Tony Milligan: The idea that aliens may have visited Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of people in the UK believe that Earth has been visited by aliens, and around 7% believe they have seen a UFO.
In the U.S., the numbers are even higher—and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings are probable evidence of extraterrestrial life has risen from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. About 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO.
This belief is somewhat paradoxical, since we have no evidence of aliens. Moreover, given the enormous distances between star systems, it seems odd that we would only learn of them through a visit. Evidence of aliens probably comes from signals from distant planets.
In a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, I argue that belief in alien visitors is no longer an oddity but a widespread social problem.
This belief is now growing to the point that politicians, at least in the US, feel they must respond. The Pentagon’s disclosure of alleged Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs, not UFOs) has attracted a lot of bipartisan attention in the country.
Much of this is based on familiar anti-elite tropes that both sides have been willing to exploit, such as the idea that the military and a secret cabal of private commercial interests are hiding the deep truth about alien visitations. This truth is believed to include sightings, abductions, and reverse engineering of alien technology.
Belief in cover-ups is even higher than belief in alien visitations. In 2019, a Gallop poll found that a whopping 68% of Americans believe “the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling.”
This political trend has been building for decades. Jimmy Carter promised to release the documents during his 1976 presidential campaign, a few years after he reported seeing a UFO. As with many sightings, the simplest explanation is that he saw Venus. (That happens a lot.)
Hillary Clinton also suggested that she would like to “open [Pentagon] “during her presidential campaign against Donald Trump, she collected as many documents as possible.”
As you can see in the video below, Trump suggested that he needs to “consider” whether it is possible to declassify the so-called Roswell dossiers (regarding the infamous alleged UFO crash and recovery of alien bodies).
Former President Bill Clinton claimed to have sent his chief of staff, John Podesta, to Area 51, a top-secret U.S. Air Force facility, in case rumors of alien technology there turned out to be true. It’s worth noting that Podesta has long been an enthusiast for all things UFO.
The most prominent current advocate for disclosure is Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. His stripped-down UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 to disclose some UAP records was co-sponsored by three Republican senators.
Pentagon disclosure has finally begun early in Joe Biden's term, but so far there's been nothing to see. Nothing looks like a meeting. Nothing looks imminent.
However, the background noise does not disappear.
Problems for society
All of this ultimately encourages conspiracy theories that can undermine trust in democratic institutions. There have been hilarious calls to storm Area 51. And after the storming of the Capitol in 2021, that now looks like an increasingly dangerous possibility.
Too much background noise about UFOs and UAPs can also interfere with legitimate scientific communication about the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology, the science that deals with such matters, has a much less effective advertising machine than ufology.
History, a YouTube channel owned by Disney, regularly features shows about “ancient aliens.” The show is now in its 20th season, and the channel has 13.8 million subscribers. NASA’s astrobiology channel has a hard-fought 20,000 subscribers. Real science is far less numerous than entertainment repackaged as fact.
Tales of alien visits have also repeatedly attempted to appropriate and overwrite the history and mythology of indigenous peoples.
The first steps in this direction date back to Alexander Kazantsev’s science fiction story Explosion: The Story of a Hypothesis (1946). It depicts the 1908 Tunguska meteorite impact as an explosion of an alien spacecraft engine similar to the one at Nagasaki.
In Kazantsev’s story, a single large black female survivor was left to her fate, endowed with special healing powers. This led to her adoption as a shaman by the indigenous Evenki people.
NASA and the space science community support initiatives like the Native Skywatchers initiative, which was created by indigenous Ojibwa and Lakota communities to ensure that the stories of the stars survive. There is a real and extensive network of indigenous scientists working on these issues.
However, ufologists promise much greater publicity for the stories of indigenous people in exchange for a mix of authentic indigenous stories of life coming from the sky with fictional UFO stories presented as suppressed history.
The modern narrative of alien visitation did not emerge from indigenous societies, after all. Quite the opposite. It emerged in part as a way for conspiracy theorists in a Europe torn by racism to “explain” how complex urban civilizations in places like South America could have existed before European settlement.
Squeezed through the filter of the new era of 1960s counterculture, the narrative was inverted to value indigenous people as those who once possessed advanced technology. Once upon a time, according to this view, every indigenous civilization was Wakanda, a fictional country appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
If all this were left in a separate box, as entertaining fiction, everything would be fine. But it is not, and it is not. Visitation stories tend to overwrite native stories about heaven and earth.
This is a problem for everyone, not just for indigenous peoples struggling to continue authentic traditions. It threatens our understanding of the past. When it comes to insight into our distant ancestors, remnants of prehistoric stories are few and precious, as in indigenous stories about the stars.
Take, for example, the Pleiades stories, the standard version of which dates back at least 50,000 years.
Perhaps that is why these stories are of particular interest to alien visitation enthusiasts, some of whom even claim to be “Pleiadians.” Not surprisingly, the Pleiadians do not look like the Lakota or Ojibwe, but are strikingly blond, blue-eyed, and Nordic.
It is becoming increasingly clear that belief in alien visitations is no longer just fun speculation, but something that has real and harmful consequences.
Tony Milligan, Research Fellow in Philosophy of Ethics, King's College London
This article was reprinted from Conversation under the Creative Commons license. Read original article.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
