Naturalizing without Demythologizing the UFO

A Textual Proposal Supporting Kastrup's Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis

In a recent article, “UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the Most Reasonable Scenario,” Bernardo Kastrup motivates an explanatory hypothesis for the UAP phenomenon. Kastrup has developed such a theory in other writings, but this iteration of his views on the UAP is particularly interesting because it takes into account the recent tantalizing developments in the available evidence (or at least the testimony avowing that there is such evidence,) while introducing a novel suggestion as to how we should frame the question of the UAP.¹ In what follows, I will give an account of Kastrup’s position and how it makes a novel contribution to the standard taxonomy of positions in ufology, and then make a suggestion of how an under-appreciated method of argumentation taken from philosophy of religion might render his hypothesis far more probable than it may appear at first blush. This treatment of Kastrup’s position will also suggest an integral, though open-ended, role for the humanities and social sciences in our confrontation with the UAP phenomenon.

1. A Taxonomy of UFological Theories

Let's begin by distinguishing two basic and common strategies for explaining UAP. On the one hand, there are what I call onto-techno theories of UAPs. These accounts explain the UAP phenomenon in terms of technology (however remote from our expectations of what is mechanically possible) wielded by some sort of nonhuman intelligent entity (organic or AI), which exists in a straightforwardly physical way (however remote from our expectations for physical beings). Onto-techno theories have come in a number of varieties.² The classic version explains the UAP phenomenon by positing extraterrestrial species (living or AI) arriving on Earth from distant planets in space craft. Other theorists postulate extra-dimensional beings visiting from outside our time-space dimension (and once again these beings could be organisms or AI).³ Another prominent suggestion is the ultraterrestrial hypothesis, which accounts for UAP as technology developed by a nonhuman intelligent species native to Earth that has mostly remained in the shadows of human awareness.⁴ Similarly, other onto-techno theorists have supposed that UAP are the work of a secretive caste of humans (a breakaway civilization) who have long hoarded highly advanced technologies while leaving the rest of us homo sapiens behind.⁵ More recently, the extratempestrial theory has shown strong promise by supposing that UAP are technologies of future human beings who have mastered backward time travel.⁶ Despite their non-negligible diversity, all of these theories have in common the claim that the UAP should primarily be understood as technological implements controlled by some sort of intelligent species or self-maintaining AI that exists in the same physical manner as we do (or at least they show up in our time-space dimension much as we do).

On the other hand, we have cosmic consciousness theories. Those who proffer such theories do not take UAPs or the seemingly related abduction phenomenon

so much as the intervention of flesh and blood entities, but instead as a planetary-wide spiritual process that is altering human consciousness in order to avoid self-induced ecological catastrophe. Carl Jung would have said that archetypes of the collective unconscious are agents behind this transformation. Michael Grosso agues that “mind at large” is attempting to correct today’s dangerous cultural imbalance. Terrence McKenna maintains that the agency involved is “the human oversoul,” defined as a human-generated “field” or enormously intelligent “organism” that regulates “human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history.”⁷

On this sort of view, the UAP phenomenon is a manifestation of the collective unconsciousness, which may stretch beyond the hive mind of the human species to encompass something like a cosmic consciousness, in the form of individuated agents (daemonic entities). The occasion of these eruptions from mind-at-large into our local psychic spaces is the imbalance brought on by our modern egoistic sense of self, and the possible apocalyptically grave consequence of behaviors following on this intersubjective derangement. Cosmic consciousness theorists argue that the phenomenon is either our own unconscious attempts (reified in daemonic manifestations) to save ourselves from ourselves, or it is an outreach from a universal mind (standing behind or transcending our individual minds) trying to do so.⁸ None of this is to reduce the phenomenon to neurotic illusions brought on by the mass psychoses of late modernity. Rather, the point is that mind-at-large is itself an ontologically significant being, and its manifestations can be concretely real.⁹ As he characterizes it in his recent article, we should see Kastrup’s earlier work on the UAP question as a species of the cosmic consciousness theory:

I believe these visions are real as such; they are part of a natural feedback mechanism intrinsic to the human mind, which seeks to dislodge it from ossified worldviews that, despite having become stable, no longer serve the advancement of our understanding of ourselves and nature. The visions in question emerge from collective, phylogenetically ancient layers of the human mind shared by all of us, which, for being incapable of language and conceptual reasoning, communicate to the executive ego through dream-like, immersive metaphors.¹⁰

Though we should resist dichotomizing the theoretical decision between onto-techno and cosmic consciousness explanatory proposals (indeed, most of the authors I have cited subscribe to some sort of hybrid view), both of these approaches enjoy strengths and weaknesses relative to different aspects of the UAP phenomenon, and as such UFologists typically seem to prioritize one stance over the other. Moreover, pulling these two different styles of theorizing into a coherent, synoptic view of the phenomenon is not without its difficulties, so the tendency to favor either onto-techno theories or cosmic consciousness theories at the expense of the other is understandable.

Though they are not necessarily uncorrelated, we are confronted with two distinct classes of observations associated with the UAP phenomenon. On the one hand, there are the increasingly well confirmed so-called “nuts-and-bolts” entities: craft that can be seen and tracked by radar and now other more sophisticated detection technologies; physical traces such as imprints or burn marks on the ground and debris (pieces of metal, slag, etc.); claims of recovered craft; and even claims of recovered “biologics.” When it comes to these data, onto-techno theories are tailor-fit to make sense of things, whereas cosmic consciousness views struggle (at least prima facie) to accommodate such nitty-gritty physical manifestations.¹¹ If UAPs are pieces of hard technology operated by physical beings (whether organic or artificial), then we would not be surprised to find them showing up on FLIR sensors, leaving tracks and debris in fields where they putatively have landed, or even that we find the remains of the their deceased operators after crashing. All of that, however, is more than we would expect prima facie from something like mind-at-large’s attempt to reach us. Why would our own collective unconscious need to leave physical traces? That seems like something that could be done inside-out, without needing to these external effects.

On the other hand, there are the high strangeness effects of UAP encounters. These data include synchronicity storms (clusters of meaningful coincidences that seem to be too unlikely to be chalked up to mere chance), strange and amorphous “craft” appearing sometimes to display contrary characteristics, telepathic or precognitive aftereffects in the subjects of these experiences, often the revelation of extensive philosophical or scientific teachings, and even interactions with all sorts of ethereal beings and memories of abductions by the same.¹² Here the cosmic mind theorists seemingly have the advantage over onto-techno theorists, as most (though certainly not all) of the data can be neatly accounted for in terms of a psychic or spiritual influences from within our collective unconscious, and it is difficult prima facie to see how physical technologies can account for such effects as precognition, synchronicities, and the overall dream-like qualities of these experiences (though here too it’s not impossible for onto-techno theorists to bring these data into their explanatory fold).

Debate in UFology has then often focused on the prioritization of either onto-techno theories (emphasizing nuts-and-bolts craft and their unambiguously physical traces) or cosmic consciousness theories (emphasizing the dreamy and ethereal effects of high strangeness encounters), or grand attempts to account for both nuts-and-bolts observations and high strangeness encounters within a single synoptic theory. None of these tasks is easy, mainly because the data are famously resistant to synthesis - it’s hard to account for one in terms of the other and it’s hard to see how they could be put into anything like a consistent picture. One wonders whether these debates are likely to become moribund, if they have not done so already.

2. Kastrup’s Division of the UFO Question

Kastrup seems to think as much. In his most recent essay on the topic, he emphasizes that “I do not think that the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon is the same as the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs,” while he cautions that conflating “the two . . . may make it impossible to account for either, as no one account will be consistent with the sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics of both.”¹³ In other words, Kastrup, at least at this point in the inquiry, has despaired of putting the nuts-and-bolts data and the high strangeness data into a synoptic whole. In fact, our attempts at such a synthesis only make matters worse, because they tempt us to distort these distinct types of data in order to make them fit together. It may be the the case that the square peg simply will not fit into the round hole, so we should settle for separate accounts rather than reshaping the puzzle pieces to conform to our desire for a nice and neat theoretical story.

Certainly, the virtues of theoretical elegance and simplicity are not to be passed over frivolously, but they cannot be served at the expense of dealing with the actual phenomena. One might presume that there is a grand theoretical synthesis of all the data at some higher level of analysis, while nevertheless operating by distinct accounts at the level of finer-grained observations. For example, one can grant that that there is in principle some grand synthesis of biology and fundamental physics, even while claiming not to know what such a synthesis might be; in the meantime, biologists and physicists could go about their separate business within their cordoned-off domains of inquiry. I take it that this is what Kastrup has in mind when he divides the UAP question between nuts-and-bolts and high strangeness data, i.e., even though there may be some synoptic account at an as yet to be discovered level of analysis, for now we will have to settle for two separate and seemingly independent theoretical accountings. Fair enough.¹⁴

Kastrup is satisfied to allow his earlier cosmic mind theory to stand as an account of high strangeness phenomena, so he now owes us a distinct theory accounting for nuts-and-bolts encounters, and here he goes the way of onto-techno theories. Following Jacque Vallee’s lead, Kastrup argues that “the pattern of behavior of UAPs is not consistent with the extra-terrestrial hypothesis,” and he instead develops a theory that accounts for nuts-and-bolts UAP data as the work of ultarterrestrials. Katrup argues that it is unlikely that these ultraterrestrials are human beings that have existed since the last ice age. A civilization capable of producing the technologies involved in nuts-and-bolts UAP data would likely have been vast and industrialized, leaving a significant footprint. If such a grand civilization existed since the last ice, we would probably see its traces, and we thus far we have found no fingerprints left by any industrial society prior to our own.¹⁵ This leads Kastrup to conclude that the intelligence behind nuts-and-bolts UAPs are “some other non-human species” that had “arisen on Earth, developed to a level of technology far beyond ours . . .,” and then “vanished due to one or more of the myriad possible civilization-ending cataclysms that could end our own (climate change/collapse, comet/asteroid impact, pandemics, solar storms, thermonuclear war, etc.)” hundreds of thousand or even millions of years prior to the emergence homo sapiens. If such a species were to have had their reign on Earth, it is possible that no traces of their civilization would remain to be found today — though we might take UAPs as just those traces!

More specifically, Kastrup supposes that whatever catastrophe wiped out the ultraterrestial civilization, some small remnant may have survived and carried on their technological ways under ground (or maybe under the seas), safely out of the way of the dangerous and aggressive apes to whom the post-apocalyptic evolutionary process handed the mantel of dominant species. The ultraterrestrials then “would be okay with allowing the monkeys to run amok on top of the roof (provided that the monkeys don’t start a thermonuclear war and compromise the entire house), but would rather stay safely in doors.” Moreover, that is why the intelligence behind the nuts-and-bolts data seem to be mostly interested in “monitoring human activity that could lead to large-scale destruction and compromise the planet’s habitability.” Thus, Kastrup’s hypothesis accounts well for the fact that the ultraterrestrials seems mostly aloof or skittish about human contact, though they do seem to linger around some of our more reckless technological projects, e.g., nuclear weapons facilities and the like.

Interestingly, Kastrup’s theory of nuts-and-bolts UAPs is what contemporary philosophers would call a naturalizing explanation. That is, under this theory, there is nothing spooky or uncanny about UAP. They can be accounted for, albeit by novel applications and conjectures, by the well-verified and broadly recognized categories and laws of mainstream science. For example, one often hears of naturalizing in the philosophy of mind when someone attempts to account for consciousness entirely within the theoretical resources of neuroscience, and there are famous attempts to solve (or dissolve) the problems of epistemology by naturalizing knowledge, i.e., re-describing it in terms of neurophysiology and empirical psychology.¹⁶ This is not to say that Kastrup is a naturalist in the way these physicalist examples suggest. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth! (This is a point I will emphasize at length in a moment.) Rather, the point is that Kastrup’s utltraterretrial UAP theory smoothly folds the nuts-and-bolts data into our going understanding of nature, and this does not require us to revise that account of nature one whit. He believes that the current resources of astrobiology, earth science, anthropology, and a number of other disciplines provide us ample resources to account for nuts-and-bolts UAPs without introducing anything supernatural or even terribly different from the ordinary physical objects recognized by mainstream scientific theorizing. Kastrup says of his hypothesis, “there is nothing unnatural or truly extraordinary about it.”

Naturalizing typically goes hand in glove with demythologizing. The latter is a term taken from modern biblical scholarship as it re-interpreted religious texts in light of the commitments of post-Enlightenment, materialist ontology. Rudolf Bultmann gave a particularly stark (infamous!) statement of the demythologizing attitude:

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one's historical situation.¹⁷

In other words, once we are committed to understanding the New Testament in the context of the modern scientific worldview, we can no longer take the mythical content, e.g., miraculous healings, the Resurrection and Ascension, prophecies, etc. as factually significant. These myths must be explained away in naturalistic terms, and at most we can see them as having some sort of allegorical or ethical significance, but they are not in any straightforward sense true. Once we take the naturalizing turn, many modern biblical scholars are inclined to think that there can be nothing from beyond the texts (outside the minds of their writers) that speaks to us through these phantasmagoric myths; the scriptures do not put us in touch with anything beyond the narrowly human. We can see that naturalizing in the philosophy of mind and epistemology has a sort of demythologizing sensibility: post-naturalization, the vaunted status of mind and knowledge has largely been diffused in the sense that these aspects of reality that once dazzled us are now relegated to the same mundane ontological plane as everything else. Once naturalized, when it comes to mind, knowledge, and the Bible, “there’s noting to see here folks!”

Kastrup recognizes that there is a significant mythical content to the nuts-and-bolts data. People who encounter entities that fit neatly within a naturalized onto-techno theory (the classic flying saucer sighting) often experience telepathic communications, philosophical or spiritual teachings, lost time, etc. (the famous Ariel School incident comes to mind as such a case). Should these strange contents of the nuts-and-bolts experiences be demythologized as part of the naturalizing ultraterrestrial story? Kastrup strong urges us to resist the demythologizing tendency in this case. That is not surprising, as a major theme (and I often think this is the ultimate goal of all of Kastrup’s philosophical work) is to counteract the modern demythologizing tendency.¹⁸ Once humanity has strayed dangerously close to setting loose processes that are likely to make earth inhospitable to just about every species of living thing (maybe by nuclear warfare or climate degradation), the previously aloof ultraterrestrials are likely to want to reach out to us in the interest of the planetary common good. The problem is that communication in any straight-forward literal sense among animals lacking any common evolutionary history (or even those with a remote ancestral connection) is almost unthinkable. Thus, Kastrup argues that

Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will perforce have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally.

The ultraterrestrials are then using the strange experiences of nut-and-bolts encounters to get through to us the only way possible, by playing on the mythical resources in our unconsicous imagination (archetypes). They are not us, in the strongest sense, so this process will be clumsy, and discerning the meaning of these communications, which are not literal utterances, will be tenuous. In any event, the mythological content of nuts-and-bolts experiences should not be demythologized. These strange encounters are not, for Kastrup, our subjective projections on an otherwise bare objective phenomenon. Rather, the high strangeness is part of the thing-it-self. Something beyond the human does speak to us from these natural objects, its message is, for all we know, the most important tidings we need to receive. Of course, taking seriously the mythical/metaphorical content of high-strangeness experiences as communications from possibly superior beings is probably too much for mainstream science and secular academics, but, as Kastrup puts it, “there is nothing unnatural or truly extraordinary about it. If it violates our sensitivities, then this informs us about our sensitivities, not about the plausibility of the hypothesis in a naturalist framework.”

3. The Existence of Homer and the Existence of the Ultraterrestrials

I have no serious philosophical objections to bring to the table when it comes to Kastrup’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis, and my own view on the matter is not all that far from something like this position. Nevertheless, there is a worry we should have about this hypothesis. Kastrup is betting heavily on the just-so story he tells about the emergence, dominant flourishing, demise, and hidden remnant of an as yet untraced non-human technologically advanced species. I am not claiming there is anything wrong with Kastrup’s account. He is a serious scholar with a scrupulous scientific mind, so I have no doubt that he has done his homework on this matter and every piece of the puzzle is scientifically plausible. That is all well and good, but I bet if we multiplied the probability of all the sub-hypotheses involved, the result would be a painfully low probability for the overall hypothesis. Of course, if Kastrup’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis is the only available explanation or the best available explanation, its prima facie improbability doesn’t matter. Sometimes a low probability hypothesis is indeed the best explanation. For example, however good the character of your roommate seemed to you before (it was unlikely to you that he would steal), if he is the only person with any plausible access to your belongings, then thievery on his part is the best available explanation of your missing jewelry.

Thus, what might be the prima facie long odds against Kastrup’s ultraterrestrial scenario is not necessarily a dealbreaker for his hypothesis, supposing that he has the best available explanation. We can’t, it seems, rule out Kastrup’s just-so story, and subsequently his ultraterrestrial hypothesis can be vindicated as long as it does better relative to other contrary hypotheses purporting to explain the nuts-and-bolts data.

Nevertheless, Kastrup’s theory would do well to get a probability boost to counteract the long odds that might be stacked up against it by the just-so story, especially if competing hypotheses don’t depend on improbable (even if plausible) just-so stories.¹⁹ We cannot say that the nuts-and-bolts phenomena are such evidence, as that would simply beg the question. Thus, the easiest way for this probability boost would be to uncover some direct evidence of ultraterrestreials independent of the UAP phenomenon. Maybe there is such evidence, but Kastrup has conceded that his hypothesis can survive even if the dearth of direct evidence remains, i.e., there are no traces of pre-ice age, non-human industrial civilizations, so it would be unfair to Kastrup to hold his hypothesis in abeyance in lieu of such data.

I propose an indirect or end-around strategy based on an under-appreciated technique in the philosophy of religion, which exploits Kastrup’s anti-demythologizing stance. At one time some classical scholars had favored the conclusion that Homer did not exist, i.e., there was no single human being who authored the Iliad, because the poem predates written Greek and it was thought to be too long to have been composed by a single human being working entirely from memory. Given the apparent limitations of human memory, the classicists ruled out the existence of Homer. At that point, there was no point in inspecting the text for internal evidence of a single author, because the existence of such a person could be dismissed up front. Later, however, anthropologists discovered that that there are in fact compositions longer than the Iliad that have been memorized by single individuals in cultures without written language. Thus, classical scholars could no longer rule out that Homer existed. “For all we know,” one might have said, “Homer exists.” Of course, that is only to say that it was plausible that Homer existed, and plenty of plausible things are still improbable. Given that Homer’s existence was plausible, classicists could then consider whether the text of the Iliad itself gave any evidence of a singular author. To make a long story short, the Iliad does indeed have many of the earmarks of a single author, so classical scholars came to conclude that it is likely that there was indeed a Homer who composed the Iliad.²⁰

The moral to that story is that even if the existence of some being is merely plausible (though not probable), purported communications from such a being can themselves provide evidence for that very same being. Since we cannot rule out the existence of Homer, it made sense to inspect the Iliad to see whether it bears the marks we would expect from something actually coming from him. Since the text did indeed seem like what we would get from Homer (a single author) and there was no reason to rule out the existence of Homer, classicists were right to conclude that it’s likely there was such a person.

Thomas Sullivan and Sandra Menssen are contemporary philosophers of religion who have applied this type of reasoning to the question of the existence of God.²¹ Suppose you are an honest agnostic; meaning you don’t have really good reasons to deny that God exists, but you can’t rule out God’s existence, i.e. the existence of God is plausible though not probable. You certainly don’t know God exists, but for all you know such a being does exist. Importantly, the agnostic inquirer is in the same position as the classical scholar who has just learned that humans can indeed memorize compositions even longer than the Iliad. It makes sense then to see whether purported communications from God do indeed seem at all like what a divine being would have to say. Among the religious traditions claiming to be expressions of divine revelations, are there any claims that strongly suggest themselves as what God would say to humans, if there were such a being? For example, maybe a certain holy book contains moral insights so impeccable that they recommend themselves as what a divine source would tell us, or maybe a revelatory tradition makes a claim that, if true, would provide a very good explanation for certain things we are inclined to believe, e.g., universal human rights or freedom of the will, but can’t quite make sense of on secular grounds. The claims of the religious texts wouldn’t matter, if the world were such as to rule out God’s existence, but short of that, the agnostic inquirer does well to see whether someone might be trying to communicate through what are claimed to be divinely inspired texts. If God’s existence is plausible and some supposed divine communication does indeed really seem like what God would have to say to us, then Menssen and Sullivan argue we would have some grounds to say the existence of such a being is probable, or at least we have increased the probability of the theistic hypothesis.

Kastrup has, to my satisfaction, made a good case that the existence of ultraterrestrials is plausible. Given his just-so story, I believe we cannot rule out the ultraterrestrial hypothesis. Kastrup also has made a plausible case that we would not be surprised if ultraterrestrials would want to communicate to us, and it is well-known that the nuts-and-bolts data do in fact include purported ultraterrestrial communications. Following the classicist’s case for Homer and Menssen and Sullivan’s case for God’s existence, we should then see the next step in the inquiry as an analysis of the high strangeness aspects of the nuts-and-bolts data to determine whether these “texts” contain anything that strongly suggests they are indeed messages from ultraterrestrials. Is there anything in the purported ultraterrestrial communications that we would expect to be told by such beings? If so, then we have some very good reasons to think the probability of the ultraterrestrial hypothesis is significantly boosted, even though its direct probability independent of this “textual evidence” is not terribly high. Thus, we should, at this point, prioritize the hermeneutic investigation of the purported utlraterrestrial messages over the scientific evaluation of Kastrup’s just so-story. As long as the latter does not utterly refute Kastrup’s position, the former may be sufficient to render his ultraterrestrial explanations rather likely.

Of course, this leaves us with a very thorny set of questions: What would we expect ultraterrestrials to have to say to us? Do we indeed find such messages associated with the nuts-and-bolts data? If by the former, we include the form of the messaging we would expect from ultraterrestrials, then Kastrup has gone some way toward answering this question. Namely, he makes a good case that communications from ultraterrestrials would likely be mythological, metaphorical, and symbolic, and that is exactly what we seem to find in the nuts-and-bolts data. Thus, there is a bit of a probability boost for the ultraterrestrial hypothesis on this point. When we come to the questions of the content of ultraterrestrial communications, I believe things will get quite difficult. The exact intentions of non-human species that have very little in common with us in terms of evolutionary history would be quite opaque. Can we expect that they would have anything like the same standards of rational self-interest as we do? It’s very hard to say, but then we have only shaky grounds for predicting their intentions.

The question of whether we find such contents in the purported communications from utltraterrestrials, supposing we knew what we were looking for in the first place, will also be fraught with difficulties. As Kastrup emphasizes, any such communications will be mediated through the ready materials of the human unconscious. That is, it will be very difficult to sort what is coming from the ultraterrestrials and what is simply our own human archetypical structures. It would be very easy to confuse the messages of the ultraterrestrials and our collective unconscious through which they are being mediated. This problem is compounded by the problem of content we just raised: it will be intractably difficult to separate our own unconscious framings from the the content of ultraterrestrial communications when we probably aren’t sure what we are looking for in the case of the latter. Moreover, how will we know whether a purported ultraterrestrial communication isn’t an as yet undiscovered aspect of our unconscious (a previously unarticulated aspect of the archetypes) or some sort of psychological background noise?

All of this is to suggest that the next stage of the investigation of nuts-and-bolts UAP, at least following Kastrup’s model, is going to rely heavily on contributions by social scientists and scholars in the humanities. Our first step in winnowing the human contribution from what might be the ultraterrestrial contribution to the high strangeness experience is to construct a thorough-going articulation, though always tentative and always incomplete, of the human. That articulation of the elements of the collective human unconscious is the work of anthropologists, psychologists, literary scholars, cognitive scientists, phenomenologists, and sociologists, and certainly natural sciences such as cognitive neuroscience will have a say too. Ultimately, we are going to have to perform a sort of subtractive hermeneutics wherein we attempt to remove the human from the purported ultraterrestrial communications and then see whether the remains suggests themselves as authentically ultraterrestrial.²² Of course, that endeavor may itself be impossible. What can be left for us to grasp after we have subtracted all our means of grasping? Moreover, we might perform the hermeneutics of subtraction, and find nothing is left over, which leaves us with an obdurate mystery, or maybe a confirmation that it’s just been us all along.

We have very difficult questions before us, and possibly even more difficult answers. I am grateful to Kastrup, however, for taking us a few very important steps down this long path of inquiry.

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1. For Kastrup’s earlier treatments of the UAP phenomenon, see his Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomenon Can Tell Us about the Nature of Reality (IFF Books, 2011) and “UFOs: Even More Mysterious than You Think,” in Brief Peaks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism, and Culture (IFF Book, 2015), pp. 164-168. Kastrup’s suggestion, though we come to different views deep down in the metaphysical weeks, in the latter essay comes close to my own theory of the UFO. See Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World (Ontocalypse, 2024).

2. All the examples of onto-techno theories that I offer in this paragraph are surely caricatures in comparison to the subtle accounts constructed by these authors. The lines among these theories are much more fluid than what lends itself to easy taxonomies.

3. Jacques Vallee has often suggested something along these lines. See his Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception (Anomalist Books, 2014), pp,. 254-255.

4. H.E. Puthoff, “Ultraterrestrial Models,” The Journal of Cosmology, Vol. 29, No. 1, 20001-20016. The locus classicus of ultraterrestrial (and extra-dimensional) theories is John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs (Anomalist, 2023).

5. Jason Reza Jorgani, Closer Encounters (Arktos Media, 2021). Jorgani’s sees all these theories as, once nuanced, basically consistent, though he provides a good example of the breakaway civilization hypothesis.

6. Michael Masters, Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon (Masters Cretive, 2019). Masters provides a very good example of how the interplay between theorization and evidence should be considered in addressing these questions.

7. Michael E. Zimmerman, “The ‘Alien Abduction’ Phenomenon: Forbidden Knowledge of Hidden Events,” Philosophy Today, Summer 1997, 41, 2: p. 247. See also Michael E. Zimmerman, “Encountering Alien Otherness,” in The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Rebecca Saunders (Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 153-177.

8. Though he none-to-quick to presume that the higher mind means us well, Jacques Vallee’s control hypothesis is akin to such views. For an extended and classic treatment of the control hypothesis, see Vallee’s The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Have Discovered about UFO Influences on the Human Race (Anomalist, 2023). I develop something along these lines in Unidentified Flying Hyperobject, but I am cautious with talk of minds and consciousness in this contexts. My view also straddle’s the border with ultraterrestial theories, as does Kastrup’s theory, as we shall see shortly.

9. Carl Jung’s perplexity over the UFO led him to come to such a conclusion about the UFO somewhat grudgingly in his canonical Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1979).

10. Kastrup, “UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the Most Reasonable Scenario?”, The Debrief, Jan. 6, 2023. See also the excellent interview by James Faulk in which Kastrup outlines his more recent thinking about the UAP issue on Neon Galactic. Certainly, this account is an application of the Jungian-cosmopsychist idealism that Kastrup has developed masterfully over the last fifteen years. For his fullest treatment of the total picture to date, see Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to the Nature of Reality (IFF Books, 2019). Along these lines, see Kastrup, “The Universe in Consciousness,” The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25, No. 5-6, 2018: pp. 125-155. For an extended account of the application of Kastrup’s overall metaphysical view to the UFO question (along with the full gamut of manifestations of the absurd), see Kastrup, Meaning in Absurdity, pp. 87-113.

11. This is certainly a bit quick on my part. Cosmic consciousness theories that draw on a broader idealist metaphysics (as they typically do), can make sense of concrete, “physical” manifestations of UAP as projects of mind, because that’s how they make sense of all physical things. Indeed, though it does not now seem to be his most considered view, Kastrup has even rather recently proposed something along these lines as an account of the nuts-and-bolts of UAP. See Kastrup’s discussion on the Point of Convergence podcast, which is also an excellent introduction to Kastrup’s overall metaphysical stance.

12. For a catalogue of high strangeness, see Vallee, The Invisible College.

13. Kastrup, “UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence.” Kastrup’s emphasis. Hereafter, unless otherwise noted, reference to Kastrup’s work are taken from this article as it appeared in The Debrief.

14. Of course, simplicity and elegance could be regulative ideals in the sense that Kant spells out in the Critique of Judgment: they are natural commitments on our part that guide our inquiries, though they may, in the end, not be finally satisfied. There is nothing up-front to guarantee that the universe isn’t a stubborn plurality. You can see a similar stance in William James’s A Pluralistic Universe, which I have discussed in an earlier edition of this newsletter.

15. Though perhaps, Graham Hancock might have some questions to raise along these lines. See America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2020).

16. All physicalist theorizing in philosophy of mind and epistemology are naturalizing endeavors, but the locus classicus of this approach is W.V.O. Quines famous paper, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia, 1969). For a naturalizing approach to philosophy of mind directly in this Quinian lineage, so Daniel Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” in Consciousness in Contemporary Science, ed. A. Marcel and E. Bisiach(Oxford University Press 1988).

17. Rudolf Bultmann, The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Fortress, 1984), p. 4.

18. See Kastrup’s More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief (IFF, 2016) for his comprehensive attempt to construct a metaphysics and epistemology within which myths are no less true, and maybe more so, than scientific theories. I believe it is a shame that Kastrup’s idealism overshadows the very significant contributions his works have made to religious epistemology.

19. A comparison of Kastrup’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis with Michael Masters’ extratempestrial hypothesis in these terms would be very interesting, though it goes beyond my scientific pay grade.

20. See Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan, “The Existence of God and the Existence of Homer,” Faith and Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2002).

21. Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan, The Agnostic Inquirer: Revelation from a Philosophical Standpoint (Eerdmans, 2007). You can find my review of The Agnostic Inquirer from the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly here.

22. Here in particular the “hermeneutics of suspicion” stemming from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, along with their more recent descendants, will be important (whatever its other vices), as these subverting methodologies are honed to expose the locally and contingently human. Of course much of contemporary academia claims that the hermeneutics of suspicion will leave nothing standing after the subtraction of the human. There is nothing that commits us, however, to a nihilistic metaphysics by availing ourselves of this methodology. For a case against that the hermeneutics of suspicion doesn’t entail that “the truth is depressing,” see Jeffry Kripal Superhumanities: New Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Diana Puasuka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Technology, Religion (Oxford, 2019) is a great example of these methods in practice without eliminating our access to the Super Human. See also chapter 7 of my Unidentified Flying Hyperobject.