Aliens Moved My Cheese

When it comes to extraterrestrials the skeptic and believer share a small piece of ground, but not in a neighborly way. The conflict between the fundamentalist skeptic and the devout believer is a classic “tragedy of the commons”. In a shared reality, individuals acting independently in their own self-interest, be that interest emotional, psychological, financial, or disciplinary, engage in behaviors contrary to the common good, thus collectively depleting the resource. In this case, emptying reality of meaning, devaluing experience, and divorcing that ever so unique and elusive construct we call consciousness from the compelling justification for its existence, that is, to derive meaning from a universe that can often seem absurd.

Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus once said, “The absurd is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent in existence of Descartes’ methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest”. The essays that follow are at heart absurdist, depending on our mood at the time, either a strange breed of stand-up philosophy, or a protest staged on the tiny swath of healthy grass that remains on the common pasture. We seek an approximation of truth, a snatch-and-grab of a little piece of objective reality, but never at the cost of meaning. We may not always believe that aliens are real, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t here.

Aficionados of the paranormal oft bemoan the lack of dialogue between anomalists, skeptics, and methodological natural scientists, but are loathe to open themselves to criticism, based on the idea that their ideas are ruled out by the ontology of the rational a priori, seemingly unaware that it is through a multitude of voices that we derive meaning, and should we desire an intellectual home for the supernatural in a world dominated by practicality, we should not eschew attempts to negotiate a space where the improbable is not directly equated with the impossible. This is just such a dialogue, filled with apparent lunacy, discomfort, and cognitive dissonance, but ever self-consciously aware of the odd logic of possibility, the potential for absurdity to free us from our existential chains, the pernicious notion that just because life may be meaningless, it does not preclude the earnest search for reality, and in fact it is precisely the search that makes us endearingly human.

This is an experiment in juxtaposition, a kind of hymn to what veteran anomalist Greg Bishop referred to as “the excluded middle”, a song about those facts that don’t fit. And like many musical experiments, there is a beauty to be found in jarring juxtaposition or as musician Rufus Wainwright said, “Using the most beautiful line to say the most horrific thing - I think one of the main things in songwriting is definitely friction between the words and the melody”. Our words are about earnest exploration, the melody that of the absurd.

The potential for life on other worlds has captured our imagination since the moment we began to conceive of the Earth as simply another planetary body in a universe filled with terrestrial flotsam and jetsam. Our ability to conceive of a greater reality in which we were not the center, allowed us to begin asking questions about the uniqueness of sentient life for which we had the dismal sample of one. Consider the absurdity of a reality in which only one species ever evolved with the capacity to consider reality. Tautology makes me smile. It also makes me drink. It is a telling fact that the closer we get to planting ourselves on other worlds, the more robust our stories about the peccadillos of extraterrestrial visitors become. Is this the inevitable convergence of fantasy with reality?

Several years before putting pen to paper, I conceived of an experiment involving an open conversation between a skeptic and an anomalist founded on the idea that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the service of an ever elusive “truth” was an overly optimistic ideal. I just wanted to be free to let my mind wander, absent ego and willing to be amused by logical contradictions, without rejecting them solely based on their defiance of such a constraining behavior as refusing to be constrained by syllogism. My version of “I think, therefore have you heard the one about the rabbi and priest who walk into a bar”. Choosing the right skeptic – therein lies the rub. Those of us of an adequately ruminative or reflective nature are tough nuts to crack. We want to be objective, but that pesky Freudian“id” keeps asserting itself in subtle ways. The desire to be taken seriously is perhaps one of the main motivating factors of most of the human race in most situations. I determined that in order for this experiment to be successful, I would simply need to collaborate with a skeptic who had other over-arching motivations beyond gainsaying Fortean claims, but nonetheless maintained a sense of humor, and willingness to entertain ideas about the subject in question. The essential element turned out to be sibling rivalry. Thus, I called my older brother, a practical psychologist and devoted skeptic, and hashed out a plan.

The essays that follow are speculative and essentially dialogic, paired in such a way as to circle around many of the questions we have about the existence, intentions, and behavior of extraterrestrials, and while reveling in absurdity nonetheless consider the context in which aliens emerged as an essential element of modern mythology. In essence, this a modern Socratic dialogue, if Socrates had brazenly dared to wear a clown nose while philosophizing and had been a little less into hemlock cocktails. At times the juxtaposition of ideas may be irritatingly inconclusive, but as Socrates himself said, “I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean”.