CCS BARD

Alien, god, or war machine? An evening of performances and conversations on UFOs and the longing for another world.

UFOlogy has been hailed as a new American religion, offering the faithful access to a mystical realm of super intelligent beings and divine technologies, along with a scripture of alien-contact stories and government leaks. Sightings have surged in the past few decades, as has the belief that UFOs are dispatched by aliens, giving rise to a network of online forums, podcasts, documentaries, and influencers calling for the government to come clean. Remarkably, Congress complied in 2023 with a hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), which featured high-ranking intelligence officials speculating on the origin of “non-human biologics.” The hearing revealed spectacular orbs to be crisscrossing the sky, confounding a secret Pentagon task force on “anomalous objects.” Suddenly, the government seemed to have shifted from denial to declassification, going so far as to set up a searchable database of UAP sightings with a tip line. And the conspiracy theorists morphed into oracles and transparency advocates.

As the fixation on aliens has gone mainstream, the UFOlogy tent has grown to accommodate countless sects, from millenarian cults awaiting extraterrestrial messiahs to security fanatics fearing a rerun of Independence Day. (Marco Rubio’s assessment: “Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat.”) Given the explosion of believers—and of related exposés, YouTube channels, subreddits, merchandise, etc.—Anomalous Objects asks how UFOs speak to the anxieties and crises of our age. How might UFOlogy act as a vehicle for countering official reality and assembling fellow dissenters?

For Anomalous Objects, Joseph Buckley, Salim Green, Clare Koury, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, and Olukemi Lijadu will address UFOlogy as a cultural resource that affords a sense of agency in the face of mass manipulation and disempowerment. They’ll consider the phenomenon as a sign of degenerate institutions and a corrosive media environment: a “hyper-meme,” as Trevor Paglen writes, that has been enlisted to muddle representation and reality. But they’ll also reflect on UFOlogy as a rebuke to a stifling worldview that banishes experiences of transcendence (and unorthodox forms of spirituality) to the domain of the “paranormal” or “supernatural,” as Jeffrey Kripal claims in How to Think Impossibly about Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (2024).

Buckley will address UFOlogy as a quasi-religious movement that expresses the will to both transcend and reorder the material world, covering biblical symbolism, sci-fi tropes, and congressional testimony. Green will debut a performance connecting mundane tactics for avoiding police scrutiny to “dark-forest theory,” which presents the universe as home to advanced civilizations that deliberately conceal themselves because detection would put them in danger. Koury will speak about the notion of UFOs as “plasma phenomena”—manifestations of electromagnetic activity that signal non-biological life forms or fantastical technologies—and consider the echoes of mysticism and occultism in contemporary visions of alien spacecrafts. Throughout the evening, Lijadu will present a mix of songs and sounds that employ UFOs as figures of foreignness and intergalactic solidarity, delivering revelation and even liberation.

Afterwards, Lewis-Kraus will respond to the presentations, drawing on his writing in the New Yorker about the Pentagon’s reckoning with UFOs, and lead a conversation with Buckley and Koury.

Anomalous Objects was developed through a graduate course at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and organized by Cicely Haggerty, Lekha Jandhyala, Ariana Kalliga, Micaela Vindman, and Charlotte Youkilis.

Anomalous Objects is supported by the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies and made possible through the generous support of the Lambent Foundation/Fund of Tides Foundation; Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color cofounded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Chauncey and Marion D. McCormick Family Foundation; the Ken & Judith Joy Family Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Stolbun Family; and Triple Canopy’s Director’s and Publishers Circles.

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