Q REPORTS (Semanario Universidad) In Washington, today there is more talk about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) than about the war in Ukraine or the recent visit of the centennial Henry Kissinger to China, and around this mystery, which for years has aroused the imagination of human beings fly over an endless series of myths and legends that have exploded in the last week.
The existing literature on the approach to those extraterrestrial beings that inhabit other galaxies and that every time they succumb to the temptation of visiting the small planet Earth is copious and appeals to all kinds of arguments, most of the time improbable, with the sole desire to alert the population that a being foreign to human DNA can always appear in the crowd.
The appearance on July 26, 2023, of David Grusch, ex-military and ex-intelligence officer of the United States Air Force, in the House of Representatives of Congress, before which he declared that that country was in possession of “alien spacecraft and biological remains non-humans”, made it spread like wildfire among skeptics about the UFO phenomenon and among those who have been warning of interstellar life for many decades.
Around this issue there is a literary subgenre that appeals to the presence on earth of men with diving suits, infiltrators and flying saucers that defy gravity and beings with an intelligence greater than human.
Encyclopedia of close encounters with UFOs by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Juan A. Fernández Peris; Aeronautical Ufology, a new concept in the study of UFOs by Rodrigo Bravo Garrido and Juan Castillo Cornejo; UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government and UFOs, S.O.S to Humanity by Juan José Benítez; UFOs and human sciences, a thematic study of 50 years of bibliography, and UFOs, what a scam by Ricardo Ocampo are some of the many titles that are in circulation in relation to the aforementioned matter, which caused a commotion in the US capital with the statements de Grusch about the disclosures he made.
Contrary to those who subscribe to an ideological and discursive vision almost automatically, there is the scientific community, which maintains that UFOs are nothing more than a narrative, built on the basis of discourse and rhetoric, which places the fact on a strictly cultural, given the great facility that human beings have to create worlds, a faculty that on earth is exclusive to homo sapiens, who find it useful and pleasant to articulate stories, tales, novels, biographies and dramaturgy of the most varied themes.
Conspiracy and language
The language of conspiracies is not exclusive to politics nor did it appear for the first time on the electoral scene with the assumption of power by Donald Trump in 2016, after winning an election in which the truth was crushed in a thousand ways throughout the months that preceded his arrival at the White House, but it is also the order of the day among ufologists, who are dedicated to spreading the presence of extraterrestrial beings on the small blue planet, where today 7 billion people live.
The first conspiracy idea is that the military has appropriated UFOs and the crew members who have piloted those ships, from which a series of technologies have been generated that, otherwise, today would be impossible to have developed. on earth.
The cultural substrate to articulate this type of vision finds a great ally in language, while poets succumb in their attempts to tell with pinpoint precision the reasons for their hearts or what the rose means without why, about which Jorge Luis Borges spoke so much in his different public appearances.
In what Grusch affirmed is the great key to what is related to UFOs: the former officer explained that he had not seen it, that they had told him. This constant of second-hand references is essential in the UFO narrative and that before passes through the inescapable sieve of language.
Hence, the idea of Guillermo de Humboldt, from 1805, in his letters to Christian Friedrich Wolf, that there is no thought without language, but thought in language, is what makes this tool the great ally of the human race. , that same lineage that maintains that on earth since time immemorial, already collected in the Bible, there have been extraterrestrial visitors.
The philosopher José María Valverde, one of the most important Hispanic scholars of Humboldt’s work, had thus synthesized the thought of the German scholar: “(…) It is simply that all our mental activity is language, that is, it has of being in words or searching for words. In other words: language is the reality and realization of our mental life, which it structures according to its forms, its nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.; its syntax, so diverse in each language; his phrasing melodies…”.
This is how Valverde advanced his analysis in his doctoral thesis titled Guillermo de Humboldt y la filosofía del lenguaje, Editorial Gredos, 1955: “The reality, then, is not that —as is usually assumed among many educated people— there is first a world of fixed concepts , clear, universal, univocal, and then let’s take some of them to communicate them by fitting them into their corresponding names; rather, we get our concepts from the use of language.
And he finished off his approach in this way: “Certainly, hardly anyone tends to deal with it, because we tend to take language for granted, as if it were natural, the same as breathing.”
In the absence of scientific evidence, the popularizers of the UFO phenomenon have to resort to the language of conspiracies and mysteries, in which the military, especially the Americans, become archetypes whose function is to hide, against everything and against all, the findings in relation to those beings coming from interstellar space, because if their presence were disclosed, the world order could be subverted, to such an extent that chaos and darkness would reign.
From that speculative effort there is only one step to myth and legend because the sightings, the encounters with crew members and the experiences of the contactees follow no other path than the endless chain of language.
The UFO phenomenon, which currently holds Washington and the world’s scientific community in the spotlight on an issue that has historically been marginal, survives thanks to an endless chain of secondhand attributions.
That is to say, there is a discourse that this one saw, this one said, that one was told, without conclusive and irrefutable evidence to date having emerged that among the earthlings, today threatened by global warming and the overpopulation of the planet, they have lived Beings from other galaxies, with other values, another genetic conformation, and who have the capacity to manage time and space differently from what Albert Einstein and the finite human species had to undergo, who historically appealed to the gods to try to explain the reasons for its appearance on the globe.
Scientific confrontation
The fact that Washington has placed the UFO phenomenon at the center of the discussion at the discursive and political level, can not only be a smoke screen to divert attention from the parallel problems that afflict the Joe Biden government, such as his son Hunter, accused of not paying his taxes on time between 2017 and 2018, and of possessing a firearm, despite being a known drug addict, which in the United States is against the law, but has also put into question I vile the scientific community, which maintains an open skepticism with this type of approach to matters historically considered paranormal and esoteric.
Hence the existence, for example, of the statements of Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, who recently explained that he had rescued the remains of a meteorite that fell in the Pacific, in Papua New Guinea, whose materials revealed that they were outside the orbit of the galaxy to which the earth belongs.
This has made the confrontation between scientists open, because there is a game of discourse between what is science and what is speculation.
In this way, before Loeb’s repeated affirmations, the scientist Steve Desch, from the University of Arizona, maintained, as he published in The New York Times:
“People are sick of hearing Avi Loeb’s outlandish claims. He contaminates the real science, because he combines the real science that we develop with this ridiculous sensationalism and dominates the conversation ”.
Once again, the discussion on this taboo subject for humanity, such as UFOs, once again rests in the formal field of language, until now the greatest asset in its favor.
Regarding Loeb’s statement that he was able to recover extraterrestrial material in the Pacific Ocean, Desch was forceful, always according to the report A scientist plunges into the search for extraterrestrial life. His colleagues are skeptical of The New York Times: “It is a true collapse of the arbitration process and the scientific method. It is most demoralizing and infuriating.”
The perfect case
The world of UFOs has been the subject of a vast literature that deals with sightings and encounters and, in this way, the “researchers”, as those who are dedicated to the investigation of the appearances of extraterrestrials call themselves, filled in the years 60, 70, 80 and 90 the newspapers of information related to the interstellar beings.
One of the cases that required the most ink was the information published in 1966 in the Madrid newspaper El Caso about the presence of a flying saucer in the community of Aluche.
From there, a magnificent chronicle was forged, all imaginary, of how the beings from Ummo began to contact those attending a gathering that took place near Cibeles, in the La Ballena Alegre café, where a postal worker, Fernando Sesma, and his fellow students articulated an entire worldview of the universe that would lead them to the indisputable conclusion that extraterrestrial life existed.
Thus, the Ummo case became an emblematic element that included UFO photographs and there were even telephone calls and letters through which the Ummites made special requests to the chosen earthlings.
Information about Ummo kept Madrid and almost all of Spain in suspense, a Spain that still lived in the shadow of the Franco dictatorship, and whose citizens needed escape routes to bear the burdens of conservatism and isolation.
Personalities of different types and origins confirmed the Ummo case, including the playwright Buero Vallejo, who participated in the meetings of La Ballena Alegre.
One of the characters who emerged and who validated the Ummite discourse, even though at that very moment he said crazy things, was the Catholic priest Enrique López Guerrero, who stood out in the town of El Alcor, in Seville.
The priest affirmed that Jesus Christ, before making his appearance in Palestine, had evangelized the Ummites and that there he came to be called Jesus Christ Woa, and all this happened while the Ummites continued to maintain a feverish communication with the contactees.
The Ummo phenomenon grew and grew, to the point that there was a group that became a sect, which was later accused of sexual abuse, especially of minors.
The journalist Manuel Carballal was one of those who contributed the most to dismantle the Ummite discourse and managed to get the intellectual author of the montage, José Luis Jordan Peña, to confess that everything had been his invention and that he had gone further than he intended. : “It was my mistake. I’m sorry. My intention was to make believe that there was a group of extraterrestrials that had reached France and from there spread to Spain, South America, etc. But it must be said that he did not allude to any sect. Believers were free to believe or not. What happens is that, over time, some people have become fanatical about Ummo and have turned it into a cult. A thing that was not dangerous was made dangerous.
Eduardo Bravo, who is the author of the book Ummo, the incredible is true, explains in a press article that to this day the Ummites continue to send messages, now through Twitter.
The Washington soap opera
Although the Cold War between the United States and the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is not at stake, those who have closely followed the statements given in Congress by Grusch and two other officials consider that behind carrying out the discussion of the aliens to Congress, there is a clear ideology and an objective yet to be elucidated, just a year and a half from the next presidential elections on November 5, 2024.
Although the Pentagon denied possession of alien spacecraft and non-human remains, and NASA itself announced, through its director, Bill Nelson, that in the next month they will provide a report from a committee of scientists, the mists around why The United States has wanted to put UFOs at the center of the debate, keeping the same political analysts on edge.
While all this is happening, the world’s ufologists celebrate the validation of their niche, for the simple fact that the US Congress brought the issue back into vogue, and this is how the series and books related to UFOs have gained a second life in the last week.
Invasion to the Earth; Annihilation; War of the Worlds; Valerian and the city of a thousand planets; Paul; UFOs, top secret project. Declassified; Being from Planet X: An Otherworldly Enigma; and UFO: Against the Alien Invasion are just some of the films and series that can be found in a vast spectrum dedicated to audiovisual production on aliens.
Washington, which has always been so cautious and rigorous in relation to ufology, has made it fashionable, has revived its myths and its scope, and has unleashed a war of discourses between science and sectors that follow the paranormal, esoteric and that they are convinced that beyond the galaxy to which the earth belongs, the orb is populated by intelligent creatures and that they have a superior technological capacity.
The liturgy of UFOs, that cultural heritage that remains hidden in the collective mind of a large part of humanity, broke into the American capital and has revived, like never before, a debate between science and pseudoscience, with the discourse and the language involved, which only leaves one element more than clear: the innate and infinite capacity of man to fabricate realities.
Read the original article by José Eduardo Mora in Spanish at SemanarioUniversidad.com
