Posthuman Blues

As the RRRGroup has pointed out, the discourse at UFO UpDates has taken an unexpected trend toward the speculative, with the usual talk about nocturnal lights and daylight discs replaced by what metaphysician Charles Upton has called "postmodern demonology."

Suddenly ufology's usual suspects -- who commonly hail from the "nuts and bolts" school -- are competing with the likes of occultist John Keel ("The Mothman Prophecies") and astrophysicist Jacques Vallee ("Passport to Magonia"). Since I've forwarded some of my recent thought experiments on the psychodynamic aspect of the phenomenon to the list, I suppose I bear part of the blame for the metamorphosis.

In a recent post to the list, esteemed ufologist Larry Hatch expressed his conviction that religion and UFOs were mutually exclusive -- an idea I can't agree with, if only because so many "high-strangeness" UFO encounters impinge on the witnesses' consciousness in a manner that can best be described as "spiritual." Conversely, the UFO evidence contains a parade of apparent religious experiences that, when examined with more than passing curiosity, fall quite easily into the close encounter paradigm (of which the "Fatima miracle" is an example).

One of the first questions to come to mind is also one of the simplest: How are we to tell for sure if religious effects are by-products of the encounter experience or a central component?

Theorists have proposed that contact with nonhuman intelligence, if and when it occurs, will be exceptionally strange. Could this very strangeness be limiting our perception of an unfolding phenomenon of crucial importance?

If we're to seriously advance a "new" ufology, we must maintain the theoretical flexibility to ask questions that may seem far removed from the extraterrestrial connotations that presently contaminate the issue (however well-meaning their adherents).