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Reconciling UFOs and the "Singularity": Part One
Posted by Mac Tonnies, Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 11:00 AM by Mac Tonnies
Like most proponents of an imminent technological "singularity," I'm troubled by the seeming absurdity of UFO behavior. But instead of trying to dismiss the mystery outright, I've become convinced that the phenomenon is substantially deeper than the "mere" comings and goings of predominantly biologically beings in metal spacecraft. In my last blog post, I wondered if UFOs might represent a spectacle enacted by an ET machine intelligence. As noted by acclaimed researcher Jacques Vallee, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) typically embraced by ufologists fails to account for the phenomenon's enduring weirdness. Vallee posits that UFO sightings might be staged events that unfold according to the mythological syntax of any given era and has discovered intriguing parallels drawn from world folklore (a subject that merits a post or two in itself).
The UFO puzzle certainly represents an intelligence of some kind. Once we exclude the fashionable notion that all "good" sightings must invariably be the result of misinterpretation or hoax, it becomes apparent that we're dealing with an extremely adaptable form of technology (or at least compelled to think we are). If the UFO intelligence is ET in origin, it's conceivable that the enigmatic "flying disks" and apparent "occupants" that have come to populate 21st century mythology are so much theater designed to appeal to our sense of planetary selfhood. (It bears mentioning that the UFO phenomenon has never been exclusively American. Nor did it begin in the 1940s, as often assumed by ufologists and committed skeptics alike.)
As Vallee has argued in books such as "Passport to Magonia" and "Dimensions," we're witnessing the latest permutation in a richly historical drama that challenges researchers to re-examine the ETH. Like accounts of gods and "little people" before them, UFOs fulfill a significant psychosocial role. Examined superficially, this alone seems like grounds for debunking sightings of unlikely humanoids and their alleged vehicles. Yet UFOs behave in ways that refute a simple psychological explanation. Decades of multiple-witness encounters, complete with anomalous radar returns and other anomalies, leave little doubt that UFOs are a physical reality.
But why would visiting aliens behave in such a maddeningly elusive manner, eschewing open contact yet persistently presenting themselves in the most bizarre context? Moreover, what do we make of the nagging folkloric parallels documented by Vallee?
While humanoid aliens engaged in a scientific study of our planet might very well inadvertently reveal themselves from time to time, UFO researchers must grapple with the peculiarly theatric flavor that accompanies so many credible sightings. It seems that whatever we're witnessing is intentionally tricking us, adopting prudent disguises that fit the reigning zeitgeist.
Vallee--and other researchers of an esoteric bent--suspect we're the recipients of a social engineering campaign that has little or nothing to do with flesh-and-blood visitors.
If he's right, we might be on the cusp of a new way of addressing ET contact that enlivens the UFO debate and casts new light on our own future.
Mac Tonnies
9 Comments:
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Posted by Scott S
March 26, 2008 at 02:10 PM
The ufo phenomenon is so strange that I doubt a simple nuts and bolts explanation could ever account for all the experiences people have been having. The abduction issue involving greys that mysteriously move through walls and remove their human victims for examinations etc. on board their ships makes me think of Carl Jung and his psychology of the unconscious mind. The greys could be symbolic for the blending of conscious and unconscious forces, or of light and dark.
There is a psychological component to our apprehension of physical reality in which our subjective nature projects itself unconsciously into our objective perceptions, thus coloring everything we see.
So, are people witnessing some kind of psychic manifestation via the power of projection, ranging from dreamlike all the way to physical reality? I am just speculating... but, it would form the basis for a model that could account for the more surreal encounters. And is enough to get oneself banned from Mufon!
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Posted by Daniel Brenton
March 26, 2008 at 12:55 AM
Doc --
"Marx Brothers meets Arthur C." That was great ... I got a visual on THAT one. Now, take the incident with Joe Simonton in Wisconsin and the short saucer men who gave him the crispy pancakes -- that seems more like Laurel and Hardy meets the shop teacher. Or maybe the French surrealists meet Buster Keaton.
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Posted by Press to Digitate
March 24, 2008 at 03:20 PM
Why compulsively shoehorn "them" into any one category? Dekker's point about the Penguins is well taken. Alien biologists here doing some kind of large scale, long term "Bioassay" of our world (perhaps a necessary safety protocol before wide ranging interplanetary relations can ensue), are under no more obligation to conform themselves to our expectations than can our zoologists, tagging Penguins for future study be expected to meet the cultural norms of the surrounding Penguin population.
Its fashionable to try to read all kinds of spooky, mind-bending perceptual theory into the UFO issue, but in the vast majority of cases, simple vehicles beyond current human technological capacity seems quite sufficient to explain their observed performance. Where non-human beings are noted in connection with the UFOs, one need not reach further than "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities" for a cohesive explanation which plausibly acccounts for the observation.
While our world is without a doubt approaching a technological Singularity, its is by no means clear that all advanced civilizations find themselves trapped in the same predicament. Among those that do, the Silicon may not always "win". In some cases, their mass consciousness may trump the Grand A.I., whether through better planning, social cohesion, evolutionary patterns, or genetics. Perhaps our impending Singularity is what they are here to observe. Perhaps it is the next moment of vulnerability in which our evolution can be co-opted for their own ends.
The whole Valee miasma seems to represent just another attempt at the rationalization of irrational 'Denial'. Something endemic to the psychosocial makeup of many people cannot accept the reality that "we are not alone". They will go to heroic lengths to discredit any amount of evidence, no matter how conclusive, for both Extraterrestrials and the Afterlife, because they cannot abide a world which their primitic fundamentalist scientific dogma has not already wholly explained. They build their entire ego-identity on their rigid understanding of how inclusive they believe their worldview to be, and any facts outside of those parameters (i.e. 'Beings simply cannot come here from other planets' or 'We just cant live without our organic bodies') challenge them to the point of apoplexy.
Denial is emblematic of Obsolescence, which, for species and cultures, is the precursor to Extinction. Its not necessary to read so much into the UFO (or Afterlife) phenomenon, nor to read between the lines. How many million More quality sightings, abductions, EVPs, or apparitions will it take to accept the obvious - that there really ARE more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreampt of in our [prevailing] philosophy?
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Posted by george
March 24, 2008 at 01:21 AM
UFOs fulfill a significant psychosocial role.
Wrong ! No one needs UFO’s psychosocially or any other ologieness !
Nada ! NO ! Taint So !
Like saying rape is a psychosocial need .
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Posted by Pavel Chichikov
March 21, 2008 at 03:11 PM
I think Bavo Dekker may be on the right track. To paraphrase Montaigne, what do we know anyway? The allusive quality of the events suggests the many layers of meaning in poetry, but also in common place experience of one is alive to it.
An attempt at an illustration: Bavo's name might be taken to refer to the St. Bavo altarpiece of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, in Ghent. Appropriate on this Good Friday, as the center panel shows the Sacrifice of the Lamb.
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Posted by Bavo Dekker
March 21, 2008 at 10:12 AM
It could bee that the whole UFO/ET phenomena is just beyond the grasp of human intelligence and just like the penguins in Antarctica who are sometimes visited by biologists from a research vessel to count them, weigh them, take blood samples,
and so on. I think we can be sure that the penguins in the colony can never comprehend what is happening to them and what the purpose of their \"close encounter of the fourth kind\" means. The event is completely outside the realm of penguin logic.
For them to understand anything about biology research, universities, research vessels etc. must be absolutely impossible.
We must learn to extend the scale of intelligence way beyond the human range, a thing that has not been researched enough yet. There must be a cosmic scale or dimension of intelligence that goes way beyond the two or three millions years of human evolution on this planet. As computers get more and more powerful there is a possibility that this could be the only way ever to crack the UFO/ET enigma.
Bavo Dekker,
Bergen, The Neterlands.
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Posted by Bavo Dekker
March 21, 2008 at 10:07 AM
It could bee that the whole UFO/ET phenomena is just beyond the grasp of human intelligence and just like the penguins in Antarctica who are sometimes visited by biologists from a research vessel to count them, weigh them, take blood samples,
and so on. I think we can be sure that the penguins in the colony can never comprehend what is happening to them and what the purpose of their "close encounter of the fourth kind" means. The event is completely outside the realm of penguin logic.
For them to understand anything about biology research, universities, research vessels etc. must be absolutely impossible.
We must learn to extend the scale of intelligence way beyond the human range, a thing that has not been researched enough yet. There must be a cosmic scale or dimension of intelligence that goes way beyond the two or three millions years of human evolution on this planet. As computers get more and more powerful there is a possibility that this could be the only way ever to crack the UFO/ET enigma.
Bavo Dekker,
Bergen, The Neterlands.
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Posted by Bruce Duensing
March 21, 2008 at 07:17 AM
Wonderful post. I just posted a similar one on my own blog. I sense that it is not rooted in a technological origin although it can mirror one. I have come to sense it is a sentient terrestrial organism which occupies a quantum like dimension interfaced in some unrecognized manner with our own. We could consider it's many "masks" as effective natural camouflage using the observer as a foil to create them. Or they are of such a constitution we are unable to observe them directly and so our own state is superimposed upon them, a form of cultural symbology in a quasi material state.
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Posted by Doc C
March 20, 2008 at 02:34 PM
Yep, right on. I've lately been rereading Vallee and just finished one I missed, the commentary on the Soviet reports. Right now, as it stands, the "nuts and bolts" community is arguing what kind of lighting is in the "craft" (I'm serious). But if this is an Intelligence, then "it", whatever "it" is, gets to set all the parameters. We see what "it" wants us to see. It's as if some of us get to step into a theatre and watch a really intriguing movie, a sort of Marx Brothers meets Arthur C. Instead of assuming that we are seeing anything close to a reality, we should be wondering who's up there running the projector or how did we get in the door in the first place? Your commentary is refreshing. The search goes on....
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