Well, the never-ending UFO story is back, with high-profile members of Congress joining hands across party lines to give yet another imprimatur of respectability to the theory that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth. The latest flap was prompted by an alleged military intelligence "whistleblower" who came forward with the staggering claim that the U.S. government has recovered technology of "non-human origin" from UFO crash sites—and is keeping it a secret from the rest of us.
If these claims sound preposterous on their face, Very Serious People are lining up to assure us they are in fact highly credible. After all, Congress is convening a hearing to discuss the allegations, and the likes of Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio have cosponsored legislation demanding answers from the executive branch on any secret UFO programs it may be operating, as well as on any "biological evidence" they may possess "of living or deceased non-human intelligence." Think Roswell and Alien Autopsy.
Even as the pile-on of seemingly credible intelligence officials and political figures may make the case for alien visitors sound more substantiated now than it ever has been in the past, a glance past the eye-popping headlines suggests otherwise. As I've pointed out at length with respect to the New York Times's previous reporting on the UFO story, nearly every stage-managed revelation on this issue traces back to a core group of committed UFO ideologues who have managed to create a New Age flying saucer religion out of a blend of sci-fi myths and Silicon Valley techno-babble.
The fingerprints of this same familiar crew are all over the present story. The original "allegations" that launched the whistleblower into the public eye appeared in an obscure online publication bylined by—who else?—Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. This is the same pair that co-authored the NYT UFO story and, as documented in my earlier post, there are several reasons to think, based on their careers and comments, that they are not impartial observers, but diehard true believers in the UFO myth.
But even if these journalists have a dog in the fight by this point in the UFO issue, how are we to discount the testimony of the DOD insider whose allegations they report? Or the supposed "vast web of individuals and groups" who have also come forward with similar claims? Marco Rubio attempts to create a dilemma for those who would doubt their reliability. "Either," he says, "what [the whistleblower] is saying is partially true or entirely true, or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and are leading us on a goose chase.”
The move is similar to the old "Jesus Christ: God or Madman" fallacy in the field of religious apologetics. The argument, recall, is supposed to be that, since Jesus said he was God, then he must either have been telling the truth, or he was unhinged. People are supposed to back off at that point, terrified of being seen to insult so brazenly a prophet whom many even non-religious people admire as a historical figure. Here, likewise, Rubio seems to be saying: "David Grusch: Whistleblower or Madman—take your pick!"
The argument is fallacious in both cases because, of course, the choice is never that binary. There are many possible interpretations of Jesus that don't require him to be either a God or a person suffering from mental delusions. For one thing, the historical Jesus, as a first-century apocalyptic Jewish prophet, almost certainly never claimed to be God himself—and he would likely have derided the notion as blasphemous. Second, even if he had made such a claim, religious belief is a complicated thing. People can profess some wild stuff in this unique domain without managing to satisfy the definition of diagnosable schizophrenia.
Likewise with the whistleblower: there are many possible explanations one could hypothesize for his decision to come forward without concluding that he is crazy, a liar, or 100% accurate in all his claims. After all, we must keep in mind, Grusch is not himself claiming to have seen any other-worldly technologies or alien craft. He is simply claiming that he has been present for briefings on this subject within the Department of Defense. And this I can believe very easily!
Let us recall that U.S. military intelligence spent much of the previous century investigating mind control and ESP. The possibility that they might still be credulous about eccentric New Age ideas born out of the Stanford Research Institute is not at all hard to believe—the UFO bunkum would just be the latest in a long series of similar fads. Let us recall as well that the single shambolic source to whom nearly all of the previous rounds of Kean/Blumenthal reporting have traced back, and who was similarly described as a "DOD insider"—Luis Elizondo—was also presumably briefing military intelligence officers on his oddball conclusions.
We don't need to look far to guess the kinds of presentations and briefings Grusch might have been exposed to in the Pentagon. Previous rounds of debunking have shown us copies of the slides used in DOD presentations on the UFO issue. They are text-heavy Power Points which make bald assertions about "offworld technologies"—but provide no illustrations or concrete details about what or where these mysterious devices might be.
Do I have any trouble believing that military intelligence officials have been shown briefings like this at work, and that some of some of them believe every word? None whatsoever. Do I think that fact makes these claims highly credible? Not a bit.
If we as a society are ever going to start thinking critically about this issue, we really need to rid ourselves of a few persistent myths. One is that people in the military or civilian Defense Department are incapable of being hoodwinked. They are not. Why would they be? Many of the most high-profile dupes of various occult charlatans in the past have been scientists, so why would people with little technical training but who happen to occupy defense intelligence posts be so much more immune?
Secondly, we need to ask ourselves whether—even if it could be shown the U.S. military had recovered strange and unknown technological artifacts somewhere—a belief in "non-human" extraterrestrial visitors is a remotely plausible hypothesis to explain it.
Unfortunate as it may be—and I regret it as much as anyone, for I too would love "to believe"—there are a couple facts that make it very unlikely that aliens from another world are visiting our planet. One is the fact that humans' many observations into the reaches of deep space have not yet uncovered any signs of other life forms. This doesn't mean there could not be some out there, but if they are already so mobile and present among us, why have they never been visible anyplace we went looking for them, but seem to live only in the Power Point slide decks of eccentric UFO buffs with ties to the military?
Another difficulty is the old problem of the anthropic principle. In short, if there really were alien life forms that bred in a world with an entirely different atmosphere and evolutionary history from our own, the odds seem slight that they would develop technology on the same scale and model as our own, just a few centuries more advanced. It is far more likely that whatever these creatures were and whatever devices they might build would be infinitely strange to us, and even impossible to perceive within our sensory apparatus—not a space ship shaped like a flying saucer that darts around like an aerial drone.
There is an essay in the French critic Roland Barthes's great collection of essays, Mythologies, on the topic of UFOs, in which he lays out precisely this objection, yet more eloquently than I can. When popular folklore conjures images of otherwordly invaders, he notes, they are almost invariably portrayed as just like modern humans, except a few centuries further along in our current technological trajectory. Rather than betraying any knowledge of alien life-forms, Barthes argues, these popular conceptions therefore just underline our poverty of imagination. We cannot really bring ourselves to conceive of the radically Other. And so we just conjure up a version of twentieth century capitalist society that has taken to the stars.
Specifically, Barthes writes—in the essay headlined "Martians"—"Mars" (a stand-in here for any extraterrestrial locale) in the popular version of the flying saucer myth "is implicitly endowed with a historical determinism modeled on that of Earth. If the saucers are vehicles of Martian historians here to observe Earth's configuration [...] this is because Martian history has ripened at the same rhythm as that of our world and produced geographers in exactly the same period that we ourselves have discovered aerial geography and photography[....] This impotence to imagine the Other is one of the constant features of all petit bourgeois mythology [....] Mars is not only Earth, it is a petit bourgeois Earth[.]" (Howard trans.)
One could not ask for a better statement of the anthropic objection to UFO mythology. There is a profound arrogance and hubris in assuming that, if alien visitors ever did show up, they would be just like us, except more so—that they would have embraced whatever technology we presently see ourselves as moving toward. The myth justifies us in a conception that our own history is teleological, and that we are progressing forward along the only proper line that any sentient civilization or life form ever could adopt. We look into space and see looking back at us the dewy eyes of Narcissus.
Apart from our own self-admiration, however, there is no good reason whatsoever to believe that alien lifeforms would be anything like us, or that they would build "craft" or drones or flying saucers or any of the other things we attribute to them. The current and former government officials and UFO true believers currently pushing New Age ideology on us under the guise of open-minded investigation often deride their skeptical critics for a lack of imagination—but in truth it is their own favored mythology that displays this incapacity to conceptualize the truly strange and unknown.
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