Playful aliens: Deceit and antipodal narratives in Chilean ufology

Abstract

Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances—contradictory statements and affective postures that show intense paradox within a schema of play. I argue that this play has two fundamental and oscillating (or simultaneous) aspects. It is both bottom-up, in the sense that it is a confined or segregated aspect of society, and top-down, in the sense that it is experienced as a cosmos of aliens with unknown designs that manifest paradoxically. I argue that the terms of our analysis in the social sciences must reflect the fact that, in this simultaneity of opposites, these extraordinary and sometimes traumatic experiences are neither subjective nor objective but lie in a sort of “hermeneutical” middle ground that recognizes the deeply ironic and recursive nature of UFO phenomena.