Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m no hard-nosed skeptic. That said, Charles Fort himself warned against being so open-minded that one’s brains spilled out.
The sudden candidness about UFOs on the part of the military, Congress, and the media raises ample reason for caution, if only because all three are acting in concert.
Even greater cause to question who’s really behind the curtain comes from the entertainment industry.
The first great era of ufology kicked off with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947. Arnold’s account came ten years after Donald A. Wolheim delivered John B. Michel’s “Mutation or Death” speech at the Eastern Science Fiction Convention. The speech called for socialist utopian ideas championed by the Futurian subset of fandom to dominate science fiction.
It’s worth noting that the early American UFO flaps, including the Arnold incident, coincided with Campbellian sci fi’s triumph over the pulps. For the first time since it came into its own as a genre, sci fi wasn’t about heroes inspired by Christian morals battling evil to save space princesses. It was overrun by Big Men with Screwdrivers engineering their way through allegories about then-current social ills.
Significantly, superior aliens descending from on high to lead mankind out of our barbaric ways were fixtures of Campbellian SF. Reflect on the glut of Star Trek stories wherein a Starfleet captain smugly delivers the, “We were once much like you …” speech to a benighted pre-warp civilization. Those backward cultures were always thinly veiled stand-ins for some aspect of fallen human nature the Left wanted to fix with Science™ at the time.
Note that the model of the USS Enterprise is an airframe glued to a flying saucer–a term introduced into the popular lexicon as a result of Arnold’s sighting. A deliberate callback? Probably not, but it’s a perfect example of how art imitates life imitates art, etc.
At the extreme end, that equation turned out a smattering of UFO cults whose doctrines read like rejected B movie scripts. To this day they stand as case studies in cognitive dissonance.
Also keep in mind that Gene Roddenberry had a background in political science, flew planes for the Army, and worked for the LAPD as a press liaison before creating Star Trek.
The alien craze that peaked in the 1950s largely died out by the start of the 70s. People had more immediate concerns on their minds, like a forever war quagmire overseas, social unrest at home, soaring gas prices, a tanking economy, and cultural malaise. The Big Men with Screwdrivers had failed after all. The Venusian High Council hadn’t arrived to save us from ourselves.
Skip ahead to 1977–an even 30 years after Arnold’s sighting and exactly 40 after “Mutation or Death”–and along come two maverick film makers named Steven and George. Nobody thought these two would amount to a hill of beans, but they proved the critics spectacularly wrong with adventure romps hearkening back to the pulps that resurrected pop culture.
Though Spielberg in particular couldn’t shake the Campbellian “alien savior” trope.
Owing almost entirely to the work of these two film moguls, generations X and Y grew up marinating in a sci fi-saturated pop culture. Television got in on the act with paranormal investigation series featuring news magazine style production. The slick presentation used the visual language of TV to associate tales of aliens with serious news. 30 years later, aliens are serious news.
The alien revival kicked off by Spielberg and Lucas cross-pollinated with In Search Of style TV shows in the form of The X-Files. The childlike optimism of 80s sci fi had turned dark by then, casting aliens as sinister forces pulling the strings of government conspiracies. Late-night radio call-in shows like Coast to Coast AM filled a role similar to the old UFO cults by running the pop culture-to-subculture feedback loop.
Then, right around Cultural Ground Zero–there’s that pesky 7 again–the alien revival lost steam. The Star Wars Special Editions signaled the beginning of the end for SF’s flagship franchise. The X-Files jumped the shark with a feature film in 98. UFO reports largely faded from the mainstream, perhaps in part because the proliferation of cell phone cameras in the aughts made hoaxes without photographic evidence less plausible.
But now, with forever war quagmires overseas, social unrest at home, soaring gas prices, a tanking economy, and cultural malaise at the forefront of people’s minds, government and media team up to bring UFOs back into the limelight.
Am I suggesting that the same people who blamed unseen Russian spies for one election, handwaved away manifest irregularities in another, and manufactured an idolatrous foot-washing cult are lying?
I’m not saying they are. But I’m not saying it’s aliens.
Not yet.
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