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Orbs, blobs, and glows: astronauts, UFOs, and photography

Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Jane D. Marsching

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Everything around us is powered by, made of, and sustained by the invisible --atoms, dust, cells, microbes, molecules, genes. Even the most ordinary things are mysterious. There are almost a thousand motes of dust in every cubic inch of air. When I shut my eyes and look at the darkness, even nothing becomes something: a star field, a fractal simulation, an indistinct halo. The fact of the real is another world from the figment of our imaginations. Analogy groups the discordant and disordered into relationships forged not on harmony, hierarchy, or order, but instead on the chance connections of experience, imagination, and presence. (16) Analogy satisfies our desire to place ourselves within the world--we link the known with the unknown to create an order that is dynamic and self-reflecting. The people who saw Jesus in the Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula made a huge visual leap. They took one small portion of the tip of one of the gaseous columns, turned it on its side, and found an image of Jesus with long, flowing hair that seems to point right at us. Never mind the fact that the light coming from the Eagle Nebula is seven thousand years old, about five thousand years older than Jesus. Their faith drove them to see the divine in a photograph of the unreachably remote.

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Vision has long been associated with reason, cognition, and empiricism. Yet its metaphors also invoke the opposite; we have visions, experiences in which we see as if with the eyes of an otherworldly being. In ganzfeld experiments, subjects place two halves of an ordinary ping-pong ball over their eyes, erasing any visual stimulation. They also listen to white noise on earphones. Lacking visual clues to maintain normal habits of vision and cognition, subjects project their own phantasms onto the homogenous visual field. This procedure is often used to test for telepathic communication between a sender and a receiver. Pilots may experience sensory confusion when they are caught in a cloudbank for long periods of time. I once went to a commercial photographer's studio where he bad created a room in which the corners of the walls, floor, and ceiling were rounded off and everything painted a flat white. When I stepped into the space, I had no sense of the room's size. I began to feel as if I were floating, as if gravity had given up on me. I forgot about ordinary things like walking and stared into the white void, straining to see the definition of the room. Pale fields of light green and blue floated on the edge of my vision, but when I looked straight at them, they disappeared.

In the absence of the known, the unknown rushes in. In the Middle Ages, things seen in the sky were angels or God's thunderbolts; today they are UFOs. Both hover near the edges of our carefully plotted, proven, and philosophized framework. The astronaut's journey into space is a modern-day echo of the journey to the heavens. A new skill on all old body. UFO photographs taken by astronomers or astronomical equipment are a technological retelling of visitations from angels or the ascensions of saints. Religious tracts have been replaced by scientific methodologies. Both worlds are taught up in fragile, forceful webs of desire. We project our anxieties and utopian fantasies upward, toward places unknown and invisible. In both systems, apophenia, the spontaneous perception of the connectedness and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena, takes us by storm. What is revealed by astronomical UFO imagery is our desire for belief, for a faith that holds us trembling on the edge between fact and myth, between technology and experience, between the known and the unknown. I have always wanted to be abducted by aliens, or at least to witness a blazing ball of light hovering over my garage But even more than the actual seeing, I'd like to take a little, grainy, black-and-white picture of it. One that can tack over my studio table, put up on my website, and tell stories about at dinner. Meanwhile, I'm crunching my SETI data like crazy and hoping that I'll be the one whose computer detects an alien signal among all the cosmic noise. I'm not really interested in what is real or what is bogus, who is conning me or who is the real thing. Instead I am infatuated with those images that desire to believe, that will do anything to create a reality m which wonder, the impossible, the extraordinary truly exist.

Orbs, blobs, and glows: astronauts, UFOs, and photography

Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Jane D. Marsching

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