by Erik Davis
Needless to say, social, economic, and institutional power often takes the form of conspiracy, and as the psychopolitics of the postwar world amply demonstrate, these conspiracies can get mighty dark. Millions on the far side of the iron curtain took homeopathic doses of paranoia just to survive in a world defined by bald-faced official lies, secret security forces, and history’s most insidious reign of social engineering. But postwar America also hosted an octopus of covert agencies, who honed the tools and tactics of domestic destabilization, data collection, electronic surveillance, disinformation, pharmacological manipulation, dirty tricks, and psychological—even psychic—warfare. This is what you might call America’s stealth government, a government that remains partly real and partly imagined, and that gets loads of mileage out of the confusion between the two.
As any X-Files fan will tell you, the UFO phenomenon is a distorted reflection of this stealth government, and has been so since the beginning. In the 1950s, in fact, it became a core article of UFO faith that agents of the state were consciously deceiving the public by deliberately introducing disinformation into ufological circles—a conviction that had rather significant psychological and epistemological implications. As the CIA well knows, disinformation is a mighty powerful hex. Even the suspicion of disinformation has the power to contaminate and destabilize an entire field of knowledge and perception, legitimate or otherwise. Ufology is the proof. With disinformation in the air, ufologists have an airtight explanation for the persistence of hoaxes as well as the lack of definitive proof; evidence that doesn’t corroborate their suspicions or delusions is simply written off as subterfuge. With this slippery logic at work, even the most rational UFO buff can sink into the bogs of paranoia, where standards of proof dissolve, agents wear double faces, and red herrings grow to the size of white whales. It is no wonder that some ufology watchers believe that the whole field was engineered by spooks.
Spectral confirmation of such government hanky-panky are provided by the Men in Black, perhaps the most hilarious figures in ufology’s archetypal cast of characters. By the late 1950s, hundreds of UFO buffs, witnesses, and amateur investigators had reported visits from strange, swarthy, and vaguely inhuman gentlemen whose characteristic garb—dark suits and sunglasses—gave them their famous name. In a typical encounter, MIBs would drive up in black Cadillacs whose dashboards gave off a weird, purplish glow. Speaking in mechanical voices, the MIBs would claim they were from the CIA or the Air Force, and then proceed to lie, steal photos, or strong-arm their hosts into not talking about UFOs with the media or other investigators. Though the MIBs’ unkind manner and robotic social skills certainly suggested your typical G-men, more savvy observers like John Keel argued that these ridiculous and uncanny figures issued from that same rip in the space-mind continuum that gave us flying saucers and ETs in the first place. Like the unmarked black helicopters glimpsed by today’s right-wing militiamen, or the electromagnetic implants that bedevil so many schizophrenics, these Caddie-cruising daemons of disinformation are visionary symptoms of the covert invisibility of postwar power, that rough magic wielded by the archons of America.
Eventually, of course, the Men in Black became movie stars and Saturday-morning cartoon heroes. In the 1990s, the culture industry became obsessed with conspiracy theories, paranormal phenomena, and alien abductions, a process that has only intensified today. TVs became stuffed with conspiracy fodder like The X-Files and Dark Skies, “spooky powers” dramas like Millennium and Sliders, Star Trek spin-offs, home-video reality shows like Strange Universe, and docudramas about angels, Roswell, and alien abductions. Summers became filled with blockbusters like Independence Day, Contact, Species, and Conspiracy Theory—all outfitted with varying degrees of paranoia, stupidity, and cosmic promise. Given all this strange fruit, it is hardly surprising that some New Agers and UFO conspiracy freaks came to believe that unseen forces, terrestrial or not, were consciously manipulating pop culture to prepare the human race for the final galactic revelation. In this unconsciously postmodern notion, the scientific debate over the reality of UFOs is nothing more than a ruse: the invasion has already happened, through the media and into our psyches. This media myth finds fit corroboration in the film Contact, where a digitally sampled image of President Clinton and real anchors from CNN lend credibility to the fiction with their mediated “authenticity.” At the end of the film, Jodie Foster takes a wild psychedelic ride to the alien system, where the extraterrestrials, in order to commune with her without completely blowing her mind, construct a kind of virtual reality landscape based on her own memories. The subliminal message? Our perceptions are manufactured, and the digitally tweaked mediascape itself has become the artificial interface between ourselves and a cosmos that has started to take an interest in our obscure little doings.
Recognizing the pregnant connection between kooky media and even kookier popular beliefs, many rationalists and social critics have attacked the entertainment industry for its self-serving and profit-driven willingness to pander to the superstitions and fringe sciences that fascinate the masses. Some of these skeptics lay the blame for modern irrationalism at the feet of those cultural institutions that increasingly mediate our knowledge and perceptions of reality. Though most working scientists would probably be content simply to improve the public’s understanding about the basic procedural differences between science and other forms of human knowledge (including religion and science fiction), others adopt a siege mentality, heaping loads of indignation and scorn on those “irresponsible” writers, publishers, TV producers, bloggers, and filmmakers who misguide, mislead, and exploit the nation’s flocks with their dangerous fabulations.
Unfortunately, the relationship between the mediascape and popular perception is a feedback loop, not a one-way street. The culture industry keeps cranking out cartoons of dark powers and visionary encounters because these images persist in us, portions of the larger and far more perennial force of the creative and collective imagination. In the twentieth century, many of the phantasms that formerly inhabited ancestral lore and folktales slipped on new disguises and colonized the fringes and gutters of media: comic books, pulp fiction, monster movies, rock and roll. By virtue of its very marginality, which is rapidly disappearing now that popular culture is feeding on itself and postmodern professors strive to be hip, junk culture has privileged access to those archetypes, fears, and heretical desires that compose the collective unconscious. As the visionary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote in his masterpiece VALIS, “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”4
Divine trash may not provide a complete balanced breakfast, but it can certainly fertilize the wayward imaginings of the soul. In Robert Anton Wilson’s mischievous counterculture classic Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the author describes how the densely networked, LSD-drenched, and satirically paranoid Illuminatus! novels that he wrote with Robert Shea started to seep into his “real” life. As Wilson’s psychoautobiography so seductively shows, catching the eye of the pyramid has a lot to do with your attention; if you consciously tune in to coincidences, stray conversations, and marginal information sources, deeper patterns inevitably begin to emerge. For Wilson, the challenge is not to seek the objective truth, but to avoid being slurped into what he calls “reality tunnels”: black holes of self-reinforcing and totalizing convictions that can capture Republican policy wonks and animal rights activists as surely as they do Roswell fanatics. Faced with the modern world’s honeycomb of reality tunnels, Wilson advocates a kind of wry schizophrenia, a yin-yang of skepticism and imagination that maintains the mind always at a crossroads, poised between yes and no.
This excluded middle is where the postmodern Hermes is born: a sacred ironist or a visionary skeptic, dancing between logic and archaic perception, myth and modernity, reason and its own hallucinatory excess. And it is precisely this tension, and not some abdication of critical intelligence, that now leads so many intelligent and c
urious minds to conspiracies, alternative histories, paranormal phenomena, and pop science fiction. They sense that merely modern skepticism has had its day, that it is precisely our rational detachment and liberal common sense that blinds us to the subliminal workings of things. For our monsters are not just bred by the sleep of reason—they are also spawned by the lies of reason, by the coercive rationality that lurks under cover and under our skin, darkly dreaming of total control. Only by carefully integrating the imaginal pathways of the premodern mind, with its symbolic and visionary modes of processing information, can we come to recognize the divine intercessors and the destructive archons for what they are: liminal figures lurking both inside and out.
Thy Alien, Thy Self
In the 1950s, while nuts-and-bolts ufologists fetishized physical evidence and worried about government cover-ups, another breed of buff tried to decode whatever otherworldly messages the little green heralds left in their uncanny wake. Given the awesome weirdness of the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (the speculation that UFOs were indeed piloted by aliens from other worlds), it is hardly surprising that the meanings people squeezed from flying saucers were mythic and mystical in nature. While writers like Jung, Vallee, and Thompson have gingerly explored this psychospiritual swamp, most of the UFO’s cosmic decoders rehashed familiar elements of the popular religious imagination, producing apocalyptic fairy tales in the language of pop science and pulp fiction.
Delving into this apocrypha, so redolent of the electromagnetic imaginary, one discovers a particularly strong obsession with the technical dimensions of communication. In 1954, George Hunt Williamson published The Saucers Speak, a slim volume that humbly proclaimed itself “a documentary report of interstellar communication of radiotelegraphy.” Williamson claimed that a radio operator named Mr. R. had picked up “wireless transmissions” of Morse code from an intergalactic tribunal of extraterrestrials established on Saturn. Mr. R.’s transmissions—most of which were produced through a “telepathic” form of automatic writing—provided loads of comical information about alien worlds. More significantly, The Saucers Speak laid down the millennial blueprint for the scores of alien communiqués that were to follow. The earth was threatened by dark forces, including nuclear power; a glorious “New Age” was about to dawn; the aliens were here to observe, inform, and aid us in the imminent translation; and physical spaceships were on their way, stellar arks that would carry the chosen ones into the cosmos.
UFO debunkers had a field day with this stuff, arguing persuasively that such potted revelations simply expressed irrational yearnings squelched by the machinery of modern civilization and the dominance of scientific materialism. Desperately seeking scientific legitimacy, most ufologists distanced themselves from people claiming to have chatted with aliens, since close encounters tended to churn up precisely the sort of mythologies these investigators were intent on weeding from their data. The most famous of these early contactees was George Adamski, an associate of Mr. R. and, to judge from his writings, a close student of The Saucers Speak. With imagery that distantly echoes the visionary chariot flights that littered the apocalyptic literature of late antiquity, Adamski described joyrides on spacecraft, journeys to the lovely Venusian homeworld, and chats with beautiful longhaired Space Brothers who promised to help save the day.
In the hands of other UFO contactees, such visionary kookery congealed into an explicitly religious ufology. In 1954, after visiting Venus’s Temple of Solace and participating in a galactic war against an evil intelligence from Garouche, an Englishman named George King founded the Society of Aetherius, named for his 3,456-year-old Venusian spirit guide. Developing what E. R. Chamberlin called, in his book Antichrist and the Millennium, a “genuine ecclesia of the technological dispensation,” King held that the earth was a self-aware goddess that was soon to take her redeemed place among the Cosmic Masters. Functioning as the Primary Terrestrial Mental Channel for these Masters, King helped assist the coming apocalyptic transformation by channeling eclectic theosophical teachings from etheric entities with names like Mars Sector Six, Jupiter-92, and Jesus. The Aetherian “scriptures” consist of magnetic tape, recordings that include not only the sermons of whatever cosmic Master hijacked King’s vocal cords for the day, but also the technical reports made to that Master by spiritual engineers responsible for keeping the transmission link to King up and running against the forces of darkness. No wonder the central object on the Aetherian altar was a microphone.
Though offshoots of the blond Space Brothers continue to channel utopian messages today, contemporary contactees also tell gruesome tales about impassive, almond-eyed, and vaguely malevolent Grays more interested in human flesh than dialogue. Thousands of otherwise well-enough-adjusted Americans have reported being abducted by these uncanny characters, who often strap their human victims down on operating tables and perform bizarre and painful experiments on their reproductive systems. As with “recovered memories” of incest and satanic abuse, most contemporary abduction experiences are reconstructed with the help of sympathetic therapists using hypnosis and other tricks to pierce thickets of denial and “screen memories” (the psychological equivalent of an Air Force cover-up). Afterward, self-identified abductees find themselves in a subculture that’s far more Twelve Step than Star Trek—a tightly knit support network that, by accepting the validity of their experiences, perpetuates their reality as well. Some abductees glimpse their Higher Power in those inky almond eyes, but many buy into the straight-to-video plot offered up by ufologist Budd Hopkins, who argues that the aliens are stealing embryos because they need human genes to graft into their own thinning stock.
Most of us understandably prefer to think of the abduction phenomenon as a symptom of some rather tumultuous sociocultural conditions. But what conditions, exactly? Many commentators invoke the rising awareness of child abuse, as well as the cottage industry of therapists exploring and exploiting the ontological vagaries of memory. But the depths of conviction displayed by many abductees point to the deeper fault lines quaking in the foundation of contemporary identity. Abduction experiences partly speak to the subconscious horror induced by the reduction of human identity to a twisted strip of genetic information that can be spliced and diced like a filmstrip. We sense that the ancient thread of human reproduction, a reproduction of both bodies and beings, is unraveling into a technological network of DNA screenings, brain scans, in vitro fertilization, hormone pills, and the trade in frozen embryos and elite sperm. Just as scientists reach the point of soberly discussing the possibility of raising transgenic pigs to furnish replacement human hearts, the nightside of the human mind hosts alien miscegenations that recall the myths of the gone world, when the fay snatched babies, the swan took Leda, and the fallen angels raped the daughters of men.
The crack-up of contemporary identity is not limited to the specters conjured by genetic engineering and interspecies mutation. In his book Virtual Realism, the cybertheorist Michael Heim outlines what he calls “Alternate World Syndrome,” a condition he links to the “relativity sickness” that besets many users of VR and military simulation machines: a profoundly unsettling and frequently nauseating disjunction between the body’s kinesthetic self-awareness and the nervous system’s perceptual reorientation toward a concocted otherworld. After returning from hours of VR immersion, Heim writes, “primary reality … seems hidden under a thin film of appearance.” Heim does not believe this ontological instability is restricted to the data goggles of VR, however, and he speculates that if our culture fails to assimilate new technologies of simulation and telepresence, AWS may reach pathological proportions. For Heim, these pathologies already rear their heads most dramatically in the “peripheral perceptions” of the culture, which include the reality slips and alternative dimensions that saturate popular SF movies and TV shows, as well as alien abductions. In the abduction experience, Heim writes,
We experience our full technological selves as alien visitors, as threatening beings who ar
e mutants of ourselves and who are immersed and transformed by technology to a higher degree than we think comfortable and who are about to operate, we sense, on the innards of our present-day selves.5
Heim thus interprets the abduction scenario as a resistance to our own imminent technological evolution. At the same time, this psychic disjunction may also result from the fact that our increasingly smart machines no longer fit the rather humble frameworks of ordinary human consciousness. In the words of the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, “However much intelligence computers may attain now or in the future, theirs must always be an intelligence alien to genuine human problems and concerns.”6 We now face this incipient alien intelligence everywhere we turn; the fact that we are learning to live with it only suggests that anxious metaphors of mutation will continue to spread through the popular mind.
The science-fiction fringe of the New Age community also believes we are mutating in the face of an invading alien intelligence, except that they look forward to this posthuman metamorphosis with open arms. Like the Extropians, many New Agers are entranced with the transformative and apocalyptic possibilities of information—as technology, as genetic identity, as postmodern Logos. Indeed, New Age culture derives much of its peculiar weightlessness by identifying the self with “information.” Spiritual transformation thus becomes reimagined as a literal mutation, a remastering of the genetic code at the hands of disincarnate entities from the Pleiades or through humbler catalysts like brain machines and chakra work. Deliverance is also framed in terms of communications metaphors, as if the transmission and reception of spiritual messages is equivalent to embodying those lessons in everyday life. With their mantra of “you create your own reality,” New Agers embrace the notion that the frequencies we tune in to actually produce the self and its experience of a specific world. Salvation therefore lies in mastering the remote control of reality, tuning in to positive frequencies and drawing enough fellow minds into the picture to make your world resonate and stick.
