Posthuman Blues

I'm reading an interesting book called "Cracks in the Great Wall: UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics." The author, Charles Upton, argues that UFO and "alien" encounters are but a new manifestation of an intelligence that has coexisted with humans since the dawn of consciousness. He likens contemporary UFO research to a "postmodern demonology," noting that the apparent technological capabilities demonstrated during "abductions" are identical to those of mythological "jinn" and other spirit entities.

Upton's metaphysical ecology (which begins with gross matter and ascends a hierarchy of progressively subtler states) is very much in keeping with John Keel's "superspectrum" and, to some extent, with the "multiverse" posited by Jacques Vallee. The most significant difference between Upton and Vallee is that Upton thinks the UFO intelligence is an active impediment to the evolution of consciousness while (the last time I checked) Vallee was less than certain what the close-encounter experience entailed; while willing to identify its effects as those of a psychosocial conditioning system a la B.F. Skinner, he wasn't sure if this was deliberate or in some sense automated (and thus irreversible).

Whitley Strieber once wondered, enigmatically, if the visitor experience was "merely" what evolution looked like to a conscious mind; ultimately, humankind's endless pageant of gods, fairies and ufonauts -- and their evident objective reality -- may be reflections of ourselves enacted on a level we have yet to define in scientific terms.

What -- if anything -- happens to the phenomenon as our instruments continue to blur the lines between empirical reality and the realm of the so-called "spirit"?