UFOs may not exist—but in the age of Trump and COVID-19, they’ve taken on fresh relevance and power.
Are UFOs real? Or a myth? I would say they’re both—understanding “myth,” not in its common sense of “bunk” or “falsehood,” but as something vital and profound: a collective dream, a symbolic display of cultural and human realities of which we hadn’t let ourselves be aware.
Which, for our ancestors, might have been visions of God.
UFOs have fascinated me for nearly my whole life, starting when I was a teen “UFOlogist” back in the 1960s. I grew up to become a professor of religious studies, with special expertise in traditions of heavenly ascent and otherworldly journeys. Once, I believed UFOs were visitors from other planets. I now recognize them as a religious phenomenon. A UFO encounter, insofar as it’s not a simple misinterpretation of something in the sky, is a bona fide religious experience. The lore surrounding the UFO is a religious myth—or rather a full mythology, complex and ramified; a product of the space age, yet as rich and evocative as the great mythologies of antiquity.
Ever hear of Roswell, New Mexico? Area 51? Chances are you have, even if you’re not sure just what happened at Roswell or what Area 51, the top-secret tract of Nevada desert that saw some of the Cold War’s most horrific weapons tests, has to do with UFOs. When Barack Obama declared in 2013 that “when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, ‘What’s really going on in Area 51?,’” of course he was joking. But the joke would have fallen flat if there hadn’t been some truth in it that his audience could understand and appreciate. Hillary Clinton may have been less than serious when she promised a New Hampshire reporter at the beginning of 2016 that if elected she’d “get to the bottom” of UFOs, sending a “task force” to Area 51. But surely she’d crunched the numbers—polls have consistently shown that one-third to one-half of Americans believes in UFOs.
If Clinton’s opponent made any reference to UFOs during his presidential campaign, I’m not aware of it. But the years since his election have seen an extraordinary renascence of UFOs in the national awareness, a leap toward cultural respectability almost unparalleled in their seventy-plus years of history. Taking UFOs seriously, The Week proclaimed on the cover of its June 14, 2019, issue– illustrated with a painting of a domed disk piloted by two huge-eyed, green-skinned aliens waving to a jet pilot as they zoom through the sky above him. In the lower right corner of the picture, its presence unexplained but notable, floats the Trump Baby balloon.
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Of all the meanings coalesced in the UFO, the pivotal one is death. The end of our awareness. The end of our existence.
The renascence perhaps began on December 16, 2017. That was when America’s “paper of record,” the august New York Times, published on its website a pair of stories headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” and “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen.’” If the stories were remarkable, their bylines were still more so. The three names included Leslie Kean, who had no connection to the New York Times but was the author of an enthusiastically pro-UFO 2010 bestseller.
The Times wasn’t alone. That evening the Washington Post got into the act, with a story headlined “Head of Pentagon’s secret ‘UFO’ office sought to make evidence public.” On December 17, MSNBC interviewed Ralph Blumenthal—a veteran Times correspondent who shared the bylines with Kean—and he repeated and amplified the stories’ claims: “They have, as we reported in the paper, some material from these objects that is being studied so that scientists can try to figure out what accounts for their amazing properties … some kind of compound that they don’t recognize.”
From the journalistic flurry that followed, a correlation dimly emerges. It was the stereotypically liberal East Coast media that gave the UFO story full play. Trump-friendly media were noticeably less enthusiastic. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked by a reporter what her boss in the White House thought about UFOs, could barely suppress her snickering. UFOs were somehow part of our political divide, and a facetious caption in New Yorkmagazine (March 20, 2018) hit on the truth: “Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET versus Trump.”
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Why the split? What’s the meaning of the post-2016 UFO resurgence? I can’t say for sure. But I can speculate, drawing on one of the main points I make in Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO ».
Of all the meanings coalesced in the UFO, the pivotal one is death. The end of our awareness. The end of our existence.
Death: the most alien thing that we can conceive, or rather fail in all our efforts at conceiving. Yet also the most intimate, with us at our birth, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh all the days of our life.
This is why the best-known UFO story, evoking name recognition in nearly everyone, is Roswell. Its central, compelling image is the dead extraterrestrials in their shattered craft, childlike with their fragile limbs and outsized heads. They embody death in its aspect of alienness. They’re also ourselves—frail, helpless children confronted by a calamity we can neither grasp nor ward off.
The events at Roswell, part mythic and part historical, took place in the early summer of 1947. This was a time when a new sort of death was making itself felt in our world—the prospect of the whole human species’ collective death through nuclear annihilation. June 1947, the month when UFOs first erupted into America’s collective awareness, was also the month when the Doomsday Clock first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
And today? Yet another vision of collective death, not nuclear this time but climatological, forces its way into our awareness. Until the 2016 election, it was possible to believe, Well, at least the nations of the world recognize the problem. At least we can work together to fight it.
Then came Trump… And the UFO, emblem of the looming annihilation we can’t help but dread, comes to be taken very seriously indeed.
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And now we have the novel coronavirus.
None of us knows how long this crisis will last or how deep and malignant will be the economic crisis that’s bound to follow. Already COVID-19 has inflicted on our society a trauma that will not soon be healed or forgotten. Nature has revealed itself as beyond our control: invasive, savage, killing.
Perhaps a foretaste of what we’re to expect from global warming.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, a warning humanity will at last heed.
How will it shape the UFO myth, the UFO experience? I think of the words of Gershom Scholem, at the end of his magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: To foretell such things “is the task of prophets, not of professors.” And I’m only a professor.
Let’s meet again in a year, in five years, and see.
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