Poli Sci Fi

I’m highly skeptical of claims that UFOs are interesting in any sense but the sociological, for reasons having to do with the Fermi paradox, and the weaknesses of evidence laid out in John Sladek’s excellent and entertaining The New Apocrypha (the relevant chapter is entitled ‘Will U Kindly F O”). But even apart from the question of whether or not there is something to UFO claims that is worthy of sustained scientific investigation, Wendt and Duvall’s argument is highly unconvincing. They claim that there is something about the possibility of alien subjectivities that fundamentally challenges the principles of sovereign rule and makes sovereign entities go into a kind of halting state (pun borrowed from Charlie Stross) when they try to think about them. Hence, the failure of states to investigate UFOs. But this doesn’t seem to me to hold up as a convincing explanation

First - the evidence is inadequate to the claims made. Even if we accept, for the purposes of argument, Wendt and Duvall’s contention that government sponsored reports such as the Condon report (which was prepared by thirty scientists and engineers for the government over a period of two years, based on twenty years of data gathered by the Airforce)¹ doesn’t serve as countervailing evidence because it was ‘politicized’ and ‘flawed,’ I would expect them to provide some serious evidence to support the claim that the purported outcome (failure of government to seriously investigate UFOs) is an outcome of the suggested causal mechanism (the inability of anthropocentric sovereign states to process evidence. We don’t get this; not only do we not get any sort of process tracing, we don’t even get a Foucauldian genealogy. Instead, we have an article which consists of (a) a claim about the nature of sovereignty, (b) a (contestable) claim about states’ failure to research UFOs, (c ) a series of mostly straw man counter-arguments, of mixed accuracy², that are duly knocked down, and (d) a re-iteration of the claim that in the absence of ‘reasonable’ counter explanations, the failure to investigate whether UFOs are indeed the product of alien intelligence must indeed be a result of anthropocentric sovereignty.

Not only is there no direct evidence adduced, but there’s no reason to think that governments’ failure to pay attention to UFOs is unique. There are many, many out-of-left-field claims out there that governments, mystifyingly, have failed to investigate, despite evidence that is at least as good as the evidence that Wendt and Duvall claim justifies further investigation of the UFOs-are-evidence-of-aliens-among-us hypothesis.³ For example astrology, which some have claimed has a statistical basis, and which would surely revolutionize predictive intelligence if properly developed. Transcendental Meditation - we have research published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, no less, which points to the statistically observable effects of application of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field to the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Curiously, states have failed (to date) to act on this finding in order to solve the problem of war. Prayer, for healing and otherwise; now there’s one that the 2000-2008 US administration should have been investigating, one would have thought, given its ideological predilections and the technology’s obvious battlefield implications. And going a bit further into the wildlands, what about Scientology? If the US military had had a few Operating Thetans on tap to send out against the enemy, the Iraq war would have gone rather better than it did.

And so on. On Wendt and Duvall’s argument as I understand it, none of these potentially exciting fields of discovery challenge the anthropocentric notion of sovereignty. Yet none to date have been investigated - something that seems difficult to explain using their argument. If only one could come up with a single mechanism to explain this seeming regularity …

Even more troubling, there is evidence (not actually discussed in the piece, although the program is mentioned in passing) that seems to directly undermine Wendt and Duvall’s basic claim. In their argument, “one of the possibilities that we must countenance if we accept that the UFO is truly unidentified is that its occupants are ETs—and that threatens both the physical and ontological security of modern rule.” But if this is the underlying problem, we can point to a research area which is equally problematic for the notion of anthropocentric sovereignty, but that has been sponsored by the state. I’m referring, of course, to the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, which uses radio telescopes and similar to search (so far unsuccessfully) for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This ought to be just as unthinkable for the modern state as UFO research, if an anthropocentric universal order is a necessary precondition for modern sovereignty. Yet it has been funded by the US over a period of many years. I think that this is substantial disconfirming evidence for their argument.

I’m much more familiar with Wendt’s work than Duvall’s; I do know both are very smart guys. Nor do I think that articles which investigate ‘weird’ topics should be dismissed out of hand - scientific progress often requires open filters. But I do think that there are real problems with the set up and evidence of this article, regardless of the topic - if you want to make a case that states simply cannot deal with certain problems, you need good evidence to support your claim, and I’m not seeing it. I am much more impressed with a superficially similar piece, Patrick Jackson and James Heilman’s chapter on “Outside Context Problems,” published in Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox’s New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction volume⁴ which convincingly argues (a) that Iain Bank’s spiffy series of ‘Culture’ novels is all about the difficulties that liberal civilizations have in encountering alien Others, and (b) that political scientists and theorists ought to pay attention to these books. Something along these lines, making less sweeping claims and using the evidence as a kind of thought experiment, would, I think, have made for a much better piece.

¹ summary of Sladek, op cit. As Sladek observes (p.39): “If nothing else, the Condon report should have convinced ufologists that saucers were being taken seriously. It didn’t. Scientists who worked on it, Dr. Edward U. Condon in particular, were accused of being ‘anti-UFO’ and their ‘professional bias’ was often noted by amateurs who themselves showed little inclination to accept anything less than visitors from space. … Donald Keyhoe sent an angry telegram to President Johnson urging him to terminate the project. Richard Shaver found Condon a ‘pedant’ for not getting on with the real business of science, i.e. fighting the evil, telepathic dero. (Shaver referred to the dero by the Velikovskyan phrase, ‘vermin from space’).”

² For example, Wendt and Duvall suggest that NASA’s defunct ‘Breakthrough Propulsion Physics’ program provides evidence that ideas about FTL travel are ‘speculative’ but ‘scientifically sound.’ I’ve been an enthusiastic amateur consumer of ideas such as the Alcubierre drive etc for years, but my understanding is that none of these ideas seem at all practically feasible for reasons to do with fundamental physical constraints, massive energy requirements etc - they serve less as blueprints for feasible stardrives than a form of entertainment for bored physicists. More to the point, while most of NASA’s BPL web pages seem to have disappeared with the passing of the ages, my very strong recollection is that the money available through this project was peanuts.

³ Wendt and Duvall do suggest that the willingness of states to investigate ESP, together with their unwillingness to investigate UFOs suggests that it really is about notions of sovereignty. But there are many other hypotheses which could explain this more simply. Most obviously, it is rather easier to study ESP in an experimental setting with controls and the like than it is to study UFOs, which have a disconcerting habit of disappearing will-o-the-wisp-like when you might like to get your hands on them.

⁴ Which, I should say, also has a piece by me.

Farrell is “highly skeptical” that UFOs are ETs. Indeed on most days so are we; after all, the idea is mind-boggling. However, the question here is, is his skepticism warranted by good science – is it something he knows – or is it a claim to knowledge that in fact has no scientific warrant, and thus which he only believes? Our view is that no one knows what UFOs are. We are all in the domain of belief here, and nothing that Farrell offers so far on this score changes our agnosticism. He points to the poor quality of the UFO evidence overall, which is a given – but says nothing about the anomalous cases that have resisted explanation, which are the only cases that really matter. Fermi’s Paradox doesn’t help either, since the whole paradox is based on the assumption that “They” are not “Here,” which begs the very question at issue. Farrell undoubtedly has good reasons for his skepticism, but we see no basis for treating it as scientific knowledge as opposed to a personal belief like God.

We have said that human ignorance about UFOs is the most fundamental question at stake in the paper, because only if we are right about that is there a puzzle then to be explained (the state’s inaction). Judging from the comments on the Monkey Cage and other blogs in response to Farrell’s post many readers will not concede their ignorance, and as such are unable to take the paper seriously. We remain to be convinced by those who dismiss the existence of the puzzle, and indeed are tempted to interpret the haste and surety of the dismissals as evidence of the very taboo our article sets out to explain. However, to his credit Farrell gives us the benefit of the doubt and moves on to engage our solution to the puzzle as well. Here he makes three basic criticisms of our claim that the failure of modern states to seriously investigate UFOs stems from a metaphysical threat to anthropocentric sovereignty.

First, Farrell argues that the empirical evidence presented in the paper is inadequate to justify our explanatory claims. We fully agree; as a matter of social science, a thorough process tracing of causal mechanisms, or at least a genealogy, would be necessary before one could accept our explanation with confidence. Earlier versions of the paper in fact contained the beginnings of such a genealogy, but word limits and reviewers’ concerns that this section was too “sociological” for Political Theory, conspired to leave it on the editing room floor. However, our intent in the paper is not in any case to test our theory: it is to demonstrate the existence of an unacknowledged puzzle, and then, in the spirit of systematic theorization, offer what we think is a plausible solution to it. We recognize that our theory might be empirically wrong. But in that case what is the correct solution to the puzzle? We welcome Farrell’s thoughts on the matter.

Second, Farrell thinks that we neglect evidence that directly undermines our theory, namely the SETI program, which was funded for a few years by the U.S. government. However, Farrell assumes that the discovery of intelligent alien life by SETI would be “equally problematic for the notion of anthropocentric sovereignty” as the UFO ET. In fact, as we argue in the paper, with any ETs safely far away, success in SETI would pose no physical or ontological threat to anthropocentric sovereignty on Earth, both of which are necessary for the metaphysical threat to have political import. In this regard SETI’s commitment to looking for alien life only at a great distance, and strident opposition to UFO research, seems if anything only to reinforce the puzzle.

Finally, Farrell points out that there are lots of left-field claims that states do not study, and in most cases it is probably not because of anthropocentric sovereignty. Again we agree, but so what? Sure, it would be great to find “a single mechanism to explain this seeming regularity,” but what if there isn’t one – how does that bear on our hypothesis about the specific mechanism in the UFO case? Moreover, we would take strong issue with Farrell’s claim that the scientific evidence for other phenomena neglected by the state – he lists prayer, astrology, and Scientology – is “at least as good” as that about UFOs. To our knowledge none of these leaves radar tracks in F-16 gun sights.

A compelling critique of our theory would identify significant empirical, theoretical, and/or logical problems with our argument about the anthropocentric structure of modern rule. Farrell provides a useful reminder that, in the absence of systematic empirical work the argument should be taken as unproven – a point we readily concede. However, his criticisms offer no grounds for thinking that it is wrong, while we offer an extensive theoretical rationale for why it just might be right.

In sum, we know from Farrell’s other work that he, too, is a “very smart guy.” Think harder Henry! After 5 drafts and 50 sets of written comments from other scholars, if our argument could be so easily dismissed we would have figured that out long ago, and certainly wouldn’t be putting this out in the public sphere now. You’ve written a critique of our paper as social science, which is fine; but in the process failed utterly to confront the larger political question – whether human beings really know that UFOs are not ETs, or just dogmatically believe it because of a commitment to anthropocentric metaphysics. And come on other, even more negative commentators – step up to the intellectual plate! By actually engaging (hell, try even reading!) the paper, rather than resorting to name calling based on just the abstract. In the end our theory may prove to be wrong, but the puzzle is far too consequential to be dismissed out of hand.

Raymond Duvall and Alexander Wendt