UFOs, God, and Preserving the Mystery

The cast of revived Star Trek, an optimistic, humanist version of alien nation.

As a lifelong science fiction fan, I’m understandably excited by the news that Congress has ordered full disclosure of the Pentagon’s UFO knowledge. Buried deep in December’s government funding bill, Congress ordered the Pentagon to release, as unclassified, the full roster of information it’s gathered about “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Nice euphemism, Cigarette-Smoking Man, but we know what you really mean.

People like me joke that, if the UFOs came tomorrow, they wouldn’t need to abduct us; we’d volunteer. This recurrent joke ignores the fact that not all UFO abduction narratives involve gracefully drifting among the stars. Many present extraterrestrials examining humans like specimens collected for an undergraduate biology class. Others present evidence that extraterrestrials are prepping for invasion. Yet the romance of aliens persists.

“Aliens” narratives break along two lines. One, embodied in Star Trek and Doctor Who, suggests that a starship or similar craft might whisk us away from humdrum activities, and give us the opportunity to travel widely, have deep experience, and combat injustice. In this view, ordinary life is deterministic, controlled by forces frequently invisible but always inexorable, and we’re doomed to eternal work and boredom, but travel might permit escape from determinism.

Alternatively, aliens threaten humanity with violent, disruptive uncertainty. In The X-Files or Independence Day, powerful people want to maintain, or re-establish, the equilibrium we’ve created through work, commerce, and authority. (Very Joe Biden.) But intrusive elements from outside our equilibrium want to smash our balance for selfish purposes. We therefore seek leaders able to repair the damage these horrible outsiders have done.

Both narratives deal with power and control. Where one wants to escape outside control, the other seeks an acceptable power figure to displace the unacceptable one. Like religion, which physicist Don Lincoln postulates alien narratives have replaced, we seek either liberation from unjust control, or protection from unjust liberation. These mirror narratives agree that injustice is endemic and widespread; they only differ in our relationship to it.

Tom Baker as the Doctor

Much UFO mythology arises from the Cold War, with its competing narratives for humanity’s future. We now know the Roswell wreck, once dismissed by skeptics as a “weather balloon,” was actually a rudimentary aerial spy device. America needed the narrative of individualist Capitalism to confront the Red Menace, but this created paradoxes. To prevent Communist infiltration, America built a massive, intrusive national security state. We became what we hated.

Even the demands for unclassified information reflect this. Reading the headline of the mandatory release of UFO information, my immediate response was: “Yay! We’ll know whether we’re alone in the universe!” Again, shades of religion; that’s like having a definitive answer to whether God exists. But the actual news report suggests Congress cares more about potential state enemies and national security. Cold War Redux.

“But wait!” I hear some readers crying, because I’m off my medications. “What about Ancient Aliens? Giorgio Tsoukalos is certainly a wing-nut, but you wouldn’t suggest he’s either a hippie demanding freedom from The Man, or a closet authoritarian, would you?” Indeed I wouldn’t. The third-path narrative shared by Tsoukalos or Erich von Däniken, has definite overtones of racism and xenophobia, but it doesn’t fit neatly into my previous binary.

Rather, they straddle the line between these alternatives. By claiming they’ve unlocked “real” history, hidden for millennia, Tsoukalos and von Däniken claim to understand reality better than anyone else. They’ve achieved secular gnosis, and therefore, like The Doctor, gain freedom to see the universe clearly. Then, by evangelizing their Truth, they gain authority to gather humanity against Outer Darkness and keep us safe and stable within.

Therefore I find myself in an awkward position. When the Pentagon releases its UFO information, it’ll answer many lingering questions, and I realize: maybe these questions should remain unanswered. If these “unidentified aerial phenomena” are human spy technology, perhaps that information shouldn’t be declassified, because we shouldn’t risk important intelligence sources. The Pentagon keeps its defense intel secret for a reason.

But if they’re not human, if these phenomena are truly extraterrestrial, what stops powerful people misusing that information just the way they misuse God? Whether aliens mean to invade and shatter our sovereignty, or they intend to help us escape our tedium, they threaten people who currently hold power. If we’ve learned anything recently, powerful people (and their supporters) will torch their own houses to prevent loss of control.

Whatever the Pentagon report contains, it will cause harm. We should find ways to resist its release. Aliens, like God, are meant to remain a mystery.