Preternatural Claims, Precarious Workers: The Content and Distribution of the Most Successfully Crowdfunded Documentary

Dugan Nichols

Abstract


This article examines the raced, gendered, and classed world of UFO-related media with the intention of assessing its potential as a form of resistance. I use as a case study the largest crowdsourced documentary of all time, Sirius (2013), which explores exotic technologies and the exploits of ufologist, Dr. Steven Greer. Sirius’s affiliates conducted immaterial, post-Fordist labor to distribute the environmentally conscious film online, yet despite their progressive, utopian bent, they indicate that any technologies associated with the film will operate under market logic. Moreover, Sirius recycles racially fraught tropes of UFO culture, such as reflecting white ufologists’ desire to experience the Other or subject to understanding a gray race of beings they fear has challenged their racially privileged status.


Keywords


UFO; post-Fordism; green capitalism; Disclosure Project; Steven Greer; Sirius

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2014.97

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