My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena — especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was taking a firmly materialist assumption of mind. Mind exists in matter, and cannot exist apart from it. But even as I was putting that argument into words, I felt uneasy, even (dare I say) “dirty.” I wasn’t sure if I actually believed what I was writing.

Do I actually think mind can only be material? Do I really not think that consciousness could have any kind of existence outside of physical neurons or circuits? Why do I think this?

The part of me that adheres to such a view is the product of Enlightenment rationality and psychology. Science has long known that the brain was the seat of thinking. The study of anatomy and observation of people with brain injuries since time immemorial had made clear the brain’s special role in thought—if only as some kind of transducer. It is possible even the ancient Egyptians knew about the special functions of certain of the brain’s lobes. By Freud’s time, even though neurons were not yet understood, he could create a theory of how the brain was essentially a machine for thinking. (The metaphor he used was hydraulics, because electricity was still new.)

Now, more than ever before, science is able to actually show us “thinking” as it occurs in the brain. We can map out what kinds of thoughts, what parts of our mental life, arise from activity in which areas and involve which specific circuits. It is even possible to record the firing of individual neurons and know their function in the organism’s behavior. From a rationalistic point of view, these advances put the material basis of thinking beyond question. They make it easy to dismiss the notion that a person’s mind, memories, sense of self, etc. – their “soul” – could depart the body, or survive beyond the decay or destruction of the body. The brain is more than a transducer, it seems: It’s where thought is born and lives, and where it has to stay. This turns many who study the matter of the mind into atheists, because it so easy now to dismiss the notion of something like the soul.

Why, then, do I feel like some kind of resentful spoilsport when I do dismiss it? I have no counterargument or alternative explanation for the self-evident materiality of mind, so why do I feel a twinge of guilt when I argue against psychic phenomena or disembodied thoughts in a blog post? Why do I feel like I have diminished myself ever so slightly? I’ve written before about the “rudeness of science,” but I don’t think my reaction was just guilt at being impolite or arrogant at dismissing what other people believe. I really think it is because this rationalistic/materialistic part of me is just that – a part of me, but not the entirety.

“Diminishing oneself” is a real thing: It means pretending to be smaller than you are, crouching down to fit inside some cramped box – a box that is an identity (such as “rational atheist”) – rather than standing tall within the fullness of your possibilities as a human. This kind of “crouching down” means restricting your vision, narrowing your gaze to only include some segment of what lies within your larger purview or field of awareness. Because any such identity box is just an idea, it’s apparent limitations don’t really exist, so to make them convincing to ourselves and others they must be “mimed.”

I think we are all, even the wisest of us, to some extent like mimes doing the “trapped in a glass box” thing. It’s more than just playing or acting out our social roles; I’m referring to something inner, an inner sense of oneself. A banker who thinks that his identity as a businessman exhausts the possibilities of how he can see the world or himself, is really just miming himself. A depressed person who keeps trying to fit every fact about their life into their diagnosis is likewise caught up in a mime act. Same with any identity: Black, White, Woman, Man, Gay, Straight, Christian, Jew, Atheist… When I, even in the privacy of my own head, put on the pompous airs of a scientist who can explain why the soul doesn’t exist, I am really miming a constraint in my thinking that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. I’m pretending to be smaller or more limited than I really am.

There are certain “glass boxes” we have a hard time questioning. Science, because it is so huge and persuasive, is one of them. But the more a thing seems self-evident, the more it should be questioned and challenged. In this way, we make ourselves bigger. (That kind of fundamental skepticism should help sharpen science, too.)

All this is to say, I suppose, that I’m going to try to be more open minded.

“We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions.” –Jacques Vallee

I’d be the first to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. But of all things paranormal, I have the hardest time bringing myself to believe in telepathy and other “psychic” phenomena. Yet such phenomena are a mainstay of alien contact and abduction reports, and have led many researchers—even rigorously scientific ones, like Jacques Vallee—to accept them as an important aspect of many UFO experiences.

The problem as I see it is this: Thoughts take the form of neural activity in the form of activated associations among groups of neurons that encode basic symbols, concepts, and schemas. Effectively, thought at its most basic level is like a language, built from the sequential activation of arbitrary linguistic signs and private and idiosyncratic associations, cascading through our neural architecture. This must be true even of universal or “archetypal” symbols. Thought, in other words, is not something vague and ‘airy.’ It has to be instantiated in material form. This makes me skeptical of the notion of an immaterial “soul” as well. (Spirit is different, but that’s another story.)

Because they arise only in the form of a private language, there is no possibility of thoughts “traveling” outside the brain other than through some form of physical expression (words, gestures, pictures) using symbols. Even a simple symbol could not directly enter the brain except via sensory stimulation—a word or graphic image.

But even if actual thoughts cannot enter or leave an individual’s head, there is another possibility that could, in theory, explain many of the experiences reported by UFO contactees.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a technique now being studied and used by neuroscientists and psychiatrists to induce very specific changes in the cortex. Through rapidly alternating magnetic pulses delivered to the scalp, weak electrical currents can be generated in the brain, and depending on the area stimulated, it can produce sensory effects such as flashes of light and other hallucinations, enhanced creativity and genius-level thought, enhanced perception, religious experiences, as well as distortions of time and memory. It is easy to imagine that, with greater refinements, TMS or something like it could be used to stimulate specific areas of the brain to produce hallucinations of entities and voices and even more specific types of experience.

Unusual electromagnetic effects are very commonly reported in connection with UFOs, and high-power electromagnetic fields are generally regarded to be somehow the basis for their propulsion. What if these objects, or their inhabitants (if there are inhabitants), deliberately or even inadvertently stimulate the brains of witnesses via some sort of remote TMS? It could theoretically explain common aspects of the experience like amnesia, missing time, light effects, strange physical sensations like floating, motor paralysis, and frightening or benevolent entities that take a variety of forms that are sometimes totally bizarre but other times culture-specific or “archetypal.” Not to mention the sensation of psychically receiving thoughts or verbal commands in the contactee’s own tongue.

Hallucinations are very convincing, and seem to arise externally, even though they are produced within the individual’s cortex. TMS could theoretically explain how such experiences could be remotely stimulated but still be the unique product of an individual’s private symbolic and associative language. It would also potentially explain why abduction experiences often involve exactly the experience of sleep paralysis but include a richness of other experiences that are not covered by that rubric.

Again, such effects could be deliberately induced as a form of thought control or manipulation, but they could also be somehow an inadvertent byproduct of proximity to some kind of electromagnetic field having an unrelated purpose like propulsion—who knows. TMS seems at the very least an intriguing possible explanation for the commonality yet uniqueness of abduction experiences, and for “psychic” phenomena, without having to invoke actual thought transferrence and other of the more hard-to-believe aspects of the UFO experience.

Or maybe I’m just being a pedestrian materialist.

The weird and sort of shady neighborhood of the blogosphere I haunt was lately abuzz (a-twitter?) about a new book called The Big Brain, by neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s an account of the evolution of the large human neocortex. All well and good. But the reason the book is making news is because it has revived interest in a paleoanthropological anomaly that has been forgotten since the first few decades of the last century: The Boskop race (or species) of hominids that supposedly inhabited part of South Africa for about 20,000 years.

The Boskops were thought to be remarkable because their brains were 25-35% larger than those of modern humans, indicating a significantly superior intelligence. They also possessed pedomorphic (childlike) facial features: large eyes, small mouth, etc. Pedomorphia in human evolution has been taken as indicating “advancement”: Adult humans look like overgrown baby chimps, the same way the Boskops looked a bit like overgrown baby humans. It suggests they were smarter, perhaps “more evolved,” than us—that is, more removed from our nearest great ape ancestors.

According to those early paleoanthropologists, this population of baby-faced, big-headed hominids went extinct only about 10,000 years ago. That’s an eyeblink ago—practically within cultural memory.

Lynch and Granger have already been criticized for ignoring the fact that subsequent paleontologists discredited the existence of Boskops altogether. These people were not a separate species, those critics argued, but were just a subsection within the normal human range of variation. The paleontologists who first described them were actually just arbitrarily separating them from the normal human remains found in the same region. Boskops were held to be a statistical fiction, in other words, and not paleontological reality. And thus, until The Big Brain, the whole Boskop question went into the dustbin of discredited science and was forgotten for 80 years.

I certainly don’t know enough to give an opinion on the science behind Boskops, but the whole question of a possibly more intelligent variety of human that once walked the earth alongside Homo sapiens sapiens is really, really interesting. It has already been suggested on a number of blogs (including Cabinet of Wonders) that Boskops, if they were real, could be the evolutionary origins of “alien” Grays: The big brains and big eyes certainly suggest such an idea. It’s fun to think about, if you like thinking about such things.

But what interests me as much as the possible hominid, “cryptoterrestrial” origin of aliens is the nature of our resistance, or even abhorrence, of the idea of more advanced hominids sharing our planet. I don’t think it can be chalked up merely to an inferiority complex. I think it has to do with a major cultural—and especially scientific—imperative of our times: to think of the human race as singular and undifferentiated when it comes to intelligence. The very possibility of slightly more intelligent hominids reopens the door to seeing mental endowments as unequally distributed, the basis of scientific racism.

Past centuries were dominated by racist thinking. Variations in intelligence between human groups were accepted as obvious fact by the European imperialist societies, and this idea legitimized all forms of exploitation and injustice. The scientific racism of early anthropologists is still a bitter memory in academe, linked inextricably to the worst excesses of European Fascism. No one wants to go down that path again. As a result, there is a tacit imperative in the social sciences to chalk up apparent differences in intelligence to variation in culture and environment. Whenever a maverick scholar bucks this convention and puts forth a view of racial differences in intelligence, as the authors of The Bell Curve did in the mid 90s, it causes a furore. No ink is spared in the effort to discredit the idea.

The political reasons are sound and obvious, and the scientific argument that all modern humans have the same innate cognitive endowment is one that I have always been persuaded by. But I’m open minded enough to think that political correctness could be biasing the science. Scientists absolutely do not want to face the possibility that the world’s peoples might not be equally endowed with mental ability. We may not want that to be true — but preferring a certain picture of reality doesn’t necessarily make it so.

If something like the Boskops were found to be real, it would reopen a whole ugly can of worms that we’d like to keep shut, for all kinds of reasons. Could their fate in 20th century anthropology have been linked to the basic reluctance to consider a scalar rather than categorical nature of inherited intelligence? To answer such a question, I think it’s useful to consider the other cryptoterrestrial that enjoys equal disrepute among modern scientists: Bigfoot.

I’ve often suspected that the scientific establishment’s dismissal of the possibility of “less intelligent” bipedal hominid cryptids is related to its resistance toward the idea of more intelligent beings like extra- or crypto-terrestrials. Imagine what would happen if it were to be established that there were slightly less intelligent hominids living in the world today: not slightly less intelligent in the sense of apes or dolphins, but slightly less intelligent in the sense of children or impaired adults: that is, within but at the extreme low end of normal human variation. What if they turned out to be essentially primitive humans, but lacking our linguistic capabilities and thus having inferior cultural capacity?

Chimps are sometimes said to possess the intelligence of 3-year-olds. What if there were creatures in the forest that basically look like big hairy versions of us, and that possess the intelligence of 8- or 10-year-olds?

No one wants to face such a possibility. While we concede an amazing range of biological difference throughout the animal kingdom, living humans are the exception: We don’t want any dangerous gradations, any continuity with lesser or higher forms that would make the distinction blurry. We need a buffer between us and our nearest ancestors. Sasquatch would obliterate that buffer.

The political dangers are real, not only because it would pose an ethical conundrum about what rights to grant Sasquatch, but because it would by extension reopen the question of intelligence variation in human populations. Are blacks perhaps really inferior to whites (as The Bell Curve argued)? Could they be somewhere on a continuum between whites and Sasquatch? It’s an abhorrent idea, but proof of Sasquatch would reopen the door to that kind of thinking.

Are Asians perhaps really smarter than everyone else? Are they a missing link between blacks and whites, on the one end, and alien Grays on the other? Again, the discovery that there are advanced cryptoterrestrials among us, a smarter offshoot of humanity, or even a past race of super-gifted South Africans, would, again, encourage such ideas.

I suspect that keeping that door shut is part of the reason scientists and other respectable people don’t even allow the “cryptid” question to be raised, and why it is consigned to certain disreputable neighborhoods of the blogosphere.

[Note (1/17/10): A reader has informed me that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues (September 29, 2006). I had not been aware of Tonnies' post when I wrote mine, but he surely deserves credit for coming up with the analogy first.]

“I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society.” –Jacques Vallee.

“People love to think. We are all detectives. We love to observe, we love to deduce. It is great to pay attention. We have a lot of fun this way.” –David Lynch

“The aim of [contradictory] commands from the viewpoint of a control system is to limit and confine. All control units employ such commands.” –William S. Burroughs.

One of funnest cat toys money can buy is a laser pointer. I got mine for $9.95 at my local pet store. It’s truly the lazy man’s pet toy: You can lie on the couch, watching TV, and idly move the pointer in your fingers, and totally mesmerize and control animals all the way across a room. The tiniest flick of my wrist causes the fascinating little red dot to instantly dart 2 or 10 or 20 feet away from them–but of course, I refrain from doing this until they make their final leap. After all, I want to retain their interest. My steady hand keeps the apparition within the parameters of believability to the feline brain, and I thereby sustain in their furry heads the illusion and hope that the red dot is a solid object that they might actually be able to catch if they’re just quick enough.

Now, it doesn’t actually take long for the cats to sort of figure out what’s going on. When they’re not chasing the dot, they’re looking at my hand–they somehow know that the dot racing across the floor and up the walls isn’t real. But no matter how clever they are, cats just can’t override their instinctual programming to chase a quickly moving object. They go after that point of light until they get completely tired out or until I get bored of the game.

Sometimes the laser pointer serves a more practical purpose having to do with social control. When the cats have snuck into a closet I don’t want them to be in, I deviously use the irresistible laser pointer to draw them out, quietly shutting the door behind them when they slink out to chase the red dot. So you could say that, besides giving me entertainment (and my cats, much-needed exercise), my little $9.95 laser pointer is a highly useful (and cost-effective) tool for deceiving and manipulating members of a less-advanced civilization.

The past three decades have seen a proliferation of UFO types and UFO experiences that surpass the “flying saucers” of the forties and fifties both in their variety and in their strangeness. Bizarre craft of all shapes, sometimes changing in shape, able to disappear, pass through solid objects like trees, piloted by entities of all physical descriptions, leaving strange physical traces, and associated with “fourth kind” close encounters—abduction experiences, psychological trauma, missing time, physical marks and illness—as well as even stranger phenomena like crop circles and mutilation of livestock, are now the norm in UFO reports.

I have argued in this blog, rather unoriginally and based on preliminary musings, in favor of a variant of the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH, originally put forward in the 1950s by Daniel Keyhoe: the notion that UFO sightings and encounters represent the presence either of alien visitors or, more likely, visitation by automated and self-replicating constructs (von Neumann probes) created by far-advanced civilizations. But after reading more on the history of UFO sightings and UFO research, including the bombshell volumes I and II of UFOs and the National Security State by historian Richard Dolan and the classic Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallee, I am coming around to the view that the UFO picture can’t be fully explained by the ETH.

I still think the statistics of the matter dictate that our planet and our civilization (and all planets and civilizations) could well be being monitoried by the von Neumann probes of advanced and possibly very ancient ETs (see George Dvorsky’s musings on such probes). Such probes, however, might be invisible to us—they could be microscopic or even molecular in scale, for example, or employ forms of stealth that would preclude us ever knowing they were here. At least some of the UFO phenomenon, being both more visible and, in a way, less incredible technologically, could have little or nothing to do with ETs or their technology.

The view that UFOs represent an intelligence much closer to home has been put forth by Vallee and by lately deceased blogger Mac Tonnies. They may originate here on earth or else be somehow psychological or interdimensional in some way we cannot yet fathom. Their suspiciously hominid appearance, their theatrical and often B-movie behavior, their travel in clumsy and large ships that seem to crash with great frequency, and their mysterious need for cattle genitalia or human genetic material, suggest a phenomenon simultaneously more bizarre and more mundane than visitation by super-advanced beings.

The main popular alternative to the ETH has always been that UFOs represent advanced human technology, kept “above top secret” by their creators, likely the US government or some secret group within the government. But critics of such a view sensibly point out that the behavior of UFOs, their incredible maneuverability and speed, their ability to change shape, defy gravity, even become physically insubstantial, just renders an explanation of advanced military propulsion technology too farfetched. The idea that such technology may be reverse-engineered from captured extraterrestrial craft, or given to us by ETs, only begs the question, and brings us back to the ETH as the ultimate explanation for UFO sightings and encounters.

But there’s another possibility—the one suggested by my laser pointer and my cats’ fascination with it: Despite their solid physical appearance, many UFOs could be holograms.

Antigravity propulsion is a long way off, but holographic technology has been around just about as long as the new breed of UFOs—the illuminated boomerangs and triangles, the shape-shifting vessels, and the alternating solid/insubstantial light formations that now seem to dominate the UFO literature. The real-world holograms most of us have seen in museums and on credit cards are actually illusions of depth on a two-dimensional solid surface; the far cooler kind, volumetric holography—that is, three-dimensional projections of images in thin air, like R2D2’s projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars—has been only a matter of science fiction until recently—or so Wikipedia would have us believe. But various means of producing volumetric simulations of three dimensions have already been developed and demonstrated on a small scale. It is not at all farfetched to think that such technologies have already been developed and tested on a larger scale, in secret, by the military or by defense contractors.

The simplest method of volumetric display projects lasers onto a physical substrate, sort of like the way the beam from a flashlight is only visible in fog or smoke. According to Wikipedia, “Several static-volume volumetric 3-D displays use laser light to encourage visible radiation in a solid, liquid, or gas. For example, some researchers have relied on two-step upconversion within a rare earth-doped material when illuminated by intersecting infrared laser beams of the appropriate frequencies.” I don’t know what “two-step upconversion” means, but “rare-earth-doped material” in the form of an airborn gas or powder does call to my mind some of the physical traces, like mysterious radioactive powder, found in the aftermath of UFO landings.

The latest approach to volumetric display doesn’t need a substrate at all. Wiki goes on to say (and please bear with me) that “Another technique uses a focused pulsed infrared laser (about 100 pulses per second; each lasting a nanosecond) to create balls of glowing plasma at the focal point in normal air. The focal point is directed by two moving mirrors and a sliding lens, allowing it to draw shapes in the air. Each pulse creates a popping sound, so the device crackles as it runs.” The interesting part is this: “Currently it can generate dots anywhere within a cubic metre. It is thought that the device could be scaled up to any size, allowing for 3D images to be generated in the sky.” (My emphasis.)

Check out a cool picture of this thin-air holography–albeit on a small scale–here.

The theoretical ease of using ground-based or, who knows, dirigible- or balloon-based laser arrays to produce believable images of solid or semisolid, astonishingly fast and even mutable aerial vehicles suggests holograms as a possible explanation for many UFO sightings. Some of the descriptions and photographic evidence produced both by the Arizona Lights event and the recent wave of sightings in Stephenville, Texas, for example, seem like they could be consistent with volumetric holography.

The purpose could be testing: They could be tests of laser projection systems ultimately meant to be used in warfare. One can imagine that projecting believably menacing holograms of nonexistent bomber squadrons, for example, could be useful for subduing an enemy in a war zone. Or projected UFOs may be used to create an ET cover story for more mundane, secret projects—who knows, perhaps involving abducting people and mutilating cattle. After all, the black helicopters are never far behind. It could be a combination of both of these things.

The uncertainty itself opens the door to the social control and manipulation Vallee warned of in his books. Like my cats chasing a laser dot, we may be watching and chasing laser projections, simultaneously thrilling to their mystery, the exotic possibility that they may be actual visitations by beings from distant stars, and also suspecting that there’s an all-too-human hand responsible for the spectacle. Is the Wizard real or is he just an Air Force engineer behind a curtain?

Police Chief Wiggam chides his nosy son in one Simpsons episode: “What IS your fascination with Daddy’s forbidden closet of mystery??” Part of the fun in any mystery is holding multiple interpretations simultaneously in mind; it’s also what tends to immobilize us or keep us glued to our seats as passive audience members. The same way cats can’t resist chasing a moving object, humans can’t resist playing detective. We love mysteries, so the contradiction between the two plausible interpretations of UFOs (they are real/they are fake) may be the strongest tool of our manipulation. It puts us in a double bind, and the result could be a heightened receptivity to social control.

The long history of tantalizing information and disinformation propogated by government agencies suggests not merely a “coverup” but, rather, an interest in perpetuating the ambiguity of UFOs, keeping both possibilities alive in the public consciousness by burying the signal in noise.

How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin given to UFO stories in the media (see Richard Dolan’s essay, “How to Marginalize an Astronaut”). Dismissive reactions by the media are often attributed to the long history of government or military interference and manipulation aimed to discredit the phenomenon (and thereby keep it out of public consciousness, other than as a joke). But I don’t think it is necessary to always invoke “the government” to explain the belittling of UFOs and ufology.

Although I have no doubt that government manipulation has occurred and still occurs—Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State, Volumes I and II, document it extensively (and depressingly)—I suspect the reasons the mainstream media and even just “people on the street” fail to take the subject of UFOs seriously is somewhat less sinister: the plain human unpreparedness to confront troubling philosophical subjects. People are quite happy accepting that UFOs may be real and that we are not alone, but they don’t want to have to think about the implications.

It’s a normal way of dealing with big and traumatic subjects. Death is a good example: We all can accept “intellectually” our own mortality, but most of us go about our daily lives pretending it won’t happen to us and not facing squarely its significance. Whether it is because it is upsetting, or because we just don’t feel philosophically up to the task, or because we are just lazy, we don’t think about death except in the abstract unless and until we are forced to. More often, we make jokes and belittle the subject. Gallows humor.

The probable existence (and possible presence) of much-more-advanced or intelligent beings is perhaps not on par with death, but as worldview-altering truths go, it is not too far from the top. Consequently, busy people deal with it the way they deal with other philosophically complicated matters they really don’t know how to confront squarely at the time—they laugh it off. Symington, to his credit, acknowledged later that his flippant news conference about the Arizona Lights had sort of this motivation.

Frustration at this apparent dismissiveness inspires ufologists to want to shake the public’s lapels, but they should recognize that people are probably more affected by the subject than they let on. Ordinary people just don’t want to have to get serious, then and there, in public, about something they are not prepared to get serious about.

Even the most rationalistic and empirically minded people are fundamentally governed by nonrational principles such as aesthetics. Like the rest of us–though they may not acknowledge it–even “hard scientists” are guided in their inquiries and in their interpretations by what feels most elegant and beautiful and right.

It is hard not to appreciate the elegance and beauty of the standard SETI picture of extraterrestrial civilizations: They are distant, ancient, and serene. “Contact” will take the form of radio signals sent years or centuries or millennia ago “across the sea of space.” It is a picture I like to call the “scientific sublime,” and Carl Sagan was its great prophet for a generation of young would-be scientists. Every Sunday morning we were glued to PBS, watching Sagan sail his “ship of the imagination” to the stars and explore the “intricate machinery of life,” and we felt inspired by this vast cosmic vision and the weirdly inspiring sense of the insignificance of ourselves and humanity.

Freud wrote of the “oceanic feeling” that stimulated religion. Sagan was a kind of prophet of science-as-religion; you could get that oceanic feeling from thinking about space and time and the incredible complexity of nature. (The recent “Symphony of Science” remixes of Cosmos and other classic science programs are nice reminders of this.)

In other words, the cosmos was, in Sagan’s picture, like God—a God we could actually believe in and celebrate because he was essentially indifferent to our tiny affairs. Throughout his career, Sagan was highly dismissive of UFOs, even though he acknowledged that it was statistically probable the earth would be visited by extraterrestrial explorers every 20,000 years or so.

I suspect this cherished sense of man’s insignificance in the cosmos is at the root of many scientists’ dismissal of UFOs: It simply violates their sense of aesthetics. It seems like a B-movie version of a state of affairs (“we are not alone”) that ought to be far stranger, far more awe-inspiring and serene. And it feels distressingly (and dangerously) human-centric, flying in the face of the wise and ethically inspiring cosmic vision Sagan and other proponents of SETI preached—the earth as a vulnerable tiny blue speck in the vast cosmos.

Other intelligences, in this view, should be far, far away, not buzzing around our planet like gnats. Alien minds should be contemplating the incredible intricacy of nature, the mysteries of existence, amid inconceivable monuments of glass and stone, not furtively spying on our army bases, molesting our livestock, and abducting suburbanites. An ET presence among us feels cheap and tawdry, deflating that sublime sense of distance and scale.

The “UFO movement” (to slap a label on something that is highly diverse and varied, I realize) tends to contain a lot of highly human-centric assumptions. Almost any interpretation of the phenomenon assumes that humans figure in the plans of higher beings, or that they want something from us, or that they are intensely interested in us. If abductees are to be believed, aliens want to do things with, or take things from, our bodies, or they want to breed with us; perhaps they “need” our genetic diversity, or want to control us by creating some kind of alien-human hybrid. More optimistically, they are preparing to contact us and share their knowledge with us. Or they are here to protect us from destroying ourselves. Or they want to elevate us, facilitate our evolution to a higher, “posthuman” state, like the slabs in 2001.

In short, UFOs encourage us to think of ourselves and our planet as special—which, unfortunately, is a dangerous and retrograde perception—a throwback to the Middle Ages.

Is it possible to accept the UFO phenomenon and also somehow preserve the sublimity that Sagan preached? Some ufologists potentially do so by departing from the ET hypothesis. Mac Tonnies, for instance, thought UFOs could be “cryptoterrestrial” rather than extraterrestrial. Yet, he also liked the alternative view that they represented an ancient machine intelligence, and also blogged intelligently (and wrote a book) about the possibility of ancient ruins on Mars—more sublime visions. Jacques Vallee likewise believes UFOs may be far stranger than anything we can imagine–psychological or interdimensional entities–but that they don’t represent beings from outer space.

There may be no single answer to the UFO question. It’s quite possible or even probable that we’re not even talking about a single phenomenon. But I do think that much if not all of what we are dealing with represents beings that are more or less indifferent to our affairs or our existence. This indifference, to me, preserves at least some of the sublimity of whatever vast and ancient intelligences UFOs might represent.

[edit 1/10/09 -- The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article "Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness"]

Every few months some new psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—comes up with a new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as the latest scientific explanation, the final answer. The New York Times this week is reporting on the latest theory by J. Allen Hobson, that dreams prepare us for emotional experiences during the day, like a kind of early-morning workout.

Usually the journalist gets lots of facts wrong—in this case, he misleadingly summarizes Freud’s now-supposedly-discredited “wish fulfillment” theory as the notion that dreaming was “a playground for the unconscious mind.” Actually, Freud thought dreams were more like a totalitarian regime than a playground: Repressed wishes, like revolutionary communiqués, had to be smuggled to the outside world in code. But I’ve recorded and studied thousands of my own dreams and I know from experience that Freud was, at the very least, on the right track. Hobson isn’t.

Of all modern views of dreaming, the soundest hypothesis is that dreams have to do with memory-building. It is well-known that during REM sleep new neural connections are formed, and it is known that recently learned stuff is remembered better after being “slept on.” Yet researchers like Hobson refuse to admit the possibility that dream images are memories, simply because dream content is absurd—on their surface, dreams don’t look anything like an accurate representation of our waking experiences. The Nobel laureate Francis Crick argued that dreams are just the discharging of mental static, random and meaningless associations, essentially the brain farting. Hobson’s view, although slightly more nuanced, is just as dismissive of the notion that dream content might be interpretable. Hobson has devoted his career, in fact, to debunking any notion that dream content might be meaningful in any interesting way.

I call the latter the “literalist” view–if it ain’t literal, it ain’t meaningful. “Hard” scientists, true to the stereotype, often do lack imagination and feel uncomfortable with things that are nonliteral or irrational (like symbolism). But if they would step outside of their laboratories and stroll through the humanities stacks in their library, they might detect that there is method in dream madness. They might find ample circumstantial evidence for the real essence and function of dreaming in other fields like art and history and philosophy. I’ve come to believe that the very “absurdity” that causes scientists to often regard dreams as meaningless is precisely the clue to their very sensible, even rational, function.

To understand what dreams really are (he says oh-so-confidently, certain that future research will vindicate him), it’s useful to approach the problem of dreams from the side of memory, specifically the method used by people in nonliterate societies and in the pre-Gutenberg world to remember things they have learned: Use free association, puns, and vivid, bizarre images and situations to help latch new material onto what we already know–a method that has been called simply the Art of Memory. Dreaming, I suggest, is simply the Art of Memory operating automatically during sleep.

To read the complete argument, see “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness.”

The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence or evolution. We are not forerunners in our universe, but latecomers. I’m hardly the first to say this, but it bugs me that even people who agree with this view “intellectually” still don’t bother to seriously grapple with its existential implications.

As I’ve written here, many sensible, scientifically minded people are persuaded of the validity of thousands of well-documented UFO encounters throughout the latter part of the 20th century (and even before). But it is not necessary to accept this evidence to still accept the likelihood that we have been visited by advanced ETs. Statistics alone—i.e., the Drake equation and its variants—dictates that this state of affairs is highly likely, even if “they” have never shown themselves or sent us radio signals. ET neighbors (or their machines) will have had ample time—millions or billions of years—to master interstellar flight that approaches or exceeds the speed of light; there has been ample time for they or their probes to propogate across the galaxy; incredibly advanced technology ensures that such beings or their machines will have the ability to manufacture new probes from local materials and that such probes would be inconspicuous if they wish to be. If we have near or more distant neighbors that are thousands or millions of years in advance of us, it only makes sense that our existence and our progress as a species would be monitored.

Besides the statistics of the matter, I do accept the UFO “best evidence.” Of course, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is not the only legitimate explanation for UFOs. Other speculations include that “UFO pilots” come from other dimensions, from our own future, or that they are more-advanced hominids, “cryptoterrestrials” as Mac Tonnies called them, that live secretly on earth. (It’s not an absurd proposition: If isolated pockets of “slightly less advanced” hominids like Sasquatch exist—and it is surely at least possible—why not “more advanced” ones that have already mastered space travel and choose to remain hidden?) These are all possibilities, but it is hard not to find the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis most parsimonious, and the one that best fits with our current understanding of physics and astronomy. And in any case, other explanations would not alter my fundamental point here: We are not assuredly and perpetually, and perhaps not even now, masters of our fate. Homo sapiens is not the only game in town, and we’re way behind the curve in terms of the level of our civilization and our technology.

In speculating about “their” motives, whoever they are, I think the most parsimonious line of thinking is, again, simply to extrapolate from the present—in this case, what we know about our own scientific and security motives. Long-term monitoring of human affairs—what could be called “deep anthropology”—would most plausibly be motivated by the likelihood that humans will one day be astropolitically relevant or even a potential threat. If they are ETs, that time is surely long in the future—hundreds or thousands of years from now—yet deep anthropology would be a totally sensible insurance policy. In a millennium or so, our spacefaring descendents’ every move will be totally predictable due to the vast amounts of data on our species already accumulated and stored and analyzed. (Analyzed for patterns of which, in our commitment to a belief in free autonomous will—human unpredictability—most nonscientists would prefer to deny the existence.) Many of the best-attested UFO reports, having occurred near political centers and military bases, near space flights and missile launches, and in the context of air warfare and maneuvers, bear out such an interest in our military development and behavior.

I know the view I’m expressing will seem paranoid, although on the paranoia scale I consider myself only about a middling 5 or 6. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; I don’t think the Knights Templars have any modern relevance. And as a very minor blogger, I’m not so paranoid as to think I actually have more than about one or two readers. Again, I base my “extraterrestentialist” argument partly on the simple statistics about what most probably is the state of affairs in our galaxy.

The lack of radio evidence, cited by SETI proponents, is no counterargument: Why would advanced civilizations necessarily still communicate in the radio band? Highly directional lasers (or something else we don’t even know about yet) are more likely. Civilizations like ours that do go through a “radio phase” probably do so for just a few hundred years, or less, and the probability of “radio simultaneity” (adjusting for the speed of light, of course) is infinitesimal—precisely the lack of technological parity that dictates at least some of our interstellar neighbors are going to be wildly in advance of us. What the standard Drake equation fails to factor in is the certainty that civilizations will not arise contemporaneously. And obviously the Fermi Paradox—“if there are so many of them out there, why haven’t they gotten in touch”—a priori denies the validity of the substantial UFO evidence that they are already here. They simply have no interest in actually contacting us. Why would they?

Radio is relevant, though, in the opposite direction: If UFOs really did begin to visit in droves only in the forties (and thus that it wasn’t merely an artifact of increased air travel or Cold War paranoia), radio explains it: This is about the time it would have taken for our first radio transmissions to have reached the nearest star systems and whatever listening posts may exist in our immediate stellar neighborhood, and then for the first visitors or probes to arrive here to investigate.

I am paranoid enough to accept that “the government” has more knowledge of ET visitation than the general public, and has done its best to cover up what it knows. The intense interest in UFOs by at all levels of the government and military since the 1940s has been extensively documented by Richard Dolan (UFOs and the National Security State). The reasons for such a coverup are perfectly sensible, and they are even a matter of public record. In a report commissioned by NASA in 1961, the Brookings Institution warned that awareness of more advanced civilizations  would possibly undermine social cohesion. The report consequently suggested that government should consider maintaining secrecy about extraterrestrials should their existence become evident. The recommendation was based in part on the advice of no less an authority on intercultural contact than the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Homo sapiens really is in the position similar to that of the stone-age tribes of Melanesia and Polynesia when the metal birds of the White men first visited them early in this century. Like those tribes, many people nowadays have developed harmful beliefs in the beneficence of extraterrestrial visitors—expecting ETs to bring us boons, as in Close Encounters, or (as in 2001) to be interested in our protection from ourselves or in our elevation to a higher consciousness. In Melanesia, such widespread expectations took the form of cargo cults; in his book Messengers of Deception, the eminent astronomer-cum-UFOlogist Jacques Vallee (the basis for the Lacombe character in Spielberg’s film) writes about such beliefs, and such movements, as they already exist on the fringes of American and European society. He worries that such beliefs could be used by very earthly groups for purposes of manipulation.

As I’ve suggested, it is much more likely that extraterrestrials (or their automated machines, if that’s what most UFOs turn out to be) are as indifferent to our affairs as biologists are to the animals they study, or as CIA analysts are even to the most backward societies they monitor. Even tribal people in Pakistan could pose a threat if they acquired weapons of mass destruction, so our analysts study them with an eye to our nation’s long-term security interests. Advanced civilizations will, similarly and sensibly, always be planning for their long-term safety, preparing for any long-term contingency. Any “latecoming” civilization’s acquisition of spacefaring and destructive technology would be such a contingency.

And lest we think we’re special in posing a future threat, statistics also dictates that we are probably only one of hundreds or thousands of civilizations in our galaxy in the same less-than-enviable situation of being monitored indifferently for “future relevance.”

I think it behooves us to really think about this likelihood, and thus ponder anew our place in the universe. Because of our almost-certain lateness on the galactic scene, humans will likely always find ourselves in a position of deference to far more advanced beings. Should this depress us? Only if we continue our present beliefs about our (high) place in the order of things. Despite the sense of insecurity it may engender, realization and acceptance of this reality should supplant willful ignorance or denial. It will have to happen sooner or later that we accept we are not the center of “God’s creation,” any more than the sun or the earth are such a center. We withstood the latter realization in the Middle Ages, and will likely do so again. We are resilient, after all. I suggest that only the humbling (yet also sublime) realization of our relative insignificance in the order of things will allow our further development and evolution as a species.

ETs aren’t about to contact us, and they have zero interest in lifting us to a higher plane of consciousness so we can be their friends. It’s up to us to lift ourselves. But acknowledgement that ETs really exist, right in our own backyard, can help us do that. Coming to grips with the reality that our species is not only cosmologically insignificant but also “exoanthropologically” backward is itself an incentive to get our collective act together, get serious, and evolve.

I’ve been writing here lately about UFOs, which is something of a departure for me. But for a long time I’ve been interested in things Fortean—amazing or paranormal experiences, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, or fringe-science topics like extraterrestrials and Bigfoot—in short, things that transcend the humdrum and everyday. Part of the reason is, I’m interested in what it means when someone witnesses something (like a flying saucer or a tall hairy hominid) “with their own eyes.” Those of a Fortean bent are necessarily interested in, and are committed philosophically to, the value and validity of individual experience.

Individual experience is, in a very fundamental way, opposed to science, and the scientific method. The latter is a set of processes whereby the individual, subjective experiencer, the human, is removed as much as possible from the gathering of knowledge about the world. This presents a problem for Forteans who also, like me, consider themselves scientists.

I think this conflict is worth confronting, because it may shed light on some of the cultural fascination with Fortean subjects. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries about Bigfoot and UFOs in the last few years, and the antagonism between science and experience can be seen clearly in all of them. One of the universal elements in such films is the token skeptic representing “the Scientific Establishment” (as Peter Graves puts it in my favorite Bigfoot film, The Mysterious Monsters). This character is the one who throws cold water on our belief; he is invariably portrayed as the Enemy, the antagonist, the stubborn authority who refuses to accept the weight of firsthand accounts. In debunking the phenomenon in question, he’ll point out the susceptibility of the mind to tricks of the imagination, to social fads, and to wishful thinking. In other words, this person distrusts personal experience, no matter how seemingly sane or sober.

This “skeptic” character clues us in to the appeal of Bigfoot and other “paranormal” phenomena. It is not simply that people wish for Bigfoot or UFOs to be real in order to give some meaning to their lives, or because they want something to believe in. (Although, sure, it’s partly that—we all, on some level, “want to believe.”) The other part is this: We–we Forteans, we back-woods Rednecks, we ordinary people–are rooting for Bigfoot or for UFOs to be real because they represent the hope, the real possibility, that science could just for once lose the epistemological wrestling match against personal experience.

The “American religion,” as Harold Bloom has observed, is essentially Gnostic, based on the fundamental value of personal experience. This “religion” is visible in all our current debates over things like global warming and Creationism. This puts Forteans who, like me, are basically rational liberal agnostics, in strange company. What rational liberal agnostic Forteans have in common with conservative American Christians is a resentment of the meta-message of science: that the testimony of our eyes, and of common sense, is invalid.

No one likes to be told that the sense they make of the world and their lives is mistaken—it is invalidating in the extreme—and yet “you are wrong” is the tacit signal sent by most science, from Galileo right down to modern neuroimaging. A scientist telling me that my worldview is inaccurate or biased, that what my parents taught me at their knee is untrue, and that what I may have seen with my own eyes on a desolate road or over a cornfield is an error, is not going to win me as a friend.

This is why I cringe every time an eminent liberal humanist scientist like Richard Dawkins writes a book about why God doesn’t exist. Such prophets of science have fallen prey to the delusion that humans are governed principally by reason, and that they persist in holding unreasonable beliefs simply because they have not been exposed to the scientific evidence. But people will go to great lengths to defend their right to bear their experience. Put yourself in the shoes of someone raised in a conservative Christian community: If this apostle of science seems to belong to a culture that I am alienated from and that represents values I have been brought up to abhor, his rational arguments will only galvanize my own knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, my anti-scientism.

I use the phrase “right to bear experience” advisedly, because there is some way in which the gun debate in America directly reflects this basic rift between science and experience. Arguments against gun ownership tend to follow the same lines, and to preach to the same choir, as arguments for evolution or global warming; they point to evidence as if facts, statistics, trends, etc. were enough—that you just have to make people wake up and smell the data. Proponents of science are unaware that rational scientific discourse conjures the image of someone who “knows better” coming into one’s home and snatching away one’s ability to construct one’s own worldview out what one’s elders have tought one at their knees and, most importantly, what one has seen with one’s own eyes. It is exactly akin to the Redneck bogeyman fantasy of a liberal bureaucrat coming into one’s home and taking away one’s firearm.

The individual is sovereign in our hearts, whether we consider ourselves liberal humanists or conservative Fundamentalists. Scientists and writers who seek to popularize science would do well to recognize this fact. Though I consider myself a scientist, I hate how offensive and tactless science often is. I wish it would learn some manners. And I wish scientists would come up with some new way of talking that accepted and honored the sovereignty of personal experience as something more than simply a negligible statistic (the n of 1). Because the fact of the matter is that no one, not even a scientist, can receive science or scientific data except via a subjective, biased, personal experience. We live in our experience, and there is, in the end, no escaping it.

The point of such a recognition would not be to reawaken the whole early-1990s constructivist-deconstructionist move, catching science in unproductive loops of navel gazing and self-critique, but rather to make science more polite, more tactful, or more humane. Science will be more successful, the more it learns to win friends and influence ordinary people. In the meanwhile, scientists will continue to be cast as the Enemy in documentaries about UFOs and Bigfoot and all the other things that are not dreamt of in their philosophy.

In his writings on contemporary culture, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to invoke a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis, “the subject presumed to know.” Basically, we often project onto specific other people and institutions a sense that they hold the answers about us. It is derived from a patient’s inner conviction that his therapist really holds the answers about his own inner self but is putting off divulging it. Therapists make it easy to believe this by not saying what’s on their minds; the imagination readily projects “complete knowledge” onto them. Even if you know rationally that they don’t know, somewhere down deep we still believe it. People have always projected such a belief onto God, and now they do so with secular institutions. Paranoia about conspiracies, etc., reflects “the subject presumed to know” in a political or social context.

The UFO phenomenon is another clear manifestation of such a need to believe in a “subject presumed to know.” Somewhere I read a good description of therapists as manifesting “a freely and evenly hovering attention” to their patients, and I’d say this probably makes a perfect description of how people think of UFOs too. I am ready to admit that my last post feeds into such a belief: Basically, I’ve come around to thinking UFOs may well be real, that if so they are probably extraterrestrial, but that if that’s true, they are basically the advanced equivalent of our automated interplanetary probes–here to gather knowledge. But I think that’s all they are.

Because I think it is important to draw a distinction between “the subject presumed to know” and “the subject presumed to give a shit.” I think the interesting question raised by Mac Tonnies, about whether extraterrestrial visitors are actually sentient—to which my post was a kind of response—could be rephrased in these terms. Because I think that lurking within the concept of a “subject presumed to know” is the assumption that someone who knows, who has the answers, also on some level cares. Even their withholding of knowledge is somehow aimed at you, reflects some way in which it matters to them whether you know or not.

Popular culture surrounding UFOs tends to presume a level of giving a shit that, I argue, just isn’t present. If UFOs are real and they are extraterrestrial, they must be here to gather data and thus they certainly “know” a lot about us, but I suspect that they really don’t have any personal or collective investment–that they are essentially probes on automatic pilot, scouring the universe for data, originally created by now-ancient intelligences that are either dead or on some other plane of existence we just can’t fathom. I think it is possible, in other words, to reconcile the “small UFO” picture with a sublime vision more along the transhumanist lines advocated by George Dvorsky at the Sentient Developments blog. It only makes sense that some advanced civilizations with a thousand- or million-year jump on us would have at some point in their history been able and motivated to send out automated probes to every solar system in the galaxy.

The intelligent automation of UFOs is why they seem so autistic, so weirdly lacking in “sentience” in the way Tonnies describes. They are not planning some big contact event a la Close Encounters, any more than NASA’s Spirit rover has a plan for contacting Martian algae if it finds it—nor will they lift a single one of their four fingers to save us from destroying ourselves, if it comes to that. But they aren’t that motivated to hide themselves from us either. Such probes avoid being seen because it generally helps in gathering data, the way field biologists try to be unobtrusive when observing baboons, but in the end stealth is not an obsession.

So UFOs and their biomechanoid “pilots” are kind of like the Peter Gibbons character in Office Space: “You see, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”