Read part one here.

Post-ufology, Utke’s interest turned toward his faith and science. Rather than see science and religion as combative opposites, Utke saw them as two disciplines in need of unity. He viewed a universe where God and science coexisted harmoniously.

That’s not to say he didn’t have his qualms. Utke was quite concerned with the direction unfettered scientific and technological progress was taking society as it grew more and more detachment from the spiritual.

Bio-Babel and Climate Concerns

Science’s impact on the future was a significant worry for Utke. He became concerned with many of the aspects published in 1972’s “Limits to Growth” – a report detailing how the then rate of economic and population growth would deplete Earth’s resources.

In 1975, Utke penned an article on the energy crisis referencing “Limits to Growth” and other reports predicting resource depletion. In 1976, Utke said the world was headed for a state of “overshoot and collapse.”

Utke’s concerns were with the environment, social unrest, Western society’s general direction, and what it would all ultimately mean for the planet. It rings of a leftist critique on capitalism – though politics don’t enter his writing at this point. Instead, Utke frames his critique in terms of balances, with modern science – for all the good it has done – throwing off the scale and setting humanity down a dangerous path.

He explores these concerns at length with the 1978 publication of his book “Bio-Babel: Can We Survive the New Biology?”

The title deliberately plays off the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis. Utke was deeply religious despite his passion for science, and the interplay between the two was central to him. He lectured on the topic often, stating, “Science has started a trend to abolish God but it is the belief of many scientists that science, rather than destroying God, actually reinforces His existence.”

“Bio-Babel’s” central premise is that humanity’s growing mastery of biology will set it down dangerous, uncharted paths. Utke sees this as all but inevitable. He opens the book quoting predictions from Mother Shipton and the works of Jules Vern to demonstrate that if man can think of something, even if it’s for a work of fiction, someday he’ll be able to do it for real.

Utke contends the following:

1. No matter how “impossible” something sounds, if it can be mentally visualized or pictured, it should probably be placed in the realm of possibility.
2. Once mankind realizes something can be done, sooner or later it probably will be done.
3. The timespan between imagination and scientific reality is closing.
4. When man attempts to estimate the future, he always underestimates it.

The book is laid out in two parts. The first covers the nature of the coming biological revolution, with its chapters devoted to reproduction, physical modification, mental modification, the prolongment of life and the creation of life. In each chapter, Utke lays out the current science around a topic and extrapolates where new discoveries will likely take society.

The book’s second part deals with the societal, moral and religious implications of the biological breakthroughs that Utke foretells. Near the end of the book, Utke writes the following:

“Challenging the American philosophy of unlimited ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ can result in one being accused of being unpatriotic, anti-American, anti-science, anti-technology, etc. Are there some things, however, that mankind might be better off not knowing and/ or not doing? And, even if all knowledge is good, are there things that we shouldn’t do with that knowledge? Where does our quest for knowledge and ‘progress’ fit into the evolutionary scheme? Into our relationship with God? Is ‘progress for the sake of progress’ and ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge’ morally defensible? Is restraining ‘progress’ and knowledge in any way, morally defensible? Such questions are far more profound, and far more important than they appear at first glance!”

After the above, the next section of the book is titled “Is Our New Religion (Science) Flawed?” and this notion well encapsulates Utke’s qualms and concerns. Utke sees the scales are too far tipped in science’s favor, leading to all manner of ecological and societal ills.

This idea of science and religion needing to find equilibrium is fleshed out in the philosophical work Utke writes for Ultimate Reality and Meaning.

URAM and IRAM

The Journal of Ultimate Reality and Meaning is an interdisciplinary academic journal published by an international association of thinkers interested in researching human efforts to find meaning in the world.

The works published by Ultimate Reality and Meaning are heady and philosophically charged. This is where Utke outlines his ideas around rebalancing the scales of science and religion. In his philosophy, these scales are known as URAM (ultimate reality and meaning) and IRAM (immediate reality and meaning), which are the innate parts of the human mind that drive’s humanity’s search for the answers to life’s questions.

Except, URAM and IRAM come at those questions in fundamentally different ways.

Utke defines URAM as the desire people have to understand reality, their place in it and why there is something rather than nothing. It’s essentially the force that drives humanity to seek the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

“We have a need to not only reach toward, but also become immersed in, and be encompassed by all of our surroundings, by holistic reality bigger than and beyond ourselves that we can believe in, even though it may even be beyond our ultimate understanding and mental grasp. This need can be termed the quest for defining ultimate reality and meaning,” Utke writes.

Inversely, there is IRAM – humanity’s need to understand, control, manipulate, and impress its will upon its surroundings. IRAM is reductionist, propelled by feet on the ground questions of “how.”

“We have a need to encompass (reach for, grasp, understand, and know) our surroundings, even if in a partial way, in order to subsequently increasingly control and manipulate them. This need is called the quest for defining immediate reality and meaning,” Utke said.

Utke argues that this need for URAM and IRAM is inside each person, with each need manifesting itself in different ways. Broadly, one can think of URAM as the questions that led man to develop myths and religions, while IRAM-based thinking led to science and technology. Neither are bad nor are they good. However, Utke believes humanity needs each force to be in balance for it to reach its full potential.

“Any human being or society (in any historical age) must recognize, address, find an individual equilibrium and balance point, and satisfactory resolve both complementary needs in order to fully reach his, her, or its full potential,” Utke said.

Pre-Modernity, Utke said humanity was too focused on URAM-based lines of thinking, seeing the world always in terms of gods, myths and stories. However, post-Modernity, IRAM has thrown the scales off entirely in its favor, desolating URAM ways of seeing reality, with ultimately negative consequences.

“The author [Utke] believes it can be argued that a limited, amoral scientific method, employed by human beings with an over emphasis on an ‘encompass’ philosophy of continued, unregulated ‘growth’ or ‘progress’ for the sake of enriching our outer lives with a materialistic preponderance of ‘things’ has created 1.) unprecedented physical problems in nature; 2.) moral and ethical crises and ‘is-caught’ problems of unprecedented nature, extent, and magnitude; 3.) a resultant increasing societal complexity, confusion, disorientation, narcissism, hedonism, and nihilism which now threatens to not only destroy Western civilization but all civilization as well,” he said.

Utke’s concern that a cold, uncaring scientific view of the world is leading to catastrophe is not necessarily unique. In fact, it can even be seen in ufology.

Jacques Vallée uses a similar notion as a framing device in the opening and closing of his 1979 book “Messengers of Deception.” Vallée shares the observation that the ancient Greek’s knowledge and wisdom of the sciences shed light on the world but did nothing for humanity’s fundamental questions. In essence, the Greek philosophers and mathematicians took away the gods by way of their knowledge but left nothing in their place.

Vallée writes in the conclusion of his book: “At the end of antiquity, people were fed up with science. The Greeks knew the Earth was a globe. They knew how big it was, and how far it was from the Sun, and they knew the diameter of the Moon. They could compute the dates of future eclipses. They even understood the atomic structure of matter. But they couldn’t tell people what the human race was doing here, and where it would go next. So their science was swept away and forgotten. Will the same thing happen to our science?”

While Vallée worries about anti-intellectualism challenging science—something he fears might be emerging with the rise of UFO cults — Utke fears that science will become so entrenched in society that it renders all spirituality obsolete. However, Utke suggests this doesn’t have to be the case; the pendulum could swing back toward spirituality as scientific discoveries expand our understanding of reality.

Utke sees the swing from URAM-based thinking to IRAM as only logical given what humanity learned and deduced of the world as its scientific knowledge grew. He doesn’t begrudge what’s happened. Utke argues that IRAM ways of thinking have led us to an understanding of reality that must eventually give way to URAM lines of thought.

Ultimately, Utke believes scientific knowledge is beginning to point us toward a greater truth – Cosmic Holism, where the interplay between science and spirituality finds its natural balance.

At One With It All

Cosmic Holism is the idea that everything in the universe – down to the most fundamental forces constructing and holding together reality – is interlinked and complementary.

In most of his papers, Utke devotes the majority of his word count to explaining scientific history and the latest scientific concepts, which he uses to demonstrate the likelihood of Cosmic Holism. Utke is most compelled by quantum physics. Some of his papers, such as the one so far cited in this feature, are like crash courses on the subject.

Utke puts quantum physics and other emerging sciences into the class of “new science.” These sciences, for the most part, deal with the reality we can’t readily observe with our everyday human senses. These are somewhat at odds with the old sciences, based on often reductionist, Newtonian understandings of the world. Utke highlights how Newtonian Physics doesn’t translate to the quantum level, with particles and forces acting in comparably strange ways. Thus, in our average workaday lives, Utke says we live in an old science understanding, as that’s what impacts us immediately. However, these strange, complementary and unseen forces of new science are what actually constitute the universe.

Utke says that humans intuit this at some level of URAM understanding. We know that what we see and do each day isn’t the sum of the whole. Utke writes that the key is successfully marrying our everyday IRAM reality in mind with the hidden fundamental properties of the universe that lead to URAM-based lines of questioning.

“Overall, it might be said that ‘old reductionist science’ pictured a universe and reality at odds with our senses – a universe and reality stronger, queerer, and weirder than had been imagined. The emerging ‘new science’ of cosmic holism pictures the universe and reality at odds with our imagination – a universe and reality, stronger, queerer and weirder than we can imagine. Humankind was eventually able to make peace with the ‘old science’ but whether that will be possible with the ‘new science’ remains to be seen,” Utke said.

Utke thinks Cosmic Holism will return “old questions,” as a universe whose parts work in perfect harmony leads to questions of a designer. He argues that science and theology will have to contend with these old questions as new science produces more proof of Cosmic Holism.

“Such ‘old’ questions as the omniscience, omnipotence, creativity, time-relatedness, immanence, and transcendence of God would undoubtedly resurface,” Utke writes. “‘New’ questions such as the possible significance of extra-terrestrial life, the possibility of other universes, and the possibility of other gods would also probably appear. Theology would need a whole new vocabulary, based on a ‘new’ holistic reality, to tackle such questions.”

In his 1999 paper “‘Omnicentricity’ and the Concept of Ultimate Reality and Meaning,” Utke explains his view that consciousness and matter are fundamental parts of the universe – complementary polarities. He refutes both the idea that the brain alone solely produces consciousness via electric and chemical reactions and that consciousness, or the soul, rests as an entirely separate object from the processes of the brain. Utke sees a third way of understanding our minds.

Utke often stresses the uniqueness of the human mind; how, as far as we know, humans are the only creatures in the universe with a brain and mind capable of thinking beyond itself backward and forward in time. We have the ability to ponder why there is something rather than nothing and examine the universe in search of an answer while simultaneously being a part of said universe.

Utke therefore sees there being an “inexplicable, enigmatic individual mind-universe mind complementarity at the heart of reality,” but wonders why, out of all the animals on Earth, humans are the only ones with the ability to expound on reality and think in the manner we do? Why is humanity alone the only part of the universe capable of thinking about itself?

“Converting disorder to order, the universe has been able to produce sequentially the hierarchical, spiraling complexity found in sub-atomic particles (quarks, electrons, protons, and neutrons), atoms, galaxies, stars, nebulae, and objects. And, at least on Earth, life, consciousness, self-awareness, mind, spirit, and soul have also appeared as seemingly inexplicable ‘over-effects’. It is as though the universe ‘knew’ we were coming, and with our arrival, achieved its own self-awareness because we humans have become aware of the existence of the universe. In this sense, the human brain is a three-pound universe,” Utke said.

Consciousness, Utke suggests, may therefore be a core component of the universe. In essence, the answer to why there is something rather than nothing could be because something wanted, or needed, to know about itself and couldn’t do that if there was nothing.

Utke says he doesn’t believe the human brain will ever be capable of fully understanding itself. However, this question of consciousness and a self-aware universe leads directly into Cosmic Holism and URAM-based ways of understanding reality, almost as if the very nature of URAM is baked into the universe. The human mind, a piece of the universe, is always trying to understand the universe and doing so by IRAM-driven examination. They’re the Yin and Yang forces propelling humanity forward.

Continuing the Work

Utke wrote several other papers further expounding on Cosmic Holism and his URAM/ IRAM philosophy over the years.

His most read paper, “Alchemy and the Concept of Ultimate Reality and Meaning” (2004), is a defense of alchemy, with Utke arguing that alchemy not only served as the precursor to chemistry but true practicing alchemists were most in touch with the URAM/IRAM balance.

In both a lighthearted and serious jaunt, Utke’s paper “The Rainbow: A Universal Timeless ‘Pointer’ Toward Ultimate Reality and Meaning” (1996) sees him going over the historical significance of the rainbow, how reductionist science stole its wonder, and how new science is restoring it.

In his last paper, “Ultimate Reality and Meaning and the Cosmic Information Field” (2021), Utke marries his philosophy with the emerging notion that information may be the most basic, fundamental component of reality underlying the cosmos:

“Is mind more fundamental than matter in the Cosmos? Can large, more particle-like quanta in surface reality (e.g., objects, humans, brains) project cumulative, collective information into the cosmic information field through quantum principles, just as small, more wave-like quanta in deep reality do? Can the cosmic information field, to some as-yet-unknown degree, record and process such information as, for example, when reality is produced during observation and experimentation (wave-collapsing functions)? In turn, can the human brain, mind, and other large and small quanta, to some as-yet-unknown degree, receive and process information from the cosmic information field? What is the origin of consciousness? Why is human consciousness unique? Do we thus both discover and invent enigmatic reality (natural laws, mathematics, geometry, and cosmic fine-tuning), the keys to understanding the Cosmos?

“Overall, are we thus only partly the authors of our own thoughts, consciousness, and knowledge, or wholly masters of our own minds? To what degree does information exchange between our minds and a mind-like Cosmos (a cosmic information field) explain our unique human desire, need, and even compulsion (dating back at least to the Cro-Magnons) to know what it (reality) is all about, and if there is a ‘the URAM’ beyond?”

To an Interdisciplinary End

Utke was, in many ways, a man ahead of his time. In the UFO world, he was investigating areas around the Midwest that wouldn’t become popularized for years later and rubbed shoulders with the people who are today household ufological names.

He was concerned with climate change and resource depletion when it was considered a fringe possibility, while today, we wrestle with the calamity wrought by each. Most notably, Utke understood the dangers of the science and technology community’s progressed obsessed, can-do, will-do attitude.

Looking back over Utke’s body of work, a throughline emerges. His interest in UFOs all the way up to his work with URAM/ IRAM and Cosmic Holism speaks to a man unsatisfied with the state of his world.

It’s clear he wrestled with the different shades of his life; his religious foundation was at odds with his passion for science and his interest in the anomalous reinforcing and challenging each in various ways.

Utke was always trying to better whichever field he dabbled in, ultimately for the betterment of society. It would be fascinating to know if that’s what drove his UFO interests deep down – the knowledge that another society was visiting Earth, one that must have overcome similar odds and challenges as humans to reach the technological potential their craft demonstrated. Undoubtedly, a society able to master the stars must have a firm grasp on the URAM/ IRAM duality.

When we look back on the many contributions to the fields Allen R. Utke was concerned with, we find an unsung figure whose ideas outpaced the times he lived in.

Ufologically, Utke should be more than a footnote in MUFON’s history, and his work in the Midwest more acknowledged. The fact alone he was researching Elmwood years before it turned into the hotspot it’s known as today rewrites the timeline for that corner of Wisconsin UFO history.

Additionally, Utke’s URAM/ IRAM ideas and thoughts toward Cosmic Holism are as relevant today as they ever were. Society’s only gone farther down the path Utke’s been warning of since the 1970s. Perhaps we need to consider reunifying the mystical with the scientific – reunite the URAM mind with the IRAM one before it’s completely too late.

Ultimately, Utke’s work serves as a reminder that the answers we seek – whether in science, religion, or the mysteries that lie beyond – may not be found in isolation but in the interplay between all these elements. If we are to navigate the challenges of our time and find meaning in the cosmos, perhaps we need to heed Utke’s call to reunite the mystical with the scientific, allowing the pendulum to swing back toward a more balanced, enriched understanding of existence. We may discover that the greatest truths lie not in choosing one path over the other but in the journey between them.