Bruce Duensing has been writing about UFOs and anomalies for many years now. His old blog, Intangible Materiality, was decommissioned, but A Transit Of Contingencies carries on his explorations into the nature of time, memory, cognition, and language as they relate to our relationship with the anomalous. If the study of UFOs is to continue, and we don’t want to run the same scripts forever, we need to take a look at the instrument (our minds and the way we experience things) that is gathering and interpreting the data.

In a completely informal conversation, we discussed the problem of identifying something of unknown origin for which all of our frames of reference are from ourselves and our culture. Duensing asked how we might escape the trap of our senses, memories, and subconscious filtering, and suggested some solutions. He also lamented the fact that most people prefer simple and uncomplicated explanations. He introduced the concept that fear may be a sort of “carrier wave” for experiencing the unknown, both from our perspective and perhaps more importantly, from the view of any non-human intelligence behind it.

We discussed what we might ask an “alien” if given a chance. “I’d ask it what it thought I was,” he said, which might give us a perspective from outside of human experience. I thought that I might instead tell the entity that I didn’t believe in it and see what happened.

During the interview, Bruce said “There is a lot of unspoken nihilism going around UFO research” which is something I want to put on a T-shirt! I gained much hope and perspective during this 2-hour talk, and would be quite interested to see the comments.