On Monomania: The High Strange Moment in the 21st Century
Yeah, this has been going on for a while now. Strap in.
High Strangeness refers to a particular mid-century variety of ontological uncertainty that I’ve always found somewhat fascinating. It’s differentiated from the “New Age” movement, though there are points where it crosses over. Largely, it’s the fusion of psychedelia, science fiction, and some other strands. I’ve been interested in it for a long time — as my repeated invocation of Phillip K. Dick, possibly the most mainstream High Strange figure, might suggest — but I’ve got too much of a rationalist/materialist bent to get much out of it. Psychic powers, Self-Transformational Elf Machines, synchronicities and so on all strike me as aesthetically fascinating — I can’t bring myself to believe a word of it, though.
I still find myself fascinated by the work of John Keel, and the lives of people like Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley — not because I believe their conspiratorial ranting, but because, behind the explanations they provide for what happened in the course of their lives, there are intimations of something unusual actually happening.
Those reading this don’t need to worry. I’m not becoming a crackpot, I’m attempting to square a circle without becoming a crackpot.
Primarily, I’m going to be referring back to what I’ve written about Mutant Epistemology and Forbidden Knowledge, among others. Those two I’m setting out as table stakes for myself, though: they’re wrapped up in this and I can’t get away from them. I also find this to be a useful thing to talk about in relation to Mark Fisher’s concept of “Acid Communism”, though there are some interstitial steps I intend to make later on that issue.
There’s something very fascinating about this framing. The character, Mulder, clearly does believe. He no longer needs to want it; he has it. Wanting to believe is something different.
My entry point here is going to be the UFO phenomenon. When I was a kid, I loved science fiction (maybe this is a nostalgia piece) and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.
Recently, however, I’ve begun to read and listen to more media around the ongoing UAP/UFO phenomenon. It’s a periodic topic on The Daily Zeitgeist, which has periodically checked in on the phenomenon since the show launched back in 2017. Shortly after that, I relistened to the Weird Studies episode on UFOs, as well as related episodes (John Keel comes up a lot, and I ended up reading The Mothman Prophecies, which I remembered as a second-rate Richard Gere movie.) Then, I took the plunge and listened to the entirety of the ongoing UFO Rabbit Hole podcast, save for some of the interviews. In addition, though only peripheral, I’ve been thinking of rewatching Hellier (previously mentioned here).
That last one is probably next on my to-watch list (Edgar and I are watching through Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so it might or might not be just me. Network TV seasons used to be much longer than I remember.) However, I imagine that it’s going to be as frustrating on the second watch through as it was on the first. Specifically, while the team behind that documentary series has an encyclopedic knowledge of ghosts, a particular field of mythology, and high strangeness in general, none of them did any sociological or historical research — or even bothered to check the IP address of the person who sent the email that sent them down their particular rabbit hole.
More on that later.
This all kicked off with the release of three different videos from the US Navy where they confirmed the existence of what they’re calling Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) and which most people refer to as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Granted, two of the leads on the most recent rounds of disclosure are Luis Elizondo, a former counterintelligence expert, and Tom DeLonge, who used to be in Blink-182 and now runs an outfit called To the Stars. I don’t necessarily doubt that these videos are of real phenomena (the second one, especially, seems quite interesting to me, though I don’t completely know what I’m looking at in them.)
Elizondo, who resigned from the intelligence establishment due to excessive secrecy and internal opposition, claims that these objects are characterized by five traits: apparent anti-gravity propulsion, sudden and instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity without signatures (i.e., vapor trail, sonic boom), low observability (i.e., they are difficult to see and detect on radar), and trans-medium travel (i.e., they are able to move as easily in water, vacuum, or air).
Generally speaking, this is used as evidence for the idea that they are extraterrestrial artifacts — ships piloted by aliens. This is questioned by some of the more academically trustworthy “UFOlogists” (Jacques Vallée, the author linked just now, for example, is also a doctor of astronomy and an author who has won the Jules Verne prize.) Other theories include (1) secret terrestrial technology developed by a government, corporation, or individual; (2) time travelers from the distant future (after all, when you get down to it, antigravity and Faster than Light Travel are closely tied to time travel — why allow just one and throw out the other two?) come back to investigate or alter the past; (3) so-called “ultraterrestrials” — hidden pre-human civilizations, interdimensional travelers, or elves and fairies.
A lot of enthusiasts of (3) tend to point towards evidence that overlaps with occultism, like this drawing done by Aleister Crowley of a spiritual being that appeared to him one evening, named “Lam”, which supposedly looks like a grey alien. Of course, it could also be a really racist drawing of a Tibetan Lam(a). I don’t expect a lot of sensitivity from a guy who signs his name with the first letter turned into a penis.
Of course, (0) is that it’s all a hoax, and having the lead on disclosure have a history in counterintelligence certainly suggests that — but it would also be an obvious objection, and I don’t really feel like playing the “I know you know that I know” game right now. There’s been enough discussion of the UFO/UAP issue that I’m willing to entertain the possibility that something is going on, and I don’t think that’s a particularly unreasonable position.
Much of this that I’m referring to right now came to me by way of the aforementioned UFO Rabbit Hole podcast, presented by Kelly Chase. It was a fascinating listen, but there were some problems with it that got in the way of my ability to come along with what she said. So, while I recommend that podcast to those who are interested in this topic, I have reservations and I will enumerate two of them — and I am not simply doing this to review her podcast, but to work towards a discussion of the monomaniacal nature of UFOlogy and comparing this to other ideological constructs.
From Wikimedia commons. Uploaded by NekoJaNekoJa, Vector illustration by Johannes Kalliauer. Used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. I highly recommend reading the wikipedia page on this topic, as it’s more accurate and accessible than what I can write on it.
Image of the Great Sphinx at Giza, uploaded onto wikimedia commons by MusikAnimal. Used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. You can see the striations in the bedrock that makes up its body here.
She brings up the Sphinx and discusses the theory that it was carved much earlier than is currently thought, a theory largely based on the work of geologist Robert Scoch, who claims that the artifact shows signs of rain erosion. This is largely a theory dismissed by the experts because there are other explanations — notably that the Great Sphinx of Giza is a monolithic structure carved from a single block of limestone and it could easily have been eroded before the carving took place, likewise, it sits very close to the aquifer of the Nile, and capillary action in the stone could bring water to the surface.
Another point brought up is the proportions. One of the things that the crowd claiming the Sphinx is 7 - 12k years old tends to point to is the idea that the head is disproportionate to the body, leaving them to claim that it was recarved at some point. This ignores the fact that the Sphinx is a monolith, all carved from the bedrock of the plateau. Its head was, at one point, a yardang — a protuberance of bedrock surrounded by sand. The structure wasn’t made to order out of blocks of stone, it was carved in situ. The artisans responsible had no say in how big the head was going to be and only mild say in how big the body was going to be in relation to that head: certainly, they could have carved it down to match the head in size, but that doesn’t mean that it would have been feasible to do so.
I cannot explain further on either point, because I am not an expert.
Göbekli Tepe — Turkish for “Potbelly Hill” — is a legitimately fascinating site that pushes back the timeline on megalithic construction, but that does not mean that there are ancient aliens or prior technologically advanced human civilizations to investigate. There are other explanations.
Likewise, she brings up the fascinating case of Göbekli Tepe — an apparent pre-Neolithic construction in south-eastern Turkey from roughly 10,000 years Before Present. As it is from a time before the agricultural and urban revolutions are thought to have happened, that means that (A) our timeline for the development of these technologies is wrong, or (B) they are not preconditions for megalithic construction. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything do what Chase claims isn’t happening and interrogate this phenomenon. They fall firmly in the “B” camp, and they aren’t alone as shown by their quotation of other scholars in a passage:
what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’
This is followed by an end-note:
Acemoğlu and Robinson 2009: 679; and see also Dietrich et al. 2019; Flannery and Marcus 2012: 128–31
I did my own check, and found that the small liberal arts college that I work at has access to databases that include nearly 500 articles on the subject of Göbekli Tepe, which flies in the face of the assertion that archaeologists and anthropologists just ignore the site. Still, most of the knowledge I have off the top of my head comes from reading Graeber and Wengrow — I know very little about these subjects, but I greatly enjoy Graeber’s work, as longtime readers will know. His work lies outside my discipline, and I read it all voraciously, and reference it constantly.
I am not, however, an expert on par with him, or his writing partner.
This is the point.
This is not a gray alien; it’s supposed to be a goblin. However, what’s the difference, really?
In both the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast and Hellier, you have well-meaning people ignoring gaps in their knowledge because filling in those gaps might close off a route to someplace beyond the prosaic reality we often find ourselves in. This is why the crew in Hellier never consult with historians, economists, or sociologists — to the point where they actually ask, of a town in Appalachian Kentucky, something along the lines of “how many abandoned coal mines could there be around here?” Likewise, despite interviewing a number of people on other subjects, Chase never thinks to ask an archaeologist or anthropologist about what life was thought to have actually been like in the paleolithic — instead, relying on common tropes and assuming that they are correct.
I will be honest: I do not believe science explains everything. I do not believe that science in its current form can explain everything, and we are most likely due for a number of conceptual revolutions. There are good odd that grappling with phenomena like UAP will contribute to that. However, this isn’t it.
The problem here is monomania: a preferred solution to a question is seen — perhaps, let’s be frank, several solutions of greater or lesser preference sit in a constellation — and it is thought that the best course of action is to run straight for it. This is a mistake. What is needed is a measured analysis. Part of what made last year’s Nope so effective isn’t that it put a twist on UFO narratives or revived an older theory of what UFOs are: it was effective because it refused to be locked into the most common explanation (i.e., “if UFOs, then aliens”.)
Up above, I said that I take a rationalist or materialist stance on most things. Given the way “rationalist” is often used, I think I should explain that. I do not mean that I am at all times a perfect rational actor that cannot be deceived or misled, or that I am a perfectly logical machine without emotions. I mean, instead, that I tend towards parsimonious explanations of things — the world is complicated, of course, but simpler explanations that fit the information tend to be better bets than more exotic ones. When I say materialist, I mean that I tend to opt more for immanent, rather than transcendent, explanations for things. Perhaps there are better terms for these things, but this is the terminology I default to.
That being said, I agree with Chase: I’ll take Hollow Earth believers over Flat Earthers any day.
If the information we have been given is accurate, though, then the UFO phenomenon is at least worth considering. This does not mean that alien contact is necessarily on the table. This does not mean that there are Nazi holdouts in the hollow earth. This does not mean that reptilians built the pyramids. It means that there are things in the sky that we cannot identify.
This means that a number of our assumptions about the world should be called into question. It does not mean that we should expect gray aliens to appear on the White House lawn anytime soon or for major monuments in large cities to be vaporized with blue light. To understand this phenomenon, we must not just question what we think we know about the world, but we cannot pin what we consider about the future to what is written in UFOlogical publications.
To assert that the world as it is commonly understood remains unchanged is monomania; to assert the validity of any or all UFOlogical theories is also monomania. To explain this, allow me to bring in the concept of the “reality tunnel” — coined by psychedelics pioneer Timothy Leery and refined by poet-theorist of the High Strange Robert Anton Wilson, a “Reality Tunnel” is a more cultural approximation of the concept of “umwelt” (referenced in Philosophy Professor James Madden’s own work on the subject, and explained in a meta-textual way by this April Fool’s XKCD comic.). The idea is that, as time goes on, our experiences form a “tunnel” through which we move, and we filter out the things that fall outside of this tunnel, making it as invisible to us as something buried behind stone.
In an interview (transcript found via wayback machine on a website called American Buddha, video found on Youtube), Robert Anton Wilson opined that
Long before quantum mechanics, the German philosopher Husserl said that all perception is gamble. Every type of bigotry, every type of racism, sexism, prejudice, every dogmatic ideology that allows people to kill other people with a clear conscience, every stupid cult, every superstition-ridden religion, every kind of ignorance in the world, are all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see, and then we believe our interpretation of it, but we don't even know we're making an interpretation most of the time.
Maybe I do need to sit down and read the Illuminatus! trilogy.
I think that this is a useful thing to keep in mind, because it teaches you something important: you cannot think of yourself — at any time — as a disinterested observer (or a rational critical thinker) simply calling balls and strikes. Even in a situation where you are not invested in one outcome or the other, you are going to be importing your own perceptions. Even — to continue the prior analogy of counting balls and strikes — the choice to watch baseball instead of reading a book: this is a value judgment, and your choices are shaped by what you have decided to do and pay attention to.
One of my big problems with Marxism is that those who adhere to it at least occasionally seem to think that it is not an ideology. The civic religion of America — with its Republican values and capitalist grindset and disavowal of systemic prejudice — is also an ideology. Weirdly, also, UFOlogy is an ideology.
That’s the problem with ideology: as soon as you think you’ve woken up inside Plato’s cave, you find yourself in your own personal reality tunnel, and you can’t navigate your way out.
What you can do, though, is backtrack, and examine the route you took to get there. You can examine other possible courses, and you can try to navigate to a place that works for you. With the big questions of this sort, though, it seems to me that a certain amount of Fortean skepticism is necessary: we need to examine possibilities without necessarily committing.
What you have in UFOlogical circles is a kind of mutant epistemology — and, please note, I’m using “mutant” in a value-neutral sense here; we need to evolve our epistemologies and mutation is how that proceeds, but (biologically speaking) many mutations are dead ends — that leads them to edit out evidence inconvenient to their own preferred explanations, the same dire sin that they tend to accuse the establishment types of committing; meanwhile, they tend to accept everything that fits the desired explanation regardless of the quality of the source.
This epistemology leads them to reject the official narrative and embrace an alternate version with weaker supports. My guess is that this is a sort of attempt to re-enchant the world: it’s a way of instilling the world with a sense of the strange and numinous that was present in ancient times but has largely been banished by the protestant reformation and the industrial revolution. Needless to say, this is a fine goal, and I don’t reject all of their points — something is clearly happening — but the teleological, directed nature of the speculation and investigation makes this way of interacting with the world sterile and, fundamentally, less strange than it should be.
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