The water was too cold
The water was uncomfortably cold. ciption below
65% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the U.S. House of Representatives is investigating UFOs. But why? What does the idea of alien life and the great beyond do for our cultural imagination?
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All in all, computer scientists and ufologists Jacque Valley identified over 60 accounts of unusual aerial events pre-19th century. Over the years, plenty of folks not lucky enough to witness any celestial shenanigans were still alien curious, as author Brenda Denzler explained. Since the Reformation depopulated the saint-filled cosmos of the Middle Ages, followed by the elimination of God from the cosmos by rationally enlightened scientific minds, a newly orphaned humanity has been asking, “Are we then alone?” Coincidentally, that’s also what I asked myself at 4 AM when nobody’s responding to my Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy memes.
But with the explosion of America’s mass media in the mid-19th century, the debate about aliens entered the public sphere in earnest. The final years of that millennium were peppered with both genuine and fabricated claims of UFO sightings, but the modern UFO movement is typically dated to 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over Washington State and reported seeing nine mysterious shiny objects in the air.
Over the following decades, America experienced numerous waves of UFO sightings. This was obviously connected to the Cold War and with it the Space Race. It was a time of rampant conformity and containment, and people were able to project their fears and anxieties onto little green men in the sky, as anthropologist John W. Traffic and writes. This created a situation in which extraterrestrial aliens could be employed to represent fears about communism and atomic annihilation, as well as to convey the possibility that we might be saved from our stupidity by an alien civilization - which, okay, rude, but see?
Many people who claim to have had contact with aliens did come out of the experience with salient critiques of 1950s America. Aliens reportedly condemned everything from the nuclear arms race to suburbia - because apparently, Martians can’t appreciate the magic of the Cheesecake Factory in a two-car garage.
These waves of alien sightings raised governmental eyebrows. In 1953, a secret scientific committee advised the CIA to undertake a public education campaign to debunk UFOs in order to minimize public hysteria. Afterwards, historian Gerald Haynes writes, CIA officials wanted knowledge of any agency interest in the subject of flying saucers carefully restricted.
But UFOs stayed alive in the public imagination, and stories of alien contact were usually positive or at least harmless. These narratives were, according to historian Curtis Peebles, a mirror to the events of post-war America, reflecting, among other things, optimism about space.
But as political theorist Jody Dean notes, the explosion of the Challenger spacecraft in 1986 marked the end of public fascination with an interest in the American Space Program. Basically, we weren’t too stoked to watch more people get blown up on our tax dollars. It also helped usher in a new era - the age of alien abduction.
Amidst the nihilism and conspiratorial paranoia of the 80s and 90s, aliens were reimagined as sinister beings that were way too eager to do weird sex stuff with you. Dean argues that by the 90s, abductees replaced astronauts in the media, as space became a site of danger rather than wonder.
While ufologists had previously tried to use rigorous science to legitimize the study of extraterrestrial life, their failure here to gain acceptance, as well as the rise of abduction narratives, shifted the UFO phenomena from a scientific zone into a religious and metaphysical one.
Unlike the social commentary-filled alien encounters of the 50s, these narratives were about the dark, disturbing personal testimonials. UFO mania blazed into the new millennium and basically hasn’t let up since, infecting the entire globe and becoming, what journalist David Clark calls, one of America’s most successful exports.
Of course, a big reason these stories are so enticing is their unprovability. It came on down and hovered about a foot and a half or two feet off of it - now, even though aliens are 1000% real, are you really gonna be able to prove it?