This essay on the aesthetics of ufology grew out of an invitation by M. A. Greenstein to write a piece for WorldArt magazine on the subject, specifically – on the relationship between ufology and the grotesque.  Since this aspect of ufology was not my primary focus, I proposed, instead, a discussion between M.A. and myself to more fully address her interests.  We met twice and recorded our conversations.  After the first audiocassette was sent to World Art for transcription, the magazine decided to cut the length of the feature so we never sent the second recording.  Sections of our first conversation were excerpted and strung together with no editorial input on my part.  Even worse, M.A.’s voice was deleted completely from the final piece, which resulted in a text that came off as a series of disconnected proclamations by me on the subject.  I was, obviously, not pleased with this editorial decision. In this new version of the text, I have combined elements from both discussions.  Unfortunately, the first audiocassette was never returned to us so I was limited to World Art’s published version of the text as my source. Because of this, I was forced to emulate World Art’s approach and excise M.A.’s contribution to the discussion for continuity’s sake.

MK                                                                             

On the Aesthetics of Ufology
(excerpted from an interview with M.A. Greenstein)
1997
by Mike Kelley

Ufology has long interested me as a cultural phenomenon.  It has evolved in many ways since its beginnings in the late Nineteen-Forties (with the sightings of mysterious air-born lights, the so-called “Foo fighters,” by Allied bombers over Europe during World War Two), yet has remained consistent in some regards. I’m particularly drawn to the stream of ufology where there is an almost utopian fixation with the hi-tech image of the flying saucer, but this is paired with an alien being of monstrous form, or other abject elements. One of the most consistent features of ufology is this meeting of hi-tech fetishism and symbolic body loathing.  This aspect of it differentiates the concerns of ufology from a more general cultural fascination with robotics. In most modern art histories, the aesthetics of technical perfection and those that relate to images of the deformed body have been set in counter-opposition. However, in ufology these two aesthetics are set side by side in a less clear relationship.

Ufology pictures an aesthetic collision between a housing structure, the UFO, and an alien element that inhabits this house, in an uncommon aesthetic mixture of the abject and the technological. In the Nineteen-Forties, the Wartime framework of the original UFO sightings rendered the technological aspects of the UFO, itself, frightening.  UFOs were feared as possible examples of unknown enemy military technology.  This concern has faded over time and the technological aspects of the UFO have taken on a different symbolic meaning.  The clean, orderly, and machinic nature of the UFO now acts as a foil for the menacing, unformed, beings that it contains.  It is only this, essentially dramatic, pairing that I would say constitutes the “grotesque” in relation to ufology.  My use of the word grotesque here is meant to point out the incongruous, and what could at this point be meaningless, nature of this combination, and is in this sense a somewhat old-fashioned usage of the term, which was once used to refer to fantastic decorative motifs.  The word, in common parlance, does not have such playful overtones any more.  Nevertheless, it strikes me as an inappropriate word to apply in ufological discourse.   At present, any discussion of ufology would have to be understood as one addressing a negative aesthetic. Despite the fact that the symbolic meaning of its technological component is unclear at this time, the mythologies of contemporary ufology are ones of fear and horror.  UFO abduction narratives often describe disturbing intrusionary practices performed upon the human body. Thus, it seems more proper that ufology be addressed through contemporary discourses attendant to the abject, and not the grotesque.

Painting by Richard Powers; cover of Above and Beyond by A.E. Van Vogt

Very few people now hold views similar to those involved in the “space brother” phenomenon of the Nineteen-Fifties.  This group of UFO devotees drew a comparison between advanced technology and morals.  The assumption was, if aliens have superior machinery they must, likewise, be more socially advanced. This empathic notion of the alien was stressed by the fact that they also looked like us. The film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which depicts a noble alien who comes to Earth to save us from our own destructive proclivities, exemplifies this view of the morally advanced alien and its technology. More often, however, Hollywood alien invasion films of that period depict the alien being as evil and totally other, like the one-eyed blob monster that inhabits the flying saucer in the film Atomic Submarine (1959).  The contrast between the primordial appearance of such a being and the ultra-sophisticated device it pilots appeals to me. It prompts the question of just why there should be such overt design inconsistency between the form of the being and its craft?  The two are so unlike that they are impossible to reconcile.  Its as if I were asked to believe that the pea soup, or refried beans, that inhabit a tin can designed that housing for itself, and that this shell somehow represents its “psychology.”  On the symbolic level, the two forms simply can not have similar meaning.

The pleasure provoked by this incongruity evokes Georges Bataille’s aesthetics of heterogeneity.  Bataille described the similarity he felt between such abject excremental forms as sperm and shit, and the “sacred, divine, or marvelous,” as a byproduct of their shared heterogeneous status as “foreign bodies” relative to our assimilating and homogenous culture.  They are both, in a sense, equally taboo. He gives as an example the image of “a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud”[1] as one that characterizes this unity. The image of the abject blob-like alien is part of a long history of images of foul heavenly masses, sometimes called “star jelly” or “pwdre ser.”  In literary sources and scientific journals spanning the Sixteenth to the early Twentieth Century one may find descriptions of “gelatinous meteors” – falling stars that, when located, reveal themselves as lumps of stinking, white, goo. The evocation of sperm in such accounts is so obvious that such finds were sometimes described as “star shoot.”[2] So, a mythic relationship between the sky and the abject has quite a long history. This conflation of the heavenly with the abject body recalls Bataille’s example of the risen Christ, which simultaneously represents rotting corpse and ascendant being. But, unlike his example, which the social institution of religion has appropriated into culture as a divine image, the abject qualities associated with similar imagery in ufology have maintained their terrifying heterogeneous nature. Ufology always invokes this connection between the heavenly and the abject and, so far, this has not been codified to the point where it could be considered a contemporary religion.

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre conducts an analysis of the “slimy,” attempting to explain why such a quality is so repugnant.  The fact that slime is base, or dirty, is not the issue. That which is slimy is terrifying, primarily, in that it provokes an ontological crisis because it clings; it threatens one’s sense of autonomy, and this is imbued with an uncanny quality.  Sartre writes, “. . .the original bond between the slimy and myself is that I form the project of being the foundation of its being, inasmuch as it is me ideally.  From the start then it appears as a possible “myself” to be established; from the start it has a psychic quality.  This definitely does not mean that I endow it with a soul in the manner of primitive animism, nor with metaphysical virtues, but simply that even its materiality is revealed to me as having a psychic meaning . . .”.[3]  Slime’s ambiguous qualities are accentuated by the fact that its “fluidity exists in slow motion”[4]; it makes a spectacle of its instability.  Unlike water, which instantly absorbs into itself, slime does so slowly giving one the false impression that it is a substance that can be possessed.  Slime is, therefor, read as a deceitful material.  Its in-between-ness, its boundary-threatening attributes, provokes a base and horrible sublime experience.

Light, like water, is generally understood as a kind of transcendental formless because its undifferentiated qualities are both unitary and actively kinetic, unlike slime’s earthy weightiness.  That is why it has found such favor in religious imagery in the form of the halo, and why fixed heavenly bodies, despite their ambiguous nature and qualities, are not fear inducing.   In “documentary” photographs of UFOs this elevated status is threatened and light is imbued with negative and terrifying connotations.  For, despite eyewitness accounts that describe “flying saucers” as tangible technical apparatuses, they rarely have been photographed as such.  Of the innumerable photographs purporting to document flying saucers collected by the government agency Project Blue Book[5], very few reveal any recognizable form.  Often, these photos only show spots of light floating in the sky.[6]  It is not the fact that these photographs image what could be potentially dangerous technologies in the service of unknown beings that makes them terrifying, it is their impenetrable quality that does so.  These photographs “picture” that which cannot be seen - cannot be known.  They do so by employing the sign of the formless – the blob.

Relative to the image of the alien being, the “unformed” alien is mostly a product of the Nineteen-Fifties and Sixties.  Many Hollywood films of those eras, and even a few eyewitness accounts, feature such beings. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) (a remake of the Howard Hawks production from 1951) is one of the few films after that time to seriously address such a conception. The film’s shape-shifting alien almost seems like an excuse to show off the wizardry of the special effects crew.  The alien can adopt any form, and the film’s most chilling moments come when the being is caught in a transitional phase, between fixed forms.  These “slimy” depictions strike me as overtly psychosexual in nature.  The fact that alien invasion films no longer function as allegories of Cold War political conflicts, throws the symbolic meaning of the alien into the realm of, interiorized, psychological conflicts. The moments when the being is discovered in transition are definitely “primal scenes” within the film. Watching them, you feel like the child who has stumbled upon mom and dad in the act of fucking. You understand this is something you’re not supposed to see. You don’t know exactly what it is you have seen, but you know it’s something horrible - the merging of two distinct bodies into one.

By the Seventies, the dominant alien type is the childlike “gray” alien as depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). However, abject slimy materials are still an important element in ufological depictions.  The current literature of alien abduction is rife with abductee recollections - of immersion in pools of goo by their captors, of waking to find themselves stained with inexplicable sticky spots after alien visitations and probings.  Less often, the interior conditions of the alien crafts are described as abject, as being dirty or foul smelling.  This condition is accentuated in the film Fire in the Sky (1993).  The horrific “in-betweenness” of the slimy in regards to the form of the alien has been replaced in contemporary ufology with a psychic in-betweenness – reality becomes liquid as abductees come to realize that their memories are perhaps only screen memories implanted by their alien captors. The image of the alien itself is truly unknowable for it is possible that even that memory is an implanted fiction.  The film Communion (1989) plays up this aspect of unsure psychic reality by intercutting filmic “reality” with hallucination scenes so that it is unclear what the “real” is.  The visage of the alien being is presented as façade - a mask. Reality is indistinguishable from hallucination.

Few films explore this territory; more often there is a clearly demarcated division between “our” space and the space of the alien intruder. Several films of the Nineteen Sixties do explore this liquidity of space, if only in their “psychedelic” art direction that pictures biomorphic worlds that themselves teeter on abstraction.  Angry Red Planet (1959) offers an extremely unusual depiction of the planet Mars, especially given the date of the film.  The scenes on the planet’s surface have been effected so that they are unnaturally colored and resemble popular psychedelic graphics of the later Sixties.  The visual effects produce a space that is gooey and indeterminant, and the planet Mars itself, personified in the form of a giant crawling amoebic organism, threatens to engulf the space explorers.  Barbarella (1968) is a much more tongue in cheek depiction of psychedelic space that obvious riffs on contemporary drug culture style.  The evil alien city in the film sits atop the seething “Matmos,” a shapeless id-organism.  This evil manifests itself, humorously, through sexual perversion in the S&M persona of the city’s she-witch ruler.  The film’s conception of the otherworldly is dominated by a biomorphic design sense.  Interestingly, a similar ‘alien’ design sense is utilized in the film Fantastic Voyage (1966) to render the interior space of the human body – which is revealed as resembling the garish insides of a lava lamp. 

These visual examples of organic space as depicted in Hollywood films are reminiscent of the graphic work of Richard Powers, one of the most active science fiction illustrators of the Fifties and Sixties[7]. Powers is, by far, my favorite science fiction illustrator. By the early Nineteen Fifties, he had broken with the tradition of hi-tech science fiction illustration, popular since the Thirties, in favor of a kind of surrealist style. He was alone in this regard. Powers’ illustrations betray the influence of the biomorphic Surrealist painters Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta and are extremely abstract.  Figure, environment, machine - are all rendered in a similarly organic manner so that they interpenetrate each other is a psychedelic miasma.  Powers seems responsible for taking the forms discredited in the America painting scene by the rise of Greenbergian formalism - the biomorphic forms of late Surrealist abstraction, and transferring them to the world of mass culture. It strikes me as obvious that the success of Powers’ book cover illustrations in the Fifties paved the way for the explosion of later popular psychedelic art in the Sixties.

paintings by Richard Powers

The rise of the acid-tinged neo-Surrealist pop culture of the Sixties radically changed the popular notion of the abject; the ‘natural’ was redefined. This is exemplified by the political meaning of the ‘dirty hippie.’ If you were a hippie, this was understood as a ‘natural’ condition, if you were not a hippie, this condition was abject. The popular symbolic representations of disorder, predicated on images of dirt and defilement, are thrown into question.  This perhaps explains why I so love blob monsters for, feeling “alienated” myself as a child, I empathized with them rather than being disgusted by them.  Also, since many blob monsters’ “horrific” nature stems from their thinly veiled genital appearance, it is only a short step to, as a viewer, strip this veil away to embrace them as overtly erotic images.  To not do so would be to buy into the repressive sexual attitudes of those that would depict the genitals as monstrous and alien.   This, perhaps, explains the death of the amoebic aliens of the films of the Fifties and Sixties and their replacement with the childlike gray alien of today. The infantile, pre-sexually conscious, mindset that the “genital” blob alien is directed toward, has been replaced by one that is sexually conscious but is fearful of sexual victimization. If these early blob aliens were “uncanny” in the Freudian sense, that is - they were genital stand-ins representing castration anxieties (and this is perhaps confirmed by the number of body part monsters found in films from this period: the crawling eyes, hands, brains, etc.), they have been replaced by more overt symbolic representations of images of child abuse.

As I pointed out earlier, aliens currently are most often depicted as childlike beings – small, frail, with oversized heads and large eyes – almost the cliché Margaret Keane[8] illustration of the soulful big-eyed waif. But these aliens are not like our children - they are genderless and asexual (though they conform in this regard to the stereotypical image of childhood innocence). They also have no insides and outsides; because the grays don’t have any orifices we might construe that they are one pure material - whole. In that sense, the alien itself could be seen as analogous to Jung’s symbolic interpretation of the egg-like form of the UFO. He read the UFO phenomenon as a “collective vision” reflecting a cultural striving for wholeness and order, represented by the mandala-like shape of the space ships -  a symbolic compensation for the “spit-mindedness of our age”[9] in the wake of the horrors of World War Two. Interestingly, Jung explained the societal interpretation of the UFO as a technological construction as a naturalizing device, a way to escape the currently out-of-fashion “odiousness of a mythological personification.”[10]

            This aspect of ufology has not changed; the hi-tech image of the UFO is the same now as it was in the Forties. But the activities performed inside these ships (primarily beginning with the famed “abduction” of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961[11]) are quite unlike those depicted in the films of the Fifties.[12]  If the plots in these films reflect the “us vs. them” mentality of the Cold War period, the new alien abduction scenarios reflect the battleground of the American family itself. (Though the recent popularity of the Fifties-style invasion film Independence Day (1996) signals a possible nostalgic resurgence of this genre.  In this nationalistic fantasy, the unified defense of the world against alien invasion results in the President of the United States becoming the President of the World.)  The unchanging image of the UFO strikes me as something of a conundrum; I would have expected that the technological symbolism of the UFO would have changed in accordance with shifts in social symbolism, but this does not seem to be the case.  Jung’s reading of the technological aspects of the UFO as a sign of order remains firm.

The scenarios described in UFO abduction accounts are remarkably similar to the “recovered memories” found in the pop-psychology literature associated with repressed memory syndrome.  This form of therapy takes as a given the explanation that most adult emotional problems are the byproducts of, repressed into forgotten, childhood sexual abuse.[13] But in ufology the roles are reversed - the childlike aliens are the abusers of adults. Alien abduction scenarios often detail painful medical procedures centering on the probing of the body’s orifices – that which the alien lacks. The abductees are powerless victims suffering at the hands of emotionless diminuative figures. Obviously, the similarity of the scenarios found both in “recovered” memories of childhood abuse and alien abduction accounts points toward a cultural crisis regarding notions of childhood, sexuality, and power. Even figures within the world of ufology itself now say that recovered memories of alien abduction are perhaps only symbolic, though they also believe that this aspect of the abduction “phenomenon” is promoted by, and in the service of, the aliens.  Jacques Vallee[14] writes, “We are compelled to conclude that many abductions are either complete fantasies drawn from the collective unconscious (perhaps under the stimulus of an actual UFO encounter acting as a trigger) or that the actual beings are staging simulated operations, very much in the manner of a theatrical play or movie, in order to release into our culture certain images that will influence us toward a goal we are incapable of perceiving.” [15]

If the UFO phenomenon reflects, as Jung puts it, “the split-mindedness of our age,” it could perhaps be understood to parallel (though on an unconscious level) the “schizo-cultural” aspirations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose notion of the “body without organs” could be applied to the uniform materiality of the orifice-less alien. Though they, surely, would not empathize with the pathological reading applied to this current wave of hallucination.  Delueze and Guttarri’s image of the body without organs is a reaction against the mechanization of the body induced by conventionalized usage of the organs of sense.  As they put it, “Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs?  Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly . . .”[16]  Well, yes it is sad if these experiences are simply reducible to symptoms associated with a group hallucination reflecting a culturally regressive desire to hold on to outmoded idealized notions of childhood purity.

At this point I want to make a U-turn and go back to my previously stated interest in the blob alien, and my contention that this could be viewed as an “erotic” image – a fanciful depiction of, rather than a fearfully sublimated image of, the genitals.  For this to be true, the appeal of the image could not be simply limited to a perverse reading – that the blob alien is a “dirty” image that represents a conflation of sexual notions with ones of defilement.  The latter idea would probably be in line with the original intentions behind the design of such creatures, but I would like to argue that we are not limited to such a reading.  Now, Sartre’s analysis of the slimy most definitely addresses the sexually horrific overtones of such substances, whose clinging qualities he designates as feminine.  The female genitals, and in fact all holes, provoke in him the same fear of being swallowed up.  The conclusion would be that he must find the sexual act of penetration to be exceedingly horrific.  He especially disdains the “sickly sweet, feminine” and states categorically that “A sugary sliminess is the ideal of the slimy.”[17]  Even so, Sartre seems to be saying that there is really no hierarchy of sliminess – sticking ones hand into a pot of honey provokes the same amount of revulsion as sticking it into a pot of gooey pus. This doesn’t ring true to me.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas makes a point somewhat similar to Sartre’s, in that she points out that filthiness is not a quality in itself but is a byproduct of a boundary disruption.  However, notions of boundary operate here on several levels.  She states, “Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind.  Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body.”[18] The problematic nature of these materials is not so much their phenomenological qualities (as Sartre would say of the slimy) but that they are confusing materials, being both part of you and separate from you.  This is similar to Sartre's slime, that provokes an ontological crisis in its clinging insistence that it is part of you when it obviously is not.  But following on her statement regarding materials issued by the body, Douglas makes a second point, “The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.”[19]  This notion of boundary is less specifically ontological and more one of definition and framework – abject qualities are defined by context.  A simple example would be - dirt in the house is bad, dirt in the garden is good.  This notion of boundary is less all-encompassing than Sartre’s phenomenological approach and allows for argument about proper usage and definition of boundaries.

Now, relative to Douglas’ list of abject bodily materials, it seems obvious to me that most would agree that some of these materials are more abject than others are.  Very few people would truly find tears abject at all, and only the most squeamish would find mother’s milk abject – in any context.  I found myself thinking about this relative abject-ness in relation to pornographic depictions, specifically the image of male ejaculation, the so-called “money shot,” and especially the photographic image of the face with sperm upon it.  This image has become a mainstay of pornographic iconography since the success of the first pornographic feature film, Deep Throat (1972).  My interest in this image grew out of the question of whether it was possible to have a sexualized depiction of a blob that was not an image of defilement.  And I would have to answer that yes, I do think this is possible.  Is a photograph of a puddle of sperm, by itself, abject?  Is it necessarily an image of defilement?  Some would find it so, some wouldn’t.  Only the most sexually conservative people, who feel that intercourse is only to be performed in the production of children, would have such a mechanistic view of sex as to argue that any visible trace of sperm would constitute a transgression.  Obviously, for many others, the experience of the gooey-ness of sperm is tactilely pleasurable, is part of normal sexual activity, and has no negative overtones whatsoever.

The money shot has been roundly criticized as an act of defilement of the female countenance, but is it truly so?[20]  Its presence in pornographic films is easy to explain – it proves that male orgasm has occurred, and this is located in proximity with the traditional site of female displays of ecstasy: the face.  Male and female orgasm is presented, in one frame, as simultaneously visible.  Pornographic films are participatory; they are designed specifically for men to masturbate to.  The male viewer’s fantasy investment in them is predicated on their “documentary” nature – that they are “real” displays of pleasure, which is proven by the visible act of ejaculation. The viewer’s pact with a pornographic film is predicated on this shared experience with the surrogate version of himself acting in it.

An amusing result of the rise of the money shot in pornography is the result it has had on the reading of earlier “spiritualist” photography, specifically the genre of photograph that depicts the medium exuding “ectoplasm,” a white substance that it said to flow from the orifices of a medium in a trance.  A photo of the medium Mary M., taken in Winnipeg in 1929, shows the cotton-like material caught in the female medium’s hair, and pouring from her ears, nose, and down her chin onto her breast.  Her eyes are rolled up in the ecstatic pose familiar from pornographic photos from the same period, a gesture that seem derived from ecstatic countenances found in Christian religious imagery.[21]  Another photograph depicts the material running from between the medium’s legs into a heap on her feet.[22] The sexual connotations of such imagery is so obvious that it could not be produced now without it looking like it was designed specifically to reference the money shot, a pornographic trope that was not even present in pornographic photography of the Twenties.  The fact that these photographs strike us as funny reveals the fact that such overt sexual connotations are incompatable with spiritualist imagery, that the “sexualizing” of an image is a form of defilement.  On the other hand, our present problem with ectoplasm photographs could simply be that the displays of ecstasy depicted in them strike us as too mannered to be believable at this time – that they are not convincingly erotic.  If it weren’t for that fact, perhaps such imagery could maintain its transcendental value despite its sexual overtones.  I prefer this second interpretation; if it is true, then my desire for erotic depictions of blob monsters is a possibility.

UFO photography has taken the place of early Twentieth Century spiritualist photography as the dominant mode of supernatural imagery. The fact that many UFO photographs look as obviously faked as ectoplasm photographs (a fact that can be forgiven in spiritualist images since photography was still invested with truth value in the early Twentieth Century) doesn’t really matter.  These are images of faith more than they are “documentary” photographs, and in that sense UFO photographs are a true folk art form representing what are, at this point, traditional and commonly held beliefs.  Still, as I stated earlier, this belief system has not yet been appropriated into mainstream culture in a “homogenized” way.  It does not yet function analogously to a true religion.  Despite the commonplace nature of the UFO mythology at this time, it is still held in disdain, still considered a “crackpot” belief system.  As such, it maintains its “heterogeneous” cultural position and its terrifying overtones.