This article was originally published on conversation. This publication is a feature of Space.com Expert Voices: Commentary and Insights.
Tony Milligan Research Fellow in Ethics and Philosophy at King’s College London.
The idea that aliens may have visited Earth is becoming increasingly widespread: around a fifth of Britons believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and an estimated 7% think they have seen a UFO.
of The numbers are even higher A growing number of Americans believe that UFO sightings are evidence of extraterrestrial life. From 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022About 24% of Americans say they have seen a UFO.
This belief is a bit contradictory, as there is absolutely no evidence that aliens exist. Furthermore, given the vast distances between star systems, it seems odd that we would only find out about their existence by actually visiting them. Evidence of alien existence would more likely come from signals from distant planets.
In the paper The paper has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union.I would argue that belief in alien visitors is no longer an oddity but a widespread social problem.
This belief has now grown to the point that politicians, at least in the United States, feel they must respond. The Department of Defense’s release of information about alleged unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, not UFOs) has attracted bipartisan attention in the country.
Many of them Common anti-elitist tropes Such as the idea that a secret cabal of military and private commercial interests is hiding, for both sides to exploit, the deeper truth about alien visitations that is believed to involve sightings, abductions and the reverse engineering of alien technology.
There are even more people who believe in a cover-up than there are people who believe in alien visitations. Gallup Poll A staggering 68% of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it is releasing.
This political trend has been shaping for decades. Jimmy Carter Document disclosure promise A few years after his own reported UFO sighting during the 1976 presidential campaign, as with many other sightings, the simplest explanation is that he saw Venus (which is common).
Hillary Clinton She also said, [Pentagon] As many files as possible” he said during his presidential campaign against Donald Trump. As you can see in the video below, Trump suggested he needed to “think” about whether so-called “declassification” was possible. Roswell Documents (In reference to the infamous claims of a UFO crash and the recovery of alien remains).
Former President Bill Clinton Sent He dispatched his Chief of Staff, John Podesta, to Area 51, a top-secret US Air Force facility, just in case the rumors about alien technology there were true. Podesta has, needless to say, had a long-standing interest in all things UFO-related.
Currently, the most prominent advocate of disclosing the documents is the Democratic Senate Majority Leader. Chuck SchumerHis Simplifying the UAP Disclosure Bill of 2023 Three Republican senators co-sponsored the bill in response to revelations about some of the UAP records.
Department of Defense Disclosure It’s finally started There have been talks of this early in Joe Biden’s term, but so far there have been no notable events. No signs of an encounter. No signs of anything approaching.
However, the background noise persists.
Social issues
All of this could ultimately fuel conspiracy theories and undermine trust in democratic institutions. There have even been humorous calls to storm Area 51. And after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, this seems an increasingly dangerous possibility.
Too much noise about UFOs and UAPs can also get in the way of legitimate scientific communication about the possible discovery of extraterrestrial microbes, and astrobiology, the science that deals with such issues, has received much less publicity than ufology.
historyThe YouTube channel “Alien Mysteries,” partly owned by Disney, regularly features a show about “ancient aliens.” The show is now in its 20th season and the channel has 13.8 million subscribers. NASA’s Astrobiology channel has a hard-earned 20,000 subscribers. Actual science is being heavily overwhelmed by entertainment repackaged as fact.
Stories about alien visitations have repeatedly attempted to hijack and overwrite indigenous histories and myths.
The first steps in this direction date back to the science fiction novels of Alexander Kazantsev. Explosion: A hypothetical story (1946), which portrays the 1908 Tunguska meteorite impact as a Nagasaki-like explosion of an alien spaceship engine. In Kazantsev’s story, one survivor is left behind, a gigantic black woman with special healing powers. Her Adoption As a Shaman By the indigenous Evenki people people.
NASA and the space science community are supporting these efforts: Native Skywatchers Initiative Founded by Indigenous Ojibway and Lakota communities to ensure the survival of stories about the stars, there is a real and extensive network of Indigenous scholarship on these issues.
But UFO researchers promise that, instead of mixing authentic Indigenous stories of life coming from the sky with fictional tales about UFOs and repackaging them as suppressed history, Indigenous history will get much more attention.
After all, modern alien visitation stories didn’t emerge from indigenous communities; quite the opposite: they arose from conspiracy theorists in a Europe riven by racism as a way to “explain” the existence of complex urban civilizations in places like South America before European settlement.
Pushed through New Age Filters In the 1960s counterculture, the narrative was flipped to emphasize Indigenous peoples. Once upon a time, they had advanced technologyAccording to this view, all indigenous civilizations were once Wakanda, a fictional nation featured in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
If all of this had remained within the framework of entertainment novels, there would have been no problem. But that is not the case. Tends to overwrite Indigenous stories about the sky and the earth.
This is a problem for everyone, not just indigenous peoples struggling to preserve authentic traditions. It threatens our understanding of the past. Remnants of prehistoric stories, like indigenous stories about the stars, are few and far between when it comes to insights into our distant ancestors.
take The Story of the PleiadesIn its standard form, At least 50,000 years ago.
This may be why these stories are especially popular with alien visitation enthusiasts, some of whom claim to be “Pleiadians.” Not surprisingly, the Pleiadians bear no resemblance to the Lakota or Ojibwe, but are strikingly blond, blue-eyed, Nordic.
It is becoming increasingly clear that belief in alien visitations is no longer just fun speculation but has real and harmful consequences.
This article is reprinted from conversation Published under a Creative Commons license. Original article.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
