Like the space program, the Internet has Cold War origins. Like the CIA, ufology considers 1947 an originary date. As the aliens came home – became personal – so did computers. – Aliens in America (1998), p.…
Tag: extraterrestrial
Jodi Dean on the familiarity of abduction
My reading asks why abduction is a familiar theme in popular culture. The answer, as I’ve been arguing, involves the theatrics of space produced by NASA, the shift from outerspace to cyberspace, and the widespread…
Jodi Dean on validization of abductees’ claims through therapeutic culture
The turn to abduction has reformatted the UFO discourse. Truth claims previously made in scientific and legal languages are expressed in a familiar hegemonic therapeutic discourse. The language and practice of therapy, moreover, have given…
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Jodi Dean on truth as credibility vs. truth as consensus
Similarly, an appendix to the 1968 symposium hearings on UFOs provided a scientific method for assessing the reliability of the perceptions of those who claimed to have seen a UFO. Included as an example of…
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Jodi Dean on ufology as a communism-free attack on the government
The disruptive effects of UFOs were recognized at the time. In a letter to the chair of the House Armed Services Committee written in 1966, Representative Gerald Ford criticizes the Air Force’s dismissal of a…
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Jodi Dean on vigilant scientism
The result of the hearings was a recommendation for an independent scientific investigation of the Air Force’s work on Project Blue Book. After several universities (including Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech) declined the project, the…
Jeffrey Kripal (& Bertrand Méheust) on la chose innommable & indetermination
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Moreover, and more bizarrely still, they [UFOs. – P.] are mischievously omnipotent in their ability to show themselves to us in quite outrageous ways,…
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Jeffrey Kripal on Jacque Vallée & gnosticism
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Vallee’s method here is quite interesting. He begins with the hypothesis that the absurd is meaningful, that the dilemma signals new thought, that we…
Debbora Battaglia (& Charles Peirce) on abduction
– “For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future”: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere I am aware that it could seem almost weird to propose recovering the concept of abduction from pragmatic philosophy,…
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Susan Lepselter on the left/right neutrality
– The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (2016) Many people in these overlapping communities arranged their political, social, and emotional affinities not around ideas of a “left”…