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 these things 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.”

For many years I was skeptical of the UFO phenomenon. I was persuaded by SETI pioneers like Carl Sagan: It’s pretty certain that the universe is full of intelligent civilizations, but the vast interstellar distances and the vast timescales involved in traversing them made the notion of an alien presence in our skies seem (to me) silly. I tended to agree with science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, particularly the view put forth in his great novel Fiasco. Civilizations will pass through a very brief “window” of maybe a couple centuries duration when they simultaneously have the technology required to communicate with other civilizations and still have an interest in doing so. After this, they will either have destroyed themselves/exhausted their resources or will have become “lotus eaters,” having solved all problems of material scarcity and retreated into virtual worlds of pure imagination, no longer caring who else is out there. Given the limitations on the speed of interstellar travel coupled with the fact that different civilizations’ histories will be wildly out of sync with each other, radio transmissions might be sent and received, but any actual two-way contact between different technological civilizations will be a tremendous statistical rarity despite the vast number of such civilizations that must arise.

I held to the view, in other words, that we would probably never make contact with an alien race, except perhaps by eventually finding its million-year-old ruins or fossils on some long-dead planet. The alternative, Star Trek-like universe teeming with roughly similarly advanced civilizations with similar agendas seems to defy both what I believed and, really, what I thought was most awe-inspiring: a sense of profound cosmic aloneness, despite infinite worlds and minds spread across unbridgeable distances.

As I’ve come to delve into the UFO stuff over recent months, however, I’m convinced that my old view requires revision. The evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being surveyed by alien craft. They are seen all the time, by perfectly sober and sane people. I saw them on two occasions, less than a month apart, this summer, and dutifully made my reports (obviously, this was a big factor in my revisiting the whole question). They are seen particularly often by pilots, astronauts, police, and people in the military. The latter four groups, for decades under explicit or tacit gag rules, are finally starting to talk openly about their experiences. It is becoming clear that the superpowers have gathered a lot of data that they have suppressed—for the very sensible reason that political control and social stability rest on governments seeming to be in control of their people’s security and destiny, an appearance that evidence of more advanced cultures in our airspace irrevocably punctures.

First of all, before I go any further: Is the UFO phenomenon a cultural construct? Of course it is. The same way “autism” is a cultural construct. Autism diagnoses have mushroomed in the past decades, not because more people are autistic but because more people are being recognized and classified that way. If it’s on our mental radar, it will influence how we make sense of the world, and it may be a productive filter. Whether or not there are actually more UFOs in our skies now than there were ten or twenty or fifty years ago, people are now primed to interpret anomalies in UFO terms and are less embarrassed to report seeing them. This certainly makes for more false positives, and more room for hoaxes, but it does not render the phenomenon “mythical” or part of our collective imagination.

And, lest I be seen as a conspiracy theorist or kook, my hunch is that, while they have probably gathered massive and conclusive evidence that UFOs are real and are extraterrestrial, the terrestrial powers that be may not actually know much more than the rest of us have been able to piece together. They probably have all the really excellent footage and photographs, perhaps physical evidence or even pieces of alien technology—too many people have admitted to such “secret rooms” and confiscations of military footage that it seems pointless to doubt. But whether our government has made any kind of actual “contact” is another question, and I’m quite dubious. I’m skeptical that the Pentagon or the Rand Corporation really know much more than the rest of us about the motives of alien civilizations to come and explore Earth.

To see why, I think we simply need to extrapolate from our own motives. If you had an interest in a less technologically advanced, perhaps even less-evolved civilization, what would you do to learn about it? And more fundamentally, why would you be interested in the first place?

For some reason, many people who write and speculate about UFOs and the motives of extraterrestrial visitors fail to do the obvious, which is put themselves in their shoes. And by “they” I mean the actual intelligences responsible for the visitations, not the visitors themselves. I’m surprised this distinction isn’t made more often, but if you extrapolate from our own space program, it seems pretty obvious that the UFO-nauts are not the “them” that sent them. If you draw this distinction, it makes the whole UFO thing seem much less farfetched and fanciful.

Let’s assume that, if nonhuman civilizations are able to manipulate space and gravity to the extent evidenced by their spacecraft, they have probably solved pretty much any other engineering problem we could imagine—which includes bioengineering and molecular engineering problems—and thus their reasons for sending spacecraft here have nothing to do with needing anything from us. They can clearly make whatever they need—mechanically, genetically, you name it. I surely think it is naïve to think they somehow covet our genetic diversity or want to breed with us. They are probably capable of more or less conjuring all their needs and wants via nanotechnology.

This is the good news, in a sense, because if they don’t need anything, there’s no motive for warfare or invasion. Call me naïve, but I suspect that Type-III (spacefaring) civilizations wouldn’t find themselves in much competition for the kinds of things wars are fought over, and thus “interstellar war” probably is mostly a matter of science fiction.

But another of the things “they” don’t want from us is cultural knowledge: What knowledge or insight could humans possibly have that an interstellar civilization, hundreds or thousands of years in advance of us [edit: Rick Philips makes the point that the difference factor would be millions or billions--he's right.], could possibly use? We should assume that whatever our most brilliant ideas are—including the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism or The Golden Rule—they had those ideas, or equivalent ones, long before we ever did. I think that this answers one question that continues to vex many in the UFO community: Why haven’t they made contact? The answer is, there’s nothing for them to gain. The nice Close Encounters idea of interstellar “sharing” is the laughably simplistic vision of beings who are, to them, still tiny children with big dreams. (Think about it: Other than as passing or idle speculation, how many biologists actually want to or could “make contact” with the animals they study? What can baboons or even chimps tell us?)

So “they” are not here because they want anything from Earth (i.e., via colonialism, invasion, let alone “trade”), nor do they want to make contact with humanity in some tableau of cosmic love and harmony. The assumption we are left with is that they are here to gather data. And by the looks of it, they are probably systematically gathering vast, vast quantities, and may have been doing so for a long, long time.

Here is where we need to extrapolate from our own space program and realize who “they” are and why “they” doesn’t need to be the “they” that originally sent them to our solar system or our planet. Data collection by and large doesn’t require a vessel to be manned. When UFOs aren’t entirely automated (as I suspect most are), their occupants are surely not the beings actually responsible for the mission to Earth; they are surely something like clones, or biomechanoid creations, purpose-built or purpose-bred for space exploration. Perhaps their humanoid form is meant to facilitate data gathering with humans specifically. It is even quite possible that the visitors and their craft aren’t even technically interstellar but are manufactured from local materials right here in the solar system or on earth. All that really needs to travel between the stars is information—marching orders and instructions—the rest can theoretically be done locally with basic nanotech and matter-reorganizing factories.

Whatever the case, the data-gathering and data-recording abilities of such extraterrestrial probes are no doubt many orders of magnitude beyond what we can achieve, so we could assume such probes have archived virtually our entire culture. Which again helps explain why there’s no question of making contact. They would already know anything we would ever want to say to them.

The two motives for gathering data are science and security, and surely the UFO presence is related to both these aims. The science aim is obvious: An advanced civilization got to where they are via science and technology, and the motive to gather all information, whether or not it seems relevant, is an easy one to program into an automated probe—the “learn all that is knowable” imperative. This, we must assume, is a basic and not an applied science enterprise–a long-term investment with uncertain payoffs. Ours is one of possibly hundreds or thousands of planets whose goings-on are being surveyed and recorded by numerous civilizations in our own stellar neighborhood (writers who classify types of UFOs have surmised that there could be at least four distinct civilizations surveying earth right now), but if “they” don’t have needs in the sense we understand it, then it’s hard to imagine what application such data would ever have been envisioned.

The security aim is more in the background, but is probably of greater long-term significance. UFOs’ clear interest in our space program and weapons clues us into this: Here we are, on the brink of being a spacefaring race, if we play our cards right and don’t blow it. Depending on how things go, we might, in a few hundred or a thousand years, be some kind of minor player in the politics of our tiny corner of the galaxy (whatever “politics” looks like on an interstellar scale). Or, if the Lem-like vision holds, “they” won’t give a shit anymore (if they even did when they sent our their probes, which could have been aeons ago for all we know), but the descendents of their biomechanoid defensive superstructure will kick into high gear to protect their ability to lotus-eat in private once our exploratory probes reach their airspace. By that point, we might have stopped giving a shit too, but we will have done what any self-preserving civilization does to protect itself: putting a nice robot-and-clone buffer out there to protect our future interests. It is only at that down-the-road point of mutual political relevance that all this data would conceivably provide some alien race somewhere with some useful insight about us. If they are still around, that is.

So we shouldn’t assume that the “active interest” of the UFO-nauts is really all that active or interested. It should be seen as mechanical and automatic. This would explain what Mac Tonnies describes as our visitors’ “clumsy, oblique interactions with us” and why they seem simultaneously both “wildly sophisticated and limitlessly stupid.” Speaking of autism—isn’t that the sense one gets from these lights in the sky, or these “grays”? The Mars Spirit rover would seem pretty autistic too.

So the view I’ve come around to is a synthesis, or hybrid, of the standard UFOlogical and “sublime” visions of interstellar communication. I suspect that something like Lem’s vision is still closer to the truth—civilizations don’t overlap much, and interstellar politics is probably nonexistent or trivial over large distances—yet it is probably also the case that during their crucial “window,” civilizations do initiate massive and self-propogating data-gathering activities throughout their local stellar neighborhoods or even farther afield. No doubt these data-gathering abilities are matched by similarly astounding (and automated) defensive capabilities that would kick in if necessary.

“They” are not the ones who sent “them,” in other words, and we shouldn’t think we’re particularly hot shit because automated probes are watching us. The ones who sent them, the real extraterrestrials, are either dead and gone, have evolved into something completely different, or have bigger fish to fry. In a thousand years, when our first flying saucer reaches their solar system, if they are still alive and awake, they’ll rouse themselves from their meditation on the Three Noble Truths (take that, measly Earth Buddhists!) and download the voluminous data reports from Earth directly to their massive quantum brains. Only at that point will they raise their middle eyebrows in unison and go “Hmm, fascinating.”