Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World Paperback – November 22, 2023

Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World is an application of the tools of academic philosophy to the UFO phenomenon. James D. Madden’s central claim is that understanding the UFO will require a re-thinking of ourselves and our standing in what is revealed as a much wider cosmos. Along the way, he addresses issues in the philosophy of mind, technology, religion, and the possibility of a re-enchantment of the world."This is the book I wish I read before I had ever considered learning about UFOs, or the works of Plato, for that matter. Dr. James Madden, a philosopher, does what no philosopher, or author, has attempted yet—to theorize the UFO as relevant and absolutely necessary for the expansion of human science and its long-held philosophical categories and assumptions. This isn’t the first time Madden has aided and abetted my understanding of the radical and revolutionary potential that philosophy offers for those who choose to know. I’d seen his lectures on Plato and read his published works. But this book argues that the UFO is necessary, now, for humanity’s cognitive breakthrough into a freer and more deeply meaningful life-experience. Madden places some of the best thinkers of the topic, like Jacques Vallee, within the Western philosophical tradition, and explains how their thinking expands and improves upon that tradition. Unidentified Flying Hyperobject makes sense of the UFO as no other past treatment has, and it will rightly go down as necessary reading for those interested in virtual reality, UFOs, and philosophy as history, but also as the contemporary means to free one’s mind."—D.W. Pasulka author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences"The evidence for the UFO phenomenon is beyond good, but that does not imply that we know what the evidence means. To study the UFO is to plumb the very depths of human thought and experience. It is philosophical through and through. James Madden shows this repeatedly, and with the figures of philosophy itself: Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Morton. It turns out we can think this thing. Where we end up, though, is quite beyond human thought, outside the cave of cognition, sensibility, and cultural assumption. But that, too, is profoundly philosophical, as Madden shows us. Such a realization can be deeply disturbing. It can also be truly fantastic."—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else Read more