Disclosure Day and the Ultimate Other

As someone with a space science background and a long-term interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), I could not avoid the recent film on that topic, Disclosure Day. The film fits within the genre of UFO flicks dating back at least to the classic The Flying Saucer (1950), the first film on the topic. The film’s release also coincides with recent testimonies of government officials claiming that the U.S. government is secretly studying and reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and the recent study by NASA on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).

In Disclosure Day, the character Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) goes rogue against his company, the Wardex Corporation, a government contractor that works with extraterrestrial technology and experiments on captured extraterrestrials with the goal of reverse-engineering their technology. Kellner, believing his company is on the wrong track, steals a device called the Archive, which. contains records of extraterrestrial technology dating back to the Roswell incident. Kellner is almost caught, but escapes with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson).

Meanwhile, in Kansas City,  news meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has an incident where she speaks in an unknown language. Unbeknownst to her, Margaret is speaking in an extraterrestrial language. After this incident, Margaret is pursued by Wardex agents and eventually encounters Daniel. The two eventually realize that they were both abducted as children by extraterrestrials and given complementary powers. Near the end of the film, they team up with ex-Wardex agents to reveal the truth of the existence of extraterrestrials to the world. 

Disclosure Day fits in with recent films in which the extraterrestrials are portrayed in such a way to make them seem more mysterious. This includes films like Arrival (2016) and Interstellar (2014) where the extraterrestrials are portrayed as mysterious, even godlike, but ultimately benevolent and films where the extraterrestrials are portrayed as malevolent or Lovecraftian, such as the 2016 film adaptation of The Three Body Problem, a science fiction novel by the Chinese author Cixin Liu. In a post-secular world, it could be argued that godlike extraterrestrials, whether benevolent saviors of humanity or Lovecraftian monstrosities, are an example of the current appetite for the re-enchantment of the world.

One of the ways this type of re-enchantment overlaps with politics is a curious left-wing political tradition that sees advanced extraterrestrials as playing a key role in advancing human progress. The Argentinean revolutionary Juan Posadas, founder of Fourth International Posadism, wrote an essay in 1968 arguing that spacefaring extraterrestrials, being more technologically advanced than humans, would also need to be more socially advanced and therefore socialist. Posadas believed that the socialist countries should call upon extraterrestrials to help them in the fight against capitalism. 

Another example of a space religion that significantly influenced left-wing movements is Russian cosmism. Russian cosmism was founded by the Russian Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fyodorov, who was also a mentor to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet and Russian spaceflight. Fyodorov believed that science would one day resurrect the dead and that space colonization would be required to make room for everyone who was to be resurrected. 

Russian cosmism was initially suppressed in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, it continued to influence the Soviet space program. The initial Soviet headstart in the space race with launching Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into space in 1957 and launching the first human, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, into space in 1961 were both hailed in the Soviet Union as the victory of socialism over capitalism, proof that space exploration was intrinsic to progress.

While Russian or Soviet cosmism did not necessarily involve extraterrestrials, it did form the background of Soviet speculation about life on other planets. This included science fiction authors, such as the Russian revolutionary and scientist Alexander Bagdonov, who wrote Red Star about a Martian civilization that had achieved socialism. It also included scientists, such as the astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, the inventor of the Kardashev scale, which classifies hypothetical civilizations by energy capacity output, and the astronomer Iosif Shklovsky, the pre-eminent SETI research scientist in the Soviet Union and co-author of the book Intelligent Life in the Universe in 1966 with the U.S. astronomer Carl Sagan.

Like their U.S. counterparts, Soviet scientists and science fiction authors interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence showed an openness to learning from intelligences other than their own. In the NASA report Anthropology, Archaeology, and Interstellar Communication,  extraterrestrials are referred to as the “ultimate others” in an essay by Ben Finney and Jerry Bentley. This perhaps unintentionally echoes more traditional religious movements that emphasize hospitality and love of “the other.” The late Pope Franics wrote about “the sacred ground of the other” in his apostalic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

An older example of such thinking in religious contexts is the tradition of Marguerite Porete (c. 1258-1310), a medieval mystic and member of the Beguines, an all-female quasi-monastic lay religious order that was part of the larger heretical Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Brethren were known for antinomianism and libertinism, but also a form of radical hospitality and egalitarianism that is described by the situationist author Raoul Vaneigem in the book Movement of the Free Spirit as a precursor to later revolutionary and socialist movements.

Porete, in her book The Mirror of Simple Souls, taught that a person needed to go through stages of increasing self-denial and realization of God’s love in order to become truly free to submit to the Holy Spirit. One stage of this was to see God as the ultimate other. In seeing God as the ultimate other, the person would then become more open to the other in general and be able to truly love others. 

The current political scene not just in the United States but around the world is defined by increasing hostility toward the other as well as hostility toward immigrants and refugees across the United States; Europe; and, recently, South Africa and Australia. The underlying issues behind these conflicts are complex and solutions are still unclear. But one thing that is clearly needed is greater openness to embracing and cooperating with the other to create a world that is less unequal and more peaceful, one in which we can solve problems such as the climate crisis and the risk of misaligned artificial intelligence. 

Perhaps an encounter with the ultimate other, whether divine or extraterrestrial and whether good or bad, would enable us to have better encounters with the “others” who live next to us and are not all that different from us in the cosmic scheme.

Lead image credit: Carsten Frenzl, via Wikimedia