We’ve talked about this one before.
It came up again today when came across this post by Palko on the latest publicity on UFOs as space aliens, this time from political performer Tucker Carlson.
I’d always thought of the UFO-space-aliens thing as being neither left nor right, or maybe more left than right in that the space aliens thing doesn’t fit into biblical fundamentalism.
But if the belief has shifted over to the right, that can make it appealing both to right-wing pundits such as Carlson, who can present it as an anti-government conspiracy theory, center-right pundits such as Tyler Cowen who can support the idea as part of a general trend of suspicion of government and of academic experts, and to center-left pundits such as Ezra Klein and Nate Silver who can use this as an issue to demonstrate how open-minded they are.
Palko linked to the blog of Jason Colavito, where I came across a 2023 in Review post, which featured a month-by-month, blow-by-blow description of UFO hype on the New York Times, Fox News, Politico, CNN, and congressmembers of both parties (including both my senators from New York! ugh).
Colavito concluded:
As 2023 came to an end, what had initially promised to be ufology’s biggest year turned into something of a Pyrrhic victory. Ufologists became the dog that caught the car. Now what? They got everything they wanted, from massive mainstream media coverage to a shiny new Pentagon UFO office to full government funding to a public Congressional hearing with a UFO whistleblower, and all it managed to do is expose the lack of anything besides stories and stories about stories behind the myth of flying saucers. But what a dismal revelation it nonetheless was for me to be proven right that our leaders are listening to kooks and self-deluded fools and are beholden to fabrications and mythology. In a year when conspiracy theories threatened the very Republic itself and democracy hangs in the balance, it chills the bones to realize that the people who will decide our fate and our future can be swayed by a spook story.
I agree. The only thing that I think was missing in his roundup was the pickup of this stuff by media insiders. As I wrote in an earlier blog comment, I think the substance of the matter is less important to them than than Tyler Cowen would call “mood affiliation,” in this case an opposition to people they view as sanctimonious conformists, even in cases where the conformists pretty much have it right. I think that these and other media insiders like being on the opposition side on the UFOs-as-space-aliens issue. It’s kind of dangerous, mildly edgelordy. Indeed, the entire “edgelord” phenomenon fits somewhere into this discussion. Edgelording can be thought of as a form of trolling, but there’s a thin line etc., and some people can take it all too seriously. It’s the difference between sharing outré theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate or ridiculous election denial theories—ha ha, just poking fun, can’t you guys take a little ribbing, etc.—and shooting up a pizza parlor.
Andrew:
2003 should be changed to 2023 in “where I came across a 2003 in Review post”
John
Fixed; thanks.
What I find most interesting about the “anti-government” bent is that there is a more compelling, but less exciting, explanation to all of this: the US government fabricated much UFO lore to cover up advancements in aerial technology during the Cold War. Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, and the documentary that followed, document the evidence in favor of this story. Even though it’s far from an air-tight case, it still seems much more plausible than extra-terrestrials, and could still give the “anti-government” bent some are looking for. I think this might be what Colavito is referring to when he mentions a “spook story”. Of course, part of what’s interesting is the government and Congressional buy-in this time around- you don’t get that when the story is en elaborate government counterintelligence campaign.
“the government and Congressional buy-in this time around- you don’t get that when the story is en elaborate government counterintelligence campaign.”
But you might get that when the government is virtually evenly divided between extreme visions and both parties are keen to cash in on every available publicity opportunity. There’s nothing better than meaningless Congressional hearings where members of both parties can harrumph and ahem and be seen carefully evaluating the evidence that windmills are dangerous villians that can only be stopped by chivalrous knights – mustered and put into action by the great minds of America’s Senators and Congressmen!
Well, about anything is more plausible than extra-terrestrials. My guess is that UFO sightings and photos result from a variety of optical effects (a magazine called the Skeptical Inquirer had articles about these) and also that what we see is always an interpretation. I used to hunt, and got familiar with my brain trying to turn strangely shaped bushes, etc., into deer — what I was looking for.
The Skeptical Inquirer (SI) still exists although the print format is gone. I used to subscribe.
Decades ago, they did an investigative piece on the Roswell
“aliens,” systematically debunking every claim. The legend stems largely from a single, breathless phone call to authorities by a local citizen. The citizen described something like (I’m paraphrasing from memory here) thin metal sheets that if crumpled, sprung back to the original shape. Gotta be alien, right? The SI folks, through extensive interviews, discovered that balloons being launched at the time – there is still a dispute as to whether they were weather balloons from a university of spy balloons from the army – were made of aluminized mylar, which had recently been invented and would have been unknown to most of the folks in New Mexico at the time. By the time the SI investigators were done, they had tied up all the loose ends in a similar fashion.
A lot of the UFO craze can be traced back to Roswell. There was one government official – forgot his name – who originally made rational statements about what had been found, but then after the alien hype started changed his tune. The SI team was able to find his original statements. I wonder if that is how the “government hoax” idea got started.
I think you underestimate how popular the Space Age was at the time, in popular culture. It’s one of those things where today’s boring cliche was yesterday’s (yestercentury’s) utterly and absolutely amazing revelation. Films, magazines, comics, were just filled with space travel and alien invaders. Even some street-level human characters – e.g. Batman – became interplanetary adventurers for a while. In such an environment, it’s no mystery why UFO’s became such a phenomenon.
Just to be clear, we are often talking about literal spook stories. Many, possibly most, of the leaders in the community are leaning toward explanations involving ghosts, angels/demons, or extra-dimensional beings. Google skinwalker ranch for a glimpse at the epicenter.
Mark:
I was assuming that Cowen, Klein, Silver, and other UFO-curious media insiders, are believers, or semi-believers, in the sci-fi version, not the ghost version. But maybe they’re open to ghosts as well, I don’t know.
Andrew,
Cowen and Silver may not know how crazy their associates are (or how bad the science behind the Drake equation is). Klein probably knows but I suspect he’s being a good soldier and trying to contain the reputational damage to his employer.
In a classic case of crazy but not stupid, people like NYT’s Leslie Kean (though on the record as believing in all sorts of paranormal stuff) are generally careful to downplay the parts without aliens, but some (like Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett) have been saying the quiet part out loud.
Mark:
I’ve corresponded or met all these people but don’t know them well. My quick uninformed guesses:
– Cowen is supportive of the UFO movement because it is conservative-identified, and supporting the movement is associated with discrediting government expertise.
– Nate has had bad experiences with sanctimonious conformists, and he sees the UFO movement as being rugged independents, kind of like the poker players he likes and respects.
– Klein sees a virtue in open-mindedness and at this point has committed enough to the UFO thing that he’s, ummm, not quite all-in on it, but he doesn’t want to let go either.
For all of them, it’s convenient to not look too hard at the details of what the UFO believers are believing.
Mark –
> or how bad the science behind the Drake equation is)
Could you elaborate just a bit in that?
Joshua–
Drake was pushing for what would become SETI and he pulled some wildly optimistic numbers out of his ass (one fifth to one half of stars with planets will have habitable planets, 100% of habitable planets will develop life, 100% of those planets will develop intelligent life) to make his case. Serious attempts to estimate the terms in the equation produce results that vary by many, many orders of magnitude. The high end gives us millions of civilizations in the galaxy; the low end suggests we are probably alone in the observable universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Original_estimates
Thanks Mark –
I always just pretty much assumed it was based on valid reasoning.
The ghosts/supernatural stuff doesn’t bug me so much directly — easy to filter that out. What’ll bug me is if I read something from Nate about basketball — is he using the ghost logic or no? How serious to take it, etc.
How does “ghosts, angels/demons” even work, in terms of an explanation? There’s this interesting older book: “In The Spaceships of Ezekiel, Blumrich asserts that Ezekiel’s account in the Bible was not a description of a meeting with God in a prophetic vision, but one of several encounters with ancient astronauts in a shuttlecraft from another planet.”. But that’s saying what some ancient writer thought was a supernatural being, was really a visiting extraterrestrial. I don’t understand the reverse idea. Most of UFO-ology is about explaining lights in term of spacecraft. The issue is that they look like some sort of simple geometrical form, i.e., the “flying saucer”. Generally “ghosts, angels/demons” are seen as humanoid of some sort, or at worst, animalistic. But they don’t seem to travel in any vehicles (well, there’s “ghost ships”, but they’re on the sea).
Jacques Vallée is the biggest name behind the extra-dimensional speculation. He was also the inspiration for the François Truffaut character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e#Paranormal_research
Yes, Jacques Vallée is one name to look up for the mystical version. Briefly, some people in this space seem to teach an outer doctrine about unknown primates and aliens in spacecraft to the public, but an inner doctrine about interdimensional entities and trickster gods overturning the scientific-materialistic world view to a few select disciples. Its similar to the ‘god of the gaps’ argument.
Clearly UFOs are not alien technology. The obvious explanation is that they are piloted by humans, travelling back in time from the future. This also explains the humanoid features of most alien sightings, with people mistaking humans who have co-evolved with their advanced technology for an alien species. (I think this thesis was developed originally by Buttons during his seminal work for the Cryptid Factor, although there may be earlier sources)
My intuition about this situation is more positive. As Colavito points out, despite “massive mainstream media coverage to a shiny new Pentagon UFO office to full government funding to a public Congressional hearing with a UFO whistleblower, and all it managed to do is expose the lack of anything besides stories and stories about stories behind the myth of flying saucers.”
By giving the issue coverage and opening investigations, perhaps it can help expose the UFO theories as nothing but hot air to open minded but reasonable people. This can whittle down the group pushing the UFO narrative to only the truly committed. Instead, without such actions, there is a dearth of open and public discussion, allowing misinformation to fester and enablign UFO proponents to point to government and mainstream media inaction as evidence in support their position. Now, they cannot.
Kind of like the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
“Kind of like the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Or maybe this:
“I’d rather have a troublemaker inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in.”
-LBJ
I think you should add the enormous influence of Rogan to the list. He’s a big time promoter of UFO shit. And many of somewhat more peripheral “influencers” like Shellenberger are further milking the spinoff audience in what I think could fairly be considered a Rogan-centered media universe.
It’s just mind-blogging how huge the larger phenomenon is here – of the popularity of conspiratorial thinking. Closely related is the whole “Ancient Apocalypse” phenomenon, which led to an enormously popular Netflix series:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/magazine/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-comet.html
The number of people who are sure of election fraud, COVID was a Chinese plot or a “plandemic,” in are change is a hoax…
Yikes. Thar should be “climate change is a hoax.”
Did you see John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight segment on UFOs/UAPs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRdhoYqCAQg
I felt the segment somewhat undermined Oliver’s credibility, especially after a lot of good work on the opioid crisis etc. Yes, it’s not really a “news” program, but still. Oliver seems to fit in your categorization of Klein and Silver, broadcasting his open-mindedness (*) on this issue while putting himself at odds with his takes on Dr. Oz and skepticism of forensic science.
Of course the public deserve answers to questions about highly unusual activity, and we should be wary of governments that have been known to cover-up all manner of things in the name of “national security”/saving face, but the tone was still too credulous to my liking. The message seemed to be “if we stopped being so dismissive, and worked really hard on it, we might just be able to see the extraterrestrial lifeforms visiting our world”.
Maybe. But the problem I have with all UAPs is my general sense that, while we understand a lot about the world (particular at the microscopic scale), it is entirely possible (and much more likely) that there are phenomena which occur in situations which are in some limit where our models don’t work as well. And this is to say nothing of human physiology and behavior in unusual conditions, nor the fact that there are 8 billion people on Earth now, with access to more advanced technology than ever before (so both the ability to see unusual things, and the number of such things will have increased).
(*) I did slightly recoil at writing that phrase because it’s the sort of phrase someone “anti-woke” or “gender-critical” would say about someone who wanted to show some basic decency to fellow human-beings.