Not of This Earth: UFO Studies

Abstract

In contemporary speculative philosophy there is a tendency to theorize about the alien. Among these theories are the xenophenomenology of Dylan Trigg, the alien phenomenology of Ian Bogost, and the weird realism of Graham Harman. All of them assert that the alien is all around us and that we will see it if only we look. Nevertheless, they are all inexplicably ready to ignore the actual encounter with the unknown and the truly alien during the scientific investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force in 1947. The article maintains that the UFO investigations are an indispensable resource without which no theories of the alien and the weird can in principle be developed. Only a thorough analysis of the scientific sources describing the encounter with UFOs will enable us apprehend the alien in itself without reducing it to the alien for us. To demonstrate this point, the author first examines the discourses about UFOs that have dominated mass culture from the 1940s through the 2000s when those discourses were finally marginalized. He identifies seven main types of discourse that gradually supersede each other: 1) encounter with the unknown, 2) guests from other planets, 3) mythological explanation of flying saucers, 4) paleocontact, 5) spiritual dimensions of the contact, 6) alien conspiracy, 7) abductions. He then considers what topics occupied researchers during the period in question and how that may be applied in contemporary theories of the alien (through analysis of the methodology of UFO investigations and the classification of types of contacts). Finally he describes in detail the image of the alien popularized by mass culture (at the juncture between contemporary myths about abductions and UFO crashes and their representations in mass culture).