Prisoner of Infinity: Social Engineering, UFOs, and the Psychology of Fragmentation

by Jasun Horsley

Prisoner of Infinity examines modern-day accounts of UFOs, alien abductions, and psychism to uncover a century-long program of psychological fragmentation, collective indoctrination, and covert cultural, social, and mythic engineering.Whether it is the forces of God, government, aliens from outer (or inner) space, or the incalculable effects of childhood sexual trauma on the human psyche, premature contact with these forces compels us to create "crucial fictions." Such semi-coherent mythic narratives make partial sense out of our experience, but in the process turn us into the unreliable narrators of our own lives.Taking UFOS and the work of "experiencer" Whitley Strieber as its departure point, Prisoner of Infinity explores how beliefs are created and perceptions are managed in the face of the inexplicably complex forces of our existence. While keeping the question of a non-human and/or paranormal element open, the book maps how all-too-human agendas (such as the CIA's MK Ultra program) have co-opted the ancient psychological process of myth-making, giving rise to dissociative, dumbed-down Hollywood versions of reality. The New Age movement, UFOs, alien abductions, psychism, psychedelic mind expansion, Transhumanism, the Space Program - what if they are all productions devised by committee in dark rooms to serve social, political, and economic goals that are largely devoid of true substance or meaning? Through an exacting and enlivening process of social, cultural and psychological examination and excavation, Prisoner of Infinity uncovers the most deeply buried treasure of all. The original, uncredited author of all mystery and the human soul.

Genres: Nonfiction, Conspiracy Theories, History, Psychology

300 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 20, 2018

About the author

Jasun Horsley is an author of several books on popular culture, psychology, and high strangeness. He is a transmedia storyteller, independent scholar, and existential detective. He lives and farms in Spain.

Artist’s Statement:

Books and things (the good ones) are like half-drawn maps of independent explorations into undiscovered lands. But to map the unknown means that first you have to get lost.

I seem to have been born that way: lost, with a question mark over my head. Creativity has been a way to fathom my own place in existence—the idea of writing for an audience is one I have always had difficulty with. Yet creative expression is like a two-way bridge between the inside and the outside, and between the one and the many.

Writing (fiction or nonfiction, there’s no difference) is an experiment in identity construction and deconstruction. It’s a way to take myself apart and see what I am made of, to have a meaningful dialogue with my unconscious, and, over time, to isolate and magnify the voice of my essential Self, to give it body—a body of evidence that is also (almost incidentally) a body of work.

The dialogue so far has been characterized by my fascination for mainstream “pop” culture (especially movies), on the one hand, and for high strangeness (political conspiracies, paranormal phenomena, Ufos, autism, and the like), on the other.

The map I am ending up with is of this no man’s land, this mysterious area of overlap between the mainstream and the margins, the inside and the outside, the seen and the unseen.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

very wacky book about whitley striber and the alien abduction phenomenon, dragging in a bunch of other stuff like mkultra, systemic child abuse, transhumanism and the author's own personal background and interest in these phenomena. sounds cool you might think, and parts of it are, however horsly is an example of a particularly annoying brand of british countercultural writer seemingly designed in a lab to irritate me specifically(the personal anecdotes he puts in are particularly annoying) , and so the book never really lives up to its potential. one thing that really gets my goat is the superficiality of the research he does - for example, whitley striber claims to have been a victim of some sort of possibly intelligence/nazi linked child abuse operation as a child, which is very interesting if alien abductions are somehow generated by child abuse as the book argues. but the rest of the book indicates that strieber is also completely unreliable even about things he seems to think are real, and there's no suggestion that the existence of such a cult was ever investigated. the best we get is a mention of the finders cult, which is very suggestive but no connection is ever actually shown. i think there is some good stuff in here though - the psychoanalytical close reading of strieber's work and the comparisons to other writers like castaneda are interesting and might be avenues for further research, and the central argument, that child abuse can generate alien abduction like experiences and that this might have been deliberately promoted as a cover, ties in with other similar approaches to the alien abduction phenomenon like The Controllers: Mind Control and Its Role in the "Alien" Abduction Phenomenon, is worthy of consideration. there is a skeleton of material here that could potentially be used to create a sort of unified theory linking the programmed to kill thesis and alien abductions, but the frustrating thing is that it's never fleshed out, and horsley lacks the research ability and critical faculty to do it.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books I've read this decade -- Easily one of the best books in the 'UFOlogy' field -- Whitley Strieber is An Important Artist and Jasun Horsley is The Critic He Deserves -- Probably the best specific antidote to the neomainstream 'hardware' saucer cult of Tom DeLonge & friends, exploring the complex and co-anaesthetic 'software' of Strieber's literary universe and its deep effect on popular archetypes of 'the Alien'

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never thought I would read so much about Whitley Strieber. I admit it’s my own dumb fault for starting to research UFOs. I always thought Strieber was making it all up. I’m not sure what basis since I never read anything by him. This guy got really *seriously* into Strieber! At one point towards the end of the book he asks ‘What was it in me that allowed Strieber to gain a foothold in my unconscious?’ You can imagine how strange it is to be reading a book like this when never before have I given too much thought to Strieber other than that he seems like an opportunist. Still it is impossible to research UFOs without running into the twilight world of alien abductions. This book is difficult to read, because of the disturbing subject matter (connecting childhood abuse to MKULTRA to alien abduction), the personal and somewhat disjointed way in which the author approaches this subject matter, and also because of the fairly conspiratorial mindset of the author. To be kind, Jung called it synchronicity. I see this conspiratorial way of thinking as a collapse of differentiation on the level of meaning, even in regards to observations that are (or could be) disconnected on the level of fact. Admittedly I already agreed with some of the author’s larger points about ‘magic’ (of the esoteric sort) being a distraction from true understanding, but at times the collapse of differentiation in his thinking becomes overwhelming. The idea that MKULTRA might be connected to ritual child abuse and alien abduction scenarios is gripping and theatrical but the factual basis appears far-fetched (at least to me, someone who has never experienced the type of extreme physical abuse discussed here, let alone an alien abduction). Still Whitley Strieber has always seemed something of a con man to me, and I too, along the lines of C.S. Lewis, do not hold out much hope for magicians or esotericism as a path to true enlightenment. This book is especially interesting from the standpoint of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society (I talk about this a lot yes if you’ve read any of my other reviews), which holds that modern society itself is differentiated, consisting of closed and self-generating systems of communication. Luhmann would discount much of the conspiratorial conjecture in this book as nothing more than contingent social system operations, but I found it shocking after realizing that, from Luhmann’s standpoint, modern society could be seen in a sense as ‘dissociated’. This is a connection I had not previously made. Paradoxically, my own reading of Luhmann sees the totalitarian impulse as a desire to collapse modern differentiation, so that instead of distinct and ‘equal’ subsystems such as politics, art, law, economy, religion, and science, it all collapses into politics, a ‘terror regime’ such as the Nazis or the terror group Islamic State (that briefly held political power in a limited region). So it seems interesting to me that in the case of ‘individuals’ (the notion of which is so essential for the development of modern, differentiated society according to Luhmann), trauma or fragmentation or *differentiation* into multiple personalities causes the collapse into an undifferentiated state of thought or conspiratorial thinking, where everything is connected on the level of meaning even if disconnected on the level of fact. Is the differentiation of modern society causing individuals to ‘differentiate’ to a traumatic degree? We can see in this book some connection to Foucault’s idea of ‘limit experience’ and also to Mark Seltzer's idea about America's 'wound culture', which embraces the 'statistical unpersons' known popularly as 'serial killers'. This is a hip idea (and I use 'hip' in all its countercultural or 'outsider' connotations), the notion of transcending through trauma. However this book poses a fairly good question on essentially asking, is it transcendence or actually dissociation? Has the shaman truly escaped the mundane world or actually only the mundane mind? And if so has the shaman healed trauma or merely traded 1 trauma for another, i.e. dissociation? On a lighter yet somewhat related note, every time the author here discussed Strieber’s notion of ‘the Key’ or ‘the master of the Key’, what came to my mind is the movie Ghostbusters and its ‘Keymaster’ versus ‘Gatekeeper’ bit. Has no one else made this connection? Was Strieber inspired by Ghostbusters? (Which incidentally has a plot involving an evil architect who builds a haunted apartment complex aka ‘spook central’ to summon the apocalypse (a sort of ultimate collapse of differentiation) after experiencing the trauma of World War I and deciding humanity is not worth saving. Another interesting ‘structural coupling’ as Luhmann would say on the level of meaning even if not factually or causally connected.) This book is sometimes disjointed but worth a read for anyone interested in modern society, UFOs, conspiracy theory or the study of esotericism and its relationship to ‘false consciousness’.

[Chelsea Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paranoid and hard to describe but I liked it. “Just because awakening is painful does not mean pain will bring about our awakening. And just because our sexuality has been crippled by shame does not mean all we have to do to heal ourselves is to be shameless about our sexuality. When the totem has become the taboo, the solution is not to make the taboo into a totem. Not unless the goal is simply to keep in place the ancient psychological mechanisms of social control.”

[Medical Gunch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the insights, but the psychoanalysis went a bit over my head. Whether Horsley intended it or not, I am more committed to the path of “Alien denial” and consider this a crucial text in this field.