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The “Believers” on the other hand are sober and respectful as they strive to describe and explain something inexplicable, weird, and indescribable. John Mack and Thomas Kuhn, for example, argue for a paradigm shift in our worldview if we are ever going to “accept alien truth.”12 Copernicus, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Leary and now John Mack present another blow to our Egoism. It should not be lost on us that the last two thinkers on this list are both renegade, visionary Harvard psychologists. Mack admits he cannot make a “claim about a phenomenon operating in the physical world—that is not my area,” “I don’t know what it is. Something’s going on. It’s interesting, it’s scary. . . there’s an authentic mystery here. . .” Mack thinks it’s time “we grew up as a species,” and rather than debate is it real or not, ask “what do you mean by real? What does this really mean for us, for our cosmology, for psychiatrists clinically in terms of our categories, for us in terms of our relationships to the ecology and to the environmental crisis. What does this mean in terms of domains of reality? 13 Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science claims a “UFO is not an extraterrestrial spaceship. It is an etic event in space-time, which some humans file in their reality-tunnels as a “space ship” and other humans file as “mass hallucination.” 14 Jack Sarfatti in California “says there’s some kind of black time hole they [UFOs] come through from beyond space-time. They’ve mastered travel in and out of our space-time universe.” Because of great contradictions and unexplainables, “some ufologists, especially Jacques Vallee and Karl Brunstein, are writing of the penetration into our reality by parallel worlds, even other universes. Vallee, for example, now states: `I believe that the UFO phenomenon represents evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime; the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us . . . ‘”15
In the accompanying text above her fir tree horizon drawing, Amy Wilson cries out against “ethnocentric” skeptics who say “over and over again: `WHAT I KNOW, I KNOW. WHAT YOU KNOW YOU ONLY BELIEVE.” What I so admire in Ken Weaver’s “Abduction Series: Eternal Return Variation 3” (1996) is the referential mise en abyme that takes place, which as I’ve suggested in my opening discussion of the real saucer landing corroborating the dreamt landing of Invaders From Mars, neatly captures the “virtual” ontological status afforded UFOs by challenging epistemological categories. Weaver’s painting at first seems to be a photo-realist depiction of a video still of a monumental saucer hovering over a pick-up truck at night due to its saturated, monochromatic blue screen color scheme. On closer inspection in person–this effect cannot be communicated by photographic slide or print reproduction—what one sees turns out to be a near three-dimensional canvas of luscious oils. The documentary evidential power of photography/film/video is at once elicited and withdrawn.
I
find myself not wanting to discount the possible practical reality of UFO
sightings and alien visitations. My position is not quite like Fox Mulder in
that “I Want To Believe,” it is more like I mistrust those who protest too
much by adamantly refusing to believe.
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