On UFOs and the Death of Astonishment

The yawn at the end of history

Dear Living Dark reader,

Can you imagine the following appearing in The New York Times—or any other major mainstream publication—just a few years ago?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with investigating U.A.P., has said it has no verifiable information to support reports of a government program to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials.

Or this:

In the film, Stratton says “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” but declined to elaborate before the screening.

That’s Jay Stratton, an intelligence officer who is former director of the Pentagon’s UAP/UFO task force. Both quotes come from yesterday’s New York Times, from an article titled, “A Film About Unidentified Phenomena Gets a Congressional Audience,” with the subhead, “‘The Age of Disclosure,’ a documentary featuring government and military officials, was screened for a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives”

The fact that the aforementioned U.S. government task force exists and is openly, publicly acknowledged, and that denials like the first quote above are even being issued by the government, is mind-blowing. These would have been unheard of prior to, say, 2017, which saw the publication of the NYT’s first major UFO story, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” Even now, eight years after that gateway event, it’s all still amazing.

But only notionally or provisionally so. Because also amazing is that the collective sense of life in America these days, and also, I think, elsewhere, has become so weird, atomized, fragmented, chaotic, and apocalyptic that such matters are just absorbed into the general maelstrom with hardly the ripple of a stone’s drop on the surface. In both the recent and distant past—certainly during all the first four to five decades of my own life—open and serious attention by the government and mass media to claims of nonhuman technology and life forms would have remained perpetually on everyone’s minds and lips. It would have dominated our collective conversation. But today, these formerly shocking reports and developments have rapidly become just another part of the general buzz that envelops us all. Just more lumps in the freakish universal pudding of undifferentiated and oddly humdrum weirdness and disorientation that has come to serve as the psychological status quo here in Present Shock America.

“The unusual bipartisan mix of Republicans and Democrats,” says yesterday’s NYT article,

had gathered to watch “The Age of Disclosure,” which had its high-profile debut at South by Southwest earlier this year. In the film, 34 former and current senior members of government, military and intelligence groups claim that they have knowledge of advanced nonhuman intelligence and contend, among other things, that there’s been an 80-year cover-up of the reverse engineering of technology retrieved from crashes.

Can we really receive things like this with a yawn? Apparently so. Or at least that’s what I expect to happen, based on precedent.

And honestly, I’m able to receive such things myself with a bit more detachment and less agitated glee than I would have been able to as a younger man. I mean, yes, all this stuff is amazing by conventional standards. If you’re not following the ongoing reporting and thinking about it that’s being conducted by the likes of D. W. Pasulka and Jeffrey Kripal, then you’re not witnessing the cutting edge of just how deep the philosophical and spiritual thinking about these kinds of paranormal phenomena can go. But at the same time, when you’ve somehow woken up and noticed that literally everything about this experience of being a self in a world is mind-blowing—that the whole thing should be flatly impossible, and that in fact the sense of being an independent self existing in a universe of separate things and entities is a kind of projection like a movie or dream, and that really there’s just one thing experiencing the infinitude of Itself, and You’re It—when your cosmic egg has blown open like that, the perceived importance or amplitude of things in the dream is now relativized by the primary recognition. Yes, the open talk of and possible eventual verification of nonhuman technologies and intelligent beings is amazing within the dream. So is the general swirl of cultural nuttiness that mutes our amazement. But neither is nearly as amazing as the screen of Being on which these specimens of living cinema are playing.

Warm regards,

The Kindle edition of Writing at the Wellspring is available for preorder. Publication date (both print and electronic) is December 15.

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