NASA, UFOs, and Phenomenal Authorization
As I am sure many people who are interested in the topic of UFOs are aware, NASA announced, on October 21st, 2022, that it was beginning a UFO-oriented program in late October. As a Twitter post reads:
We’ve selected 16 individuals to participate in an independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), or observations in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena. The nine-month study will begin on Oct. 24.
This struck me as strange and worthy of comment, but perhaps not for the reasons one might assume. Although I am sure that, during the weeks since this announcement, many people have responded with their interpretations, I would nevertheless like to provide my own.
There is nothing about NASA’s structuring which has ever made it beholden to (at least publicly) exploring “fringe” trends, especially in a way which involves coordinated academic/establishment interests, as we see here. After literal decades of NASA publicly distancing itself from the topic of UFOs on the basis of its supposed insignificance, lack of evidence, or associations with so-called pseudoscience, one cannot expect that this program will all of a sudden yield a bounty of information, especially if that information would conflict with governmental interests.
Nor does NASA’s study represent an attempt to bridge a disciplinary gap: despite years of preexisting research, none of the people on this study’s team have even a partial background in the study of UFO data. The rift between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” analysts/analysis remains intact.₁ Furthermore, the study’s emphasis on astrophysics marginalizes the studying of UFOs within the range of Earth’s atmosphere — precisely the place where most UFO sightings occur!
So, reasonably speaking, people should be prepared for results just as thin and tepid as those of the UAP report from last year (lest it is forgotten, however, the report specified that, of the 144 cited objects, only one could be identified: a significant yet understated detail). Richard Dolan, an eminent researcher and historian of UFOs, predicted just as much in a recent video. But the similarity doesn’t end there — because NASA’s “sudden” interest here appears to parallel the “sudden” willingness by venerable outlets and programs, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, or 60 Minutes, to publish articles and produce segments on UFOs, and the sudden “obliging” of the United States government of requests for transparency regarding its own purported investigations, data, and conclusions.
As I wrote in a 2021 essay entitled “UFOs, Disclosure, and the Religious Impulse”:
…to discount the possibility that the UFO narrative, at least in the US, is being manufactured in unclear ways and to unclear ends is detrimental to the subject’s scope and complexity. The mistake here would be to presume to know why the manufacturing and manipulation is occurring, and/or who its enactors are.
I think that what we are witnessing are about-faces which are reversals only to the extent that they are public. In other words: these may be narrative-controlling performances. More specifically, they may be instances of what Jason Reza Jorjani calls “phenomenal authorization.” Phenomenal authorization is how institutions can define the terms of reality. Once the parameters are set, anything outside of those parameters is rendered as conceptual junk. Jorjani writes, in Closer Encounters:
When the Americans went into Germany and occupied it in 1945, they happened upon the notion of “psychological warfare”, which was an inadequate American English translation of the German term Weltanschauungskrieg or “worldview warfare.” Subsequently, the United States military and intelligence community softened “psychological warfare” to “Psychological Operations” or “PsyOps” and these days they call it “the battle for hearts and minds.” But this completely covers over the original meaning of Weltanschauungskrieg in German. To speak of “psychological warfare”, let alone “psychological operations”, makes it seem as if one is trying to alter the subjective states of individuals in a certain target population. […] Something much more fundamental is meant by [Weltanschauungskrieg], which goes back, not only to Nietzsche, but ultimately to Heraclitus. There is a war over the nature of reality.
When such wars are waged in the forms of ideas and how effectively they can infect and spread, the power to determine narratives is significant. If successful, such performances will allow a given agency to more easily act as if any future “discovery” (or lack thereof!) related to UFOs is novel, or exclusive to that agency — and its nation.
Just as “[there] is nothing about NASA’s structuring which has ever made it beholden to exploring ‘fringe’ trends”, there is also nothing about its foci which necessarily makes it more suited to studying UFOs than other agencies or fields of research. The same goes for the United States Armed Forces (which the constant deference to by UFO communities constitutes a subtle and unintentional sort of jingoism). Why the presumption that the appropriate arena here is outer space? Indeed, given the multiplicity of sightings of UFOs emerging from or submerging into large bodies of water (as explored by authors such as Ivan T. Sanderson and Debbie Ziegelmeyer), why would oceanography not have more of a potential claim here than astrophysics?
I would additionally and provocatively refer to David Jacobs’ wry but, I think, accurate claim that perhaps “…what ufology needs is not the scientific assistance of physicists or astronomers, but of ‘gynecologists, neurologists, and urologists.’” Note that this latter suggestion is categorically ruled out by NASA’s phenomenal authorization: by reintroducing the bare-surface question of whether or not UFOs are even observable phenomena, and by carefully curating its task force so as to not risk “ufological contamination”, NASA’s study negates the much stranger — yet decades-old, amply reported, and much more pressing — matter of close encounters and abductions.
Whatever happens with NASA’s study, it will almost certainly not be mere disclosure or denial. Rather, it will likely constitute a form of acclimatization.
But what is this acclimatization driving at?
History is being apparently reoriented in real-time to make UFOs, or “legitimate” UFOs, out to be a near-exclusively 21st-century phenomenon — as if the sighting on the USS Nimitz were where it all began. Any level, casual or concentrated, of genuinely skeptical investigation will reveal this to be not the case; but, for many people, the US government’s switch from the public stance of “UFOs don’t exist and we won’t even talk about it”, post-Condon Report, to “There are some things flying around our airspaces which we cannot identify” may be all that’s required to settle the narrative.
Let’s remember that, for instance, the US army was able to drastically shift the narrative regarding the crash at Corona, New Mexico (usually misidentified as Roswell), and that its final explanation has generally stuck — although, how the Roswell Army Air Field could’ve mistaken a weather balloon for an anomalous “flying disc” is anyone’s guess.₂ It is relatively easy to get people to accept an official narrative once it has lingered around long enough, been reinforced by enough representatives, or had its counter-narratives conflated with disreputable topics or groups. Note, too, the presence of the United States’ fingers in all of this, and how this prolongs the country’s long-held position as the master of world history₃ — a master which can determine narratives even by not engaging certain subjects publicly.
Despite NASA’s overt, and easily researched, historical ties to the Department of Defense, Operation Paperclip, and employment of various imported high-ranking Nazis (NASA’s original biography for Wernher von Braun failed to mention that — oops! — he was a member of the Allgemeine SS), it has been successful at cultivating a “nerdy”, “wholesome”, and “inclusive” brand-image for itself.₄ This is rather remarkable, given the intensifying trends of disintegrating public faith in institutions and the weaponized citations of historical wrongdoings. NASA might represent, for many people, the last bastion of science as a force for good. In his essay “UFOs: Lost in the Myths”, Thomas E. Bullard writes, “So many other cultural pillars tumbled from the 1960s onward that the rank and file had good reason to distrust all social institutions. […] Science and technology have fallen perhaps hardest of all. Forty years have seen their transformation from a secular religion promising utopia through progress into a threat to be feared and a scapegoat for multiple social wrongs.”
It is highly relevant, too, that the majority of skepticism brought to NASA’s history and claims has been pretty consistently of the “conspiratorial” variety. To wonder if NASA has ever airbrushed its photos of lunar surfaces is to helplessly invite associations of faked moon landings or the flat Earth. All of this is not to diminish NASA’s accomplishments, but to say that a variety of factors are at play which preemptively condemn skepticism and suspicion to the bin of paranoid thinking.
To reiterate: what is important here is not merely that NASA is publicly associating itself with the subject of UFOs, but that its engagement is exclusively contemporaneous in what it deals with — I will reiterate the facts that no one on the team has ties to the UFO subject, that most of their specialties are actually counterproductive to the study’s material, and that the decision to do the study at all is uncharacteristically “trendy” — and that this has consequences for how it retroactively frames the issue.
All of the media, all of the reports, all of the language about UFOs today is trying to bundle the phenomenon up into a twenty-years-long package. There is no attempt to form a connection to reports spanning the 1940s to the 1990s, implicitly maintaining an official, institutional position that there was really nothing worth studying in those years, and insisting that no groups were formed to seriously study the subject until the 21st century (as, for example, the constant attention given to AATIP reinforces).
NASA’s study of UFOs should be examined in tandem with the reality that we have not had any manned lunar missions for fifty years — a stunning fact which cannot be sufficiently waved away with the usual explanation of public disinterest and a subsequent lack of funding (neither of these aspects have ever greatly mattered to independent agencies of the federal government) — , and with China and Russia’s sudden reinvigoration of such programs. And let us remember that coincident with the dissolution of NASA’s manned programs, the basis of which was a nationalist race to militarize space, was other nations doing the same. But, if anything, according to conventional narratives, the United States’ relinquishing of its efforts herein should have been the opportunity for other superpowers to fill that void. And yet this never happened — as if NASA’s consecutive lunar breaches ultimately scared everyone off.
It should also be examined in tandem with the UFOs-as-threat narrative, propagated by persons such as Luis Elizondo, Christopher Mellon, and Marco Rubio. The fact that none of these propagators are willing to identify what, exactly, the threat is may have a profound relevance when considering von Braun’s near-death statements to Carol Rosin, the founder of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space:
The strategy that von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites.” We were then told that they were coming to get us and control us — that they were “commies.” Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify Third World-country “crazies.” We now call them “nations of concern.” But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based missiles. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point, he kind of chuckled the first time he said it. Asteroids — against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons. And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up the last card: “Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens — and all of it is a lie.”
Of course, I cannot be definitively sure why, specifically, this new narrative — “UFOs are real and worthy of study now” — is the one that’s being spun, and it’s likely that precious few people know either. But it is being spun — and, barring access to the rationale for its inception, we should be much more skeptical of its proceedings.
Who will you grant phenomenal authorization to?
₁ Stuart Appelle briefly outlines the impediments to serious mainstream studies of UFOs in his paper, “Ufology and Academia: The UFO Phenomenon as a Scholarly Discipline”, one being the interdisciplinary nature of ufology, and that: “…opposition to disciplinary boundary crossing persists at academic institutions, and scholarly activity remains largely cloistered within discrete academic units. […] …ufology can neither find an existing home in the established disciplines nor create a new one for itself.” Moreover, the scientific establishment imposes a Catch 22 for ufology: it critiques the field for a lack of methodological and critical discipline, yet makes no room for the field to have access to the outlets and resources which would grant it the seal of scientific respectability.
₂ It is an interesting and perhaps related coincidence that the US Air Force was founded only a couple of months after the 1947 incident at Corona.
₃ Perhaps the most noteworthy detail of Avi Loeb’s counter response to a present-day study of UFOs within Ukraine’s airspace was this: “…last evening I received a special request from a high-level official in the US government to summarize my thoughts on observable signatures of UAP.” Why is an astrophysicist being asked by an anonymous government official to interpret — really, to quickly “debunk” — data on UFOs from the scientists of another country, no less the country of Ukraine? Is this not an obvious attempt at retaining informational, or narrative, hegemony?
₄ The CIA’s attempt to do something similar has, by comparison, fallen flat.
Great article!