UFOs, the X-Files and Bureaucrat Epistemology
With all the recent disclosures from the military about UFOs, it’s only appropriate that I’ve started to binge watch the X-Files on Hulu. There’s something wonderfully nostalgic about this kind of science fiction storytelling that’s played totally straight and dramatically. It’s also gotten me thinking as I’ve been writing my recent Palladium Article on the relationship between science and state ideology.
The report on UFOs, coming from the head of the US intelligence community, just landed hours before writing. It’s a fascinating document, not for what it says about UFOs (next to nothing), but what it says about the epistemology of the intelligence community. This is a field where there exists extreme unknowns, out of the 144 cases mentioned in the report, only one could be explained. There are of course obvious biases, the threat to national security presented by the possibility that these phenomena are meddling by a foreign power is trumped up despite the fact the report says no intelligence of such an operation exists. And yet, what comes across most clearly is the scientific progress made by the UAPTF, our government UFO hunters. A process has been standardized by the Navy and Air Force to document these cases, and the UAPTF intends to place them all in a central database which will allow them to algorithmically assess the dataset for patterns. The FAA is being brought into the documentation process, and there is talk of looking back on old radar data for evidence.
This is a far cry of the titular X-Files, which are literal manila files in a cabinet in the J Edgar Hoover building basement. Sporadic, anecdotal, shadowy, these reports hint at some deeper truth which is constantly beyond grasp. The UAPTF, by all accounts, was also a small office with a mission to document the unexplained, and which is now asking the Senate for greater resources. We are quite lucky that in reality the government spooks, the bureaucrats, the military brass, are also bound by the same processes of knowledge generation as the rest of us.
Whether or not the military has secret crash-site evidence of UFOs, which has been hinted at in some reports, the data and analysis which the UAPTF is generating would not exist had it not been for the hard work of data collection and documentation. There were individuals and reports that would have not been known by any central body let alone a shadowy government cabal had it not been for the project kicked off by former senator Harry Reid. The X-Files sometimes hinted at the idea that perhaps Agent Mulder was in fact doing this work for those behind the scenes unintentionally, but for the most part the knowledge that individuals like the Smoking Man posses seems to have an almost arcane, mystic quality to it. It is information passed down by those in the role before them, knowledge that comes from their very position of authority.
The Smoking Man is a very, horrifyingly, real archetype in the intelligence community. The individual tasked with committing atrocities, and bought off not with just money or titles, but with the thrilling honor of being in on the secrets of history. It was remarked by Hegel somewhere, as well as Marx and Hal Draper, that bureaucracy requires secrecy for it to function, in order for its outcomes and authority to truly appear as a force above and beyond class society. But so is this secrecy a necessary aspect of creating desire and motivation for the horrors of the most professional-repressive aspects of the state: the intelligence community.
When I was studying civil military relations, my professor told me about his encounters with the mercenaries who offered their services in overthrowing governments in Africa. These men are prideful creatures, their ability to make these accomplished facts giving them access, by transference, to all the mystic authority of the state. In the case of Africa, the mysticism is sometimes non-figurative, with rumors about witchcraft circling around many significant strongmen. The Smoking Man is a fetish, the power he has isn’t the power of his physical violence, which is still very real, but in his secrets. The idea that with his special authority comes access to the arcane wisdom of the state and history.
The X-Files actually does an excellent job of showing how hollow this fetish is - these kind of men in the post-war period were consumed with hatching conspiracies behind the scenes like assassinating Castro and other figures, doing terrible experiments in wars like Vietnam. These machinations never did move the needle in the Cold War, which was decided by far larger structural factors. These men are small, and only in their pretense do they have power, the power to invoke the fetish of the Smoking Man who inspires others to carry on the horrors swept under the rug by the intelligence community.
We can see in some of the coverage of our UFOs evidence of the Smoking Man fetish, in the way those involved within the government withhold their knowledge selectively, with the effect of making them seem larger, more knowledgeable than they really are. This is true whether we are speaking of alien spacecraft debris or Chinese missile space-magic.
At all times there is a tug-a-war to the twin natures of the bureaucrat, the professional and the state-secret aspects. At its most professional, the US government is capable of putting together impressive scientific investigations, whether we are speaking about the scientific work of creating the atom bomb or the internet, or economic research taking place at the FDIC or Federal Reserve. At its most state secret, everything becomes a pretense for an agenda, whether it be personal or political.
In the intelligence community especially, secrecy can undermine any kind of scientific investigation. The CIA and military intelligence has before been swindled by pseudoscientific garbage when it comes to mind control and psychic powers. At the same time, the intense documentation and archiving that is done by the intelligence community has proven a fruitful source of data for scientific inquiry. In some third world countries, the publicly available CIA archives provide more historical documentation than any domestic source. One can only hope that after the propaganda purposes of the UFO hunt have passed, the dataset created by the UAPTF will serve to further our understanding of one of these aerial phenomena.