UFOs exist. On that we can all agree. The question is not whether they are but what they are.
The same is true for all numinous experiences, or, better, encounters. People have them. They have always had them. The issue, therefore, is not their reality but the nature of their reality.
In itself, there is nothing odd or extraordinary about the existence of life, including intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe, beyond Earth. From the perch of any other globe, we ourselves would count as “extraplanetary” life. Such a discovery would be, by comparison with the discovery of a new species in the ocean, a difference in degree, not in kind.
What makes reports of encounters with extraterrestrial life—as with religious studies scholar D.W. Pasulka, we’ll place these under the umbrella term “the phenomenon”—feel remarkable, then, is not the bare facts. It’s the social stigma, for starters: Such things are not supposed to happen; believing that they do makes you a quack or some kind of religious fanatic. It’s also the character of the phenomenon. Encounters are never run-of-the-mill. By turns, they effect paralysis, induce lost time, stupefy witnesses, facilitate self-knowledge, or illuminate the mind.
Stripped of proper nouns, a description of the phenomenon might reasonably be mistaken for Saul’s journey on the road to Damascus. The blinding light, the voice that sounds like thunder to onlookers, the commission and bestowal of a new vocation: These are the raw elements of thousands of similar encounters ever since. That modern-day witnesses identify the phenomenon with aliens rather than Jesus is neither here nor there to the point. Or, rather, it is the point. What is noteworthy about ufology is how much it reads like theology. Ufology is theology, in style and often in substance.
So far as I know, I have never encountered a ghost, a fairy, an alien, or an angel. Neither have I witnessed a miracle. I have prayed for healing and for many other things, and, when what I hoped for came true, I have given thanks to God. Yet in truth I could not know whether any of the petitions were granted because I prayed for them. Even if I did, I would not know whether they were granted miraculously.
Nevertheless, like all Christians, I believe in miracles. That is, I believe 1) that God has the power to bring about effects in the world both with and without intermediary causes; 2) that these effects are sometimes contrary to or exceptional in the ordinary run of things; and 3) that God exercises this power on occasion, and perhaps more than occasionally. Jesus walked on water and gave sight to the blind. His followers have performed similar marvels in every century since. To say this is not extravagant on my part; it’s not an idiosyncrasy.
I say it, though, to make my priors clear. Signs and wonders have occurred in human history, and they continue to do so. More or less every religious tradition, practice of worship, and premodern philosophy affirms this. It is the odd newcomer on the scene, representing an infinitesimal fraction of a minority of the human family, who denies it. In a word, the secular is the outlier. The paranormal, past and present, is normal.
A Glitch in The Matrix?
I began by saying that UFOs exist, because the term usefully denotes not a particular kind of thing but a grab bag of unspecified phenomena. In this sense, “UFO” is a genus, not a species. The argument to be had thus concerns specification and interpretation, not a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Moreover, the word belief is ambiguous. It carries the baggage of religious experience. It also reifies the essentially secretive or sectarian epistemology that bedevils ufology. It suggests, in short, a lack of clear conceptual categories for naming, debating, and understanding the range of possibilities presented to us by reports of anomalous encounters.
That is not to say that substantive public conversation about these things is impossible. Government disclosures have been piling up for the better part of a decade. Reputable scholars such as Pasulka, Jeffrey Kripal, and Andrew Davison research the topic, and academic publishers such as Oxford, Chicago, and Cambridge put out their books. Writers at the New York Times pen op-eds about it without blushing. Just last summer, Clare Coffey wrote an outstanding essay in The New Atlantis laying out a sort of taxonomy of the discourse, focusing on its participants, whether insiders or skeptics.
I’d like to do something similar, homing in not on adepts, debunkers, and the logic that informs their passionate engagement but instead on the nature of the phenomena and encounters themselves. What are they? Which is to say, what could they be? When I read about the subject, I find a consistent lack of categorical clarity regarding the spectrum of interpretations available to reasonable people—where “reasonable” includes anyone willing to apply general standards of logic, evidence, and argumentation, and to follow where they lead. I do not have in mind those who know and dismiss in advance anything that might count as kooky or fringe.
Christian theologians are used to not being taken seriously. We’re always already fringe and therefore cringe. When I was in seminary, the university newspaper wrote a column wondering why a school of theology still stood on campus, since alchemy and astrology weren’t part of the curriculum. Touché, brother. I recognize my place among the deplorables: the alchemists and astrologers, the remote viewers and bilocators, the witches and ufologists. So be it. I’ll risk my reputation and take the phenomenon with philosophical seriousness. Easy enough, since it doesn’t exist. My reputation, I mean, not the phenomenon.
In what follows, I assume a basically realist epistemology. In other words, reality exists independently of our minds; we have reliable (though far from exhaustive) access to this reality; and our varied modes of reasoning are capable of putting us in greater or lesser touch with the truths of reality. I also assume that we are not living in a simulation. In a way, such a thesis only pushes the question one level up. If we’re in The Matrix, numinous encounters are a software issue: either a glitch or programmed on purpose. Regardless, at that point the presenting mystery becomes the fact that we are living in a computer program, not that spooky occurrences can’t be explained. (Besides, in the world that designed the program, does the phenomenon occur there?)
Finally, there is a terminological distinction that will be useful to bear in mind at the outset, before the range of hypotheses becomes clear. The distinction is between the highly contested terms natural and supernatural. As I will use it, natural names any phenomenon that would be recognizable within, and in principle analyzable by, physics and math-ematics as they are practiced today. A natural entity, hence, is one that fits reality as contemporary scientists imagine it to be—even if it is not immediately measurable or subject to empirical study. Supernatural, on the other hand, names anything else. For limit cases, on the border between the strictly natural and the strictly supernatural, I will deploy the term mythical.
Toward a Lexicon
As I see it, there are five broad categories of explanation for the phenomenon. The following is my attempt to provide a lexicon for the discussion. Note well that none of these proposals is necessarily mutually exclusive of any others, although it is logically possible (if unlikely) that there is a single explanation for the whole of it.
The first category is theological. Alien apologists love to turn to the opening chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet of Israel who lived around six centuries before Christ. The book of his prophecies opens with the record of his encounter with a complex entity he understands to be Israel’s Lord, the one God who created the heavens and the earth.
Like so many others, Ezekiel is not vague about dates. He gives precise coordinates, opening with a time and a place: “In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” Amid stormy winds and a bright cloud and flashing fire, he sees “four living creatures,” a variety of human and animal likenesses, including wings. Then “upon the earth” Ezekiel glimpses “a wheel,” or, rather, four of them, each “a wheel within a wheel.” And above it all he sees a kind of throne, and upon it a sort of human form, and “such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” And then he hears “the voice of one speaking.”
What more, our alien advocates ask, do we need to hear? Ezekiel encountered extra-terrestrial life and interpreted it within the framework of his antecedent religious culture.
Maybe. Or maybe the explanation runs the other way, and what Ezekiel saw was a vision of God, and what (some, most, or all) subsequent encounters glimpse is the same: deity.
The Ezekiel case is instructive here. The string of genitives with which the prophet shields what he saw from God in himself is theologically significant. God is invisible, immaterial, and incorporeal. Visions are, by definition, ecstatic experiences because one’s eyes cannot directly, immediately, or literally “take in” the divine. What is “seen,” rather, is “the appearance of the likeness of the glory” of God. Or as Paul, a fellow prophet, would put it much later: “the god of this world”—already a suggestive phrase—“has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God.”
At some point, the accumulating distance suggests an alternative. Perhaps when one seems to glimpse God, one is instead glimpsing the gods—in other words, angels.
Per Abrahamic tradition, angels are creatures no less than humans or, for that matter, stars, beetles, and microbes. Like God, though, angels are not composed of matter, and so do not belong to the space-time continuum of our universe (though they can, also like God, interact causally with it by divine order or permission).
An additional theological option, then, is that the phenomenon may comprise encounters not with the Creator but with fellow creatures. To be sure, these are creatures who do not reside in our world, are not subject to scientific analysis, and therefore are not “natural” entities. Demons, likewise, fit this category, because demons are nothing but fallen angels. And Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history (scriptural and otherwise) is full to the brim with angelic and demonic visitations, possessions, and sightings.
For this reason, besides any other, religious people have good reasons to suppose that some portion, great or small, of inexplicable phenomena is angelic, demonic, or divine in nature.
The second category is mythical, which is surely the weirdest. After all, most of the world is religious; a majority believes in the God of Abraham. Most of us, however, do not volunteer faith in mythical entities. Which is not to say that only a few believe in them.
I see three main options here. First is fantastical entities from ancient myths. Think the lost city of Atlantis, or extraordinary creatures like mermaids, centaurs, griffins, goblins, and werewolves. Some of these are fantastic in the literal sense; some could theoretically be the product of evolution (in this or another world); others arguably denote “normal” creatures with marvelous names and attributes. Another example is the Nephilim, from the sixth chapter of Genesis, which on one reading are the offspring of angels and humans, and thus a kind of super-race of creatures long extinct (or not).
A second option is fairies, perhaps better rendered as faerie. Whatever entities one classifies here, they are anthropomorphic, legendary, cross-cultural, and mischievous. Fairies are magical tricksters who cannot be forced into the open, but live a kind of parallel life to ours that occasionally intersects with it, not always to their or our betterment. Faerie as a phenomenon is intrinsically ambiguous. It is neither angelic nor demonic; they are, as Ross Douthat once put it, “non-aligned.” If devils are malevolent and angels benevolent, fairies usually spell trouble.
A third option is ghosts. Unlike goblins and fairies, ghosts are not obviously mythical. Most cultures and religions have assumed something like the persistence of life after death, the immortality of the soul, or the consciousness of ancestral spirits. It is a short trip from there to supposing that some of the dead are unhappy, unfree, or restless.
Ghosts are supernatural inasmuch as they are spiritual, but they are better placed here, with the mythical, because while belief in ghosts is ubiquitous, it is typically a product of folklore. Christianity permits it, for instance, but neither requires nor logically entails it. Plenty of atheists and agnostics believe in ghosts without seeing any contradiction in their convictions. It’s easy simultaneously to accept that whatever happens after death exceeds our current knowledge and to argue that it bears not at all on the questions of God’s existence.
In fact, Christians may not “believe” in ghosts, but they do believe in saints. The saints reside in heaven with God, are conscious of events on earth, pray continuously for the living, and sometimes appear to the faithful or grant their petitions with ordinary or miraculous occurrences. Practically speaking, the saints function like human angels. In this respect, they belong in the first category above. But because they remain human beings, and because what power they have comes from God, and because the nature of their existence is indistinguishable from ghosts (i.e., they are disembodied souls interacting with fellow human beings, the “only” difference being that the former are dead and the latter are living), I include them here among the myths.
The lines are blurry, in the end, because the theological and the mythical overlap in complicated ways, whatever one thinks of the truth of either. We call their perfect coincidence superstition.
The third category is ufological—the money category for true adepts. The initial thing to understand, as I outlined at the beginning, is that truly ufological explanations are not supernatural, spiritual, or religious in the ordinary sense of those terms. Consider three options here.
One is that the phenomena involve aliens, that is, living, sentient beings from elsewhere in the universe. Such a discovery would be momentous, yes, but the sheer fact of life on another planet is neither unlikely, as a matter of probability, nor revelatory of previously unknown physical or mathematical laws. What would prove amazing is that they had somehow journeyed to Earth, in which case their civiliza-tion would surely have far surpassed ours in technological sophistication. By comparison with them, we might feel ourselves to be, as in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, mere “bugs.”
A second option is something like inter-dimensional beings, whether by this we mean inhabitants of another universe altogether or creatures whose existence is unrecognizable to us—who do not relate to time or space the way we do. This would be truly astounding, to the point of stupefaction. Strictly speaking, though, we would still not be in the realm of the supernatural, although it is true that our physics might have to adjust to the discovery.
One last option involves time travel. In this case, the entities involved, whether human or nonhuman, would be fellow residents of this universe, though able to traverse not only space but also time, backwards and forwards. No reader needs me to catalog our culture’s popular obsession with the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel. In my view, the two most powerful recent depictions are Adam Roberts’s novel The Thing Itself, which doesn’t involve aliens, and Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” (adapted into the film Arrival), which does.
It is telling that when Christopher Nolan, probably the world’s most famous pop-culture time-obsessive, made a movie about life in the universe, the only life in question was our own. In Interstellar, Nolan bent time and space only to turn humanity in on itself (incurvatus in se), the finger of Adam and the finger of God extending from one and the same outstretched arm.
The immediate point is that when we are considering time travel, all bets are off; it could even be ourselves we are sighting. The larger point is this: Ufological explanations are not mythical or religious in nature. They are not, even in reductively materialist terms, unscientific. The only relevant question is whether the grounds we have to believe them are credible, compelling, or undeniable.
The fourth category is technological, and we have already had occasion to discuss two such hypotheses: On one hand, the phenomenon could be alien technology; on the other, the universe could be a simulation. The remaining options are entirely human and therefore quite pedestrian, namely, that at least some of the curious phenomena, especially seen in the sky or recorded by jet pilots, are our own creations.
If so, then the creation is either known to us or not. If it is, then it’s just a drone or a plane or some other invention that wouldn’t make front-page news. If unknown to the general public, then the technology is our military’s or perhaps the creation of an amateur, an unofficial group, or a corporation. The issue here would be government secrecy—keeping us guessing while highly advanced technology is tested out above our heads. (The government may also be keeping secrets about aliens, although that isn’t a matter of what the phenomenon could be but of who already knows and what motives they might have for keeping it hidden.)
If, though, some new human technology is unknown also to our government and military, then the only remaining option is that it belongs to some other entity in the world. Which is scary in its own right, if not epistemically groundbreaking or theologically resonant.
Naturally, for the purposes of this category, we are assuming that such a phenomenon is this-worldly and technological. If, however, it were real, objective, and not a trick of the mind, and if no one on earth made it or knew what it was, then of necessity one of the first three categories above must supply an explanation.
That need not be scary, but there are many for whom it would be life-changing.
The fifth and final category is psychological. Most observers of the phenomenon know that a substantial percentage of seemingly numinous encounters are “merely” subjective and not, therefore, encounters with anything beyond oneself. In such cases, phenomena are a function of mental perception and “nothing more.”
Such experiences might be induced by any number of factors: trauma, drugs, illness, sleep deprivation, dreams, desire, poor diet, pollution, random brain states, hallucination, or the natural environment. To the uninitiated, for example, the northern lights might be inter-preted as celestial beings displaying their glory for mere earthlings. (Although it must be added that knowing what material factors cause them does not foreclose such an interpretation. In C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a human visitor to Narnia remarks, “In our world…a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” To which his heavenly interlocutor replies: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” The upshot: Interpretation is unavoidable in this discussion, hard cases are often undecidable, and there is always more than one level of interpretation to be had—think again of answered prayers.)
In my experience, the standards of public discourse regarding UFOs and aliens require that they be attributed, without remainder, to technological or psychological explanations, usually a combination of both. Since these standards are arbitrary and not representative of most people’s beliefs, I think it fair to say that religious people add theological and at least some mythical explanations to the mix (certainly ghosts and saints, perhaps fairies and leprechauns too). In short, a majority of people (in North America and in the world) reach to describe the full range of phenomena with a diversity of types of explanation.
There is, as a result, no one master answer, no key that unlocks—or debunks—the whole. Given the variety of experiences that fall under the description of numinous, spiritual, uncanny, or inexplicable, the fact that they call forth a matching variety of explanations is epistemically satisfying. Parsimony, in this case, isn’t to be expected, because we aren’t trying to explain (much less explain away) a single thing, but many things, which are united not by concrete shared features but by formal similarities: the mysterious, the ecstatic, the otherworldly—what reduces one to silence.
The final matter is whether the third category, the ufological, is a reasonable addition to the range of phenomena in view. Answering this question does not lie in the purview of this essay, since I have sought to offer only a lexicon for the phenomenon, a grammar by which to name, distinguish, and discern the truths hidden by the raptures of personal experience. Percipients may be struck dumb in the moment, but like Ezekiel, they go on to speak of what they have heard. The rest of us need words to sift their words, even if they are doomed to come up short.