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I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
I have only a passing interest in aliens/UFOs, but the one book I read on the topic really piqued my interest. It's called The Uninvited by Nick Pope, who by his own account was tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the UK Ministry of Defense, began the role as a sceptic, but came away from it convinced that there really was something going on.
Per your dichotomy, the book starts off by the Explorer end of the spectrum and becomes increasingly Esoteric as it goes along. The opening chapters describe some of the canonical alien abduction stories which are very much in the Explorer camp (a man meets a spaceman who claims to be from Venus and who explicitly urges him to promote nuclear disarmament; a couple on a long cross-country drive experience several hours of "missing time": regression hypnosis reveals that they were plucked out of their car into a spaceship and surgically experimented upon by "Grey" aliens), followed by chapters in which Pope recounts anonymised interviews he's conducted with members of the British public, whose own accounts are far more bizarre and harder to square with a simple extraterrestrial explanation. Throughout the book, Pope emphasises that accounts of interactions with intelligent, non-human entities (from Biblically accurate angels to leprechauns and djinn) are as old as the human species, and gave me my first exposure to the Bayesian concept of priors shaping experience: if you wake up in the night and see a pale, short, oddly-proportioned figure at the end of your bed, you might think it's an alien, but a religious person might think it's an angel, while a believer in the afterlife might think it's a ghost.
At the end of the book, there are two chapters in which Pope offers a range of hypotheses for what's going on. The first is Explorer: assuming these experiences are the result of aliens visiting us from elsewhere in our own universe, what are their motivations? The second chapter is a collection of hypotheses which don't take aliens as their starting point, ranging from mundane (hallucinations, mass hysteria) to mundane-but-conspiratorial (government-induced mass hypnosis) to Esoteric (the "aliens" are visiting us from another dimension; the aliens are our genetic descendants visiting us from the future). It's cracking stuff.
Interesting, thanks for the recommendation! My first exposure to the Esoteric case for UFOs/UAPs was reading The Mothman Prophecies for the first time but I've never shaken it since. The publicly released videos from the Navy have seemed more Esoteric than Explorer to me as well, though to be fair that might well be because my bias had already been established at that point.
Oh I'd be curious to read that book. I have something of an obsession with the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere. My understanding is that it has very little in common with the source material, but it's incredibly eerie and unnerving all the same.
Given that you're already curious, I'd definitely recommend it. The movie is what got me to read the book as well, and while I'd agree that the source material differs substantially from the movie, one of the things that I was able to better appreciate after reading the book is how well the movie does at both creating the strange atmosphere and conveying how deeply the MC (Keel) falls down the rabbit hole. I'm not a UFO/UAP buff or anything like that but my dad was so I'm familiar enough with the basics, but that book was my first exposure to the Esoteric explanation and I found it to be every bit as unnerving as the movie!
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