Religion of Technology

On UFOs, Mythology, and Enchantment

Some think that the soul pervades the whole universe, whence perhaps came Thales’s view that "everything is full of gods."
— Aristotle^[1]

UFOs—or, UAPs as they have now been pointlessly renamed^[2]—are an endless tease. We are offered coy little glimpses but never the pay-off of “full disclosure.” As Carl Jung once said, UFOs are “not photogenic.”^[3] Whenever the government discloses information, it comes with a host of caveats. Consider the now famous UFO footage confirmed by the U.S. Navy a few years ago, be it of the USS Nimitz or USS Theodore Roosevelt. That little smoo-shaped dot on your computer screen might be going faster than any known human aircraft or spacecraft, but the dull, low-resolution black-and-white footage certainly leaves something to be desired. To risk a cliché, it “raises more questions than it answers.”

Whenever more colorful information surfaces—be it the accounts of Barney & Betty Hill or Lonnie Zamora, Bob Lazar or naval and commercial pilots today, not to mention the myriad rumors concerning sightings by nuclear submarines and at nuclear power plants—it usually comes with yet more glowing disclaimers and bright red warning signs. USAF officer David Grusch’s testimony to Congress, for example, was dramatic and unprecedented in its claims that the U.S. government has recovered crashed alien technology as well as alien bodies. Though it seems implausible that such a vast conspiracy could remain relatively under-wraps while still involving at least hundreds if not thousands of people, there have been other government secrets, like the CIA’s MKUltra program, which have remained partially hidden for decades.

Is this a psy-op? Are we being had? Such skepticism has become the canny, knowing response online. According to this line of thinking, the entire UFO phenomenon is a government distraction, a construction of the intelligence agencies. If you buy into it, you’re a gullible sap, a rube, an NPC, a fool.

It’s a plausible enough interpretation. And yet…

There are numerous events in the history of UFO sightings—far too many to name—that are more compelling than any of the moments of “disclosure” (or pseudo-disclosure) noted above. The 2004 “Tic Tac” incident is nothing new: the 1966 Hillsdale UFO sighting, the 1969 Berkshires UFO sighting, the 1994 Michigan UFO sighting, and the 1997 “Phoenix Lights” incident all stand out due to the large numbers of people who had highly compelling and detailed sightings of UFOs. Roswell too, if you can get to the other side of the “weather balloon” babble, is a genuinely strange event.

Famously, after a rancher recovered strange debris near his ranch in Corona, New Mexico in 1947, a press release from Roswell Air Force Base declared that the debris was from a “flying disc.” The story was quickly retracted and covered by a new statement, stating that the debris was actually from a weather balloon. Then, in 1994, the story was changed again, the weather balloon this time metamorphosing into a spy balloon. One reason to be skeptical about the official narrative is that people who helped concoct that ever-shifting balloon narrative admitted to having made it up as a cover story under official orders. The military intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel, who recovered the debris from the rancher, and the public information officer, Walter Haut, admitted to going along with the farce. The son of the rancher also stated that he and his father felt that the debris was not of this world.

As Jacques Vallée discusses in his classic work, Passport to Magonia (1969), these sightings and close encounters have occurred in virtually all cultures across all times and places. Vallée is a French scientist and expert on the UFO phenomenon, whose interest was first piqued while working for France’s National Center for Space Studies, the French equivalent of NASA. During his time there, he personally witnessed French government authorities remove a tracking tape of UFO activity without explanation. Vallée’s research has shown the cross-cultural scope of the UFO phenomenon: for instance, medieval Japan was curiously rich in UFO sightings. This ubiquity leads to some fascinating implications. One is the observation that there is a large degree of cross-over between faerie folklore and modern ufology.

In one odd story, Vallée talks about a Wisconsin farmer who allegedly received pancakes (!) from an alien visitor. The pancakes turned out to be made from the same ingredients that, in folklore, faeries put in the cakes they served to humans. Just as contemporary aliens allegedly abduct and probe people, medieval European faeries occasionally kidnapped their victims, dragging them off to faerieland and poking them with pins. Accordingly, a “trickster” element is strongly present in many of these narratives.

Considering the numerous anecdotes presented by Vallée, the phenomenon is either psychological, having to do with shared archetypes that inform our ways of storytelling (or lying), or a real phenomenon, involving entities from another dimension or planet. Or it could be both. We may well be seeing the manifestation of an untamed and often dangerous reality that spurs the gears of our socio-cultural matrix to develop the folklore of ufology. Here, it might be helpful to turn from Jacques Vallée to D.W. Pasulka.

Pasulka is a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, whose research has concentrated on Catholicism (the concept of purgatory was the subject of her first book). Noticing the parallels between Christian mystical and spiritual experience and the claims of UFO adherents, Pasulka engaged in six years of ethnographic research, interviewing scientists secretly engaged in studying UFOs and related phenomena. After reading the result of this research, American Cosmic (2019), and putting it in conversation with Vallée’s earlier work, it became clear to me that UFO mythos is the technologization of all myth (I use the term “myth” technically, without implying that myths are false). It uses the same “mythemes”—borrowing a term from Jeffrey Kripal—found in other cultures, but they are given a mechanical emphasis. The UFO myth displaces religious emotion from hope for the spiritual world to hope for near-divine blessings brought by extraterrestrial technology.

In essence, aliens are scientized angels who herald an inverted revelation. Rather than choirs who sing of the grace given by a transcendent moral order, the aliens are messengers of a scientific equivalent: the power to seize control over cosmic processes. Just consider how far this pseudo-religious mythology has permeated pop culture, from Stephen Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which shows Hindu monks chant the same musical notes played by an alien spacecraft, to the incontinent ravings of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, which recasts Biblical stories like Elijah’s chariot of fire and Ezekiel’s vision of God, as inevitably involving—you guessed it—aliens.

Pasulka talks about her experiences with the “invisible college” of UFO researchers, including many professors and scientists of notable standing who pursue their work on the down-low to avoid ridicule. One particular anonymous researcher, “Tyler,” even leads Pasulka (alongside Stanford professor Garry Nolan) to recover an anomalous “artifact” in the New Mexican desert, ostensibly at a secret UFO crash site. Tyler’s true identity and origins are left mysterious by Pasulka, but she states that he has a high level of government clearance and worked on every space shuttle launch with NASA.

Now, Pasulka, while a historian of religion, is a believing Catholic. Yet after reading through the experiences Pasulka covers—like Tyler’s belief that he is directly influenced and guided by aliens through psychic means—it becomes clear that alien encounters follow an old religious pattern in a new mechanical context. These encounters always recycle experiences that, in earlier eras and other cultures, would be classified as encounters with the spirit world. The technological spin is especially evident in the fact that Tyler believes the aliens historically have been, and continue to be, communicating ideas for new tools in order to benefit humanity. Instead of saying that he was inspired by an angel or a god, an adherent of the UFO religion might talk about having information “downloaded” into his brain.

The process Tyler describes sounds the same as inspiration, which poets used to believe they received from gods and jinn—or as Milton thought, from the Holy Ghost. Our best thoughts are messages beamed to us from the depth of the self, from the unconscious (whatever that is; a deeper mystery than alien encounters). Pasulka compares Tyler’s moments of alien technological inspiration to those of the Indian genius, Ramanujan, who derived brilliant mathematical insights from religious dreams and visions, sent by the goddess his family worshiped. UFO myth removes the inspiring agent from the inner depths of the self and from the spiritual beyond, where the daemon, the jinn, the genius, and guardian angel reside. The source of inspiration is now physically up there, rather than inside us or spiritually “upwards.” Thus what was once mystical revelation becomes merely a source of material products for human manipulation.

Most of these alien encounters point towards the same message: technology is the answer. If we think of technology as an extension of our powers through means extrinsic to ourselves, we can see that the need for improved technology is the real message and constant refrain in all UFO discourse. As Pasulka says, channeling what must be the aliens’ Sermon on the Mount, “Our instruments will save us.”[^5] The aliens have a religion, and it is the religion of the machine—one that turns manna from Heaven into the mammon of Pharaoh.

Something seems off about this. One of the problems with the religion of techne is that it puts everyone, except for scientists, in the passenger seat. The rest of us are buckled in, strapped to a rocket, and cannot determine our trajectory. We are tied to the ever-accelerating arrow of narrowly-defined material progress, with no real importance assigned to our own existential and moral struggles. Our salvation or destruction are entirely dependent on which technologies evolve. The religion of technology has little to do with the moral life, aside from—as the logical conclusion of this process—generating, say, a pill that would make people better behaved.

“The UFO phenomenon,” as Ross Douthat muses), “is part of a general post-Christian ‘weirdening’ of the world, linked at some level to a lot of other strange happenings (AI, hallucinogens, more) at the borderlands of consciousness.” Douthat is not free-associating, for the association of UFOs with artificial intelligence and hallucinogens is not accidental. These are all different manifestations of the religion of technology, and they all promise to provide some sort of guide—some Stranger or mysterious Other—who will lead us to greater practical knowledge and well-being. This Stranger leading us to paradise could be aliens, the “cosmic machine elves” seen under the influence of the drug DMT, or an artificial intelligence, be it Optimus Prime or Roko’s Basilisk. In all of these cases, the Stranger is a prophet of technology.

Psychedelics are essentially an attempt to achieve enlightenment through merely instrumental means. By ingesting a drug, Michael Pollan and many others have been pursuing the optimization of human well-being through an enhanced understanding and application of hallucinogens. It is not a coincidence that the messianic LSD advocate, Timothy Leary, focused later in life on three major goals: space migration, increased intelligence, and life extension (the “S.M.I2.L.E.” agenda as he called it). It was likewise with Frank Herbert: inspired by trying peyote, he originated the “spice” of the Dune series that lets mankind to traverse space, foresee the future, and extend longevity. These are all technological goals.

Obviously, modern technology can make our lives easier and improve our conveniences. But anyone recognizing his own smartphone addiction can see it doesn’t produce human flourishing on its own. There is something insidious in placing all our attention on its benefits and away from our own souls, from the inner life and its cultivation through spirituality and the arts, from charity and fellowship. In a hyper-technologized world, we can imagine the triumph of Nietzsche’s Last Man, the victory of the ultimate couch potato, rather than any sort of superhuman. But UFO phenomena show that our modern tools have not hollowed the hallowed world of spirits but only altered their disguises. The process of disenchantment cannot stop breeding myths of its own–myths that are both caused by disenchantment but are also a sign of resistance to it.

Spoiler alert: at the end of Pasulka’s book, Tyler ends up converting to Catholicism, after being especially moved by the examples of service he finds among priests and nuns during a trip to the Vatican. This illustrates a notable point. UFO mythology is useful if it becomes a bridge to an even broader, re-enchanted view of the cosmos, one that connects us with the wider realm of morally deepened, transcendent experiences. UFOs and alien encounters are fragments of the numinous, perhaps of little importance in themselves, but valuable insofar as they lead us towards consciousness of something greater. But the UFO mythology is far less useful, and perhaps actively harmful, if it functions only to place our faith in technological progress and scientific expertise, while letting our souls slide into a state of torpor. It remains to be seen which of these two tractor beams will ultimately pull us up.

Sam Buntz is a writer based in Chicago. He has made a music album, “Wine Moms and Whiskey Dads,” runs a podcast, “Buntzcast,” and has independently published two books: a novel, The God of Smoke and Mirrors (2020), and a collection of short stories, The Great American Cougar Hunt (2021). His recent fiction is available on his blog, “The Muted Trumpet.” He invites you to follow him on Twitter.

Featured image: "Um suposto disco voador sobre a Ilha da Trindade" photo (1958) by Almiro Baraúna via Wikimedia Commons.