[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 this post on recent revelations!]
On how to
make sense of the dramatic rise in reputable “UFO” sightings in recent years.
First
things first: what crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 was apparently an
Air
Force high-altitude balloon (part of the top-secret but now declassified Cold
War Project Mogul), not an alien spaceship. I haven’t studied in depth all
the other “UFO” sightings across the centuries that are highlighted on this
Wikipedia page, but I’m willing to bet that every one has a similarly
mundane (or at least earthbound, as I suppose a top secret Cold War balloon
project is pretty interesting in its own right) explanation. To wit: in
December 2024 there were a ton of reported
UFO sightings across the Northeastern U.S., and from what I can tell they
were almost certainly all drones,
perhaps even private-use ones that people had gotten as holiday presents and
were trying out.
In many
ways, that paragraph might seem to be an argument for fewer “UFO” sightings in
the 2020s, since we now know a lot more about the various (temporarily)
unidentified flying objects, past and present, natural and human-produced, that
we could potentially misidentify as alien ones. But somehow, our increased
awareness of those realities has been complemented by an increase in the number
of alleged UFO sightings
in recent years—and, even more strikingly, an amplification of the U.S.
government’s willingness to take such sightings seriously, as it did for
example with numerous “drone”
sightings between 2019 and 2020. As that latter date indicates, the
pandemic was a particularly prominent moment for such reports, and that’s a
logical enough explanation to be sure—but not one that’s close to
comprehensive when it comes to alleged sightings over many more years than just
the Covid ones.
So while
ideas and images of alien arrival aren’t at all new, as I hope this whole series
has made clear, they do seem to be on the rise here in the 2020s. And while I
don’t think we can attribute that to the pandemic (at least not as an origin
point, since for example that 2019 rash of sightings predated Covid), I would
argue that our broader sense of imminent, if
not indeed ongoing, apocalypse has a lot to do with why we seem to be
seeing aliens everywhere. In part I mean that it would be helpful, psychologically
anyway, to be able to blame the strong sense that the world might be ending on
extra-terrestrial causes, as so many of our pop culture texts across the
centuries have already done. But I also and especially mean that, when we seem
so incapable here on our shared planet of doing what’s necessary to save it, it
sure would be nice for a deux ex machina to come on down and help out. “Take us
to your leader?” Nah, little green dudes, y’all better lead the way.
August
Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment