Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

1. Alien Phenomenology

1 [ 1 ] alien phenomenology New Mexico offered me a childhood of weird objects. When the weather is clear, the Sandia Mountains to the east of Albuquerque drip the juices of their namesake fruit for a spell each evening, ripening quickly until the twilight devours them. At the range’s southern foothill, apple trees take the place of watermelons. There, in the hollowed-out Manzano Mountain, the U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Command once stashed the nation’s largest domestic nuclear weapons repository, some 2,450 warheads as of the turn of the millennium.1 One hundred miles due south from the Sandias rests Trinity Site. There, in the summer of 1944, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, and Robert Oppenheimer placed dollar wagers on the likelihood that testing an implosion-design plutonium device would ignite the atmosphere . Today, the site opens to the public on the first Saturdays of April and October. Families caravan in from the nearby cities of Socorro and Alamogordo to picnic on roast beef and roentgens. At the southern edge of the Sangre de Cristos, down which blood runs at dusk instead of nectar, different munitions lay buried beneath Sharpshooter’s Ridge: buckshot from Union buck-and-ball muskets of the 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass. It’s a small sample of the world that sat unconsidered beneath, above, around, behind, and before me: mountains, fruit, atmospheric effects, nuclear warheads, sandwiches, automobiles, historical events, relics. A few entries logged in the register of one tiny corner of the universe. Yet no catalog of New Mexico would be complete without the [2] Alien Phenomenology aliens. Two short years after Oppenheimer incanted from the Bhagavad Gita at the fireball that would ignite suburbia, Roswell Army Air Field personnel allegedly recovered a crashed flying saucer, as well as the bodies of its anthropomorphic passengers. In the reports and conspiracy theories that followed, the craft, corpses, and debris were often called “nothing made on this earth,” although each element remained conveniently identifiable as spacecraft, equipment, or invader.2 Roswell’s are the aliens who looked for us. West of Socorro, we look for them. There, amid the desolate plains of the San Agustin Basin, lounge the twenty-seven antennas of the Very Large Array (VLA). They stretch twenty-five meters across and point up toward the big, blue sky like so many steel calderas. When linked like a school of tropical fish, the VLA antenna is used for various experiments in astrophysics, including the study of black holes, supernovas, and nearby galaxies. But many prefer to think that the occasional use of the array by organizations like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) constitutes the primary purpose of the instruments. Radio telescopes listen to the sky; SETI collects and analyzes the data in a hopeful search for electromagnetic transmissions suggestive of extraterrestrial life.3 It’s a field called astrobiology, one unique in the research community for possessing not a single confirmed object of study. Meanwhile, to the northeast of the buried buckshot at Glorieta Pass, past the mountains whose crests draw the blood of Christ, beyond the ski resorts and the hippie enclaves and the celebrity ranches lies the Raton-Clayton field, where the corpses of hundreds of volcanic scoria cones laugh silently at the fatuous trendiness of both musket and plutonium, as they have done for the fifty thousand years since their last eruption.4 To the south, across the field’s cousin lava flows at Carrizozo Malpais , beyond the Trinity Site, the gypsum dunes of White Sands shift in the wind. Like a Žižekian daydream, they form a seashore that stretches across 275 square miles without ever reaching the sea. Once an alternate landing site for another tool to study the cosmos, the space shuttle, that vessel landed here only once, on March 30, 1982.5 The cleanup proved too onerous, as NASA was forced to extract Alien Phenomenology [3] gypsum from every last crevice of the Columbia’s body, like a nursemaid might do to a corpulent boy after a raucous day at the beach. When the spaceship shattered silently over Texas twenty-one years later, the White Sands gypsum still shifted, going nowhere. Just to the west, in Doña Ana County, the hot, dry sun increases capsaicin levels in the green chile crops that grow around the tiny village of Hatch. Tumbling in vented steel cylinders, chiles crackle over the...