The Great UFO Panic of ’23

C'mon Now, Folks

A Very Specific Meme

I’ve been online through several different apocalyptic scares at this point. The first one in 2018 was truly terrifying: an emergency push notification sent to residents of Hawaii that read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Within seconds of this being sent out, I saw screen grabs of it on Twitter. This was it: The end of the world, the nuclear holocaust. It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was unlikely that Hawaii would be the first or only target of a nuclear attack, unless for some reason North Korea just decided to suicidally lash out at whatever they could. In that terrible moment, I didn’t even want to text my love ones in case it was a mistake, but also, why bother them? There was nothing we could do. A few minutes later it was clear it was some kind of error. There were two other times. Once, fairly recently there was a North Korean ballistic missile that appeared to be heading for Japan, triggering a “take shelter” alert in that country. Then, parts of a Ukrainian surface to air missile landed accidentally in Poland, but it seemed for a moment like it could be a deliberate Russian strike on a NATO country, sparking fevered online talk of “triggering Article 5” and World War II. By this time, I had sort of learned to learn to be wary of these episodes, forswear hysteria, and wait for more information, but still, you get that little electrical shock of terror through your body, which can’t be good for you to keep having.

Just this past weekend, there was the strange UFO episode. You might have read about it in the paper: three “unidentified flying objects” were shot down by U.S. jet fighters over Canada and the Northern United States. Or you could have gotten the news the way I did: live and unfiltered, getting NORAD alerts that National Defense Airspace had been declared over part of Montana or Michigan, that F-15s were being “scrambled,” and refueling tankers were in the air as well as electronic surveillance aircraft. Turns out now that these UFOs were likely just detritus. President Biden addressing the “crisis” last night, said, “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.” Wait, recreation? So, you’re saying we used a $100 million dollar jet to shoot down a kite? The Pentagon must be a little on edge since the Chinese spy-balloon debacle. So much so, we apparently recalibrated their radars, which then started to pick up these formerly insignificant objects. Biden again: “We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky. We’re now just seeing more of them, partially because [of] the steps we’ve taken to increase our radars.”

An internet conspiracy quickly spread was that the UFOs were an intentional distraction from the horrible East Palestine, Ohio train derailment and chemical spill. The truth is probably far stupider: because of the political fall-out of the balloon fiasco, probably someone in the White House got yelled at, then someone in the Defense Department got yelled at, and then they yelled at their subordinate, and so forth, until official policy became extreme touchiness about any sign of anything in U.S. airspace. Why take a risk? Shoot first and ask questions later! Now probably all those same people are getting yelled at for fucking up again.

It’s worth recalling that much of the entire newfound explosion in UFO interest over the past few years was due to the revelations of a “secret” Pentagon program. This particular secret program was the brainchild of late Nevada Senator Harry Reid:

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

Uh huh, okay. Now, I still have a good deal of affection for Harry Reid, but this sounds an awful lot like a boondoggle for his good buddy’s company. Is that manifestly corrupt? Well, I also think Reid and his friend genuinely believed in UFOs and thought they were doing their nation a service. This is how business coziness with government usually looks to the people involved: less like graft and more like constituent services. After all, businesses employ people, right? Aren’t we just creating more jobs? It’s for science, right? Sure, kid—here have a cigar. Delusional idealism about a cause that just happens to also align with one’s own self-interest is a very American trait. I always thought a great premise for a movie would be if a quasi-corrupt political machine boondoggle actually discovered the existence of aliens, a kind of interstellar Charlie Wilson’s War crossed with Contact crossed with The Great McGinty.

I, for one, don’t really believe in alien visitors. I think most of the reasoning that comes from people to believe in them is transparently motivated and faulty. “But we can’t be alone,” they object. Of course, the universe is massive, there are about 200 billion trillion stars. That means it’s highly likely that there are other planets capable of sustaining life. But it doesn’t follow from that that any given “UFO incident” is an alien. “Well, there are so many!” Sure, but they could all be different things: an instrument malfunction in one case, trash in another, and so on and so forth.

“But the closest star is just four lightyears away!” Okay, but a lightyear is 5.88 trillion miles. Even if you could physically travel at the speed of light, which you really can’t because nothing with resting mass can, it would still take years to traverse these distances. And because of time dilation, in those relatively few years thousands and thousands of years could pass on the home planet of the voyagers. The civilization that birthed such creatures would likely have come and gone in that time. Unless, of course, they are space nomads, living on some kind of great ark. Or their conception of time is so radically different from ours that these considerations are meaningless. But the fact remains that everything in space is very far away.

If there was something that could make quick work of these distances and the physical constraints of faster-than-light travel, it would not be our imagined alien in a flying saucer, it would be more like an angel or some other supernatural being. We have to remember that our imaginations are conditioned by our own cultural productions: we see flying saucers or spacecraft, because that’s what’s in our movies, books, and shows. Life on other planets might be radically unlike anything we’ve imagined so far. And what is “life” anyway? It’s not even a self-evident concept, but something that’s difficult for philosophers and scientists to clearly define.

In my experience, people so badly want these things to be aliens that they even start to invent things about them. One of the pilots who shot down one of the recent UFOs stated there was no sign of propulsion and that it was a cylindrical object. Now, to me that sounds an awful lot like a balloon. But a friend who I was arguing with insisted it was not a balloon because it was “mechanical.” With all due respect to my friend, he just made that up: There was absolutely nothing written about it being mechanical. The objects apparently evaded the sensors of the planes! Well, is that a sign of advanced technology or is it because that the sensors of the planes are for picking up other planes and missiles, not floating garbage?

People find the prospect of alien life to be so tantalizing or frightening that it causes them to lose their reason and senses. This suggests to me that there is something else going on here. Whether it’s some misdirected desire for transcendence, some anxious predisposition of the human psyche to produce feverish explanations when confronted with the real, or just boredom, a longing for something new under the sun, I do not know. Someone wrote something on Twitter to the effect that the existence of aliens would cause some kind of an existential breakdown in the skeptics. Why? I just don’t find the existence of aliens that mind-blowing of a prospect: there probably are out there, but they probably can’t reach us, but if they can, well, then I guess I was wrong. Observing the events of the past week or so, I find it increasingly hard to believe that there is intelligent life anywhere in the universe.

CORRECTION: As user Rob K. pointed out in the comments, I got a little confused about the principle of time dilation. Thousands of years would not pass on Earth in the 4 lightyear journey to and from Alpha Centauri, but that would happen when traversing distances of thousands of lightyears at the speed of light. This is why I should not ever write about science.