In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
“People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it’s the end of times,” said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. “It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts.” ^
I remember, as a kid, going to the back of the library where, apart from the shelves, they had a turning wireframe shelf where they put all the weird and whacked out books. The conspiracy theories about Mayans inventing television, exposes of Replicants and Liquefactionists among us, theories about Egypt and magnetic mind control, and finally, reams of UFO information. When summer wore boring, I’d even check out some of these books and see what they were about.
In all honesty I have to say that most were paranoid, religiously desperate interpretations of inconclusive data, but not all of the UFO ones were fully whacked. The problem with the UFO books was that at some point each book had to cite or otherwise reference someone who was a whackjob, even if the authors were on the level. Maybe three-quarters of the UFO books were charlatanism, sensationalism or amateur con-jobs, but that remaining quarter seemed to come from sincere people.
To use William Gibson’s word, I’m agnostic on UFOs. I haven’t seen one. However, I also can’t think of a single conclusive reason why other species with advanced technology cannot exist, especially in a universe that’s huge and billions of years old. To think that there is some scientific datum that proves that UFOs cannot exist or other species cannot exist is to me the same kind of religious delusion as some of those books about Mayan magnetic Liquefactionism.
But because I like to think I’m objective, I have to ask myself: why do we humans (including myself) resist the idea of UFOs existing? Even in this blog, I’m not exactly jumping to go out and find the truth. It’s like I’m so inured to its possibility, yet not really looking forward to a positive answer, that I’ve filtered it out in the same way suburbanites filter out crime, traffic, nuclear war and aging as they settle down in front of their TVs at night.
Luckily, one of my favorite authors gave me a hint:
Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to “the intellectuals” also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly. ^
The fiction absolute is a convincing theory. As long as we are alone in a society, we can accept our role in it and reason that others with more power or money deserve it, according to some theory of what that society values. If another society appears on the horizon however and they appear to be having a better time of it, our contentment is shattered, and we want to murder them or submit to them so we can have the better life.
It’s kind of like the dickhead in traffic this morning who was perfectly content to bobble along at five below the speed limit in the left lane, until I started to pass his fat cell-phone-yammering ass, at which point he floored it so I couldn’t get ahead (note to interested readers: he lost out to a left turner because I could from the right lane see ahead of the SUV that was blocking his vision). He was happy at a slow speed, until he saw someone moving quickly. Relativity in action?
UFOs present the same kind of challenge. We can’t see their home planets, so if they’re here, their technology is superior to ours. Since we explain ourselves as being smart and progressive on the basis of our technology, that means they’re smarter and better organized than us. Basically, if UFOs are real, humanity just got massively one-upped and we can’t be content with what we have anymore. We have to start striving toward something.
Instability comes with our foreign visitors. What if their ways are better? What if we aren’t the pre-eminent force in the universe? What if the universe is like a wild west, and no Cosmic Arbitrator is going to prevent a more advanced species from doing to us what we do to cows, and using us to produce milk or meat? If a UFO landed in Washington, D.C., tomorrow and an alien got out and was verified as an alien, existential panic would shatter humanity.
At least for a few days. After that, it could end up being beneficial, since we no longer could rest in fat lazy contentment that makes us hate ourselves. We’d have a new quest. That can’t be all bad. I still don’t know if UFOs exist, but sometimes I wish for more of these highly credible sightings.
[...] math is that if they can convince you you’re wrong, you give up, and they are safe. (Author Tom Wolfe, who draws our attention to things like this, invented the term homo loquax to demonstrate how much [...]
[...] view, as much as observes in advance, using his knowledge of sociology and the rigid link between self-identity and moral relationship to society at large. In his realism he may be closer to the future than the [...]