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- Convenor:
-
Aaron French
(Universität Erfurt)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Aaron French
(Universität Erfurt)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lambda 3 room
- Sessions:
- Thursday 7 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Short Abstract:
This panel builds on scholarship exploring the intersection of religion, technology, and the UFO phenomenon. Recently the stigma associated with UFOs appears to be fading. What does this mean for religion and religious studies scholars and the relationship between religion and technology?
Long Abstract:
In 2017, the NY Times published a story detailing a U.S. Department of Defense program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which had been secretly funding research to study UFOs. The article introduced new terminology, referring to such objects as UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). This facilitated massive intellectual engagement with UFOs in the public spotlight, especially in the US and UK. In 2022, congressional hearings were held to analyze UAP reports. Additionally the US Navy succeeded in developing an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and a recent National Defense Authorization Act established a permanent office for reporting on UAPs.
Some scholars have already begun approaching the UFO question. Jeffery Kripal (2010; 2016) argued for the importance of studying authors outside the academy who take "impossible" phenomena seriously. Kripal also co-authored a book with a well-known UFO "experiencer." Diana Walsh Pasulka (2019) published a groundbreaking book that includes an ethnographic study of scientists and engineers claiming to have a connection to the UFO phenomenon. She illustrates the role technology plays in this developing "modern myth." Hussein Ali Agrama (2020) published an article suggesting that these developments pose a challenge to secularization and post-secularity.
This panel builds on such scholarship by exploring the intersection of religion, technology, and UFOs. Topics could include: histories of Ufology; New Religious Movements and UFOs; UFOs in esoteric currents; methodological approaches to UFOs and Ufology; the UFO phenomenon approached from non-European perspectives (e.g., jinn); the relationship between mythology, folklore, and UFO encounters.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation attempts a preliminary investigation into the connection between UFOs and modern esotericism.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, the UFO phenomenon has become mainstream and under active consideration by the US government, introducing ideas of time travel, advanced states of evolution, and magical technological abilities into public conversation – all themes that have been found in modern currents of alternative spirituality known as esotericism. Esotericism in the modern context is largely understood as an array of related but differentiated ideas and movements that emerged during Europe's transition to a global modernity. Often this took place in reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, but just as often it was an attempt to synthesize allegedly separate domains of knowledge (e.g. religion, magic, and science) and ways of knowing (e.g. rationally, mystically, scientifically, etc.). What's important is that the modern groups and thinkers now associated with esotericism challenged the view that the cosmos was spiritually uninhabited and only scientifically explainable. For them, a much wider perspective was required. Is there a connection between the development of modern esotericism and the UFO phenomenon? If so, do they share a specific type of modern religiosity, a way of knowing the world, which includes ideas of planetarity, evolution, technics, outer space, various forms of monism, and interaction with non-human intelligences? This presentation will attempt a preliminary investigation into this connection in order to offer us, as so-called moderns, living in the modern world, a chance to enter a liminal state, an esoteric reality, to get outside ourselves and see the world from a different perspective – a perspective that could help us better understand theories of disenchantment and secularization and their potential pitfalls.
Paper short abstract:
In this talk, I consider a ritual called “CE-5” that began in Peru in the 70s but has since gained traction in the US and now around the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Japan and Canada, I argue that CE-5 is a ritual of cosmological transition.
Paper long abstract:
In 1972, Dr. Allen Hynek, a professor of astronomy at Northwestern University, classified three levels of close encounters people report having with unidentified flying objects: First, a visual sighting of a UFO less than 150 meters away; second, the UFO is observed to have had a physical or physiological effect on the immediate environment; and third, an animated entity is observed either operating the UFO or in the surrounding environment. Later ufologists would tack on two additional types of close encounters. A close encounter of the fourth kind is classified by abduction into the UFO. The fifth entails communication between human beings and the operators of UFOs, whether they be extraterrestrials, time-travellers, or interdimensional beings. In this talk, I consider a ritual called “CE-5” that began in Peru in the 70s but has since gained traction in the US and now around the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Japan and Canada, I argue that CE-5 is a ritual of cosmological transition. Through skyward meditation and intentions directed toward interspecies telepathy with the operators of UFO, CE-5 provokes in participants a unique form of cosmic consciousness in which the universe is viewed not as dead empty space, but as an animate expanse, teeming with intelligent life. This perspective, nurtured by CE-5 ritual practice, adds a cosmic dimension to participants’ views of self and society at home, here on Earth.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to propose a study of the singular psychological view elaborated by Carl Gustav Jung regarding the UFO phenomenon. Seeing flying saucers in the sky is considered, in his essay devoted to this topic, as the unconscious expression of a religious need, currently unsatisfied.
Paper long abstract:
In his essay Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), Carl Gustav Jung had focus his interest on the UFO phenomenon through the lens of his own analytical psychology. Some letters, previous to this essay, reflect however his critical position on the topic of flying saucers, lacking in his opinion of a serious empirical data basis to decide whether or not such things seen in the sky could really exist (Letter to the Weltwoche Journal, July 9th 1954 or Letter to Major Donald Keyhoe, August 16th 1958). Without arguing in favor or rather against the materiality of UFOs, Jung demonstrate that this phenomenon reveals an unconscious motive serving as a compensation of the conscious self. Flying saucers constitute a modern myth, responding to the human need of religion in a time where old myths are becoming meaningless for the man of the 20th century. Facing the in-vogue imaginary of alien life and technology increasingly powerful, seeing UFO appears to rest upon a profound incompatibility between the man and the universe, but also between the modern man and himself. Focusing on the jungian theory of religion, as developed previously in another essay Psychology and Religion (1936), we will try to understand how Jung’s religious perspective can be used to think every new modern myth, such as UFOs. In a second time, we will wonder about this specific myth of flying saucers by investigating which kind of ancient myth this modern one could seek to replace.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the integration of science, new technologies and spirituality in the Raëlian movement and contextualizes followers’ cosmology within various influential religious currents.
Paper long abstract:
Technologies of various kinds have been central to the outlook and discourses of members of the Raëlian movement. Established in France in the mid-1970s, and categorized as a UFO religion, followers of Raëlism interpret the biblical Elohim as an extraterrestrial group of advanced beings that created humanity and will return to humankind. The founder of Raëlism, Claude Vorilhon, averred he had been brought to the Elohim's home planet, which he described as a technological utopia where robots carried out the work leaving the people to live a carefree life. Advanced machinery was from the outset married to the conceptualization of a spiritual idyll. Their interest in science and technology has often been the media talking point, particularly in the 1990s when the biotechnology company Clonaid, part of the International Raelian Movement, made controversial claims about cloning a baby they named Eve. Cloning is significant as part of the cosmology in that the afterlife may involve the “recreation” of individual human beings by the Elohim by way of “transmission of their cellular data”. This paper explores the reconciliation of science and religion – often presented as dichotomous – in the Raëlian cosmology as well as the influence of New Age and various esoteric currents on the integration of science and spirituality in this new religious movement.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focusses on references to ufological material in the wider sense of the word (and including the ancient astronauts-theory) in one of the younger Japanese new religious movements, Kofuku no kagaku viz. Happy Science, founded in 1986.
Paper long abstract:
The Japanese new religious movement Kōfuku no kagaku (literally, ‘the science of happiness;’ presenting itself internationally as Happy Science), founded in 1986, is in many ways a typical example of the most recent phase of new religions in Japan. Amongst its many features the interest in several ufological topics is an interesting aspect. The contribution is an attempt to interpret these teachings and their evolvement within the emergence, the early history and the further development of the movement, but also in the wider context of the recent history of Japanese religions in general. A particular focus will be laid on one specific aspect of ufological traditions, namely the ancient astronauts theory, that plays a prominent role in Happy Science. References to this concept are an important ingredient in the movement’s specific view of history that is characterized by the idea of a sequence of various cultures (including the lost continents Atlantis and Mu). Standard topics of the vast ancient astronauts-literature (obviously inspired by the books and films of the Swiss-German author Erich von Däniken as its best known propagator) are constantly referred to as additional proof for the presupposed history. In this regard the concept of (spiritual) ‘science’ as purported by the movement is of primary interest as it is intrinsically interwoven with the the topic of ufological references. All that is prominently presented in many media productions of Happy Science that include manga but also full-length, professionally made anime as part of a highly developed and thorough publication strategy. The paper will try to situate this specific material in the context of the movement’s teachings and the wider religio-historical setting, i.e. recent Japanese religious and cultural history.