Neither Believing nor Disbelieving: Impossible Futures, Conspiracy Theories, Aliens, and More: Part III
December 21, 2012 - the end date of the 5,126-year Mayan long count calendar.
Planetary destruction of cosmic new age?
As modern, non-Mayans, with little to no understanding of the Mayan culture, cosmology, and concept of time, some of us scoffed, some of us were perhaps disappointed, and I’ll venture to guess most of us paid little attention when this date passed and delivered neither of the above outcomes.
. . . Then again, the last ten years have been freakishly weird. I have playfully speculated to a few that the world as we knew it really did end and we’re in some surreal alternate timeline.
Let’s put aside US politics during the last decade and explore another unexpected development.
One thing that I thought I’d never see taken seriously, in my lifetime at least, is the subject of UFOs. According to many studying the phenomenon, this December 2017 New York Times article is what reeled the topic in from the fringes and made it acceptable for mainstream discussion. While the wave of interest seemed to recede after this 2017 burst, the topic is once again gaining traction. Harvard astronomy professor, Avi Loeb, for example, hypothesizes that a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization has entered our solar system in his book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. At the time of this blog post, the Pentagon has reported about 400 UFO encounters that go well beyond spy balloons. There’s a lot more out there, but you get the point.
One aspect of the phenomenon worth noting is that the familiar term, UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) evolved into UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and finally into UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). This last iteration basically throws the doors wide open to any unexplainable anomaly. Maybe it’s flying. Maybe it’s not. But it’s doing something weird, whatever it is. At the same time, those who study the phenomenon have speculated a number of classifications for the intelligent entities that may fall under the “anomalous” umbrella term.
Extra Terrestrials (basically, aliens).
Extra Dimensionals (not from somewhere else in the universe but from another plane of existence).
Ultra Terrestrials (non-human entities capable of taking on whatever form they want)
Extra Tempestrials (our distant decedents who have travelled back in time)
To add to the developing body of knowledge, scholars such as Dr. Jeff Kripal from Rice University and Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka from my stomping ground, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, have drawn comparisons between modern anomalous encounters and reports of mystical/religious experiences from previous centuries. It seems that these occurrences, whatever they are, are often contextualized within a cultural framework by the experiencers and their communities in order to make sense of the events. In other words, if an experiencer grew up in a heavily Catholic country 100 years ago, that person might see the Virgin Mary, whereas a secular modern day experiencer could interpret the same type of encounter as contact with a technologically advanced alien species. Behind these peculiar meetings, however, could be something far stranger than humans have the capacity to understand, according to theorists.
I’m interested in this idea of a something beyond our ability to comprehend because of its potential to temporarily suspend the default mind - which for most of us (myself included) is looping in overdrive with the same old thoughts that produce the same old way of seeing the world that ultimately may suppress radical solutions to problems.
Through my most recent animation, “Revelation to the Disembodied,” I aim to simulate an anomalous encounter that not only affects characters in the story world but also works on shifting the film audience into a preternatural state. I discuss this in detail in a previous blog post, Stories Beyond Perspective. As I mention in that post, what I find especially interesting about various reports of non-ordinary events is not just what the experiencer sees and hears “out there” but the internal suspension of the experiencer’s default sensory navigation system. Within this state, experiencers have described such effects as an altered sense of time or a feeling of merging with other objects and beings.
Through looping voiceover and other cinematic elements, the below “Revelation” clip invites an audience to process information in a non-ordinary manner. This can be somewhat destabilizing, but ideally will nonetheless evoke a simulated non-ordinary experience.
“Revelation” includes several references to UAP-like phenomena that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Toward the end of the film, for example, the oracular character predicts:
Your creators won't see these [stars] for a few million years, but when the light does finally reach them, it won't have travelled from far away as they will come to believe. It will disguise itself as a distant, alien intelligence in order not to overwhelm them.
This last sentence especially appeals to me because alien contact, I assume, would already be overwhelming, so what could this presence possibly be that’s even more astonishing? For those readers who are Jaws fans, this is my equivalent of the yellow barrel effect.
I feel that UAPs, whatever they may be in and of themselves, are also a metaphor for an increasing epistemological shock that we as a culture are experiencing. Has our fundamental reality become alien to what it was 10 or 20 years ago and have we become more alien to one another? There is a lot to unpack with this question and I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, personally, the answer is a pretty strong yes.
In an attempt to explore the question, I’ll make some assumptions. I could be completely wrong - but here it goes, anyway.
If I grew up in medieval Europe, I’m assuming that my fellow townspeople and I would share, more or less, the same cosmological views and we would have more or less the same outlook on our world. Sure, some of us might be Jewish, some Christian, and so on, but there would be an agreement on consensus reality. My own experience growing up in the 1980s wasn’t markedly different. Yes, my friends’ parents may or may not vote for candidates from different political parties and we might all be brought up with different philosophical outlooks, but there wasn’t a lot of disagreement on the fundamental nature of our immediate reality.
Is it safe to say that this is not the case, today? It seems that cyberspace has seemingly opened up a portal to multiple planes of reality. The internet manifestation of what Robert Anton Wilson termed “reality tunnels,” (which cause individuals to see the same world differently based on the set of mental filters with which those individuals navigate the world) has led to many interesting Thanksgiving dinner discussions, I’m sure. Needless to say, the more of our consciousness we “upload” to an online ecosystem, the less we share with our medieval ancestors who could probably all agree on the same cows, chickens, carts, and castles that made up their daily reality.
I could hypothetically pass someone in my local coffee shop on any given day who lives in a world where the British Monarchy are reptilian aliens (though I have actually heard a good argument for this being true - on a purely metaphorical level) or I might walk past someone else who spends hours each day in a vividly colored and complex simulated world populated by endless battles and mythological creatures.
So while UAPs are being given serious consideration in the media, the argument could be made - considering the above coffee shop analogy - that, thanks to our reality tunnels (and newly discovered online/digital landscapes), we are as much surrounded by aliens as we are alien to others. Borrowing from the contemporary speculation around the Mayan long-count calendar, maybe we have actually branched off - not into just one alternate timeline but several.
The digital Garden of Eden in “Revelation to the Disembodied”
In the above “Revelation to the Disembodied” image, the mythical Adam and Eve characters are looking up, arms crossed, with each character subtlety contained within a computer circuit (see below image). There are layers of symbolism in this image. Most obviously, the two humans represent a futuristic update to the male and female characters within the Genesis myth. However, on a more esoteric level, these two figures also symbolize the binary 1s and 0s that exist at the atomic level of any digital landscape.
I would argue, like many, that these online landscapes have also facilitated polarization and black and white thinking (conceptual 1s and 0s) - as we are seduced into being slotted into one reality tunnel or another. Note, then that the Adam and Eve characters are crossing their arms, as if binding themselves, while also being bound by their position in the frame. Are they readying themselves for a journey into their respective reality tunnels? They also look up, away from the complex network of organic life within the earth and toward an impulse to “transcend” the Earthly realm.
Speaking of the concept of transcendence, let’s turn, for a moment to the subject of psychedelics.
It’s curious that the epicenter of the 1960s psychedelic scene, the San Francisco Bay area, later became the epicenter of the tech boom. Timothy Leary, perhaps the most notorious character of 1960s psychedelic culture (at least according to former president Richard Nixon who labeled Leary as the most dangerous man in America) proclaimed, at the dawn of cyberspace, that the internet was “the new LSD.”
Leary died in 1996, so he didn’t live to see how prophetic that statement was. If one consider’s the word psychedelic in terms of its etymological roots (psyche = mind, delos = manifest), no exogenous chemicals are required for a “trip.” Psychedelic experiences are characterized by, among other things, a departure from consensus reality. As we become increasingly drenched in this “new LSD,” we embark on internet trips that lead us down reality tunnels and into different metaphorical timelines and I would argue that our potential futures become much stranger and further away from consensus than ever before.
This, in turn, opens us up to a variety of impossible futures, which I will discuss in the fourth and final part of this blog topic.
