UFOs and the Longing for the Unidentified

“During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 there was an exponential increase in UFO sightings throughout the West.”

“The Italian writing collective Wu Ming recently published UFO 78, a novel whose principal plot is set between March and May 1978.”

“In it, the kidnapping of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades is intertwined with the great wave of UFO sightings that occurred in Italy that year.”

“The novel closely follows another book, La Q di Qomplotto [The Q of Qonspiracy] (2021), in which a member of the Wu Ming collective developed an anticapitalist take on conspiratorial thinking, taking Qanon as his case study.”

“the Italian collective interprets the return of UFOs into our collective imagination and the “longing for the unidentified” not only as a symptom of climate anxiety and our  post-pandemic predicament, but also as the manifestation of a “utopian impulse,” an attempt to escape a system that forces us to continuously identify ourselves while suffocating any future perspective of radical change.”

“When human beings feel cornered, constrained, oppressed, distressed, they turn their eyes to the sky, to the firmament.”

“The act of looking at the starry sky is the prelude to any liberation, any revolution.”

“Is it any coincidence that the latter term originated from stargazing? The “Copernican revolution,” from Immanuel Kant onward, is a metaphor for epochal change, for a reversal of perspectives, for entry into a new paradigm of knowledge.”

“looking at the sky broadens the perception of space and therefore of possibility, relieves the head from the ballasts of the present, allows one to think more freely — the verb “to consider” comes from being cum sidera, in the company of the stars — and therefore to aspire to something else and better. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).”

“people jump to conclusions about UFOs, in today’s world as in 1978 Italy, because there’s a widespread longing for the unidentified.”

“The unidentified is liberating.”

“We tend to call a light in the sky a UFO, that is, an unidentified object, as a reaction to a world around us that constantly, aggressively requires us to identify ourselves, to continually declare who we are, where we come from, which side we’re on.”

“Emergency as an instrumentum regni grounds a reality that allows itself to be described and explained in one way, and one way only: the official way, that of state-capital-media power.”

“A world in which everything has been definitively classified, cataloged, quantified, and certified would be a world where imagination has died, therefore where humanness has died.”

“On February 15, President Biden declared that the last three objects shot down were not spy balloons but “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.””

“Picoballons run on solar power, so they can fly for a very long time. According to some estimates, 2,000 are launched every day.”

“It is most likely that the object taken down in Canada was a picoballoon named K9YO-15, which started its trip in Illinois on October 10.”

“While it takes only 30 dollars to assemble and launch a picoballoon, each AIM-9X Sidewinder missile — the kind used for shoot-downs — costs $400000. Assuming and not conceding that the first object was indeed a spy balloon, and considering that at least one strike was unsuccessful, the U.S. spent $1.5 million to pull down, in all likelihood, some nerd’s balloon and two flying wrecks.”

“The episodes summarized took place in the daytime sky, which is very different from the nocturnal vault.”

“At night — light pollution permitting — we are cum sidera; at night we can let our thoughts run free, and think bigger. By contrast, the daytime sky is nothing but the atmosphere as seen from below. And today the atmosphere disquiets us as it’s never disquieted us before, even though most of us chase away such thoughts in order to avoid having to face their implications.”

“As we write, it hasn’t rained for two months.”

“You see it, but you chase the ensuing thought away: if we’re already at this point in the winter, this summer is going to be catastrophic. And, in the long term — although not even that long — will this place just become one big desert?”

“These questions can crush you, that’s why you end up thinking of something else, and on and on, avoiding bad news, developments whose enormity are enough to sicken any of us”

“But repressed elements return. Climate anxiety manifests itself in other forms. Instead of rain, something else appears in the sky: spy-balloons, Chinese surveillance technologies, alien threats… These are unconscious metaphors, manifestations of our climate anxiety.”

“They enact the threat of the future, the future that we either repress, or — as with the conspiracy fantasies about “chemtrails” and “climate warfare” — imagine through cognitive biases, forcing it into more usual and “manageable” patterns.”

“Certainly The Economist, among the staunchest defenders of capitalist realism, can’t acknowledge this impulse while devoting an entire article to the new, increasingly sophisticated ways of searching the universe for extraterrestrial life.”

“the article and some of the hypotheses it illustrates confirm that the capitalist imagination is gripped by a circular paranoia”

“This sounds almost like a response to what controversial Trotskyist guru J. Posadas wrote in June 1968.”

“any civilization capable of intergalactic travel had to be superior to the capitalist one”

“Posadas explained,

Capitalism feels that it has been made to look inferior, faced with a system that it sees as superior. People draw the conclusion that capitalism is useless. [Confronted with UFOs, people] say “Look at that! And you, what are you any good for?” The ruling class feels diminished [and tries] to spread the impression that this is fantasy, so people will not think that there are superior forms of relations and that capitalism is incapable of reaching this level.”

“Decades later, capitalist realism responds by saying: make no mistake, if other civilizations exist, they think just like we capitalists do. If we had the power to consume entire stars to draw energy from them, we’d do it, wouldn’t we?”

“Only an imagination capable of reaching beyond capitalism will enable us to draw together these disparate expressions of utopian impulse, beginning with the desire for the unidentified, and direct them toward a change.”

“Some of us are preparing for that change, even if it seems we’re only staring at the sky.”