We have been waiting patiently, long enough, for the aliens to fully reveal themselves in the pantophagous pulse of our starving world. For too long we’ve only heard the stories, seen some grainy questionable video, watched movies with extravagant scenarios mapped out in the coruscating focus of the constellations. We’ve memorized the argumentative evidence proving the ancient aliens built the pyramids, fantasized of an extraterrestrial intelligence seeding our prehistoric origins with the technological impulses for our modern desires. It’s about time they gave us something.
I am excited to see aliens returning to the public consciousness—It means we care about something else besides our own domestic horrors. In the United States this past July, the House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing where three former military officials admitted covert sections of the government not only know about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), but they have possession of the aircraft. These men identify as whistleblowers, thereby confessing secrets the government doesn’t want you to know about. In the hearings, they spoke to the existence of “nonhuman biologics” and “dead pilots” somewhere in the confidential coffers of the government secret program warehouses. Then, in Mexico, two 1,000 year old alien corpses were publicly shown to their Congress, with fantastic stories of its Peruvian origins. You have of course seen the viral images everywhere. They look like little petrified garden gnomes resting peacefully in their pristine coffins, a few crumbs of rubble sprinkled on top like the confections of time. It’s as if these cute Peruvian corpses were designed for memetic stardom, as if witty captions are meant to underline their sleeping portraits: “ME AFTER PRESSING THE SNOOZE, LMFAOOO.” But if all this isn’t enough evidence for you, NASA just announced it has appointed a director of research into UAPs, proving that even they don’t know what the most mysterious objects are in the sky.
We love our aliens, and now it seems that they love us back.
We had a lull there for a while, where aliens weren’t discussed as much as they used to be. They used to be everywhere, with myriad sightings and shapes of spacecrafts, crop circles of labyrinthine orifices, blockbuster movies and television docuseries titillating our fanciest splendors. But we need aliens. They are the gods of modernity in a world conquered by agnosticism, these are the ancient deities we’ve always suspected of creating the world. But our marvel of them just sort of went away for awhile. People moved on to more exciting things to believe in—Donald Trump, the Earth was flat, QAnon, vaccines, “natural” disasters. Our planetary egotism became too much for the rest of the cosmos, and so we discarded it, and turned all the fears and horrors and destinies about ourselves.
But at the same time, our angst and need for aliens is as old as the gods, and can’t just go away. We had to go through the primitive renderings to get to where we are today. The three former military officials, David Grusch, David Fravor, and Ryan Graves, look like serious people—instead of being long white-haired freaks in their tie-dyed shirts talking manically about Roswell from the inside of a Winnebago, they came well-dressed, once held respectable positions in the military, spoke articulately and rationally.
When a top secret U.S. military ballon that was being developed to spy on the Soviet nuclear program crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, it set off a storm of personal testimonies of people being abducted—excited loners usually, bucktoothed hicks in the desert recounting the time when gray people visited them in the middle of the night and had sex with them. People started getting abducted everywhere, returning with strange and vivid retellings of the inside of the spaceships. They saw spacecrafts everywhere, like seeing a heart in the clouds when cuddling with your girlfriend on the beach. Area 51 is effectively still shrouded in lore and obscurity, with fringe movements of internet nerds coordinating that they are going to storm the gates together—if there’s enough of them rushing the barbed wire fences maybe a couple of them will get a hold of an alien head bobbing listlessly in a canister of preservative.
After the Cold War, when a pair of Air Force reports came out that confirmed the truth about the suspicious aircraft actually being a spy balloon, true believers were unshaken. The Roswell crash could not just be explained away that easily. If a Congressional hearing happened in an earlier decade, Americans would have lost their collective minds. I used to think we believed in such things just because they were a fun way to pass the time, even subconsciously, they filled the cruel tedium of the days with something to think about other than chores and loneliness and work. But more and more I’m realizing that we need them to be there. Surely we can’t be the first pioneers of space, the yeehawing inbred aliens setting out into the frontier. Surely there must be others spreading through the fabric of time before us.
There’s a fun conspiracy theory that says Marilyn Monroe was killed by the CIA because she knew about the archives of alien intelligence. Because of her affair with JFK, Monroe had access to the alien files and she was such a hysterical buffoon at that point she would inevitably spill the beans to the public and mass hysteria would ensue because the general population simply could not handle the fact of aliens visiting Earth. Norman Mailer started the assassination part of the theory, and others later added on the bit about the aliens. But Mailer later admitted that he made it up in order to sell more books. But it didn’t matter, because the story was off and running. Just the other day, someone I know was adamant that this conspiracy was actually true, and wouldn’t take my simple explanation as a remedy to his truth. I sort of envied him in a way. It’s better to believe America’s biggest icon of beauty was killed by the U.S. spy agency for the most nefarious reasons than it is to recite a lackluster claim at truth.
So, with new evidence presented to us, why isn’t there more of a conversation being had in the public arena? Have our agnosticism and skepticism chipped away at us that much that we aren’t all drawing up new theories? It’s almost a shame that the government is telling us there are aliens; it was more fun to think they were keeping them hidden from us, it was more fun to figure it out for ourselves. There is a similarity in how our belief in aliens has changed over time to the way our belief in God has. These things take time to take their present form.
Religious portrayals of an omniscient monotheistic God are so outworn now that it’s hard to imagine it was ever fashionable in the first place. That brand of god is now an antediluvian cartoon, a badly rendered globular comic relief. He’s a plagiarized illustration of Zeus, brooding with his arsenal of thunderbolts as he wades through the cotton candy clouds, the curling mustaches of fog consuming the awkward space where his feet actually press down upon. In a sense, our modernity and cultural agnosticism seems so sprawling and ubiquitous that it almost seems impossible that anyone ever believed in that type of god. It now seems insane that people were terrified of a conscious recourse, that they would dissuade themselves from envying their neighbor’s ass out of fear of serving an infinity in a cauldron of fire. It’s the tale of an amateur lampoonist, his crude crayon drawings of puerile dreams. Even when George Carlin did his famous bit about how ridiculous our belief in this god was, his ridicule almost came across as facile and elementary, cheap digs that stupid people run rampant like wild rodents. Everyone could laugh because nobody believed in that anymore. Not even evangelicals or megachurch worshippers actually believe in a god with any real tangible power anymore. We have modernized ourselves out of belief, entertaining and politicizing ourselves into oblivion, our selfishness and hypnotisms consuming everything. The god from those times would return our follies with floods and earthquakes and civil war, delivering secret conflicting messages to opposing kings. We don’t like it because it’s not realistic anymore; it’s too old fashion, and so we scoff at it the way we laugh at the first King Kong movies and their ridiculous special effects. But when those early monster movies came out, people were terrified, leaving the theater en masse, crying hysterically in the street. Avatar will probably look like shit too in fifty years. It already sort of does.
So our gods change. There’s some spiritual abstraction of a godness, a consummation of deism perhaps, the belief that your soul will go on forever, into different bodies and iterations like self-improving globular masses, evolving offspring of your spirit gently escorted through time by a higher power of some kind. A person can be godlike. A landscape of great beauty, especially one dramatic and unspoiled by the ravages of man, is godlike. So, God is by no means dead, he just looks a little different than before.
In this sense, so too do our aliens change. No more gray people with spindly limbs and noodle fingers, their skulls swelling like birthday balloons, eyes bulging with enormous pupils like a freak who took too much MDMA, consuming spectral infinities along their travels. No more flying saucers. No more crop circles even—the farmers got bored and started growing corn instead. No more Phoenix Lights or Roswell, it’s all been debunked in too much detail. We have to keep redefining ourselves to keep up with the times, to stay relevant.
When David Grusch spoke of “nonhuman biologics”, he wanted to give us something new to hold onto, some nebulous golden egg for us to volley into the conversation at the bar. Everyone held onto that perfectly indeterminate phrase, because it means nothing and everything at the same time, because it could be a scoop of cellular curds bubbling like prehistoric microbes, or it could be a sentient all-knowing Mother Ship brain, illuminated with neons and beams scintillating through time. There’s no more flying saucers because now we have video of a flying Tic-Tac catapulting through our skies, the sonic angst of its movements in sporadic schizophrenic bursts, then disappearing and flying under water. Tic-Tacs are negligible sugar pills, placebos of belief that often prove your brain does most of the work anyways. Other military officials have admitted to these incredible accounts where the ships defy all laws of physics, hovering perfectly in category five hurricanes. Reports of UAPs descending from space and hovering above the Persian Gulf for two weeks, with one account of a UAP jamming the radar of nearby military aircraft.
And while I’m pleased to see these recent reports, and I’m pleased to see the rebranding of UFOs to the more mature and sophisticated UAPs, the Congressional hearings in the U.S. and Mexico failed to spark any conversation lasting more than a couple days on the periphery of our usual gossip, nothing meaningful or hysterical, no good conspiracy theories spreading into the cultural fabric. Even the fires in Maui have garnered far better conspiracy theories of premeditated coordinated efforts of control. Everything went back to the Trump indictments and the Republican primaries. Nobody believes anything anymore. There is too much other meaningless information to consume, shoal knowledge, news consumed in series of memes and pictures, the torrents of reactionary rage fed to us like spoonfuls of gruel. We have been lied to too many times, we’ve become jaded and cynical, offended when the government says there are aliens, insulted when they say there are none.
In Adam Curtis’s 2016 documentary epic Hypernormalisation, he explains that when UFO sightings were at an all-time high in the 1980s, it was all a manipulative ruse by the U.S. government to divert people from realizing it was just a series of innovative Cold War weapons tests. “Perception management,” they called it. Of course it was far better for the government if the people thought there was advanced extraterrestrial life frantically zig-zagging through our skies than it was for them to realize their government was preparing the most effective ways to bomb the world. Maybe this is why Americans especially love their aliens, why they always seem to visit us.
We need to believe in aliens again the way New Age women with those crisp wide brimmed hats believe in astrology—if you press them hard enough, they might admit that your moon-rising-mercury-gatorade may not be true, but they’ll say at least it’s a fun way of looking at what you need to focus on, a nice metaphor for our connection to the cosmos. I am more and more sympathetic to all of this. You need to believe it before you see it.
We need to believe in something other than ourselves, because we don’t even believe in that anymore. Even if it’s just a metaphor to remind us that we’re part of something larger than ourselves, or if it’s a fanatical belief in evil colonizing bugs coming from other dimensions, we need to believe in the greatness of outer space again.
Yay for aliens!!!