Looks like UFOs are back. CB radios next?

There can no longer be any doubt: every fashion phenomenon does come back. I, for one, really thought we had seen the last of UFO-mania. When I was a boy, the idea of stealthy extraterrestrial visitors zooming around in miraculous aircraft was everywhere in the nerdier corners of popular culture. If you liked comic books or paperback science fiction or Omni magazine — and especially if those things were among the staples of your imaginative diet — there was no getting away from it.

Anyone remember the NBC series Project U. F. O. ( 1978-79), inspired by the USAF’s real Project Blue Book program? As the anthology show’s Wikipedia page observes, most episodes had the plot of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, only backwards: they would end with the investigating protagonists discovering that UFOs remained impenetrably Unidentifiable, but must be “real” craft capable of physically improbable manoeuvres. ( I know citing Wikipedia will savour of pumpkin- spice holiday laziness on my part, but the Scooby thing is a truly perceptive point by some anonymous Wiki-genius.)

Then, at the end of the show, a disclaimer would appear on-screen: “The U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. After 22 years, they found no evidence of extra-terrestrial landings and no threat to national security.”

The ironic effect of this notice on a child’s mind, or a childlike one, was obviously fantastic. Few read that text and thought, “How much money did the U.S. government waste on this horse hockey?” No: you thought “Wait ... they stopped investigating?”

Many cross- currents converged to make UFO reports and UFOlogy hip at that time. U.S. aerospace engineers were still creating medieval-manuscript monsters like the SR-71 Blackbird, and no one could be too sure what truly advanced flight technology might look like. Watergate was still fresh in the mind, and it had a paradoxical effect on the public consciousness, allowing people to believe the most ludicrous tall tales about government conspiracies and cover-ups.

And let’s not let the most obvious culprit off the hook. In 1975 Star Wars suddenly made old-school science-fictiony junk food popular again after a period of “harder,” more intellectual movie SF. Decades of source material involving flying saucers and green men were just waiting around to be rehabilitated and ripped off.

There is a visible straight line from Star Wars through Close Encounters of the Third Kind ( 1977) to the Project U. F. O. series, not that Project U.F.O. really got off the ground ( yes, I went there). The show was made in an easily summarized spirit: oh, so you kids like “star wars”? What if I told you...

So here we are in 2017: new Star Wars, new UFO craze. But perhaps I am overreacting a little to Saturday’s New York Times story headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘ Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U. F.O. Program.” It is an immaculately reported piece about, essentially, a bitter former Pentagon man who lost a secret budget envelope devoted to UFO investigations, much in the spirit of the original Project Blue Book (1952-70). The money was spent under the auspices of powerful, aged Senators with aviation interests and poor B. S. detectors: Harry Reid, Ted Stevens, and Daniel Inouye.

The latter two have died, and Reid is retiring, leaving the program without protectors in Congress. But Reid is proud of his stewardship of the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program,” and a lot of cash seems to have found its way into the hands of Robert Bigelow, a real-estate billionaire who is a hardcore true UFO believer.

The Times story cites Harold Puthoff, who followers of ’ 70s pseudoscience will remember as a high- profile promoter of parapsychology and “zero-point energy.” ( Puthoff was one of the specialists who studied TV spoon- bender Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute and declared faith in his paranormal powers, turning a handsome conjuror into an international guru-celebrity. Psych students learn about this research today as a cautionary tale.) The NYT says Puthoff worked on the newer UFO program, and was presumably paid to do so. This is surely much more astonishing than the blurry UFO videos that accompany the Times article on the web.

There are very good reasons for a superpower’s military apparatus to devote a little money to following up UFO sightings. “Threat Identification”? Sure, whatever. Plenty of U. S. military flyers have seen UFOs, and these people ought to be comfortable reporting odd occurrences without ridicule. But if I were American, I would definitely want most of that budget to go to Scully rather than Mulder. Don’t throw cash at someone who really, really wants to believe.

What I find vexing is that most of the response to the Times story has been in the spirit of “Whoa, aliens!” rather than “Taxpayers got robbed.” Young people may know on some level that ubiquitous good-quality cameras have all but eliminated civilian UFO sightings. But they lack the personal memory of a live, thriving UFO fad, one that bred quasi-scholarly international UFO-study associations along with a whole publishing industry devoted to UFO tales. I wonder if the Times’ piece on UFO research, by the very virtue of its flat-voiced Grey Lady objectivity, is having the same weird effect as that disclaimer they showed at the end of Project U.F.O.