What the Aliens Tell Us About Us
Aliens are in the news again.
Not because we’ve recently spotted some new craft that looks like it might just belong to an all-wise extraterrestrial being, but because conspiracy theorists and rabbit-hole-diving hobbyists are excited about a slew of documents they just might finally get their hands on from the U.S. government. There’s nothing a conspiracy theorist likes more than documents.
Late last week, President Donald J. Trump told more than 3,000 people at a TPUSA event in Phoenix, Arizona, that he had directed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena.” He added that “we’ve found many interesting documents, I must say, and the first releases will begin very, very soon.”
The announcement wasn’t exactly breaking news. Trump had announced effectively the same thing on his social media accounts back in mid-February. What is new is that apparently we don’t have all that long to wait before our curiosity is indulged, and we can take to obscure forums in the corners of the internet to debate timelines, eyewitness accounts, and the tiny inconsistencies contained within them, real or imagined. (LISTEN: The Spectacle Ep. 402: Demons and Spiritual Warfare: It’s REAL)
To make things even more interesting, there have, of late, been all sorts of fascinating tells that maybe, just maybe, we can prove once and for all that aliens are real.
For instance, earlier this year, Barack Obama told an interviewer over coffee that aliens are, in fact, “real, but I haven’t seen them.” Of course, after people noticed he said anything, he tried to dismiss the whole thing as a mathematical probability. Then, of course, Trump accused him of releasing confidential information.
Meanwhile, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee has been making the interview rounds, calling on the Trump administration to release the files because “I think we can handle it,” all while assuring us that the evidence he’s been privy to in congressional hearings is nothing short of shocking. “We’ve seen too much. I’ve seen too much. Not myself personally, but out when I’ve been briefed by government officials. Video, pictures. Some of the best-trained pilots in the world have described having close collisions with some sort of aircraft or apparatus, and so I think it’s time that they come clean.” Burchett’s point is that, if we’re spending tens of millions of dollars on the whole alien thing, it’s only fair that we get all the juicy details out of it.
As a taxpayer, I’m deeply grateful.
In all seriousness, the question of whether aliens exist is intriguing, not because the answer is fascinating, but because the aliens are. Aliens are like fairies: They are the green-skinned, creepy-eyed representatives of enchantment in the modern world. Serious and superficial folk (in the words of G. K. Chesterton) tell us that it is absurd to believe such creatures exist. And yet, the myth persists.
And a myth it is — at least in its cultural import. First, and perhaps least importantly, we use aliens the way the Greeks employed Zeus or the Irish employed leprechauns: to describe things we don’t quite understand. Are we not quite sure what exactly the oblong flying object the Navy encountered in 2004 was? Alien activity is as good a hypothesis as any. (READ MORE: Lee Strobel: Americans Don’t Need Much Persuasion in the Supernatural)
More significantly, however, the alien myth is the one modern man has used to satisfy his deep desire to believe that something exists which he cannot see and to build worlds out of it. Man, as Tolkien liked to point out, has a need to indulge in sub-creation. In turning a barren red planet into a place thriving with intelligent life, man is exercising a faculty which (at least in part) impelled the author of Genesis to write that man is made in the “image and likeness” of the Creator.
It is true, of course, that aliens are a much lesser type of myth than Cinderella’s godmother or that prideful talking pussycat who likes his promises kept. They tend to be less romantic (I’m decently sure that no alien princess has been wooed by an alien prince as of yet) and frankly, a bit less moral (so were the pagan gods). It is, however, also true that it’s more important that the myth exists first than that it’s a perfect myth (that already exists anyway and was written by a far better mythologist than H. G. Wells).
It is proof that perhaps our culture is not so far gone that it has lost its sense of imagination and that men are not quite so grown up that they’ve forgotten to be children. And that’s quite a welcome bit of news.
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