The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology

Résumé 0

This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the “UFO” serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, but thresholds of evidence as well. We take evidence here, not as given but as an ethnographic category. In particular, the UFO as a theory machine in the Chilean context, and the different stakes of evidence found within it, yields a theory of possibility and impossibility, which we have called evidence-as-possibility. This is not confined to matters of the existence of UFOs, but also spatial differences in which one conceives of such manifestations. We pit materialist understandings of evidence against ones that regard alien contact as something interior and embodied. But we also forego this division and explore how different, apparently contradictory facets of the evidence-as-possibility theory actually work together, such that each condition or event creates its own spatial configurations for UFOs. Finally, we explore “absurd” moments in which this theory machine collapses or goes into overdrive, escaping this spectrum of possibility altogether.