NASA, UFOs, and Phenomenal Authorization
As I am sure many people who are interested in the topic of UFOs are aware, NASA announced, on October 21st, 2022, that it was beginning a UFO-oriented program in late October. As a Twitter post reads:
We’ve selected 16 individuals to participate in an independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), or observations in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena. The nine-month study will begin on Oct. 24.
This struck me as strange and worthy of comment, but perhaps not for the reasons one might assume. Although I am sure that, during the weeks since this announcement, many people have responded with their interpretations, I would nevertheless like to provide my own.
There is nothing about NASA’s structuring which has ever made it beholden to exploring “fringe” trends, especially in a way which involves coordinated academic/establishment interests, as we see here. After literal decades of NASA publicly distancing itself from the topic of UFOs on the basis of its supposed insignificance or lack of evidence, one cannot expect that this program will all of a sudden yield a bounty of information, especially if that information would conflict with governmental interests.
Nor does NASA’s study represent an attempt to bridge a disciplinary gap: despite years of preexisting research, none of the people on this study’s team have even a partial background in the study of UFO data. The rift between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” analysts/analysis remains intact.₁ Furthermore, the study’s emphasis on astrophysics marginalizes the studying of UFOs within the range of Earth’s atmosphere — precisely the place where most UFO sightings occur!
So, reasonably speaking, people should be prepared for results just as thin and tepid as those of the UAP report from last year (lest it is forgotten, however, the report specified that, of the 144 cited objects, only one could be identified: a significant yet understated detail). Richard Dolan, an eminent researcher and historian of UFOs, predicted just as much in a recent video. But the similarity doesn’t end there — because NASA’s “sudden” interest here appears to parallel the “sudden” willingness by venerable outlets and programs, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, or 60 Minutes, to publish articles and produce segments on UFOs, and the “sudden” obliging of the United States government of requests for transparency regarding its own investigations and data.
As I wrote in an essay from last year, entitled “UFOs, Disclosure, and the Religious Impulse”:
…to discount the possibility that the UFO narrative, at least in the US, is being manufactured in unclear ways and to unclear ends is detrimental to the subject’s scope and complexity. The mistake here would be to presume to know why the manufacturing and manipulation is occurring, and/or who its enactors are.
I think that what we are witnessing are about-faces which are reversals only to the extent that they are public. In other words: these may be narrative-controlling performances. More specifically, they may be instances of what Jason Reza Jorjani calls “phenomenal authorization.” Phenomenal authorization is how institutions can define the terms of reality. Once the parameters are set, anything outside of those parameters is rendered as conceptual junk. And when wars are waged in the forms of ideas and how effectively they can infect and spread, the power to determine narratives is significant. If successful, such performances will allow a given agency to more easily act as if any future “discovery” (or lack thereof!) related to UFOs is novel, or exclusive to that agency — and its nation.
Just as “[there] is nothing about NASA’s structuring which has ever made it beholden to exploring ‘fringe’ trends”, there is also nothing about its foci which necessarily makes it more suited to studying UFOs than other agencies or fields of research. The same goes for the United States Armed Forces (the constant highlighting of and recourse to by various online UFO communities constitutes a subtle and unintentional form of jingoistic deference). Why the presumption that the appropriate arena here is outer space? Indeed, given the multiplicity of sightings of UFOs emerging from or submerging into large bodies of water (as explored by authors such as Ivan T. Sanderson and Debbie Ziegelmeyer), why would oceanography not have more of a potential claim here than astrophysics?
I would additionally and provocatively refer to David Jacobs’ wry but, I think, accurate claim that perhaps “…what ufology needs is not the scientific assistance of physicists or astronomers, but of ‘gynecologists, neurologists, and urologists.’” Note that this latter suggestion is categorically ruled out by NASA’s phenomenal authorization: by reintroducing the bare-surface question of whether or not UFOs are even observable phenomena, and by carefully curating its task force so as to not risk “ufological contamination”, NASA’s study negates the much stranger — yet decades-old and arguably more pressing — matter of close encounter/abduction reports.
Whatever happens with NASA’s study, it will almost certainly not be mere disclosure or denial. Rather, it will likely constitute a form of acclimatization. But what is this acclimatization driving at?
History is being apparently reoriented in real-time to make UFOs, or “legitimate” UFOs, out to be a near-exclusively 21st-century phenomenon — as if the sighting on the USS Nimitz were where it all began. Any level, casual or concentrated, of genuinely skeptical investigation will reveal this to be not the case; but, for many people, the US government’s switch from the public stance of “UFOs don’t exist and we won’t even talk about it”, post-Condon Report, to “There are some things flying around our airspaces which we cannot identify” may be all that’s required to settle the narrative.
Let’s remember that, for instance, the army was able to drastically shift the narrative regarding the crash at Roswell, and that its final explanation has generally stuck, despite the almost comically obvious rewrite (how the Roswell Army Air Field could’ve mistaken a weather balloon for an anomalous “flying disc” is anyone’s guess).₂ It is relatively easy to get people to accept an official narrative once it has lingered around long enough, been reinforced by enough representatives, or had its counter-narratives conflated with disreputable topics or groups. Note, too, the presence of the United States’ fingers in all of this, and how this prolongs the country’s long-held position as the master of world history — a master which can determine narratives even by not engaging certain subjects publicly.
Despite NASA’s overt, and easily researched, historical ties to the Department of Defense and Operation Paperclip (note that NASA’s original biography for Wernher Von Braun failed to mention that he was a member of the Allgemeine SS), it has been very successful at cultivating a “nerdy”, “wholesome”, and “inclusive” brand-image for itself (the CIA’s attempt to do something similar has, for example, and by comparison, fallen flat).
This is rather remarkable, given the intensifying trends of disintegrating public faith in institutions and the weaponized citations of historical wrongdoings. NASA might represent, for many people, the last bastion of science as a force for good. In his essay “UFOs: Lost in the Myths”, Thomas E. Bullard writes, “So many other cultural pillars tumbled from the 1960s onward that the rank and file had good reason to distrust all social institutions. […] Science and technology have fallen perhaps hardest of all. Forty years have seen their transformation from a secular religion promising utopia through progress into a threat to be feared and a scapegoat for multiple social wrongs.”
It is highly relevant, too, that the majority of skepticism brought to NASA’s history and claims has been pretty consistently of the “conspiratorial” variety. To wonder if NASA has ever airbrushed its photos of lunar surfaces is to invite associations of faked moon landings or suspicions of a flat Earth. All of this is not to diminish NASA’s accomplishments, but to say that a variety of factors are at play which preemptively condemn skepticism of alleged institutional transparency to the bin of paranoid thinking.
To reiterate: what is important here is not merely that NASA is publicly associating itself with the subject of UFOs, but that its engagement is exclusively contemporaneous in what it deals with — I will reiterate the facts that no one on the team has ties to the UFO subject, that most of their specialties are actually counterproductive to the study’s material, and that the decision to do the study at all is uncharacteristically “trendy” — and that this has consequences for how it retroactively frames the issue.
All of the media, all of the reports, all of the language about UFOs today is trying to bundle the phenomenon up into a twenty-years-long package. There is no attempt to form a connection to reports spanning the 1940s to the 1990s, implicitly maintaining an official, institutional position that there was really nothing worth studying in those years, and insisting that no groups were formed to seriously study the subject until the 21st century (as, for example, the constant attention given to AATIP reinforces).
NASA’s study of UFOs should be examined in tandem with the reality that we have not had any manned lunar missions for fifty years — a stunning fact which cannot be sufficiently waved away with the usual explanation of public disinterest and a subsequent lack of funding (neither of these aspects have ever greatly mattered to independent agencies of the federal government) — , and with China and Russia’s sudden reinvigoration of such programs. And let us remember that coincident with the dissolution of NASA’s manned programs, the basis of which was a nationalist race to militarize space, was other nations doing the same. But, if anything, according to conventional narratives, the United States’ relinquishing of its efforts herein should have been the opportunity for other superpowers to fill that void. And yet this never happened — as if NASA’s consecutive lunar breaches ultimately scared everyone off.
I am not sure why, specifically, this narrative — “UFOs are real and worthy of study now” — is the one that’s being spun, and it’s likely that almost no one else knows either. But it is being spun — and, barring access to the rationale for its inception, we should be much more skeptical of its proceedings.
Who will you grant phenomenal authorization to?
₁ Stuart Appelle briefly outlines the impediments to serious mainstream studies of UFOs in his paper, “Ufology and Academia: The UFO Phenomenon as a Scholarly Discipline”, one being the interdisciplinary nature of ufology, and that: “…opposition to disciplinary boundary crossing persists at academic institutions, and scholarly activity remains largely cloistered within discrete academic units. […] …ufology can neither find an existing home in the established disciplines nor create a new one for itself.” Moreover, the scientific establishment imposes a Catch 22 for ufology: that is, it critiques the field for a lack of methodological and critical discipline, yet makes no room for the field to have access to the outlets and resources which would grant it the seal of scientific respectability.
₂ It is an interesting and perhaps related coincidence that the US Air Force was founded only a couple of months after the 1947 incident at Roswell.
