recencie

“First, one can’t help but feel that there is a contradiction, or at the very least a paradox, in the concept of the crashed saucer.” (p. 134). As Niklas Luhmann the German sociologist sees it, paradox is the ‘holy shrine’ of modern society. I admit these boys are scientific, but this isn’t my favorite UFO book. There is a lot here to like though, some adequate debunking of some ufological ‘holy cows’. If your ‘holy cow’ is the ever elusive UFO ‘disclosure’, be prepared to either hate this book or to have a few of your comfortable illusions on the subject thrown into doubt. Still the ‘earth lights’ floated by the authors as a plausible and scientific explanation for UFOs is just boring and no fun. This is of course one of the biggest problems with science, it’s tendency to disenchant! ‘Tectonic Strain Theory’ (TST) as it is officially called will not satisfy true believers or even those looking for a little entertainment via well-spun folk tales. Earthquakes and magnetic fault lines spitting out balls of colored light cannot explain abductions though right? The authors do a fair job of presenting ‘suggestibility’ as a reasonable explanation for hypnotically reconstructed abduction events, but even if these colored lights spat out from the earth are to blame, “[a]ltered mind states can be also occasioned by artificial energy fields.” (p. 177) Could “electrical hypersensitivity” explain the Travis Walton experience? (p. 177) It seems impossible to arrange for a complete catalogue of all such occurrences that would satisfy either the true believers or the more scientifically inclined ufologists. Indeed that is my chief complaint about this extremely well-written and well-researched book - namely that the authors do seem to avoid any unexplained sightings or events that might throw their primary conclusion (‘Tectonic Strain Theory’ or TST) into question. This is John Keel’s chief complaint against the extraterrestrial hypothesis (‘ETH’) - that it selects only data which fits the theory and avoids the rest. Again since this book is a bit out of date some of that may be due to more recent developments. Could the UAPs of more recent Defense Dept. provenance be explained with this theory for example? I’m not so sure, and I can think of a few contact type events described by Keel and others that (may still be hoaxes but if not) would seem to defy the TST theory. The authors make a big deal out of “things-seen-in-the-sky” but what about examples of things-seen-on-the-ground? Can they confidently say that all of these ‘ground sightings’ or contacts are “misperception, hoax, mirage, psychosocial aberration or whatever”? (p. 179) Not being a geologist and/or a physicist, TST is difficult to refute. Still, my broader question for the authors would be as to why there aren’t even more such events ascribed to ‘electrical hypersensitivity’ given the level of background electromagnetic radiation we are all subject to whilst living in our modern ‘technoculture’? The obvious sociological insight is that no two observers seem to observe the UFO phenomenon in the same way - a lesson in modern society with which most systems theorists would agree. I would say that the ‘differentiation’ of modern society resembles too the trauma or ‘dissociation’ of individuals who find themselves as aliens on the outside of this complex social machine. From this point it is easy to observe that “like most fringe subjects, ufology feeds a desperate spiritual hunger and need for release from mundanity felt by vast numbers of people within modern Westernized societies.” (p. 9) This book offers much by way of description of this ongoing modern spiritual dilemma. “[W]e have traded the soft flicker of firelight for the more mechanical glow of the . . . screen”, whether television, cinema, laptop or cell phone. (p. 37) Within ufology, these boundaries (distinctions even) between fact and fiction blur. “Most of us live in a limbo world of manipulated information.” (p. 39) The sociological truth remains that “all . . . researchers really have to go on are UFO reports, not UFOs themselves.” (emphasis in original, p. 46) Ufology adds to this complexity (or noise?) with its difficulty of objective scientific distinction between hoaxes and naturally produced ‘unidentified’ phenomena as evidenced by attempts to scientifically test crop circles, as “nobody knows where or when crop formations occur, only when they are noticed.” (p. 73) We must perhaps admit that the “nature of . . . [certain ufological] claims is intrinsically insusceptible to what would pass in either the courtroom or the laboratory as proof or disproof.” (p. 81) It may thus come as no surprise that “[s]cientists have largely ignored UFOs . . . and so have governments.” (p. 119) Yet in a modern differentiated society could such scientific and political subsystems even hope to communicate any solution to the spiritual (religious) dilemma at the core of what may be “more complex than simple folklore”, and in fact “modern-day social narratives” which display the “augmented . . . dynamics of folklore narrative in . . . a high-speed technoculture”? (p. 95)