Published March 26 by JSTOR, I was prepared to do something of a takedown of David Chauvet’s essay “Far Out: Why Don’t We Believe in UFOs?” Instead, I found myself nodding along in agreement through it all. Chauvet takes the words right out of my mouth on the subject.

So … I guess … newsletter over. Good night, folks!

I jest. There are still 900 words left before I shut up — because while I agree with everything Chauvet says in his essay, there’s still plenty to explore further.

The most interesting aspect of Chauvet’s essay is that he’s coming at this question from an animal rights perspective, on which most of his other published work focuses. Per his JSTOR bio: David Chauvet holds a doctorate in private law and criminal science and, “is the author of a substantial body of articles, books and translations concerning the animal question, encompassing its legal, historical and philosophical aspects.”

At the heart of “Far Out: Why Don’t We Believe in UFOs?” is humanity’s view of itself. Chauvet argues the reason scientific and political institutions don’t take UFOs and extraterrestrials seriously is due mainly to anthropocentrism, the idea humans are the center of the world.

The arguments Chauvet applies to the UFO phenomenon are similar to the ones he’s made in his writing on animal rights.

A good portion of Chauvet’s work centers around Donald Griffin’s concept of mentaphobia, which “denotes strong resistance from scientists to the idea that animals, other than humans, are conscious”

He published the book “Against Mentaphobia” in 2014, whose summary reads (translated from French): “In the countries of the animal-machine, it is clear that animals are denied a conscience when it comes to justifying their murder. This book denounces this opinion and gives a name to the impossibility for many humans to accept animal thought: mentaphobia.”

In 2023, Chauvet authored the paper “A New Definition of Ethical Mentaphobia.” Per the paper’s abstract: “It has become difficult to deny animal consciousness. However, we have nonepistemic reasons for denying it that are related to our interests. … It is therefore possible that mentophobia is expressed in ways other than the denial of the nonhuman animal mind. We revisit the concept of mentophobia to show that it includes at least one other way of belittling other animals by attacking their mental abilities or traits, namely, through denigration.”

While the paper is gated, it’s safe to extrapolate from the abstract that Chauvet is making a case that the evidence for animal consciousness is so great that to preserve mentaphobia, we’ve moved from outright denial of animal consciousness to denigration — they feel and think, but not in the way we feel and think, so it’s still okay to exploit them.

In other words, there’s evidence for animal consciousness on par with humans, but it’s not “good enough” evidence in the eyes of scientific and political institutions, so while we might not be able to deny it outright any longer, it’s open for ridicule and certainly won’t be impacting the status quo anytime soon.

Anyone who has gotten into the weeds of anomalous phenomena research knows that headache, and obviously Chauvet sees the parallels with UFOs and extraterrestrials.

Chauvet is by no means the first person to bridge the paranormal-ecological divide. There have been many who have drawn similar connections and tackled the subject in similar ways. However, Chauvet is unique in applying the same arguments for animal rights to UFOs in a nearly identical manner. I can’t think of a similar one-to-one application where the arguments from a non-paranormal field require almost no tweaking to be applied effectively — anthropocentrism, mentaphobia, etc.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay titled “The Nature of Oz” about the Oz Factor, which is often reported in stories of paranormal encounters, where the experiencer finds their world suddenly altered during an event, with otherworldly silence being a hallmark. The key observation I make in that piece is how this silence of the natural world unsettles and frightens people even before they see the supernatural anomaly at the heart of it, and that there’s perhaps a purposeful irony to the Oz Factor. Humans often view themselves apart from nature, but when they become truly separated from it in the case of this unnatural silence, they start to break down.

Considering Chauvet’s framing of the UFO and extraterrestrial problem through the lens of animal rights, the ideas in “The Nature of Oz” are refocused.

What if the Oz Factor’s imposed silence mirrors our mentaphobia towards the animal kingdom? Where humanity denigrates the minds of animals to do as they please, these supernatural events impose something similar, placing us alone and afraid in the face of something we can’t quite understand. Chauvet might argue this is similar to what animals entering a slaughterhouse no doubt feel.

In “The Nature of Oz,” I mused that the point of the Oz Factor was to force us to reexamine our position in nature by temporarily removing us from it. In many stories of folklore and the paranormal, the natural world is, if not the central focus, the backdrop — and there’s a current in our society trying to reconnect with nature via the anomalous.

In Chauvet’s ideas, we might see the problem and solution being presented — our disconnect from nature and view of ourselves both allowing for its exploitation and keeping us from considering the anomalous seriously. I’ve written at length about how at the heart of strange events like UFO encounters might be a push beyond self-imposed boundaries — and mentaphobia is one of them.

If Chauvet’s right — and I’m inclined to think he is — the real question isn’t whether UFOs and related phenomena are real, but whether we’re ready to stop denying what’s been quietly trying to reach us all along.