumented observations angle; the more speculative and theoretical angle (both humanities and STEM); the religion and experience-of-UAP angle; … we’re also gonna get the capitalist exploitation angle thrown in there as well. Is that for good measure? Well, I suppose it’s just the thing you do with knowledge, right (especially with the knowledge coming from a place like Stanford): why not capitalize? You make companies (with innovative tech—no matter from where it’s derived: crashed craft or Plato’s Heaven) for the benefit of human beings, for society and all that—and maybe get to be successful and at least comfortable money wise? That’s a reward—a meritorious gesture baked into the system so that we don’t all fall into a place of lazy complacency, just learning and living for the hell of it—knowing just because. There’s that whole “instrumental reason” thing that we moderns are good at, right? (That’s thinking wrapped up in exploitable means, which in turn governs the ends we come to care about.) It seems like a possibly unstable, maybe even ultimately untenable admixture for a Foundation to attempt: government & policy advocacy; academia and the free pursuit of knowledge of things UAP; private corporate interest (very much special interest) seeking an explorative inroad. The specific power structure which Sol ultimately (or, worse, effectively) begins to work out, given by its leadership (Boards and Councils and whatnot), could go very wrong: with academics getting involved in the lobbying which ultimately feeds into the toxic competitive logics of the private sector corporations taking the information or knowledge and repurposing it. Sol, as a nonprofit, surely can’t do all of this itself—but can it provide moral and material support for the whole kit-n’-kaboodle so others can? (Is a nonprofit even legally allowed to engage all these areas simultaneously?)

Now of course, how much can one read off of the menu of an organization’s inaugural event? It’s ostensibly and simply a “symposium”: a gathering of many quite different minds. But there’s the purport of the event, and what it signals phatically to the community: here’s what we’re all about. And it seems clear, abstracting away from the content, what the Holy Trinity of the Sol is: (1) government and policy wonking (which includes the transparency-with-the-intelligence-community track); (2) academics doing their thing (which includes the hard sciences and the softer ones, plus the humanities tracks); and (3) industry/corporations getting a seat at the table somewhere, somehow and for some purpose (besides just supplying needed funding and support—a practicality that can be neither underestimated in its importance, nor exactly poo-pooed too much in an age of increasing resource and bandwidth scarcity, monies and funding being the great bandwidth expander).

Berthe’s talk was entitled quite directly: “Unlocking the Future: Navigating UAP Disclosure for Global Prosperity”. You gotta get the “we’re all gonna be prosperous” thing in there so that somebody can stand up and be the prosperity prophet. (Who’s Bible are we using?) As the talk stunned me dumb (as if I hadn’t proven to be that already in the many places where worms have eaten lacunae in my notes), Chris Mellon rose to the dais with his talk, entitled “What if an ET Presence is Confirmed? The Potential Consequences of Disclosure”. As I suggested, it was delivered with that candor from a public servant that makes you like them, abstractly speaking. But Chris does actually strike one as a really likeable guy—even if he’s someone who orbits a rather different kind of sun than your planet does. Sol’s got Chris on their board too, I think. Or at least he seemed to be closely linked with their leadership.

Well, as if government didn’t have enough of a presence here, in an event devoted to a subject that’s had lots of it (indeed, “fraught” puts an understatement to it), we were treated to a half hour or so of the inner workings of the “Chuck” McCullough the 3^rd mind, the lawyering behind Grusch. (Grusch closed the event with a bit of a cringy, undergraduate-essay-y and therefore somewhat overblown paean to transparency and the existential—ok, ontological goddammit!—ramifications of disclosure and/or official (?) contact. I mean, contactees have gotta be nonplussed, right? It’s earthshattering, upheavaling, and all that. (But don’t we get that it’s all so overdetermined by not only the densely populated Hollywood imaginarium, but also by the never-ending drumbeat of YouTubing interviewees saying it’s gonna be shattering, etc.—we’re drowned by ceaseless expectations … and shit, I’m running out of parentheses with which to permit my nested asides.).)

My notes again appear blank for what McCullough actually ended up saying during his dialogue with Skafish (it was interview-style), but it all seemed general enough, a high-altitude tour through some of his experiences (not of course detailed case information) from when he was an IG-IC working at an OIG on the Hill (an “oigoth”?). I think he might have said (obligatory?) that he wasn’t an experiencer, and that maybe he cares just about the truth of what people like Grusch have to say. And he didn’t try to make a case for or against it—just that he supports his client and by some kind of lawyerly implication, trusts that what he’s saying is really truthful (that the there’s being said are there are like really there). And what else can one do if the fact remains that most if not every last utterance of relevance for UAP remains classified—but advocate for declassification? (For the nth time please think about the objective epistemology of this situation, as Ralph Blumenthal himself outlined very clearly in a panel discussion he did along with the other luminary UAP journalists I’d invited to the event I organized back in February 2023: all the relevant info is classified, so none of it can be independently verified apart from a source saying it’s so; but if that’s the case, then logically we do not independently know, or have a means of coming to know, what the hell is there if there’s anything at all. From ignorance and non-access comes, well, more ignorance and no further access. Period. We’ve got trust, yes—and Grusch probably ain’t lying. But we can’t verify the claims for ourselves, with publicly—which is to say democratically—available evidence. In other words, if there is a religion being born out of the words falling from the mouths of those like Grusch, and other ostensible “insiders” who are anything but of the charismatic religion-founding sort (one wonders about Elizondo, however), it’s a kind of theologico-academic-political Gnosticism: a religion of special access, hidden gnosis, and initiation, and all of the lovely psychosocial dynamics that go along with that. Science ain’t mixin’ well with all that anytime soon—hence the internal contradictions that are possibly showing themselves within the Sol fabric.)

After another delightfully delicious luncheon downstairs in the reception hall area, it was time for “Working Through the Shock: Social and Religious Perspectives”. The first talk was this academic I’d mentioned before who does something like “space psychology” but which is more properly or generally positioned within something called the psychology of exceptional or extraordinary human experiences. In space, everything would seem to be extraordinary—not least of which the mere fact of one’s being there to begin with. A violent insertion back into the cosmic womb, a reverse birth of sorts, getting flung closer to our precious (but no less temperamental) Sol and the astral dust it attracts and produces from which we all, organic bags of water and protein goo alike, derive. If only Nixon could go to China, is it the case that only a modern could go into space (prepped for all the silence and airless vacuity, with the necessity of the technical to get us and keep us there—fortunately keeping us distracted as we merge not so much with the cosmos as with that switchboard of salvation glinting like an X-mas tree Santa has populated with what you need to just stay alive)? Yeah, seeing the Earth that you’ve left behind, the “overview” effect is quite a jolt (we’re told). And that would seem to be, psychologically anyway, the condition in which a UAP experiencer is put. Hence, the two (space and saucer shock—sorry for crass alliterations here) make a perfect pair for the psychologist of the existentially perturbative to take a serious look at.

Prof. Iya Whitley (whom I’d thought was related to the esteemed writer, also present and vigorously asking questions, even queuing to do so with everyone else!) is the “Director of Centre for Space Medicine” at University College London (UCL). As she made reference to the many cinematic portrayals of psychic shock on encountering the nonhuman intelligent other, she seemed to have herself emerged from a Tarkovsky masterwork (did he ever do anything else?), working through her subject with that patient and quiet but no less enthusiastic objectivity that’s the special preserve of the psychologist. I found her talk utterly fascinating, even a field of insights not only into the mind in traumatic “ontological shock” (there I said it), but also, perhaps, into the inner nature of the phenomena—insofar as we can work backwards from effect (the psychical consequences of UAP on their percipients) to cause. (Yes, that is perhaps not advisable—but either UAP are intrinsically related to the psychical effects they bring about, or they are, like anything else, an independent but no less motivic cause for the activation of psychical/psychological processes to which the mind, for general reasons not specifically having to do with UAP per se, is prone under the conditions of a traumatic, perturbative encounter.) She looks at how and when language fails the patient when they wish to articulate the character of their experiences—or even just what the hell it was about. With only the shock and the phenomenology to go on, that narrative of what it’s “about” necessarily remains subjective—without the fact having to lead us down the (perhaps fashionable) path towards worldview upsetting. Before we move towards the speculative, the metaphysical, it’s worth just examining what is happening at the psychological level. In the trauma, as language simultaneously fails and the mind is muted, despite the whisperings (in language) of supposed beings or entities … perhaps in this breakdown alone lies a clearing, an opening the structure of which gives us the key to understanding if not UAP but the nature of the relationship between UAP and their percipients. Again, since we only have the percipients and their reported experiences “in the lab” as it were, the uncanny remainder captured in a trauma of (if we’re honest) unknown origin, any deduction regarding UAP remains conjectural. We have two halves of the phenomena—the one contained in the many instrumented observations preserved in the “grey literature”, that indicates the direction and reasonableness of our search for harder and more definitive evidence; with the other housed in the recesses of the mind, the consciousness of the witnesses who happened to encounter UAP and have an “experience” that seems to rise above a simple sighting of an otherwise mute aerial apparition. To join these data systematically requires not only the kind of probative depths of the psychologist of the experientially extraordinary, but also the deeper grasp of the physical presentation of these enigmatic becomings (and let’s not forget the structural portrait that was begun in Knuth’s presentation—surely not the first, but a recent reminder of how the physical sciences ought to be approaching the subject). Yes, if there is a more obscure psycho-physical character to these phenomena—and the many gathered at Sol danced and circled ‘round this gravitational attractor, to be sure, with the religious dimension or the necessity of reexamining the structure of indigenous thought reached for in, I must admit, an honest searching for ways beyond the epistemological dilemmas (the blinding strictures) of modernity (I do essentially agree with the necessity to critique modernity, the technoscientific, and seek out viable theoretical-conceptual alternatives—here I am completely on the side of Dr. Skafish, despite my specific critique, perhaps only preliminary, of the position he adopted during the symposium) … if there be this more obscure psycho-physical character to these phenomena, then we have at least the start (surely no more than that) of a way forward for grasping what this (perhaps more fundamental) relation could be. But given the complexities of each side to the problem (the mind and the matter sides, as it were), and given that not only this dichotomy itself is problematic, but that the mind side alone, quite apart from the complications introduced (ostensible to be sure) by UAP-human encounters (whether showing “high strangeness” or not), is already theoretically and practically challenging to a science that comes anywhere near human consciousness and the rich experience of qualities (“qualia” in a more technical register) which are anterior to any scientific, political, social, economic act. We are first human, and conscious, before we are any of those things—and the very fact alone of our consciousness (something so intimate yet so analytically alien to our sciences) perplexes the sciences because of this anteriority—the fulcrum around which our knowledge and understanding turns but which cannot itself be brought under its categories.

Looking at my notes (such as they are—they seemed to increase in detail in proportion as my grogginess abated and as I settled into an actual seat in the main hall), Dr. Whitley concerned herself with at least two more subjects beyond a consideration of the event of language’s failure during extraordinary experiences (like the ones that crop up during time in space): the phenomenon of intention, and how this can be shockingly important for human perceptual awareness (of one’s surroundings—being so powerful that, if distracted, major and anomalous elements can be missed entirely, as the “gorilla” experiences seem to demonstrate); and proprioceptive perception, where we must take into account the larger totality of human sensation, the whole-body sensory field: that beyond visual there are the other human senses, ramified throughout the body, that constitute an important perceptive field of awareness (the limit of which is, we should note, philosophically and theoretically contested: how far beyond the confines of the biological organism does perception extend?). Here she referred back to Nolan’s injunction to “sample the ecosystem” (here, meaning the entire proprioceptive field of awareness—the PFA), lest one fall victim to a kind of theoretician’s or analyst’s inattentional blindness, the equivalent of failing to see the gorilla in the room because one’s attention is elsewhere. Though this blindness is a first-order psychological fact under these conditions of attentional distraction (that attentional shifts induce perceptual blindness to otherwise obviously anomalous and shocking elements of the perceptual field), it is no less important to worry about it occurring at second-order as well. In any case, what I found intriguing was the implicit suggestion that the human-UAP encounter could be approached by looking at this more general PFA, looking at the encounters from a variety of non-visual sensory modalities, and indeed by examining the role proprioception could play during a human-UAP encounter. (Though we should pause to note that in contemporary neuroscience, ‘proprioception’ as a technical concept is often given a circumspect gloss; for example: “Proprioception, or kinesthesia,” writes J. L. Taylor in the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience in 2009, “is the sense that lets us perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body. It encompasses a complex of sensations, including perception of joint position and movement, muscle force, and effort. These sensations arise from signals of sensory receptors in the muscle, skin, and joints, and from central signals related to motor output. Proprioception enables us to judge limb movements and positions, force, heaviness, stiffness, and viscosity. It combines with other senses to locate external objects relative to the body and contributes to body image. Proprioception is closely tied to the control of movement.”).

We very much live in a world (in civilizations) dominated by visuality (much Western philosophy is so dominated—sometimes explicitly, as with the philosophy of Plato, though at its apex visuality, along with its concomitant in the word, seems to fail in a kind of mystical finale). But what about the ear? About touch? Smell? Taste … the entire range of proprioception that has its root in our whole body (the somatic totality, if you will)? From this perspective, the whole body is the sensorium, as it were: an extended sensory field of awareness. It’s this proprioceptive dimension to our sensory awareness that allows us to be oriented in the world as we are, to coordinate, and move, and navigate around. Is there something important to be discovered about how UAP might interact with the human at this whole-body level? Are there cases where proprioception is involved in interesting ways?

Finally, there was a third subject which Dr. Whitley broached, related to her work on attention, perception, and proprioception—and that was the problem of communication. This is of course more speculative, since it must proceed on the assumption of there being some intelligence to communicate with, but as a theoretical matter it is surely germane: the evidence such as it is (and despite its incompleteness) does fairly clearly suggest the operation of some form of intelligence behind (maybe identical with) UAP in some of the best cases, and so it’s reasonable to query how communication might work—what complicates it. Here she points to Tarkovsky’s masterful retelling of the Stanislav Lem story Solaris, ostensibly a love story, but in fact a story about the uncanny, elusive and evasive interactions between a human scientist and some form of nonhuman intelligence (perhaps even a planetary one—certainly one that evades the ontological-methodological individualism that pervades the epistemology of scientific and even humanistic scholarship, certainly affecting its categories and concepts). It is perhaps one of the best essays (insofar as it has rich conceptual content to read) on the subject—far surpassing the overly explicative and conceptual film Arrival (IMHO), which deals more with the speculations of time travel and the psycholinguistics of a species which has a relativistic experience of time and space (the language of the octopus-like NHI portrayed in the film is—and this is a brilliant aspect of the story we should acknowledge—itself temporal, changing in time in ways that our language of frozen letters or symbols does not, which adds a richer depth-dimension of meaning and syntax not possible with literally static linguistic structures like sounds, words, and sentences. Yes, our languages change over (great periods) of time, but the temporal modulations are not themselves constitutive of the meanings in the ways this NHI species’ language seemed to require). Perhaps it’s time to learn UAP (referring to Sagan’s famous observation, Dr. Whitley reminded the audience that some dolphins learned human, but no humans learned dolphin—perhaps trite, but important to keep in mind all the same).

I will allow (no, force) my review to fast-forward and pass quickly beyond Prof. Paul Thigpen’s musings on whether (in some sought-after “post-disclosure” world) the discovery that there are more (and perhaps “smarter”—at least in Avi’s estimation) “kids on the block” than the human will perturb, significantly and decisively, the Christian religion (theologically or otherwise). The very, very, very, very (…, very) predictable answer, one overwhelmingly overdetermined by the dogmatic presuppositions of any religionist whatsoever (I mean, who is going to get up there and ever countenance the total end to one’s dogmas? To one’s religion? It’s a stupid idea. Ain’t gonna happen—that’s why its religion, right? It has immunity from such speculative upheavals … which is why it was from no surprising, earth-shattering discovery from Nature that Nietzsche recognized the death of God as an immanent happening, not an event brought about in the comfortably neutralizing boardroom of theological-philosophical disputations) … the answer was—surprise!—a resounding NO! They are all God’s children, too. We are all God’s children. Right. If only it were that easy. In any case, it was a tedious and pretty much useless exercise in dogmatics. I suddenly felt like I was back in (Catholic) grade school, mindlessly mouthing catechistic formulæ. I mean, it was all pretty much predictable once you know the dogmatic axioms (which is probably why the Medieval Schoolmen were so enamored of Aristotelian logics: it kind of made your expositions neatly compactified, so that you could browbeat the unlearned and unbelieving into theological submission, allowing them to evade the deathly peace of The Rack with only this mere conceptual acceptation). In any case, I almost disappeared in that soothing realm of astral travel that had left me wanting more when I awoke groggy and complaining of lack of sleep that morning, as the rainbows prepared their joyful apparition for the symposium-goers (though only Minister Maguire and I, whilst we stood for the first few talks—I for my recent sins—were the only ones who seemed to take much notice, this as Gallaudet et al. took the stage and awed). At some point the theological tedium was over (having been entitled “They Are All God’s Children: Insights [(!)] from Catholic Theology on UAP and Nonhuman Intelligence”—for the record, there were no insights that were not already predetermined by theological presuppositions), and we found ourselves traversing richer, more comparative scholarly shores—freed from the trappings of Christian dogma to think about, perhaps, trappings of a more varietal sort.

We come, finally, to Prof. Jeff Kripal’s closing talk, characteristically toned with a bit of conceptual provocation: “‘To Shoot Down Souls’: Some Paradoxical Thoughts on the UFO Phenomenon from a Historian of Religions” (though in the talk he described himself as a scholar of comparative religion—both seem apt). The talk, the last in the Sol Foundation’s inaugural lineup, closed the event, but not before a final word from a “Special Guest Speaker” (unlisted, but rumored—correctly as it was to turn out—to be David Grusch himself). Jeff’s talk was appropriate as the closing lecture, pondering, as he does, over the entire range of what the UFO phenomenon has manifested in its fraught history (or rather, not in its history, but in the fraught history of our dealings with UFOs—which is how the historian of the phenomenon Dr. Eghigian accurately describes the history here).

In Kripal’s estimation, there is a distinct reason why the UFO phenomenon has manifested in such a fraught history of human dealings with it (or “them” as the case may be). Not unrelated to Dr. Skafish’s position, which takes “modernity” as its point of departure (reaching—in my view too quickly—for the thought-worlds of indigenous peoples to aid us in our faltering attempts to understand the what or why), he takes it that what’s missing today is an adequate theory of the imagination. In the history of “modernity” such is indeed a point of contention, debate … even a term of derision or condemnation. What is ‘imagination’, where is it located, and what is its signification—metaphysical, moral, theological, practical, political? Today perhaps the default assumption is that it’s from whence art—mere artworks—derive, being the locus of a power of creativity neither metaphysical nor theological but practical and constructive (even if creative): taking from what is given to human beings in their experience, taking the aethesis of our sense-experience (what we see, hear, … what we feel and sense) and producing something out of preexisting materials. A very mundane act that nevertheless, in some merely aesthetic-conceptual sense, acts to elevate, inspire, move and arrest in beauty. But to imagine is just to think by other means: to work from the material and the process of the mind. For Kripal, however, the imagination has yet further valences that would exceed the comforts of modernity’s presupposition of individualism: to wit, that whatever else the imagination is, it’s wholly contained by and derivative from one’s separate mind, local and located—the Cartesian reservoir of thought and our other cognitive powers. Yet Kripal would deny this methodological individualism that would keep imagination local and all-too-human. If already the human (the “self”) is non-Cartesian, nonlocal—somehow far larger than what modernity (and in particular, what the technoscientific paradigm) would care to accept—then the imagination is something more than mere aesthetic play of human creativity. It, perhaps, is creation, creativity being ontological or cosmological, not (merely) personal and micro-logical (as it were). What if we flip (a term he favored in a recent text) the ontology of modernity, Jeff seems to be suggesting (here and elsewhere in his oeuvre), and take imagination as fundamental, rather than first either matter or mind (the twin ontologies of current and past philosophies)? If the cosmology (and perhaps cosmogony) of the universe is imaginational, then the UFO phenomenon is but one of its many faces—“valence” here being a literal operation of the mechanics of the imaginational cosmos Jeff is suggesting. I understand that Jeff is hard at work on another text in his “Impossible” series, and this new edition would suggest an alignment with the metaphysical visions of a philosopher whom I consider (personally) to be the greatest of the Enlightenment: Spinoza. The cosmos Spinoza thinks is one grounded in neither mind nor matter, but, like as what Jeff is proposing (at least this is my preliminary gloss), an “infinite substance”—the formula for which Spinoza gives in Latin as Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature). This infinite substance is infinitely creative, containing within itself an infinite number of modes of expression (Spinoza says “attributes”) of itself—only two of which we know: “mind” and “matter” (one might therefore say that modernity has simply become trapped in an unreasonably constrained corner of Nature’s imaginarium, although Spinoza himself somewhat mysteriously thought that the categories of matter and mind were the only expressive modes to which we, human beings, have access). In this infinitely creative play (a kind of madness we might call deus ludens—the playing god, not unlike a certain Hindu term, “lila”), a Nature ever surprising, we find indeed an unsurpassable creative volume of imagination.

What is objectionable and jarring to the ear of us technoscientific moderns is that this seems to lead us to mere anarchy, existential chaos—play, after all, seems to slide into lawlessness, caprice … the very opposite of what it was and is that science, after all, has discovered. We are not gods; our imagination creates not worlds but sandboxes of no consequence (or of consequence only for our collective sandbox: science is rather ontologically consequential, even if we put aside this Spinozist philosophy of imagination I’m attributing to Jeff). Not so, of course. Whilst Nature (or God, if you prefer—Spinoza was neutral: either was acceptable) is indeed infinitely creative, in its productions order emerges. It might be a changing order (with no fixed rules), but rules there are—perhaps “habits” are better for Spinoza’s own philosophical lexicon, as the text where he undertook its detailed exposition is called Ethics, which stems from a word Aristotle fancied meant “habit”—all the same. The paradox, perhaps, is that being embedded in such an imaginational matrix, the human (the very local) participates in this madness, playing along with the deus ludens. With this gesture towards the imagination, and along with the Spinozist foundation guiding the way, Jeff seems to open us up back onto a kind of world we’d thanked (the previous) lord we’d left behind: a magical world, a world shimmering with resemblances, resonances … the cosmic web linking the local and the global, the micro with the macro. It is, perhaps, a synthetic philosophical vision, grasping both ancient Hermeticism and the radical Enlightenment philosophy (underappreciated, under-studied and mostly ignored) of Spinoza.

But Jeff did not assume his lectern that evening to preach a new philosophy; he is not a philosopher in the professional sense of that term. He was there to remind us that whilst UAP or UFOs do have an undeniable physicality, a matter of measurement, meter, mass, and spectroscopy, there is this other dimension (an otherness in many senses) too which we ignore at our epistemological (and intellectual) peril. What to do with it—with the strangeness (both high and low)? The para-physical or paranormal aspects that academics only can whisper to each other about in hidden circles, if they want to take it “seriously” at all? It’s why Jeff called the UFO a kind of “hyperpresence”—his three or four themes by which we should attempt a more serious interpretive undertaking for UFOs. Though I have myself pushed back in different ways against Jeff’s readings of the UFO phenomenon (my particular issue is with the incipient gnostic elements of the cult of the UFO that Pasulka wants to document as an emergent religion; Jeff thinks of himself as a kind of modern gnostic, but I think that a bad thing), what is brilliant in Kripal is not necessarily systematic but in the clear suggestions, the many valences (some more ambiguous than others) he affords the UFO. And his patient (he is a very patient thinker, I believe) refusal of the clichés of academic scholarship: “religion”—well, maybe but don’t forget the stupidities of religion and its falsifications; “science”—well, there is that, too, but don’t forget it operates in an unreasonably constrained quarter of Nature’s imaginarium; and so on. Each are partial, each inadequate in very specific (and historically locatable) ways. Each falsifies as it reveals. If there is a “paradigm shift” required in order to gain a better understanding of UFOs, then, as with all such shifts, part of what we have to be prepared for is that the very phenomena themselves—and the concepts we’ve tried out on them—change as well. In other words, if it sometimes seems that Jeff isn’t quite talking about the UFO, then that’s because in this passage from the old to the new, the phenomena themselves alter, fracture, change, and metamorphose. That is something hard to accept: for the religionist, the scientist, and the ufologist alike. Maybe not for the philosopher. Here, in this radical gesture of difference, searching for a better form of understanding, I stand entirely with Jeff. I’m ready to cross that Rubicon. And it means alienating many.

But, I still have a foot on the other side, the left bank. We are still faced with the multiple challenges the UFO presents to each of our existing academic disciplines. From a certain point of view, the “UFO” per se may dissolve, a class of phenomena that fractured the landscape of modes of scientific, religious, political, social, and historical analysis. “UFOs surely continue to confound us,” writes Garrett Graff in his recent book, “in part because we know so little about the world around us. As much as we now know … it’s worth remembering how new (and still evolving) much of that knowledge truly is.” But what is harder to countenance is that we are not guaranteed a recognizable historical continuity from one way of understanding to another. There’s no straightforward accumulation of knowledge here. Concepts and the phenomena they grasp may change beyond recognition or acceptance by later generations. Yet, we cannot skip the history, the long hard work that’s needed to do on the problem. So, while in a philosophical register (which even Garrett seems pointed towards) we might look towards a future where the problem resolves (or more likely, dissolves), more practically: there’s lots of work to do. We’re just not there yet.

But just where are we, with Grusch? Well, we’re always stuck at the bus stop, awaiting the arrival of our coach, the one which never seems to come, as we look, impatiently, down at our iWatches. For him, the fallen angles are all around us, stowed away from public view, worked on to discover, from thing to theory and process, how their wings work. We wait. Can we please have the goddamned evidence, already? Yes, yes—but don’t you remember: “trust but verify,” the earnest formula of one of your numbers?

“David” as his friends call him was indeed our “special guest speaker”. But he landed not on the solid material floor of the upper event hall of the Engineering Rotunda where we were all gathered. No, he landed on the screen. A simple Zoom call would bring the event to a close. Perhaps thankfully, Grusch’s actual talk was a statement, one written in undergraduate-y overblown terms (“since the beginning of time itself, man has pondered the meaning of…” kind of a thing; as an arrogant asshole Ph.D. holder, I winced—but it was a quite sincere piece of writing, all the same, I recognized—in penitent absolution for the sin of my arrogance). Nothing much, then, was said. It was all a pass—to the audience, who predictably queued up to have a chance (fleetingly rare) to query the Primary Whistleblower (I almost wrote “witness”—but as Leslie Kean herself has corrected on many occasions since she, with Blumenthal, broke the story last summer, Grusch is a whistleblower not a witness). The questions were all, it seemed to me, predictable in that they edged towards what he has said, over and f***ing over, cannot be disclosed. Not especially to you, puny civilian unclassified mortals—not even if you brought your own SCIF with you down from your Napa Valley ‘shroom commune (“shroomune”). Please. Just. Shut. Up. And. Wait. No unclassified information is available publicly that would confirm (or contradict) the testimony; all of it is classified. How many times do we have to repeat what exactly this means for you and me, who’re very much on the outside of this whole messy, governmental insider affair? Piles of Roswell files and books on this or that “crash retrieval” program and the witnesses thereto will not change the fact that this particular testimony is publicly undecidable, and unfortunately may remain so. In a previous post, I’ve worked out the basic logic. It ain’t changin.

But what will change is my tune, for now we have—finally—come to the end of my impressionistic reflections on the Sol Foundation’s Inaugural Symposium 2023. I hope I haven’t been glib. Well, if I was, hopefully it managed to titillate you in ways a fancy bathroom might not be able to. In any case, all chiding and kidding aside: as with almost every academic conference/event I’ve ever attended (including the ones I’ve myself organized), we had a mixed bag. Great talks; bad talks. And everything in between. Worrying is the admixture we had circulating about—it wasn’t strictly academic, and neither, too, seems to be Sol itself: government and intelligence was one quarter; academia another (ostensibly the bent of the thing); venture capitalism & the corporate (tech) world yet another. Can all three be housed under one big happy Foundation? And not just for any run-of-the-mill issue: it’s UAP—UFOs—fir chrissakes, fraught, epistemologically and ontologically liminal, metaphysical and material, a story, at the end of the long, long day involving “genuinely mysterious events that always remain somehow just beyond solution while becoming impossibly tangled in a web of wacky human failings and yearnings” (that’s Garrett again, quoting ufologist James Mosely). Do you wanna put all that shit together, shake it up a bit, throw in some decent funding, give some opportunities here and there, and see what the hell happens? On K street? On the Hill? While I fully and unapologetically support the academic scholarship and the science side of things at Sol, I fear this other stuff: the excess (in my view): the almost designed-to-get-entangled political side (sure, “policy” writing is all good, but you have to have advocacy for it, and get somebody to pay attention—and that means you gotta do influencing); and the corporate side, with its penchant for the exploitative (I mean Berthe was just honest: what’s in all this for corporate benefit? You gotta gimme something more than conceptual pyrotechnics and “experiencers” here.).

Ultimately, it’ll all depend on management, on organizational structure so that the center can hold. But what is that center, finally? If Sol is the gravitational center, what are the planets? Or will its gravity be as indifferent to objects as is our own sun—whatever is gravitationally receptive will be pulled into its orbit, unified just because rotationally bound? (Money, power and politics are certainly powerful attractors, to be sure—and selectors.)

It began to rain softly that evening. Reading my manuscript closely, I found the schedule had listed a “second reception” at 6:00 pm—just after closing time at the Symposium. I was excited. Another basement party! I milled around some, finding some colleagues and friends whom I might join down there for the reception. There’d be wine, cheese, dips, … all the accoutrement of the modern reception. Enthused, I didn’t expect it to be dinner, so my friends and I also planned for a follow-up dinner after the reception. Great. Sounds like a plan.

Gathering my things, I went down, via the stairs, to see if I could find a nice lonely spot that would again fill up with the throngs as thirsty as I was for some post-event analysis. Well, dear reader, the “reception” still remains an utter mystery. Only empty chaffing dishes were piled onto likewise empty tables, in the entirely empty bowels of this Engineering Rotunda. Maybe the reception was upstairs, in a room that (I fabled in my imagination) existed but which was hidden from view. Not even finding that, I had to signal the others that we had to move to Plan B: food elsewhere. But maybe there’s a reception back at the Hotel?! Seems reasonable, I thought, so back I drove a few of us, after walking back in the soft rain to my (free!) parking spot somewhere in the back of the lot.

It was a star trek: roads blocked just where we needed to turn, we had to navigate down, ‘round and through various parts of campus just to go around the sports thing that was going on that evening. Getting to a decent parking spot, after letting everyone off at the Nobu, I soon discovered that, neither here too was there going to be a reception. No reception! Maybe it was a speakers-only affair—again at an undisclosed location, as with their dinner the night before? Well, even so, it was time to get that dinner underway. Scouts were sent ahead to find something that was neither crowded nor closing anytime soon. Success was found at a southeast Asian place (I think it was food from Myanmar—can’t quite recall). We ordered, ate, and chatted to the point where we’d all had quite enough for the evening. Saying our goodbyes—always that bittersweet sorrow—I walked, feeling somewhat lonely, back to my parked car under a now-clear and moonlit sky. I felt the alien hum of things around me—including my fellow man. This young kid had skidded on his skateboard to avoid me, and seemed to have spilled his drink some, which he then proceeded to blame me for, requesting a replacement. I lol’ed onward, half expecting to be stabbed or something—before realizing he was reeking of the weed, which tends to subdue more than agitate (well, at least that was my working theory as I pressed the “unlock” button, rather than PANIC on my car clicker fob thingy.)

Again falling asleep to flickering Netflix, or radioactive reels, I found myself on Sunday morning awake too early—but with passably enough sleep. I was supposed to get lunch with people from the Symposium (a vague plan, to be sure), but I felt this odd something developing in my upper chest and had the intuition that I should just get the hell on the road and go home. I had a five-and-a-half hour drive ahead of me, so if there was gonna be any funny business healthwise, I’d better be home.

So home the wagons went, through some arrestingly beautiful back roads near lakes and reservoirs, mountains and hills showing themselves off in that lovely Californian landscape sort of way. A stubborn cough developed, which was noticeably unproductive. When I got home, it seemed to become more persistent. Uh-oh.

By Monday, it was clear: I was sick. A friend texted: Covid. Yep. By the next day, the fevers started. I fumbled through junky drawers to locate those at-home Covid tests. Yeah: I was Covid-y too. Which makes Part II for me. Fun.

Well, from the printed words you’re reading here, and the time frame from then until now, you can surmise that I recovered fairly well (though I’m always hesitant to make such confident declarations—my last Covid bout had me, two months later, hospitalized with pericarditis). Well enough to record my wild (at least in my mind) and extravagant and ebullient and all that kind of a romp through all things ufology, UAP, techy, political, academic, and Ivy League (no wolfmen, I can say—however, except the entity that was emergent from my coughing fits).

So, with this, let me finally sign off.

Thanks for reading.

Pax Vobiscum.