“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men

The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of Christian faith there is a singular, distinctively American core religion that has more in common with the Gnosticism of the church of the first centuries AD than it does with the more doctrinal Catholic and Protestant churches that replaced it. Gnosticism is a religion founded on direct personal experience, direct knowing of reality (which goes by a variety of names of which God is only one among several).

If you think about it, UFOs are perfect symbols of such a Gnostic religion. For example, I Know What I Saw is the title of a recent documentary by James Fox (the most significant and sober film treatment of the subject of UFOs) and the phrase “I know what I saw” is expressed verbatim or in paraphrase by many of the interviewees in that film. Indeed it is expressed by UFO witnesses everywhere. (The phrase is also used by witnesses to Sasquatch and other extraordinary phenomena.) It means knowing that is based not on the testimony of science or mainstream common knowledge, but on direct personal experience with something most of society dismisses as impossible or as fantasy.

As more and more Americans witness unexplainable objects in our skies, and as more and more reputable authorities (military personnel, pilots, astronauts, government officials) go public verifying the reality of a UFO presence, the more I believe UFOs will become a central symbol in the American Gnostic religion. We don’t know what these objects are, or even if they represent a single phenomenon. There is no evidence they are from space, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis is losing ground among many believers—there are other explanations. But whatever they are, seeing is believing, and the more people see them, the more they will become central features in the American religion.

Jacques Vallee has written of UFO cults as harmful tools of manipulation. But I’m not sure that direct personal experience is such a bad basis for a religion, in the sense of belief in — or rather, knowledge of — something “higher” that passeth understanding. Awe and wonder, a questioning of common sense and of the limited nature of science, are the typical effects of such extraordinary experiences and thus are an effective destroyer of human arrogance, something churches no longer do a good job at.

The second time I observed an aerial object that I could not identify was in the evening of August 3, 2009, on the Mall about four blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was camped out with friends, part of the crowd attending the weekly “Screen on the Green,” and this evening the movie On the Waterfront was playing. Probably around 9:15, just about 20 minutes after the movie started, I saw a single bright light move from due North to due South, almost straight overhead and thus seemingly directly over the Capitol (although without knowing its altitude there is no way of verifying that). I watched it for about 10 seconds, and then it faded out.

Had it been a clear star-filled night away from the city, in the mountains, and had the light been far dimmer, I would have identified it as a satellite with a polar orbit (i.e., carrying it straight North to South). I’ve never seen a straight North-South satellite before, but I’m sure they exist. But in this case there was far too much light pollution for it to be a satellite. Only one bright planet and the moon were visible at that hour, and this object was as bright as that planet. As I said, the sighting lasted maybe ten seconds in all. I did not see it first appear, so I don’t know if it came into view over the skyline or faded into view somewhere overhead.

I didn’t say anything to anybody, and I suspect I was probably the only person on the Mall looking up at the gray sky and not at the movie at that moment. I had viewed my first “UFO” only a month before, in similar circumstances (camped out on a park in a city in the evening) so I was particularly attuned to the sky, and I even admit I had a very clear sense of expectation, that I might see something anomalous if I paid attention. So I was not really watching the movie. And as I said, that expectation paid off literally within 15 to 20 minutes of the start of the film.

I saw nothing else strange the rest of the night, although I was constantly watching. At one point I saw a helicopter low over the skyline, which was not out of the ordinary, but it did provide a base of comparison. It also reminded me that the airspace over Washington, DC is highly restricted. Planes aren’t allowed to fly over it. But what I saw did not resemble a plane.

I won’t deny that this light in the sky probably had a very prosaic explanation—I’m not assuming it was an alien probe or anything so exotic. But at the time, an idea arose that will seem paranoid: As I was watching this light, I wondered if it could also see me, and see that I alone, among all the people on the Mall right then, perhaps even among all people out at night in the city that evening (because people actually don’t look up very much), was watching it fly over. If the light were somehow an observation device observing the Capitol and the people gathered near it, and if it were the product of super-advanced technology (a lot of ifs, obviously), then might it not possess optical capabilities of vastly greater scope and resolution than what we would envision? Even our own satellites can now discern objects on the ground at a size of under a meter. What if an advanced alien probe had effectively an optical “skin,” viewing at high resolution in all directions, and with the image-processing, analytical, and recognition power to match its information-gathering sensitivity?

What if, to that probe flying high over the capitol, the faces and the eyes and even the pores on the skin of the hundreds of people camped out on the lawn, dimly illuminated by the light of the screen and the gray evening sky, were clearly viewed and registered and recorded? What if it could recognize those individuals? What if it could independently note and record what each of those individuals were doing?

So, what if that UFO saw me seeing it, saw me, alone among the throng, track it across the sky, registered my silently satisfied yet surprised expression, and immediately knew who I was from the fine-grained data it and its fellow probes had gathered on the city and the country and the species? What if it added such knowledge (“observed by Eric Wargo”) to its memory, and made a “mental note” that I was among the witnesses to its presence, and marked me for possible future added surveillance?

What if it even dimmed its lights (faded out) because it detected that it was being seen?

The baboon sees the biologist crouching behind the tree on yonder hill. The human has never hurt her, indeed has never come near, but out of instinctive cautiousness she picks up her baby and moves under the cover of trees, where she sits and continues pulling up roots from the ground. Never does it enter her baboon mind that that human, to her just a distant colorful shape, is watching her through binoculars, can see up close her every facial expression and tic of behavior, knows her identity and her whole history, when she was born, her rank in the troupe, etc., and even at that moment is taking notes on a laptop computer, adding her current activities to a database.

It’s not absurd to think that a remote witness to advanced surveillance technology would reciprocally be witnessed, would be seen seeing it, and that that piece of technology would be able to see and know more about the witness than the witness could possibly fathom. There are probably no limits to the watching and knowing capabilities of a piece of technology thousands or millions of years in advance of our own and having “deep anthropology” as its raison d’etre.

There are also no limits to the paranoia of the human mind, once it goes down the kind of slippery slope that UFOs and other paranormal phenomena encourage.

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. It is making news, however, for reviving interest in a paleoanthropological anomaly that had 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.

Could the Boskops’ 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 (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing--I thought somewhat originally--that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that 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 have now edited and shortened my post to its more essential argument on holography, to reflect this.]

“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.

I have argued in this blog, rather unoriginally and, I now realize, based on prevailing cultural assumptions, 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, perhaps, 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 classic works by Jacques Vallee such as Messengers of Deception, I am coming around to the view that the UFO picture can’t be fully explained by the ETH, but may represent technology and intentions that are much closer to home. The suspiciously hominid appearance of “ETs,” 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 aerospace 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 that I find quite intriguing. In his blog, Posthuman Blues, Mac Tonnies likened UFOs to the laser pointers that are one of the ultimate toys for entertaining cats and their owners. Like the moving red dot that cats find so irresistible, UFOs tantalize us and fascinate us and, just as we seem on the verge of catching them, they zip out of our reach. And I find that, besides the pure play factor, laser pointers also are a good tool for “social control.” I use mine to distract my cats from mischief, or to lure them out of closets I don’t want them to be in. You could say that a $9.95 laser pointer is a highly useful (and cost-effective) tool for deceiving and manipulating members of a less-advanced civilization. What if UFOs represent an advanced laser technology designed for deceiving and controlling humans, holograms deployed to “lure us out of the closet.”

Whatever the state of research into “antigravity” propulsion seemingly used by “flying saucers,” 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 until absolutely necessary.

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. To his credit, Symington, who was among the many astonished witnesses of the lights over Phoenix that night in 1997, later acknowledged that his flippant news conference 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.

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.

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.”