WE WANT TO BELIEVE

Of UFOs, ETs, and needy conspiracy theories.

Is there a starman waiting in the sky? American studies scholar and Atlantic contributor Kirsch says no, there’s not a shred of credible evidence that supports the existence of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth. Indeed, there’s scarcely any evidence of intelligent life of any sort out there. “But this has never stopped human beings from imagining alien beings and hoping to encounter them,” he writes. That impulse has been gathering force in recent years: Where polls in the last years of the past century showed that most Americans didn’t believe ETs were among us, something like 40 percent of Americans now do. Kirsch suggests numerous reasons for the growing certainty in the popular culture that UFOs and such are real. Some are more or less benign: Movies and novels have planted the seed for a long time. More troubling is the disdain a growing number of Americans show for expertise of any kind. Witness the recent phenomenon of Covid-19 denial: “It becomes easier to understand once we recognize a major driver of vaccine resistance is expertise resistance—refusal to listen to experts simply because they claim to be experts.” All this is not to say that life elsewhere in the cosmos isn’t possible; as Kirsch notes, astronomers have identified more than 5,000 exoplanets that in theory could sustain life. But what sort of life? Perhaps microbial. And, perhaps, he suggests more darkly, we haven’t found life out there because that life, like that of Earthlings, comes with a warning label: “Any species powerful enough to escape its planet is powerful enough to destroy it.” For all that, yes, we want to believe—it fills some hole in the soul that seeks meaning more transcendent than the usual grind.

A thoughtful essay in what the search for extraplanetary aliens tells us about ourselves.