The daimonic world

 

“Aliens – striden om utomjordingarna” is a two-part series shown on Swedish public service TV (SVT). It deals with the UFO phenomenon, or rather the very human actors who believe or disbelieve in it. The narrator is an ethnologist named Kalle Ström. Both episodes are rather slow-paced and could even be seen as frankly boring, unless you are a UFO buff (or perhaps Skeptic ditto) with an undying interest in all aspects of the problematique. An American covering exactly the same material would have made it more dramatic, I´m sure!

“Aliens” contrasts two groups of people with entirely different perspectives on UFOs. The organization UFO-Sverige is something as peculiar as the world´s only Skeptic UFO-logy group. Its longtime leader Clas Svahn more or less dominates the “serious” UFO discourse in Sweden. At the other end of the spectrum are the true believers, who unironically try to contact the space brothers through the CE-5 protocol, see evidence for ancient aliens everywhere during a visit to Peru, or look for “portals” in the Swedish woods together with a masked “whistle-blower”. Naturally, they see UFO-Sverige as “the gatekeepers” and suspect that Svahn is an agent working for the CIA or Swedish military intelligence. Is there really no middle ground in this dogfight? At one point, the staff at UFO-Sverige´s archives at Norrköping seem to deny *any* kind of UFO-related conspiracies, surely an absurd proposition! There simply must be “secular” conspiracies around these topics, unless you have a very naïve view of, well, military intelligence. See my reviews of John Michael Greer´s “The UFO Chronicles” and “Project Beta” by Greg Bishop.

There are two twists in the second episode of “Aliens”. One is that Ström actually observes a UFO himself, which creates quite a stir in the alternative crowd. Svahn eventually debunks the alien craft as a bright star, Capella in the constellation of Auriga. The other is that Svahn admits that he had a dramatic UFO observation he has never been able to explain, featuring three luminous x-shaped objects flying through the night sky. He speculates that maybe UFOs are something unknown, strange but nevertheless terrestrial. Which is probably true in some cases (think earth lights).

Ström eventually reaches the conclusion that the real difference between the two camps isn´t really feeling versus facts, but rather whether or not you want to live in an enchanted or disenchanted cosmos (although somebody might argue that *is* feeling versus fact). After all, even some of the true believers are looking for empirical facts: stone walls in Peru, portals in the woods, or footage of strange objects in the sky. But they also suggest – quite explicitly – that the official explanations bore them half to death! They are searching for the daimonic, to borrow a term from Patrick Harpur. It´s therefore quite ironic that one of the few people who truly encountered it, might have been the skeptical Clas Svahn…