Track 1: A Personal Opinion of the UFO Phenomenon

Justin Carter: I’m speaking with the prolific writer and software designer Douglas Rushkoff. His books include: Ecstasy Club, Children of Chaos, The Gen X Reader, Siberia, and one of my personal favorites, Media Virus. His writings can also be found in various periodicals worldwide through the internet. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today, Douglas.

Douglas Rushkoff: Thanks for caring enough to call.

JC: Well, I’d like to start by finding out your personal opinions on the UFO / ET subject, then move to it’s presence in the media.

DR: Well, I guess I have a lot of feelings about the UFO / ET phenomenon. I mean just in the simplest, basest terms, I mean, I do believe there’s something out there…

JC: Real quick–have you ever seen a UFO?

DR: Strictly speaking, yeah, but only because I couldn’t identify these flying objects.

JC: OK…

DR: But I don’t believe that I’ve seen anything that would count as a UFO-like spaceman in the traditional sense. I mean I have had, and this is getting off track even, I have had what I would consider to be experiences with forces, entities, consciousness, or states of awareness that I don’t know if they could be explained away, you know, simple…

JC: Sure…

DR: …subconscious human projection but I guess that would have much more to do with inter-dimensional beings or ghosts or something like that, than spacemen coming in crafts. I mean, as I see it, we stand a much greater likelihood of interacting with what you could call non-earthly species or nun-mundane consciousness through sort of more and more meditative, or even psychedelic states than looking in the sky using telescopes.

JC: With radio waves…

DR: Well yeah, I mean even if not, I don’t know that technology is going to be the easiest way to get there. I mean my guess is that certain South American shaman or Australian aborigines have been in contact with a hell of a lot more than anyone in NASA or in a giant radar listening dish has contacted. But to answer your original question, as far as what do I make of the whole sort of the recent spate of UFO abduction experiences and encounters. I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with our own cultural psychopathology than it does with visitation from other places. I think we are a tremendously repressed culture in many, many ways. I think that the general censorship of the media, the lack of sex, and the…

JC: Censorship of sexuality… things like that.

DR: …in media and censorship of violence is akin to censoring someone’s dream life. Now, and if you prevent a person from having dreams, if you wake them up as soon as they go into REM state, within a week or two they’ll start to have waking state hallucinations. So I think one possible explanation for what’s going on and why it’s so similar is that we are similarly deprived of certain kinds of thoughts and imagery. So that it’s going to peek up one way or another. Another thought I’ve often had is that these are not really UFO’s from other planets at all but some kind of visitation from the future. But these aren’t beings from another planet but beings from our own kind of coming back or trying to communicate with us or…

JC: Some kind of future technology…

DR: Right. I mean if you want to play it out in kind of a science fiction way, I mean–why would people from the future who look that strange and evolved be coming back and scraping DNA samples off current day humans. Well, it’s probably because we’re the last human beings, the last part of our species that are going to be around that are pre-cloned. You know, I would guess that once we start really implementing cloning technology, if we do, and selective genetic techniques, I think a lot of those UFO’s might go away–and if they do, well then we’ll have our answer right there. And the other possibility is that–I’ve been looking at it historically at the rise–when there seem to be these great rises in UFO phenomenon and media awareness of people’s UFO experiences and, in our country anyway, they tend to mirror the development of new technologies, So, you know, we develop the atomic bomb and everybody’s looking up in the sky afraid of god knows what coming down and that’s when people started, really in the mid 40’s, seeing UFO’s, and then in the 1970s really it was about when we had Roe vs. Wade and legalization of abortion that people started having initial contacts with these sort-of fetus like aliens that were coming and putting tools in women’s wombs. So in some sense it could be, and I’m not an abortion foe, but there could be some lingering cultural guilt about our relationship to fetuses and the sort of rampant use of abortive techniques now.

JC: So you see kind of a widespread cultural archetypal projection going on.

DR: Right. And then now, I mean now that we’re, I mean the big science of the day is cloning and genetic engineering so again it’s no wonder that we get a further modified version of our, of our UFO encounter to that. While I don’t agree that there are people in crafts circling our planet and dealing with us physically, I do believe that this is a real and experienced phenomenon that either represents some kind of a subconscious incursion to waking state reality or the entrance of some sort of inter-dimensional consciousness to waking state reality and frankly I don’t know that there’s that much difference between the two.

JC: That’s very interesting…

Track 2: The UFO Phenomenon And It’s Effect On Popular Culture

JC: What kind of effects do you see, you know, the various manifestations of UFO / ET memes, what kind of memes do you see floating around in our television and movies and radio? You know, what kind of effect have they had on our culture currently?

DR: Well, it’s interesting. I guess ET phenomenon tends to fabricate culture into two really polarized extremes neither of which I think is absolutely healthy. You know, if you want to just absolutely reject the ET / UFO phenomenon and say that it’s nothing but simple insanity or people making things up or an inconsequential mass hysteria, then you might be adapting such a rationalist’s perception of the world that you essentially just calcify, you calcify your awareness you prevent change, you prevent evolution, you prevent new thought structures and make life a much less fun thing. On the other hand, people that hear about or have one UFO experience and then decide that reality itself is liquid, and then–or vapor, and twist the conclusions and theories of quantum physics to their own end and decide that the Heisenburg uncertainty principle means that reality itself is simply a projection of our awareness and if we think about it differently that, you know, solid state will cease to be an effective barrier to (??? 1:33)

JC: … but simplistic…

DR: Right. I mean it’s too simplistic, it’s too superstitious, and it’s ultimately is-empowering to have an extremely magical view of the world. You know, neither of these views though, help us deal with the matters at hand which are: Can we think our way out of environmental doom? Can we create new ways of interacting so we can distribute the food we have to the people who need them? Can we create new political and economic structures that can more efficiently and compassionately deal with the whole of humanity? And in order to do those kinds of things we need to be both optimistic, open-minded, and rational. So my problem with looking at the way the UFO phenomenon trickles up or trickles down popular culture is that it tends to split us into two extremist camps that either accept fully or reject fully these kinds of–this sort of thinking and stymies our efforts to move forward.

Track 3: Religion, Military And The Control Of Cultural Psyche

JC: So do you see that as similar to, in previous centuries, religion, you know, in a way the internal battles of God and the Devil and things like that?

DR: Yes and no. Religion in previous centuries–really since religion became an organized thing–I’ve seen religion as a way that certain people, usually those in power, attempt to maintain their power. You know, religion is a great way to, and perhaps it’s one of the only ways to, really prevent the mutation of memes, of cultural code. Because part of following a religion is maintaining faith and not allowing it to change. The reason the Catholic church has survived this long is because it’s very resistant to change. The basic memes inside Catholicism are not up for discussion. But you know you look at something like the new age movement, and, I mean if you want to call that religion, that’s kind of the opposite. That’s about making everything up for discussion, and making everything have the ability to change…

JC: Well, do you see governments and militaries attempting to control these memes or to alter them in any kinds of ways for that control factor?

DR: I don’t really see government and the military as taking a long term view of the cultural psyche. I think they’re much more crisis oriented and, while a military sponsor, public relations firm like Hill & Knowlton. A firm like that can certainly alter and direct public opinion about the Gulf War, I don’t think those kinds of firms and companies and dollars are going to somehow be taming or controlling public or global sentiment. I think it’s much more on an as needed basis…

JC: Yeah, but I was thinking more along the lines of mind control type projects to feed people the ideas that they’ve been abducted and things like that–to kind of start the fires.

DR: Right. Well there’s, of course there’s the people that believe and have the evidence that they believe supports the notion that in mind control experiments or brainwashing experiments they subject children and people to all sorts of abuse–ritualized abuse–and then implant these memories. To me it seems a bit far fetched given the more practical goals of these sons of agencies. I mean there’s so much…

JC: … expensive too…

DR: Well, it’s expensive, it’s risky and–no, I’ve really put that in the, in the realm of things like the Montauk Project and there’s a lot of people emerging who claim to have been part of some sort of, you know, advanced government mind control and time travel experiments and even though there’s no records and they have no physical evidence of their connection, they have these memories. It just doesn’t feel like the shortest distance between to points for me.

JC: So you haven’t come to a final conclusion on that.

DR: No, I just–I have trouble believing in the–in anything beyond Manchurian candidate style work, MK-Ultra and things like that. And I think it’s because the people working in those realms quickly discovered that the tools they were using–things like LSD and hypnosis and…

JC: Kind of the opposite effect they were going for…

DR: Right. They tended to have the opposite effect on the culture and they tended to produce more people like William Burroughs and Ken Kesey than automaton robots they might have wanted to create.

Track 4: Media And The Need To Connect The Dots

JC: Getting back to the different memes found in our culture related to the UFO / ET phenomenon, which ones do you see as the most pervasive currently, that are having a lot of effect on us?

DR: It’s interesting. I mean, I think as new media replaces old media, and media itself seems to replace physical space as the chief environment for human interaction…

JC: Kind of an electronic tactile space for going into…

DR: Uh-huh, and just a hyper-mediated, hyper sensationalized reality. I find people increasingly disoriented and attempting to get their bearings and, while young people might use television shows like Beavis and Butthead or the internet and hyper links to try to make connections between things that people had trouble making connections between before, I find a lot of people almost making random links. I mean, you can think of conspiracy theory really as the first form of hyper text where people are trying to make connections between things that haven’t been connected before. People want to make connections between things so that they can feel that there’s some sort of a map so it’s not just as chaotic and unpredictable as it feels, but that there’s some guiding principle or some underlying organization. For many people it’s preferable to believe that there is a malevolent force that’s organizing reality against them than that there’s no force at all. So I think the predominant means that tend to be surfacing in connection to UFO abduction and government conspiracies and X-Files like things is an underlying need for order and for pattern recognition.

JC: Fill in the gaps…

DR: Right. Or connect the dots.

JC: OK.

DR: And when people are connecting the dots for themselves and using whatever similar events happens to be going on to connect dots, it can have very dangerous results like in the Heaven’s Gate scenario. I mean here are people living in a very free form conceptual reality and there really is nothing–there’s no guiding principal–there’s no way to connect the dots. So astrological events occur, or an astronomical one of a comet coming and they go, “Oh! This is a sign! This is the moment we’ve been waiting for!”. And that’s very much like what we could call primitive civilizations looking at a lunar eclipse and saying, “Oh my God, this is it!”. You know this is it because they didn’t really have a way of ordering their greater reality.

Track 5: Mars And Universal Order

JC: Now what do you think of the artifacts on Mars ? Do you think those will be found to be real or just anomalies of cameras?

DR: I think that the world we live in is much more ordered than we understand. I think that the repetition of shapes in nature and the echoes of movements culturally, the–really the recurrence or recursions of various phenomenon at regular intervals means to me that the universe is really much more musical than we give it credit for. And there’s octaves and tonics and refrains and choruses and that there is a harmony to nature so that it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see many of the shapes and forms that we consider to be results of human biological, or earthly biological, evolution to be repeated in context where there is no seeming evolutionary or biological imperative to create those shapes.

JC: Sure, you kind find all kinds of, you know, I collect rocks and such–you find all kinds of geometric shapes, you know, right out of nature–that’s where we get them.

DR: Right. And that doesn’t mean–and this is where we can’t go too far on the other side–I’m not such a rationalist or thermal dynamics fan to say that this is just probability and random and, of course, these things are going to show up. What I’m saying is, it’s both more ordered and less intentional than either side chooses to believe. That it’s absolutely probable for there to be more of these kinds of shapes and more of these kinds of patterns than other ones, because that’s the way that matter has–and I use this word loosely–chosen to organize itself. I mean, we already know now there seems to be more right handed molecules in the universe than left and that defies probability. Well, of course it does. Life defies probability. You know the only force in the universe is not entropy. You know there’s another force called, what we call life…

JC: Negentropy…

DR: Right. Negentropy. And that’s quest for awareness–for organization–and we’re going to find because the universe is dealing with essentially the same kinds of building blocks, we’re going to find these shapes occurring again and again.

JC: You know, on a personal level, would you guess that the supposed artifacts on Mars–do you think those are remnants of a previous culture you know, personally, or do you believe that they are natural formations, or are you remaining undecided?

DR: If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably not remnants of a civilization as we know it. But that they are manifestations of consciousness we don’t understand yet.

JC: OK, so there’s another for you…

Track 6: Matter, Consciousness, and the UFO Phenomenon

JC: … it sounds like you believe consciousness permeates everything (DR: Yeah) throughout the universe. So that would be the basic principle?

DR: Yeah, I think that the great illusion that we’re under right now is that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs in individual beings and I don’t think that’s true. I think consciousness is something that individual beings can evolve to tap into. But that consciousness is not unique– it’s not mine. It’s a reservoir of sorts or a wavelength or a–it’s a stuff, it’s an ether and that creatures evolve in order to participate in that–you know–but it’s got nothing to do with human beings.

JC: So would you see life as permeating the universe as much as consciousness–well, not as much, but alongside?

DR: Yeah, I would say life is–life is matter’s attempt to participate in consciousness.

JC: Then you find, you know, basic matter as also being consciousness than like the floor, my door, a cup….

DR: Ummm…. Yeah, but in a much less participatory way than you or I.

JC: Yeah, a much more passive form of consciousness.

DR: Yeah, I mean I think the higher states of organization that matter has developed, with consciousness as help, is what’s allowing that interplay–that dance to occur. I mean you could look at–I mean there’s really two main things going on. I mean matter is reaching up and striving towards this etheric sense of awareness and the ether itself is reaching down through matter to–towards experience and the interplay of those two forces is what we normally consider life.

JC: It’s a great way to look at it. Well, I really love that you’re an optimist, also. I appreciate that.

DR: Well, I mean I don’t consider it–I mean optimistic as much as, you know, realism. If you’re going to be alive then life itself is optimism.

JC: Well, you’re an optimist of utopian proportion.

DR: I don’t know that we’ll really ever get there. I don’t know that we’re ever going to be able to stop pain and suffering. I don’t know that we’re ever going to wake up from this game, but I think we have to at least envision ways in which that can happen. Otherwise how do we justify going on?

JC: Where do you see the ET/UFO phenomenon going in the next 10 years as things change?

DR: Well, it’ll be interesting. I think that there may be some alleviation after this year 2000 business is over with. You know, there is a kind of stirring of the pot that comes with Jesus Christ’s 2000th birthday. If for no other reason that’s when we decided to start these numbers. I mean, I think millennium is crock, but that’s O.K., a lot of people don’t and…

JC: Life always finds a way, huh?

Dr: Yeah, really. But I think that may diminish a little bit. I mean, what will happen is–if our culture becomes more repressive over time then you will start to see these–well, it’s like these clumps of tuna salad that get pushed out the sides of the bread…

JC: Well, really quick–are you talking about our culture here in the US or as a world culture?

DR: Um, I guess both. I mean I only really experience it that much in the US, but it’s a combination. See, if you don’t get so much of this in a repressive culture like Iraq, say, because it’s much more of a fundamentalist culture and it’s exerting pressure on people with very strict and orthodox world views. Here in the states, the extreme force of capitalism and of economics combines with this kind of open mindedness–collapse of religious and public institutions tends to flip people out in extreme directions like, it’s more like when you try to put your finger on a tomato seed it kind of skirts away on the table. That’s sort of what happens here because we’ve got a pretty fluid culture.

JC: So you’re saying if our culture were to become more repressive…

DR: I think we will start to see more of the experiences and phenomenon–we’ll profligate. Whereas if we become less repressive–meaning if we, what you could call the subconscious conversation, is allowed to rise to the surface then you’ll see I think less of this subconscious material…

JC: … spilling out over the edges…

DR: Right.

JC: OK well, you know, you’ve answered my questions. I really appreciate it.

DR: Oh, sure…

JC: It’s been a lot of fun.

DR: What’s your sense–do you really think there’s UFOs?

JC: Well, you know, I’ve had some personal experience and I’ve never been really able to get a handle on it completely. So…

DR: Right. I mean the thing I would definitely tell you is even if it’s not real in a sense of the UFO thing, it’s not necessarily your own experience either. You know what I mean?

JC: Yeah…

DR: I certainly don’t see it as the person’s fault. You know…

JC: Well I might’ve just plugged in at…

DR: Right

JC: … the wrong time to the wrong thing, so…

DR: There’s a definite communication switchboard between people right now and certainly between people all the time and the fact that you happen to tap into that and end up having that experience doesn’t mean you know, there’s something wrong.

JC: Thanks guy, I appreciate it. You take care and I’ll catch you later.