ufOOO

I’ve been thinking—to put it mildly—a lot about UFOs recently. Or more correctly, “the UFO” as people now say. Or even more correctly, “the UFO phenomenon.” Or much more contemporarily correctly, “the UAP phenomenon.” Maybe I’m just old (and OAP in Britain means old age pensioner!), but I like the sound of “UFO.”

That’s good. The UFO phenomenon. The use of the word phenomenon, I mean. A phenomenon is an appearing, an appearance, a happening, without regard to where that phenomenon emanates from, in particular…there is a whole practice of phenomenology which depends on “bracketing” (epochē is the Greek term) that stuff and focusing on how a phenomenon hangs together…that’s what logic means, “how things hang together.”

A phenomenon is “there,” but if I’m doing phenomenology, I’m not going to limit that “happening” to the ways I might reduce it, explain it (away). Especially if that happening or appearance or phenomenon is radically uncertain. Perhaps the UFO Phenomenon is not a product of human anything, or perhaps it’s not a product of current human ideas about human anything. But current humans sure to seem capable of experiencing (something to do with) them.

I’m used to this weirdness, because I trained as a literature scholar. To read literature you have to forget your ideas about who wrote it, where they wrote it, why they wrote it…you just look at “the words on the page” as they say. The text as phenomenon, as a happening. There’s more to say about how strange this can get, but I’ll save it for now. (It has to do with how phenomenology is entangled with another amazing thing, hermeneutics.)

I was going to subtitle this “Real, but Not Your Grandaddy’s Real.” UFOs and so on are there, but this is not your granddaddy’s “there,” so I need to talk real careful about the UFO Phenomenon. I need to be honest, which first of all means faithful to the experiences people have, not trying to explain them away, reduce them, fit them into a box, even of current kinds of Ufology.