ACFM - ACFM Trip 40: UFOs

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Should the left care about the existence of aliens? The ACFM gang explore the impact of UFOs on political thought in this Trip. Keir, Jem and Nadia discuss the connections between UFO conspiracies and right-wing thought, why some communists think aliens will bring about world revolution, and whether Fermi’s paradox means we’re not alone, with […]

Hello and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol. Hello? And Keir, Melbourne. Hello. And today, almost inevitably, we are talking about UFOs.

So, Keir, this is your fault. Explain yourself. Well, of course we have to talk about UFOs, because this is a podcast about the weird left, and UFOs are having a moment. I also wanted to talk about it because it was a childhood interest of mine. You know, I grew up in a period when you would be interested in UFOs. and that would be linked to like paranormal.

UFOs, Luckness, Monster and Ghosts and ESP. All of that business, yeah. But I'm also interested in it because I think there's something really interesting in that expansion of UFO beliefs which cross over into that ever interest of ours, which is the cosmic right. I think it's a way into the cosmic right,

which could be an interesting thing to revisit at this moment. There is also another reason, I think, which is perhaps there's a little bit of like escapism and lightness in this topic in a moment, which is pretty heavy in the wider world. Yeah, right, quite so. So Nadia, why have you even consented to this triviality? I don't think it's a triviality. I'm just, I'm just not interested, I have to say.

So I'm here for the ride. I don't think I've ever had a interest in space. I think I said this in the space episode. I just feel like there's too many exciting slash horrific things happening on Earth that are kind of taking my attention to, to worry about what's happening out of space. But I have recently watched a couple of documentaries on UFOs, and it got me thinking about the relationship between groups of people having a sort of belief

and how that relates to the state and what the state tries to do about it when a community somewhere says, we think this thing is unexplained, and then what the state's interest is in reacting to that. So that's one reason why. Mostly I'm here for the ride. For the ride on the spaceship. On the spaceship, absolutely. Let's see if she's a believer by the end of the show.

Yeah, let's see. What about you, Jeremy? Well, like Keir, I was really interested in this as a kid, and I agree. I concede the point that as a weird left podcast, then we have to do it. The weird left, this phrase, I think, was originally coined by Matt Full, friend of the show, who also coined the term acid carbonism, therefore basically invented us.

And the euphology is central to weird culture, which is one of our topics. But I also feel, I have to say, as a professional cultural studies scholar, I feel like it is a subject. I just, I have to think about a bit because it is a huge part of contemporary culture, you know, the belief in UFOs or the disbelieving UFOs or discourse on UFOs. So it is all really, it is important stuff. But before we get into that topic, let me remind you, listeners, that if you, you enjoy the show, you can go even weirder and even leftier by

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So with those notices out of the way, let's get on with the show. We should play the Purple People Eater by Sheb Woolley from 1958. What you might call a novelty song with the lines? I said, Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line? He said, eating purple people and it sure is fine. But that's not the reason I came to your land. I want to get a job in a rock and roll band. And that, dear listeners, is the secret to aliens.

out of the sky, but a one long horn, one big eye, like a mr. shaking in a sedery. It looks like a purple people eater to me. It was a one-eyed, one horn flying purple people eater. One-eyed, one-horn flying purple people eater. One-eyed, one horn flying purple people eater sure looks strange to me. One eye. Yeah, well, we should probably start on why there's been a renewed interest of them recently.

like interesting UFOs and explain flying objects which are now often called an identified anomalous phenomena UAPs it comes and goes interest that comes in waves and we're in the middle of a really big wave now and that wave probably goes back to like 2017 when a series of videos taken from US aircraft mainly US military aircraft they sort of circulated online and then US government released them publicly basically in 2017. 17. So that sparked a sort of interest. In 2022, the US Congress opened its first public hearings into UFOs for like the first one for 50 years. And then sort of just after that, there was a wave of, if you remember, the Chinese weather balloon, it flew across the Pacific, was seen as either

a UFO or a spy balloon or something like that. It was just an errant Chinese weather balloon. That then caused whoever runs the radar for the USeronautics Association, I don't know. Basically, they're people who man the radars. They lowered the level upon which something would be detected. So you have to sort of, you know, you're only going to detect things which are above a certain level. Otherwise, you just detect every bird in the sky and it would be useless. They lowered that a little bit. And then suddenly discovered huge amounts of new and identified flying objects

because all of a sudden you could detect more basically and so there was a famous thing last summer where like the US Air Force scrambled and launched like a billion pound missile at something that turned out to be a balloon that somebody bought for $50 off the shelf of a supermarket so there was that then and then this summer you know just a couple of months ago there was another sort of hearing in Congress

and this guy David Grush who was a retired Air Force intelligence officer testified to Congress in a big public hearing about what he claimed to have discovered during his research, basically, which are pretty out there. David Grush's testimony is none of it is like things he's seen himself or even reports he's read himself, but he says he's taught to like people who have either seen these things or read reports which confirm these things. And his job was to investigate this sort of area for US Air Force. Yeah, and the things are, We need to clarify what the things which Grush claims credible sources within the American security agencies have confirmed to him include the fact that the American government is in possession of both crashed alien spacecraft

from which they are in the process of extracting advanced technologies and have been for decades and the bodies of crashed aliens, the dead bodies of crashed aliens. how come alien space pilots are so bad at landing? I don't know. That's one of the great mysteries. That's a good one, actually. So just to clarify, in terms of this wave, we're not just talking about Anglo-America, we're actually just talking about America. Is that right? Or was there a Chinese perspective on this?

Well, the Chinese perspective is why they're shooting down our weather balloons. But, no, I mean, it's one of those things, though. When there's publicity about this, then sightings of U.F. et cetera, and experiences with UFOs go up, and that's what's happening at the moment. And do you know if it goes up globally? Like, does the U.S. statements on this affect, like, people around the world? Or is this an Anglo-America thing? That's a very good question.

I don't know the answer to that. I suspect it's, I suspect it follows US culture and how far that that testimony is spreading about, I don't know. I mean, the other thing to say about, like, David Grush, though, is that, like, he has other claims which are aliens have been killing human. beings. Some of these alien ships are the size of football fields. These are not like there's some very interesting and explained sightings. We need to work at what they are. These are like bang in the middle of like absolute, the wildest claims mixed up with conspiracy theories,

etc. The other thing to know about this and then we can move on, I think, is he's a retired Air Force intelligence officer and he's testifying to Congress. So all of these statements have been cleared by the official body that monitors secrets for the US government. So the US has looked at these and said, these are not secrets, right? There's a couple of interpretation you can put on that. One of them is that this is all true, and they don't mind people knowing about this. And in fact, it's never really been a secret that we have secretly found reverse engineering. It sounds unlikely to me, basically.

The other explanation is these are all not true, and therefore they're not secret. Or they could be, you know, actually the US government wouldn't mind people talking about this sort of stuff. And in fact, you know, David Grush could well be somebody. who believes this, but it's not the first time that you've had people who work for the US government who are making these sorts of claims, basically. It sort of seems to be a repeated pattern. One of the theories about the whole phenomenon of uphology is that it's something that's quite handy to the US secret state, and it's something that they lean into, and in fact, some people claim that they, in fact, try to get these sorts of theories going, and you have this reverse

thing where people are saying, look, the US government actually has a program in which they are trying to fool euphologists, et cetera. That's where it gets all tricky, you see, because, you know, you can say, oh, well, perhaps these are like, this phenomenon is purely an earth-based phenomenon. But then it's like, how does the government relate to that? Why is the government agreeing for David Grush to testify? And then you get into this hidden secret world in which that just produces its own conspiracy

theories and finding firm footing on all of that is quite difficult. And just to pull back a tiny bit before we get into this, And I know we're going to get into the taxonomy of, you know, the different aspects of uphology later. But, like, just in terms of understanding what we're talking about, are we primarily talking about when it comes to, you know, what you were just mentioning, KIA, state security, all of this theories and conspiracies, are we primarily talking about things in the sky, or are we also talking about crash landing and alien people? Because the way that human beings, I would imagine the way that human beings experience that is quite different, is that. anthropologically and historically, there could be an argument that's made that human beings have always had a tendency in terms of like the mysteries of life and like ideas around God, that there are these other beings or higher powers in the sky, which perhaps could be, you know, understood

within different cultures and different ways, which gives people that tendency towards that belief, which is quite different to having said, you know, I opened my window one day and there was these flashing lights and this man knocked on my door, you know, who had like a cone head and was like, eight foot or whatever. Is that all part of these kind of stories and narratives? Or are we mostly talking about spaceships? Well, it depends who you ask, actually. So people who study this phenomenon do make those distinctions. The clearest distinction I've heard made is between stories which are about UFO's proper, like supposed aliens craft, presumably from space, maybe from another dimension or something that don't involve any encounters with aliens.

And that might include, like, supposed sightings of dead alien bodies, you know, being in the possession of the US military or whatever. And then there's actual, like, intelligible encounters with other beings who might be extraterrestrial, or might be from other planets, or I think the different, the reason for classifying it that way is that, well, People have always claimed contact with supernatural entities of some kind. There's three aspects of it from that point of view and reverberationship to what you just said, Nardia. Because, yeah, it's also true.

People have pointed up at the sky and said there's stuff there. This was weird stuff like whether it's the gods or whether it's like just stories about cloud ships. You know, people thought they saw ships, like sailing ships in the sky. There's that. Then there's the fact that people have always claimed to have, you know, various relationships. with non-human entities. And there's this very specific phenomenon of UFOs that really start with the flying saucer,

scares of the mid-20th century. I mean, that history briefly is around the mid-20th century, you start to get these claims that people are seeing flying saucers, these saucer-shaped flying objects, seem to be some super-advanced type of flying craft. And I think this starts during the war. And it's not even initially assumed that they're extraterrestrial.

Like the fear is that there's some secret weapon being tested by the Nazis or immediately after that by the Soviets. And there's these theories about them coming from the hollow center of the earth where beings might be living that we didn't really know about before. But then quite shortly after that, this lines up with the tradition of fearing that, that there might be extraterrestrial life, which is hostile, and the idea that flying saucers are actually from other planets

starts to become quite popular. I mean, again, this is quite complicated, because the idea that we might be invaded by hostile aliens starts in the late 19th century, H.G. Wells' novel The War of the World. But my understanding of the precise history is the very first sort of flying saucer sightings in the mid-20th century,

people weren't assuming they were extraterrestrial. And then there's this, I remember there's some book gets published in the 40s or really 50s called Flying Sources Come From Another World. And then people come very preoccupied and then quite shortly after that you start to hear these stories where people claim to have been actually met aliens

who landed in Flying Sources and maybe took them into their spaceship and things like this. And lots of people claim to be seeing things in the sky. Well, that's super interesting because that kind of lines up with what you would think would be happening in the West in terms of like the enlightenment, this idea that, you know, human beings can, are capable

of creating, you know, these different technological innovation. So this idea that in the 19th century, it's like, well, this must be, these must be things created from this world would be, like, that would line up with that. And then coming into the 20th century, you know, following the wars, et cetera, or around that time, people thinking, well, perhaps it's, it's from somewhere else as, you know, the, the, the belief in the purity of technological advancement perhaps started to crumble. Yeah, yes. The other thing, the thing I would really stress, actually, I think it's easy to forget these days. I think you can see a shifting over the course of the 50, 60, 70s is, I mean,

it's important to remember now that it wasn't clearly established that there wasn't other organic life, as we know it, in other planets in our solar system, really until the 70s. So up to that point, it seemed perfectly plausible to people that there might be like civilizations that were only slightly more advanced than ours, who could send spacecraft like between Mars and Earth or Venus and Earth. So it's only in the 70s with the Voyager probes going out into the solar system that it becomes clearly established. Oh, actually, no, there's no life out there. So, and at that point, you have to start saying, oh, well, if these things are coming from another planet, they're not like coming from inside our solar system. They're coming from, they're crossing interstellar space. And

That is much a weirder concept, because as I'm sure we will come back to, I mean, basically, modern physics says you cannot do that. Nothing, nothing can, no physical thing, nothing can cross interstellar space. I don't think that's true. That's not true. Yeah, it is true. It is true. It's not. It's totally true.

Yeah, it is. It's not. It just takes time, basically. It can do it over hundreds of thousands of years, yeah. It can do it over hundreds of thousands of years, but it would take, it would take literally hundreds of thousands of years for any physical, not just for a physical object. but for any form of information to cross the space between the stars. No, not that long.

Yeah, that long, yeah. No, because the nearest stars is like 30 light years away, so that's like 30 years. Okay, that's 30 years if you can go at light speed, yeah. Yeah, but that's like information. That's what information travels at. It's not, that's not the speed information. No, information doesn't retain any coherent at that speed.

A light does. Yeah, but basically that's how fast, you know, some thumbs up, detect a bit. can travel. You could have probes which can just, you know, fly on for a long, long time. And, you know, depending on the level of speed you could get up to, you could have generations, which are like, just like 10 generations or something like that. Only if they can go hundreds of thousands of miles an hour. Yeah, like go incredibly, incredibly fast.

Let's hear I have the dream, Jeremy. Let him have the dream. No, no, no. I just want to, I want to roll back a little bit because it is interesting how it relates up to sort of like the current level of scientific understanding. like the H.G. Wells War of the World's book was partly inspired by misinterpretations of observations of Mars, basically, where people are looking on Mars and saw lots of straight lines, and they assumed that there was a canal system, a detailed canal system on Mars, which started the wave of thinking there might be a civilization on Mars, etc. But also, let's just roll back slightly as well, because I think there's also, like, when we were making the distinctions

between the different sort of phenomena we're talking about, that there probably are three. One of them is like sightings. The other one is like remains, crash landing remains or physical remains. You can account for those with this idea that like what's been going on since the 50s is that people have been misinterpreting stuff with like secret weapons, etc., produced by the secret state. And then people are misinterpreting that data and the state is leaning into it in order to obfuscate what's going on.

So like the most famous supposed alien crash landing was at Roswell in 1947. and like it's pretty well established that was like a secret balloon which the US government was using to try to monitor rocket launches in the Soviet Union and then when it crashed the first person

there misinterpreted it as a UFO remain and the secret state sort of lent into it and said well that's good that that will keep people off the trail of what's really going on so you can see that like you know you could have sort of physical explanations if you want for those sorts of phenomena but the third phenomenon

which is like, yeah, for the abduction testimony, that's something else, basically. You either have a paranormal or perhaps a psychological or a psychosocial explanation for those. Do you know what I mean? That leads to somewhere else, I think, the whole abductions thing. And it relates to a different series of phenomena, like ghost sighting these sorts of things. I think that would be something useful to come back to, I think, because I think we have to reach for different explanations if we're trying to work out what's going on with them. Yeah, and I think there's like a development of an understanding of what the role of the

state is and how that works with mediated culture. Because before you have mediated culture in the sense that we have it in the 20th century, whatever, like people didn't perhaps know what the government was up to in such, you know, specific detail. So this idea that there's a gap between what the public are being told and what, you know, the state or the deep state is up to and what interests and power won out of these actions is something that is going to produce all sorts of theories and, you know, interest from the public. Or we're going to have to play something by Blink 182. I don't even know any Blink 182 songs.

I know why. The lead singer, Tom DeLon, the lead singer of Blink 182 is like this really big euphologist, basically. And like, you know, I said in 2017, though, these testimonies, et cetera, in Congress and stuff like that, so there are two guys. Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, and they were both like ex-defense department officials, etc. And they came and testified to all of this UFO ufology stuff. And then it was discovered they were actually employed by one of Tom DeLong's company called To the Stars, which was then doing a big, like, share issue about to try to get money in order to do UFO research.

So anyway, that's why we need to play. Aliens exist. It's Blink 182. Hey, Mom, there's something in the back room. Hope it's not that creatures from above. You used to read me stories As if my dreams were boring We all know conspiracies are dumb

So there's this book And a documentary actually Called Mirage Men So the books written by Mark Pilkington And that's one of the more coherent arguments That says, like basically what's going on Is that basically there are misidentifications in the 60s and 70s in particular

there were like new religious movements were sort of like latching onto these misidentifications these ideas of UFOs and then the secret state has been really leaning into it and in fact Mark Pilkinton claims that like they're organized attempts to like obfuscate this stuff to enhance and boost up uphology communities and these sorts of things and even to like you know

do really quite horrendous manipulation of people to convince them that UFOs exist etc and that they should keep going with their investigations, that sort of stuff. Yeah, the argument here is that the motivation for the Secret State to do that are multiple. Like, on the one hand, it goes back to attempts to just hide the fact that radar-proof stealth technologies were being developed in aeronautics, in military aeronautics. Then it also includes the idea that basically trying to convince people that UFOs were real was a useful sort of test exercise in psychological operations and propaganda. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, at a time when we do, it is now a matter of record that the CIA was completely off the leash in terms of both black ops all over the world of various kinds, including like trying to convince people that communists were Satanists and this sort of in Indonesia and this sort of thing. Well, like dosing people of LSD, etc. We should go a very important moment in the counterculture.

Various mind control and psychology and collective and individual psychology experiments. So it's totally plausible. So basically just. for a laugh, you know, they would see if they can convince people in various towns or villages that they've seen aliens and stuff. And also, from a deterrence perspective, they might well like the idea of convincing the Soviets or now the Chinese that, yeah, we've got some secret alien technology, so you should be extra scared of us. Or even just, they like the idea that like the Soviet, the Chinese these days, we'll be sort of trying to interpret that and they can actually perhaps they just have got, what exactly advanced technology have they got, even if it's not derived from UFOs, you know what I mean?

Yeah, creating that anxiety. Yeah, just creating a confusion and uncertainty. And there's also the argument, which I think is perfectly plausible, given how evil those things are, that like sections just of the military hardware industry globally have had it in their heads for decades, that sooner or later, like the UN and the general global distaste for war would limit, potentially limit their profits. profits. And so what, but if they could convince people that there was an interstellar space threat that they had to defend the earth from, then they'd be laughing forever. So that's also totally plausible,

I think. You know, I was always kind of interested in and curious about, you know, UFOs ever since I was a kid, like we said. But I remember the first time I ever saw a picture of an actual stealth bomber, a plane that's been designed to make it very hard to be detectable by radar. It has this really kind of flat structure and really flat shape, almost like a saucer, you know, especially from a distance because that's the easiest way to make it hard to detect by radar.

I remember the first time I saw a picture of one of those sometime in the 90s thing, just immediately felt like a penny dropping, just thinking, oh, yeah, that's obvious. It's perfect. They were researching that like 30 years ago and they didn't want people to know about it. That's obviously what flying saucers were.

So it seems really plausible to me. Let's hear, inevitably, a track by Sun Ra and his Myth Science Orchestra or whatever name they're using that week. I think it is that name on this recording. This was recorded actually in 1960, but I don't think it was released till 67. It appears on the album Interstellar Lowways, and it is called Interplanetary Music. Music Interplanetary Interplanetary

Interplanetary interplanetary music Interplanetary galonies end of planetary homoies interplanetary

interplanetary music I mean the ever thing to think about about what's different about this wave of UFO interest is basically, like I said, these are the first congressional hearings on UFOs for like 50 years. And like partly what's gone on is that there are, well, let's put it frankly, there are a load of far right nutbags in Congress who basically are receptive.

They want this. They're very, very enthusiastic to get these, find these people and get them to testify in Congress, basically. And there's something interesting going on there. But why? Why is there such a crossover, in fact, between wanting to believe these sorts of, sorts of things, or at least to express these sorts of ideas, and magerism, you know, the contemporary American far right, which is like, as we know, is tied up with denialism and there are members of Congress who have at least expressed the idea that they are full on cue and unbelievers. And one idea for that, I think, is this idea that there have been UFO crash landings, alien bodies and the government, not just a government, but what we might

call the deep state is covering it up. Like, that really fits with the contemporary far-right worldview in the US, that there is a deep state, as Trump went on and on and on about, who are covering up deep secrets, basically. And in a way, uphology bit is like a trivial bit in some sorts of ways. But it's that thing of like, oh, if they're covering up UFOs, what else could they be covering up? That is partly why this current uphology explosion has a different flavor, I think,

to previous ones and why it opens up under stuff like the cosmic rights. linking exactly what you were saying, Q, the cosmic right, the other thing that's going on here is the purity of narrative, which is very appealing to people who are finding their lives unexplained because it's very difficult for people to understand like the structures of how late capitalism and imperialism or whatever work. So the fact that this, the UFO story fits in quite well with all of the conspiracy theories of there is someone,

a specific person or, you know, they look like this or these people look like this. And it's because of them that our lives are shit, that kind of conspiracy theory framework or, you know, the architecture of the argument, UFOs slots into that quite easily. It's also, I would say, it's part of a kind of anti-science discourse because. Yes. I was a 30 a few minutes ago, you know, contemporary physics says, of the light travel is not possible. You might be able to get something that could travel

just under the speed of light, but even to be able to do that on the basis of all currently known physics, it would require so much energy that it would, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it would exhaust the power of the sun to do it. So the consensus among astrophysicists right now is that it's just extremely unlikely,

even if there are advanced civilizations all over the galaxy, that they're actually capable of communicating with each other. I'm not saying it's totally impossible, but it's extremely unlikely based on currently understood physics. And a whole part of contemporary right-wing discourse is the rejection of science. It's rejection of climate science, rejection of virology and immunology. Because we're just at a point, I mean, that is one of the real conditions of our present moment, which we do talk about on the show, but I think it's really interesting to focus on. And I feel like a lot of the

current commentary, even within my own field on things like conspiracy theory, doesn't quite, we're not quite getting to grips with this, I think, partly because, you know, the sort of critical tradition over the past 30, 40 years has been one which has wanted to emphasize the extent to which science is kind of problematic, it's socially constructed, it's biased by institutional economic pressures, all of which is totally true. But it is also, at the same time, it is true that, look, we're at a point in history where just the scientific facts of climate change have pretty much rendered unsustainable, like some of the basic political arguments

of both conservatism and liberalism. The arguments they used to have as to like why socialism couldn't really work. We're based on this sort of cost-benefit analysis, this idea that, well, yeah, you could do socialism, but it would require so much authoritarianism that it would limit people's individual freedoms too much.

Therefore, it was a bad idea. Or from a conservative perspective, you could do socialism, but, you know, Actually, any attempt to really radically change society is always, always just messes up and leads to totalitarianism and terror. Therefore, you should never really try to do that. And like, both of those arguments are blown out of the water by the simple scientific fact of climate change. The conservative, skeptical position on the possibility of radical reform and now just amounts to a total nihilism to just say, right, we're just all going to die.

That's it. It's over. Human civilization, nothing you can do to fix that. And the liberal argument, well, you just, I'm sorry, no, it's no longer the case. costs you may think would be imposed upon people's individual freedom by some form of socialism, no sane person could say that those costs are less than the cost being created by climate change, by run of an uncontrolled consumer capitalism. And so in that context, the right becomes increasingly, I think, anti-science. You have to be anti-science in general. It has to reject the authority of science as a form of knowledge and truth-telling, because you just can't render scientific, current scientific knowledge, consistent with either conservatism or liberalism.

I mean, it's interesting, we're talking about it from the right, but we've always got to say this when we talk about the cosmic right. And it is a point we make on the show loads that the post-neo-liberal centre is also completely out of its mind with this complete unreason at the moment. It might not be taking the form of believing in UFOs, but, you know, believing that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist, is in its way just as wacky an idea. Russia done Brexit Yeah, Russia did Brexit Exactly

The belief that Russia did Brexit The Russia did Trump You know, the bots are out there Underneath all of this I think Is like climate change And the fact that You know, one confronted with The hard scientific fact

Based on one of the biggest research projects Well, the biggest research project In human history With like this huge consensus some findings. You either accept that and follow that logic through, or you have to basically deny that. And I do think that, like, neoliberal centristism and the right basically have decided they're going to deny that. The different degrees and with different modes of doing that, but that does seem to be the fact. And that, and in some ways, I think that does explain a lot

of the contemporary phenomenon of, like, well, I'm going to be perfectly honest, like, basically a new alignment between the neoliberal center and their far rights, basically. All of sudden, there's more in common between those two. They're like a sort of binary that want to be in contact with each other so they can share a basic worldview and then dispute certain parts of it. And so that's why you see this incredible turn to authoritarianism in this country for no other. The attempt to like redraw a line cordon sanitaire, which used to be the far right cannot be part of mainstream discord. They're trying to draw it where the far left or just the left is outside of mainstream discourse and should be excluded, they should not be

allowed to protest, their view should be, you know, expression of their view should be, should qualify you for censor or even to lose your job, etc., etc., or even to go to prison, these sorts of things. And like there is a certain hysteria there, sort of like, you know, a hysteria to do with the fact that, you know, unless you're prepared to give up on all notions which derive from liberalism, not just economic liberalism, I mean, you know, the tradition of liberalism, political theories. If you're going to give up on all of that, then you're drawn towards leffering conclusions at the moment, I think. I think there's also been, you know, going back

to Jeremy's point about, like, why we don't have a proper explanation for understanding, like, why there's an appeal for these conspiracy theories is I think Jeremy's point about this issue of, like, science being aligned to global capital and, you know, like the big pharma, etc. And what I've seen as perhaps this is lessening now, but a trend on the left towards like cultural relativity and identity politics and away from materialism, which I think is bad, also means that that also might be an explanation for why there hasn't been enough of an investment in understanding like why it is that people move away from a scientific and a materialist understanding of things. We could play The Season Is Hours, a track from the self-titled first album

by British sort of post-you-gays band Flying Saucer Attack. So we should play Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Space by The Carpenters, a strange addition to their easy listening repertoire, a fantastic song, which appears on the album under the tagline The Recognised Anthem of World Contact Day was apparently inspired by the idea of having a day to anticipate first contact with the aliens.

With your mind, you have ability to fall and transmit thought energy far behind the north. You close your eyes, you concentrate together, that's the way. To send the message we declare a world, I want to talk about this. I want to talk about this book by Susan Leps Lep Seltter called The Reson of Unseen Things, Poetics, power, captivity and UFOs in American Uncanny. It's an ethnography.

So like, you know, she went and lived with. believer communities, in particular UFO abductee believer communities. She went to live with them, interviewed them, et cetera. That's what an ethnography is. And it's like pretty generous one as well. You know, she's not, she's not like going out there to dismiss their experiences, et cetera, et cetera. It's called the resonance of unseen things.

And it's got the word American uncanny in it. Because she's like, her analysis of it begins with this idea that like all of the people she interviews have got, I've had like really traumatic lives. just that didn't you? Traumatic lives as in poverty, abuse, these sorts of things which are unfortunately not rare. She has this thing that, like, that trauma produces something which is much more widespread,

which is a feeling that, like, there's something not right about the world. You know, there's a gap between the official story about what the world's like and then their own experiences of that world, if you know, I mean. She says, like, that that produces this sort of, like, free-floating sense of anxiety, which needs some sort of expression. It brings us back to some of the discussions we've had

about cosmic, right, her analysis is that like, within those communities, what they try to do is like they try to cultivate apathenia. So we talked about apathenia before, which is the tendency to see meaningful patterns in abstract data. And so seeing faces in clouds or shapes in clouds is one of those, right? Our brains are producing those because we find it enjoyable or something that they don't exist in those clouds. These communities are trying to look for like these resonances, these uncanny residences, the communities, they build a way of seeing the world which builds on like a more ambient sense of spirituality, I think. It goes like this, I think, this argument. If you take that the underlying feeling of spirituality is that everything is

connected, then the practice is to cultivate into yourself the ability to see those connections or to feel those connections, in fact. So that's the resonances. Oh, yeah, these things sort of resonate together. I feel as though they're connected. I'm going to feel it before I think it. And when I do my research, basically, that's the search for confirmation bias, which is something we all do. And like contemporary algorithms or platforms are basically machines for producing confirmation bias. That's what they do. They give you what the algorithms think you already want because that confirmation bias is something that we enjoy. And that will keep us on the platforms longer and they'll make more money.

Like they're the machines for producing this. That accelerates this more general tendency towards confirmation bias. So that's the research part of it. basically. And there's something there, right, about apophenia. Sorry, I'm on one now, let me just follow this through. That sort of, like, ambient sense of spirituality is really, really, like, widespread. And that sense of, like, just trying to cultivate this idea that things are connected and I'm going to prove it, like, that can be a positive thing. That can, like, be the thing that breaks us out of, like, hard fetishisms, is that, that we have discrete

individual entities which are unchanging in some sort of way. That's something that needs to be broken. The problem is. The problem is that. with this is if you just remain apophenia and then do the confirmation by his research, you can't get that stepping back to criticality to understand how your experiences are structured. Do you know what I mean? So there's this emphasis or this valuing of like raw experience above anything else, a raw feeling above everything else. But if you just affirm that and don't have a like a step back to a criticality, then you can't understand how the structures of neoliberalism, institutions we interact with, how they structure those experiences, they condition those

experiences, do you know what I mean? You're there trying to do this and want to be open to the world and you end up falling back on these hard, limited subjectivities that's produced by neoliberalism. And then with the cosmic right, you know, underneath the neoliberal subjectivities are hierarchical orderings of human society, racism, et cetera, et cetera, basically. So you start up with trying to be this openness to the world, you end up reinforcing the most harsh and limited forms of understanding humanity. That's a nice rant for me there. No, no, no, no.

That was a good argument. But there's just a little thing I want to interject with, which is, you know, the reality of it's, there's also a evolutionary and a biological tendency towards parodolia, what I think is called paradolia, which is this phenomenon that you see a human face or you see like a structure that you are familiar with in inanimate objects. So, like, it's not a surprise that when, that you, that the interpretation of, like, otherworldly beings are seen in a, in a, that have faces in a way, like, this is, like, it's, it's an evolutionary thing for humans to, to put faces on things.

I've never heard a paradox here. Is that, like, to see human faces, or is that, like, to attribute human intention? It's the visual thing where you see two dots. It's like, the classic is a Picasso, it's like, you see faces in Picasso. where he's suggesting a face to you, if you break it down, you don't necessarily see that. But then, you know, like, the classical, like, British culture joke example is, like, Jesus in the toast. It's like, you know, you see Jesus's face in the toast or whatever. It's like. There's trees.

It's trees in the forest. Or trees. And you can see, and you can see it's because human beings have a bias towards, like, putting, like, certain geographical, like, sorry, geometrical dots together or forms. together as a face. So it's not a surprise that you look up to the sky and you say, oh, that looks like a human form or a human face. Like, that's what our brain does, which is, which is separate to like the bigger argument, which you're making care, which is that, you know, like, these are narratives and these are like forms of understanding, which exist for, for other reasons.

So are we saying that UFOs are just a completely non-existent phenomenon? They're a completely illusory phenomenon of no reality outside a set of fictionalising discourse. is a misleading untruths. Because I sort of think, my feeling about it is, yeah, I am basically,

you know, I basically don't believe that there are alien spacecar traveling between solar systems. I sort of buy the modern scientific argument that's just not physically possible. That's why the reason

there is no clear evidence for the existence of alien life is because even if it is out there, it's just not something that life becomes capable of doing. It's like traveling between stars or sending information between and stuff. To me, that's just like the simplest explanation of where we're at.

But there's something going on with the phenomenon, like the really persistent phenomenon of people claiming like alien contact. And there's something, there's some continuity between people claiming contact with aliens and, you know, animistic beliefs or belief in spirit or DMT users thinking they're talking to the machine elves or Mother Ayahuska or whatever. to me there's always there's something going on in all that zone of experience which I'm not willing to say oh yeah that stuff it's real and the way that the table I'm sitting at is real but also it there's too much consistency to it there are too many patterns to it even amongst people who haven't really had any contact with each other for me just to say well that's just a completely kind of individualized mythical imaginary phenomenon there's something about the nature of consciousness I think and about the ways in which you know, elements of consciousness or elements of perception are shared between people in ways that an individualistic account of human experience doesn't really allow for

that I think are sort of being expressed here. You know, Young, Carl Gustav Young, like one of his most famous, most interesting books, is the book about the Flying Sorcer phenomenon and this idea that somehow it's an expression of the collective unconscious. when we were researching the show like I was one of the things I was really thinking about was the ways in which these these explanations as we've already said actually explanations for this phenomenon

which don't want to just say well it's all just a government it's just the security services messing with people or it's people having sleep paralysis and thinking they've been abducted by aliens or whatever have really sort of shifted over time partly based on how they interact with and, you know, prevailing scientific paradigms. So, like, when we were kids, it was much more common for people to basically think

that at some point in the future we might, there might be faster than light space travel. It was a trope in loads of science fiction, but I would argue it's just because, you know, Einstein's model of relativity hadn't had anything like the level of experimental verification it's had subsequently things like the Large Hadron Collider, which now make it seem very, very unlikely that there's ever going to be a scientific paradigm, which reverses some of those basic assumptions about how fast things can go in the universe. And so it's become more and more the case these days. My understanding, the people who sort of don't think that it's just completely mythologically,

they think something is going on or that are entities of some kind contacting people, then they come up with quite different sorts of explanations, which seem less completely disallowed by the standard model of physics. So there's a big resurgence, I think, in people saying, oh actually these are like they're beings from a parallel dimension and they're basically the same beings that people used to call fairies

are what are aliens and fitting it into those kind of narratives which go back into like Celtic mythology about the other world the parallel universe in which the spirits and fairies and gods live so that's a much more popular narrative these days that oh well actually they're fairies

they're not like they're not aliens from another planet the most interesting thing I saw when we were doing research for this show I watched some Netflix documentary about people who believe that UFOs are manifestations of the consciousnesses of hyper-involved, like extraterrestrial beings, but they're not traveling in spaceships. They're just able to project their consciousness through space and time,

and somehow that's what they're doing, and somehow UFOs are just some sort of manifestation of that. And it featured these communities of people who actually think that basically by sitting around and meditating a lot, You can sort of call the UFOs. You can get to see them. You don't necessarily talk to them. You just see some shiny lights in the sky.

But it's like them kind of waving back at you. Presumably these hyper-evolved beings kind of experienced human meditators sending out thought waves to them a bit, just like we would experience some little, you know, like a squirrel begging for a nut or something. They're just sort of waving at us. And I'm not saying I believe this,

but I'm saying it's interesting to me because actually on the basis of current science, that was like the most plausible explanation I came across, precisely because consciousness is actually, it's like one of the great mysteries of contemporary science and philosophy. Like nobody really knows how it works or what it does or what its limitations are. So there isn't really any sort of scientific basis on which you can say, well, it's definitely impossible to project consciousness in some way,

like a cross space and time faster than the speed of light, because we just don't know what it is at all. It's a mysterious phenomenon. I thought that was a really interesting example of how the explanations that people are coming up with for this phenomenon are always related to current scientific paradigms but also like one of the big things which trying to think about these sort of phenomena and all kinds of paranormal phenomena to some extent one of the things it always points towards is the whole question of the nature of consciousness and what is it like how is it

you know to what extent is consciousness a function of the individual self to what extent is it actually a function of some sort of some process which involves everything that exists in the universe interacting with everything else in ways that we only barely understand and which might produce all kinds of weird things which seem to be like glitches in the system if you don't really understand them and might produce consequences like people actually having an experience of contacting aliens in a way which isn't exactly real but isn't exactly isn't just like a dream or a hallucination either? I don't know. I sort of, my intuition is it's sort of something like that. These experiences people seem to

have that there's something in between like just a real normal experience and a pure hallucination. I think we should play subterranean homesick alien by Radiohead, which is arguably, you know, a stream of consciousness story about the life of a human, being who's ready to give up their boring life in a sense and dreams about being abducted by aliens. But also there's a deeper meaning to it, which is, you know, it's said it's a metaphorical lens about, you know, alienation in modern society and being disconnected from the lived environment. The breath of the morning, I keep forgetting the smell of the warm summer air.

I live in a town where you can't smell a thing do you watch your feet for cracks in the pain I don't like patronising people, you know and there's all of these different accounts of, you know, groups of people in various different places believing that there's, or saying that they've had some kind of encounter with,

with aliens or whatever. But as you were asking the question, Jeremy, of like, are we saying that aliens and, you know, UFOs or whatever don't exist? And the problem is, is that I can't care enough. Like, I don't feel like I care enough. I don't care to form, to form an opinion, to spend time thinking about it. But then as you were speaking, I thought, actually, I do care. and I do resent aliens. And the reason why I resent aliens is because of the theory that it's the aliens that built the pyramids,

which are, you know, as an Egyptian, you know, it's extremely Anglo-American, Eurocentric that Egyptians could not have possibly built the amazing structures that were the pyramids. So I think what's going on with me is that I don't care, but the reason why I tell myself I don't care is that I just resent that whole world

because of like the whole aliens built the thing in the majority world kind of culture. That whole ancient alien thing is quite interesting. Let's go through that as a historical phenomenon. You talk about that, Keir. Well, I mean, you know, basically, what I know it from the 1970s when Eric von Danakin wrote in the 70s,

but I remember I used to read these comics based on his theories, basically. Really? I never saw those. He famously published a book called Chariats of the Gods. So he may have come out first in the early 60s, but late 60s rather, I'm not sure, but it became really a big bestseller in the 80s. But his theory, and you see it now, that it's recycled in ancient alien documentaries on the history channel.

I say documentaries, and I'm doing my fingers, of course. But it's, and like so his sort of idea was you'd look around at like the remains of ancient civilizations, and there'd be evidence that aliens had visited and intervened, basically, and so there'd be a carving on one of the pyramids in Angkor Wharting in Cambodia, etc., which would look a little bit like a 1950 spaceman. Sorry. Did they say that about Stonehenge? I know.

Yeah, no, no. Yeah, yeah, no, no, they totally. They totally have said about Stoneheny. Right. They said that why are Stone Circle, circles, because they were landing sites? for flying horses. I mean, that's a fucking good argument, actually. But one of his famous one was the patterns,

what are they called where people walk patterns in the... The Nazca lines in Peru. The NASCAR lines, yeah. So you can only see them from up in space. So the assumption was that they must have been produced by four people who are flying or by people who had flown. These stupid people from South America

wouldn't be able to work out the basic geometry of doing this, etc. Well, there's this colonialist version of that ancient aliens theory, which is awful, which is tied up with this assumption that somehow these ancient peoples who were brown skin couldn't possibly have created great monuments, which nobody really takes seriously. Now, I mean, I would say, to be fair, at a certain point in the history of our scientific understanding, it's not a mad idea that, like, ancient peoples who worshipped, like, these pantheons of gods, who seem to be like basically

they had all these incredible powers but they mostly just seem to be like you know assholes a lot of the time they're not like really divine beings like the Greek gods or something that it's not a totally mad idea that oh well maybe actually they were having contact with

people from other planets who came in spacecraft and had much more advanced civilizations and much more advanced technology that in itself isn't a totally mad idea until you dig into it a lot more and find that well actually there's zero evidence for it And where are they now, then, these people?

And that was part of the idea of Tarriott to the gods. As a kid, I was really taken with the idea of the idea of Charity Gods. And it wasn't really, it wasn't the idea that the aliens built the pyramid. It was the idea that, oh, those stories about, like, Zeus and Terra and Apollo, they're really stories about advanced space travelers, which is an idea, which is also, I mean, I think it's there in things like some Star Trek episodes and stuff as well, actually, that has an idea. So, I mean, it's totally wrong, but I just think it's an interesting example of a theory which now seems completely bonkers, but at a certain point in the evolution of both archaeological and scientific understanding, you can see why people might have thought, yeah, that makes sense.

But yeah, it totally got tied up also with this notion that somehow people seem to have had forms of technology, which it didn't fit with a certain kind of white Western imaginary that they should. should have had access to. The reverse of the, like, the racist sneering, they could never have invented this, is actually these civilisations are access to really advanced technology, and they had knowledge that we couldn't hope to, we couldn't hope to achieve, which is, of course, why the Aztecs were right and the world did end in 2012. The Mayans, the Mayans, who said the world was going to end in 2012. Sorry, that's racism for you.

Graham Hancock, he's the current exponent. of a kind of ancient civilization pseudo-theory who's really hated by all the proper archaeologists because of the amount of attention and he gets, and documentaries he gets to make. And his theory is that there was this super-advanced global civilization that preceded all the currently known civilizations. It's not like a racist theory.

He doesn't claim they were white, like ancestors of the Aryan race, and he doesn't claim, I think, that they were aliens. But that is a theme that recurs every time there's a new wave of archaeological discoveries and people realize that people were building quite advanced cities like several thousand years previously to what people had earlier thought and it really freaks people out and they've got to reconfigure their idea of history. I take an interest in that stuff, but as an outsider to archaeology, I never really understand why it's such a big deal.

I mean, surely it's not surprising that you dig deeper every year and you're going to find new stuff that you didn't find before and the more buried stuff is going to be older and sometimes it's going to be like, you know, more impressive than you're expecting. But I think that is just the standard view in archaeology, to be fair. But there's something about the way people responds to kind of a reconfiguration of their assumptions

about the history of technology and the history of so-called civilisations that produces these really extreme theories. I suppose the attraction of that is basically, there's a way out of, like, this impasse that we're in now, do you know what I mean? There are, in fact, past civilisation who had access to incredible technologies. If aliens really are visiting us and can save us, etc., then that's a way out of the situation we're in without having to deal with it politically, do you know?

Yeah, well, that's a really good point, yeah, because of course we've been, so we've got on to this whole issue, well, what is the ontological status of the aliens and UFOs? Because they real, which I am really interested in, and it was me going on about that. But of course, let's say it's a given that the vast majority of cultural discourse on UFOs, aliens, et cetera, is just pure fiction. It is fictional discourse, but that fictional discourse is always expressing, like, real cultural anxieties. The great alien invasion narrative is kind of invented by H.G. Wells, the great British scientific author. I did a bit of research on this, and I think there was one book that came out like a year or two before War of the Worlds by some other writer that also had the idea of an alien invasion in it. But it was just like written from the point of view of the aliens who were just like a couple of spies hanging around in London or something.

It didn't really describe the kind of the aliens coming to Earth and attacking people and taking over. And it's H.G. Wells, who really creates this whole image of the alien space fleet coming to Earth, taking over invents. And it's a really obvious, I think he himself, I think, would have acknowledged, like it was a pretty obvious expression of the sort of anxiety that people were experiencing in places like Britain at the time. Partly the fear of invasion from Germany was like absolutely rife in British culture at the time in the years leading up to World War I. But also the growing sense of colonial guilt and the fear that, well, what if some superiors, technologically superior race were to do to us what we have done to the, you know, the. non-white people of the world. And that idea of the alien invasion, you know, it persists, like, you know,

persist and persist and persist. And it's a pretty obvious expression of a certain kind of colonial imaginary, the assumption that it's basically natural and normal. If a technologically superior people encounters a technologically inferior people, what they're going to do is enslave them. I remember Stephen Hawking?

Remember Stephen Hawking just a couple of years before we died, giving out about how we should be trying to hide out presence from alien species, because all they're going to do is enslave us. And that's because his reading of the history of colonialism is somehow that it's built into the nature of intelligent life, that's what it's going to do. But then parallel to that has been always the historic assumption that, well, if there are beings who are sufficiently technologically advanced to travel the dark reaches of interstellar

space, then they must also be socially and morally and ethically superior to us. us. And the idea that they're the ones who are going to save us, they're going to save us from nuclear war. They're going to save us from climate change. They're going to save us from capitalism. That's also like a really persistent theme. Yeah, there has been sort of like waves of aliens are hostile and going to kill us. And then aliens are peaceful and beneficent in some sort of way. Well, those things are totally coexisting. I was wondering about this. I was trying to work out if it goes in waves or if it's sort of parallel. And I think it's, at least now it's quite parallel, isn't it?

Because on the one hand, you've got exactly, we've talked about, on the show already, we've talked about two examples of people who are, people really, really believed basically the X-Files version of history that the government agencies are secretly in communication with aliens and they all want to eat us. And on the other hand, no, the alien, the UFOs are just the expressions of angelic into stellar super beings who are just waiting for us to be as good at mediation. as they are. So, like, yeah, if you look at, like, UFO fiction or films that, you know,

the day the earth stood still, oh, God, 1951, something like that, that is the idea, which is a common one, actually, because what the first wave of, like, UFO enthusiasm goes along with the space race, or actually it predates the space race, but, you know, it goes along with intercontinental ballistic missiles, et cetera, and the, you know, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the nuclear bombs there. So the story of the day the Earth stood still is that, you know, aliens had spotted that we developed nuclear power. So now they have to intervene. And so they come down and land and then the soldiers attack and shoot Gort, I think.

I just Gort the robot. No, Gort's a human who comes down. But he says, you know, unless you all get together, decide to get rid of nuclear weapons, we're going to destroy the Earth and to demonstrate their power that the robot, Klahto stops the world basically, stops the earth, etc. Planes fall out of the sky and these sorts of things. So that's that idea that like basically there are beneficent aliens out there. And in fact, they treat the earth as almost like a zoo that we're not going to go through and interfere.

More like a nature reserve than a zoo. Yeah, nature reserve and that they would only interfere when it got to the stage where they might be a threat to other people. So perhaps, you know, the first inclines of going out. to space on nuclear weapons. Are they going to come save us from climate change? Hopefully, yeah, hopefully. That is the version, isn't it? Yeah.

And then what about, so talk about the Pissardists, because for us, that's absolutely cool territory. I'm building up to the Pesardis, because that's turning this theory up to 11, isn't it? All right, well, you've mentioned it. Yeah, I mean, you know, you've got to talk about the Pissadis, basically, if you're talking about this,

which is, so, Jay Posadas, I don't know what the J stands for, I think he was always just known as Jay Posadas, basically. He was like a fairly major Trotsky's leader in Latin America, like from Argentina. Juan, Juan Posadas. Thank you. Thank you for Googling. And in the early days of the Soviet Union, and in fact, before the Soviet Union,

there was this thing, Cosmism. We talked about this when we talked about space. In fact, yeah, I interviewed Fred Sharman about his book, Space Forces, and he talks a lot about this early cosmism and this theorist called Bogdanov around the early days of the Soviet Union. There was all sorts of fiction about a communist civilization on Mars, etc, all these sorts of things

and real interest in like the Soviet Union being technologically advanced and therefore would go out into space. And then that reoccurts in like a very strange way in like the 1960s basically with this Argentinian leader. So the Pasadism was like international sort of organization like really authoritarian, very much a cult of personality, quite a lot, like a cult generally, basically. There were some people involved in that who were very interested in UFOs, and then Posadas does this speech in 1968, which later gets published as I'll read it out.

Flying Sources, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working class struggle, and the socialist future of mankind. So that's the title. You can imagine it would be a dense, thick text, but it's basically like the history of civilisation, has to go through stages, then you've reached a higher stage, which is communism, et cetera. And the energy in that bit is that capitalism is stuck. It's stuck with fossil fuels, there we are, climate change. Fossil fuels, and then, like, human labor, the exploitation of human labor.

We have to supersede capitalism. And so he makes this speech where he says, Pasadus, this is interstellar civilizations, a civilization which could travel across between the stars, would have to be able to access all the energy trapped in matter. So he's extrapolating from, like, you know, the discovery of nuclear. energy, et cetera. And like, in order to get to that level, you must have the social unity of communism. That's the sort of general idea, is that we should take this seriously, and we should see that as partly, like, people's belief in it is a desire to supersede capitalism, but also

he seemed to actually believe it as well, because he also refers in that speech to, like, not alien abductions, but close encounters of aliens, basically. And at the time, his interpretation was, these are all peaceful and beneficial aliens who are non-aggressive, so they must be communists, etc. So basically that was like this moment in 1968. There's been a revival of interest in it over the last, I don't know, 10 years. I've got a book by A. Gittlitz, I want to believe, which is about Posadism. It's become a sort of like humorous reference, like, or a meme, etc. People identify with it ironically, which is ironic because Posadist was against humour, he thought that jokes would disappear under communism because

our contradictions would be a null. And now he is the joke. There's a line in the Woody Allen film, Stardust Memories, where a character, a guy walks up to Woody Allen and says, I can prove that if there are alien civilizations, they will have a Marxist economy. I don't think we play before Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive, their instrumental anthem from their early days playing long instrumental jams at the UFO Club in London. I would like to come back to this interstellar travel. I do believe. I want to believe in interstellar travel.

Where are they then? Well, I have that it several of you. Here's one thing people often date. Just let's think about this for a moment, right? When people first started believing, that flying sources, UFOs might be spacecraft coming from within

or outside the solar system. Okay, there was almost no capacity for observing space outside our atmosphere apart from just with traditional telescopes on Earth. Now, if something was coming from another place

to Earth from outside, there are tens of thousands of observing instruments that would see it. But that doesn't happen. We don't see these things coming and entering the atmosphere. Yeah, I mean, that is a good point. But, of course, they've got very good stuff.

I think Jeremy's making the point that these are subterranean aliens. Yeah, exactly. They're obviously fairies, rather. They're obviously in the realm of fairies. I am an interstellar believer. Go on, go on then. Let me, let me. Marcelling your argument.

Fairies are just not very... Fairies are just not very masculine, so they have to have a sci-fi version of fairies, which is aliens. Yeah, hard fairies. I'm talking about traditional pre-modern fairies who were hard, who are tough and sexy. Yeah.

Okay. The best sort of mythologies. No, let me marshal my scientific arguments, which comes from a fictional novel I read recently by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. But Kim Stanley Robinson is like a sort of like Halen Seifer. He's the one who famously, like his most famous books, apart from the one he wrote about climate change recently,

Kim Stanley Robinson's series about the colonisation of Mars is absolutely fantastic. You've got to read those. He studied with James and he's like, you know, very theoretically sophisticated and he's a good Marxist, etc. Anyway, in repudiation of this idea that we should conquer Mars, he wrote this book about a generation ship which goes to Towsetti, he says that it would take

170 years, 160 years for this ship to travel to Tau Setti, which is a never star, if that ship was traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light. And he has this thing where there's a huge sail which gets a, which gets huge lasers on it, which accelerates. This is why

you're committed to this being true, because Kim Stanley Robinson said it in a book. Yes, I've read a very convincing fictional novel. I'm not, I'm not, I'm I'm sort of saying this is fucking watertight. I'm just bringing it in there. But no, the other way to get into that would be, like, you know, where are they? Is the question of, like, Fermi's paradox, basically.

So Fermi was this physicist, and they were asking about at a conference lunch, and he sort of said, well, you know, hang on, where are all the aliens, etc? You know, and it's this idea that, like, detectable civilization has emerged on the earth. Although at that point, it'd probably been detectable via radio waves and TV waves being breamed out, probably only be detectable for like 40, 50 years or something since the first radio waves. So basically that's not gone off any far. That's like 50 light years or whatever. But before that, there's this idea that is there alien life on other planets?

And I think that's the thing that really gets people is that like, surely if it arose on the earth, then it must arise elsewhere. Yeah, I think we've got to spell out more clearly what is the paradox. The paradox is there are so many stars in the galaxy that logically scientific, there must be enough that can support life and enough of those that can support life that have produced intelligent life, that there must be other intelligence civilizations in the galaxy. Yet we have had no firm evidence of their existence. We haven't detected signals coming out from other planets that are definitely artificially produced and we haven't had any contact with them. So that is the paradox that the Keir is now explaining. Yeah. And so there's

various explanations for that. One of them is like the rare earth thing, which is perhaps it's just incredibly rare for life to get to the stage where it can be detectable in an interstellar level. The earth has been incredibly stable, partly because the proto-moon planet crashed into the earth and the moon was created out of the remains, etc., etc., and kept Earth in a very stable place. Perhaps when we look at planets now, it's quite rare actually to have rocky planets in the position where the Earth is, where you can have liquid water. In fact, quite often, it seems to be like you have really large planets then. It's likely that Earth, the very very very in a different part of the solar system was moved in towards the sun.

All of these things increases the less likeness of life emerging. But there are just so many stars and so many planets, that that must happen again. Do you know what I mean? Well, there's also, and also, I mean, one of the popular answers to Famies' paradox is the self-destruction paradox that actually civilizations or destroy themselves before they become capable of interstellar travel of any kind. That's a popular one. Yes, we have plenty of evidence that might well be a possibility. Just going on the one detectable civilisation we know. I mean, I think I've already explained my attitude of Amy's paradoxes.

It's a non-paradox which is handy for filling time on podcasts because it's not. So that sounds nasty to you, Kear. I didn't mean it to you at all because I wanted to talk about it as well, totally. Because it's only a paradox if you assume that interstellar travel is possible. that is achievable eventually by detectable civilizations. If you just say, no, it's not. It's not. There are some things which are not scientifically achievable, and that's one of them.

Then the whole thing just isn't a paradox. There's a lot of kind of speculative fiction, which kind of self-consciously resists these sort of colonialist assumptions and just suggests that, well, actually, probably what happens when civilizations reach a certain level is they don't like spend loads of energy like travelling out into the solar system in the galaxy, they just kind of they render their populations and their

habits like manageable and just spend their lives having a good time on their planet. That's an interesting thing about the Pasadist assumptions because that that whole thing was based on this assumption that like the drive of humanity is to maximise the amount of energy that you can access. And so

from that you sort of intuit this idea of UFOs, etc. That there is this super historical drive for amongst humanity to maximize energy use. What I will give you, Jeremy, is so the popular imagination of aliens being able to visit the Earth and then go home, et cetera, like that's just basically, that doesn't work. I think intercellar travel is theoretically possible, but like basically that doesn't mean

that there are aliens. That would mean that, you know, the amount of stars and planets that they could come from and even with like incredible technology traveling at the speed of light, etc., is still incredibly small. It's one of those things where people can understand very large numbers are very large. But get in your hand on the distances involved and also deep time, basically. So, yeah, there could well have been alien civilizations. Why would they be around in this particular 50 years we've been looking at for them?

Do you know what I mean? Is there any commentary out there on like aliens and dinosaurs? No, but I think there will be soon. It was a UFO crash that actually killed the dinosaur. Yes, come on, let's go for that. The birds, the classic country rock, jingly anthem, Hey, Mr. Spaceman. Would you please take me along for a ride?

Goes the chorus. Hey, Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me along? I won't do anything wrong. Hey, Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me along for a ride? I woke up this morning I was feeling quite weird Had flies in my fear My toothpaste was smeared Over my window

They'd written my name Said so long we'll see you again Alien abduction testimonies They are testimonies that people have had Close encounters with aliens They've been taken away with aliens by aliens, particularly in the 90s, people were being probed by aliens. And the common sort of trope of the testimony is like paralysis,

is that you felt paralyzed, you couldn't move, and the aliens were doing things to you. You know, like the most obvious explanation for that, to sort of say, that's to do with, like, this idea of sleep paralysis, you know, that state between dream and weight where you feel as though you can't move. That's an explanation that people go to for lots of, like, ghost phenomena, etc. There's all sorts of phenomena.

the woman at the end of the bed is one of these things that goes in waves that you feel trapped and they're sort of like either an evil witch or a woman who's sort of just staying at you at the end of the bed. Why is it a woman? It's just one of those tropes, basically, that emerge. Presumably like witchy sort of stuff, I'm not quite, I'm not quite sure. Basically, you can just analyse it on that thing and say, oh yeah, it's probably people falling asleep in their cars in the US countryside somewhere and that, you know.

But I think it's more interesting to think about it in like a, socio-psychological sort of idea. And that's one of the things that this, the Resonance of Unseen Things book by Susan Lepselter, she's really interested in this. Like, well, look, if it is this common narrative of like paralysis and then abduction by aliens and aliens doing things to you, like what's going on there?

Why is that the thing that people go to? Why is it aliens and not the witch at the end of the bed, etc.? Her sort of interpretation of that relates to this sort of trauma thing of like, you know, there is something there about paralysis relates to the sense of trauma and the sense of like a lack of agency in your life, the lack of being able to do something, that's what makes that sort of explanation or that sort of feeling really, really meaningful to certain people, if you know, I mean.

There's like some sort of parallel to a more socio-economic or social cycle sense of paralysis, you know, I mean, or it could be, you know, the DMTLs. I'm open to all explanations. It is one of those phenomena like ghosts, really, where it sort of feel like we don't have the categories for even saying, like, in what sense these things are real or not real. Because I do take seriously the fact that one of the things that gave the abduction phenomenon legs in the 80s and 90s was highly trained psychologists and psychiatrists treating people who claim deduction experiences, assuming that what they were dealing with was trauma symptoms of some kind. and just in some cases coming to the conclusion that no, like in whatever sense they were able to verify, these people were just talking about a literal experience

that had happened to them. It's the same with ghosts. It's just like it's such a ubiquitous thing and so sort of trans-historical in some ways. There's something going on, even if it's just some sort of neurological phenomenon, there's something going on that current paradigms don't really properly have a handle on.

I mean, it might just be neurological. I remember hearing some, podcast or some show about this and somebody was talking to someone who'd worked just as a had worked in elder care you know they just worked with loads of um old people who were suffering various kinds of neurological degeneracy or dysfunction and and they said they had so many symptoms they were basically like seeing ghost or talking to aliens or something that they they lost any belief they'd ever had in any sort of paranormal phenomenon because it just seemed to be that all paranormal phenomena seem to be matching these neurological symptoms.

But then there might be some ways in which they might be non-pathological, neurological phenomena that we don't really understand, that they're not just the things that happen to people, not just their experiences people have, that can't simply be traced to some sort of pathology, that there's some part of the normal functioning of human consciousness, like collectively or individually. I think that sort of, that is sort of what I think about that stuff, actually. And I feel completely dissatisfied with all the explanations presented for it, whether they're just purely psychologising or whether they're purely medical or whether they're purely believing. They all seem to not quite get to something.

And my deep suspicion is that you can only understand them by understanding consciousness itself in terms of it's a totally non-individualistic, understanding that, well, there are these aspects of the human experience which are shared in ways which just can't be. captured by our normal way of thinking about ourselves as isolated individuals and it's something at the blurry gaps in between you know then we normally think of ourselves as these isolated individuals these islands of experience and we know like theoretically philosophically politically politically even from a lot of contemporary science we know that's wrong but we don't as we say I'm saying on the show all the time like we don't really have a great language or a great way of talking about the fact that that's wrong that actually our experience of the of ourselves is always an experience of the world.

And I sort of think there's all this kind of bleed at the edges of so-called individual experience. You know, and it might just be the ways in which we can influence each other and get excited about things together. And it might be the ways in which some people have an experience of the world that includes alien abduction experiences, which are very similar to each other for no apparent reason. I was trying to say something like that earlier, I think. That's why we should be interested in this stuff, I think. is partly because that sense that something's out of joint or that the way we think about

the world is not sufficient and that like openness to re-enchantment we've talked about this in or enchantment in this sort of way, this idea that like we're not just discrete individuals, et cetera, and there is, everything is connected in that sort of way. You know, it is something that is politically useful, basically, and also just seems basically true. And in accordance, at least to a certain degree in accordance with like current scientific understandings, etc. But the other reason I think we should be interested in these sorts of experiences and the sort of communities that build up around them

is this sense that there's some sort of like deep hidden structure to the world that you can only glimpse in these like out the corner of your eye, do you know what I mean? In these these isolated experiences, somebody's been abducted or these sorts of things. And that idea that like there's deep structures that you can't see directly and you can only sort of see by non-continuous occurrences, that's pretty fucking close to the structure of critical thinking. Do you know what I mean? Where you're trying to interpret these sorts of things?

My point I was trying to make earlier, I think it's an important one, is that, like, you know, basically that sense that there's something wrong, there's something that doesn't fit, there's a deep structure, and like, you know, somebody's hiding it from us or perhaps things have been obscured from us. Those are the beginnings of, like, moving to a sort of,

left analysis of the world, do you know what I mean? But the problem is, you know, unless you know, unless you break with this ontology of like we're discrete individuals, et cetera, and we are isolated from other, you know, unless you break from that in a, but stronger way than you do with just a vague sense of like things are connected, then you fall back a reinforcer, which is, I think, what's going on with the far right. If you can't break from this ontology that the world is just made up of discrete individuals, then your explanation for phenomenon for this sense that there are deep structures is basically world governments. conspiracies by individuals or and you'll even like supplement that with the idea that there are

let's add omniscient aliens in rather than to like do the harder harder thinking of like how structures or it's the hysteria of the contemporary liberal yeah yeah this is what i think it's easier to imagine omnipotent aliens and it is to grasp the structures of capitalism stick that in your jizzek we say where are we landing where are we landing where are we landing on you Euphos. I'm landing on the perspective that the acid, it's clearly, clearly the acid communist position on UFOs is any sufficiently advanced civilization will have zero interest in going out in traveling like for hundreds of years across space. It'll manage its own planet to be habitable and enjoyable and everybody probably will spend hours a day meditating and tripping. Therefore, might well be able to protect their consciousnesses out across the, across the, across. the known universe to shine little lights of hope and less advanced people. That's self-evidently the position, the most likely future for us and the most likely explanation. BORAT