TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  VIII

  The Alien Call

  The chimeras of online life may be tugging at the souls of cybernauts, but they can’t hold a candle to the specters that stalk some folks in the world outside. Even as Western commodity culture strives to unite the hearts and minds of earthlings under a single canopy of satellite signals, T-shirt logos, and movie marquees, more and more Americans seem to be dropping out of consensus reality altogether. Literally millions believe that alien craft cruise the skyways, or that psychic phone networks will do them good, or that, as born-again Christians, they will be beamed up by God in the rapture that precedes the imminent conflagration of the apocalypse. Thousands of otherwise ordinary citizens have reported run-ins with luminescent angels, underground satanic cults, the Blessed Mary, black helicopters, chupacabras, and almond-eyed extraterrestrials armed with anal probes.

  Most of us feel comfortable chalking up such close encounters to neurochemical imbalances, lax education, or bad lunch meat. But the closer you look at these phenomena, and at many of the people who are captured by them, the more difficult it becomes to completely separate this loopy world from the straight one. After all, we live in a time of strange weather, of sheep clones, Martian rocks, quantum computers, xenotransplants, magnetic mind machines, planet-smashing asteroids, nanotechnologies, and global electronic brains, while all about us the planet seems to be cracking apart at the seams. Reality, it seems, has been deregulated, and nothing is business as usual anymore—least of all business. The horizon of history bends into an asymptote, and at its warping edges, the more wild-eyed and speculative can’t help but glimpse the shadows of some imponderable and ominous X leaning in. As the ancient mapmakers wrote when they sketched the edges of the watery unknown, “Here be dragons.”

  Of all the dragons slouching along the borders of postmodern consciousness, none leaves more enigmatic and goofy tracks than the UFO and its trickster crew. For more than half a century, flying saucers and their daemonic occupants have crash-landed, buzzed corn-fields, delivered messages of doom and salvation, sucked bovines dry of blood, conspired with military brass, slipped subliminal messages into B movies, stolen embryos from Bible Belt housewives, seduced Brazilian farmers, and explored the orifices of horror-fiction writers. Though public interest and reported sightings have waxed and waned over the last half century, UFOs and ETs rose in prominence once again as we crested into the new millennium, thanks in no small measure to the kind of media presence that would make most Hollywood actors drool.

  As the ultimate superscientific machine, the UFO comes straight from the radiating heart of postwar technoculture, and the lore that has grown up around the alien craft, both within and beyond the culture industry, has blossomed into the most visionary pop mythology that directly engages the question of technology. We should not pass lightly over this word mythology, however, as if you could stick UFOs on the same shelf as superheroes or sewer alligators. We need to recall that the first mythologists ran into the cave with their eyes bugging, babbling as they pointed at that thing out there. For people who possess crystal-clear memories of clammy-fingered ETs gathering at the foot of their bed, science-fiction tropes are not really an issue. At its phenomenological core, the alien encounter exceeds signs and folklore, and this immediacy recalls the basis of myth-making and religion alike. As Carl Jung wrote in his prescient 1959 study Flying Saucers, which argued that the UFO was a modern archetype squirted out of the collective unconscious, “in religious experience man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.”1 The high-tech drama of the UFO stages just such a mystical collision, generating otherworldly fabulations that drip with apocalyptic and deeply gnostic motifs.

  With such concerns in mind, the question of whether or not UFOs are “real” is, alternately, too crude and too philosophically taxing to broach. For over fifty years, so-called “nuts-and-bolts” ufologists have been scraping turf, making charts, and tracking the comings and goings of what they believe are perfectly material mechanisms from afar. Desperate to make the UFO a legitimate object of scientific study, these investigators simply mirror the literalism of skeptics, whose bulk-rate sociology and rules of evidence inevitably leave the most interesting and ambiguous questions unasked. Much more compelling are the nimble tactics taken by writers like Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist who has written some of the most rigorous, yet open-minded, books on the subject. For Vallee, the conventional story that UFOs are physical craft piloted by beings from other planets is at best a reflection of our own materialism, at worst a ruse. Instead, Vallee peels back the baroque surface details of UFO lore to trace its deeper epistemological and cultural patterns. Unlike those more naive ufologists who hope that the final piece of the puzzle is just around the corner, Vallee points out that the very nature of the phenomenon—its peculiar combination of scant physical evidence, believable eyewitnesses, recognizable patterns, and patent absurdity—seems almost designed to befuddle. All explanations and interpretations are like signals shot into the heavens: they either fade into the stellar maw or bounce back, echoes of our own descriptions.

  For nuanced observers like Vallee, the peculiar behavior of these epistemological loops suggests that deeper forces are at work. Some sense a mischievous, deceptive, and coy intelligence lurking behind the stage of the UFO’s theater of the absurd, an intelligence whose “message” seems almost intentionally tangled inside a briar patch of rumor and report, pop archetype and con job, evidence and hoax. It is as if the UFO incarnates the trickster spirit of information itself, constantly flip-flopping signal and noise. In his book Angels and Aliens, Keith Thompson argues that ufology thus replicates the binary tension found in literary allegory. As in something like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the field’s “truths” are split between surreal surface details—what appears to be happening—and a deeper structure of possible explication. Debunkers, conspiracy theorists, and investigators all attempt to untangle these two levels of understanding, to get to the heart of the mystery by separating appearance from reality. This process even has a psychological component, as abductees attempt to dig beneath their superficial “screen memories” to recall their “real” abuse at the hands of extraterrestrial mad scientists.

  Shifting this allegorical scramble to the level of myth, Thompson accuses most ufologists (pro and con) of a quest for Apollonian truths when the UFOs themselves follow the tangled path of Hermes. Thompson describes the “hermetic intelligence” that UFOs seem to embody: “inherently ambivalent, leaning to this side and that, [it] operates through analogy, intuition, and association, always seeking the larger pattern in the small isolated event.”2 As we’ve seen throughout this book, such hermetic intelligence has been dogging technologies all along, and we should hardly be surprised that the supreme technological phantasm of the twentieth century moves like a trickster at the crossroads, and demands a similarly mischievous line of hermeneutic attack. This hermetic twist may even explain the mysterious cattle mutilations that have long been associated with alien flybys; after all, as the Hymn to Hermes shows, the god is fond of molesting other people’s cows.

  Saucers Full of Secrets

  In his classic study Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallee traces many motifs of UFO lore to the legends, religious texts, and historical accounts of premodern times. In the ninth century, the Archbishop of Lyons mentions the widespread popular belief in manned floating ships; a twelfth-century Japanese record describes a strange “earthenware vessel” flying around Mount Fukuhara; a medieval Irish account claims that a cloudship got its anchor stuck on a church door. Vallee draws particularly striking connections between alien abductions and the fairy lore compiled in ethnographies like Robert Kirk’s seventeenth-century Secret Commonwealth and Evans-Wentz’s massive The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. In a more than trivial sense, ET is only the latest in a procession of fauns, satyrs, leprechauns, incubi, and other spectral critters who have peered through the windows of the human soul, especially when that soul fi
nds itself in a twilight zone where the borders between phantasm and fact are not so tightly policed.

  Whatever Möbius twist of mind and matter explains these otherworldly cameos, some of these entities seem particularly fond of reflecting technological evolution. What appeared to medieval witnesses as cloudships with anchors became dirigibles in late-nineteenth-century America, when newspapers across the country reported numerous sightings of manned cigar-shaped airships, some of which featured mechanical turbines, air brakes, and the sorts of headlamps found on locomotives. By World War II, ghost rockets and jet-speed “foo fighters” were the most popular anomalous sightings, and as countless commentators have noted, flying saucers hit the scene in the radiating wake of the atomic bomb.

  The obvious technosociological conclusion is that flying saucers are manifestations of nuclear anxiety. This thesis gained prominence in the 1950s, popping up in the work of debunkers and B movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still. But it also made its way into the messages of the Space Brothers themselves. According to early contactees like George Adamski, whose widely publicized and thoroughly ludicrous encounters with Venusians dripped with religious imagery, the aliens decided to drop by for a chat once they realized that humans were capable of blowing the planet to kingdom come.

  Keeping mid-century fears about nuclear apocalypse in mind, the UFO must also be seen as a visionary projectile hurtling from the unconscious depths of the information age. The first anomalous objects to be dubbed “flying saucers” were sighted in 1947, the same year that gave us the CIA, information theory, and the transistor, the nerve cell of the modern computer. Flying saucers then and now show a particular fondness for the electromagnetic ether: buzzing TV stations and power plants, causing electrical disturbances in cars and streetlights, and interrupting radio broadcasts with weird voices and strange bursts of static. Even today’s SETI program—mainstream science’s stab at searching for extraterrestrial life by aiming massive radio discs at distant stars—is based on the faith that the information in spectral signals can be distinguished from noise. The UFO, it seems, is a rumor of God stitched into the fabric of the military-industrial-media complex, a complex whose cybernetic tentacles encircle us still.

  As a hallucinatory figure of information, the UFO demonstrates the epidemiological role that peripheral data and fringe media sources play in constructing alternative, if not heretical, accounts of reality. To seriously track the UFO, you must explore the margins of media: trashy paperbacks, weird websites, photocopied “documents,” home films and videos, B movies, buff newsletters, and the goofy shows on the History channel. In his best-seller Communion, which helped spark the alien abduction craze in the late 1980s, Whitley Strieber described the dislocation induced by such ambiguous information: “I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of ‘unnamed sources.’ And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.”3 Like the cyclone of factoids, photos, lab reports, and testimonies that swirl about the assassination of JFK, the thin smoke of data leaking from the exhaust pipes of the UFO has led many a mind, sturdy and not, into information wormholes from which they will never return.

  Ufology’s grassy knoll is Roswell, New Mexico. During a rash of flying saucer sightings in the summer of 1947, something strange fell out of the sky onto Mac Brazel’s ranch, only a short hop from the Roswell Army Air Field. Summoned to the scene, Major Jesse Marcel allegedly discovered a heap of wreckage that included superstrong balsa wood–like struts and powerful metals that resembled tinfoil, as well as a material that he later described as a nonflammable “parchment” covered with indecipherable “hieroglyphs.” The next day, an information officer at Roswell named Walter Haut issued the statement that “the many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday,” because Roswell’s “intelligence office” had actually recovered one. It was the only official military report to date that confirmed the existence of flying saucers. Newspapers across the globe picked up the report, but it was retracted the following day, when military spin doctors identified the object as nothing more than a crashed weather balloon—a claim that Marcel denied to his death.

  Needless to say, the story was not over. For one thing, the afterimages left by the Air Force’s swift retraction gave rise to rather contagious speculations about cover-ups. Over the decades, Roswell lore grew more baroque, and rumors spread that the Air Force had recovered four alien corpses near the crash site. This claim was “substantiated” in 1984 when a TV producer produced a “top secret” stack of documents, allegedly prepared for president-to-be Eisenhower in 1952, that confirmed the discovery of the bodies. These documents, circulated widely in blurry xeroxed copies throughout the UFO community, described the work of Majestic 12, a hush-hush panel of scientists and military men supposedly organized by President Truman in 1947 to study UFOs. Die-hard techgnostic conspiracy theorists should note that this panel included Dr. Vannevar Bush, the cybernetics honcho who invented the first electronic analog computer and wrote a famously visionary essay on the future of computing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1945.

  Even true-blue UFO investigators now regard the MJ-12 documents as fish wrap, but Roswell lore grew even more intransigent in the popular mind in the 1990s. Roswell-related rumors popped up in cable docudramas, furnished material for The X-Files, and fed the hype surrounding a “newly discovered” film that allegedly recorded a military autopsy of an alien corpse in the late 1940s—a document whose oozing detail indicates, at the very least, that some talented media pranksters have a lot of time and money on their hands. In the summer of 1997, two weeks before fifty thousand people flocked to Roswell for the fiftieth anniversary of Brazel’s find, the Air Force conspicuously released Roswell Report: Case Closed, which disclosed, rather anxiously, that the “weather balloon” was actually a top secret high-altitude surveillance device, while the recovered bodies were actually test dummies chucked out of the sky.

  Regardless of the facts, the Roswell incident presents a microcosm of the strange loops that information takes in the vicinity of the UFO: news leaks, cover-ups, infectious rumors, high-tech “hieroglyphs,” bizarrely timed official retractions, and a perpetual and markedly cheesy afterlife in the fringes of infotainment. Indeed, throughout its history, the flying saucer has been cloaked with spiderwebs of rumor and deception, ruse and hoax, suspicious fact and even more suspicious synchronicity. As an object of information, the UFO is impossible to extricate from visionary noise, but all this hermetic ambiguity weighs heavily on the minds of most ufologists, who want their answers firm and their causal connections clear. Unfortunately, this drive to get to the bottom of things has led a good many ufologists into the very abyss of reason: conspiracy theory.

  Though conspiracy theories have always been with us, in one metaphysical guise or another, their logic seems particularly attractive to people who lose their way along the highways and byways of the information age. Even if one is given to only the mildest of suspicions, the systematic and deeply invasive character of contemporary media induces myriad doubts about who controls what we see and hear, and what hidden agendas they nurse. Moreover, as the production and distribution of information grows exponentially, traditional hierarchies of knowledge collapse, leaving behind a fragmentary but excessively data-saturated world of ambiguous reports, marginal information, and suggestive correspondences. If you find yourself compelled to somehow knit this chaos together, the feverish mechanics of conspiracy theory work like a charm. Every bit of data becomes a link in an expanding network of connections; if tended with the proper amount of credulity, the network will grow into an explanatory weed so virulent that it may invade the entire landscape of the real.

  With their obsessive insistence on a secret hermeneutic code that can tie up the loose ends of history, the more extreme or paranoid conspiracy theorists are not so different from religious fanatics or feverish mystics with a Kabbalistic bent. The paranoid kno
ws that everything fits together, but unlike the mystic, this knowledge only confirms him in his separate and anxious selfhood. God is gone: the infinite webwork is ruled no longer by a supreme and integrated intelligence, but by an invisible array of nefarious cabals, hidden machineries, and mysterious agents of deception—occult archons rather than omniscient angels. Even the most secular conspiracy theorists are sometimes marked by this esoteric psychology; the archons may be secular (the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, ZOG), but the basic cosmology remains the same. The visible world is controlled by invisible powers, “the rulers of darkness of this world,” as the apostle Paul put it in Ephesians 6:12. But unlike the Christian warrior, who puts on the armor of righteous faith to combat this “wickedness in high places,” the gnostic conspiracy theorist girds himself with knowledge: the information that he collects, organizes, and disseminates.