Magonia as Hyperobject

The Organic Control Hypothesis and the Re-enchantment of the World

But it may be that with this anchoring of ontology in a single ascetic dualism, thousands of gods are released into the woods, unnoticed.

-- Graham Harman, Tool Being

For god, wanting to make the world as similar as possible to the most beautiful and most complete intelligible things, composed it as a single visible living being, which contains within itself all living beings of the same natural order.

— Plato, Timaeus

Beings, however, do not wish to be badly governed: 'To have many rulers is not good: let there be one ruler.'

— Aristotle, Metaphysics

. . . one is obliged to understand all motion, all ‘appearances,’ all ‘laws,’ only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end.

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Could it be that our reaction to the reports, individually collectively, is as much a part of the UFO phenomenon as the objects themselves?

— Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College

In an earlier installment of this series, I pointed out that Jacques Vallee argues strongly against the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) as an explanation of the UFO phenomenon. The going alternative is the Utraterrestrial Hypothesis (UTH), according to which the ontological grounds of the UFO phenomenon are not provided by alien species visiting Earth from another planet, but another species or race of highly advanced intelligent beings that have long existed right here on earth. UTH has some advantages over ETH, but, so I argue, it suffers many of the same difficulties, i.e., it forces us either to defend evidentially expensive ancillary hypotheses or relegate UTH to unfalsifiable triviality by positing special powers on the part of the ultraterrestrials. In that same essay, I proposed my own explanatory framework, the Uber-Umwelt Uterrestrial Hypothesis (UUTH), as a friendly alternative to UTH, though with the benefit of a greatly reduced evidential expense. The Umwelt is the “environment” of relevance an organism creates for itself based on its limited perceptual capacities and survival strategies. The idea is that our (along with all organisms’) perceptual powers are not attuned to getting everything right, but only what is relevant to our particular needs and strategies. Thus, all perception leaves behind far more than it draws in, i.e., there is a vast Uber-Umwelt “out there” beyond our possible ken. This is a concept already well-credentialed in cognitive science, perceptual biology, and phenomenology, so UUTH possesses sufficient evidential credentials (independent of its introduction into UFology) to avoid the dilemma between triviality and evidential paucity. My proposal is to think of the ontological ground of the UFO phenomenon as something existing on the very edge of our Umwelt; a being mostly in our Uber-Umwelt with which we only have very occasional, and utterly uncanny, interactions.

In a follow-up to that essay, I furthered UUTH by adding the suggestion that the we consider the UFO phenomenon as a single hyperobject. A hyperobject is a being so vast in terms of space, temporality, and/or complexity as to be beyond the grasp of a “smaller” entity. In other words, hyperobjects exist mostly in the Uber-Umwelt, because their sheer magnitude (in the broadest sense) far outstrips our powers of comprehension. We only have access to hyperobjects along their “edges,” i.e., limited manifestations of the whole that offer us the distorted appearance of being distinct phenomena. Of course the parts of a hyperobject, at one level of analysis, can really be distinct things, though, at a higher level, they are manifestations of a greater unified whole (a substance) that is running things, e.g., tornados and snow storms as manifestations of the climate. One of the important points to consider regarding hyperobjects is that they can be hybrid substance composed by between something in our Uber-Umwelt and our own doings, e.g., the Anthropocene. Human activities might call into life hyperobjects that dwarf our own standing. On this view, anything with its own causal powers, identity conditions, and an influence on or control over its parts is a bona fide object, even if it was originally an artifact or caused “artificially,” e.g., Pizza Hut Inc. may have a life of its own that outruns our attempts to grasp or control it. Thus, we might be unknowing manifestations of some hyperobject operating in a “higher phase,” as Tim Morton puts it. That is, we are constituents of hyperobjects that originate in our own doings, though now they exert their own organic control on us and defy our abilities to understand them at their in depth, e.g., the Great Depression or all the plastic in the world might be such hyperobjects. The suggestion that THE UFO may actually be a hyperobject to which we have unwittingly contributed does much to explain, for example, the sharp uptick in manifestations of THE UFO following the Second World War: our poking around in the skies (and eventually outer-space) and utterly novel technological interventions in nature (most significantly the atom bomb) led to more frequent or qualitatively different interactions with something (someone?) in the Uber-Umwelt, and that interaction has taken on a hyperobjective life of its own.¹

Both ETH and standard versions of UTH posit explanatory entities that are more or less comfortably placed in our default Goldilocks Ontology of proverbial mid-sized dried goods: technologically advanced visitors from other planets or elusive earthlings wielding the same implements are concrete particulars of the sort we are used to dealing with. That is, ETH and UTH treat the ontological ground of the UFO phenomenon as though it were the kind of thing we are used to managing within our Umwelt, even if its powers and qualities greatly outstrip those of the humdrum beings that ordinarily concern us. It makes sense that we would tend toward such explanations, since our Umwelt is the anchor point of all of our sense-making activities. Nevertheless, we should not trust ourselves too readily in this regard. The fact that there is an Umwelt of things that make sense to us (through our particular strategies for perceptual and cognitive selectivity) entails there is always an even greater Uber-Umwelt that far surpasses our ordinary perceiving and thinking. Thus, whenever we encounter something truly uncanny along with a tendency to package it among the mid-sized dried goods of our comfortable consensus ontology, we should be wary that we are likely simplifying or caricaturing things almost to the point of distortion. That’s just how we get around in the world! Notice, however, by taking The UFO as a hyperobject, we are admitting as much, i.e., we are accounting for the fact that this being is something that operates almost entirely in our Uber-Umwelt, and therefore we are guarding ourselves (though not infallibly) against our natural tendency to “cut things down to our size.” This ontological humility is one of the prime virtues of the UUTH that I am trying to motivate.

With all those considerations in place (albeit tenuously!), I want to return to Vallee’s own preferred explanatory proposal for the UFO phenomenon, the Control Hypothesis (CH). In what follows, I will attempt to synthesize Vallee’s CH with the UUTH, using the notion of the hyperobject as the key point in the maneuver. In short, by taking Vallee’s Magonia as a hyperobject (maybe even a hyperobject of which humans have always been oblivious constituents), we are able to provide a broad explanation along the lines that Vallee has in mind with his original CH. Moreover, I will argue that the this suggestion allows for an even smoother synthesis for those looking to connect the UFO phenomenon with the broader phenomena of what Jeff Kripal calls Super Nature.