The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

The reasons for resistance to fortean subjects like UFOs and bigfoot are numerous. It is now abundantly documented that the U.S. government and military have gone to great lengths to prevent UFOs from being taken seriously by the public, and the reasons are easy to understand: More technologically advanced beings freely entering our airspace, meddling with our military defenses (e.g., shutting down missile launch sites, as was attested recently by reliable witnesses in the 1967 Malmstrom AFB case), would be unacceptable by any sane superpower to publicly acknowledge. That would have been especially the case during the height of the cold war.

And there is the fear of cultural disruption or social breakdown, which has always been the result of less advanced societies coming into contact with more technologically advanced ones. Consulted by the Brooking’s Institute for a NASA-commissioned report at the start of our space program, the anthropologist Margaret Mead counseled that revelation of the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization could damage social cohesion and may be best kept under wraps.

If it were to be established that an advanced nonhuman intelligence existed and was present on earth, it would have staggering philosophical implications about our place in the scheme of things, implications that people don’t want to have to face unless absolutely necessary. It’s not simply a matter of “social cohesion.” Polls show that most Americans think UFOs are real, yet we joke-ify the topic anyway, due I think to a reluctance to squarely face any big philosophical issue. (The much bigger and scarier philosophical issue of mortality, for example, is typically dealt with by gallows humor until it touches us closely — see my post “Belittling Ufology.”)

I have also speculated in a previous post that some part of the resistance by scientists to the possibility of what, following Mac Tonnies, I opt to call “cryptohominids”–both extant, very-close primate relatives like bigfoot and more-intelligent cousins like the extinct “Boskops” or the advanced “cryptoterrestrials” Tonnies wrote of (if that’s what so-called aliens really turn out to be)–is that such a discovery would readily relegitimize the scalar conception of innate human cognitive ability, an easily abused idea and the basis of scientific racism.

Related to this, there is, I think, a broader reason for the tendency to ignore or avoid seriously facing the question of possible cryptohominids, a reason having to do with the natural human resistance to things that transgress conceptual boundaries—especially the categories of human and nonhuman.

The human discomfort with boundary crossing, or liminality, is a product of our innate need to categorize, and it has been observed in all cultures. In a classic study of the subject, Purity and Dangeruncanny valley.” Because they are “almost human”—in Douglas’s terms falling between the category of animate and inanimate—highly realistic simulations of human beings arouse a very negative emotional response, the same way corpses do, or the hyperreal sculptures by the artist Ron Mueck. Aliens and bipedal hairy hominids are in the same non-category, neither human nor nonhuman. They live together in the uncanny valley.

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