Introduction
I was encouraged to read James Madden’s Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World by Jeff Kripal whose recent books have been immensely stimulating to me [How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities].
Madden is a philosopher and his take on the UFO theme was immensely helpful in a completely unexpected way. He referred frequently to Kripal’s work, and to D. W. Pasulka [American Cosmic] and Jacques Vallee [Passport to Magonia and others]. I had to revisit Pasulka and Vallee to keep a perspective on what Maddon was arguing about.
The attention that serious academics are paying to the UFO theme is important. I have lost count of the UFO books I have read over the decades. These haven’t necessarily been written by authors with an academic background. That’s not an issue most of the time. But what academics like Madden, Kripal, and Pasulka bring is a level of intellectual rigour often absent. It isn’t that they have a superior perspective, just one that adds a valuable point of view.
I am aware that most folk with an interest in UFOs focus on the nuts-and-bolts aspect and the idea that ET is from elsewhere in our physical universe. But Luis Elizondo’s recent [2024] book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs struck me as reviving the case for interdimensional travel that I first encountered in Vallee’s Passport to Magonia. Intrusions into our reality by interdimensional entities [and travel into interdimensional realms by humans] have been a consistent theme throughout human history.
Madden’s book has obliged me to rethink how I understand my own UFO and non-ordinary experiences. I had been heading down this path for some time in a somewhat disorganised manner, but Madden’s argument about the idea of a hyperobject anchored me and triggered a flood of insights.
I want below to reflect on those insights and my reaction to them. I should observe, however, that I am not trying to persuade the reader to my conclusions. They are based on my experiences and will not apply necessarily to the reader. The point of interest is that the UFO theme is far wider and more complex than the nuts-and-bolts perspective. As Jeff Kripal argues, we need to escape the temptation to think in either or terms and dare think both and– even if doing so immediately triggers us to recoil against the apparent impossibility of that being doable and valid.
Just for the record I am not saying no UFOs are of the nuts-and-bolts variety, just not all.
Are we dealing with a spectrum of experiences?
In a recent email I wrote [as a consequence of reading Madden], “As I reflected on my own experiences the two seemed at times intertwined. [this was my UFO experiences and my ‘regular’ non-ordinary experiences] I ended up with 3 categories – UFO related, UFO adjacent and experiences that had no discernible relationship with UFOs. It seems that it is a spectrum. The UFO content is either dialled right up, or so way down as to be indiscernible.”
Vallee has argued that the themes of UFO encounters are not confined just to UFOs and are sometimes replicated in folklore and religious traditions. So in terms of being disruptive of our normal, UFOs belong to a varied set of disruptions that share similar attributes with non-UFO experiences. How, or why, this might be the case is a question Madden offered a solution to.
But why is it a question worth asking? If your interest in UFOs is mainstream, there is no evident reason to think it is. My initial interest in UFOs was casually mainstream, partly because I had had a compelling sighting when I was 14. As a once intensely devoted sci fi addict I was completely comfortable with the idea of ET visiting us in nuts-and-bolts craft.
I also grew up with what are called paranormal experiences. I call them ‘non-ordinary’. They and UFOs collided in the early 1970s when I accidentally found myself involved in a group committed to communicating with ET. That intersection lasted less than a year. The UFO theme faded back to the mainstream and stayed that way until 1995 when there was another collision which became a fusion. But I stubbornly maintained an intellectual distinction between my non-ordinary experiences and UFOs because I had found no compelling means to fuse them. Madden’s articulation of a hyperobject offered an instrument to enable the fusing to happen.
The reader is better off seeking a discussion on hyperobjects than looking for a definition. I found the following definition via google. It wasn’t very helpful:
Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time. And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. I prefer to think of hyperobjects as ‘big ideas’ whose nature isn’t immediately apparent and whose contents are not evidently associated with it.
A point of argument and disagreement
Madden referred frequently to Prometheus in the context of him being the ‘god of technology’. He referred to Prometheus also as a hyperobject. He was referring to the Promethean gift of fire manifesting as technology and maybe epitomised in the UFO as part of a philosophical argument that I got badly distracted from following closely. It wasn’t that I was disagreeing, but I was seeing a far bigger picture.
Madden’s take on Prometheus struck me as being more literary than philosophical in that the business of him being the god of technology is similar to the invention of Lucifer. We first encounter Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12 in a bit of a rant about the plane Venus. He becomes the Christian devil in the same way the serpent of Eden is creatively fictionalised to serve rhetorical purposes. Prometheus was transformed into the god of technology via a fictional fiat.
That’s fine. Fictions are powerful instruments which can deliver useful truths. In this case neither Prometheus nor Lucifer are the original meanings of the stories that bore them. And, strangely they are also related. I’ll come to that.
Linking Prometheus to UFOs makes sense since presently we can see UFOs as the apex of technological development – from our perspective. But we are talking about the fictional Prometheus who has evolved out assuming that the stolen ‘fire’ is literally the fire we see in our physical world.
Why would we do that? Myths convey deep themes in narrative form. Obviously, fire is a necessary foundation of so much of our technology. We could have no metals, no glass, and so much else without the heat originally generated by fire. There is no doubt that fire in the physical world transformed humanity. But ‘fire’ has other meanings and associations – like generating warmth as communal focal point and giving light. Why take a thin slice of meaning and discard the rest? Why not see Prometheus as the god of community and the god of enlightenment?
Exactly why technologists want to appropriate a myth of this nature to champion their passion for technology isn’t explored sufficiently in my view. Perhaps there are useful commentaries of which I am unaware. Madden doesn’t strike me talking about an actual god, but more a symbol of a grand, but unarticulated idea. It seems folks like the idea the Promethean tale because it speaks to them, satisfying a need they may not have conscious knowledge of.
I am interested in this phenomenon because without it, Prometheus would be unknown to other than fans of the Greek tradition. So, when Madden says Prometheus is a hyperobject, does he mean as a symbol or as an actual god?
What is the big idea that UFOs signify?
The evolution of technology has had a singular pathway, and an aspect of fire has been critical. This is especially the case over the past few centuries. Nuclear energy is presently the most terrible analogue of fire we have developed. The association of UFO with nuclear weapons suggests a compelling relationship that has symbolic and moral connections.
We can fold back those connections to Prometheus as reason why we embarked on our perilous pathway. If the end is suicidal, are we blaming a symbol or a god? Is the UFO a moral warning against our reckless folly or a signal of future hope? Maybe both?
So, does the UFO occupy only the technological end of the spectrum of possible meaning? Or does it participate in a wider drama of meaning and morality?
We are disposed to see technology as something apart. We used to believe that humans uniquely were tool users. Now we know that’s an insubstantial conceit.
In between states of mind and confusion
I am working through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. I think its an intellectual masterpiece that is also very long and demanding. One of his early thoughts has stay with me. We have disenchanted the world through our rationalism and materialism.
I think we are in a transitional phase as we find the basis for a new enchantment. This is what Kripal’s work is about – though he doesn’t use that term – to my recollection.
Over 12 months ago I became fixed on the idea of the ‘future of human spirituality’. I still haven’t figured out why I had to specify ‘human’ spirituality. Could be to drive home an as yet unconscious rhetorical point.
That transition is vitally necessary as materialism and aspects of Christianity have waged war on a once thriving ecosystem of spirit. So, it is deeply interesting to consider exactly what the state of play is at the time that UFOs have emerged as a powerful theme in our culture.
The nuts-and-bolts devotees have their story – there’s a prospect of access to unlimited clean energy. Those claiming to be abductees have another perspective that has ecological and moral elements. If we allow both to fuse, we have a more holistic vision that blends both.
And then there Pasulka’s angle – that there’s an element of the religious that we need to factor in as well. There are aspects of how we respond to UFOs that are distinctly religious. In the background we have Prometheus as a possible god.
There is no doubt that Prometheus is a better god for us than Jehovah. The mere fact that he has been adopted by unbelievers as their god of technology makes this point.
What we are seeing with our evolving technology is what I see as a ‘techno-animism’ which seems to part of a drive to re-enchant our human-mediated reality. Are we moving toward an intelligent living technology that will create an ecosystem of the made which may one day mesh with ecosystem of the natural? Is there a god for that?
You gotta be kidding! Right?
No, I am not. If you don’t allow yourself to go where the evidence points you are engaging in dogma and apologetics. We are bedevilled by a deep suspicion of religion thanks to the way it has been done badly and has become a tyranny of dogma and coercion. I get that. But we do a lot of things badly that are wonderful when done well. I am thinking sex and food immediately. Who wants to be a starving celibate because of a few lousy experiences?
My point is that Madden almost goes there by declaring Prometheus a hyperobject, but what did he mean Prometheus is in this sense – a symbolic abstract or a god?
What is the ‘big idea’ behind UFOs? If we go beyond the nuts-and-bolts literalism, which surely we must, we end up with some kind of controlling mechanism which aligns the various manifestations of interdimensional contact into a continuum. That control, rule, or logic either arises from an entirely abstract intelligence, rather like mathematics, or a sentient one – maybe another case of both and?
So, UFO contact with Earthlings can’t be solely be a case of random ETs turning up here in their nuts-and-bolts spaceships because they fit a model that is echoed in human history as contact with fairies, demons, and gods. Our religions have been informed by such contacts. But not all contacts have a religious dimension. The consequences might also be philosophical or scientific. The UFO technology is a minor aspect of the contact.
Because our fixation on technology – a common theme of sci fi stories – can dominate our evaluation, we think of UFOs in predominantly technological terms. Historically any interdimensional craft’s technology would be of least importance to experiencers. And now, despite claims of secret reverse engineering, the best we might confidently assert is we really don’t understand the technology. We also don’t know where they come from, or why they are here – at least not in terms of any admitted public knowledge.
The definitive impact UFOs have on us is to precipitate doubt about our current notions of reality. It wasn’t so long ago that our scientific community’s position was that we were alone in the universe and the very apex of intelligent life. That educated conceit was contradicted by the religious and contactees. We can maybe agree that UFOs have impaled our conceits.
Is there an intelligence governing the UFO phenomena?
What about gods?
I have no empathy with theists in terms of their dogmas, but I do understand the impulse to believe. What we believe in is mediated by personal experience, culture, and history. We all have our version of a big idea – with varying degrees of coherence and complexity.
I quit my family’s faith [Protestant Christianity] when I was 6 when I was punished for emulating Jesus and suggesting my parents do likewise. It was probably the latter that attracted the penalty. But they had sent me to Sunday school against my wishes under threat of physical chastisement. I liked Jesus. He was a nice man. So being punished for following his teachings was a deal breaker for me. Besides I was dealing with a bunch of non-ordinary stuff nobody wanted to know about.
That non-ordinary stuff ensured that while I quit religion, I had no motive to become an atheist or a materialist. I didn’t like the Christian god, and I wasn’t too keen on his followers, but I had a sense there was more to the story. I later practiced western ritual magick and Wicca. The idea that gods and goddesses were real was baked into those systems.
In the late 1970s I had experiences interacting with discarnate entities called ‘inner plan teachers’. Two who were associated with the occult orders I studied under provided me with compelling evidence that they were real. The 3rd I had lengthy interactions with via my partner at the time over a couple of years. I recorded many hours of our conversations and transcribed a lot.
To answer the question the reader will doubtless be forming about how I determined the experience was real I will simply observe that as a natural scientifically minded sceptic I did perform tests to assess whether it was. My partner, the channel, was filled with doubt. She feared what was happening was a projection from her subconscious and nothing about it was real. A good deal of my conversations with the teacher concerned her problems and the difficulties they were creating in the communication process. The communication sessions were eventually discontinued but I had no doubt they were genuine. I’d also exhaustively researched the theme of mediated communication. And I had no desire at all to delude myself.
That’s a long-winded intro to some remarks about the gods. Because we were engaging in ritual magic at the time I had some doubts about whether the gods we were invoking were real or human inventions. As I noted above, I am a sceptic. I want to pause and observe that a sceptic is not a denier, but a doubter. The word has been debased by materialist dogmatic deniers. Good scientists are sceptics. It is curiosity and doubt that make them good. I was a science nut before my non-ordinary experiences dominated my life and I took that commitment to doubt with me.
I was given several clear messages on the subject of gods:
- They are very real.
- They are of the One, not as the One. This was an emphatic distinction.
- They might, from time to time, command human action – and this was pretty much non-optional.
This made what we were doing in ritual magic pretty petty to me. I often struggled to understand why we were invoking god forces for poorly formed reasons and quit the practice when my doubts overwhelmed motivation. I wasn’t into power for its own sake.
Back on track.
Subsequent non-ordinary experiences left me in no doubt that there was a potent non-ordinary intelligence influencing the world. But was it a god? I had no way of knowing. The thing about a hyperobject is that you never see all of it – just the bits impinging on your awareness.
This is what a lot of faithful don’t understand when they claim they speak to/are spoken to by God. They cannot know that. Their beliefs may lead them to that conclusion, and they make the claim based on those beliefs, but that’s all that can be honestly asserted. This is a reason why many innocent and gullible folks are duped by prophets and pastors who seem to others to be talking utter nonsense.
I have no doubt soever that there are non-physical agents with whom I interact and who can and do influence things on the physical plane. That’s based on substantial experience and is legit. Other folks have physical agents who influence things on their behalf. Let’s not discriminate on whether your influencer is physical or not. You can have a physical influencer, a priest, interceding on your behalf with a non-physical influencer – a saint.
The key question is whether such influences are real. Vallee surveys the spectrum of such claims in Passport to Magonia. And then we have UFO as a source of influence as reported by contactees and abductees.
My point is, as I have seen in my own life, that stuff can happen when non-physical and physical influencers work together. The physical influencer need have no idea what influences them. Whether this is an act of a god is a moot point. It may be an act in conformity with what is understood to be the god’s will or intent.
Can we know whether a god has acted in our favour? Unlikely. Can we know a god exists? Equally unlikely. The best we can hope for, most of the time, is that a reliable authority passes on a trusted insight or knowledge. And that is a vast scope for delusion and deception.
The legions fleeing Christianity found, despite claims, there is no reliable evidence its god exists, let alone that it is reliably effective in delivering the interventions claimed on its behalf. There are those for whom their faith generates effects in conformity with their beliefs. This is also close to what magick is – and this applies to any system of belief and practice.
There is justifiable scepticism about the reality of gods, and I am not discouraging such scepticism. Maintain it. Just step back from utter rejection.
Back to Prometheus
In the late 1970s I was a participant in several seriously strange occurrences that precipitated a frustrating interest in Prometheus. It was frustrating because the inner plane teacher we were in touch with insisted only in giving oblique hints on the grounds that his role was to teach us how to think, not tell us stuff.
I must have a particularly stupid side because I made virtually no progress on thinking about Prometheus until I read Madden’s book. In the back of my mind I did recall that there were two pieces of information granted me. The first was that this ‘god’ is called Prometheus only in the Greek tradition – with which it seems we have past life links. I couldn’t get any information about who he was in other traditions – apparently not useful information. The second idea was that in thinking about Prometheus a useful symbol was the familiar Greek flaming torch.
The version of Prometheus Madden promoted is that of a ‘god technology’. The logic is obvious. Fire is the foundation of almost everything we think of as technology these days. But was that the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods? That’s unlikely because that kind of fire occurs in nature – via lightening strikes and volcanoes.
Besides this is a myth laden with symbolism, not an incident report. It is more likely that the stolen ‘fire’ has a meaning drawn from how we evocatively use the word – or what it symbolises.
I had almost forgotten the flaming torch. What does that symbolise? A kind of illumination essentially – awareness. That sounds familiar. Isn’t that what happened in Genesis? The serpent conveys to Eve knowledge of good and evil, previously entirely owned by the God/s – a kind of theft involving deception. Prometheus deceived the gods. The serpent deceived Eve – as the story goes in what could simply be a deft bit of mythic blame shifting.
Comparing myths can be a fraught business at the best of times. I merely observe that here are two themes very close together once we see that the Promethean fire might be torch fuel to ‘enlighten’ human consciousness – just like the ‘knowledge of good and evil’.
We must be careful not to let materialists capture Prometheus and bind to the mountains of technology. I am not here asserting an actual Prometheus but a literary fiction that has evolved out of myth in a similar fashion to Lucifer. Both have their place and value in our culture but neither are connected to their sources in any real way. Neither is how they are interpreted mythic. Both are fictions and may have a symbolic value – just not a mythic one.
So why bother? Well, because I don’t think literary fictions can be hyperobjects. They are too ill-defined and insubstantial. I do think a god can be, though. This means we must separate literary fiction from myth before we can progress our thinking.
Absent compelling direct evidence, I don’t think we can ‘know’ whether gods exist. We can think or believe they do as a theory or a belief. But the idea of a god as a hyperobject appeals to me. The evidence must be the coherence of themes that at least get us to thinking there is the prospect of an organised unity. That doesn’t have to be absolute. It can be contextual. We are talking gods, not God, here.
Vallee makes the compelling point that what we see as sophisticated craft as UFO have been seen as exotic airships. Experiences are filtered through our knowledge, perceptions and imaginations. The UFO may or may not be a 3D object, but it certainly seems to be something that can appear to be – as well as whatever else experiencers imagine.
And here’s the problem. We can’t confirm the nature of the manifestations of any imputed hyperobject. So how can be form definitive notions about its nature?
I like the idea that the hyperobject might be a god some of us call Prometheus, and which may have been represented in the Eden myth as a contrarian snake. I like this idea simply because it shakes the hell out how we think – and there’s a risk there may be some truth in it all.
I call myself an animist deeply conscious that the word is carrying a heavier burden than it should in this context. But there’s not yet an alternative that bridges the dimensions of meaning it has for me.
I am completely comfortable with the idea of gods. While I may have been dumb about Prometheus in particular I have spent the last 40 years getting to grips the idea of gods being very real.
My present position is to assume there is a god we can call Prometheus and then behave in a way that might generate empirical consequences. Seeing this god as a hyperobject which might express as UFOs is going to take some doing. But what’s the point of having a theory if you can’t test it?
I am already cool with the idea that non-physical agents routinely impact material reality in intentional ways. Now I need to upscale. Do I think I am going to get unequivocal confirmation? I don’t know. When I started to type this my intent was to say ‘Frankly, No.’ But I had a firm intuition not to say that.
Back to UFOs
Are UFOs the form our mindsets have forced upon the inner plane dwellers who engage with us? Has our fixation with technology as the highest form of intelligent expression dictated how we accept inter dimensional communion?
I don’t rule out that UFOs are also genuine craft for what appear to us as organic beings to travel in. they could be necessary vehicles to facilitate inter-dimensional travel as well.
Think of the car. It’s a nuts-and-bolts machine. It is also expressed in a huge variety of forms intended to appeal to our egos, conceits, delusions and dreams. None of those forms are necessary for the car’s essential utility – unless they are specific to functions – race car vs bush-basher for eg.
This nuts-and-bolts machine inhabits our cultural or psychological space way more than our physical space. It signifies more than the mere utility of moving through space. It has informed how our living spaces are designed – and experienced.
If we could imagine the idea car as a hyperobject, how would we describe it? It would maybe be close to being a kind of god. I don’t mean a big god, just a member of a family of gods – a functionary, not a ruler.
I am making the point that a vehicle that is very familiar with us has deep and complex with our psychology, culture, and life world. Maybe the UFO is, at its core, just a conveyance. But who is conveyed and why?
If we stick to the notion that UFOs convey ET or aliens, we need to dive into what those terms mean. A god is an ET. So is someone who comes from Sirius, or from a non-material dimension. Our myth traditions don’t tell us where these ‘others’ come from in any consistent way, but there is a blend of far off on this plane and somewhere else on other planes.
What we can know is that conscious intentional agents have been entering or intersecting with our sense of reality for as long as we have records. Sometimes we have needed to loosen up our grip on this reality via drugs or ritual or other practices. But ‘here’ seems more like a grand central station than a remote backwater that has led some to the ludicrous notion that we might ‘be alone’.
The specific idea of what we call a UFO has arisen in the age of flying machines. It must signify that it is more than what our machines can be. It is both metaphor and actuality.
An audiobook I recently finished [Magnificent Rebels] made the compelling point that reason and imagination are fundamentally connected. The book concerns the late 19th century German romantic thinkers who thought that art and science were inseparable. It reminded me how materialism had censored so many alternatives to its dour utilitarianism. Its what Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, described as ‘disenchantment’.
In a way the UFOs is our disenchanted perception of an interaction caused by the fact that we are condition to imagine we are alone in the cosmos. How might these interactions be perceived if we were free from that monstrously silly idea?
I seem to have spent my life struggling to dishabituate my consciousness from dominant mindsets. Sometimes this has been exhilarating but mostly it’s been fraught, difficult and unpleasant. If we persist in shoehorning the ‘impossible’ into entirely mundane thought containers we will not find a good fit. The pragmatic thing to do is prune the ‘impossible’ to fit.
While the idea of a hyperobject has been unexpectedly liberating for me I am struggling to see what kind of discrete hyperobject might generate UFOs. But I like the idea of a god as a hyperobject. However, for that notion to be anywhere close to thought sensible we do need to completely re-imagine what we mean by the idea of a god.
Conclusion
There’s a place for gods in our evolving scheme of things. As we inch toward theories of consciousness underpinning reality, we can ask how that reality is organised and whether the gods our ancestors reported were not part of that organisation.
Theories of the transition from underpinning consciousness to material stuff can evade the idea of entities like gods if we want, but we may have to invent other steps to address their absence. Simply put we may need ideas of gods to help us organise our evolving theories of consciousness as the foundation of being – at a cosmic scale all the way down to our personal experience.
The Greeks developed the story of Prometheus to convey a deep truth. The Jews have their god of Genesis to tell their version of that truth. In the Greek myth what was stolen was fire. In the Jewish myth what was stolen was ‘knowledge of good and evil’. The thieves were punished [acts of self-sacrifice?] but what was stolen was never restored to those who asserted ownership. The transition seems to be irreversible. This is important.
What becomes known cannot be returned to ignorance. The gods who claimed ownership of fire could not recover it. The gods who claimed ownership of the knowledge of good and evil could not recover it. What is done can’t be undone. What is known can’t be unknown. The rulebreakers can only be punished – kinda pointlessly.
I am not insisting that Prometheus is a real god. But I make several observations:
- Our culture needs a meta-narrative that has been traditionally provided by our myth traditions. But it must be attuned to our age. We need a big idea that gives shared meaning and purpose.
- As the power of the agrarian Jehovah myths have declined and faith in traditional religion has waned, the Promethean story has been revived in the service technology – at a time when we might need a new big idea.
- Scientific advances are dispelling the dogma of materialism in favour of an emerging narrative about consciousness.
- UFO is injecting into our normal a stimulus to re-imagine how we think things are.
The relationship between Prometheus and Lucifer is that both are bringers of fire/light to humanity. Both are re-imagined as tragic heroes as fictional characters. Or are we seeing the evolution of a new mythos to convey a new truth coming freshly into consciousness? We always need myths.
Our affection for rationalism and materialism has misled us into thinking that we don’t need myths or enchantment. Our present peril has arisen, I believe, because of that misjudgement. A crisis foreseen – baked into our destiny? A dramatic peril that is finally transformative? Is that how great stories end? And the next instalment is…..?
Are UFOs part of that evolving new mythos? Their possible interdimensional nature neatly matches our technological trends which take us to the very edge of materiality, but not yet beyond it. And that’s the point – not yet. We are on the doorstep of interdimensional awareness, unaware we are knocking. So when that door is opened we will not be ready.
UFOs and their earlier analogues are associated with transformation. Once encountered we cannot unknow. In this sense there’s a Promethean or serpent element about them. They have, in the past, betokened an enchanted reality, and now they seem to be heralds of a re-enchantment of our arid materialistic sense of the real.
What do we dare think? That’s always the question.
Its not my goal to persuade the reader toward a conclusion or belief. My goal is to trigger questions among those who dare go beyond their safety zones of beliefs and opinions.
And no, I don’t have a settled opinion. I am still tyring to figure it out. Its damned exciting.