Flying saucers? Government conspiracies? Psychedelics? Little green men? Just what the fuck are we talking about when we talk about UFOs? Join Leah (Prime) on a guided tour through modern ufology: from nuts-and-bolts to tinfoil hats, Carl Jung to DMT entities, ‘to study the UFO phenomena is, in actual fact, to study pretty much everything.’

In 2022, UFOs are a synecdoche for a constellation of loosely-related subjects: consciousness, ontology, epistemology, spiritual emergence, folklore, mythology.  Against the backdrop of the psychedelic renaissance, rapidly-scaling technology, and emerging global crises, what does the UFO say about alien life? Hell, what does it say about us?

Forget sex, drugs, and politics: UFOs remain the last, ultimate taboo, garnering universal fascination – and derision. The subject’s popularity has surged since the 2017 New York Times’ article by Leslie Kean, but the core inquiry of the topic – are we alone in the universe? – remains one of the most consequential questions in all of human experience. 

In the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson and the Hell’s Angels, Leah’s been embedded in the UFO community like an anthropologist on Mars. In this salon, we’ll explore modern ufology as an interdisciplinary subject and emergent cultural movement. We’ll tackle questions like: What are the main theories about UFOs? Who are the main figures shaping the conversation? What are people actually seeing in the sky? Who are ‘experiencers’? How does the UFO intersect with beatific visions, mysticism, and meditation? (And how much does the government really know?)

Recommended resources: 

• The Invisible Night School – Bryan Sentes on the Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the film)
• Our Wild Kosmos!: An Exo Studies Exploration of the Ontological Status of Non-Human Intelligence
• Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal – Diana Pasulka on Jung, Atheism, Heidegger, and the Dark Night of the Soul