The UFO Paradox

As a currently widening out contentious issue, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), or better, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) have for the past eight decades either stirred up much polarisation of views, or total refusal to admit that there is any issue.  Much vituperative expressionism has been, and still is, thrown from and towards ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’, with the refusal category either ignoring the whole razzmatazz or defining the two sides as both of them deluded or simple-minded.  There is also much fear:  Are they real?  Are they from another planet?  What are they wanting here?  Are we in danger of invasive takeover?  Et al.

Thomson provides a saner view by remaining neutral in order to examine the various viewpoints with meticulous carefulness and so better understand them, thus bringing clear thinking to bear on matters which, seemingly, have important implications for human kind:  also part of the ongoing debate.  In the process, he examines the more viable acceptance side, those noting the curious irrational phenomenon as just that.  This category includes respectable academics, importantly the late Harvard Psychiatrist John E. Mack, who wrote two books concerning the experiences of encounterers.

The subtitle to Thompson’s book indicates:  ‘The Celestial and Symbolic World of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.’  And the head-quote supports: ‘An irregularity in nature is only the sharp exacerbation, to the point of perceptible disclosure, of a property of things diffused throughout the universe, in a state which eludes our recognition of its presence’ - Teilhard de Chardin.

To which I would add polymath Francis Bacon’s remark that one should not contract observations to fit our thinking, but expand thinking to fit what is observed, not specifically mentioned by Thompson, but a critique he penetratingly employs, referencing investigators who insist on viewing the issues from the standpoint of conventional (Western) human culture, so not allowing possible learnings from the phenomena, as if ‘the science is settled.’  ‘In ways that push the boundaries of physicalist models of science, the phenomena suggest a co-creative context that joins the observer and the observed:  us encountering it, and vice versa’ (p.10).

In the Introduction he recounts an early experience while surfing off the coast of Hawaii in which a powerful sea-going current sweeps him nearly into death, (p. 7) inducing trauma which he describes as equipping him internally for considering without bias the matter of the UAP (with no personal encounter) as apparently material, apparently spiritual, both at once, and appearing seemingly out of nowhere, and similarly disappearing: a matter of the connectivity between science and religion, best called here religio to avoid reference to religious organisation, supported by the SMN, separated in traditional academe.  Thompson lays it out:  ‘deeply ingrained binary thought-forms:  reality must conform either to matter or mind, literal or metaphoric, world or imagination, no other choice.’

The chapters that follow forensically examine some well known encounter stories, or lay out careful philosophical aspects of the phenomena, pursuing thoughts which carefully avoid taking any fully formed stance on the subject.  In the process he finds support from many others, including C.G. Jung on collective psyche, Jeffrey Kripal’s various supportive analyses, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on absurdity: ‘The absurd is, and has always been, an intrinsic part of our world’ (p. 37); and several other well-known thinkers, including C.D. Broad, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Kuhn and, particularly, Jacques Vallée, who points out that the phenomena occurred well before the 1947 event which started the current furore.  In fact earliest available descriptions of ‘alien visitors’ date back at least 3,000 years, a proposition refused by academe, and not mentioned by Thompson.

Chapter 10, ‘Musing on the Future of Reality’, brings together the essence of many of the foregoing thoughts, leaning particularly on Bernado Kastrup who provides a confirming comment to Thompson’s discourse: ‘Crucially the ultimate map of nature may be the map of the psyche as uncovered by depth psychology.  As such, depth psychology may take precedence over physics [as conceived in materialist terms] as a description of the universe. (p. 191)

Thompson as a journalist takes care to render his book readable:  I found it quite entertaining as well as importantly careful in examining strange happenings in the sky, or in our minds, or both.  He is attempting to describe the ‘ordinary’ world as imbued/underlaid quantumly in terms possible to be understood by his non-academic readers.