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Paper short abstract:

Through my ethnography of Chilean ufology (2019 to present), in this paper I unwind the ufology expert´s premise that the UFO is essentially an unrepresentable object and attempt a recursive anthropology that seeks outside of itself tools to elucidate the non-conceptual.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have often dismissed the conceptual “dark”, those absurd or paradoxical experiences that interlocutors are at odds to explain themselves. What is not known is taken as somehow ontologically extractive, an absence to be explained later on with fuller knowledge. Paul Stoller has referred to these experiences as “not-knowing-your-backside-from-your-frontside” (2021). In Chile, some ufologists maintain that UFO phenomena is essentially constituted by absurdities and what they show us about the limits of our representational thought (much like koans). For example, there are multiple witnesses of roadside UFO crashes, where aliens are mechanically repairing their craft at the side of the road, or UFO appearances that seem to mimic UFOs in movies. Through my ethnography of Chilean ufology (2019 to present), in this paper I unwind the ufology expert´s premise that the UFO is essentially an unrepresentable object. I suggest a look at a school of negative theology that posits a cosmogonic force to unknowability, absurdity and paradox. Ever-elusive, the UFO phenomenon presents itself as a game of mirrors, through which it both envelopes and creates itself. But absurd events lie in a void, an in-between or a cloud of not-knowing that also pushes us, its documenters, to places that recognise our own mis-recognitions and incomprehensions – our limits as ethnographers of social realities. Thus, following Žižek´s notion of parallax (2016), I argue that there is a gap between two perspectives (within the ufological absurd and its witness, as well as between this absurd and anthropology) that precludes a final narrative.