In the wake of the news that
Tom DeLonge will at last reveal his Big UFO News on October 11 (a.k.a. tomorrow), I find myself reflecting
on why stories like this always grab headlines and stir our deepest yearnings to
learn who or what is behind the UFO phenomenon.
To
most people who were alive in the 1960s, the most significant NASA space
mission of that decade would likely be the Apollo 11 moon landing. Neil
Armstrong’s “small step” onto the surface of the moon, which took place July
16, 1969, marked the first time that human beings had ventured beyond Earth
orbit and landed safely on another celestial body, and it forever altered our
perception of our place on the cosmos.
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| The most important NASA mission of the '60s? Not this one. |
It
is startling to be reminded that just over 50 years ago, well within my lifetime, it was a commonly-held belief among sane, educated humans
that intelligent life existed on Mars. This was not a crackpot idea; it had
been promulgated, promoted and reinforced for decades by sober scientists and
journalists (and, admittedly, the occasional science fiction writer). Ever
since Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had first described the “canali,” or channels, he saw on the
Martian surface in 1877 and American astronomer Percival Lowell then deduced in
1894 that Schiaparelli’s canali could
only be irrigation canals constructed by intelligent Martians, we Earthlings
have been intoxicated—indeed, madly in love—with the notion that life exists on
other worlds, that we are not, in
fact, the one and only, nature’s supreme accomplishment.
Yet
Mariner 4 dashed our hopes, permanently (or so we thought at the time). Mariner
4, an unmanned probe resembling nothing more than an oversized ceiling fan,
passed within 6,000 miles of our nearest planetary neighbor on July 14 and 15,
1965, and transmitted to Earth 21 “close-up” photographs (and a partial 22nd
photo) of the Martian surface. It was at that moment that the human race
learned, absolutely and definitively, that there were no Martians on Mars. For
generations who had grown up wondering about the canals on Mars and reading the
speculative fiction of Ray Bradbury and H. G. Wells, it came as a lonely shock
to discover that the bleak, dry Martian landscape was incapable of supporting
life, and that we had the solar system to ourselves. “There was disappointment
among some scientists, and the public alike,” reported space.com with some
understatement.
On
the surface, this disappointment makes little rational sense, as the prospect
of encountering alien life in any form tends to bring the worst, most primal
type of human fear and loathing to the surface. Ever since the H. G. Wells’
1897 novel The War of the Worlds
introduced the concept of the alien invasion narrative to the human psyche, and
the 1951 science-fiction film The Thing
from Another World brought that horror to life on the big screen, humans have
harbored a deep and abiding fear of alien life. And it isn’t just pop-culture
narratives stoking the fire, either: for every space scientist today searching
the skies for incoming messages from the stars or transmitting friendly radio greetings
beyond our solar system, there is another warning us that attracting the
attention of an alien race on some distant planet may not be our wisest move. “If
aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America,
which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,” physicist and cosmologist
Stephen Hawking famously warned in his 2010 Discovery Channel TV series, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.
“Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and
colonize whatever planets they can reach.”
And
yet we humans keep longing for that contact.
How
do we recognize this ever-present yearning? Consider the fact that today
UFO-
themed reality television shows crowd the cable TV listings, and amateur
UFO investigation
groups receive hundreds, if not thousands, of UFO reports
every week. Consider the fact
that when science fiction films came to the fore
in the 1950s and 1960s, they became so
immensely popular that film historian Patrick Lucanio wrote, “One might argue convincingly
that never in the history
of motion pictures has any other genre developed and multiplied so
rapidly in
so brief a period.” Consider that the return of FBI special agents Fox Mulder
and
Dana Scully in a recent six-episode X-Files
“reunion” was one of the top ten rated TV
shows of 2016, and the series is
coming back by popular demand in 2018. None of these
cultural barometers
operate in a vacuum; aliens repel us, yes, but they also
attract us with a
power that is a wonder to behold.
I
was first alerted to this strange attraction when researching the life and work
of Dr. Hynek (1910-1986). Hynek's call for rigorous scientific study of the UFO phenomenon—a study
that called for categorizing UFO events and identifying potential patterns in
the most phenomenal cases—put him in an awkward position as a scientist, but he
never allowed fear of ridicule to divert him from his mission.
When
in the 1970s Hynek developed his iconic “Close Encounters” categorization
system for classifying UFO reports, he identified Close Encounters of the Third
Kind as those involving the presence of a being or “occupant” in association
with the appearance of an unidentified flying object. In the nearly four
decades Hynek studied UFOs, he came across thousands of Close Encounter of the
Third Kind cases, and the sheer number of these reports was deeply troubling to
him, as he simply did not want to make room in his rational brain for the
bizarre concept of UFO occupants.
“I don’t know
what makes me want to automatically look down upon these creature
cases,” Hynek
said in a 1978 interview in UFO Report
magazine. “Maybe this involves an
atavistic fear of the unknown, or of rivalry
with another species. There is, upon closer
scrutiny, another factor which I find difficult to sort out. It is odd that the creatures seen
coming from these
craft should resemble our own homo sapien race so
closely.”
And yet “creature”
cases continued to abound, and Hynek was called in to investigate a
great many
of them. And the more time he spent with the witnesses in these CE3K cases—
many
of whom claimed to have been abducted by these entities, brought onto their
crafts,
even flown off into space—the more he was forced to accept that the
presence of
unexplained, often humanoid beings in association with UFOs were a
significant factor in
the phenomenon.
And those
beings were not altogether unpleasant. In one 1959 case that fascinated
Hynek
for years, an Anglican priest named William Gill who ran a mission in Boianai,
Papua
New Guinea, witnessed, with some two dozen others, the appearance of a
flying disc with
glowing, oversized humanoid occupants visible on a top “deck”
on the craft. On the second
night the disc appeared, Father Gill and another
witness waved to the strange occupants,
and they waved back. For a few exciting
moments, the disc approached the witnesses
below, and Father Gill expected the
figures to land their craft and say hello. But the disc
reversed course and
moved away, leaving Gill and the other witnesses feeling oddly
frustrated and
disappointed.
Similarly, in
the Hudson Valley UFO sightings of the mid-1980s, in which thousands of
people reported nighttime encounters with V-shaped light formations traversing the
Hudson
Valley north of New York City, the desire to get close to an apparently
alien presence
overrode the witnesses’ common sense. In several instances,
witnesses claimed to have
wished secretly that the object would come closer to
them, only to flee in terror when the
object seemed to respond to the wish and approach the witness.
Had a meeting
between humans and aliens transpired one of those nights in 1959 or in
the mid-1980s, what might it have meant for mankind? All we know for certain is that
in
more than one occurrence, numerous earth humans reported being at least
momentarily
giddy with excitement at the thought that they were communicating
with beings that were
quite possibly not from this earth, and that those beings
might land and say Hi.
I would argue
that a great many of us—perhaps most of us—would feel that same thrill
of anticipation at the thought of making contact with an alien life form, Stephen
Hawking
notwithstanding.
But, why? Why
was a great swath of the population of earth so at ease for so many
years with
the idea that Mars was populated with intelligent—and, let’s be honest here:
possibly malevolent—beings? Why were we so disappointed when Mariner 4
transmitted its
devastating photographs of Mars’ destitute landscape?
Why do we fear
being alone in the universe?
My theory—and
it’s a very simple one—is that if we are the only intelligent life forms in
the universe, that makes us seem accidental. Believing that intelligent life has
evolved
elsewhere makes our existence—and theirs—seem intentional.
So,
yes, on a very basic level, we need aliens. We need them everywhere, and so we
have them everywhere. I have an alien emoticon on my phone, for God’s sake, and
I bet you do, too.
This
much was obvious to Dr. Hynek as far back as the early 1980s: “UFOs are a
subliminal theme in society,” appearing in “many of today’s video games, movies
and in rock music,” he said in an interview. “It’s a new form of religion with
some people—a dissatisfaction with the old-time religions in which people are
looking for a scientific twist.” Of course, Hynek himself was a factor in these
developments—he even appeared in a six-second cameo appearance at the climax of
CE3K, cementing his role as a popularizer
of UFO culture.
While
I am not suggesting that belief in the reality of UFOs and their possible
occupants constitutes a religious movement, I do agree with Hynek that there is
a profound allure in finding a “scientific twist” to traditional religious
beliefs. Many of us humans place as much or more faith in science as we do in
our Gods, in part because for many of us science justifies our faith more often
and more reliably than does religion.
And
yet, science is not without its failings. When Charles Darwin placed us at the
top of the evolutionary ladder, he neglected to consider that we humans have an
innate drive to keep climbing. If there’s a top rung to the ladder, where do we
go next? The aliens seem to know.
Maybe,
then, our need for aliens is one part a need for comfort and reassurance and
one part aspiration. We want company in the universe, and we want a procession
of new goals, new hopes, new reasons for our existence. And the aliens just
might be willing to help. Now, if only they could make their message a little
more clear to all of us...
Understanding
may not come quickly or easily. Dr. Hynek knew that the universe demands that
we play the long game, but he also believed that our patience would be rewarded.
“I would not be prepared to defend the thesis that UFOs represent visitors from
outer space,” Dr. Hynek once mused. “Indeed, I think the answer may be even
more interesting than that. I think the answer will be very exotic and beyond
our imagination.”
