Stop Watching the Skies
The UFO craze has its downsides in a culture bereft of meaning
In this age of rampant divisiveness, distrust, and dissent, it should come as a relief when a diverse group of people agrees on something. But when the “something” that has been agreed upon is the existence of unidentified flying objects, or at least the possibility of their existence and their origin from outer space, it is hardly a cause for celebration. In the past few years, numerous sincere, articulate, and not-at-all-unhinged people have started speaking seriously about UFOs, the belief in which was once confined to crackpots, sci-fi fans, hippies, readers of popular “nonfiction,” and other assorted outcasts on the American scene. Their faith in flying saucers was harmless but not on the national agenda. Nonetheless, about four years ago, Joe Rogan devoted two-plus hours of his hugely influential podcast to an interview with one Bob Lazar, a longtime fixture on TV programs about extraterrestrial life for his claims to have viewed and studied such crafts somewhere in the vicinity of the secret U.S. government site known as Area 51. Rogan asked plenty of questions of Lazar, some of them probing, but anyone listening to the podcast would reasonably conclude that the host, at minimum, found Lazar’s claims to be compelling. Now, it is one thing when a roughand-ready personality like Rogan tacitly endorses the notion that the government has acquired, analyzed, and kept hidden from the public flying saucers. After all, Rogan’s podcast is not far in spirit from, if much broader in scope than, the famously wacky paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM, that longtime clearinghouse for eccentrics of all stripes and the tales they tell. Yet, more recently, far more mainstream figures than even the widely popular Rogan have started to treat the topic of UFOs with a degree of solemnity once unthinkable. Apart from the true believers who assert that they have
been beamed up, implanted with foreign objects, or experienced episodes of “missing time,” the notion that beings from outer space pay visits on earthlings has traditionally been the stuff of fantastical fiction, particularly in the movies or on television. From William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953) to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), countless movies have mined the scenario of alien contact for dramatic possibilities. On TV, the medium that, after all, bequeathed us The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, the paranormal has always had a great deal of staying power, too: Any child of the 1980s will remember the straight-faced eyewitness accounts of alien encounters regularly featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and The X Files, which premiered 30 years ago last year, remains one of the most durable franchises in TV history. Yet to make a movie or a show about something is not necessarily to take it seriously. After all, the 1997 blockbuster Men in Black and its sequels basically took something like the situation outlined by Lazar as grist for a Will Smith comedy. These days, however, the situation is far different. Prior to leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson made UFOs the subject of one of his Fox Nation specials. Last summer, the House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee held a hearing on UFOs or, as they are presently being rebranded, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) — another sign of their growing legitimacy. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has assured his followers that, upon his election, he will disclose all information regarding UFOs. Interviewed in the Hill, Kennedy had a sense of humor about the topic but then got serious on us: “I guess they’re taking it seriously on Capitol Hill, which I’m very happy about. I think everybody is curious about this. Everybody would love to know whether we have company, neighbors, in the universe.”
Still, some may ask: If UFOs existed, and if a duly elected president had the right to know about them, wouldn’t former President Donald Trump have already spilled the beans to visitors at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster? Wouldn’t he have brokered a meeting with the chief Little Green Man, much as he did with the tyrannical North Korean leader he once dubbed “Little Rocket Man”? Then again, it’s possible that Trump’s minders kept such information from him, a further illustration of the challenges that lie ahead for Kennedy’s alien disclosure program if he were to, somehow, wind up in the White House.
Yet the talk of UFOs or UAPs or whatever continues in high places: Last year, journalist Garrett Graff peddled his new book, UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There, on what is possibly the wokest, lamest, most white-bread radio show in the known universe, Fresh Air with Terry Gross. When this topic, even couched in fairly skeptical, self-consciously rational terms, has made its way onto public radio, you know society has jumped the shark.
What to make of all of this alien mania? On one level, it is the latest sign that the faith in government that had eroded during every political scandal from Watergate through Russiagate — and had further eroded during the lies, exaggerations, and appeals to “the science” that accompanied the Trump and Biden administrations’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic — has now completely collapsed. To put it another way, when people discover that their government is capable of locking down society, consigning children to education-by-Zoom, and denying employment, even participation in society, to those without COVID-19 shots, they start to imagine other things.
If the government can do all that, why can’t it also warehouse UFOs and keep the fact a secret? We now know that compliance with safe, standard childhood immunizations has declined following the strained case made for the ineffective COVID-19 vaccine, and something similar is at work here: People know they were lied to about COVID-19 (and they were), so they can think they are being lied to about an alien invasion (a far less likely scenario). Talking heads such as Rogan and Carlson, as well as enterprising, social media-savvy public figures such as Kennedy, also learned during the pandemic of the insatiable appetite for contrarianism, a healthy instinct when it comes to pandemic lockdowns and the pronouncements of a certain Dr. Anthony Fauci — but also one that can be easily exploited or abused.
Yet it would be too easy simply to blame our present cynical age for the UFO craze. Perhaps our popular culture, one that has, however mindlessly, relentlessly fed the appetite for stories about visiting space creatures since at least the Roswell incident in 1947, deserves some of the blame, too. Generally speaking, aliens in mass media prey on our psyches in one of two ways: They either serve as
Generally speaking, aliens in mass media prey on our psyches in one of two ways: they either serve as boogeymen — such as the title creature in Ridley Scott’s scifi classic Alien or the creepy, lanky invaders in M. Night Shyamalan’s underrated Signs — or as spiritual beings who bring with them something akin to salvation, as do the kindly, melodically inclined aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
boogeymen, such as the title creature in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien or the creepy, lanky invaders in M. Night Shyamalan’s underrated Signs, or as spiritual beings who bring with them something akin to salvation, as do the kindly, melodically inclined aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To my thinking, the first form of fictitious aliens is largely benign: We all enjoy contemplating things that go bump in the night, and aliens, in this understanding, are just a variant of ghosts or zombies. Yet, much as I love Close Encounters, isn’t there something the slightest bit pitiful in looking to flying saucers and the hairless little fellows that navigate them, the so-called greys that inhabit our imaginations, as a source of enlightenment?
By the same token, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a marvelous, engaging, charming picture, but the fact that its young hero Elliott can find communion with no being — not his mother, not his older brother, not his younger sister, not even his dog — except a waddling spaceman is rather sad, is it not? Elliott may indeed be lonely and unhappy, but Spielberg is doing his audience, including those youngsters who empathize with Elliott, no favors by suggesting that the answer to his problems is what director Peter Bogdanovich, no fan of the film, once called “an ugly and lovable space creature.” And the undeniable physical ugliness of aliens, as presented in movies and through the accounts of those who claim to have had encounters with them, has to be dealt with here as a symptom of our disordered times. In The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo painted Adam straining to make physical contact with God, depicted by the artist as an almost unfathomably majestic figure. In our disordered times, though, our Adams, the UFO seekers, look for fellowship with hairless, slimy, monosyllabic little fellows. A little strange, no?
Movies like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact, and both Avatar movies propose what amounts to an alternate theology in the form of a cosmology. Lapped up by a public that increasingly knows nothing of the great Western religious traditions, these movies satisfy humans’ innate interest in celestial forces and undeniable appetite for systems that explain our place in the universe. Believing in UFOs constitutes a substitute religion, all right, but one perfect for our irreligious age since it’s a belief system cloaked in the language of science, exploration, and physics. Where orthodoxy fails, Hollywood steps in, and the result is a society awash in sci-fi fans, cosplayers, and comic con attendees who took aliens seriously long before Rogan or Kennedy. Church attendance is declining, but the Star Wars franchises live on. Popular culture can be harmless, but only if it remains in its proper place: as entertainment, perhaps even an outlet for understanding, but not as a substitute for the answers offered by millennia of spiritual teaching.
“Keep watching the skies!” a character exclaims in Howard Hawks’s masterly chiller from 1951, The Thing from Another World (remade, just about as well, by John Carpenter in 1982). The idea of humanity forever watching the skies for visitors from other planets is undeniably appealing: It’s spooky, it’s eerie, it’s fun. But if taken to heart, it also suggests something lacking in ourselves and our understanding of the world. To watch the skies in this manner is to lose sight of all the joys and wonders already made known to us in the realities of the heavens and the earth. ⋆
Believing in UFOs constitutes a substitute religion, all right, but one perfect for our irreligious age since it’s a belief system cloaked in the language of science, exploration, and physics.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.