You may have noticed that among the reporting of major news outlets on Covid-19, the US election, Donald Trump, the storming of the Capitol and mad conspiracy theories such as QAnon over the past year, there have been a suspicious number of articles in reputable newspapers about unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
That’s because the Pentagon released a long-awaited report that for many seemed to indicate that the US government had — as agent Mulder in the X-Files had been warning all along — always taken the phenomenon of UFOs very seriously. It would finally prove what those written off as mad people over the decades had been trying to tell us. More things are flying around in the sky, Agent Scully, than are dreamt of in most of our philosophies, and the US government has indeed been trying to hide them from us because they prove the existence of aliens.
The report, released last Friday, was the culmination of a process that began in 2020 when a group of Republican officials managed to attach to Trump’s $2.3-trillion Covid-19 Relief Bill an act ordering government agencies to provide “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) data and intelligence” and “a detailed description of an inter-agency process for reporting UAP”. The Pentagon scrambled to fulfil the demands of the act, and some of the pictures and videos used in its evidence were leaked online.
These caused a flurry of speculation and expectation that the agency would have no choice but to finally admit that these inexplicable objects must be the result of alien expeditions sent to the blue planet to begin their invasion plans. However, the final report found that, though US intelligence and military agencies have to admit that several instances of UAP cannot be explained satisfactorily, they do not believe them to be the work of aliens.
Many people are afraid to admit they believe for the real fear of being laughed at.
— X-Files creator Chris Carter
One of the most publicly disappointed close observers of the report and its findings was The X-Files creator Chris Carter, who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times this week in which he said the release of the report has only made him “as sceptical now as I’ve ever been”.
He wrote, “‘The Truth Is Out There,’ ‘Trust No One’, ‘Deny Everything’ went the provocative catchphrases on The X-Files, but that was in the ’90s, when we had a relatively shared reality. The slogans are now a fact of life.”
Carter believes that radical nutters within the UFO movement have “bedevilled high-minded ‘ufologists’ for decades and coloured the public’s perceptions of the phenomena. Many people are afraid to admit they believe for fear of being laughed at. (Fear itself may be the reason some of us refuse to believe that aliens exist at all.)”
For decades, creators of popular culture such as Carter have been the biggest source for our fascination with UFOs, extraterrestrials and the idea of life elsewhere in the universe. Long before the US government deigned to take the idea seriously, Hollywood had, as a recent article in the Guardian observed, shaped “our collective shorthand for aliens: flying saucers, little green men, hyperpowerful beings”.
This shorthand has also been used as a metaphor on screen to reflect larger anxieties plaguing us on earth — from the existential dread of life in the nuclear age in the Cold War era to fears of foreign powers and the terrors of artificial intelligence as a means of taking away our personal agency.
Carter’s series, which ran from 1993 to 2002 and centred on a plot involving the long-running attempt by shadowy forces within the US government to cover up evidence acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrials, was a direct response, by its creator’s own admission, to the deep mistrust in government after the Nixon era and the Watergate revelations. As Carter wrote in his op-ed, “Do I believe the government lies to us? Absolutely. I’m a child of Watergate. Do I believe in conspiracies? Certainly.”
Now, with the damp squib that is the release of the Pentagon’s report, perhaps UFO chatter will no longer be the subject of reporting in mainstream news publications and op-ed pages but you can be sure that won’t stop it being the subject of many more films, TV series and pop culture products in the decades to come. For diehard believers such as Carter, more than enough reason remains to “want to believe” that something or someone is still out there that even the Pentagon, with all its scientific and technological resources, just can’t satisfactorily explain.
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