UFO Lore Reveals America’s Darkest Fears

The UFO phenomena suggests Americans are secretly terrified of their own government.

From Area 51 to the Phoenix Lights, the very glue of ufology is undying suspicion. Yet while UFO enthusiasts are willing to believe alien visitations are an almost everyday occurrence, they are entirely dismissive of official pronouncements on the matter.  Indeed, primal mistrust of the American government is central to perpetuating the entire subculture. It is a paradox that a country that prides itself on its democratic transparency has proved to be such fertile ground for the suspicion-washed corpus of UFO legend.

Cultural historians have often pointed to post-war geopolitical tensions as an explanation for the rise of the UFO myth: for the first time in history continental North America was directly threatened from afar.

1947 saw not only the coining of the term ‘flying saucer’ with the sighting of nine unusual objects traveling at speed near Mount Rainier but, just weeks later, the alleged retrieval of a crashed alien spacecraft outside Roswell, New Mexico.

With anti-Soviet paranoia in the ascendant, right from the start, UFO folklore merged the power of the American military with its propensity for utmost secrecy when the spokesman for the Eighth Airforce backtracked on an earlier statement from the 509th Bomb Group that a ‘flying disc’ had been recovered on a nearby windswept ranch.

It didn’t help that the USAF were testing disc-shaped hovercraft modeled on Nazi designs, dropping dummy figures from high altitude, and launching silvery balloons with weird Christmas wrapping symbols on their frames in an effort to monitor Soviet atomic detonations under Project Moghul.

The truth is that global tensions, which animated sci-fi B-movies galore from the early 50s, do little to explain the paranoia that has proved to be such fertile pasture for the central canon of UFO scripture. And yet, ufology didn’t emerge in the Soviet Union, were conventional western wisdom routinely portrayed a silently skeptical citizenry versus a monolithic state- but, ironically, in the land of the free.

MUFON: The Mutual UFO network is a grassroots effort to investigate alien encounters. With thousands of members and 75 field investigators, MUFON has examined countless cases of UFO sightings and abductions since 1969. Unlike the USAF’s Project Blue Book, MUFON offers no presumptions either way on the existence of UFOs.

The Men in Black bear an uncanny resemblance to US government operatives- which they are often assumed to be. Like the gun-toting private contractors guarding Area-51, they symbolize not just the deep state-but the threat of unchecked power. The Men in Black are the personification of state sponsored evil- as is their South American junta modus operandi which comes with the signature threat of ‘taking people out into the desert.’  Whatever is going on in the American psyche, it is safe to say that it is indicative of a troubled relationship between the rulers and the ruled and that the UFO narrative exemplifies, above all, congenital fear of the state.

US government attempts to come clean on UFOs from Project Blue Book to Bill Clinton’s much vaunted search for the truth have been largely met with derision suggesting that public suspicion of the government is so deep rooted- no amount of disclosure can bridge the gap.

As the UFO legend has evolved over time, fear of the outsider, nominally the Soviet Union, seems to have worked in tandem with Vietnam and the counter culture revolution of the 60s to become instead- fear of Uncle Sam. After all, your enemies might be far closer to home than Moscow given the waste of life Vietnam represented.

Not only is the American government ruthless, manipulative and thoroughly untrustworthy when it comes to aliens — it is entirely powerless to stop them sneaking into bedrooms at night, abducting whomever they wish for Nazi type experiments, all done as UFOs take on the heartland with everything from cattle mutilations to mass abductions.

But UFO believers go several steps further into not just breaking from their own government- but breaking off their government from the rest of humanity: In what is surely a metaphor for the rise of globalism, some UFO researchers even claim that elements within the US deep state have struck a deal with aliens to rule in their name. It is something that takes the idea of a selfish global elite to a whole new level.

Globalism Saves Humanity-Again: Independence Day 2 harnesses UFOs to produce a globalist parable that provides a rationale for a one world government. If fighting world poverty and racism won’t ever justify a new world order- then fighting aliens most surely will.

Who believes in UFOs? Is there a correlation between angry right wing middle America, the kind of people who dislike paying taxes that are then blown on NATO, with the UFO faithful? There does seem to be a correlation between a pushback against big government, state secrecy, and a sense of powerlessness before perceived omnipresent domestic tyranny.

One statistic that might bear thinking about is that according to the Huffington Post, 48% of Americans believe in UFOs. It would be an interesting exercise to determine how many of those who voted for Trump are diehard UFO believers.  Bearing that in mind — if there is any truth behind the UFO craze-perhaps President Trump will be the man to finally reveal what America’s elite have supposedly known all along: Only if he did, would his own supporters ever believe him?

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.