2008-01-17 11:17:35

A DIFFERENT DEAL

Filed under: Democrats, Republicans, Unidentified Flying Objects, X-Files, politics
Posted by: John

Responding to a reporter’s questions in Stephenville, Texas, where dozens of townspeople saw what appeared to be an Unidentified Flying Object this week, machinist Ricky Sorrells told the Dallas Morning News, “You hear about big bass or big buck in this area, but this is a different deal.”

Steve Allen, a pilot, talked of Biblical prophecy, saying that religious locals saw the fulfillment of End Times scripture in the appearance of the object, which he guessed to be a half mile wide and a mile long.

I don’t know if we’re at the End Times, but we’re back in transitional times, for sure, when UFO’s start to appear. The last time the subject made a lot of news, in the 1990’s, the Clinton administration had become the first Democratic White House in twelve years, the Cold War had ended, and the technology boom had begun.

Popular culture gave us the ultimate statement on alien invasion. In 1993, The X-Files began its remarkable run, at its best a perfected brew of government paranoia, folk superstition, religious iconography and weird science. FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder argued weekly about the nature of the paranormal, whether inexplicable events could always be understood in the context of science, or whether certain phenomenon belonged to a state outside of rational inquiry. The show had an exquisite motto for the era of Kenneth Starr and the special investigation of the Monica Lewinski scandal: “The Truth is out there.”

Thanks to the show, Area 51, a military base in the Nevada desert, became a household word, a catch phrase for everything the government had done to hide that “truth” from us. And then there was Roswell.

In 1997, Roswell, New Mexico, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged crash landing of an alien spacecraft subsequently spirited away by the US military. Not long before or after the anniversary, the US government released documents about the case, revealing that a high tech surveillance satellite, meant to register distant shockwaves from Soviet H-bomb tests had gone down in the area. Not everyone in the Ufology community believed that the case to be settled, but it seemed in the last years of the last century that the truth about Unidentified Flying Objects had been uncovered at last; the space ships had been advanced military technology kept under wraps during the rapidly receding Cold War.

By the time of the September 11 attacks, the X-Files had gone off the air, Roswell’s 50th anniversary had become a quaint, small-town American tourism industry, which it always had been, let’s face it, and alien space ships seemed a welcome relief from the rising tensions of the world. And yet it’s intriguing to note that the September 11 attacks possessed a quality of science fiction horror, the image of airborne craft launching an assault on mere earthlings. Cultural commentators noted that the fall of the twin towers echoed images in movies like Independence Day, which had depicted the annihilation of the human race by aliens.

These aliens were Muslims, and they came in the name of God, not interstellar hegemony, but they successfully replaced the space invaders as a source of existential anxiety. Since the attacks, I’m sure there have been plenty of UFO sightings. I read somewhere that 400 UFO incidents occur annually, but most of these didn’t make headlines. The Stephenville case seems to have arrived with a bit of the gusto of the 1990’s, as if to announce a new era of interest in the visitors from the skies.

It’s tempting to speculate on the political dimension of the UFO experience. In the 1970’s and the 1990’s, we saw great upsurges in public interest in the subject. When I was a kid, in the Watergate era, I couldn’t get enough of those flimsy paperbacks that tied the Bermuda Triangle, the Roswell crash, and the bas-reliefs on Mayan tombs together into a speculative mix. In his Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg made it all seem so real, so relevant, and there must have been half a dozen magazine covers asking the question: “Are we alone?” That movie came out in 1977, the year that Jimmy Carter took office.

Is it a plot? Do the aliens come to us as the silent partners on a Democratic ticket? Are they unofficial members of that party’s White House cabinets? If loyal Democrat voters see fascism or worse in the rightward swings of a Republican administration, do die-hard, opposition Republicans tend instead toward thoughts of cosmic usurpation, liberal progressives hiding under their rubbery faces the traces of distant contellations?

If it could be proven, it would be a fantastic bellwether, but I don’t think so, nor does the conventional academic wisdom, which tends to see UFO’s as harbingers of social and cultural anxiety. And yet, in the last seven years, the most anxious of my adult life, I hardly remember a single sighting that made the kind of news generated by Stephenville.

And so this week’s incident made me wonder. Are aliens harbingers of stability rather than anxiety? Though it may sound bizarre, I would be much more inclined to see the appearance of the Unidentified Flying Objects as a sign of optimism about the future, of a coming relaxation of the tension of the last few years. In periods of real world fear, the space invaders lay low. There were sightings in World War II, but who paid much attention?

It was only after the war ended, in 1947, with the Roswell crash, that Americans began to wake up and smell the ectoplasm. The 1950’s were a heyday of UFO excitement. Hollywood turned out a series of alien invasion classics: War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Despite the realities of the Cold War, it was a time of prosperity and stability in this country, and people had the leisure to both witness space ships and get agitated about them. Alien abductions seem like a peacetime hobby.

Did the end of the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Nixon government, and a return to a semblance of normalcy in the 1970’s allow the Little Green Men to rise once again? And when the Cold War ended, and the hawkish, crisis-prone Republican administration of the early 1990’s had gone, both events accompanied by the end of a Recession, did the change in epochs provide yet another access point?

Mind you, I can’t prove any of this, but that’s the beauty of the argument. It occurs in a cultural space where no one can prove anything.

A few conclusions can be drawn, however, a handful of guesses made. One, if the Democrats take the White House, if we don’t go into deep Recession, and don’t see another major terrorist attack on American soil, all of them big ifs, I will expect to see a tremendous flowering of UFO mythology in the next four years. Eight years of Republican fearmongering and legitimate terror anxieties should produce a bumper crop of sightings.

Two, the promise of a new X-Files movie, in the works for a while, means a revival of interest in that series, I bet, and in the whole subject of the visitors from the skies. Pop culture is recycling vampires right now; in two years or so, it may well be on to Martians.

Finally, if the UFO’s do start coming again, we could see a rise in seriousness about the subject, as more thorough attention is given to the possibility that the US government has been covertly designing flight technology for years and test-driving out in the wide open reaches of the country. Not every sighting can be attributed to such testing, but a lot of it must be connected to the defense industry, and in the trail of the Iraq War, these questions will have their own urgency.

The machinist Ricky Sorrel was on to something when he described the Stephenville incident as “a different deal”. But does it herald a New Deal? Or will it be the same old Raw Deal? That’s an open question, pending the outcome of the presidential election.

Meanwhile, for those who plan to visit Stephenville to discover more about the mystery, it remains to be said that the town has a pretty good barbecue joint in the Hard Eight, where you can buy steak, brisket, pork chops, ribs and sausage drenched in a tasty barbecue sauce. Dr. James Hynes over at the Cultwriter Institute for Paranormal Activity and I have disagreed about the ultimate designs of these visitors, but we both suspect that the spacecraft in question had pinpointed the region for culinary reasons.

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1. [...] John placed an interesting blog post on A DIFFERENT DEALHere’s a brief overviewThough it may sound bizarre, I would be much more inclined to see the appearance of the Unidentified Flying Objects as a sign of optimism about the future, of a coming relaxation of the tension of the last few years. … [...]

   Pingback by Relaxation » Blog Archive » A DIFFERENT DEAL — January 18, 2008 @ 6:54 am

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