(eyes) !?!?!?!!!??????....??? (eyes) On the Artist-Run Archives of Ufology
It's a raccoon, not a cat. But it could be a cat, and it could be my cat, who knows.
It’s a raccoon, I think.
I live in the UFO Archive. Accidentally, premeditatedly, forcefully—basically thrown into it by society. I don’t remember how it happened, we all just...drew the Sun on the corner of the paper with an orange crayon, and then an alien with a green one.
While I am drawing with crayons in my head, I am riding my bike. I ride my bike nearly every night, if I didn’t ride it to work earlier that day. I have a little light on my bike — for safety reasons, of course, but mostly, I love feeling like I’m on a mysterious adventure once I turn the light on.
An ambiguous white shape, set against a black background.
I bought and sold three others before I finally found my current perfect ride. I know nothing about bikes except riding them. As fast as possible. Mine is a second-hand, small-sized bike, with a silvery shining body, black dropped handlebars, Prussian-blue cables...the only word I would use to describe it is: handsome.
My jobs and my art practice are very exciting to me—yet they are utterly boring, of course, when compared to my wildest dreams. My boring life mostly involves sitting in front of computers, papers, paperclips, staples, books, archival boxes, and folders, slowly and carefully, but swiftly, maneuvering among shelves and physical objects... riding a bike and imagining I am chasing something, or being chased by something, is undeniably more stimulating.
I often come back to a quote that can’t find its way out of my mind; I don’t remember where it came from. I don’t remember if it was in English or in my native language, and or what its original context was. I also don’t remember who said it, but it went something like, “Ufology is really, really boring; not very often do you come across an actually interesting UFO case.”
Once I was biking in the cold winter Chicago wind, and I took out my phone and tried to get Spotify to play Sufjan Stevens’s “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois,” from his 2005 album.
Moving to Chicago wasn’t that big of a deal in my head, but every now and then it hits me, and I realize I am in the Chicago: a city that people dream of living in, aspiring to its DIY art scene, famous enough that a foreigner doesn’t need a map to know where it is. It is a city visited by my favorite fictitious journalist-adventurer, Tintin (from The Adventures of Tintin), in 1932, and where that band also named Chicago formed sometime in late 1960s. More consequentially, for me, Chicago is the birthplace of Josef Allen Hynek (1910–86), whose Center for UFO Studies has been based here since the 1970s — it’s the city where his legacy lives on.
Diagram of a TSA screening screen. There are two buttons: one on the left, labeled “Scan,” and another, on the right, labeled “Clear.” A humanoid figure has their hands up, and their hair is styled ambiguously, resembling an aura. Two small rectangles point to where the machine finds the humanoid suspicious.
I am currently working as an archival processing assistant at Northwestern University, where the fourteen boxes comprising the Hynek Papers are housed. Oh … Illinois, you spoil this alien (legal alien). Through the act of collecting — as Jenny Rice, author of Awful Archives (2020), would say — I am piecing things together to prove that I am indeed an alien: my expired visa, which stuck me in the US of A; my latest I-94 records; my multiple I-20s and foreign tax forms; my EAD identification card; my most recent email from Her Majesty’s Passport Office; the TSA officer’s enlarged pupils when he patted down my chest, as if he realized he was in the process of accidentally breaking something that must be processed by an archive—oops.
I never admire artists; I fall in love with their flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities. UFO people aren’t artists, though, so I never know what to do with them. In pursuing ufology as an artist — clearly, an unscientific approach—I never know which UFO people to fall in love with, in part because their vulnerability is all the more obvious. It is hard to navigate within the realm of ufology and fringe science: no one is truly right and no one is absolutely wrong, so I don’t know who and where my people are. After I sent my fifth email to the Center for UFO Studies requesting a quick chat, I realized once again that I had completely forgotten I live in the same city as them. Living through the Covid-19 pandemic not only made me lose my sense of time, but also made it so that I had no idea where I was geographically. I always have my head down and rush home every day to avoid human contact. Chicago. Earth.
In April 2021, 6851 kilometers away from Chicago, Clas Svahn, age 63, received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. When he told me over Zoom, I smiled politely, but I felt my heart expanding. He said he hoped the vaccine would allow both him and also his longstanding project Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), to live on a bit longer. Clas is chairperson of AFU, and vice-chairperson for UFO-Sweden. The more I talk to him, the more I wish he would live as long as possible.
Can an archive live forever? What is forever? [Big Mama from The Fox and the Hound: “Darling, forever is a long, long time.”] Is an archive that doesn’t aim for forever still an archive? And if I happen to have forever, would I even care about archives?
Who would have imagined I would first “visit” an archive in Sweden, before I saw any in Chicago?
A field of black rectangles, Scotch-taped onto a silvery, shiny bubble-wrapped background.
As emails have increasingly dominated everyday life, my inbox, along with my outreach to UFO people, has expanded. Only 5 percent of them ever reply back to me. Even when I naively thought I had finally found the ufology writers who shared an approach similar in spirit to my own, they never followed up. I can’t help but compare these situations with strangers in the ufology realm to soliciting studio visits with artists. How often does a studio visit actually benefit my practice? Is a UFO tweet a WIP? Why do people put fire emojis under Instagram posts of paintings? Do I bond with people who have seen a similarly shaped UFO? Is my social media identity categorizable? Can someone do a studio visit with me about my UFO book collection? How often do I find an artist I genuinely like, and then go on to form a friendship with them? Is friendship a goal of visitation? Do I find my friends’ art practices intriguing only because they are my friends, or do I actually understand where they are coming from? How many of my friends understand my art practice? How many of my friends just endure me talking about UFOs? How many people blank out when I open my UFO mouth?
I am looking up into the starry downtown Chicago sky—I have stopped pedaling and am allowing the bike to run on inertia. As my bike and I glide under the stars, I am thinking of photographic evidence and the desire to own an experience, the burning desperation to possess an object that we all sometimes feel. With a decent speed and a broken phone, the photo I took of the sky was a complete blur of dark colors, intermixed with sources of light.
There are specifics of ufology or pseudoscience or paranormal stuff at the back of my mind that I can access anytime. I close my eyes and there is a voiceover function I can turn on, an endless podcast, on shuffle, suffused with bits and pieces of different UFO cases that I have filed away in my mental cabinets. I don’t know what to do with them. The drawers of the cabinets could maybe be described as sticky, at best, a polite way of saying that I don’t have a good memory. I don’t remember events that happened to me most of the time. I only remember obscure details. Sometimes I only remember emotions. The lingering ones.
Three sequential images of unidentifiable white shapes, taped onto the same silvery, shiny bubble-wrapped background, as in the previous image.
I have seen a UFO twice in my lifetime: once, I was alone, and the sole witness; the other time, I was with a bunch of pedestrians, but none of us talked about it. I didn’t own a smartphone or a camera then, and my memories of these sightings have since been contaminated by my interest in and work with the UFO Archive, and like all other kinds of proof, have disintegrated over time.
Contaminated might be too strong a word. My bike just passed by a raccoon, and its shadow stood still for a fraction of a second, to acknowledge that my bike and I were moving by, before it spirited away. I initially thought the raccoon might have been my cat, but no. Of course not. That shape, moving in this particular area, could only ever be a raccoon. My second thought was, Aw, cutie baby. I didn’t actually see the raccoon. But I know it must be cute because, well, how could it not be? If it reminds me of my cat, how could it not be cute, an adjective I am most willing to use to describe my animal companion? My bike and I — and the perhaps-raccoon — shared an intimate moment of exchange. Would I even recognize my own cat on the street if she left my (her) house?
A UFO sighting is another intimate encounter, but only momentarily so. The sight itself is the evidence, but it’s fleeting. The memory then becomes evidentiary. It’s fleeting, too, and so are all the ways we try to contain it. Oh, but to own something! To briefly capture something—Oh, my God! It’s in my hand! I can show it to you!—that's not greed, but temptation. It is human nature (and the work of the artist) to want to relive something, to replay a memory, to see it again, to ensure that you—yourself—own that moment. The residues from this intangible and fundamentally non-objective evidence (the sighting) simply must turn into something. A thing. A thing that is free. Free from being chained to a bookshelf, free from having to be coalesced into a form, free from our tainted language...
But what do these sightings actually offer evidence of? Nothing, and anything.
But to be a not/any thing: for this intimate encounter to be used, to be understood, to be recognized, it must be translated into the form of an Object. Then? It’s labeled (haphazardly or not), it’s filed, it’s indexed, it’s wrapped, it’s softly laid upon a shelf...it’s part of the Archive now. The thing is alive, within an (UF)Object!
The UFO Archive we “maintain” is filled with instances of the evidence-as-thing, as encounters with UFOs became (evidential) objects. But they are proof in waiting: longing to be used, to be activated. Waiting for us to go touch them again and tell them what, exactly, they are evidencing, and more importantly, maybe, why.
Now, I am riding towards the end of this archive. Maybe I am lingering. I am biking slower and slower, to enjoy my last bit of mysterious adventure. I know I will be back again tomorrow night. Objects are always waiting to be manifested into this dimension, and their shapes sit in a holding pattern, until they can be formed by our imperfect human brains, given our desperation for understanding.
The raccoon is long gone by now, and I am close to getting home: to feed my actual cat, a form with which I am most familiar. And perhaps, I will see a different raccoon tomorrow.
PS: Happy twentieth birthday to the Hynek Papers, whose finding aid was first published in Summer 2002.
