The route of Orion: Towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I analyze a Chilean mining geoanalyst's narrative about large unrecognized geoglyphs he has charted in the Atacama Desert. The turns of this narrative take us through the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, but also an alterative pre-Inca migration route between the Atlantic and the Pacific thousands of years old, and in contravention to normative Andean archaeology. I argue that we need to look at alternative forms of history making that are not based on ontologically realist premises. Using Kleinberǵs notion of ‘past possibles’, based on Derrida's theory of historical deconstruction, I defend that in the mining expert´s narrative coexist a multiplicity of possible pasts, in oscillation between latent and manifest. I also look at the Desert itself, and its extractive industries, as well as a notion of ‘extreme’ in relation to temporal thinking, arguing that it is not enough to see the narrative on aliens as a result of neoliberal capitalist exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Aliens
• Atacama Desert
• geoglyphs
• past possibles
• technologies

Acknowledgments

My first acknowledgement goes to Alberto Nadgar. His generosity and passion for his discoveries is inspirational. I owe much gratitude to Alejandra Vergara, my excellent research assistant, with whom I have worked on Chilean aliens for three years. And finally, I thank my two reviewers for pointing out important shortcomings of the text, which I have attempted to respond to. All failings in that respect are of course mine only. This paper is a reworked chapter from the forthcoming book Spirited Histories: Technologies, Media and Trauma in Paranormal Chile (Abingdon: Routledge).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), Programa de Investigación Asociativa (PIA), grant number SOC 180033.