The Men Who Fell To Earth
In the seventies movie The Man Who Fell to Earth starring David Bowie plays Jerome Newton an alien that presents himself as an Englishman in New Mexico. There is a drought on his planet and he hopes to make enough money to build a spaceship to carry water back to his own planet. The plot is obscured by a santa claus motif where an alien comes to earth and showers humanity with new technologies and makes a fortune on patents.
What I learned working in renewable technology is that technology markets are unstable – what the public accepts is sometimes absurd. While a breakthrough in battery technology prevents us from creating a stand alone power source, a cultural barrier seems to also be at play: the adoption of solar panels when they were invented was esoteric. I am not one who thinks a deep state is withholding zero-point energy because of my experience working in the renewable energy sector. The conspiracy is not as sexy but astonishing all the same. We might have hit a ceiling in battery technology and maybe this is why the government is finally interested in foo fighters.
When I was in the Navy Stephen Hawkings Wrote an essay, saying that we should not be sending radio signals into space because all life had evolved a predatory nature and would colonize us in a best case scenario. I knew he was wrong, but it wasn’t until after the Navy, where I read Darwin’s origin of species. That reading didn’t help me understand why Hawking was writing outside of his area of expertise. I read a brief history of time when I was in high school as an aspirational exercise. We are not looking for a life — that would be boring. We are looking for consciousness. As far as I know, we have not even found life. If the conspiracy is that far reaching that even that little fact has not breathed air then 1. There is an omnipotent power obscuring our vision like horse blinders 2. We are looking in the wrong way for the wrong thing. Our canon is teaming with anecdotes of individuals, claiming to have encountered otherworldly consciousness. The quality of such encounters can only be assessed by the economy around them and thus we are once again stuck with a prosperity gospel.
The movie Close encounters of the Third Kind nails a fundamental idea of consciousness where the mode of communication in first contact is games. As a poet I understand how fundamental and ancient call and answer is to communication. That is the game that the Foo Fighters seem to be playing with pilots for fifty years or more. Only the smartest animals on this planet play games. I keep hearing language from the modern pilots who experience Foo Fighters that frames these games as threats to national security. I think it’s very dangerous to draw attention to an issue by framing it as a threat. Poets often claim to be in contact with otherworldly consciousnesses: Samuel Coleridge saw Kubla Khan and William Blake saw angels in the trees from boyhood. Socrates bit his thumb at poets claiming they were unoriginal radios in The Apology. The way that Plato wrote about the spirit of logos one would think that this is a foreign intelligence with which Greeks are communing.
I am glad I got to wonder about the world before I read Charles Darwin because it’s possible that evolution doesn't explain consciousness. Heidegger’s Being & Time might be a book more in line with defining our consciousness but very few understand it. The reason we are in an evolutionary paradigm is because Darwin is much easier to read and English. Something I learned about while I was working with renewable energy was technology acceptance models or TAMs. Solar panels have been around since the 50s so you can only imagine the broad field of study as to why certain technologies are adopted by markets in certain technologies aren’t. This is what the David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell to Earth doesn’t anticipate: that even if aliens were spoon feeding us technology, free market capitalism would make sure that good ideas are outpaced by novelty or war focused. Markets determine what technologies and they are fickle. We were able to do our banking online way before we did but consumer confidence wasn’t there yet.
This whole idea that predatory nature is the only way that consciousness can evolve has roots in a kind of neocolonial ableism and social darwinism. The fact that we are so visually dependent is probably to our detriment and a disability. We have over five senses and we are over reliant on one especially when it comes to our standards of evidence. Our whole scientific apparatus is oriented around this one sense. As I write this I posted a video on the gram about an existential crisis rectangle that we carry in our pockets. Anecdotes are how we communicate but no matter how many narratives you have that does not amount to proof. And it seems we have painted ourselves into a corner with deep fake technology making video evidence less trustworthy.
In Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers by Jaque Valle finds similarities between folklore and modern UFO encounters. Trickster archetypal is somehow what we’ve come to expect (and rightly so) but like gambling addicts we welcome new accounts. Dr, Jon Macks work with the abduction phenomenon shares the same narratological nature. Is the abduction narrative an experience with a consciousness or with a procedure of some sort. Terrance McKenna posited that we might be communicating with time travelers trying to warn us. I don’t really believe in free-will at this point so there are certain philosophical questions that are a given to me. I try not to have too much use for belief but language also has aspirational quality.
If we live in a fixed system like a storybook it would be very difficult for a consciousness that is outside of that fixed system to communicate with us. The Jungian interpretation of mass hallucination caused by proto-industrial strain, begs the question: what kind of universe do we live in if we can share hallucinations. One of the answers to the Fermi Paradox is called the zoo or laboratory hypothesis. The stated reason here for first contact refraining from a hegemonic utopian species is a waiting game for some communal accomplishment. My personal experience has more to do with randomness and math. Like a thought was put in my head about the unlikeliness of consciousness (the most precious of all gems) – is it something that we possess or does it possess us?
I have found that my encounter has spanned an undefinable period and made me question the meaning of time. In narratology, the study of narratives, stories are reducible to man versus self. Our story has always had a precarious adjacency with prophecy. The Jungian interpretation of UFOs being mass hallucinations can be framed as a kind of prophecy in process for those who chose to listen.
In episode 12 of Jeremy Korbel’s Weaponized podcast with Dr. Colm Kelleher mentions that there is qualitative data of autoimmune flare ups with hitchhiker phenomenon. Skinwalker Ranch suddenly peaks my interest because my encounter with multiples sclerosis has defined me. Autoimmune includes everything from Diabetes, Crohn’s to IBS to MS: an overactive immune system that attacks itself rather than immune deficiency where the immune system degrades.
As my immune system started to behave differently I also started to have experiences that made me question reality. As I’ve mentioned before in this sub stack after I got the swine flu in New York I felt that I was glamoured by some sort of augmented reality. The key factor in a hallucination is that it has to be familiar. It’s not possible to hallucinate something you haven’t seen before.