“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
—Bill Watterson
I get lost in extraterrestrial conspiracy theories in much the same way that I might get lost in a city that I don’t know. Some of this can be attributed, easily and not incorrectly, to me being an idiot—I have some broad ideas about life on Mars and some 2001: A Space Odyssey references rattling around in my head, and some vague sense of previous UFO “sightings” and a vaguer-than-that sense of how these nothingburgers might impact our perception of intelligent alien life in the future. And so, just as I might if I found myself on some strange and narrow street without a GPS, I just kind of follow the noise and the crowd and my instincts. There are more informed and effective ways to travel and navigate the discourse, but this method works for me pretty well most of the time in regard to topics I have invested only a modest amount of attention into. This latest round of Congressional UFO hearings feels like one of the rare instances when it’s appropriate to drag out one of the most overused and hackneyed terms on the internet: psy-op.
The hype around aliens is electric, in the way that a downed power line popping around on a sidewalk could be described as such. (“The aliens probably don’t even smoke loud!” says the feeble mind.) The janky mechanics of the details often leave me skeptical, solely because anything potentially revelatory has a tight proximity to the CIA and military operations; the geopolitical and security implications will steep any meaningful information in way too many layers of classifications for the actual truth to ever surface. UFOs are always described with this vague and ominous pseudo-militaristic gobbledygook like “nonhuman biological pilots,” so if there is any truth to aliens chillin’ in our atmosphere, I think the Pentagon found a dead slug on a crashed drone and decided to tell the plebs it was augmented by the Chinese to pilot the vessel.
As the market grinds on through what feels like the closing stage of something, these incredibly soaring and swirly-eyed expressions of apocalypse have drifted into the mainstream—so of course, the existence of aliens would have to be some history-altering event. Humans of any period in time tend to appoint themselves as the protagonists of reality, which would make it patently ridiculous to assume we are the only life to exist in this universe. Even if the government hypothetically disclosed extraordinary and independently verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial life hovering in our orbit, I will treat this as entertainment until it affects me personally. I don’t blame people who would process this revelation by moving on with their lives and going to work the following morning because I would too, unless the aliens are going to pay my rent.
If extraterrestrial creatures ever descended on our lands, I imagine it would be no different than the white man sailing up to the shores of North America. I just hope Kang and Kodos would allow us to run their Earth casinos. In the coming years, there will be cultural appropriation discourse as woke aliens fume at their peers who wear human garments like Supreme hoodies and Nikes.
In many ways, pop culture is funny and grandiose, especially in the ways it portrays aliens as these sinister macro-scale villains looking to trigger nuclear exchanges on spec and generally work to conquer our planet and hurt as many people as possible on pure misanthropic spite. Some of this anti-heroic scale is a matter of classic Hollywood storytelling necessity where disembodied human villains are concerned, and even though the idea of hostile aliens is old, it is also resonant. It would be more lacerating and self-evidently correct to accept that aliens hover atop all our human foibles and toweringly insignificant strifes and gaudy yachts and just glancingly chuckle at the depravity. If aliens were actually villains, they are likely too busy and ambitious and big to care about Earth, and instead treat us like we went on one Hinge date a month ago and we’ve been texting them, Do you wanna get that drink next week? and they reply three hours later, I don’t really like the vibe you guys give.
It feels either intriguing or depressing to think that aliens would pop by our planet to see what’s going on. In a very lightly tweaked parallel universe, they would see functioning multi-racial democracies and fully automated luxury communism, but in the more stupid and squalid one we live in, they would see melting ice caps and hear a sonic transmission of the UN secretary general declaring “the era of global boiling has arrived.” Aliens would observe studio executives actively draining our culture’s dream reserve in a bloodless white-collar war to homogenize all film and television into something equally cost-certain and shelf-stable and disposable. Aliens would wonder why millions of barnacles have latched onto Elon Musk’s nutsack and cling to his self-serving grandiose futurism with unwavering theocracy, even as he killed roughly $20 billion in brand value in the social media platform he overpaid for by about $19 billion. Aliens would scoff at our fantasy of terraforming Mars, even as humans continue to act out this existential punchline by watching the planet we currently inhabit wither into a Danse Macabre of strip malls.
Aliens probably lock the door when they drive past Earth. The statistical mean of humanity is plagued with the unfortunate habit of eating their own excrement until they go insane. We’re the species that sees anything that looks even remotely different than us, and our first thought is either When can I eat that? or Should I just murder it? Or maybe aliens have already landed here without our knowledge and visited a Bass Pro Shop thinking it was the great pyramid of Giza; their expectations for Earth went all downhill from there.