Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

Paranoia is skepticism taken to the point where it becomes faith. In the same way, the UFO narrative takes twentieth-century scientism to the point where it becomes mystical. I mean that in all transparency: It takes the aesthetic paraphernalia of mid-century science (advanced aircraft, faster-than-light travel, gleaming labs, silvery fabrics, shiny implements) and uses them to clothe a story whose whole underlying structure is religious (superior beings watching from above, secret truths revealed only to a few, problems of faith and proof, and so on). Which, again, says nothing about whether people have actually experienced it. Remember how I said that Area 51 was both there and not there at the same time? Spend enough time with these questions and you end up feeling like Augustine, who wrote of God and heavenly creatures that “they neither are nor are not in existence.”