 | Contact and Multidimensional Subjectivity
Toward a Phenomenology of Disclosure
Kimberly S. Engels
What happens when accounts of contact with the intelligences behind UFOs/UAP are no longer interpreted through the lenses of delusion or extraterrestrial technological threat, but are instead allowed to appear on their own terms? Working closely with first-person accounts of contact, Kimberly S. Engels asks what new possibilities for thinking about humanity, consciousness, reality, and ethics emerge when these experiences are taken seriously as sites of inquiry rather than dismissed or reduced to preexisting explanatory frameworks. Disclosure appears as a phenomenological event—one that opens new ways of thinking, doing, and being.
When I read Kimberly Engels, I cannot resist an “I told you so.” But this is that confirmation taken to a whole new level of philosophical sophistication and public answer. What Engels is proposing is a kind of nondual signal that breaks down our assumed distinctions and boundaries, an ethics that does not focus only on individualism and agency but is more adequate to the actual hyperdimensional reality, fuller super-environment, future of the body (including the body’s super sexualities and paranormal powers), and transpersonal transformations that are actually reported by the experiencers. The very notion of “consent,” along with the nationalistic “threat narrative” and scientistic “nuts-and-bolts” reading that are so dominant in American political and military culture, are severely challenged and, frankly, moved beyond. Engels understands that it is not all about crisis and control, that these are often the colonizing ego’s fearful responses that we now need to think and imagine after with the liberatory and beneficent tools of transgression, transformation, and the trickster. We need to be someone else, someone really related to all and everything. This is impossible thinking at its very finest.
Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else
The study of UFOs demands contributions from phenomenological methods. Kimberly Engels provides us with a ground breaking study of this kind–providing a paradigm for what counts as taking the experience of the phenomenon seriously in all its relevant aspects. She gives us the tools to articulate the contents of uncanny experiences and follows the epistemological and ethical implications for how we should understand our relation to the phenomenon and those who encounter it. This work should now serve as the point of departure for a phenomenological study of uncanny experiences.
James D. Madden, author of Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World
In this ground breaking book, Kimberly S. Engels carefully defines the phenomenological method, then employs it in discussing experiences reported by people contacted by non-human intelligence. The results are revelatory and uncanny. Evidently, we are not alone in the universe. Highly recommended.
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Colorado-Boulder
978-1-9-84890-507-8
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