The Resonance of Unseen Things

Front matter

Wy unglue.it M | UNIVERSE ror T PRESS

ONLINE SURVEY

In collaboration with Unglue.it, we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used.

Chapter I

This is not a book about UFOs. It’s not a history of UFO belief, nor a sociology of believers. Rather, this is a book about a vernacular American poetics, something you can hear building up in the stories I will tell. The content of these stories varies, but their themes keep circling back to a sense that life in America is shaped by some ineffable, enormous power, a power that can be seen only in the patterns of its effects.

This book tracks both the form and the social life of the poetics I want to describe. I explore the prophetic desires and the historical iterations of its major trope, captivity. The stories here express public feelings and popular theories. And so this book is not about UFOs: rather, it follows the recursion and resonance between uncanny memories, hauntings, conspiracy theories, captivity narratives, and tales of everyday life.

Fantastic stories, like ordinary personal memories, arise amid experiences of class, loss, race, gender, and the body’s unmoored location in a world of accelerated technological change. But those experiences aren’t always articulated. Their shapes as stories are only partially visible from wherever one stands.

Many of the stories in this book were told to me directly, either one-on-one or in a group. Others are items of public culture: they come from grainy Xeroxed pages from UFO magazines, mass market popular books, academic theoretical books, radio, movies, newspapers and TV news, the Internet. The stories from all these media (from both academic and popular sources) are public signs that circulate through social space, and there are many ways that their intertextual flows can be tracked, critiqued, and analyzed. Through their connections, we can think about the interplay of public and intimate discursive domains. These stories let us follow that quick leg of the semiotic journey where the public sign is internalized, and then reproduced as another sign, or another story—one that’s stained with other signs from the inner place it’s been.

Some stories that I tell here came from hundreds of years ago, some from half a century ago, and some are from just the other day. Most of the stories I heard orally were told (or retold) at some point during a long stretch of the 1990s. When I think of that period now, it is like an eye in a hurricane. The First Gulf War was over, and the next wars against Iraq and Afghanistan had not yet begun. The World Trade Centers were standing, enormous and unmarked against the skyline. No one could yet have said that government bombs and not the planes caused the building to collapse, or that Flight 93 was completely staged, or that all the Jews and top financial traders stayed home that day. All the fraught events that quickly followed in the aftermath of the towers’ destruction—the medicalized terror of anthrax scares, the secretive “code orange” days, the arguments for public safety through the erasure of civil liberties, and even years later, the growing uneasiness over the government’s ability to read one’s email or listen in on one’s phone calls—all these still lay in the future. And yet for some people, when these anxious events did occur, they did not seem so very unfamiliar.

A sense of trauma fills many of the stories here. The referent of the trauma is elusive. The source is ambiguous not just for a skeptical critic but also as an element of the story itself. People telling these uncanny stories can only wonder about what really happened, but they just know something is wrong. Lauren Berlant has said that “the trauma produces something in the air without that thing having to be more concrete than a sense of the uncanny—free-floating anxiety in the room, negativity on the street, a scenario seeming to unfold within the ordinary without clear margins, even when a happening is also specific” (Berlant 2011: 80). This book explores the intense elaboration of this affect as it moves from a fleeting sensation into the center of things.

In the period when most of the ethnographic stories here arose, the Tea Party did not yet exist. Antigovernment conspiracy theory was commonly described in dominant media, if mentioned at all, as marginal or kooky. Before the mid-2000s, it was hard to imagine antigovernment conspiracy theorists achieving the empowered political base they found in the birther movement. Yet in many ways, libertarian discourses and movements based in a conspiratorial sensibility that achieved political ascendancy in the early twenty-first century were already latent, not just in the common populist strand long-standing in America, not in some quintessential “paranoid” quality of American character, but specifically in the uncanny talk that mushroomed in the 1990s.!

To remember a sense of the public sentiment of the beginnings of the time frame I’m going to explore here, you might think of it as the first year of the Clinton administration and ending, in 1999, as confusing predictions began to haunt the media with visions of an apocalyptic Y2K, when “the computers” would all break down and society would fall apart. My friends in rural Nevada were gearing up for Y2K with extra stores of canned food and ammunition; my friends in New York City laughed at how ridiculous the doomsday rhetoric in the media was, how technophobic, but filled their bathtubs with water on December 31, 1999. You never know.

In 1992, when I first met UFO believers in the midsize southern city I here call Hillview, The X-Files had not yet appeared on television.” There were still yellow ribbons hanging raggedly in some trees, leftovers from the Gulf War. In 1992, the country was in a recession. By 1998—when Hilary Clinton was mocked for accusing her husband’s opponents of a “conspiracy”—there was an economic boom. But for many people, talk of booms and busts did not necessarily make a difference, except to the way they thought of themselves in relation to master narratives of class mobility. There was a sense that the true driving force of economic and political life in this country, and in the world, was not to be found in the surface ups and downs that might be declared on the news (see Dean 2009). Instead there was a sense of occult and sinister operations, something that went far beyond the moment’s booms and busts and elections, back thousands of years, forward into the future, beyond America, beyond Europe, beyond the earth itself. There were forces of good and evil, forces that became manifest in our politicians but far transcended them. They gained power through their links to each other, building up strength and intensity through subterranean connections. There were things people did not name directly, but called these connecting forces they and the powers that be.

Apophenia Apophenia refers to the experience of perceiving connections between random or unrelated objects. This definition, though, already contains within it a specific point of view, an assumption of power. Who decides what is really related or unrelated? Who defines whether the relations between objects—or between events, or between spectacles of dominance across various contexts—are random and arbitrary?

In mainstream psychology, apophenia is called an “error of perception . . . the tendency to interpret random patterns as meaningful” (Hoopes 2011). But the people I write about here cultivate apophenia, not as an “error,” but instead as a way to begin seeing those things that have become invisible. They foreground the naturalized patterns that normally go without saying. It is in one sense an endless bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966), but rather than building something concrete from the “odds and ends” at hand, here the product is never finished; you select the part for the rush of its echo to another part. Here each found or revealed sign leads on to other resemblances, other openings.

The people here pay close attention to parallels and resemblances between stories. And the parallels produce a feeling of, and an aesthetic sense of, resonance.’ And, I argue, the resonance itself becomes another story. The sense of uncanny resonance becomes an expressive modality, a vernacular theory, a way of seeing the world, an intimation of the way it all makes sense. It becomes both performance and theory, creating a sense of an occult design that might someday be apprehended below the jumbled surfaces of the ordinary. Accumulating and recursive images, and the felt connections between them, reveal how historical trauma gets lodged in the bright, broken bits of fantastic things.

I use the term “resonance” in this book to mean the intensification produced by the overlapping, back and forth call of signs from various discourses. The uncanny narratives here acquire affect, intensity, and meaning through their resonance and dissonance with other more familiar cultural narratives, those that can seem like the inevitable shape of the real and are less overtly marked as constructed narratives. Resonance describes the social, affective, and aesthetic dimension of a perspective based in apophenia, finding connections between signs, and often understanding that process as political. Here those connections are based on resemblance and repetition. This effect entails mimesis, but the resemblance is partial and fluid. It is felt. And the intertextual connections feel vertically layered, rather than horizontally bridged.

Resonance is not an exact reiteration. Rather it’s something that strikes a chord, that inexplicably rings true, a sound whose notes are prolonged. It is just-glimpsed connections and hidden structures that are felt to shimmer below the surface of things. It is what makes people say, It all fits together and Something just clicked and My whole life I just felt like something was going on, and this explains it. And as I describe later, that sense of resonance gives rise to the partial sense of familiarity that makes an experience classically uncanny, where the strange leads back to what you already knew.

Abductions

People I met in Hillview, and at UFO conferences in the Southwest, often told the same origin story about how their lives shifted into a register that included extensive thinking and talking about aliens; the story was about discovering Whitley Strieber’s book Communion: A True Story. They said just seeing the book changed their lives. Strieber was already a successful writer of gothic fantasy fiction when he described his own weird alien abduction experiences in Communion. People said they’d been browsing in a bookstore and suddenly came upon Communion displayed on a table. They were flooded with feelings and half-memories, they got a palpable shock, and they knew then this is what happened to me. Even before they identified with Strieber’s strange narrative and its tone of anguished questing, the visual cover image struck people with the immediacy and intensity of revelation. It was the first time they saw a picture of that iconic alien face dominated by enormous black eyes like a giant insect, or like a Nazi in a gas mask, or a surgeon peering down at you as you veered in and out of awareness on the table. But also like none of those things exactly, not specifically one of them alone. People I met said it was that cover—and then the book—that made them remember things they had already known and, over time, forgotten.

Throughout that decade, alien abduction discourse mushroomed. People passed around battered paperbacks by Budd Hopkins telling abduction stories from his work with abductees. Hopkins’s books widely circulated the now-familiar abduction narrative: how aliens come to your bedside, paralyze you, silence you, and float you out of the room and into their nightmarish surgeries. His colleagues in abduction research added to the picture common hallmarks of captivity: how “abductees commonly feel that data of some sort is being extracted from their minds” (Jacob 1992: 97).4 How they steal not just thoughts and feelings but your eggs and sperm, the babies in your womb. How the aliens put trackers up your nose, silently follow you year after year so you can just feel that presence. And how they do this while all the time calming you, pacifying you, making it impossible to break free.

The image, the idea, the word, the story, struck a chord: abduction seemed instinctively, uncannily real. People felt an organizing convergence of a vaguely ominous sense. The word itself, abducted, with its Latinate sound and hard split as your lip pops between its consonants, was somehow more clinical and official than “kidnapped,” the duct inside it a rushing force, a channel that carries you away. Abduction expressed an overspilling sensation of captivity and containment by something you can’t control, communicated a feeling about the unseen forces that inscribed your body and tracked your movements, controlled your memory, and did things to your reproductive organs... it just made sense, it just fit in with the feeling people said they’d already been having. Some people acted on this feeling and underwent hypnosis with therapists sympathetic to the abduction experience, to see if they might unearth a whole memory. Many people have, through hypnosis, recalled alien abduction. Many others remain in the liminal space where the haunting feeling of abduction brings together a nagging, familiar sense of a something that was already there.

You could say all that in different words, a new vocabulary— perhaps, now, in words that make that same kind of intuitive sense to me. Another way of describing an image or idea that seems to organize a whole range of feelings and social experiences, that appears in stories of different kinds and links them together, that makes a pattern out of things you never before knew how to pull together, is to see it as a trope. The more I heard over the years about things just fitting together, the more it seemed clear that abduction itself was a greatly capacious trope, one that was changeable and alive. But abduction was only half the trope. The other half of abduction was release, the coming through containment to the other side.

There are so many facets to this trope, piling up into an enormous set of resonating images that might never be an entire whole. I locate the trope throughout this book in a different ways. It appears in various forms, and it is shot through with shifting sentiments in different contexts.

There is abduction and release; there is captivity and restoration. There is paralysis, and there is mobility. There is the centripetal force of containment, and there is the centrifugal force of flight (Bakhtin 1981). There is the captivity of amnesia and the release of recollection. All these are connected expressions of a larger structure, a broad figure that includes all of these dimensions of captivity and liberation. And it is grounded in the forceful insistence of freedom as a master metatrope of American national identity, and a way of storying what you might say this way if you were an academic historian: that “the glorification of freedom [is] the essential characteristic of American life in a struggle for global dominance” (Foner 2003).

In 1994, the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack wrote Abduction, describing his psychological work with UFO abductees. Because of Mack’s academic and writerly credentials (he had previously won a Pulitzer for a biography of Lawrence of Arabia) Abduction generated a wider attention than UFO books usually did. Mack said the way truth was figured by official, elite perspectives was out of touch with truth on the ground, where a new paradigm was taking shape, an ability to transcend the binary of material and imagined realms. Other prominent alien abduction researchers whom the people I knew talked about (for example, Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs) had insisted that alien abduction was by definition sinister and violating. If abductees had a positive experience, either they hadn’t really been abducted—they were “confabulating” (Jacobs 1992)—or their experience offered more evidence that aliens pacified their victims through deceit. But Mack veered into spiritual and New Age ideas; alien abduction led to transformation, for “unlike human abusers” and political kidnappers, these “beings reveal a shared purpose, and offer the possibility of openings to inclusive more expansive worldview” (Mack 1994: 399).° Still, Mack authored a report with Hopkins and Jacobs, based on a Roper Poll of “personal experiences” the three had sponsored. As Jacobs wrote, “The results of the Roper Poll indicated that millions of Americans might be abductees... the final analysis indicates that 2 percent of the American people—five million Americans—have experienced events consistent with those that abductees experienced before they knew they were abductees” (Jacobs 1998: 123}. Many people reported that they had, for example, wakened paralyzed with a strange figure in the room, seen a terrifying figure, left their bodies, had missing time, seen a ghost, flown through the air, had puzzling scars. They came from “almost all groups in society” (124). The signs of abduction were everywhere.

Carla and I were friends from the Hillview UFO experiencers’ group. She and I watched John Mack on TV one evening, on 48 Hours. He had a serious, soulful face, spoke of his patients in intelligent and respectful tones. When I spoke with Mack once, in the 1990s, he thoughtfully said that psychiatrists must listen to their patients from a stance of belief.

And the abductees who appeared with Mack on TV were professional people; they were believable and sane, speaking not just of violation but of that something more—the transformation, the redemption or release. Some had made it to the other side. We sat in Carla’s little house, with her paperbacks piled everywhere, books on ancient UFOs and spirit religions and political conspiracies and psychology. She smoked pensively, petting her dog, and acknowledged that Mack—even though he was appearing on suspiciously mainstream TV—was pretty good. Mack was respectful of his patients, his book told their stories faithfully, he marveled at the similarities between their memories and did not explain anything away. Carla approved of his “new perspectives,” and she too believed that alien abduction was part of a wider spiritual growth. She liked how he said the people weren’t crazy. Carla sometimes said that only people who had gone through things in childhood were open enough to be chosen, to be abducted or taken up and out of the banal realm of everyday life. The wounds of life left you primed for a something more than this shit down here. But she still talked about the gray aliens in clinical registers, and the sinister abduction horror story still dominated popular narrative.

Explosions

Through the 1990s, the image of the alien kept exploding in popular culture; talk of UFOs and representations of extraterrestrials were everywhere (see Dean 1998; Brown 2007; Badmington 2004). This wave of 1990s alien images was cheerfully popping up in everything from new television shows (like The X-Files) to movies (like Fire in the Sky in 1993, the Hollywood rendition of a UFO abduction testimony whose book version had been important to believers for years).° In the 1990s, suddenly, everywhere you looked there were inscrutable bumper stickers featuring black alien head icons, a series of images mysteriously called “Schwa” stickers after the company that made them.’ Alien images became part of a hipster 1990s aesthetic—a kind of “alien chic” (Badmington 2004) that signaled what Badmington (2004) has described as a posthumanist embrace of the other within, a refusal to maintain the rigid us/them boundaries that had marked warlike aliens at the height of the Cold War. On one level these 1990s “chic” alien images performed a rejection of the older us/them national identity. But the social worlds where people felt passionate about the meaning of UFOs were not chic at all. People who organized their lives around UFO belief knew that talking about them urgently and earnestly was still generally a stigmatized and trivialized practice. It was still linked to “the tabloids” as a code for the debased habitus of an imaginary group of uneducated, lower-class Americans (Dean 2009, 1998).

Some people’s intellectual and social lives revolve around the quest to reduce the stigma of UFO belief; as they put it, they want UFO investigations to “go mainstream.” But there are other people who passionately organize their lives around UFOs in a way that expressively embraces and identifies with their marginality. The rapidly proliferating signs of UFOs in the public domain, in TV shows and movies and books, didn’t sit well with those who felt intuitively that UFOs belonged to the unincorporated realm of the weird stuff. They didn’t want UFO belief to “go mainstream.” And they didn’t trust “Science” to approach the mystery of UFOs without killing something irreducible in what that mystery meant to them. For these people, the fact that most folks just didn’t get it was the point.

I met some of these people in the Hillview UFO Experiencers Support Group. I was led to the Experiencers through a local chapter of its parent group, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). MUFON is an international organization whose mission is to make UFOs a credible topic of scientific investigation and Hillview has an active chapter. There were some intellectual and strategic differences between the two local groups in Hillview (though people often participated in both), but the Experiencers Support Group was my primary ethnographic home base in the overlapping Hillview UFO worlds. I did fieldwork in these groups, though primarily in the support group, for a total of two years, maintaining friendships with a few members for many years afterward.

Many people in these overlapping communities arranged their political, social, and emotional affinities not around ideas of a “left” or a “right” political wing but always around ideas of invisible centers of power (cf. Dean 2009). In this specific structure of feeling and imagination, the margins oppose that occult, sinister center, a black hole that invisibly sucks people into its gravitational pull. My closest friend in the UFO support group eventually drifted into a social world that actively sympathized with the militia movement. It was sometimes difficult to understand her support for right-wing militias along with her intense championship of gay rights and gender nonconformity. Many UFO believers plucked stances from both traditional right- and leftwing ideologies, relating not to traditional activist political lines but instead to a sense of distance from the powers that be (see Dean 2009, 1998). The “prepper” bookstore I visited in Nevada displayed militia manifestos and apocalypse-preparedness handbooks next to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

Carla could smell appropriation and incorporation from miles away. She hated the way the UFO thing is everywhere now. For Carla, talking about UFOs expressed her distance from a sinister power that tried to control ordinary people. The power came in various manifestations, emerging in bloody centuries of the past and secret cabinets in Washington today. As the powers that be, it was always present in some form. If you weren’t careful, it incorporated you into its zombified center where you could no longer think for yourself. After a while, Carla left the UFO Experiencers group and joined another group that fervently studied the Constitution as a redemptive, sacred democratic text.

Carla had politicized her distance from the powers that be in a way that would soon itself become mainstream in populist public culture, forcing her to move on yet again. After a while she was no longer talking so fervently about UFOs, inner dimensions, or unusual spiritual experiences, but more and more about the New World Order, the threat of worldwide socialism, and the plots that global networks were secretly planning with then-attorney general Janet Reno, the Trilateral Commission, and wealthy powers that be across the brutalized body of the world.

After a few more years, her constitutional study group itself could not express what she was looking for in the peripheries. She and her new intellectual companions saw that the world as they knew it was ending.

Many people do end their worlds, unworlding what they’ve made (Stewart 2007), drifting off to spin a new one. After Carla left, the little UFO Experiencers group passed into the hands of a bright, intense, selfeducated young man named “Lenny,” with a keenly organized, passionate take on every bit of literature he had ever seen on the topic of the paranormal. He started a zine, created one of the first solid online presences I knew of, read and discussed everything from physics to psychedelic speculation. Carla and I continued to call and email each other for years, talking about what was going on in the world as she saw it, until our friendship drifted too.

Later on, I participated in another community of uncanny storytellers in central Nevada, a land of both drifters and homesteaders. Rachel, Nevada, is a rural hamlet located on the border of the vast militaryindustrial complex of Nellis Air Force Bombing and Gunnery Range

Io | THE RESONANCE OF UNSEEN THINGS and the Nevada Test Site, and the secret military base called Groom Lake, or Area 51. Although the U.S. government finally admitted its existence in 2013, Area 51 then was literally an enormous open secret: four million acres of unacknowledged bomb range (Patton 1998; Jacobsen 2011). Its 4,742 miles of restricted airspace (Patton 1998: 3) are known as Dreamland. And in fact the secret was a dream of the Cold War come to life in the desert, a hugely funded, technological project of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy, and the U.S. military in conjunction with private contractors like Wackenhut and Lockheed. This is the place that produced covert aircraft like the stealth bomber and the U2, the place that supposedly built the fabled Mach 6 speed plane Aurora. The base is connected to the Nevada Test Site and the nuclear detonations that occurred for decades there. Local people in the area still talk about seeing the buildings set up around the test site, and then seeing their ruins (see Masco 2006). Here, amid lingering Cold War secrets and the continuing development of war machines, aliens perhaps inevitably came to live like the “Martian in the Machine” described by Jackie Orr: “A new fear encased in an old story of monsters wielding magical, murderous weapons? Or an old fear encased in a new frequency, exciting strange electronic fields of as-yetuncharted human motion?” (Orr 2005: 40).

I made my first visit to Rachel in 1997 because of the UFO stories I’d heard about this place from people in Hillview. (I do not use a false name for the town of Rachel, as I do for Hillview, because Rachel is already public, a well-known destination for UFO tourism.) There were indeed plenty of similar tales floating around in Rachel. But once there, what I more vividly heard was the restless interplay between uncanny and ordinary stories. This was a place not just for “conspiracy theorists” but also for hardworking western people with strong community bonds, valuing the decency of everyday accomplishments and a fierce attachment to a legacy of independence. The inextricability of the uncanny and the ordinary expressed a particular blend of desire and nostalgia—a mix of otherworldly displacement and the deep specificity of a heavily entextualized, lived-in place in the American West. The ways these discourses came together suggested other kinds of anxiety about colonization and the earth, secrecy and theft, nature and loss, and the vulnerable boundaries of the human body. These were themes—about strange, amorphous power and the vulnerability of unsuspecting subjects—I’'d also heard in the UFO groups in Hillview.

The central meeting point in Rachel is a UFO-themed café called the Little A’Le’Inn. After my first brief visit there, I called the owners to ask if I could waitress that fall at the Little A’Le’Inn, to write about the stories I heard. Someone had just quit, and Pat said I could live with her and Joe, in their mobile home next to the café, in lieu of waitress wages. I waitressed there again the following summer, this time living again with Pat, Joe, and another waitress for part of the time, and partly in a separate mobile home with my husband, when he came with me to Nevada for a month.

Joe, who owned the café with his wife Pat, believed in many of the same things as Carla. Both Joe and Carla were charismatic storytellers with abandoned origins in charismatic churches. And they were both driven by the partial designs they saw—architectures of conspiracy, webs of the powers that be whose hidden strands you could tease out, a bit at a time, through talk. Like the other people I write about here, their sense of hidden meaning was an “occult cosmology,” the term used by Sanders and West to describe the “ontological dimensions” of covert systems (Sanders and West 2003: 6).

Like Carla, Joe had always just felt it in his bones: Something was wrong. And one day for him too, he said, It all clicked, it all came together, everything just made sense as a plot by the powers that be. But Joe, who had a poor childhood, was now making a good living at his café. Though he liked to keep life simple, he owned his mobile home, and he’d bought land. By midlife he was in a stable, long-term third marriage. Carla was moving around, still trying to find the right place.

She had nothing fixed in place but her convictions, her fierce intellect, and her ability to meet new people who, for a while, formed a world with her, based on a feeling that there was always a something more.

For some people the ominous powers in the world came into sharpest relief as a coherent belief when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives raided David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993 (see Fenster 2008). The Waco incident crystallized an already-developed sense of how things are and played out this sense of subterranean sinister developments in an overt, concrete display of government violence against civilians. There it was, on the news: the government was killing people who didn’t toe the line. They could come and do it to anyone who wanted to live the way they saw fit. The media was part of it, showing things in the news from only their own side: they were the ones who demonized Koresh and let the government off the hook, keeping the public in its perpetual state of deception. It was maybe even worse than Ruby Ridge the year before: now it seemed they were going after not just overt independence and freedom but also spiritual belief.