Perhaps we do not live in the Era of Communication and/or Information. Maybe we live in the society of the spectacle, where the events exist only as representation, and news are a promise of the big show.
Adorno and Horkheimer in their book called “Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” writes:
“ The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
In this environment we should understand the UFO subculture as spectacle, as the promise of a bad defined enlightenment. The whole manipulation of the disclosure activism is not directed towards a solution of the UFO enigma, but kept as mass media marketing where the important thing is how the statements and conspiratorial delusions have only real value as commodities.
The society of the spectacle is also the world of the simulacrum. The picture is more important than the real thing. In photos and videos showing a touristic attraction, the representation is paradoxically more real that the thing itself.
The postmodernist critics of the rational thought turn the evidences unnecessary for a world that looks for the image instead of the event and where the artificial and the simulacrum are passed for real things.
Of course in the society of the spectacle, existence and inexistence are seen from a relativistic perspective. Guy Debord, the French activist who wrote the book Society of the Spectacle in 1967, says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction.
Debord’s thesis is this : "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
In the rhetoric of the Cosmic Gurus we see this phenomenon in action. Nonsense replaces the real world and balloons are transformed into big ET spacecrafts. Contactees give us New Age talk as Extraterrestrial messages, ex rock musicians become Aliens and lawyers time jumpers.
However all this must be considered and analyzed in Ufology. We must recognize the impact of the UFO phenomenon in our society. We must recognize also that the great absents are the presumed entities behind the unknown 6 % of UFO sightings that remain unexplained.
