UFO religion

A) UFOs as products of blind faith

1. This is a definition of UFO religion:

A UFO religion is any religion in which the existence of extraterrestrial (ET) entities operating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is an element of belief. Typically, adherents of such religions believe the ETs to be interested in the welfare of humanity which either already is, or eventually will become, part of a pre-existing ET civilization. Others may incorporate ETs into a more supernatural worldview in which the UFO occupants are more akin to angels than physical aliens; this distinction may be blurred within the overall subculture. [1]

2. As I understand it, a UFO religion is the belief in some divine entity, either such an entity is invisible and indefinite as a God, or it is tangible and material as an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence). The problem however with blind faith, or religious belief in general, has always been the same: A person who takes for granted the superiority of another being, either human or not, is ready to follow and obey that being, without ever questioning or challenging that other being’s authority.

3. This is why governments as well as churches have so meticulously cultivated the notion of God and ETI. In fact the myth of ETI in modern times was originally created and has been cultivated further on by governments to cover up their own military secret experiments. Moreover modern churches have admitted the possibility that ETI may exist, so that they can boost the fading religious sentiment of societies. Therefore even if governments and churches might plausibly deny the existence of such entities, they finally play the role of their mediators, assuming thus authority over all the rest, controlling this way the ignorant masses.

4. All people who believe in God also believe in UFOs, either as expressions of divine entities, or even as diabolic appearances. Only those who are agnostic question their existence. No one of those who have a blind faith in UFOs has ever asked himself what would happen if an advanced extraterrestrial civilization did come to Earth. Such a contact would be so devastating- since reality is always very different from expectation- that the people who never challenged the existence or actions of God would be the first to run away from the ET visitors.

5. But why should a God or an extraterrestrial intelligent species bother to contact a civilization such as our own, when most people consider ETI in a selfish and impetuous way? In fact if aliens did care for the ‘welfare of humanity,’ this could be suspicious. When most people blindly believe in them, there is no chance that they can teach us anything- since intelligence is based on free thinking. Thus if they finally came and appeared in front of us, it is almost certain that they would intend to subjugate us. But if they are truly superior beings, believing in self- determination and freedom of thought, they would never intervene with our own affairs- at least as long we are unable to appreciate it.

B) Taking the UFO phenomenon seriously 

6. This is an article which shows that UFOs have become a kind of modern fashion:

Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, Dr. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists in Silicon Valley, professionals, and entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the realist effect produced by the search for planets that might support life, as well as alleged alien artifacts that have recently made news in outlets such as the New York Times. This discussion explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences, and argues that the media technologies have helped create new religious forms, among which the belief in non-human intelligent life is one example. [2]

7. There is a trend nowadays to depict aliens as the ‘grays.’ I don’t know how this fashion started, but what is important is that in the future the fashion will have changed, while in the past there used to be ‘little green men’ living on Mars. It seems therefore that this modern mania about aliens is a sign of the times. On one hand it is modern technology which has given new shapes and aspects to the ancient problem of God and the supernatural. On the other hand it is some sort of melancholy pervading modern societies, either because our own activities have destroyed the environment and are posing a serious threat to our own preservation, or because our modern lifestyle is so dull that we try to find ‘exotic ways’ to escape.

8. However, no matter how much technology improves, or how many television stations or internet sites broadcast programs about aliens, the UFO phenomenon will stay an abstract and elusive form of mass hysteria or personal misconception with respect to the origin and purpose of life. Our civilization who, despite its technological progress, stays mentally, morally and ecologically uncivilized, will keep on searching for aliens and habitable exoplanets, Gods and demons, just to spend its time in a narcissistic way, without ever truly wondering how Gods or aliens may look or must be like.

C) Another ETI found…

9. Here is an article (among many) which suggests that an ETI may have been found:

There’s one star that many astronomers, both amateur and professional, are focusing on right now, known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star. The odd nature of this star has led some to believe that it could possibly be a sign of highly intelligent alien life in the Cygnus star system, some 1,280 light years from us.

What’s so intriguing about Tabby’s star is that it has been dimming drastically over time and in dramatic fluctuations. These fluctuations have confounded scientists who have trained a multitude of high-powered telescopes on it, including NASA’s Kepler telescope that originally discovered it. The massive dips that have been recorded in its luminosity have led some to speculate that it could be an advanced alien civilization building a Dyson sphere or swarm around the star, harvesting its energy in a process referred to as star lifting.

Tabby’s star was first discovered by an astronomer at LSU, named Tabatha Boyajian. She is now the head of the Planet Hunters project, a program that searches for exoplanets in other solar systems, especially those that could potentially harbor life. She said that initially the program would have been deemed a success if they found just one exoplanet that fell in the habitable zone, but it has since found more than 50. But the program has received the most attention due to its recent observations of KIC 8462852, which has been exhibiting a phenomenon that scientists can’t fully explain. Numerous theories have been proposed to define the anomalies in the data associated with Tabby’s star, but none have succeeded in fully explaining what’s going on. Even Tabby, herself, hasn’t ruled out the possibility that it could be an alien civilization. [3]

10. However this an article which contradicts the previous evidence:

For the last two years, astronomers all over the world have been eagerly observing what is hailed as “the most mysterious star in the Universe,” a stellar object that wildly fluctuates in brightness with no discernible pattern- and now they may finally have an answer for its weird behavior. Scientists are fairly certain that a bunch of dust surrounding the star is to blame. And that means that the more tantalizing explanation- alien involvement- is definitely not the cause.

It’s the most solid solution yet that astronomers have come up with for this star’s odd ways. Named KIC 8462852, the star doesn’t act like any star we’ve ever seen before. Its light fluctuations are extreme, dimming by up to 20 percent at times. And its dips don’t seem to repeat in a predictable way. That means something really big and irregular is passing in front of this star, leading scientists to suggest a number of possible objects that could be blocking the star’s light- from a family of large comets to even “alien megastructures” orbiting the star.

The idea of aliens drummed up so much public interest that more than 1,700 people donated $100,000 to a Kickstarter campaign to fund further observations of the star. From March 2016 to December 2017, astronomers at the Las Cumbres Observatory watched with telescopes all over the world, observing four of its weird dips. The campaign collected oodles of data, which still needs to be parsed out thoroughly. But early analysis, detailed today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that whatever is blocking the star’s light is definitely not opaque and most likely filtering the light as dust does. So that puts the alien megastructure theory to rest. [4]

11. My own opinion about the whole matter of ETI is that if we really found one we wouldn’t know what to make out of it. This is because our civilization will lack the ‘I’ (intelligence) component, in comparison to them. Practically a truly advanced civilization will be thermally invisible. For example a Dyson sphere is a hypothetical artificial construction (which by the way may be infeasible in reality) surrounding the star of a solar system in order to produce energy (like a huge photovoltaic system). It is supposed that the thermal radiation of such a construction could be visible to us. But I really doubt it. A sophisticated civilization will have found ways to deal with such a problem of thermal pollution (and certainly they wouldn’t like to be visible to anyone else). All this taking for granted that Dyson spheres will or have ever been built.

12. Therefore by definition sufficiently advanced civilizations will be undetectable. On the other hand civilizations equally advanced to our own, although presumably they will constantly pollute their stellar environment with their activities, they will be relatively too far away to be detected. In reality even our strongest radio transmissions do not travel more than a couple of light years in space. Thus even if a civilization like our own existed in Alpha Centauri, the closest solar system, one would ignore the presence of the other one.

D) But have we already killed the aliens?

13. This is an article which supposes, according to some logic or another, that aliens are dead:

If you’ve ever looked up into the unfathomable night sky and wondered, “Are we alone?” then you are not alone. About 70 years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi looked up into the sky and asked a similar question: “Where is everybody?” There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, Fermi reckoned, and many of them are billions of years older than our sun. Even if a small fraction of these stars have planets around them that proved habitable for life (scientists now think as many as 60 billion exoplanets could fit the bill), that would leave billions of possible worlds where advanced civilizations could have already bloomed, grown and- eventually- begun exploring the stars.

So, why haven’t Earthlings heard a peep from these worlds? Where is everybody? Today, this question is better known as the Fermi paradox. Researchers have floated many possible answers over the years, ranging from “The aliens are all hiding underwater,” to “They all died,” to “Actually, we are the aliens, and we rode a comet to Earth a few billion years ago.”

Now, Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi’s paradox- but he doesn’t think you’re going to like it. Because, if Berezin’s hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that’s “even worse than extinction.”

“What if,” Berezin wrote, “the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?” In other words, could humanity’s quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe’s bad guys? [5]

14. Here again we see the same paradox, according to the anthropic principle, arising: The question allegedly is, “what if the first who makes it to the stars destroys all the rest who are already living there?” But the problem with that kind of logic is that it supposes that when we reach the stars we will be as greedy as we are now. But this is impossible. If we ever have the technology to reach the stars, we will also have acquired the moral and mental sophistication which goes with advanced technology. Therefore when we will indeed reach the stars we will also be very different as a species from what we are right now. This of course will happen only if we finally overpass the stage of self destruction- something which we haven’t achieved yet.

15. The problem therefore is not if we kill the aliens when we find them in order to take their resources, but if we have already killed the same planet we live in, by destroying the environment in order to perform our luxurious researches on ETI. While we look at the skies wondering about the miracles of the universe, turning our telescopes deep into the sky to find the ‘little green or gray aliens,’ our home planet is suffering from deforestation, water pollution and global warming. Should we care therefore about what we shall do with some aliens we might find somewhere in the future, or should we instead take a look at what is going on around us, discovering thus the aliens among and within us?

E) A cosmological exclusion principle

16. There is a paradox in astrophysics and cosmology, previously mentioned, the Fermi paradox. Supposing that life is common in the universe, and that life must have evolved in other planets, which by the way are numerous, the universe should have been filled with ETI. So where are they? Thus the paradox.

17. Many different explanations have been given to explain the paradox. Instead of listing these options, here I will rephrase the paradox in the following way:

- There is no other advanced civilization in the universe (we are alone). Thus it is obvious why we don’t see them.

- There is a sufficient number of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe. However, because they are advanced, their technology is stealthy (and our own instruments are too weak). Thus we don’t see them not because they don’t exist but because we cannot see them.

18. The point is that by definition we are eternally doomed to be ignorant about their existence. The opposite is also true: If we were sufficiently advanced, another civilization out there would be unable to detect us. The fact that we would know about their existence (even if we wouldn’t bother to contact them) doesn’t change their own status of ignorance.

19. Thus the paradox is resolved by assuming a mutual exclusion principle: Contact is only possible between two equally advanced civilizations. On the cosmic scale primitive civilizations (like our own) will be too far away one from another so that contact will be (thankfully) impossible- ‘thankfully’ because their mutual destruction will be avoided.

F) UFOs as a psychic phenomenon

20. Here we will depart from the representation of UFOs either as demonic or angelic undefinable entities, or as real- but equally hypothetical- extraterrestrial civilizations. We will see why we have such ideas about UFOs in the first place, how such ideas unfold in our mind, and how they become tangible little by little, either because we will someday come in contact with a true alien civilization, or because we will have invented the corresponding technology and have also adopted the corresponding moral attitude and mental superiority.

21. To begin with, this is a letter Carl Jung wrote to Wolfgang Pauli, concerning UFOs, found in the book ‘Atom and the archetype:’

“For several years now, I have been preoccupied with a problem that might strike some people as crazy; namely, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) = flying saucers. I have read most of the relevant literature and have come to the conclusion that the UFO myth represents the projected-that is, concretized- symbolism of the individuation process…

I have therefore asked myself whether it would be possible that archetypal imaginings had their correspondence not only in an independent material causal chain, as in the synchronistic phenomenon, but also in something akin to bogus occurrences or illusions, which, despite their subjective nature, were identical with a similar physical arrangement.

In other words, the archetype forms an image that is both psychological and physical. This, of course, is the formula for synchronicity, albeit with the difference that in the case of the latter, the psychological causal chain is accompanied by a physical chain of events with a similar meaning.

The UFOs, however, seem to be occurrences that appear and disappear for no apparent reason, the only legitimation for their existence being their relationship in meaning to the psychic process. So I would be happy, and it would be a load off my mind, if I could convincingly deny their objective existence. But for various reasons, I find that impossible. There is more to this than just an interesting and conventionally explicable myth.” [6]

22. Here Jung expresses the need of human beings to believe in the super- natural. But in the context of the collective unconscious the supernatural is composed of archetypes (so that the supernatural becomes the natural landscape of the collective unconscious). During periods of social unrest or personal misfortune someone may withdraw into this primordial world of fantasies in order to find a kind of shelter against his/her own problems and preoccupations. At this point archetypes may emerge in dreams and visions with therapeutical effects.

23. Extreme experiences however, either as dreams or visions, may also arise during periods of great expectation or ‘excitation.’ Many of UFO sightings for example occurred during or after the Second World War (the Roswell incident for example), as people expected their governments to be the first to produce advanced machines in order to surpass their enemy. Many of such sightings could be real experimental flying machines made by humans, which have evolved into modern aircrafts. The individualization process which Jung mentions is the identification of a person with such visions or machines, so that one may rest assured that one’s government or divine providence will intervene to solve one’s problems.

24. However beyond individualization lies ‘collectivization,’ or ‘structuralization.’ If we define individualization as the process by which the individual is formed out of the collective unconscious, structuralization will be the process by which a society is similarly formed. But in the latter case to the social processes we will have to add the instinctual collective processes, pre-established structures which emerge and coalesce to form large groups of people and societies. Such patterns can be revealed either in myths of common origin or in fashions and social trends which join nations and groups of people together. Most of those trends are in fact unconscious since they are often expressed in concerted acts of irrational behavior (riots, wars, pilgrimage, etc.) It is also apparent that in such cases ‘consciousness’ refers to the collective properties of the group, not to the individual consciousness of each member of the group. But even if personal free will gives its place to ‘collective intelligence’ for the sake of a society or of a social group, even in the case of a specific person his/her own free will often surrenders to instincts, while his/her own intelligence has been made out of instinctual drives in the first place.

G) The aspect of Universal Preparation

25. Here we have to note that archetypes are not just ‘prototypes’ (patterns of behavior formed during the evolution of a species) but truly primordial patterns, independent of nurture and free will (while even nurture and free will may also be described as products of archetypal structures). Thus, to leave aside individualization, collectivization or structuralization may define and describe the process by which the morphic field of the collective unconscious unfolds upon a group of people or of any species in order to independently guide the group’s behavior. But during the process of structuralization not only the person learns how to behave in relation to the group he/she belongs to, but also the group learns how to deal with larger groups and entities which the group may come in contact with in the future. Visions or depictions on the large scale of UFOs, or of Gods and Saints, are such manifestations of the structuralization process, which we may also call Preparation.

26. Thus we may define Preparation as follows,

- Preparation is the psychic process by which, through visions, the collective unconscious ‘prepares’ individual consciousness for the emerging contents of the soul.

27. These contents gradually become the tangible objects of the real world. Take for example airplanes. Before the real craft was constructed the possibility of such machines had already been perceived in the minds of people such as the Wright brothers. Moreover the idea had been perceived even earlier, although more obscure, in myths (the story of Icarus for example), and possibly on wall paintings, such as the alleged Egyptian ‘helicopter hieroglyph.’ Thus when UFOs instead of mere hallucinations become real alien machines flying in the Earth’s sky then we may suppose that the human race will be psychologically ready for such ‘close encounters.’ [7]

H) Waiting for the first contact…

28. We have always looked at the sky and the stars, searching for answers. Are we alone in the universe? Why are we here? Is there anybody out there? Will we ever go the stars? Presumably the same questions are posed by intelligent beings out there looking for us- without knowing about our presence and that we are also looking for them. But here is the point. It seems that in the universe there exists some kind of principle which excludes or forbids us to come in contact with another civilization.

29. We have already mentioned Fermi’s paradox. This has to do with the apparent contradiction between estimates about the number of extraterrestrial civilizations which may be out there (such as the number predicted by Drake’s equation), and the fact that no one of those civilizations has ever been discovered or visited us. Although such a paradox may be based on a rather pre-mature deduction (as our technology is still incapable of tracing such advanced civilizations), a more elucidating argument could be that even if they came, we wouldn’t notice them. We wouldn’t pay attention to their presence not just because they could be so advanced as to be practically invisible to us, but also because, even if they appeared in front of us, our own mental state would deny their presence, either misinterpreting what we really saw or just repressing the experience.

30. Therefore we may say that even if they had come we wouldn’t know it. However the probability, or improbability, for the existence of alien civilizations should not be seen just as a statistical estimation or approximation, but has to be regarded also in relation to our own level of advancement. We may say that the more a species advances, the more probable a contact with another species (from another planet) is. But what could be the corresponding process or property in nature which tunes up the probability of such an encounter? Are we doomed to be alone in the universe until we discover such a fundamental universal law, reaching also the necessary awareness that goes with?

I) So why haven’t they called us yet?

31. Why should an ETI, either in the form of invisible gods or in the form of a material advanced extraterrestrial civilization, care about humanity? Is there something too important or too special about us, so that anyone else in the universe should care about us? In fact if our civilization was destroyed by a natural catastrophe or was driven to extinction by its own actions right now, the universe would be more or less the same. Isn’t it therefore just our own egoism and arrogance which make us think too big about ourselves? Would an advanced alien civilization ever bother to contact or even pay any attention to us? How would we treat an extraterrestrial species on another planet if such a species was no more than apes? But how have we already treated other species (supposedly inferior to us) on our own planet? If the exploitation of an inferior species by a superior one is a natural law, should we have rested our hopes on gods and aliens in the first place? Hadn’t we better rely upon our own powers and self- determination in order to advance?

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_religion]

[2]:[https://medium.com/@DBMetcalfe/taking-the-ufo-phenomenon-seriously-religion-narrative-media-and-the-flying-saucer-204b3e678a40]

[3]:[https://www.gaia.com/article/nasa-may-have-found-evidence-of-an-advanced-alien-civilization-in-the-cygnus-star-system]

[4]:[https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16843678/alien-megastructure-tabbys-star-kic-8462852-dust]

[5]:[https://www.livescience.com/62715-first-in-last-out-fermi-paradox-answer.html]

[6]:[https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10235.html]

[7]:[https://archive.org/details/TheoryOfTheForm]

11/15/2018

Image: An artistic rendering of KIC 8462852 (Tabby’s star)

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16843678/alien-megastructure-tabbys-star-kic-8462852-dust]