Whose Truth Is Out There?: UFOs and Spiritual-Communicative Knowledge Production

How do meaning-making strategies surrounding the “UFO phenomenon” intersect with “religion”? This paper explores the call-and-response between mainstream institutional UFO denial and grassroots subcultural knowledge production. The UFO phenomenon and associated notions of non-human intelligence destabilize hegemonic Western paradigms. Those in the UFO community navigate this fraught terrain through four distinguishable truth-seeking orientations: 1) speculative-political, 2) investigative-scientific, 3) communicative-spiritual, and 4) reconstructive-experiential. Symbolic boundaries and appeals to authority, experience, and science position UFO knowledge relative to mainstream institutions. Communicative-spiritual knowledge production, the third mode, is oriented vis-à-vis the spiritual-but-not-religious milieu as well as religious orthodoxies. In the U.S., UFO communities bypass both cautious Catholic openness and fundamentalist Christian demonization of UFOs to improvisationally bricolage Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, esoteric, and New Age elements into UFO-based spiritualities. The paper will conclude with two subcultural case studies of attempts at communication with non-human intelligences and the hierarchies of knowledge thereby reproduced or subverted.