Sure, the UFO phenomenon has some stigma attached. But it’s a mystery worthy of government attention, particularly amid the rising threats we do know about.
Sure, the UFO phenomenon has some stigma attached. But it’s a mystery worthy of government attention, particularly amid the rising threats we do know about.
S ure, sure, there was last year’s intelligence report and this year’s congressional hearing. But you really know that UFOs/UAPs are having a moment when they turn up in the Financial Times’ storied Lex column — albeit in a piece that has a faint but unmissable “crazy American” subtext and is a touch disapproving.
Lex:
Most Americans believe in aliens. Stories of mysterious craft hovering in the air or travelling at hypersonic speeds have fuelled interest in unidentified flying objects since the 1950s. The U.S. government is the latest UFO enthusiast.
The polls are more nuanced, however. According to a Pew Survey published shortly before the release of that report last year, the best guess of almost two-thirds of Americans was that there is alien life beyond earth — not unreasonable, given the amount of planets out there (and I write that as a lifelong UFO skeptic).
Fifty-one percent of Americans reckoned “that UFOs reported by people in the military are likely evidence of intelligent life outside Earth,” but only 11 percent thought that this is definitely so. Forty percent plumped for “probably.” An Ipsos poll from January had 49 percent of Americans believing in UFOs, while Gallup went for 41 percent (and that was in August, after publication of the report). Gallup found that the proportion of believers (33 percent in 2019) had jumped since those mysterious videos (and other evidence) began to emerge. Fair enough: The material is intriguing. That is not an admission that it is the long-awaited proof that ET is checking us out, merely a recognition that something strange, perhaps very strange, may have been going on.
UAP? That’s the abbreviated form of the new official designation — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — for whatever it is that is up there, a term that has the advantage of both precision and ambiguity. Uncle Sam is not ready to concede that those things are necessarily solid. They could be a trick of the eye, a mirage, some sort of projection, who knows? More than that, though, I suspect that this name change is a desperate attempt to distance the Pentagon from the intellectual debris that has surrounded UFOs since the “flap” that began after Kenneth Arnold reported seeing mysterious objects flying near Mount Rainer in 1947.
All that said, Lex’s main focus is on drawing a comparison between what may have led to the UFO wave of the earlier Cold War years, and today’s flurry of interest.
Lex:
Some cultural critics see a postwar fascination with aliens as reflecting the fear of communism and aggressive foreign powers.
That’s a familiar theory, but a better explanation may well be that the extraordinary technological advances — from lethal progress in rocketry to the development of the atomic bomb — made during the Second World War had combined with the growing popularity of science fiction to boost the public’s willingness to believe in the once unbelievable. The consequence was to persuade the gullible that the light they had seen in the sky was, you know. If we could launch rockets from Earth, why couldn’t someone/something somewhere else send a craft toward us? Cold War paranoia? Not so much. The Second World War had taught a terrifying lesson about the less-than-benign uses to which technology could be put, although the presence of Stalin in the Kremlin and, later, Sputnik in orbit certainly contributed to a more generalized American unease. And rightly so.
That UFOs and the lore that grew around them often fit, in an acceptably “modern” way, into older mythological frameworks didn’t hurt, either. Put all this together, plus the fact that, Cold War or no Cold War, alien visitors (preferably menacing) make for a great story, it’s not surprising that “sightings” spread rapidly. Nor is it surprising that this topic was picked up by movie-makers, and that the films they made in turn affected people’s perceptions of what they thought they had seen one night on some lonely road.
That aliens (previously a varied bunch) were increasingly described as resembling the beings in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (to be sure, their look in that movie was based on one of the supposedly existing alien types) is a vivid demonstration of the influence of Hollywood on a myth that, like many myths, is constantly evolving, shaped and reshaped by a feedback loop between media depictions and the public’s own “experiences.”
But Close Encounters, a détente-era movie, incidentally (it was released in 1977) did more than (semi) standardize notions of the aliens’ appearance; it also revived interest in the idea that they were around and about. To be clear, that was an idea which had never disappeared. Nor had science fiction or humanity’s ventures into space, both of which continued to expand belief in what was possible. Lex’s columnist notes that “between 1947 and 1969, the Air Force collected 12,618 reports of sightings,” a figure that comes from its Project Blue Book.
Sightings didn’t end with the first moon landing.
Lex:
Public reports collected by the US National UFO Reporting Center show that people are still spotting plenty of strange objects in the skies. Since it was created in 1974 there has never been a month without a sighting.”
Perhaps it is only a coincidence — perhaps — that it was about a year after the release of Close Encounters that an almost entirely forgotten “incident” that had allegedly taken place near Roswell, N.M., in 1947 suddenly came back into view. Witnesses resurfaced, surfaced, or were remembered. A book, co-authored by an expert on the Bermuda Triangle, was soon published. It was a best seller: Roswell’s aliens never crashed into New Mexico’s high desert, but they hurtled deep into America’s consciousness, a consciousness that had been made more receptive by the media taking advantage of something that could not be denied: Extraterrestrials among us were box-office green.
And some of them, it was claimed, were abducting us. Tales of alien abduction had been around for a long time (and can again be tied to older myths) but took off in the 1980s for reasons partly connected, I imagine, to the horrific satanic panic of around the same time. The idea of abduction not only made for enjoyably alarming (probes!) entertainment but was also a powerful enough concept to appeal to sufficient numbers of the not-quite-sane to create a community of “abductees” whose stories were capable, it sometimes seemed, of endless exploitation and even convinced one or two who should have known better. This prolonged a farce that deserved only ridicule or (sensible) psychiatric intervention.
Fast-forward a few years, and the X-Files fused Roswell, the alien-abduction narrative, and other developing alien mythologies into a TV show that sent yet another alien wave surging through our culture — and, it should be emphasized, not just U.S. culture.
But for the X-files, which debuted in 1993, the foe was either internal (a strong thread of all-American conspiracism runs through it) or from (very) far away. Yeltsin’s Russia was a pal of sorts, and China was clearly moving toward a freer future (and selling us lots of cheap stuff while it did). When 9/11 ended the illusion that history had ended, the series, admittedly already fading, died, taking with it some of the alien boom. Americans no longer needed to import their enemies from the stars.
The concluding paragraph of the Lex column reads as follows:
As the latest government report admits, most UFO sightings remain impossible to identify. But if they proliferate, it may point to something other than little green men in flying saucers. The data may instead reflect rising paranoia. The US and its allies are once again trapped in a dangerous confrontation with Russia and China.
The last sentence is true, but the talk of paranoia that precedes it is nonsense. The new evidence (of who knows what) is, as I mentioned above, remarkable. It may be triggering all manner of sightings, some possibly of interest, the overwhelming majority of none. But to maintain that an increase in the number of sightings may be the product of paranoia about Russia or China is a stretch. Our fascination with aliens has been with us for a long time. It ebbs and flows, but paranoia about some foreign threat has had little to do with it.
Moreover, back in the 1940s, the military had every reason to be concerned about the weapons that might be headed our way from the Soviets (they had their German scientists, too) and no clear idea of what form they might take. Strange sights in the skies merited at least a little research. And so now in 2022, history repeats itself, but with two major adversaries rather than one, and mounting, not altogether undeserved, anxiety about the technologies that we may have to confront. Under the circumstances, for the Pentagon to be looking into these, okay, okay, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena seems not paranoid, but prudent.