Content provided in partnership with
Orbs, blobs, and glows: astronauts, UFOs, and photography
Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Jane D. Marsching
The astronauts' UFO images are, of course, outside the NASA pantheon of mythic images of space. As the early twentieth century paranormal researcher Charles Fort said, "The science of astronomy concerns itself with only one aspect of existence, because of course there can be no science of the obverse phenomena." (6) The astronauts' UFO photographs are caught in a cyber nether world, endlessly circling paranormal and debunking sites, accompanied by claims of authenticity or contemptous dismissals. They are often described as photographic errors: reflections on the reside of the capsule window or against the camera lens, floating debris, etc. The word error once meant a wandering or roving course. It is in this sense that the images are errors; they reveal a hunger for the other, for a world inhabited by more than clear science, a rich cosmos of possibility that exists just on the periphery of our ordinary lives.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Carl Jung proposed that aliens were a hybrid of the religious beliefs of the collective unconscious going back to early man and the technological drive of our late-modern consciousness. Caught between a theistic and a capitalist world view, UFOs resist the standard order. They resist description, interpretation, and even belief. Surfing through the 258 UFO sightings from January 2003 in the National UFO Reporting Center's online database, I found that many eyewitnesses contextualize their experience with comments like "I've never believed in UFOs," or "This is my first sighting." These comments seek to place the encounter in a realm without conscious intention or framework. The language is one of seeing properly so as to remove the stigma of kookiness. The actual descriptions of objects or lights are usually vague and rambling, peppered with scientific terminology familiar to us from television shows like The Twilight Zone or The X Files. (7) Almost always the reports cite the viewer's activity and location: "I was taking my daughter home when ..." "I was walking my dogs when ..." They anchor their otherworldly experiences with the stabilizing influence of the everyday. Similarly, the UFO photograph seeks to place the otherworldly into our world by means of the treeline or the curve of the earth over which the saucer flies. The hazy, indistinct forms of alien spacecraft are completely vague, as if the actual form of the alien is unseeable. But the ordinary world that they infiltrate is an indispensable framework for belief.
Every new medium opens up a new outside, a phantasmagorical realm. When we leap to a new mode of perception where our physiological limits and familiarities are breached, an unknown is equally created. As technology brings us forward to new capabilities, the potential of perfection ushers in a febrile world of excessive, out-of-control technologies. The leakage of the paranormal into the "normal" world of science begins with the first tools to extend our physical selves and radiates through culture using the sheer uncanniness of emerging technologies. Jeffrey Sconce's book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television describes how, over a five year period in the 1840s, America saw the introduction of both spiritual and electromagnetic telegraphs. Morse's telegraph and the conversations through rappings and knockings between the Fox sisters and various spirits were not isolated, unconnected discoveries. In fact, spiritualists went on to elaborate the connections between the telegraph and spiritualist phenomena in an effort to legitimize their supernatural experiences. Photography was not far behind in its conscription into the arsenal of spiritualist methodologies.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur