Can we keep our eyes on the ball?

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” — Mark Twain [Artwork/Michael Moffett]

If you don’t remember the autumn of 1989 in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, too bad, it was high drama, stirring high hopes. I mean, I read all about it: A rip in the Iron Curtain sent legions of exhausted nonbelievers streaming west, Soviet repression was growing futile, and UFOs were making a joke of Russian air defenses (as they do everywhere, to be fair). The bogeys had probably been kicking around upstairs forever, but state media wasn’t big on pointing it out until glasnost offered cover.

KGB files began filling up with incident reports that summer, most ominously in July, when Soviet troops logged repeated instances of UFO insouciance over a weapons depot. Sightings poured in by the hundreds, with eyewitness reports including discs and triangles, light beams, circular landing marks, electromagnetic disruptions. Anatoliy Listratov, head of the All-Union Astronomical and Geodesic Society, felt compelled to state the obvious: “we are still wandering around in the darkness.” Then came a belated and sobering announcement from air force Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, who had triggered an international crisis during the Andropov era by ordering the shootdown of a Korean civilian jetliner as it strayed over Kamchatka. In 1993, Kornukov confessed that a jet fighter had gone down while scrambling after a UFO in ’89.

But the flap that got all the press occurred in and around Voronezh, population 1 million, spanning several weeks in September-October. Witnesses included local cops and white-collar professionals. But the headliners were the schoolkids whose accounts, in retrospect, are reminiscent of their young counterparts in Australia (Westall ’66) and Zimbabwe (Ruwa ’94) [see “The Phenomenon” documentary for details]. Soviet youngsters in one of Voronezh’s parks reported the approach and landing of a craft, the debarkation of occupants – and the temporary abduction of a 16-year-old. There may have been telepathic communication as well.

But there was one detail that made me sorta dismiss the whole thing. Because it just seemed insulting to what I thought I knew to be true. More precisely, it sounded flat-out absurd.

I could accept the details about one of the ships being “banana-shaped.” I could accept that one of the beings stood 10-feet tall, had three eyes, maybe, and was decked out in silver-colored overalls and bronze boots. And accounts that some of the occupants exhibited robotic behavior? I can handle that, too.

Here’s what I could not abide: Tass news agency’s quotes from eyewitnesses who described the humanoid creatures as having “very small heads.” Because not only was that version the antithesis of the prevailing archetype of hydrocephalic lightbulb-headed aliens, it reminded me of the punchline of a joke I never ever tell anymore.

It's the one about the poor slob who gets approached by a curious stranger wanting to know why his head is the size of a golf ball. The deformed man explains how he’d found a bottle on the beach, and when he rubbed it, an extremely hot but literal-minded genie pops out. She offers him three wishes. After stocking up on limitless wealth and healthy immortality, the lucky dimwit makes his final wish: “Baby, what I could really use right now? How about a little head?”

Well, OK. It was funny back then.

Images from Voronezh dislodged from the plaque the other day when I read Wired’s profile on Jacques Vallee, ufology’s grand old man who, at 82, appears reconciled to leaving the planet without getting the answers to his lifelong quest. As he made clear to reporter Joshua Rothman, “absurdity is an essential feature of the phenomenon. It fatigues the rational mind because the rational mind cannot ken it.” Comparing UAP behavior to that of a dolphin, Vallee added, “It’s a lot smarter than we are, and it uses humor at another level.”

Vallee had touched on a theme Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb wrote about in his 2021 book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. More than halfway through, the Galileo Project director riffed on Albert Camus’ look at the Sisyphus myth. Condemned by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, and condemned to watch it roll downhill, just shy of the summit, for all eternity, Sisyphus’ plight was “analogous to the absurd condition of man … caught in a perpetual cycle as he tried to understand an inexplicable world.

“I believe that other sentient beings – who are bound by intellectual limitations, just as we are – will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: life is absurd. It is difficult to remain arrogant in the face of the absurd,” Loeb writes. “Humility is the more apt posture. The more we see evidence of humankind cultivating humility when confronted with the awesome, the more we have reason to anticipate the same from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

Unfortunately, events in eastern Europe over the past few days have confronted a more wearily familiar kind of awesome, the kind of awesome you get from watching scarves of napalm descending upon faceless innocents below; only, you realize this isn’t archived footage at all, but the same old primordial exploding-now bullshit we pretended we had evolved past more than a generation ago. ETs confronting that kind of awesome back on Pandora would know more about Sparta than Athens, and would be unlikely to tell us anything we don’t already know. So here’s to Avi Loeb’s more hopeful scenario.

What 1989 gave us was a glimpse of alternative possibilities. Eulogies for that moment are streaming at us now in real time, unfiltered, on cell phones and social media, in what former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls “the end of our holiday from history.”

If, as some surmise, UAP/UFOs are trying to give us humility lessons, they need to step it up. Grand-scale human folly is once again tempting us to take our eyes off the ball, the great mystery, the pursuit of which might well pave the only exit ramp out of global Groundhog Day. Scratching the brewing debate from policy-level urgencies is not an option, not if we care about the sort of future we have left. Here’s one thing we can count on:

Retreating from scientific inquiry into the dazzling UAP absurdities that make our weapons look like toys, and locking it back inside its pre-12/17 closet, will be quietly applauded by at least a few of the usual suspects. The U.S. Air Force might even breathe a sigh of relief, and call it Mission Accomplished.