Cardinals

I’ve spent a lot of time in remote locations. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the skies. And I’ve seen a lot of UFOs. The most recent was northwest of Albuquerque. Ironically enough, it happened while I was shooting B-roll for a film about an Air Force counterintelligence officer who allegedly both worked on various Air Force UFO programs and created disinformation about them. He told me that the Air Force has an unofficial code name for them: CARDINALS.

In my travels through remote landscapes, often adjacent to restricted military ranges, I’ve tried, when possible, to photograph the novel aerial phenomena I’ve witnessed. I’ve been doing this for many years: one of the first images I ever made was of three lights outlining a triangular shape in the sky.

UFOs simultaneously exist and do not exist. They are akin to magical objects, blurring the lines between perception, imagination, and “objective” reality (whatever that may or may not be). Their existence challenges the traditional distinction between the two. As Eric Davis aptly puts it, “the question of whether or not UFOs are ‘real’ is… too crude and too philosophically taxing to broach.”

To take UFOs seriously is to take seriously the idea that reality is far weirder than Western traditions of science and empiricism imagine it to be. This prospect is as frightening as it is difficult to square with the epidemiologies we’ve inherited from Aristotle and Galileo, and that have given us everything from refrigerators to satellites, cell phones, and nuclear weapons. The scientific consensus seems to be: UFOs cannot exist. However, dismissing UFOs means waving away the lived experiences, cultural precepts, and worldviews of most people throughout history. Of course, when we add into the mix the fact that the US military and intelligence agencies have spent decades using UFOs for psychological operations, the picture gets blurrier still.

UFOs appear to live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual, at the crossroads of fear, desire, and logic. They produce communities of believers and debunkers, and dreams of divine salvation, endless energy, impossible physics, dark conspiracies, existential fears, and the fantasy that somewhere, somehow, someone knows a “Truth” so powerful that it could spell the end of modernity and capitalism.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a proliferation of UFO sightings is happening at the same time as the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. Each comes with their own forms of optimism and pessimism, wonder and doomsaying. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the UFO has reemerged in this era of synthetic media, disinformation, and political and cultural fracture. After all, as Davis points out, the first “flying saucers” were seen in 1947, a year that gave us supersonic flight, the first general-purpose computer, information theory, the transistor, the CIA, and the Polaroid camera.

In many ways, UFO photographs are emblematic of photography itself. The photograph is a record, but it’s not clear what of. An exposed sheet of film has some relationship to the light that facilitated that exposure, but it’s hard if not impossible to pinpoint the exact nature of that relationship. Like UFOs, photographs lack context; they don’t explain themselves no matter how loudly they speak. They lend themselves to laborious forensic analysis but make no promise of yielding anything conclusive, much less constructive. In other words, all photos are UFO photos.

The works in this series are made with various cameras: a Phillips 8x10 view camera, a Wista 4x5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format cameras, one modified to shoot infrared. The vast majority are shot on analog film—usually Kodak Portra and T-Max.

They are undoctored.