A Potential Framework for Querying the UFO Phenomenon
Whether he meant it descriptively or as a criticism, John Alexander apparently summed up Grant Cameron’s 2018 book, Managing Magic, as “a compendium of rumours.” Cameron, who has been around long enough not to have anything resembling a thin skin, decided he liked the phrase and what it said about ufology, so he used it in the introduction to his 2024 follow-up, Beyond Managing Magic: Tangled in Secrets.
In a field like ufology where the subject itself resists analysis and — even if you eliminate the most radical conspiracy theories — the keeping of secrets can’t be denied, running on rumours is unavoidable. Grainy pictures, dubious documents and scraps of hearsay have been woven together over more than 80 years into a patchwork of incomplete facts, theories, myths and outright bullshit.
It doesn’t help that the most common modes of communication about the topic seem to be:
· Unconfirmable assertions
· Counter-claims and naysaying (“You’ve heard wrong…”)
· Evaded questions
· Hints and implications (“I can’t tell you that, all I can say is…”)
· Flat-out denials
· Winking media commentary (though this is changing to some extent)
· Dogmatic debunkings
Efforts to forklift the field into new, more disciplined investigative approaches continue to multiply, including the publication of a spate of professional and academic papers and authoritative op-eds from folks like Bernardo Kastrup, Avi Loeb, Tim Gallaudet, Hal Puthoff, Jacques Vallee, Christopher Mellon, the trio of Lomas, Case and Masters, and others. The discourse has broadened, gained a degree of credibility, and is more persistently in public view.
Yet what’s still absent, arguably, is an integrated framework that accounts for all the different aspects of the phenomenon and represents the huge range of knowledge domains being brought to bear on it. (I’m sure frameworks have been proposed or are being developed but it’s not clear that any one has fully taken hold.)
To me, it seems there are four principal ‘buckets’ of inquiry:
1. Physics — the fundamental what of ‘what is it’
2. Biology — the nature of the sentience behind the phenomenon
3. ‘Psychics’ — psychoemotional effects and questions of consciousness
4. Information — the data, implications, conjectures, rumours and further questions resulting from all the rest
None of these can be considered in isolation because too much of the phenomenon is then omitted, running the risk of false conclusions (the classic problem of people in the dark touching different parts of an elephant and trying to deduce the whole from their own limited contact). Discrete boxes won’t work; the problem demands a concentric, interdependent approach:
The investigation of all of them is as much about us, who we are, as it is about what UFOs might be.
A logical first step in working with a framework like this may be to list out all the questions in each category and note their potential intersections. These lists probably exist to a large degree already, because specialists in each area have been compiling them for years. The following are just my own superficial thoughts on what a scant few of these might be in each case.
1. Physics
Since the physics of the phenomenon have been a foreground concern from the beginning, the questions here are bound to be among the best-defined out of the gate. One area I’ve become personally curious about is scale. Anthropomorphism is often defined as the ascription of human qualities or characteristics to non-human things, but we also seem to have a deeply ingrained habit of relating to the universe purely on our scale of experience. (Which interestingly — I think it was the physicist Brian Greene who pointed this out in one of his books — is pretty much right smack in the middle between the smallest subatomics and the cosmos as a whole.)
I recently watched the 1996 up-close insect documentary, Microcosmos, and was awed — as was the point — by the complexity, strange beauty and purposefulness of ants in colonies, bees in hives, mosquitoes breeding in ponds. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that the atoms comprising the smallest forms of life are the same size as the atoms that make up a human being. Scale is a function of quantity, organization and structure: it’s not a fundamental source of difference.
Separate from questions about materials, gravity, interstellar distances and how many dimensions this universe may have, or how many universes there might be, I can’t help but wonder if clues could be revealed by shedding assumptions that the phenomenon necessarily originates on our physical scale.
2. Biology
Biology emerges from chemistry, which emerges from the underlying physics of things — or so we conventionally think. Exactly at what point, or on what scale (to carry that notion forward) life emerges from inanimate matter is unsettled. It’s also unsettled whether or not life ‘emerges’ at all or is fundamental. Is the universe inherently alive, and is it possible for things to be alive within it that are radically, almost incomprehensibly different from the organic life we’re familiar with on Earth? What are the limits on the potential variety, what kinds of phenomena could different forms of life be capable of generating — and how would it affect us to encounter those phenomena?
3. ‘Psychics’
This is quite possibly the weakest link in the chain, partly because we have a poor understanding of ourselves and how our minds work, and partly because words like consciousness get used with wild imprecision.
We tend to identify ourselves — to take our sense of self — from the awareness we carry of our personal continuity and personal encounters with the (presumably) external world. Yet as the Buddhist insight tradition shows, when you look more deeply for something on its own that stands out existent as a ‘self’, it can’t be found. Right from the get-go, we’re caught in an illusion that permeates how we then perceive everything else we encounter.
As folks like Donald Hoffman point out, we have no direct experience of the world: we receive sensory inputs (or generate internal mental stimuli) and create out of them a mental picture of the world. More than a picture, in fact: what we create is our experience. This makes it tricky to know how to interpret that experience, to decide questions of what is ‘real’, to know which perceptions are trustworthy, etc.
It also seems clear that experience is somehow more than the sum of its parts — that the physics and biology of the human organism produce or manifest a mental process of ‘being’ that is constructive, that transforms its inputs into something else.
As physicists would likely say — and the Buddhists, too, for that matter — at a certain level there is no meaningful distinction between inside and outside, self and other. There are simply systems within systems. We’re inseparable from our environment and our environment as it exists is inseparable from us because if we were not here, it would be different. Every ‘now’ and any ‘here’ is a product of interdependencies.
There are many, many deep and hard questions here to help make sense then of how the UFO phenomenon affects those who encounter it, what might be happening and what role our minds have in it.
4. Information
As a word, ironically, ‘information’ doesn’t have much information in it, but that vagueness may be its strength as a category for holding what emerges from the three preceding types of inquiry. The way the term is used these days, information can mean everything from times on a bus schedule to the irrecoverable knowledge of what a thing used to be before it fell into a black hole. Information can be valid (reliable fact) or invalid (delusion, disinformation); it can change, grow, evolve and shift; and it can be used — for good or ill.
This last bucket of inquiry may have two parts: 1) what can we say we know from asking and attempting to answer physical, biological and psychical questions about the nature of reality, ourselves and the UFO phenomenon; and 2) what is being done with that information, by whom and for what ends?
There is also a related question that some people have posed: is the phenomenon itself playing in this territory? Is it attempting to convey some kind of information, valid or invalid, to make an impression on us or communicate something to us?
Food for thought
It’s probably obvious that I’ve even gotten a little lost myself in trying to articulate this potential framework for structuring the study of UFOs: so much of it is so difficult to express and hard, mentally, to hold on to. This is partly because, as Jeff Kripal has said, we are the “I” that is looking into the mirror of this experience and trying to see itself.
Maybe it’s not possible — though, again, meditators in various traditions and other experimenters with altered states of consciousness seem to have gotten outside of themselves to recognize something here that in our normal thinking lives we don’t see. But it seems entirely worth the effort to try. And as I’ve said before, it may be that it’s what the phenomenon is inviting us to do.
