Anyone following the news on UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — news that may be hard to miss, since the New York Times, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, CNN, and most other major media have covered it in recent months — knows that an important government report is about to be released. (What’s more interesting is that science media are reporting on it, too.) Here are a few thoughts in anticipation of that report.
Many things are reported and believed to exist, which remain scientifically unsupported: ghosts, poltergeists, encounters with spiritual beings, experiences that appear to cross or at least blur the boundaries between life and death, sightings of creatures unknown to science (Nessies and sasquatches and the like), and so on. Reports of UFOs, or as they’re now sometimes called, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), tend to fall into this same grab-bag. A social scientist might consider them to be part of the unformatted “plasma” of reality that may be “out there,” but remains scientifically unmapped, unclaimed, and “untamed”; which means that we’re not sure which reality bin to slot them into — material, fantastical, fictional, folkloric, or some other kind. Evidence of personal and collective human encounters with all of those things is plentiful; there just isn’t a coherent and credible scientific theory to account for them.
Not that theories haven’t been proposed. Science is an enterprise that’s built of theories — “facts” are meaningless if they aren’t theoretically supported — so the existence of theories is helpful, but it’s only a start. Theories only take on weight when they gain both sufficient evidence (and the ability to counter claims against that evidence) and coherence with other weight-bearing theories. And they only become important when they become productive, resulting in tools and techniques that can be monetized or turned into public goods, and that, at the very least, produce grantable opportunities for further research.
Ghosts and life-after-death aren’t supposed to be real because they violate much of what is taken for granted in the theories that are considered credible: theories of gravitation, motion, thermodynamics, evolution by natural selection, and so on. That said, the human sciences are full of problems, like the “hard problem” of consciousness, that leave a lot of room for possibility; and so questions of mind over matter, life after death, and the like, are never fully refuted or resolved.
With UFOs, you’d think the issue wouldn’t be so terminal. In principle, unidentified aerial phenomena are just that: unidentified. If they seem to violate the laws of physics, it could be that they just haven’t been studied closely enough. They could be perceptual errors, reporting errors, errors of judgment, or errors of classification. (And hoaxes, of course.) Or they could be super-advanced technologies developed by governmental (or, more troublingly, non-governmental) secret programs, that are so advanced as to be shocking, but not too advanced to be real. While that doesn’t seem likely, given who has been expressing bewilderment (which government and which military), it’s not impossible.
On the other hand, if they turn out to genuinely violate the known laws of physics, then it’s the laws of physics that will have to change. The two main, credible approaches to theorizing UFOs then become these:
- the Extraterrestrial Visitation Hypothesis, which says that extraterrestrial beings are visiting us, and that they’ve done a pretty good job (if imperfect) at concealing their presence; and
- the Even Weirder Hypothesis, which says that something else is going on: at the tame end of the spectrum, this might be a collective hallucination that isn’t explainable through current psychological theory (though Carl Jung and others have tried); at the wilder end, it could be some kind of space-time scrambling, such as humans from the future visiting us today, or the appearance of entities that both are and aren’t there, or invisible wormholes that allow things to visit our world temporarily (which dovetails with the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis), or something else.
Of the “even weirder” theories of what UFOs might be, the one that raises the most epistemically troubling questions may be the Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis (IDH), popularized by astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist Jacques Vallée. Once you open up to the possibility that there are other dimensions that interpenetrate with ours, all epistemological hell breaks loose… Not only do all religious and folk beliefs become plausible, so do all manner of interaction between the imagined and the real: from human-experimenting reptilians and human-reptilian hybrids (like those Hollywood personalities and high-level Democrats that QAnons go on about) to time-traveling benevolent and malevolent forces, Pleiadians and other star people, and anything else that might pop out of anyone’s cognitive closet. All they need is the technology to “materialize” and “dematerialize” in and out of our reality.
Maybe I’m overdramatizing. But if former military intelligence guy Luis Elizondo, who’s central to some of the recent journalistic write-ups on the upcoming report (media need someone to talk to and he’s there and willing), is a good indicator, then weirdness is definitely on the horizon. In his recent interview with the Washington Post, Elizondo talks about UAPs being something “extra hyper dimensional,” before disclosing that UAP sightings appear to be connected to incidents in which nuclear power and/or weapons systems were interfered with, both to shut them down and to start them up. (Huh?)
Figuring out how to make sense of the radar pictures, leaked to the New York Times and now available everywhere, is certainly interesting, but so is figuring out how to make sense of the new sociology of UFOs, including people like Elizondo, politicians from Harry Reid to Marco Rubio, the pilots who report these things (and those who cover them up), etc. Oh, and ourselves, too. It’ll be interesting to see how all this shakes out.
If anyone asks “why bother with all this UFO stuff?”, we now at least have a good answer: because influential state, military, and media people are interested, and whatever they are interested in will have an impact on their behavior and therefore on us. The upcoming report (according to reports preparing us for the report) is likely to include pretty intriguing evidence of UAPs, but not much in the way of theorization of what they may be. The interdimensional revolution, alas, is not likely to be televised. (Which means that of course it will be televised. And already has. What’s too wild for science is never too wild for television.)
