[30 years ago this week, the pseudo-documentary film Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility of alien life, leading up to a post on recent revelations!]
On the
longstanding, contemporary, and problematic sides to an otherworldly theory.
Despite
spending his whole life in Europe (nearly all of it in his native France),
pioneering author
Jules Verne seems to have understood quite well a longstanding American
tendency: our obsession with space, and our ability to use that alien world as
an escape when things are especially difficult or fearful here at home. Verne
set his groundbreaking science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
and its sequel Around the Moon (1870) in a post-Civil War America, one in
which the adventurers of the Baltimore Gun Club hope to create a vehicle that
can take them away from this troubled place and toward that extraterrestrial
body. 150 years later, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s groundbreaking science
fiction film Interstellar (2014)
represents the latest version of this trend, using space travel and the
possibilities of escape to other worlds as an alternative to climate change and
inevitable destruction here on Earth.
No
historical moment better encapsulated this trend than the first decades of the
Cold War. There’s a reason why President
John F. Kennedy emphasized in a 1962 speech a successful American journey to
the moon as a central goal for the decade—while that ambition was partly
based on the practical fears of Soviet space domination inspired by Sputnik and the Space Race, I would
argue that it also gave the nation yet another way to focus on the heavens as
an escape from such terrestrial fears and concerns. Fifteen years prior to
Kennedy’s speech, in the first years of the Cold War, a routine incident—the
crash of an Air Force
surveillance balloon near Roswell, New Mexico—had produced an even more elaborate
escapist space fantasy, the suspicions and stories of a covered-up alien
landing that would become one of the nation’s most extended
and enduring conspiracy theories. From TV shows like the X-Files and Roswell
(1999-2002) to a central sequence in the film Independence
Day (1996), the Roswell theory has become a staple of American
popular culture, a shorthand for both the belief in extraterrestrials and this
broader fascination with the mysteries of space.
That
fascination seems silly and harmless at its worst, and (as with the very
successful culmination of Kennedy’s and NASA’s 60s goals)
productive and meaningful at its best. But NASA’s successes notwithstanding, I
would argue that there is a more problematic side to the escapist space
fantasies exemplified by the Roswell theory (besides the suspicious
anti-government rhetoric it can engender and amplify, which is a
recurring theme across many conspiracy theories). As he has done so often, Don
Henley nicely summed up my thoughts on the matter, in the song “They’re Not Here, They’re Not Coming” from his
album Inside Job (2000). Henley notes
that such theories of alien encounters “carry our highest hopes and our darkest
fears,” but recognizes them for the escapist fantasies that they are: “Now you
long to be delivered from this world of pain and strife/That’s a sorry substitution
for a spiritual life.” That last line is a bit more preachy than I would like,
but I would agree with Henley’s concluding recommendation for what we must do
instead, now more than ever: “Turn your hopes back homeward/Hold your children,
dry their tears.”
Next aliens
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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