Close Encounters with Myself and Others
On UFOs, dreams and other conspiracies
Diana Pasulka's 2019 book American Cosmic was a revelation to me when I first read it upon publication. Pasulka's religious studies background offered a mind-altering perspective on the UFO phenomenon framing it as the early days of a new religion, complete with miracles and sacred relics. Since then, she seems to have immersed herself into the UFO community and lost much of the critical detachment of her academic background that gave her first book such refreshing insights. In her latest book, Encounters, she much more credulously accepts and platforms the wild transhumanist views of her confidants, rarely engaging with why they are drawn to such otherworldly phenomena.
To my mind, the uptick in conspiracy communities in recent years, whether that be Flat Earth, Qanon or UFOs, is the result of an overwhelming feeling of cultural stasis nurtured by an economy of precarious employment in which people feel a lack of meaning and agency in their everyday life. For those who have grown up with no living memory of the power of collective labour and a political system that only serves the obscure desires of the free market, reality has become reduced to a mere spectacle they have no control over. The only way to claw back any agency is to creatively decode it: philosophers have given up trying to change the world, it turns out they can only interpret it.
These communities offer both the allure of a secret explanation that you have discovered and now have privileged access to and become a member of a community in which your own experiences and knowledge are valuable contributions. In a political landscape in which change seems impossible, belief in the apparently impossible becomes attractive, a sublimated desire for miraculous change that is denied in everyday life. To ‘do your own research’ is to find evidence of a miracle to come, whether that be the great disclosure of files relating to UFOs that the government has been sitting on or the mass arrests of the cabal of demonic Democrats controlling the deep state. Like all conspiracy theories, there are reasons for plausibility: there is of course ample evidence of government cover-ups and no reason why UFOs could be exempt from similar treatment. Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force study into UFOs from 1952 to 1969, was well known for debunking UFO reports so aggressively that it only heightened suspicions they were hiding something.
It is undoubtedly thrilling to imagine that there is a secret community of scientists engaged in UFO research that are either too scared to go public for fear of ridicule. Pasulka draws parallels to esoteric religious orders of yore and reveals that two of the foremost intellectuals of UFOlogy, Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, are non-denominational adherents to Rosicrucianism, making her analogy more concrete.
Western epistemology has always tried to explain away and marginalise the supernatural rather than engage with its stubborn appeal, a barrier that Pasulka frequently comes up against. In Encounters, she clumsily grafts the cosmologies of indigenous peoples to fill this gap, particularly the aboriginal concept of ‘The Dreaming’. Many reported UFO experiences are also accompanied by dreams, frequently lucid and prophetic, which has led many to theorise that the phenomenon of sightings of mysterious aerial crafts and dreams are the manipulations of extradimensional beings, opening up human experience to a new ontology where there is not such a hard border between waking and dream life and chronos gives way to kairos.
All this talk of dreams made me reflect on one of the most significant dreams I had as a teenager. One morning I woke up with the vivid depiction of a medieval monk holding a placard in a Boschian style that simply bore the legend ‘PSALM 3’, an image I can still recall to this day. I located the Bible in my house, opened it for the first time to find out what this dream was telling me. The third verse jumped out at me:
I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.
I will not fear though tens of thousands
assail me on every side.
Was this God giving me a message that he is watching over me while I sleep? Being an avowed atheist, I had to explain it otherwise. Surely I must have subliminally seen the phrase ‘PSALM 3’ the previous day and it just combined with some other religious flotsam in my unconscious. Back then I was in thrall to the empiricism of David Hume I had been taught in my Higher Philosophy class, forcibly filtering the experience through his rubric of impressions, ideas and perceptions. Nevertheless, though, it preyed on my mind and I casually mentioned it to my one devout Christian friend when we were out skateboarding the following weekend. Later he messaged me to say that this was God trying to reach out to me and invited me to join him at his church. I politely declined, obstinately clinging to my atheist beliefs. Now I can’t help but wonder if I had been less sure of myself, would my life be different? Would I have been seduced by the holy spirit and drawn away from my literary path? These days I am not so dogmatic in my beliefs and wonder, with some shift in my epistemological frame, if this dream could attain some luminous meaning that may yet alter my course.