13 Reasons to Believe Aliens Are Real

Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for

human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be
seen so we know we exist. What’s unusual about the alien
fantasy is that, unlike religion, nationalism, or conspiracy theory,
it doesn’t place humans at the center of a grand story. In fact, it
displaces them: Humans become, briefly, major players in a
drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of
which is, unfortunately: We’re total nobodies. That’s the lesson,
at least, of a visit from aliens, who got here long before we were
able to get there, wherever there is; if humans are the ones
making first contact, we’re the advanced ones and the aliens are
probably more like productive pond scum, which may be one
reason we fantasize about those kinds of encounters a lot less
than visits to Earth. Of course, when the aliens are the explorers,
we’re the pond scum.

But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain,
which should probably not surprise us given how dizzying,
secular, and, um, alienating that world objectively is. Most
conspiracy theory (https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/its-easy-
to-get-people-to-sorta-believe-conspiracy-theories.html) is
fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible —
the bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you
believe (https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/why-believing-in-
ufos-is-more-fun-when-youre-the-only-one.html) in pervasive
totalitarian malice. Alien conspiracy theory keeps the malice
(cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black). But rather than benzo
comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic
drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly
deep, mystical experience of existential ignorance.
 Floating Down (1990), by David Huggins, who makes oil paintings about his encounters
with aliens. As featured in Love & Saucers, a 2017 documentary about the artist. Photo:
David Huggins

Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of

consequentiality. Crop circles began as a phenomenon of the
English countryside, then spread to the far corners of the
onetime British Empire (Australia, Canada) after World War II,
when the U.K. was falling unmistakably back in the ranks of
nations and when its provincial subjects would have felt some
understandable desire to demonstrate that, somehow, their lives
really mattered. American encounters were invariably rural as
well — typically farmers and ranchers, mostly in the country’s
interior and the deserts and mountains of the West, in decades
the country as a whole spent rapidly urbanizing and then
industrializing its farmland so systematically it looked like
Monsanto was trying to exterminate the American farmer along
with the cotton bollworm.

These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other

witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as
horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires.
But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode:
the suburban encounter, often still private and personal but
more ooey-gooey New Age than abductions and anal probes.
The two major authors were Steven Spielberg, who gave us
broken-family theology in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and E.T., and Carl Sagan, who gave us Cosmos and Contact,
which, when it was turned into a movie, featured an eerie
seascape that was basically a secular heaven, maintained by
offscreen aliens explicitly playing the role of gods. Stephen
Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not
just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-
lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last
acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire
building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley. Americans used
to regard the space race with not just national but something
like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the
new middle class. Suddenly, it’s the rich kids with the cool toys
and the keys to the rocket ship.

Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American

stories of alien encounters have been (often anxious)
meditations on the status of American power — meditations
informed, surely, by both the memory of European settlers, for
whom “first contact” was a story of triumphant genocide, and
sympathy for those they trampled. Given the option, America
will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post–
Cold War 1990s, the dominant alien-encounter template was
still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day. (The
closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up
paranoia of The X-Files (http://www.vulture.com/tv/the-x-files/),
which just expressed a darker faith in the same American
power.) By the time we got an alien epic
(http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/best-alien-invasion-
movies.html) for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it
as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of
course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the
humans — that is, the Americans. And then came the financial
crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E.T. may
take pity on us.

Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively

speaking, you might expect a different perspective on aliens —
and indeed, as The Atlantic
(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/what-
happens-if-china-makes-first-contact/544131/)’s Ross Andersen
documented last fall, the Chinese have recently opened the
world’s largest radar facility to listen for signs of aliens,
wherever they are out there. But even our future Chinese
overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-
receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens;
as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the
evidence. And why wouldn’t they be? They have their own
memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that
empire — to reckon with. And, besides, the unknown is just
scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance
on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change.
—David Wallace-Wells

1. The Government Literally Just Admitted It’s

Taking UFOs Seriously

And, according to researchers, it’s only pretended to end the

program.

A 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an “unknown
object.”

In 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board

concluded that, when it came to UFOs, the American public was
dangerously gullible and prone to “hysterical mass behavior.”
The group recommended “debunking” campaigns to tamper the
public’s interest in unexplained phenomena. But the government
seems to have been interested, too: In December, the Pentagon
confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program. Created in 2007 by senators Ted
Stevens (who reported being chased by a mysterious object),
Daniel Inouye, and then–Majority Leader Harry Reid
(http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/harry-reid-on-what-the-
government-knows-about-ufos.html), and funded with $22
million of “black money” from the Department of Defense’s
budget, the program investigated and evaluated reports of UFO
sightings, many of which came from American service
members.

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but

what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the
program identified five observations that showed mysterious
objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known
as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate
with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or
reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they
seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any
aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has
been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who
ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have

been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored
in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las
Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t
found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive
to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized
in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of
defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.”
This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but
still.
Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed
supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or
battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy
cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of
San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious
aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was
not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective,
the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial
phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the
pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below
the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then,
suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving
like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began
mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly
at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

The Pentagon has said funding for the program ran out in 2012
and wasn’t renewed. But Elizondo has claimed the project was
alive and well when he resigned in October. —James D. Walsh

2. Harry Reid Says We’re Not Taking Them

Seriously Enough

The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther.

Eric Benson: I’m curious about just where your interest in this
subject comes from.

Harry Reid: Bob Bigelow [the founder of Bigelow Aerospace and

Budget Suites]. He’s a central figure in all this. When he was a
young man, he heard a story from his grandparents about
driving down from Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas, where they
saw a so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description.
Bob became a very wealthy man. He would pay for these
conferences about UFOs, and he would bring in scientists,
academics, and a few nutcases.

There were people trying to figure out what all this aerial
phenomena was. Bob started sending me tons of stuff. Mainly
what interested me is that so many people had seen these
strange things in the air.

EB: So tell me how this program got started.

HR: I was in Washington in the Senate, and Bob called me and

said, “I got the strangest letter here. Could I have a courier bring
it to you?” I said sure. He didn’t want to send it to me over the
lines, for obvious reasons.

The letter said, “I am a senior, longtime member of this security

agency, and I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I
also want to go to your ranch in Utah.”

Bigelow had bought a great big ranch. All this crazy stuff goes
on up there — you know, things in the air. Indians used to talk
about it, part of their folklore.

So I called Bigelow back and said, “Hey, I’ll meet with the guy.”
The program grew out of that, to study aerial phenomena.

We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get

something done. I didn’t want a debate where no one knew what
the hell they were talking about on the Senate floor.

EB: I saw that you tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we
have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” To
you, what’s the most compelling evidence to support asking the
questions?
HR: Read the reports. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three
weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had
another strange deal at a missile base up there. It goes on all
the time.

EB: Do you know things about this program that you can’t
discuss publicly?

HR: Yeah.

3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish

About the Possibility of Life Out There

The universe is really big, people.

Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet

outside our solar system. Now we know of more than 3,000 of
them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least
one planet in its orbit. “Even people who are not terribly
interested in science know that we’ve found that planets are as
common as fire hydrants — they’re everywhere,” says Seth
Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “One in five
or one in six might be a planet similar to the Earth.”

That doesn’t mean we’ll ever find an exact replica of Earth, but
maybe we don’t have to. Our study of other planets and moons
in the solar system shows us many worlds possess the
ingredients necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic
compounds, liquid water, and other necessities. (The moons
orbiting Jupiter
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/nasa-surprising-
activity-on-jupiters-biggest-moon.html) and Saturn, for example,
feature whole subsurface oceans.)
And even though these places are extremely harsh
environments, that doesn’t mean as much as we might once
have thought it did; recent discoveries on Earth itself
demonstrate that life is much tougher than we thought. We’ve
found organisms in blisteringly hot geysers in Yellowstone
National Park, in the darkest crevices under the most ungodly
pressures in the deep ocean, in dry hellscapes like the Atacama
Desert in Chile (an analogue for Mars). These “extremophiles”
don’t need a warm and fuzzy paradise to call home — in fact,
they have already evolved to live in environments as harsh as
those on other planets. Some, like tardigrades, can even survive
the bleak vacuum of space itself. If there’s life in most of those
places, “it’s going to be pond scum,” says Shostak. “But it’s alien
pond scum. It shows that biology is all over.”

And where there’s biology, there may well be intelligence, and

our increasing understanding of evolution also tells us life can
evolve faster than we ever anticipated. Millions of years is a
long time for us, but it’s the blink of an eye on the cosmic scale.
Blink too fast, and you’ll miss that pond scum turning into an
intelligent civilization sending out messages every which way,
looking for friends.

And we’re now at the point where we could one day find those
messages and send a reply. New technology gives us a better
chance to actually make contact with extraterrestrials. Our radio
telescopes can scan more of the night sky for an intelligent
message than ever before. Our optical telescopes and
observatories can peer farther into space and look for new
planets, moons, and perhaps even signs of something
altogether artificial (see “Tabby’s Star”). Our ability to parse
volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably
survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. That’s why, in
the past few years, Shostak has continually bet a cup of coffee
with everyone he knows that humans will find aliens by around
2029. “We’d have to be dead above the neck if we weren’t
interested in this,” says Penelope Boston, the director of the
NASA Astrobiology Institute. —Neel Patel

4. They’re Especially Bullish About These

Planets

Adventures in the “Goldilocks zone.”

Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be

habitable, based on two general criteria: They’re rocky, and they
reside in a region of the star’s orbit called the “Goldilocks zone,”
where it’s not too cold and not too hot, but just right to allow for
liquid water to form on the surface. And where there’s water,
there can be life. Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts
are most excited about these seven:

Proxima B: The closest exoplanet ever discovered is also a

potentially habitable world in its own right, if the intense stellar
winds don’t make it barren. It’s not totally inconceivable we
might be able to actually send a probe and study it directly this
century — even travel to it ourselves one day.

TRAPPIST-1 System: The red dwarf at the center of this

possesses a whopping seven planets in its orbit — three of
which reside in the Goldilocks zone, but all of which seem to
possess some degree of potential habitability — and they’re so
close to one another that life on one planet could quickly spread
to another.

LHS 1140b: This wouldn’t be a planet we could colonize. It’s

almost seven times the mass of the Earth and 40 percent larger,
making it a “super-Earth.” But its mass means that it would
retain a thicker atmosphere capable of keeping it warmer and
more comfortable for life than most other places.
Ross 128 b: One of the best chances we have so far at finding
life on another planet. It orbits an inactive red-dwarf star,
meaning it’s likely not being bludgeoned by solar radiation. And
we’ve detected strange signals emanating from the nearby host
star — signals that perhaps have intelligent origins?

Mars: Mars has water, as we’ve known since 2015. Although the
planet looks like a barren wasteland these days, there’s little
reason to write off any chance we might find aliens residing in
some cavern or crevice.

The Ocean Worlds (Europa, Enceladus, Titan): Many of Jupiter’s

and Saturn’s moons show signs of possessing a liquid ocean
underneath the surface.

GJ 1214b: Nicknamed “waterworld” by scientists; signs of

potential clouds give us some hope the planet has an
atmosphere.

—N.P.

5. And There Is “Documentation”

In 2012, the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention

attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with
extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences. A
sampling below.

Camille: A beam of solid blue light came through her ceiling and transported her onto a
table where she was surrounded by beings in white robes with high collars. Photo:
Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Bruce: An alien woke him from his bed to show him the moons of Saturn. Photo: Courtesy
of Steven Hirsch

Lisa: A gray alien knocked at her door and handed her two babies, leaving her with a hole
in her head. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Steve: He saw a beeping, bright white light; it zapped his friend up. Photo: Courtesy of
Steven Hirsch
 Nancy: Her body responded to the “low hum” of the UFO spacecraft, a memory she
accessed in regression therapy. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Rita: She has been visited by a golden reptilian alien throughout her life. Photo: Courtesy
of Steven Hirsch

6. That “Asteroid” Looks an Awful Lot Like a

Rocket Ship

For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a

particularly exciting one.

‘Oumuamua.

We May Have Just Seen an Actual Flying Saucer

When ‘Oumuamua — the name means “first messenger” in
Hawaiian — was discovered floating through the solar system in
October, SETI nuts immediately started checking the boxes that
suggested the rod-shaped object might be an alien spacecraft
of some kind. After all, it’s the first interstellar object we’ve ever
seen pass through the solar system. UFO enthusiasts point out
that rods (along with flying saucers) are the two most common
shapes cited by witnesses in UFO sightings, and the cigar shape
would allow it to be slim enough to avoid collision with other
objects as well as maximize aerodynamics for travel. Both the
SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen initiative pointed
their instruments toward the object but found no unusual
signals emitting from it. Of course, maybe it’s an ancient relic
from an interstellar civilization, or maybe the aliens just weren’t
interested in making contact (that asteroid-ness could’ve just
been camouflage). With the object on its way out of the solar
system, we may never know.

And There Could Be an Alien Megastructure Much Farther Out

In the fall of 2015, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright posited
that erratic shifts in brightness coming from a newly discovered
star 1,280 light-years from Earth couldn’t be explained by
exoplanets or other astrophysics that we understand. He
theorized, instead, that the fluctuations may be the result of
massive objects passing in front of the star, in a kind of orbit —
a whole array of massive satellites or other kinds of structures,
presumably produced by a civilization of advanced intelligence.
Whoa.

Aliens Could Be Dancing to Earth Music Right Now

Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting a red dwarf
12.36 light-years from Earth. At least one of these planets is in
the Goldilocks zone, so METI International decided to beam
some musical signals over to the planet. With a closer proximity
to Earth than most potentially habitable exoplanets, it’d be an
exciting planet to start an interstellar pen-pal relationship with —
assuming there’s someone around to hear our notes and listen
to them as a welcoming tune instead of a battle cry.

And We’re Getting Radio Signals From … Something

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most mysterious
phenomena ever observed by scientists. Though they last only a
few milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in 2007, emit more
energy in that time than the sun does in 24 hours. Three more
were found this month, and we’re no closer to understanding
their origin — except that they’re coming from outside the Milky
Way. So naturally, many experts have begun to think perhaps
they’re produced by an ultra-advanced civilization from afar,
trying to speak to us through signals we can barely
comprehend.

—N.P.

7. These Masters of the Universe Are

Obsessed (They Are Also All Men)

Which space-besotted billionaire will be the first to make

contact?
Robert Bigelow
As a child, Bigelow watched the government test atomic bombs
from his bedroom window and he and his classmates could see
the mushroom clouds bloom over the Mojave Desert from their
school playground. To some, such memories are the stuff of
dystopic Cold War hellscapes, but Bigelow remembers them as
an epiphany. Even back then, Bigelow knew he wasn’t going to
be a scientist (he was lousy at math), so he resolved himself to
make as much money as possible in the hopes that he could
one day fund his own space program. He went on to make at
least $1 billion with Budget Suites of America, long-term motel
rentals around the Southwest. He now runs Bigelow Aerospace,
which holds contracts with NASA and was a primary contractor
for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program.

Photo: Stephen Lam/Reuters

Elon Musk
Musk is hell-bent on using his $21 billion to colonize Mars
(http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/elon-musk-if-you-want-to-
move-to-mars-be-prepared-to-die.html). His company SpaceX
has been trying desperately to reduce the cost of space travel in
the hopes of beginning a million-person colonization of Mars. “If
[we’re not in] a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s
some advanced alien civilization that’s just watching how we
develop, out of curiosity, like mold in a petri dish,” says Musk.

Photo: Paul Allen/Twitter

Paul Allen
When Congress cut off funding for NASA’s hunt for aliens in
1993, Allen gave millions to the SETI Institute; in 2009, the Allen
Telescope Array started searching the cosmos. Allen has given
an additional $30 million to the project, a sum that bought him a
guarantee that if the array detects an extraterrestrial
communiqué, Allen will be the first nonscientist to know.
 Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Breaktrough Prize Foundation

Yuri Milner
Last year, Milner — named after a Russian cosmonaut —
announced a plan to send spaceships to Saturn’s moon
Enceladus in search of alien life. Milner is also funding
Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year project to use a telescope in
West Virginia to search for messages from intelligent life, and
Breakthrough Starshot, in conjunction with Mark Zuckerberg and
the late Stephen Hawking
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/pioneering-
physicist-stephen-hawking-dies-at-76.html).

Jeff Bezos
His company Blue Origin is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX
to launch reusable rockets (and comically rich tourists) into
space. While Musk played himself in a cameo in Iron Man 2,
Bezos appeared as an alien Starfleet official in 2016’s Star Trek
Beyond. (It was not a speaking role.)

“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Bezos said last

March as he piloted a giant manned robot at Amazon’s MARs
conference.

Franklin Antonio
Antonio cofounded Qualcomm, a mobile tech company, in the
mid-’80s. He’s also the company’s chief scientist and has given
millions to SETI research. Last year Antonio gave $30 million to
the University of California San Diego’s school of engineering
and followed that donation up with a contribution to Roy
Moore’s failed senate campaign.

8. As Are Some Prominent Military and

Government Folks

You see a lot more as a test pilot than as a farmer in Iowa.

Nick Pope
“Know that there are people who watch our skies to protect the
sleeping masses,” Britain’s former chief UFO investigator warns
in his memoir (https://www.amazon.com/Open-Skies-Closed-
Minds-Nick/dp/1910198684/ref=sr_1_1?
s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519004811&sr=1-
1&keywords=open+skies+closed+minds&ascsubtag=
[]in[p]cjeyj063k00zsn5y6go8uknx8[i]eSMFXI[t]w). “But also
know that not all potential intruders into our airspace have two
wings, a fuselage, and a tail, and not all show up on our radar.”
Pope’s ominous counsel follows time he spent in the ’90s
inspecting thousands of paranormal incidents from crop circles
to purported bedside abductions. He took that job certain this
kind of stuff “only happened to weirdos,” but unexplainable
sightings soon convinced him that “there is a war going on” with
aliens. Worse, the U.K. Defense Ministry cut
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/04/uf
o-ministry-of-defence) his old UFO desk’s funding in 2009, so
whatever’s out there “could attack at any time,” Pope believes.
Earthlings’ diminished odds have gotten him more fatalistic
lately, too: After scientists suggested ‘Oumuamua — a bizarre-
shaped asteroid that’s the first interstellar object to pass
through our solar system — might be an alien spaceship,
he argued (https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/5160440/alien-
probes-watching-ufo/) in December we “probably wouldn’t
survive an alien invasion” anyway, because if they find us, it’s
clear who has the upper hand.

Paul Hellyer
Canada’s Defense minister during the Cold War, now 94, believes
that at least 80 species of aliens have been visiting Earth for
millennia. One group is called the Tall Whites (because they can
reach basketball-goal height) or Nordic Blondes (because they
look like they’re “from Denmark or somewhere”). Unfortunately,
the others may include ecoterrorists: “We’re doing all sorts of
things which are not what good stewards of their homes should
be doing,” he told media in 2014. “They don’t like that, and
they’ve made it very clear.” Hellyer adds that many technological
“breakthroughs” were aped from these extraterrestrials.
Microchips and fiber optics, for instance, were taken off crashed
alien vehicles and reverse-engineered. The aliens have a special
technology that would solve climate change as well, he claims,
but the Illuminati are hiding it because it would devastate oil
interests.

Philip Corso
Corso’s military career was long and illustrious, from rebuilding
Rome’s government after World War II as an Army Intelligence
captain to having worked the Pentagon’s foreign-technology
desk in the ’60s. He doesn’t appear to have said a word publicly
about aliens until 1997, when Simon & Schuster published The
Day After Roswell — with a foreword by Strom Thurmond — just
13 months before Corso died. It was his tell-all outlining a
decades-long Roswell cover-up while plugging his own
clandestine exploits, which he claimed involved reverse-
engineering technology found on alien spacecrafts. This is how
the world got lasers, particle beams, microchips, even Kevlar,
Corso said. Skeptics argue that regular Earth people’s R&D
behind technology like lasers is impossibly well documented.

Barry Goldwater
Had he won election in 1964, one of his White House’s first acts
might have been releasing top-secret UFO files. He harbored a
lifelong fascination with the truth about extraterrestrial contact,
much of it stemming from his desire to “find out what was in”
the mysterious Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
home to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book
(http://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-
Sheets/Display/Article/104590/unidentified-flying-objects-and-
air-force-project-blue-book/). In the ’80s, it surfaced he’d spent
decades corresponding with UFO investigators and harassing
the military for access to the hangar’s so-called Blue Room,
where conspiracy theorists believe
(https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Real-Area-51-
Patterson/dp/1601632363?ascsubtag=
[]in[p]cjeyj063k00zsn5y6go8uknx8[i]YNVQLR[t]w) alien bodies
from Roswell are preserved. (“Not only can’t you get into it,” his
friend General Curtis LeMay supposedly snapped
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/04/25/auh2o) in
1975, “but don’t you ever mention it to me again.” Goldwater
claims he didn’t.) After retiring in 1987, the senator told
(http://www.ufocasebook.com/blueroom.html) Larry King the
Earth is “one of several billion planets in this universe. I can’t
believe that God or whoever is in charge would put thinking
bodies on only one planet.”

Roscoe Hillenkoetter
After he’d served as the first CIA director (he’d been appointed
by President Truman), Hillenkoetter retired from a distinguished
Navy career in 1957 and took a gig at a brand-new private
research group called the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena. Its chief purpose was pressuring the
government to disclose what it knew about UFOs, via
investigations like Project Blue Book. Hillenkoetter went after
the intelligence community, writing angry open letters that said
things like (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
res=F50A12F9345D1A728DDDA10A94DA405B808AF1D3): “It is
time for the truth to be brought out in open congressional
hearings.” When he pointed out in 1960 that the Air Force had
investigated 6,312 UFO reports to date, but was seemingly
trying “to hide the facts,” the military reminded Americans that
“no physical evidence, not even a minute fragment of a so-called
flying saucer, has ever been found.”
Of course, another theory popped up in the ’80s — that
Hillenkoetter had helped run a secret committee all along of
politicians, military officers, and scientists called the Majestic
12. Ufologists claimed this cabal was formed in 1947, once
Truman started panicking over what to do with all the alien
spacecrafts the government kept finding. The group’s existence
is based on government files that allegedly materialized in
1984. The FBI denied their authenticity entirely, but they and the
Majestic 12 remain popular grist for conspiracy theories, having
figured in Blink-182’s song “Aliens Exist” and even one of Twin
Peaks’s side plots (http://twinpeaks.wikia.com/wiki/MJ12).

Dennis Kucinich
Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign didn’t suffer from his
admission, made during a live TV debate, that, back in 1982,
he’d seen a UFO at friend Shirley MacLaine’s Washington State
home. (He was polling around 4 percent at the time.) But the
current candidate for Ohio governor got mocked plenty; one joke
among Beltway insiders was he wanted the “little green vote.”

Staff were prepped to deny

(http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/01/nation/na-ufo1) the
encounter when reporters asked about the passage in
MacLaine’s 2007 New Age self-help book, Sage-ing While Age-
ing, that revealed Kucinich didn’t just see a UFO but had also felt
“a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind.” The
other witnesses — a Juilliard-trained trumpeter working as
MacLaine’s bodyguard and his model girlfriend — also report
(https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119923872081461417) havin
g seen a trio of triangle-shaped aircrafts flying in tight
formation. Her house was 50 miles from Mt. Rainier, a “saucer
magnet” for UFO buffs because of all the nearby sightings,
including America’s very first “flying saucer” in 1947. Kucinich
had the community’s full support, even if he spent years playing
coy.
It helped that in Congress he did things like trying to ban
(https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/hollow-man/Content?
oid=1481926) space-based weapons. A 2001 bill he authored
himself prohibited America from using “radiation,
electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies”
for the purposes of “information war, mood management, or
mind control of such populations.” It explicitly singled out
“chemtrails,” a term for jet condensation trails when conspiracy
theorists believe they’re being used for biological warfare. In
2008, however, he only confirmed he’d seen a UFO, then pointed
out (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/10/31/kucinich-i-
saw-a-ufo/), accurately, to moderator Tim Russert that “more
people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of
George Bush’s presidency.”

John Podesta
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/john-podesta-
wants-ufo-files-declassified.html)
When WikiLeaks published the Hillary Clinton emails, a weird
number of Podesta’s mentioned aliens and involved contact
with believers like Tom DeLonge
(http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/blink-182s-tom-delonge-
named-ufo-researcher-of-the-year.html) and astronaut Edgar
Mitchell. As Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, he was known as
an X-Files fanatic who’d “call the Air Force and ask them what’s
going on in Area 51.” In 2014, he spent 13 months advising
President Obama — and what was his “biggest failure”?
According to him, failing to get government files declassified on
the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO incident.
Then during Bush’s term, he began publicly crusading
(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-kean/john-podesta-
pulling-back_b_6717872.html) for NASA to release UFO
documents to journalist Leslie Kean, the person ultimately
behind the Times’ Pentagon exposé.
Podesta has kept his personal ET beliefs under wraps, but in
Kean’s best seller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government
Officials Go on the Record, he gamely wrote a foreword
(https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-
Officials/dp/0307717089/ref=sr_1_1?
s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519104523&sr=1-
1&keywords=ufos+generals+pilots+and+government+officials+
go+on+the+record&ascsubtag=
[]in[p]cjeyj063k00zsn5y6go8uknx8[i]ClQK3T[t]w) that argues:
“It’s time to find out what the truth really is … The American
people — and people around the world — want to know, and they
can handle the truth.”

Pavel and Marina Popovich

This husband-wife duo was one part world-renowned
cosmonaut (Pavel) and one part the Soviet Union’s most
celebrated female pilot (Marina). They held among their titles
that of sixth human in orbit, first Soviet female to break the
sound barrier, and holder of more than 100 aviation world
records. Once their illustrious flying careers ended, both
became ufologists. Pavel headed up
(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/oct/07/pavel-
popovich-obituary) Russia’s UFO association and claimed to
have seen an unidentified aircraft zip past his airplane on a trip
home from Washington, D.C., with a group of scientists. People
onboard said it was triangular, brightly lit, and rocketed by at
1,000 miles per hour.

Marina one-upped him, though — she claimed

(https://www.rt.com/news/411498-record-holder-ufologist-
dies/) to have seen multiple UFOs and a “Bigfoot creature” —
and after they divorced, she became the acclaimed expert, not
Pavel. She began preaching (http://articles.latimes.com/1991-
11-20/news/vw-110_1_soviet-air-force) a UFO glasnost of sorts
under Gorbachev, claiming the Soviet government had pieces of
five spaceships in its possession and reports of 14,000 UFO
sightings, yet for decades researchers were “either fired or put
in psychiatric hospitals.” Her eventual book, simply called UFO
Glasnost, spoke candidly about how Leonardo da Vinci, Jules
Verne, and Ray Bradbury were alien mediums and Gorbachev
had the markings of an extraterrestrial emissary because “he’s
an epoch-making phenomenon.”

—Clint Rainey

9. (And This Genius Thinks He Can Talk to

Them)

In January, Stephen Wolfram

(http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/stephen-wolfram-thinks-
he-can-talk-to-aliens.html) — a computer-scientist philosopher
and the author of a “universal” programming language that
informed the alien communication in the movie Arrival
(http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/movie-review-arrival-is-a-
tantalizing-puzzler.html) — wrote an exceedingly long blog post
(http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-
universe-beacons-for-the-afterlife-of-our-civilization/) about how
best to communicate with aliens.

Tim Urban: You created a language you think we might be able

to use to communicate with aliens. So what exactly is it that we
would want to say to the rest of the universe if we had the
chance?

Stephen Wolfram: I think the main difficulty is the definitional

one. You talk about alien life, you talk about intelligence; what
are those things abstractly?
We know the specific example that we have historically been
exposed to: life on Earth, human intelligence. The question is,
when you generalize away from that, what do you get to? One of
the things that I’m fond of quoting is the statement “The
weather has a mind of its own.” What does this mean? What is
the abstract kind of thing that’s like the mind? It’s the ability to
do sophisticated computation. That’s something that exists in
the weather, just as it exists in our brains, just as it exists in lots
of living systems. And then, what’s different between the
weather and its sort-of-mindlike thing and our human
intelligence? The fundamental answer to that is our human
intelligence has its particular cultural, civilizational history and
the weather doesn’t.

TU: So is it that history that we’d want to communicate?

SW: Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization

have followed a particular path. There are an infinite number of
possible paths that we could’ve followed. To any other
intelligence, our path would be quite mysterious.

TU: Right, so we actually have unique information to

communicate. You could have the most sophisticated species,
and we can still tell them something they don’t know about our
history.

SW: I’m particularly amused by Elon Musk’s car going into space
(http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/02/falcon-heavy-rocket-
launches-elon-musks-tesla-to-jupiter.html). That is so extremely
aligned with the notion of grave goods from ancient Egypt,
where you’re taking things from your everyday life to be buried
with you. It’s charming.

10. There Have Been Enough Well-Known

Encounters to Fill Encyclopedias
Here, just a small sampling of the classics.

Barney and Betty Hill. Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images

Barney and Betty Hill’s Abduction

The Hills (above) claimed that in 1961 a bright light swooped
over their car on a New Hampshire road and that they woke up a
few hours later and the car had been “magnetized.” With
regressive hypnosis, both were able to recall being abducted
and probed by the little gray men, which soon became the de
facto alien description. (The Hills’ captors were, interestingly,
very similar to Selenites — the five-foot moon inhabitants H.G.
Wells invented for The First Men in the Moon.) Betty astonished
authorities when she began drawing a map of the constellation
the creatures claimed to be from. Initially it looked like
nonsense, until a few scientists noticed its resemblance to Zeta
Reticuli, a system inside the constellation Reticulum largely
unknown in that year. Their case generated widespread publicity,
partly because they were a mixed-race couple in the ’60s, and
turned into the flagship example of a “close encounter,” though
not until years after the fact (skeptics argue the delayed report
is a sign it’s a hoax). The hype ultimately culminated in The UFO
Incident, a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring James Earl Jones
and Estelle Parsons.

Antonio Villas-Boas’s Seduction

In 1957, small aliens with huge heads allegedly came for Villas-
Boas, a young Brazilian farmer. Villas-Boas was forced inside
their vessel, where the creatures took blood samples from, of all
places, his chin, and rubbed in some sort of gel. Soon after, a
blonde female with big, almond-shaped eyes joined him. She
began rubbing his body, then initiated sex. After they were done,
she left quickly, which gave Villas-Boas the impression that he
was being used to better the aliens’ “stock.” He didn’t react well,
as he suddenly felt exploited as “a good stallion” by these
foreign chin-fetishists.
Weird as it was, Boas’s encounter, with its probing and forced
sex, became the archetypal alien abduction. Reportedly skittish
at first, he eventually told his story to João Martins, the writer
behind popular magazine O Cruzeiro’s “Flying Saucers’ Terrible
Mission” series. Doctors confirmed Boas had suffered radiation
poisoning, but Martins ultimately soured on Boas’s story, for one
because his spaceship sketch bore remarkable similarities to
the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. He turned out all right, though: He
got a law degree, had four kids, and died believing his children
had a half-sibling living in space.

The “Wow!” Signal

In 1977, Ohio State’s Big Ear radio telescope intercepted a 72-
second burst of sound that bore signs of having come from
interstellar space, which could be a sign of extraterrestrial
communication. The anomaly measured 1,420 megahertz, a
frequency in the “water hole,” the term for a radio-emission
range thought ideal for intergalactic messages because it’s
unusually quiet. Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who spotted it,
was so excited that he scribbled a giant “Wow!” on his printout.
Astronomy’s explanations for the bizarre phenomenon include
secret spy satellites and a passing comet nobody knew about in
1977. But many admit nothing explains it adequately, and even if
the signal doesn’t prove aliens exist, it’s still a “tug on the
cosmic fishing line.” To date, it remains the best evidence of
alien communication ever obtained.

Foo Fighters
In the middle of World War II, things took a mysterious turn for
Air Force pilots flying overnight missions. They reported seeing
lights chasing their aircraft. The number varied (sometimes it
was one; other times ten), and so did the colors (red, orange,
and green). But the unidentified objects shared in common that
they moved very fast, up to 200 miles per hour, yet could dart on
a dime. These pilots — among the world’s best — admitted the
objects generally flew circles around them. Their lore grew
among the squadrons. In 1944, a crew flying along the Rhine in
Germany described seeing “eight to ten bright orange lights”
whiz by “at high speed.” Neither ground control nor their own
planes caught anything on radar, and when one pilot turned
toward the lights, they reportedly “disappeared.”

They called their mystery air companions “foo fighters,” an

inside joke based on a phrase the comic-book character Smokey
Stover used to declare (“Where there’s foo, there’s fire”). The
term flying saucer hadn’t caught on yet, or else it would’ve
sufficed. Some witnesses assumed they were tracer fire,
reflections from ice crystals, or high-tech weaponry developed
by the Nazis, while the government had a boring explanation
(https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-
archive/2016-featured-story-archive/how-to-investigate-a-flying-
saucer.html) as always: They were “electrostatic (similar to St.
Elmo’s fire) or electromagnetic phenomena,” though which one
and wherefrom were “never defined.”

Kecksburg UFO Crash

In 1965, an intense fireball streaked over southern Canada and
Detroit and dropped debris over Ohio, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania. Officially, it was declared a midsize meteor, but
eyewitnesses in the small Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg
claimed they’d found an acorn-shaped object about the size of a
VW Beetle in the woods that was festooned with hieroglyphics.
Newspaper reporters on the ground said the military conducted
a “close inspection” of the crash site, and despite the official
line being that the search yielded “absolutely nothing,”
conspiracists maintain the object was packed onto an Army
flatbed truck and that the whole thing was a Roswell-level cover-
up. Leslie Kean’s Coalition for the Freedom of Information
managed to secure some of the government’s files but
reportedly not anything enlightening.
However, a second explanation surfaced in the early aughts: It
was Die Glocke, purportedly a top-secret weapon Nazis
developed that let them time-travel. By dumb Back to the
Future–esque luck, it had come to rural Pennsylvania in the year
1965. These proponents argue Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler
was navigating the device when it crash-landed in Kecksburg,
allowing him to escape Allied troops in the days before VE Day
and successfully integrate into postwar U.S. society.

Kenneth Arnold’s “Flying Saucer”

Kenneth Arnold, a respected pilot, claimed in 1947 he’d seen
nine mostly flat objects whip past Mount Rainier at speeds he
timed at 1,760 miles per hour. “They were shaped like saucers,”
he reportedly explained, “and were so thin I could barely see
them.” A neologism was born.

Arnold he demanded military personnel explain what the

contraptions were, if they knew, since he’d dismissed any
possibility of them being guided missiles or new types of jets.
His best guess? “From another planet.” Dozens of others came
forward with similar sightings, from as far away as Oklahoma
and Arizona. But Arnold didn’t enjoy his newfound celebrity. He
said people had started shrieking in cafés when they saw him
and fleeing. He described the situation to reporters as “out of
hand” and regretted having people “look at me as a combination
of Einstein, Flash Gordon, and screwball.”

Phoenix Lights
On March 13, 1997, thousands of people in southern Arizona
say they saw weird lights move across the night sky in a flying
V. Most of their reports came in between 7 and 10:30 p.m. along
a 300-mile stretch from Phoenix, through Tucson, and to the
Mexico border. A majority of people spied the pattern passing
overhead (it was supposedly several football fields long), but
the Air Force also sent a team of A-10 Warthogs from nearby
Barry Goldwater Range on a training exercise that same night,
and, as luck would have it, those planes dropped some
stationary flares just outside Phoenix, considerably
complicating any UFO conspiracies with a second set of strange
bright lights.

Witnesses claim to have watched the first set of lights — the

low-altitude wedge formation — coast by with their binoculars;
they say the lights were red, had a singular white one at the V’s
tip, seemed engineless, and even banked southeast at one
point. Actor Kurt Russell now claims
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR_dxZJGWfU) he saw
them while up in a private plane near the Phoenix airport, but air-
traffic control told him the radar was clear. Governor Fife
Symington reportedly witnessed the V-shaped as well. At the
time he felt sure it wasn’t aliens, but his mind changed in 2007,
after retiring from politics: He told media
(http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17761943/#.Woz-HBPwZ3k) that
as a pilot, he knows “just about every machine that flies,” and
these lights definitely weren’t terrestrial.

The “Warminster Thing”

Warminster’s long, controversial association with UFOs began in
the English town on Christmas Day in 1964, when a local woman
heard a “crackling sound” rip over her head. Other so-called
sonic attacks plagued scores of others in town around the same
time. Townspeople had no clue what was behind them, so they
began blaming the “Thing.” Additional reports of inexplicable
lights in the sky made it clear the “Thing” might have hailed from
outer space.

Travis Walton’s Abduction

In 1975, a team of loggers claimed their 22-year-old co-worker
Travis Walton disappeared for five days after a glowing disc in
the Arizona woods zapped him with a “bluish ray
(https://debunker.com/texts/walton.html).” Intrigued, he’d
reportedly wandered underneath the hovering object, and it
abducted him. He claims he awoke on a table in a sterile-looking
room surrounded by three “well-developed fetuses” wearing tan
robes. He tried to flee (http://www.travis-
walton.com/ordinary.html), passed out, then regained
consciousness only once the aliens had ditched him on the
Arizona roadside.

The story received loads of publicity — authorities thought

Walton had been murdered, and seven eyewitnesses
corroborating a single close encounter was unheard of.
The National Enquirer ultimately paid
(https://debunker.com/texts/walton.html) the group $5,000 for
the story, after they passed polygraphs and Walton agreed to be
interviewed by the tabloid’s “prestigious” hypnotist. In 1993,
Paramount released Fire in the Sky, a movie it said
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106912/) was based on “the
most famous case of UFO abduction ever recorded.” Skeptics
have shot holes in what they assume was a hoax and note that
James Earl Jones’s NBC movie The UFO Incident had aired two
weeks before Walton’s own UFO incident. The encounter has a
cult following to this day, though, enough that a first edition of
Walton’s 1978 memoir The Walton Experience now
fetches hundreds (https://www.biblio.com/book/walton-
experience-walton-travis/d/654009655?
aid=frg&utm_source=google&utm_medium=product&utm_camp
aign=feed-
details&gclid=Cj0KCQiAq6_UBRCEARIsAHyrgUwLtPVk8loRlhm
mh1HJA0FGOQMW_siV0PKsEIc31sXDKDDOAk5qZQIaAnUVEAL
w_wcB) of dollars online.

The Battle of Los Angeles

On February 25, 1942, reports filtered in of a glowing object
floating over Culver City. Air-raid sirens sounded; the Army
proceeded to pepper it with 1,400 anti-aircraft shells. Eventually
it disappeared from view, but not before a citywide blackout was
ordered, shell fragments got lodged in surrounding buildings,
and five civilians died. The Navy later explained it had been a
weather balloon. But ufologists suspected an alien spacecraft,
which would explain why an hour’s worth of heavy artillery had
failed to eliminate a single weather balloon.

Steven Spielberg would mercilessly satirize the incident in 1941,

a “comedy spectacular.” But ufologists immediately suspected
an alien spacecraft, which would explain why an hours’ worth of
heavy artillery had failed to eliminate a single weather balloon.
Conspiracists site a famous L.A. Times photo as extra proof; it
seemingly caught searchlights trained on a very un-balloon-like
object getting barraged with shells. The next day’s Times ran an
editorial on page A1 (“Information, Please
(http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-fake-news-20180117-
story.html)”) demanding the Army and Navy release more info,
“if only to clarify their own conflicting statements about it.”

—C.R.

11. And Continuing Right Up to the Present

Day

New encounters happen all the time — even to famous people.

When Guillermo del Toro spotted one in Guadalajara, he says, “It
was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights.”
Above, a sampling from ufosightingsdaily.com
(http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/) over recent months.

January 18, Japan. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

February 4, Popocatépetl, Mexico. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

February 28, Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

March 7, Bangs, Texas. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

12. We Even Have Some Pretty Developed
Theories About Why We Haven’t Heard From
ET Yet

Maybe we’re the pond scum.

The Aliens Are All Dead

Let’s start with the most depressing theory: Maybe we haven’t
found extraterrestrials because they’re all dead — at least now.
The universe is 13.78 billion years old, and in that amount of
time, there might have been plenty of civilizations that evolved
and went extinct.

The Aliens Are All Sleeping

But maybe they’re not dead — just hibernating. Another theory
suggests that perhaps there’s an extraterrestrial species out
there that’s so advanced it cannot efficiently make use of its
technology right now, because the universe’s temperature is
currently too high. Good news, though: The universe’s
temperature is cooling down (even as Earth’s is heating up). So
aliens may have decided to take a snooze for a few trillion years
while they wait for colder weather that’s more suited.

The Aliens Are Hiding

If even a genius like Stephen Hawking thought that aliens might
destroy us
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2010/04/stephen_hawkin
g_when_aliens_vi.html) if they ever were to find us, then maybe
we should be a little afraid. Perhaps the aliens think the same
thing, so they’ve gone into hiding — from us. If another
civilization were technologically savvy enough and had enough
resources, it could build a massive orbital structure like a Dyson
sphere to keep it cloaked from detection. Or it might use high-
powered lasers to provide an optical façade that keeps its
planet from being detected by telescopic instruments.
The Aliens Are Still Evolving
Maybe alien life is actually everywhere — it’s just not intelligent
enough to speak with us. It took about 3.5 billion years of
evolution to turn single-celled microbes into humans. Maybe we
just happened to evolve faster and earlier than everyone else.

Humans Haven’t Spent Enough Time Looking

Realistically speaking, we’ve only had the proper equipment to
search for aliens for a little over half a century. On the scale of
the cosmos, that time frame is less than a fraction of the blink
of an eye. The process could take centuries or even millennia —
optimistically speaking.

The Aliens Are Already Here

This is where the conspiracy theorists get to go nuts. Yes,
maybe the aliens are already here and we just haven’t figured it
out yet. They might be taking some time to study us before
unveiling themselves, or maybe they have already let
themselves be known to certain groups. The truth isn’t out there
— it’s here.

—N.P.

13. And in the Meantime, Aliens Can Be

Whatever We Want Them to Be

Joseph O. Baker
(http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/sociologist-joseph-o-
baker-on-americas-alien-fixation.html) is a sociologist and the
co-author of the 2010 book Paranormal America
(https://www.amazon.com/Paranormal-America-Encounters-
Sightings-Curiosities/dp/0814791352?ascsubtag=
[]in[p]cjeyj063k00zsn5y6go8uknx8[i]avKz90[t]w).
Katie Heaney: Why, when we think of aliens, do they all look the
same — three feet tall, gray or green, big black eyes?

Joseph O. Baker: It didn’t used to be that way. UFO narratives

became much more popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and during
that era, the descriptions of the aliens would be almost
humanlike in form. If you see drawings that some of the so-
called contactees made, the aliens almost look like Swedish
people — very attractive blond types with shining eyes. The
abductee narrative really took over pop culture in the 1970s and
’80s, and after that, there’s this homogenization of the public
perception because of all the stories and TV and movies about
abductions.

KH: Even those guys look pretty human — why do we have such
a hard time imagining radically different forms of life?

JB: We’re the people doing the projecting here. Much the same
way people do with God — really, what sense does it make for a
supernatural entity to have a gender or be humanoid
Anthropomorphized supernatural entities tend to be more
compelling.

KH: Is there a reason why so many of the abduction stories

feature “probing”?

JB: The probe part of the abduction narrative took over in some
sense because it tends to be the most salacious aspect of these
stories. It’s almost become shorthand for alien abduction. But
the stories of abduction among believers are really diverse, and
usually probing is only one small part of it. Men will report
having sperm extraction, and women will report having eggs
extracted. Positive encounters tend to be akin to religion in
some ways, in which beings of higher enlightenment show
people the errors of humanity, or help them reach a higher plane
of consciousness.

KH: Who is likely to believe?

JB: Men, and people with lower levels of income, are more likely
to believe. We don’t really find strong patterns by education, and
if we do, there’s usually a slight positive effect. But one of the
strongest predictors you can find for believers is their extreme
distrust of the government. That’s part of the reason it got so
big in the ’70s, when trust in institutions was low. Trump might
actually increase belief in UFOs.
(https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/sarah-huckabee-sanders-is-
checking-if-trump-believes-in-ufos.html)

Another one of the strongest predictors is not participating as

strongly in forms of organized religion. In some sense, there’s a
bit of a clue there about what’s going on with belief — it’s
providing an alternative belief system.

KH: Most alien-encounter stories give aliens one of two motives:

Either they want something from us or they want to kill us. What
does that say about us?

JB: It shows that we have a high level of perceived self-

importance. The idea that, in this vast universe, these beings
sought us out in this tiny corner of the spiral arm of the Milky
Way to come learn omething
from us, or eliminate us, is a bit flattering.

KH: I’ve heard that sightings are way down in the smartphone
era, when people presumably don’t take a story as proof enough.
JB: Well, it’s easier to hoax things now than it used to be. I
would think that with an increased availability of videos, if it was
going to do anything, it might lead to more belief, but from most
of what I’ve seen, it looks more like stasis. Rates of reported
sightings and rate of belief have been pretty stable. The 2005
Baylor Religion Survey found that 25 percent of respondents
agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Some UFOs are
probably spaceships from other worlds.”

A Brief History of ‘Alien Dreams’

1899: Nikola Tesla notices rhythmic sounds on a radio receiver

and is convinced they’re communications from Martians.

1924: At the request of David Todd, former head of the

astronomy department at Amherst College, the Navy agrees to
limit unnecessary radio communications from its largest bases
for one day so that he can listen for alien signals as Mars
passes closer to Earth than it’s been in over a century.

1960: The modern search for ETs begins when Frank Drake uses
an 85-foot radio telescope in the hills of West Virginia to scan
stars for signs of intelligent life; he later develops an equation to
estimate the number of advanced civilizations.

1969: Jimmy Carter, candidate for Georgia governor at the time,

sees a strange light.

1992: NASA formally begins its own SETI program.

1993: Congress eliminates funding for NASA’s SETI program.

1999: UC Berkeley launches SETI@home, a screen saver

available to the public that enables anyone’s idle computer to
analyze data collected by radio telescopes.
2016: Breakthrough Listen
(https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/1) launches; it will
collect as much data in a day as past SETI projects collected in
a year.

*A version of this article appears in the March 19, 2018, issue

of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
(https://subs.nymag.com/magazine/subscribe/nym-article-
aa.html)