UFOs in the archives [& reality?]

Ross Douthat, What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do? NYTimes, July 24, 2025.

Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat and this is “Interesting Times.”

There have been a bunch of flying saucer crazes in American history, but the one we’re living through started in 2017, when my newspaper, The New York Times, reported on these weird encounters experienced by U.S. military pilots. Since then, we’ve had congressional hearings, would-be U.F.O. whistle-blowers and we’ve had a brief panic over mysterious objects in the sky over the state of New Jersey.

I’m not persuaded that we’re actually being visited by E.T. However, this era has left me with a lot of weird unanswered questions. For instance, what do all of these government bureaucrats and whistle-blowers actually know — or think they know — about unidentified aerial phenomena? Does at least part of the U.S. government really, really want Americans to believe in U.F.O.s? And if so, why?

To help me search for answers, I asked Diana Walsh Pasulka to join me. She’s a religious studies professor who writes about U.F.O. experiences as a very American kind of religion, but she’s also been pulled into this weird world of apparent government believers — and she’s become something of a believer herself.

Pasulka started looking in the archives to study how Catholics thought about what happens to the soul after death.

Pasulka: So I’ve been studying religion for many years. [...] I didn’t believe in U.F.O.s. I had never seen “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I wasn’t a person who was interested in that topic. But I was interested in the ways in which people thought of transformation, spiritual transformation, but also transformation that happens on Earth through these narratives of going into another place, an “other world” journey.

Douthat: How did that pull you into studying people who claim to have had a U.F.O.-style encounter?

Pasulka: When I was doing my work for the book about the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, that brought me to a lot of archives. I’d go into the archives — and archives are places where things aren’t digitized — and I started to look into how Catholics viewed how souls ascended into Heaven or Purgatory.

What I found was a lot of documents from 1,000 years ago, 800 or 500 years ago, about recorded sightings of aerial phenomena that Catholics had from Europe.

Douthat: And these are things flying in the air?

Pasulka: Yeah, aerial phenomena. And they interpreted these in different ways.

Here’s a good example: In the 1800s, there’s this young nun and she’s living in a convent. Every night, this ball of light comes through her cell, and she’s pretty upset about this. So she tells the Mother Superior and she says: This is happening.

And the mother superior says: You’re having a bad dream. The nun is pretty certain this is happening — it happens nightly. At one point the Mother Superior says: OK, I’m going to be with you at night to see what’s going on. And they determine that this is a soul from Purgatory that needs to be prayed back into Purgatory. So the whole convent gets together and they go through a process of prayers to kick this orb or this flame of light out of her cell.

I saw these kinds of things, and I started to keep track of them. Sometimes they were interpreted as flying houses. Sometimes they were interpreted as little beings about three feet tall and shiny. I shared this with a couple of friends of mine and I said: What do you all think of this? One of them said: It looks like modern-day reports of U.F.O.s.

That shocked me. I didn’t accept it, to tell you the truth. I thought it was hogwash. I was like, no, it can’t be that.

There was a U.F.O. conference in town called MUFON — the Mutual U.F.O. Network — and I decided to check it out. When I was there, I heard people talking about their experiences encountering U.F.O.s, and it sounded very similar to the log I had of reports of Catholics in Europe talking about this.

So I started to do a lot more intensive work. I met academics who were studying this. Before I knew it, people who were a part of aerospace companies and the military began to want to correspond with me and see the data and the research that I had been doing. That’s what got me into this topic.

Douthat himself:

I read a book around the time that U.F.O.s came back into the news, which would’ve been when my own newspaper, The Times, reported on weird sightings of aerial phenomena by U.S. pilots. I had not watched “The X-Files” in the 1990s, had not been a U.F.O. person in any meaningful sense of the term, but I got sucked into reading a little bit of the literature.

One of the most persuasive books that I read was by a famous U.F.O. researcher shrouded in mystery, a guy named Jacques Vallée. He wrote books pretty early, I think, in the modern U.F.O. phenomena, where he connected this not just to past religious experiences but also to a whole realm of folklore around, let’s say, fairy abductions.

And I thought Vallée’s argument was quite persuasive, that there is this persistent phenomenon in human history that suddenly gets reinterpreted as the space age dawns, in terms of creatures from other planets, but in fact is this kind of folklore substrate that just takes different forms depending on the cultural context.

That seems to be a version of the argument you’re making in linking modern U.F.O. sightings to the experience of Catholic nuns or religious mystics in the past. So you think that whatever we call the U.F.O. phenomena doesn’t start in 1947 with Roswell or anything like that, but rather, there’s some consistent historical phenomenon that’s part of human religious sociology.

What's real?

Pasulka: As for me, I try to stay out of it. I’m not on any side. I’m watching this happen just like you are and just like other people are. I might have more insight into what’s going on because I know several of these people on both sides, both on the part where people are basically saying it’s all not real — I know those people — and I know the people who are saying that it’s real. It’s definitely something that’s not transparent.

Douthat: It’s definitely not transparent. And I think that what you just described is a good description of my own perception that there are people who work within the government, some of whom themselves believe that there is a real phenomenon, or — related to or overlapping with that — want Americans to think there’s a real phenomenon, and then there is an official government narrative that there’s some weird stuff out there, but the government doesn’t know any more than you or I do. [...]

Pasulka: OK. So part of it was that — and by the way, I don’t advocate believing this for anyone. They have to do their own research. So I’m not advocating belief in U.F.O.s or U.A.P.

But I became convinced that there was definitely something to this when I met so many people who interfaced with the phenomena through their jobs, which happened to take them high into the stratosphere, launching rockets into space so that they had a view of what was happening in space. They’ve witnessed aerial phenomena that are not ours, and they are not Russia’s or China’s.

And when you meet 10 of these people and they all have similar reports, it’s interesting. It changes one’s view. These people are not public — some of them are, but most of them are not. They don’t want to be associated with this work that they do. They don’t want people to know about it. And they’re everyday Americans.

Why Daniel Kahneman chose to die on his own terms

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death, NYTimes, April 14, 2025.

Daniel Kahneman was a world renowned psychologist and a Nobel Laureate in economics. He was old, 90 years, and in reasonable health. I did not have a debilitating or terminal illness. He was still capable of doing the intellectual work to which he had devoted his life. He died by assisted suicide on March 27 of this year. Lazari-Radek and Singer interviewed him on March 23.

About half-way through the article:

He surprised us by denying that his work had any objective significance. “Other people happen to respect it and say that this is for the benefit of humanity,” he said. “I just like to get up in the morning because I like the work.”

We pushed back, arguing that there are objectively good things to do with one’s life. But he resisted. “I feel I’ve lived my life well,” he said, “but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done. I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant.”

We do not agree that the size and complexity of the universe render irrelevant an individual’s work for the benefit of humanity. But if, after careful reflection, you decide that your life is complete and remain firmly of that view for some time, you are the best judge of what is good for you. This is especially clear in the case of people who are at an age at which they cannot hope for improvement in their quality of life.

The final paragraph:

Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.

You might want to compare with a passage from Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger that I have quoted in this post: A spearmaster's way of death. Spearmasters are spiritual leaders among the Dinka of South Sudan. You might also read my account of my father's death. Here's the final paragraphs:

When, later that day, my sister, my mother, and I returned to the hospital, Dad was restless and tossed and turned quite a bit. Both my sister and I asked him whether or not he was uncomfortable and he indicated that he was not. One time when I asked him how he felt he just shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if to say, "How should I know how I feel, I've never done this before." One thing he did, and it was quite striking, was to clasp his hands together and move them together over his right shoulder and then down to his waist. He seemed to be practicing his golf swing.

By this time the the morphine drip had began to relax him. Figuring we might have to be here all night, my sister, mother, and I went to the waiting room to rest. When we returned to his room, Gino, a nurse, was shaving him. Gino told us that he'd asked Dad if he wanted a shave and Dad indicated that he did. Dad had enough presence of mind to move his chin and cheeks to cooperate with the shave. Then he simply went to rest. About 10 minutes or so after that he'd died.

He went out swinging and smooth shaven.

World-Spanning Thoughts

That’s a blog-tag I added recently. I’ve currently got two posts with that tag. This will be the third. I’ve got a vague impression that I’ve got other posts on that topic, but under a different tag for pretty much the same idea, but I can’t think of what that tag might be.

Anyhow, I’m writing this post to jog my memory and to cement some specific label – e.g. world-spanning thoughts – for the idea. I’ve had the idea kicking around for a while, but sticking a label to it has been tricky.

What’s the idea? It goes like this. We’re creatures that have to, are driven to, make sense of the world around us. Everything we see or hear or smell or taste or touch, everything has to have some account, some place in an overall scheme of things. “World-spanning thoughts” is a label, one label, I’m sticking on this impulse, this imperative, this desire.

I associate this with the theory of William Powers. It’s not that I got the idea from him. Rather, an organism with a mind that works according to his account, such an organism needs to make sense of everything. Hence world-spanning thoughts.

Actually, not all such organisms. To the extent that Powers is current, all animal perception, action, and cognition is organized in this way. BUT, we humans have language. And that changes everything. Now we’ve got an open-ended need to make sense of it all. That’s an all-together different kind of beast.

Why does language affect/effect us this way? Good question. I’ll take it under advisement.

It worked!

I think I’ve found the other label I’ve had for this idea: meaningful_life.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) – World-spanning thoughts [Media Notes 99]

I’ve just watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters – in three sessions over two days (is there any movie capable of fully holding my attention for two hours given everything else I’m thinking about?). I’m talking about the 2019 sequel, if you can call it that, not the 1956 American re-edit of the 1954 Japanese Gojira. For my money it’s the best Godzilla film I’ve seen (and I’ve only seen a half-dozen or so) since the Japanese original. While it’s bulked up considerably, not only is Godzilla larger, but there are three or four monsters featured prominently, it manages to capture some of the spirituality of the Japanese original. I’m thinking particularly of the scene where the Serizawa travels to Godzilla’s underwater lair so he can energize it by exploding a small nuclear bomb, killing himself in the process. In the original, of course, Serizawa set out to kill Godzilla, and succeeded. But the 2019 film captures some of the ritual quality of that scene.

But that’s not what this note is about. While watching the film I was struck that THIS is SOMETHING I’ve been thinking about from time to time. I’ve probably made a post or two about that something, but I don’t know how to find those posts because I’ve never given it at name. I’m going to call it world-spanning thoughts. What do I mean? To the extent that we can perceive and conceive the world, not only do we seek to understand it, but to exert (some kind of) control over it, the WHOLE extent. In particular, I’m thinking about this in the context of the control theory of William Powers, though I’m going to have to leave that out of this little note.

If you are an animal, your ability to conceive of the world is quite limited, limited to what you have immediate access to, more or less. When a thunder storm blows, you deal with it. When it’s over, it’s gone from your mind. Not so with humans. We can remember, and brood, and worry. And not only about thunder storms, but about volcanoes, about lions and bears and snakes. What about the sun, the moon, the stars? What are they, how do they affect us, and how can we influence them? And so we invent magic, myth, and religion, and populate the world with strange and powerful creatures that we can appease through ritual.

All this is pretty much standard. You’ve read it many times before, and so have I. And yet, there’s more to be said about it. Just what, I’m not sure, and I am sure Powers would help, but not now.

What I’m after is how all this becomes REAL. If it’s not real, in some deep sense, it doesn’t work. Films like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, are one of the imaginative vehicles through which world-spanning thoughts engage with reality. On the one had we’ve got these huge ancient monsters, called Titans in the film: Rodan, King Ghidora, Mothra, and Godzilla (there are a bunch more, but they’re not depicted). We’ve got high-tech science, computers and submarines, and the whole damn thing hangs on a twelve-year-old girl. Above all else, she’s what brings human scale to the whole venture.

Fiction is full of such world-spanning thoughts, the function of which is to bring human scale the very large (but also the very small). James Bond films do it in a different way, conspiracies plus Bond himself. Super-hero films do it as well. But what of realistic films, what is their scope? But what is realism? Where do we situate 2001: A Space Odyssey?

More later. 

Hmm...World spanning thoughts, or desires, goals, objectives?

BTW, lots of Gojira/Godzilla posts. 

ALSO, check out this post from 2015, Our Rage for Order and Coherence.

Our Rage for Order and Coherence

A quickie, just to get it out there so I can see it (from January 2015).

I have long believed that a need for order, coherence, patterns, is intrinsic to being human. I suppose I can date this belief to the mid-1970s when I read William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Under the topic of reorganization (more conventionally, learning) Powers talked of intrinsic reference levels for the (proper) construction of control systems (which I’ve recently recounted in Cultural Beings, the Ontology of Culture, and a Return to Books and Blues). Hays and I included Powers’ notion in our paper, Principles and Structures of Natural Intelligence (1988), and I associated it with Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow in Culture as an Evolutionary Arena (1996).

That’s what’s behind ‘beauty’ or whatever it is that works of art are said to have, and for elegance in scientific theory and mathematical proof. And it is, I believe, behind cultural evolution. We must make order of the world; that is the ‘other side’ of anxiety.

But where’d it come from? In our paper on natural intelligence Hays and I associated the need for coherence with the process of reorganization (following Powers) and we linked that to the emergence of vertebrates. That makes it very old indeed. What seems to have happened with humankind is that this rage for order has been set free from merely biological imperatives, has been set from from the tyranny of the present, so that it now ranges over the whole of space and time.

How’d that happen? And when? There is the emergence of human language. That sets cognition free of the present by allowing us to index the past, and thus recall it, and allows us to index the cognitive system itself, thus creating a need to order that index (ontology).

But there is also death (see Cultural Beings Evolving in the Mesh). It is one thing to mourn one’s fellows, as animals do. It is another think to know that you will, at some point, die. How is it that we came to know that? What are the cognitive presuppositions of such knowledge?

Explicit grave sites along with grave goods appear in the human record about 100,000 years ago. I take that as evidence that people have come to know that they will die. It may be the dead that are buried, but it is done for the benefit of the living. It is a way of keeping the living whole.

Somewhere in the nexus of language and death, that is where we’ll find our rage for order. That is what drives us.

Addendum: The order, to be meaningful, must be collective. Language can exist only in a group. Burial rites are meaningful only to a group. This sets up a peculiar dialectic in which “cultural beings” are utterly dependent on the people who participate in them even as the participants are dependent on those same cultural beings. It is through those cultural beings that the individuals experience the order and coherence that is so important to them.

 

And the sharing of experience is itself a source of pleasure. When experience alone grief, for example, is merely grief. Sharing it transforms it, not into pleasure in any direct sense of the world, but into something that is fulfilling. It’s the sharing that works the transformation. That’s why sad music can make us feel good; that’s why tragedy can be so powerful, so cathartic.

* * * * *

Photographs are of the Jersey City and Harsimus Cemetary and were taken in March 2009.