What happens to human futures when they are organized around the possibility of contact with beings who are, by definition, unknowable? This panel brings together three scholars working at the intersection of religion, science, and culture to examine how extraterrestrial life and intelligence–scientifically speculated, culturally contested, and personally experienced–function as sites where alternative futures are imagined, struggled over, and made livable. Each paper examines communities operating at the margins of both institutional science and mainstream religion that are nonetheless engaged in urgent, consequential work to open new horizons: epistemically, cosmologically, and therapeutically. Together, the papers illuminate how UFO subcultures, alien abduction communities, and the scientific practices of SETI researchers function as laboratories for the anthropology of the future–spaces where competing imaginations contest the shape of what is possible, who has the authority to say so, and what forms of life will be viable.
This paper examines how SETI practitioners use game theory, historical analogy, and policy protocols to predict and control the fundamentally unknowable event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of scientific literature, I argue these methods constitute scientific divination that transforms radical uncertainty into managed risk while simultaneously generating new forms of enchantment. Game-theoretical models depend on non-empirical axioms that conjure particular futures into calculable existence. Historical analogies mobilize sanitized colonial narratives as predictive tools, reading futures in the past. Post-detection protocols impose bureaucratic order onto speculative scenarios, promising control without eliminating surprise. Rather than opposing enchantment, these rational methods produce meta-empirical otherness—potential alien presences that structure present action despite their unknowability and speculative nature. SETI's predictive practices are existential technologies for navigating decisions with species-ending consequences, revealing how prediction operates and enchantment intensifies precisely where empirical grounding fails and rationalization appears most complete.
This paper will provide an overview of the lineage of thought, treatment, and community building that anomalous experiencers have engaged with to make meaning of what has happened to them. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reframes the lives of experiencers, and often their most traumatic moments, not as cultural curiosities but as sites of lived meaning and care within the context of psychiatric history and religious experience.
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.