The UFO, Religion, and Our Epistemic Vulnerability

Diana Pasulka's Unheard Message for UFology

Then also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it — statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material. And, as you’d expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.

It’s a strange image you’re describing, and strange prisoners.

They’re like us.

Socrates conversing with Glaucon, Plato, Republic, Bk. VII

We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for a good reason: how can we ever hope to find what we have never looked for? The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself,” will hold for us to all eternity. Of ourselves we are not “knowers.”

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

And if it is a mystery, we too have a right to preach a mystery, and to teach them that it is not the free judgment of their hearts, not love that matters, but a mystery which they must follow blindly, even against their conscience. So we have done. We have corrected Thy work and have found it upon miracle, mystery, and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts.

— The Grand Inquisitor’s Indictment of Christ, Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.

— W.V.O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

“Is she saying that all of religion is just some kind of put-on?”

That was a question one of my students asked while we were discussing Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic as part of a course I am teaching on the UFO and the philosophy of religion. My reply to this student was that her question betrayed both a profound understanding and a profound misunderstanding of Pasulka’s book. On the one hand, my student is correct to think that Pasulka (though I doubt she would put it quite so crudely) sees religion as some kind of put-on¹, while on the other hand Pasulka is far from thinking that religion is just a put-on. This is no criticism of the bright young woman who asked this question. Again, she’s getting something very right, and very deep, about American Cosmic.²

Moreover, my student understands something about Pasulka’s work that has, as far as I can see, gone nearly unnoticed by the great a lot of UFologists. Maybe “unnoticed” is the wrong word, as the problem UFology has in comprehending Pasulka’s work is not a matter of mere inattention, but a cognitive blindspot intrinsic to the UFologist’s own deepest, meaning-constituting commitments. That is, the UFologist misses one of Pasulka’s central lines of argument, because she is critiquing the very lens through which the Ufologist sees the world as a UFologist. In the same way you can’t see your own eye balls directly, the UFologist cannot comprehend the object of Pasulka’s critique without stepping outside of his or her means of sense-making. UFology is held captive by a certain picture that structures the very discourse of UFology, and that implicit picture is what Pasulka has put under her powerful critical microscope. As Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 115). I have a sense that Pasulka’s intentions, like Wittgenstein’s, are ultimately therapeutic, i.e., the picture that holds the UFologist captive is a constraint blocking her from seeing things (including the UFO!) as they are. Thus, Pasulka provides an occasion to “let the fly out of the bottle,” or at least she offers a timely caution to those of us on our way into the trap. Her cautionary critique, however, seems to have fallen on deaf ears among those who most need to hear it.³ This implicit picture certainly helps the UFologist see something (and Pasulka emphasizes this frequently), but, like any lens, it enhances our vision only by simultaneously narrowing it.