Passport to Myopia: Silver Saucers, Ivory Towers

A look at, and criticism of, the two predominant trajectories academia may assume in regard to UFOs, "aliens", and close encounters, as outlined by two recent papers.

Two pieces, more or less centered around so-called UFOs and extraterrestrials, came to my attention over the past month. The first, published in August of this year, is a research paper, written by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph and Rudolph E. Schild, entitled “Mars: Humanoids, Bodies, Bones, Skulls, UFOs, UAPs, Spacecraft Wreckage?” The second is an article for the September issue of The Brooklyn Rail, a New York-based periodical, by Scott W. Schwartz, entitled “Optical Collusion: The Underpolitics of the Alien.” It is my opinion that the two may preempt what will come to be the two dominant lenses for academia to analyze and explicate the topic. If there is any accuracy to this opinion, it does not point to an encouraging development.

What is first concerning, given these academics’ prior history of authorship, is that these texts seem almost as anomalous as UFOs. Of course, one must always begin somewhere, and merely pointing to the fact of an initial effort is not adequate criticism. The problem is that these lenses obstruct more than their appliers know; and that they seem perfectly representative of a bandwagon effect. Suddenly, the CIA-approved theater going on with UFOs and self-described whistleblowers — most of whom conveniently (and anonymously) reside within the governmental structure — has prompted everyone and anyone to opine in ways not at all commensurate with their apparent level of knowledge, or the matter’s imposingly interdisciplinary nature. This incommensurability is rendered as ahistorical, explaining-away arrogance in Schwartz’s piece, while, in Joseph’s and Schild’s piece, hot-topic, pigeonholing credulity is conflated with a properly open-minded, curious approach.

In the case of Joseph and Schild’s text, despite publishing astronomical academic papers for years (it appears that Schild’s first paper was in 1964; Joseph’s in 1978), both men only began putting out work on UFOs this year. More specifically, the topic of “space-craft” did not enter into Joseph or Schild’s résumé until a July 2023 publication. Prior to this, the only “extraterrestrial” aspects the two were willing to speculate on involved potential fossilized traces of minor, primitive lifeforms on Mars’ surface. How these researchers (one of whom, non-trivially, holds the position of emeritus professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) decided they were qualified to make such an enormous speculative leap — and why they decided to make it — is perplexing, unless we partially account for the bandwagon effect, which has built up over several years. Reading the actual paper, it is clear that this leap was premature to the extreme. Schild’s and Joseph’s analysis is just as specious as any "conspiratorial" YouTube video wherein a paranoid individual blows up blurry photos and proceeds to engage in an hour of unmitigated pareidolia. Such a video would have been dismissed as nonsense not even a year ago. Why what is obviously its textual equivalent should now be taken seriously is equally unobvious.

It is important to note that there are characteristics and features of our solar system’s celestial objects which remain puzzling, and are made all the more puzzling by the almost categorical disinterest with which they are regarded by most of the high priests of Science. Such characteristics and features would include practically everything we know (or, rather, do not know) about our moon — the question of its manner of formation; its positioning relative to its size, which allows for perfect solar eclipses; the fact that only one of its sides faces the Earth; the presence of what has been termed transient lunar phenomena; etc. — or, indeed, Mars: the Cydonia region’s enormous and bizarrely symmetrical formation known as the “D & M pyramid”, for instance; or the remarkably high isotopic presence of xenon-129.

It is equally important to note than none of this information should, as if it were the inexorable next step, push us towards what has come to be the modern — and, again, CIA-infested — mythos of the extraterrestrial. But this is exactly what Joseph and Schild do. Indeed, the paper’s conclusion is on, or just beyond, the cusp of uncritically courting Ancient Aliens literalism, with all of its culturally-displacing ideology. “What might be the technological and scientific accomplishments¹ of ‘humans’ and intelligent nonhuman ‘animals’ that evolved on Earth-like planets billions of years before our solar system was formed?” the authors ask with a rhetorical slant, after propping up an all-too-brief false conflict between the presence of extraterrestrial life and Christianity — as if “Christianity” could be encompassed by certain centuries-old statements from the Catholic Church; and what of Swedenborg? of Steiner? of Cayce? Joseph and Schild conclude alike an Erich von Däniken book: “They might appear to us as ‘gods.’ And they might be visiting Mars and Earth.”

So, the downfall of Joseph and Schild’s paper is credulity. But the downfall of Schwartz’s article is not incredulity; instead, it is a lack of curiosity, resembling that of the aforementioned scientists. So embedded is this attitude in the readymade, ever-mundane assurances of academia that one is compelled to describe it as anti-curiosity.

What connects Joseph and Schild’s paper to Schwartz’s article is that, as instances of analysis, they exhibit people (that is, the authors) seeing only what they want to see — a point of high irony, given that Schwartz’s piece is positioned as a critique of ocular ideology. While Joseph and Schild squint at photographs of pretty dismal fidelity and squeeze any odd knob or shard into a box of “exotic materials”, Schwartz enforces an institutionally-promoted incapability of exploring beyond an unimaginative sociopolitics. This places Schwartz’s analysis into a politically convenient yet baffling spot where the UFO, with its attendant “alien” pilots, is turned into a sort of euphemism for colonial-capitalism, and where Schwartz at once claims to solve the mystery in a single, four-sources-cited blow, and never explains how cultural mimetics can make the imaginary, by all appearances and effects, material and subjectively independent. Any person who is unwilling to defer to the authority-conferring effect of intersectionalist jargon will just be left wondering what is going on in humanities departments when “the eclipsing of linear perspective by vertical perspective as today’s dominant viewpoint” (???) is set down as the answer to global phenomena escaping any explanatory enclosure for the better part of seventy years — if not much longer. According to Schwartz, all we ever needed to do was simply listen to a few people of color (each of whom, presumably, represents a monolithically non-white point of view) to figure out how silly UFOs are. If only it were that easy.

Schwartz's supplementation for an ahistorical claim regarding UFOs and race — that “the UFO/alien abduction phenomenon is exclusively experienced by white people in the United States” — is taken from the first line of a paper's abstract by another author, Jonathan Jacob Moore, who — surprise! — only began (at least publicly) critically writing on UFOs in 2022. Strange blind spots exist within Moore’s paper as well, which chooses as its focus the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill: despite citing the work of John Mack, Moore appears to be oblivious to the fact that Mack traveled to a grade school in Ruwa, Zimbabwe to investigate one of the most unusual UFO reports of the 1990s, the primary witnesses of which were sixty-two children of varied age and of black and white makeup.² Given the demographics here, this event should be worthy of some level of comment, regardless of how one chooses to interpret the particulars of the encounter or the integrity of Mack’s investigative methods.

Other major blind spots exist throughout Moore’s paper, such as the matter of how the Hills ostensibly shared a psychic stress so powerful that it caused both to pass out and continue safely driving for dozens of miles along U.S. Route 3.³ Moreover, Moore expresses no concern over, or is oblivious to, certain highly suggestive facts connecting aspects of the Hills’ case, and potentially exploding it into a parapolitical domain: for one, that the Hills were members of the NAACP, with Barney sitting on a local board of the United States Commission on Civil Rights⁴ — precisely the sorts of alliances the FBI and CIA have historically undermined through confusion, murder, and other extra-constitutional means; and, for another, that, as researcher Nick Redfern has laid out, “the Hills were being monitored by USAF [U.S. Air Force] Intelligence before the encounter took place, through Major James MacDonald, who had befriended them some time earlier. Betty Hill wrote to [UFO researcher/author] Donald Keyhoe who, despite the fact that he received over a hundred letters a day, homed in on this initially unremarkable case. Within twenty-four hours, Keyhoe had arranged for the Hills to be visited by top-level scientists, including C.D. Jackson, who had previously (definitely not coincidentally) worked on psychological warfare techniques for President Eisenhower. Stretching coincidence far beyond breaking point, Jackson already knew Major MacDonald, with whom he next interviewed the Hills.”

One could easily stray from the main point by tending to the inadequacies of Moore’s paper, the purpose of which ultimately seems to be not a nuanced attempt at interrogating various phenomena but, rather, the utilization of UFOs, as abstract theme, to reinforce an academically desirable ethno-pariah-tribalism. It is the very manipulation of abstractions Schwartz cautions against. Again: seeing only what one wants to see. Of course, Moore — who claims to have become “versed in UFOlogy” — and Schwartz are both completely wrong about the abduction phenomenon, the decades-long and highly aggressive encounters within Brazil being perfect counter-examples. A number of these are documented in Jacques Vallée’s book Confrontations (1990). Moore and Schwartz’s assertion becomes all the more ridiculous given that the 1957 Brazilian case of Antônio Vilas-Boas, an individual ripe for tokenism, is commonly recognized within UFO histories as perhaps the popular initiating case of the modern, reproductively-genetically oriented abduction phenomenon.

By resting on the idea that one can adequately perceive and resolve the subject matter by rolling it over in one’s mind, referring to a few on-hand texts, and then pontificating according to one’s departmental emphases, Schwartz’s piece unwittingly wields the passive logic of monoculture when concluding that the apparent absence of non-white people in abduction literature points to the perception of UFOs as a kind of white social contagion. But it should be obvious by now that absence can derive from documentary exclusion — intentional, unintentional, or both — and that such exclusion can be all the greater when the subject matter is marginal to begin with. Is it not possible that, at least within the United States, a complex interaction of the faith traditions of black Americans, a retention of the colonial-imperial-scientistic dismissal of the magical as both unreal and solely demonic, socioeconomic situations, less stability when it comes to a public image, and generally stricter societal allowances might be a compelling reason to not speak of such experiences? Certainly, this forms a part of filmmaker Patricia Avant’s interpretation of silence herein.⁵

In effect, Schwartz’s logic is comparable to the person who enters a museum full of nothing but European art and concludes that there must be nothing artistically remarkable outside of Europe. Is this not, ironically, rather close to the logic of casual, or “unconscious”, white supremacy? And does Schwartz not stray even closer to this when he demeans and defines mythology, the cornerstone of all human societies, as the narrative privation of truth? Let us be clear: Schwartz wields his own mythology — the mythology of colonial-capitalism as the final phenomenal fact guiding all global forces since the advent of modernity. Like any mythology, there are truths to this narrative; but by granting it the absolute term “history”, as if that were a coherent dividing line, Schwartz forgets that history is the preferential label given to mythologies which have been itemized, quantified, stripped of poetics, and objectified. Again, this has its uses, but it is not the only avenue for comprehension.

The closest paranormal dimension Schwartz’s article nears is the so-called super-psi effect, occasionally sub-categorized as mass hysteria. Such an effect would be the anthropologically orthodox explanation for a standout event like the Miracle of the Sun and for lesser interpersonal occasions — say, a group interacting with a Ouija board. However, as Grant and Jane Solomon write in The Scole Experiment (1999), many persons “who take the trouble to actually review the comprehensive evidence pertaining to mediumship over the past 100 or so years […] say that this is why the super-psi hypothesis is preferred by most critics: since super-psi is inherently unprovable, it is a perfect dump-bin for all unexplained happenings.” Schwartz’s analog for the super-psi field seems to be the explicit and implicit web of white supremacy, similarly unfalsifiable in total extent of influence and consequence. As such, it is likely that information conflicting with or complicating Schwartz’s ideology would be contorted into a readymade explanation. But the identification of anything resembling the super-psi effect would, as the Solomons write, at least hypothetically “…be an indication of some previously unknown power of the mind…” And surely this possibility would excite all domains of research and prompt a multitude of publicized experiments. Yet, as we all know, it has not.⁶ Like Schwartz and his contextualizing of UFOs, adherents of the super-psi/mass hysteria hypothesis deploy it with a certainty that is just as professionally disinterested in the relevant phenomena as they are in their own explanation’s mechanisms.

It must be said that Schwartz’s piece does contain far better potential entry points for careful, grounded analyses of UFO phenomena than Joseph and Schild’s paper; and that the most critically advantageous of these is an understanding of the political-religious utility of the Alien. The window into the current U.S. congressional hearings over UFOs — now dutifully called UAPs by toadies — may also be a window into the nascent formulation of a policy succeeding NSC 68. As authors Phillip and Paul Collins have remarked, “We’re migrating away from seeing the Russians as the alien Other to alien-aliens as the Other” — an observation with resonance to Wernher von Braun’s statements to Carol Rosin. As this point is met with fiercer resistance within UFO communities, so deeply poisoned now by a lust for a precious and forever-imminent Disclosure event, our giving sober and investigative thought to it seems more necessary than ever. But because the whole topic to Schwartz is so solvable, and thus so mundane, he cannot help but disregard the wider and deeper real-world possibilities of his own musings, writing, “Aliens are (at best) a distraction from the pointlessness of the world.” As the Internet and supplementary technology have demonstrated, however, “distractions” can exert intoxicating global dominance.

Similarly, in over-focusing on “aliens [having] been constructed as ominous Others since the atomic bomb”, Schwartz stops short of equally interrogating the New Age characterization of the Alien as savior, creator, and even rightful inhabitant of the Earth. It is not a stretch to suggest that what Jacques Vallée, in Messengers of Deception (1979), identifies as the "intellectual abdication” seemingly inherent to the positioning of the Alien as uniformly beneficent and incomparably evolved, may be just as dangerous as the positioning of the Alien as national security threat. Within these two interpretations, one may discern a reflection of inexact yet identifiable generational outlooks. While the latter reemphasizes exceptionalist attitudes justifying the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan and, more recently, the resuscitation of Cold War dualities via the prolonging of the Russo-Hungarian proxy war, the former aligns with the pessimism of climatic catastrophism, wherein the very separatist ideology⁷ which regards Earth as a mere collection of resources — Heidegger’s bestand — is the unwitting basis for a righteous suicidal impulse. That is: Earth can only be saved if we, its wrongful inhabitants, are expunged. Here, the positioning of the Alien as super-indigenous god makes humanity into the true aliens. Could it be that the reemergence of an alien-god religion will go hand-in-hand with a self-deprecating depopulation ideology? It’s hardly out of the question.

How droll.

It would be not just irresponsible but blatantly wrong to deny that there is a racial dimension uniting much of the close encounter and abduction phenomena, and the prioritizing of certain typologies. Why is it, for instance, that the most evolved beings of each L. Ron Hubbard-like neo-pantheon — commonly called a Galactic Council or Galactic Federation — tend to be tall, blonde, blue-eyed “Nordics”? Why was it that when the German-American Reinold O. Schmidt was brought aboard a UFO in Kearney, Nebraska on November 5, 1957, he found himself among such Nordic men and women who, he realized, were speaking High German, an aristocratic dialect, among themselves? How do we make sense of the aforementioned reproductively-genetically oriented abduction phenomenon often appearing to represent a genetic modification cult — in other words, a eugenic program?

The politically correct — and, again, oddly obscurantist — impulse here is to interpret all of these aspects and events as projection. And Schwartz appears to do this. This interpretation assumes a 1:1 literalism rivaling that of the Ancient Aliens mythos: white people see white “aliens” because they are white; Schmidt hears High German because he is part-German; men and women are sexually invaded because of prior sexual abuses. Such an interpretation veers close to a solipsistic perspective, for it inadmits the human as a phenomenally porous being. According to this outlook, we are incapable of experiencing anything which does not extend from and reinforce certain demographical characteristics of our identity. All phenomenal intrusion, then, is not an intrusion at all but an event the person has brought out of and upon theirself — a highly troubling outlook to implicitly advance in the context of racial justice.

One might argue that Schwartz’s considerations were curtailed by limitations of a typical article’s length; but it is rather that this type of thinking is willfully abbreviated. We are witnessing the emergence of an aggregate which sees legacy media write-ups, government statements, and the odd academic publication from the past several years as adequate historical information. Academia, like the news media, has trendily latched onto the UFO subject after treating it as radioactive material for four-and-a-half decades following the conclusion of the USAF’s Project Bluebook. Well, fine. That’s merely annoying. The bigger issue for academia is that it continues to suffer from what Alberto Pérez-Gómez identifies in Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983) as the nineteenth century’s “…emergence of a new intellectual leader: the arrogant and self-sufficient technical specialist. […] With an infinite faith in mathematical reason and believing himself educated because he had passed through difficult schools, he had little or no knowledge of society, its history and problems…” And, as the journalist Joseph Alsop observed, “A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous rearguard action against the facts.”

The UFO has settled into the mind of popular culture as formally identifiable. It is a trope. We can trace this form’s edges in our mind. But no one has yet delineated the phenomenological boundary of UFOs — least of all the authors under scrutiny here. And we cannot make a call for analytic expropriation because it is a mystery as to what the territory of UFOs actually is (although, if we are curious, adventurous, and studious enough, we can make some educated guesses). In his book, The Cosmic Pulse of Life (1976), Trevor James Constable writes, “The Little Man wants you to recoil from the vastness of the subject. When the problems are presented as they have been here, already interwoven with each other so that we can see the folly of segmental, indecisive approaches, we can already see why there have been no governmental announcements about UFOs that have any meaning whatever. Only an idiot — a Little Man — can expect or feel the need for such announcements. The subject is too vast, too far-reaching, and too radical in the primary meaning of that term, ‘root’ — to permit quick assurances to the Little Man. This subject is big.” Academia will recognize an insight like Constable’s only once a majority of its members rethinks the sectarian designs by which their workshop has come to function. Given the unlikeliness of such self-critical deterritorialization, we may be in for many more years of analysis satisfying not much besides the assurances of ignorance.

1. As is crucial for Ancient Aliens mystification, which is, at its base, technophilic, the technical or quantitative holds complete sway here over the artistic or spiritual.

2. Moore’s omission here is all the stranger, given that he cites Barney’s description, via an audio recording, of one of the abducting figures as a “German Nazi” — a detail considerably more obscure than the Ariel school sighting and Mack’s subsequent involvement.

3. One would think that a researcher such as Moore would be curious as to why such an event remained apparently singular within the Hills’ lives, if this psychic stress of interraciality and racial-generational trauma were a perpetual force underlying a day-to-day existence.

4. There are claims that the Hills harbored communist sympathies as well. Via the embedded article: “In a January 2022 appearance on Erica Lukes’ podcast UFO Classified, [Martin] Cannon described a phone conversation between ufologist Robert Durant and Betty Hill that Durant had clandestinely taped and later played for Cannon: ‘I found out things about the Hill case that [have] never been published… The two most important things I found out about Betty Hill from that telephone call was, one: She was a communist! …I don’t mean that in the sense that people will call you a communist if you vote Democratic. No, I mean she was literally someone that thought Russia was on the right side in the Cold War. She says exactly that in this conversation with Robert Durant. And so was Barney.’”

5. Avant goes a step further, suggesting that if the “transcendent” object or intelligence is unwilling or unable to help the black subject overcome systemically derived struggles, then, perhaps to the individual, this phenomenon may as well not exist.

6. The history of the work of the Marquis de Puységur, Franz Mesmer, and Hénin de Cuvillers in relation to animal magnetism, later known as mesermism, and then hypnotism, can be especially revealing in this regard. With science having been granted ontological status, we have lived with the “common-sensical” notion that scientific discoveries progress more or less linearly, and that scientists impartially follow the data. A closer look reveals that the procession and recession of certain ideas is powerfully organized around one group’s defense of its disciplinary domain against another. It is an irony that the greatest stimulant and threat to scientific specialists — and that is all we have today — continues to be the emergence of alternative ideas. No one wants to be considered outdated.

7. By “separatist”, I am referring to the idea that humans are organisms independent of the planet, rather than organisms with some intimate teleological link to the Earth.