The quaintness of UFO conspiracy theories

So, former US president Barack Obama thinks that aliens are real. Although, as he told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen last week, he hasn’t personally seen them and they’re not being kept in Area 51 – a highly classified US air-force base. ‘There’s no underground facility’, he insisted, ‘unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president’.

While Donald Trump has expressed no view on the question of aliens – ‘I don’t know if they’re real or not’ – he has apparently been angered by Obama revealing this ‘classified information’. And so, seemingly to head off the conspiracy theorists, he has now announced that the State Department will ‘begin the process of identifying and releasing’ government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life.

There is something unavoidably quaint about the UFO conspiracy theory. The discovery of supposed alien space-craft debris near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, is closer to the time of Jack the Ripper than it is to the present moment. The idea that materials discovered there belong to some advanced interstellar craft that the United States Army Airforces (USAAF) have been reverse-engineering ever since should by all rights have decayed and perished as much as the rubber components implausibly found among them. The Greys – those top-heavy, affectless, ocular beings that influenced the wise visitors featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind – would be lucky only to be grey by now.

Why has it lasted? It may be because, as conspiracy theories go, this one is unusually optimistic. When the truth comes out, it will make things better, more exciting. This is very different from the usual tin-foil-hat fare, which is either to suspect that something incredible – such as the Moon landings – were a psy-op, or to assign malign intent behind some genuine catastrophe – 9/11, the assassination of JFK, Covid-19 – to some agency not officially to blame. The secret UFOs, meanwhile, point to something wonderful. The possibility that the universe, and maybe the future, are still stranger than we can imagine.

On this reckoning, I too would love it to be true. Compared with the century preceding the publication in 1980 of The Roswell Incident, which initiated the ongoing speculation, the 40 years since have been short on thrills, especially of a cosmic nature. What have we had to compare with progressing from manned flight, through jet engines to the Apollo programme, all within a perfectly normal human lifetime? Largely just a series of increasingly sophisticated entertainment platforms to simulate it all.

I remember seeing a quote in a Reader’s Digest in the 1990s that turned out to be from a pastor, Ralph Sockman: ‘The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.’ I loved it then and still do now, though perhaps not exactly for the reasons intended by the reverend. It suggests that learning does not extract magic from the world, does not disenchant it, but rather enhances our capacity to ask ever more awe-struck questions. Who could not be buoyed up by such hopes?

Sadly, the fact is that the intervening decades have introduced relatively little in the way of promising shoreline. It is still possible to gaze up at the night sky and let the silent majesty reset your soul. But whereas my father’s generation grew up excited by technological advances that allowed us to cross land, sea and sky at ever faster speeds, or scientific advances like cracking the code of DNA, too many of the innovations of the past 30 years have a distinctly dismal subtext. Warnings on tobacco, alcohol and anything that tastes nice. Fat jabs that eliminate the need to exercise and resist junk food from the dieting process. Anti-depressants that take the edge off the anxiety created by all this, by making it harder to feel anything at all.

Not to mention, there’s all the apps that quietly replace the hippocampus and pick your pocket every month, years after you forget ever subscribing to them, let alone why. We have communications platforms that replace the need to leave your burrow to see a working approximation of your colleagues’ face. And Netflix.

Compared to all this, flying saucers are as steam punk to the present moment, as Jules Verne’s Nautilus and HG Wells’ Time Machine were in 1947.

Apart from anything else, where are UFOs supposed to have come from? The chances of anything coming from Mars have lengthened… to zero. And not only are interstellar distances simply implausible, our own shift in the past few years from fighter jets to drones suggests that if any super-beings from Proxima Centauri were to get terra-curious, they would not be sending their best.

The physical presence of interstellar craft in our airspace is a minor concern to those seriously interested in extraterrestrial intelligence. They just want to hear a single squeak. In the century since Edwin Hubble demonstrated that Andromeda was not merely another star but a Galaxy entirely unto itself, little of our new knowledge has enhanced our capacity to wonder if we are not alone. Statistically, as Obama himself admitted, ‘the odds look good’. But none of the two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy has yet to so much as send us a LinkedIn invitation, so adding a further two trillion galaxies is just making the silence all the more pointed.

There is plenty of inorganic cosmic gee-whizzery available. Learning that supernovae can burn 100million times brighter than the Sun is blunt-force trauma to the imagination, but it remains a fundamentally numerical nugget, as is the insane density of a black hole. It brings us no closer to linking hands across the skies. Where is the life?

Sadly, I feel that Roswell is to our postmodern, jaded imaginations as inadequate a remedy to our want of wonderment as Conan Doyle’s dinosaurs in The Lost World of the Amazon Basin, or indeed the fairies at the end of his garden. But if you know otherwise, Barack, I’m begging you – do tell.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.