Unidentified Fundamental Obsession

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Even someone desperate to be skeptical may find it hard to imagine that all these cases are confabulations and fantasies. Can a cultural belief system this powerful and durable be constructed entirely from vapor? People may say to themselves, Isn't it possible that Earth has been just a little bit invaded?

The finest minds in the UFO world are coming to the conclusion that the aliens are involved in some kind of elaborate breeding program. They want our genetic material. This is what might be called the central irony of the UFO world. The belief in aliens is, at first glance, a firm embrace of the Copernican principle: Humans and the planet we live on are not the center of the universe. There are other intelligences. They are, indeed, smarter and more advanced. And yet these other intelligences are obsessed with us. They come across mind-boggling reaches of space to meet us, experiment with us, mate with us. We have such enchanting DNA, they just can't stay away. Ufology, for all its generosity in filling the universe with life, nonetheless has a distinctly anthropocentric flavor.

To the dismay of the UFO researchers, the mainstream scientific community has remained adamantly opposed to the notion that aliens are visiting our planet. Even worse, the capitalist system has turned the whole thing into a commercial gimmick. The ufologists want to prove that there's a cosmic Watergate going on even as we speak, and yet, well, there are all these aliens on backpacks, lunch boxes, T-shirts, and children's TV. There are aliens bobbing from rearview mirrors and staring off bumper stickers. There are alien key chains, alien snow domes, alien tattoos. In the wee hours of the morning, Art Bell, a man living in a trailer 60 miles from Las Vegas, brings word of the alien presence and the government cover-up to an estimated 8 million radio listeners around the world. Meanwhile, Hollywood has made the alien story a staple narrative, like the Western used to be. Aliens are so overexposed, in fact, that the movie studios have resorted to parodies and send-ups: Mars Attacks! and Men in Black. Human civilization is apparently more adept at cashing in on conspiracies than at solving them.

So deeply has the Alien penetrated popular culture that we need only the slightest visual clue to identify a character as being from a different world. In the 1960s it was antennae, as in My Favorite Martian. Now it's the bald oversized head with big almond-shaped black eyes, skinny limbs, hands with four, or sometimes three, fingers. The alien in the notorious Roswell 'autopsy' documentary had six fingers, which many ufologists felt was proof that it was a hoax--their research showed that the real Roswell aliens had only four.

Most observers make a sharp distinction between legitimate exobiology--the scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life--and 'kooky' ufology, but both are part of a fabric of curiosity. The common thread is a sincere desire to understand the universe, to find truth and meaning in a time when we are overwhelmed with astronomical data. The UFO story is really what you'd call a heresy, a heresy of modern astronomy.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print