A Look at the (Un)Safe Sky: Unrecognised Phenomena, Visions, and Contemporaneous Technologies

Abstract

The cultural imagination of the sky is shaped by the interplay between faith and rational thought, as well as by the evolving possibilities of human vision (seeing) under the influence of optical technologies. Historically, the credibility of seeing was grounded in religious traditions; in modernity, it has been reconfigured by the natural sciences, which argue that perception is not a direct function of the eyes alone but is mediated by complex cognitive processes in the brain. The sky is commonly associated with the “natural” upward orientation of the gaze, as well as with culturally and religiously encoded images. Yet any attempt to define its boundaries or scale inevitably reveals conceptual gaps. Efforts to produce ever more precise explanations of rare atmospheric “miracles” thus expose the fragility of human knowledge. In everyday experience, the sky is observed from a specific geographical position, always partial and situated. At the same time, its limits feel unstable: questions of (un)safety and boundedness persist precisely because objective knowledge and subjective perception continually intersect. The reliability of extraordinary visions can sometimes be institutionally validated by the Church, as in the case of the Marian apparitions at Fátima in 1917, which were officially recognised as miraculous decades later. In the second half of the twentieth century, accounts of extraterrestrial entities and “alien spaceships” became consolidated within the popular mythology of UFOs. More recently, these phenomena have been reframed as still-unexplained, i.e., unidentified anomalous or paranormal phenomena—so-called unidentified aerial phenomena. Increasingly sophisticated observational instruments extend the limits of vision beyond human capacity, enabling access to phenomena previously unthinkable—such as observations concerning the beginning of time. Such anomalies, whether detected by terrestrial instruments or witnessed by pilots in orbital and aerospace flight, open up strange intersections between cosmology, new military secrets and contemporary research into unidentified aerial phenomena of various kinds.

Drawing on the history of vision technologies and insights from cultural and religious theory, this text examines the (un)security of the sky. The overview of Western cultural imagination is complemented by selected works of Lithuanian art from the 20th and 21st centuries, including God Perkūnas by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1909), the photo-collage series Civilisations by Vitalijus Butyrinas (1983), and Kristina Inčiūraitė’s three-photograph and audio work Anna and the Phantom (2016). The discussion also incorporates a visionary experience reported by Artūras Raila in the early 1970s, reconstructed more than two decades afterward in his moving-image work Primeval Sky (as the artist notes: “In 2002, I tried to visualise the phenomena seen in 1980”). The analysis further emphasises how the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has produced an unprecedented militarisation of the sky. Through the deployment of advanced military and surveillance technologies—above all drones—the sky is increasingly configured as a contested threat sphere, exposing the fragility of nation-state borders. Within this framework, the selected works of modern and contemporary Lithuanian art function not only as objects of art-historical interpretation but also as visual and rhetorical figures through which shifting vectors of perception and subjective optics can be critically examined.