Stories of collaboration, sharing and writing: an anthropologist meets a UFO researcher

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Stories of collaboration, sharing and writing: an anthropologist meets a UFO Researcher1

American Anthropological Association Producing Anthropology

113ª Annual Meeting

Rafael Antunes Almeida University of Brasília

Abstract

This paper describes the process of collaboration between an anthropologist working with UFO collectives in Brazil and an experienced UFO researcher on the topics of “extraterrestrial violence” and “scientific violence”. Based on the contributions of the ontological turn to anthropology, according to which we should engage with the native processes of " worlding ", taking them less as subjects of analysis and more as the analysis itself, the text narrates the creation of a common space where the conceptual economy of the field interlocutor appears as the main “character” of the whole narrative. That is, the notions brought to the forefront by one of the authors of the mentioned text are regarded less as descriptions of the “UFO believers’ research practices” and more as potential reverse native conceptographies, which could be defined as an effort towards an anthropology of the otherwise, insofar as they seek to give rise to "modes" of life, which do not have an explicit force between “us”. (Povinelli , 2012) During the process of co-authoring the paper several questions emerged: “How to sign a paper when the authors have different assumptions about the characteristics of the beings that they are describing? How to forge a “technology of description”(Pedersen,2013) which accounts for the diplomatic dimensions involved in the writing process? How to think the writing as a mutual flux of transformations? “What Einstein never saw ...”

Since 2011, I have been actively engaged into following UFO research collectives in Brazil –

UFOlogists –, throughout their conferences, their field investigations, their major specialized

journals and habitual virtual spaces as well. This work is part of a multi-sited (Marcus, 1995)

ethnography which aims not only to describe the ways UFOlogists articulate in practice notions such

                                                                                                               1  Acknowledgements: This paper wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the research grants provided by CAPES and CNPQ. Also, it was benefited by the valuable comments Prof. Guilherme Sá, Prof. Debbora Battaglia and Prof. Joshua Roth provided me along the research. A final and important expression of gratitude must be addressed to Alberto,  whose teachings,  intelligence and sensibility  I will never forget.  

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as evidence, proof and validity (Lagrange,1990), but also to the discuss the problem of how certain

socialities are formed out of a partial visibility of their objects. (Battaglia,2005)

To this end, I started to attend the meetings of the Association of Extraterrestrial Studies in

Brasília in 2012. The EBE-ET2, at the time, had already existed for more than 20 years and their

meetings were taking place at a common room of a residential building where one of the members

lives. Alberto Francisco do Carmo wasn’t a member of the group at all. He was invited by the EBE-

ET to give a talk on the UFO cases he had investigated in the last 50 years, and to make some

remarks on the general topics concerning extraterrestrial life.

On the night of his talk to the group, Alberto commented on the mechanics of the alien

ships, relying on the descriptions given by several abductees about the seats of the vehicles – as they

usually are stools, the aliens can possibly neutralize the inertia (Fig. 1,2,3,4). He also made some

remarks on the anatomy of the ETs, who, according to a specific abductee, offered him some sort of

liquid in a kind of glass that was shaped as “a parallelepiped with a pyramid carving”3(Fig. 5). Using

this information, Alberto concluded that they had a vertical mouth (Fig. 6) and that they couldn’t

communicate with humans using their language, due to this anatomic characteristic.

Moreover, while giving more details on the last case, Alberto argued that the abductee

experienced the “searchlight effect”, a phenomena described by Einstein, according to whom as an

object gets closer to the light speed, it would gradually become clearer and then just light. Alberto

remarked: “A poorly educated police officer has seen what Einstein never saw”4.

Almost two years later, I would comment that this statement, in some way, summarizes the

importance UFOlogists give to the account of the witness, which echoes Foucault’s comments on

the status of the testimony in Sophocles’ tragedy:

                                                                                                               2 EBE-ET is an acronym for Entidade Brasileira de Estudos Extraterrestres. 3 Edited by Alberto Francis do Carmo. 4 Edited by Alberto Francisco do Carmo.

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Deep in his cabin, although being a man of no importance, a slave, a shepherd saw. As he has in his hands this little fragment of memory, because he brings into his discourse the testimony of what he saw, he can challenge and slaughter the pride of king or the presumption of the tyrant. (Foucault,2001:54)5

Beyond cooperation: mutual affect

By the end of the night, I was totally impressed by the way Alberto conducted part of the

meeting and by his analogies between mainstream science (Cross,2000) and UFOlogy. But what

deeply caught me was his very particular view on the intentions and modalities of actions of the

extraterrestrials towards his abductees: Alberto claimed that not only the ETs were committing

violence towards those people they abduct, but also that they were acting as disinformation agents.

According to Alberto, the stories the ETs usually tell to the abductees were neither actual

descriptions of the their thoughts or state of life, nor complete hoaxes. They were carefully arranged

bits of partial truth/partial false information (Wagner, 2000), aimed to spread disinformation and to

ruin the reputation of the abductees “in order to keep mankind and academia unaware of their real

purposes, thus reinforcing their stealthy actions in our planet”. 6

After the meeting, I contacted Alberto in order to ask if I could interview him. A few days

later I would be invited to his home and from that day on we have started a relation of close

friendship and mutual cooperation that lasts until now. Thereafter, we had talked on a weekly basis,

exchanged a great volume of e-mails, materials and bibliographies as well. In the end of 2013, we

decided to collaborate on a paper that later would be called “ Extraterrestrial Violence and Scientific

Violence: Prototypes for an exoanthropology.”7

                                                                                                               5 Translated from “No fundo de sua cabana, embora sendo um homem sem importância, um escravo, o pastor viu, e porque detém em suas mãos este pequeno fragmento de lembrança, porque traz em seu discurso o testemunho do que viu, pode contestar e abater o orgulho do rei ou a presunção do tirano.” (Foucault,2001:54) 6 Alberto Francisco do Carmo edited part of this paragraph – in commas - in order to explain that the abductees are deceived in order to hide the activity of the extraterrestrial beings on Earth. 7 The paper is not published yet. A first attempt was made in order to negotiate its publication on a special issue on violence held by a Brazilian Journal, but the editorial board kindly insinuated that they were interested in human affairs rather than on extraterrestrial ontologies.

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No more reductions

At first, Alberto’s theory on the extraterrestrial violence8 would be no more than a topic of a

chapter of my dissertation, pointing to the centrality of the notion of “disinformation” for the

UFOlogists. Following this route, I would end up using extracts of his interviews to illustrate general

claims on UFOs, or would reduce his speech to some sort of “hidden machinery” working

underneath UFO discourse.

However, I preferred to accept the invitation Bruno Latour makes to the readers in his

Irreductions (Latour, 1993): “What Happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this

indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to

reduce everything?” (Latour, 1993:157) Or, Viveiros de Castro’s suggestion that we should work in

order to produce a sort of anthropological knowledge that can be altered by the “native’s” discourse

(Viveiros de Castro, 2013)

In short, what changes when anthropology is taken to be a meaning practice that is epistemically continuous with the practices that it discusses, and equivalent to them? (Viveiros de Castro, 2013: 475-476)

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How it happened

To work along the aforementioned lines, namely, to accept Viveiros de Castro’s invitation to

stop the attempts at explanation in favor of the Latourian “principle of irreduction” means that we

should give up the task of creating meta-categories to analyze “natives” discourse, in favor of the

effort of allowing them to alter our own: “The problem is thus not of seeing the native as an object,

and the solution is not to render him a subject” (Viveiros de Castro, 2013: 479). As Povinelli (2012)

and others (Holbraad, Pedersen, Viveiros de Castro, 2013) suggest, it has to do with “thinking

                                                                                                               8 John Keel (1996) and Jacques Valée (1975), were the main sources used by Alberto in order to develop his theory.

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otherwise”, “through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it...” (Foucault, apud Povinelli,

2012: 456).

Also Holbraad et al (Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro, 2014) argue for the need of

a “technology of description” which means “[... experimenting with the affordances present in the

ethnographical materials” (Ibdem, 2014). But as one of the authors of the Politics of Ontology

position paper remarks later: “I didn’t deal so much, however, as did the post-modernist critique,

with the problem of the representational credentials of the epistemic subject: its claim to

transparency, its monological elocution, etc. I concentrated rather, on the representational status of

the object of the ethnographic discourse” (Viveiros de Castro, 2014 Annual Marilyn Strathern

Lecture). So, as Viveiros de Castro (2014) points out, we are not dealing here with the problem of

ethnographical authority, but with finding a way to “contaminate” (Battaglia, Antunes Almeida,

2014) anthropology with these other ontologies.

For that matter, my position in relation to Alberto’s comments on the extraterrestrial

violence and on disinformation, could not be the sole transcription of our multiple dialogues

(Dwyer, 1987), nor could it be an attempt to “access” collective experience through a personal

account, as Sidney Mintz did with Tarso (Mintz, 1984). Crapanzano (1985), a long time ago, called

our attention for the great naiveté of supposing one can “access” the others world through personal

accounts:

The attempt to discover what a culture looks like from personal-historical documents has always struck me as an act of great naiveté. Rather, I look at the way in which Tuhami makes use of the particular idiom at his disposal to articulate his own experience, including his personal history within our negotiations of reality. (Crapanzano,1985:XII)

In fact, I was trying to adopt an attitude towards Alberto’s narrative, that was similar to the

one Bruce Albert undertook when working with the Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa, in the

great oeuvre recently published by them: “The falling Sky: words of an Yanomami Shaman”

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(Kopenawa; Albert, 2013). Bruce Albert defines his participation in the encounter as an effort to

“…clarify the circumstances and adventures that brought us together…” (Kopenawa and Albert,

2013:424).

I do think that during the collaboration on that paper, I was sort of “clarifying the

circumstances” of the process of writing. But Alberto, was also engaged in the same move. As I tried

to situate our project along the lines of the “ontological turn”, he was, on his side, reading our

endeavor through his own metaphors. After presenting to him my views on collaboration between

anthropologists and the people they intend to study, Alberto decided to include into the text a story

he tells very often. I will quote him:

Ephedrine, ufology and the Chinese Uncle

“This is a story which I tell very often: the discovery of ephedrine. Once I read that it all started

when a Chinese student went to the United States to attend a medical college. After some time he

returned to his homeland, where he met his uncle, who was one of these Chinese healers. The man

knew the healing powers of various herbs and also the practices of what we now call traditional

Chinese medicine. However, the young Chinese doctor criticized the uncle’s methods, generating an

argument. At one point, the Chinese Uncle took a handful of an herb and challenged his nephew:

"Take it! Ma huang! It can resurrect a dead person." The young doctor changed a bit his mood, but

kept the herbs. Then, on his return to America he jokingly showed the uncle’s herb to his colleagues

and to a teacher. The teacher, however, asked the young Chinese doctor to prepare an herb extract

with that herb sample. One day the group was doing some experiments with a sedated dog.

Suddenly the heartbeat of the animal began to dangerously decrease. Then, the chief doctor recalled:

- " This is a good time to try the remedy of your uncle!" The dog received an intravenous injection

of the extract and, to everyone's surprise, the heartbeats returned to normal rates. All were stunned.

Later they would discover that the "Ma Huang" (Ephedra vulgaris) contained an alkaloid that was a

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powerful vasoconstrictor. Ephedrine was discovered. [...] UFOlogy is similar to the Chinese Uncle.

It has offered lots of data to the academic world, but until recently, this métier was more similar to

the young pretentious Chinese doctor, than with the chief doctor.”9

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From this point on, I am going to make an attempt in order to be sensitive to the story

Alberto has written about the relation between ufology and academia. Nonetheless, I won’t be able

to analyze the kind of data he referred to in his story of abductee experiences and disinformation. I

don’t have the means to undertake tests on UFO images and I am unable to apply any psychological

test, which would discern if the abductee was telling the truth. But still, I am interested in taking the

route he has indicated seriously. Inspired by the use Roy Wagner (2000) has done of the concept of

disinformation, I want to think how the way Alberto mobilized this concept can alter common

interpretations in the domain of the social sciences of UFO phenomena and maybe, of the “realm of

the extraordinary” in general. Elizabeth Claverie, in “La vierge, la désordre, la critique: les

apparitions de la Vierge à l’âge de la science” (Claverie, 1990) asks herself if we have a way out of the

following options:

Comment délivrer notre objet de ses saisies traditionnelles, celles de l'ethnologie (les croyances, les représentations), celles de la psychanalyse et de la psychiatrie (l'hystérie, l'hallucination), celles de la sociologie (sécularisation contre émotion, tradition contre modernité), celles de l'Église (théologie négative contre religion populaire) ? Comment donner à « tout cela » une visibilité, un statut, une présence ? (Claverie, 1990 :S/P)

I am interested in thinking how the notion of disinformation – in the sense and specific way

Alberto used it – can transform some of our current uses of the concepts of belief and

representation.

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                                                                                                               9 This quotation is part of what Alberto has written in our unpublished paper. According to him, he learned about the discovery of ephedrine on a volume of “Reader’s Digest”, but he couldn’t find its number or edition.

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Bruno Latour has pointed out that the notion of belief should not be understood as a

psychological disposition, but as a particular way of relationship (Latour,1996). For that matter, Jean

Pouillon (1979), Gerard Lenclud (1990) and Jeanne Favret-Saada (2012) reinforced this idea, when

they claimed that the use of aforesaid concept proceeds by imposing an exception for the analysts

who, unlike the people he/she studied “étaient solidement établis dans le règne du savoir” (Lenclud,

1990).

Besides, the concept of belief, as it depends of the idea of projection, seems to suppose an

unilateral action of the believer, who is always the one “creates” the entities she/he believes. Latour,

in his Pétite Reflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux Faitiches (Latour,1996) has already offered a

good elaboration on this particular point.

On my side I want to state that Alberto’s comments on disinformation, in some way broke

this alleged passivity of things seen in the sky. His remarks on the usual forms of action of the

extraterrestrial beings not only withdraw the ETs from the position of “patients” of the belief, but

also impose an inversion in the logics of belief as well. If the ETs disinform the contactees and the

abductees by telling them foolish, incongruent or nonsensical stories – as Alberto conceives – , they

are not the “repository of beliefs”, but the “manufacturers of belief”. Everything would happen as if

the extraterrestrials would be responsible for their own cover-up: by spreading false data on their

origin, way of living and technology to humans; and, as a consequence by causing skeptics to accuse

abductees of believers.

As I see it, the way Alberto articulated this version of the argument concerning

disinformation, completely changes the regular approach that the social scientists that relied on the

notions of belief and social representation were using to think the phenomena. An anthropology of

ufology sensible to this position, wouldn’t spend time trying to describe how UFO modern

mythology was social/cultural constructed along the last 57 years. Instead, what comes to matter are

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the ways this sort of “alien anthropology” disinforms certain humans, and what kind of knowledge

can emerge from it.

As a consequence, if we keep the centrality of the notion of “alien disinformation”, not only

would UFOlogy change, but also the anthropological efforts dedicated to thinking about these

collectivities. UFOlogy would start to look like a counterintelligence agency and the anthropology of

“UFOlogists” would have no choice but becoming the “ ‘science’ of the tricks”, or the science

between the tricks. Roy Wagner, as I read him, was the first to develop the centrality of the notion

of disinformation for anthropology (Wagner,2000):

If I seemed to be persuaded that “culture” or “society” is that which creates the effect of society, just exactly who is responsible (let me guess) and by which trick of disinformation might it come about? (I’ll let you guess). It seems quite probable that all one would need to do to touch off a spate of “cargo-thinking” in Melanesia would be, however inadvertently, to disinform the ‘natives’ about our own world just exactly as we, ourselves, have been disinformed about it. (Wagner, 2000:363)

Final Remarks

By following Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014), I have progressively shifted the discussion

from the dilemmas related to notions such as co-prodution, collaboration and co-authorship, to a

shy attempt to let other’s ontologies “contaminate” (Battaglia, Antunes Almeida, 2014) this work. I

have tried to experiment not only with a conceptual tool -the notion of disinformation – , but also

with a particular ontology that addresses extraterrestrial entities and modalities of operation in an

attempt to relate to events that happen in our own world. A question, for sure, still remains: Should

ethnography allow itself to be transformed by any ontology? (Battaglia and Antunes Almeida, 2014)

Or, as Bessire and Bond (2014) put it: “[…]how difference comes to matter and what kinds of

difference are allowed to matter[…]? (Bessire and Bond, 2014:442)

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Images

Alberto gently sent the above images to me. The first four are drawings that show the

interior of extraterrestrial ships, in which all the seats are backless. This “detail”, as Alberto calls it,

authorized him to suppose that the alien’s spacecrafts, differently from those made on Earth, have

some mechanism to “neutralize” the inertia. The last two images show the “vertical mouth” of the

alien and the container with liquid he offered to the abductee.

Image 1

Image 2

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Image 3

Image 4

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Image 5

Image 6

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References

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Mintz, Sidney W. “Encontrando Taso, me descobrindo”. Dados: Revista de Ciências Sociais, Rio de Janeiro, v. 27, n. l. p. 45-58, 1984 Pouillon, Jean. "Remarques sur le verbe ‘croire’." La Fonction symbolique, M. Izard et P. Smith (dir) Gallimard (1979). Povinelli, Elizabeth A. "The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance."South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (2012): 453-475. Vallée, Jacques. "The Invisible College: What a group of scientists have discovered about UFO Influences on the Human Race" New York: Dutton (1975). Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. "The relative native." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013): 473-502. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “ Who is afraid of the Ontological Wolf?” CUSAS Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNTdIG-Z_ho Wagner, Roy. "Our very own cargo cult." Oceania (2000): 362-372.