American Cosmic

by D W Pasulka

  Buddhism. Because these are considered religions, and Star

  Wars is based on and il ustrates them, it should therefore be

  considered a type of scripture that, like a finger pointing to

  the moon, refers to eternal and transcendent truths. Thus,

  practitioners of Jediism place their fiction- based religion

  within a category reserved for traditional religions.

  David Chidester, Carole Cusack, and Markus Alteena

  Davidsen have all studied new religious movements based

  on movies, science fiction, and other nontraditional

  inspirations. According to Chidester, “fakelore or fake reli-

  gion, although invented, mobilized, and deployed by frauds,

  can produce real effects in the real world.”22 In a more gen-

  erous vein, Cusack argues, “Studying religions that openly

  advertise their invention not only enriches what we know

  about traditional religions, but sheds light on how science

  fiction speculations and new technologies inform religious

  belief and practice.”23 She also notes that invented religions

  il ustrate and challenge common assumptions of tradi-

  tional religions, such as the idea that real entities, like gods

  or angels, intervene in human affairs. Davidsen proposes a

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  new category of religion. Unlike historical religions, which

  are inspired by historical events and claim to refer to the real

  world, fiction- based religions “draw their main inspiration

  from fictional narratives that do not claim to refer to the ac-

  tual world, but create a fictional world of their own.”24

  My interpretation is somewhat different. Jediism

  exists within a milieu of beliefs and practices about

  extraterrestrials, galactic visitors, and UFOs that posits their

  realism, if not as a contemporary reality, then as a future one.

  They are as real to some people as gods, Jesus, and the var-

  ious Buddhas. Confidence in their existence is bolstered by

  cultural authorities like NASA’s chief scientist Ellen Stofan,

  who announced, “There will be strong indications of alien

  life within a decade and definite evidence of it within 20 to

  30 years. We know where to look. We know how to look. In

  most cases, we have the technology, and we’re on a path to

  implementing it.”25 Many UFO- based religions profess the

  belief that these alien “entities” have left us artifacts; indeed,

  such “artifacts” inspire Tyler and James to create their inno-

  vative technologies. Jediism and other belief systems about

  extraterrestrials and UFOs are so powerful because they re-

  place, supplant, or even, as in Eddy’s case, supplement and

  revise traditional religious beliefs. They incorporate the re-

  alism of historical religions and project it into the future.

  A basic tenet of these belief systems is that we will find non-

  human life elsewhere in the universe. It is only a matter of

  time. What’s more, these ideas are supercharged because this

  potential nonhuman intelligent life exists in our world and in

  our universe, not in a past of questionable historical veracity

  and not in a nonmaterial postdeath reality.

  The context that makes this new form of religiosity

  possible is digital. Historian of religion Robert Orsi

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  challenged scholars to understand the roles of gods and

  sacred entities, like saints, as autonomous agents.26 These

  examples of how Star Wars characters inhabit the ordinary

  lives of millions of people offer a clue to an answer. We live

  within a media- saturated world where fictionalized factual

  productions like those created by Impossible Factual are

  beamed through screens into the brains of viewers and be-

  come real memories that are integrated into the cultural

  and social imaginary, as well as into viewers’ bodies, be-

  cause a brain is a body. We cannot understand this devel-

  opment within the conceptual frameworks of the real and

  the unreal, or the humans and the gods, or even the body

  and the mind. We must understand it at its source— from

  within the screen itself.

  I M AG I NAT I O N E X T E R I O R I Z E D

  Seeing is believing, we say. Yet, at least since Plato,

  philosophers have shown that the “seeing and believing”

  construct is deceptive. This idea is known as external world

  skepticism: we cannot assume that what we see or identify

  with our senses is real.27 But the issue becomes much more

  complicated when what one sees is processed as real, even if

  it isn’t real in the conventional sense. Reflecting on a talk by

  “alien abductee” Whitley Strieber about the experiences that

  informed his best- selling novel, Communion, Jeffrey Kripal

  notes the role played by popular culture: “One evening he

  [Whitley] explained to us that he was perfectly aware that his

  visionary experience of the visitors was deeply informed by

  the bad sci- fi B movies that he had seen in such numbers as a

  kid in the cold war 1950s in southern Texas.”28

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  Whitley’s consumption of Hol ywood’s B movies

  occurred many years ago. Things have changed a lot since

  then. We don’t have to imagine how this experience has

  changed. We just have to flip open our laptops or engage

  our telephones— or even just consult our memories— to

  recognize (re- cognize) the reality. It’s as if our imaginations

  have become exterior to ourselves, existing out there in our

  media, and our media then determines what is in our heads.

  Where does the spectator end and the screened media event

  begin? Where do we draw these boundaries? As Andy Clark

  has observed in his research into extended cognition, the

  assumption that cognition is brain- bound, or that it just

  occurs within the skul , is wrong. Cognition occurs within a

  network that extends into the environment.29

  The modern binary of “human” and “machine” is shown

  to be the real fake, not new religious forms, populated as they

  are with nonhuman persons and intelligences. Technology

  scholar N. Katherine Hayles argues that humans coevolve

  with their technologies.30 She uses the term “technogenesis”

  to refer to this relationship. Technologies are not exterior

  to humans, she says, but as we use them, invent them, and

  incorporate them as media and biotechnologies, we merge

  with them in an ever more complicated and inextricable re-

  lationship. Some have speculated that this is part of an ev-

  olutionary process of the human species, and will impact

  longevity and the human ability to travel off the planet.

  Humans— Homo sapiens sapiens— will evolve into a different

  kind of posthuman being. Philosopher Susan Schneider has

  written that if humans eventual y do encounter nonhuman

  intelligence, that intelligence would be in a postbiological

  form— a form of artificial intelligence (AI)— because this is

  the form that “the most advanced alien civilization” would


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  take.31 This makes sense. Already we biological humans have

  sent our own AI, the Rover, to Mars to explore the red planet.

  The relevance of Robert Ager’s analysis of the monolith

  in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his conclusion that the mono-

  lith is a metaphor for the cinema screen, seems inescapable

  in light of research into cognition in media and memory.

  Ager’s observation suggests that Kubrick was even more

  of a genius than previously thought, as he somehow knew,

  perhaps intuitively if not consciously, that cinema and its

  spectators exist in an inextricable and intimate relationship.

  Ager notes, “After the release of 2001, Stanley Kubrick openly

  stated that he created a film that was intended to bypass the

  conscious rationalizations of its audience and sink straight

  into the unconscious.”32 Several scenes in the movie focus on

  the eye, either the artificial eyes of computers and machines

  or the eyes of the characters in the movie. The cinema

  screen– human eye relationship is especial y well il ustrated

  in the “stargate scene,” in which astronaut David Bowman

  approaches the planet Jupiter, where a monolith has been

  identified. The monolith represents nonhuman intelligence.

  As Bowman approaches, the object floats toward him and

  then morphs into “the stargate,” which appears as a screen

  with brilliant and colorful flashing lights. Bowman’s own eye

  morphs to reflect these lights, and it becomes difficult to dis-

  tinguish between the stargate and the astronaut’s own retina.

  The boundaries between the spectator and the monolith (as

  colorful screen) have been erased, or are indistinguishable.

  At the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s book, in the hotel room

  where Bowman eventual y finds himself, there is a television

  above the bed. In the movie, the television is replaced by the

  monolith. The monolith is in front of the bed, where one

  cannot help but look into it. Ager notes that in the book, the

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  reference to the idea that Bowman himself is living within

  a movie is explicit: “His feeling that he was inside a movie

  set was almost literal y true.” This point is made clear in the

  movie: just before Bowman transforms into the starchild, the

  audience sees the actual movie camera crew reflected in his

  helmet. In these scenes, Kubrick il ustrates the imperceptible

  influence of cinema.

  After Ager cracked the code of the monolith and posted

  his analysis on YouTube in 2007, he received hundreds of

  thousands of positive responses. Apparently, the time had

  at last come to understand the movie— and the monolith.

  Oddly, at about the same time, a series of ads appeared on

  YouTube featuring key scenes from 2001 with the iPhone

  superimposed on the monolith. The ads were popular, and

  there is now a proliferation of videos that feature the mon-

  olith and other scenes from the movie in conjunction with

  various Apple products, some of them authorized by Apple

  and others produced as entertainment by fans. At least in

  popular culture, where it matters most, the truth about the

  monolith has been revealed: there is a human– monolith con-

  tinuum, the boundaries of which are very vague (Figure 4.2).

  There is a dark side to the monolith. This towering ob-

  sidian object appears in key scenes in which humans experi-

  ence an evolutionary shift, as in its first appearance, where it

  helps a group of hominids by somehow teaching them how

  to use a tool— a bone. In a later scene, a hominid throws the

  bone into the air and it travels into space to become a satel-

  lite. The bone, which, used as a weapon, enabled one group

  of hominids to dominate another, is now a satellite, and the

  cinematic association of the two suggests that the latter is a

  modern tool of dominance. Interestingly, in one of the later

  Apple ads, this entire scene takes place on the screen of an

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  Figure 4.2. Monolith presaging the iPhone, from 2001: A Space

  Odyssey. Source: MovieStil sDB.com.

  iPhone. Perhaps the “dominance” association between the

  bone, the satellite, and the iPhone in the ad is unintentional.

  Perhaps it reflects a truth.

  There are other dark elements in the movie, one of which

  is a program funded by the Department of Defense in which

  subjects are treated with hypnosis, drugs, and special effects

  to make them believe that they are in contact with alien

  intelligences. The Department of Defense program is part

  of a public relations effort by which the government hopes

  to acclimate humans to the reality of extraterrestrials. This

  minor scene in the movie provides an interesting frame-

  work for interpreting the cultural development of the alien

  abduction phenomenon, which has rested on the idea that

  humans can access suppressed memories through hyp-

  notic regression. The entire premise of John Mack’s book

  Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens relies on his ability

  to uncover others’ memories of alien abductions through

  hypnosis. I have encountered several such experiences in my

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  own work, reported by people who had not been hypnotized,

  but this tradition does need to be reassessed given what is

  now known about how media technologies influence how

  humans think and what they remember.

  David Halperin, a scholar of the Merkabah, the Jewish

  mystical tradition that arises from the visionary aspects of

  Ezekiel’s wheel, has written extensively about the UFO phe-

  nomenon.33 Halperin has examined the case of Betty and

  Barney Hil , whose alien abduction narrative was the first to

  be popularized in the media. It may also have been the first

  time hypnosis was used on people who claimed to have been

  abducted by aliens. This established a precedent that would

  become a convention for alien abductees. The literature, both

  supporting and debunking the Hil s’ experience, is extensive,

  and a lot of it focuses on their hypnosis sessions. What if

  what they remembered was not real but virtual y real? For

  the record, I am not discounting the possibility that Betty

  and Barney had a real experience, but I am placing their ex-

  perience within a new framework that considers the cogni-

  tive science of media.

  T H E H I L L C A S E , M E D IA ,

  A N D M E M O RY

  Betty Hill and Barney Hil , an interracial couple, were both

  active in the civil rights movement. They lived in New

  Hampshire. On September 19, 1961, they were driving on

  a rural road in that state, when they spotted a light that

  resembled a falling star but moved differently. They stopped

  and used binoculars to try to identify it, but then got back

  into their car and continued their journey. The star, however,

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r />   continued to be visible and in fact seemed to hover in the

  sky above them. At one point, it came toward their vehicle,

  almost filling the windshield with its light. Frightened, they

  stopped the car, and Barney got out with a pistol he was

  carrying. Then they returned home and tried to sleep.

  Two days later, Betty called the nearby Pease Air Force

  Base. It was another day before Major Paul W. Henderson

  returned the cal . Betty described the details of what they

  had seen, but she did not mention the presence of beings

  or extraterrestrials. The Air Force file says that Henderson

  explained the sighting as a probable misidentified planet.

  After Betty made her report to the Air Force base, she went

  to the local library and checked out a book about UFOs by

  Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine aviator who was head of the

  National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a ci-

  vilian research organization. This was Betty’s “book encounter.”

  In the book Keyhoe contends that there are alien beings that are

  more technological y advanced than humans and that the US

  Department of Defense is keeping the evidence secret. As Betty

  and Barney recovered from their experience, Betty believed that

  more had happened than they had at first surmised. Additional y,

  Barney had been experiencing headaches and nightmares since

  the event. Betty sought out a qualified hypnotist. In hypnotic

  regression, the hypnotist would uncover memories of an ab-

  duction event. Betty and Barney related, while hypnotized, that

  they believed that alien beings had abducted them, taken them

  aboard a UFO craft, and then examined them.

  David Halperin’s analysis of the Hill incident is relevant

  in that he highlights its link to the popular media of the time:

  In hypnotic regression on February 22, Barney described the

  eyes of one of the UFO beings as “slanted . . . [b] ut not like a

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  Chinese.” In a sketch he made under hypnosis, the eyes look

  indefinably sinister, malevolent: the irises and pupils, not dis-

  tinguished from each other, are close together, while the rest

  of the eyes trail away upward, toward the sides of the being’s

  head. Barney later told [author] John Fuller that the eyes con-

  tinued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared