UFO MEMES: Lost In Translation

This is the report no one wants to read.  For those skeptical of the UFO phenomenon, it is far too permissive of the possibility of a different reality than that dictated by the official reality of scientific reductionism.  For the True Believers, it won't go far enough to serve anyone's confirmatory search.

While admitting the possibility that some people may experience UFO-ET contact, this report speculates that it is a contagious notion which has invaded the collective imagination, and many individual psyches.  Therefore, it is useful in evaluating the whole scenario to take a look at both sides of the argument.

1). UFO-ET phenomenon emerge from fauly cognitive processing, folklore and pseudoscience, or

2). "They're here."

As of this writing (4-95), Disney has begun the promotion of a new experiential novelty, which will blur the distinction between fantasy and reality even further.  "Tomorrowland" is set to offer a virtual reality experience of alien abduction open to all comers.  It seems as if this "psychic implant" might have emotional repurcussions which are as yet unknown, and color or condition future "contactee" reports.

As if we have not been permeated enough with visual and auditory images of this experience, we can now partake of it recreationally, in the theoretically "safe," multisensory, full-immersion environment.  As entire generations partake of this imaginative experience and it becomes embedded in their consciousness, it can condition any subsequent dreams and experiences, real or imagined.

Disney's presentation is based on the premise that "they are here," and the government is suppressing this fact from public knowledge.  We can only speculate on why one of the most powerful forces in Hollywood would make a choice to take such a political stand in regard to this phenomenon.

The paranoid might ask "What if it is some kind of sick desensitization project?  And what about that short, humanoid "mouse" with the big cranium and slight body?" Are you ready for "Hybrid Mickey?"

MEMES

[2000 update].  Since this book was originally written there has been an increase in interest and literature about the notion of social contagions, as originally described by psychologist Carl Jung.  The books out now include Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, by Aaron Lynch, The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Richard Brodie.  These books don't specifically analyze UFO phenomena, but some of these authors, such as Blackmore, have discussed it elsewhere.  So have the scientists who support CSICOP and its organ The Skeptical Inquirer.

This literature attempts to show a predictable expansion-contraction pattern to the social spread of ideas.  A meme is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission.  They spread through motivating their "host population," novel configurations of old ideas, and by proselytizers.  Popular beliefs spread like contagions--cognitive viruses.

But where do the original notions originate?  Does it come from our cultural paranoia about invasions ingrained from the cold war?  Does it come from a quasi-religious yearning for contact with something greater than ourselves?  Neurologist Michael Persinger has put forth a "Temporal Lobe seizure" theory based on his electromagnetic experiments with subjects at Laurentian University in Toronto, Canada.  See his hard-to-find, expensive, but excellent book, The Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs.  He also has investigated the relationship between UFO sightings and fluctuations in the local conditions of the earth's magnetic fields and their relationship to luminous bodies generated by tectonic forces, called Earth Lights or free-floating plasmas.

The hallmark of postmodern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives," or translations of reality.  Postmodernism has even turned its profound skepticism on such important humanist concepts as "objective truth" and reason.

Yet, for a deconstructionist postmodern society, individually we are still riddled with superstition and gullibility, and open to manipulation through our belief systems as any politician, philosopher, clergy, or salesperson will attest.

Further, most people are painfully naive when it comes to even the simplest scientific understanding.  Most of us don't have a clue about the fundamental nature of physical reality or our own psychological nature, and our ability to be fooled by our senses and mind.

Physical and psychological aspects of consciousness are studied in the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, which include philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.  The new science of consciousness is emerging from an interface with the new postquantum physics.

A maverick tack in mind science research is the quest for sentience in other dimensions, meaning we have begun using our own minds in a multidimensional way.  Perhaps psychology is more complicated than physics because inner space has more dimensions than outer space.

A major accomplishment of cognitive science has been the clear demonstration of the validity of positing a level of mental representation; a set of constructs can be invoked or the explanation of cognitive phenomena, ranging from visual perception to story comprehension.  These representational assumptions and concepts are now taken for granted and permeate the cognitive sciences.

Many vocabularies and conceptual frameworks have been used to characterize the representational level, including scripts, schemas, symbols, frames, images, mental models, etc.  Terms used to describe the operations carried our upon these mental entities include transformations, conjunctions, deletions, reversals, and so on.  There may be several varieties of representations, perhaps on a continuum from implicit to explicit, or from hard-wired to flexibly programmed.

Nature rejects the naivete that seeks absolute truth.  We are beginning to realize, individually and culturally, that "realities" are all human constructions.  The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events.  Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.

The challenge of the therapist in these times of chaotic change is to validate the concept that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.  We can embrace this dissruptive chaos, trusting that it is an emergent self-organizing process.  We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system (the "box" we live in), nor our belief in absolute truth.

Metaphor--what an experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences.  "How we know what we know" is encoded within our own unique epistemological metaphors, which describe what our personal experience is like.  Narration, or storeytelling puts the general human condition into the particulars of experience.  The metaphors are usually those of physical experience.

We construct a reality based on our belief system about what is "out there" and "in here" and live within that framework, unless something or someone unpredictably disrupts that image.

Though we share some firmly held notions about reality, there is no Archimedian point from which we can compare our views of the world to the world itself.  We cannopt step out of our culturally limited perspective to see how things really are in themselves.

A strong desire to engage in the "quest for uncertainty" complements our anxiety that perhaps there is no absolute, objective ground to reality.  The warrant of Truth is ever-elusive when we deconstruct the foundational justifications of our convenient notions about the way the world works.

It is easy to confuse what is actually the creation of beliefs with the "discovery of Truth," a common goal of science and theology.

The scientific model of reason and universal rationality is evolving toward fuzzy logic, a new model of perception of reality.  "Fuzzy philosophy" is a relativistic perspective of conceptual modeling.

Fuzzy philosophy is based on acceptance of degrees of truth, the "grayness" (truth values) of most propositions.  Paradox and polarization are the results of a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, black and white thinking.

Rather than approaching UFO-ET phenomena as real-unreal, or true-untrue, we can reframe these experiences in terms of the meaning of the transformational relationships.  In this analogy, the prevalance of "the Grays" seems to point in the direction of this new paradigm.  Surety and fact meld into psychic reality.

To "fuzzy consciousness" nothing is absolute.  It frees us from having to choose one polarity over another.  It helps us accomodate conflicting concepts, keeping us open to examining the "evidence" from both sides.  Thus, we can "believe" to a limited degree without unconditional surrender of our critical faculties, and still continue to question skeptically, and evaluate each event on its own merits.

As we will see in this report with its critique of both sides of the argument, the facts usually are partially true or false.  Even the best scientific experiment only proves or disproves a particular notion.  No study can explain away all of the particulars of the UFO-ET scenario, though debunkers try to dismiss them in toto.

To the extent science has measured facts and interpreted them in all or nothing terms, it has failed to describe experiential reality.  "Truth" doesn't always match the facts.

Logic and chaos, like any pair of opposites, meet and merge at the boundary.  This boundary domain is the creative "edge of chaos," "the twilight zone," "the crack between the worlds," where the two meet and progressively meld into one another.

The surety of fact melds into psychic reality.  In this mode, there is a suspension of the tension between the opposites of the logical and natural mind.  Beyond the paradox of yoked opposites lies the realm of relative "truth."

The "Fuzzy Principle" is described and experienced as vagueness, "shades of gray."  There are an infinite number of gray values on the continuum, which spin out an infinite number of fractal solutions.

Fuzzy thinking can help us revision our perspective on the relationship of mankind and the Other -- the interrelationships of man and transpersonal forces, including God and nature, life and death, and extraterrestrial entities.  It is part of our adaptive evolution, provoking a quantum leap in our consciusness by challenging us with chaotic perturbations at the foundational level.

In terms of the UFO-ET phenomenon, fuzzy logic defines tthe degree of containment within that discrete mode of reality, which presents us with universal physical and sociological consequences.  What any ultimate consequences of this phenomenon might be are open to speculation.

Whitley Streiber, whose autobiographical novel and movie COMMUNION, probably did the most to popularize the notion of alien encounter and abduction has come to conclude that,

"This is not unconscious debris, but something above what we call consciousness.  The human mind seems to exist in some way on a hyperphysical and hyperdimensional level, perhaps even a hypercognitive level."

"What is happening is that the barriers between this hypercognition and normal cognition are falling, and we're finding that there is a physical evolution of humankind that exists at this hyperphysical and hypercognitive level."

"What I'm looking forward to, is seeing the nature of human experience change as our consciousness rises toward this hyperconsciousness, and we begin to understand this higher level of physical being...this is essentially a vast, immensely subtle, immensely complicated theatrics of hyperconsciousness trying to penetrate our level of reality.  It is like someone knocking at the door, something trying to get us to move up, to wake up and to come up in scale."

Further he states, "When the authorities try to impose themselves on the experience, all they do is narrow it to their belief system.  In other words, it gets filtered through what they expect.  It can't be like that.  It's got to be between the individual and whatever this is, so that it gets narrowed through everybody's experience, without the need for anybody telling anyone what to do."

He echoes the sentiment of others when he speculates that over the next one- or two-hundred years that "society is going to completely recast itself as a reflection of hypercognititve thought.  What that will mean, I have no idea."