psychoceramics: [Pigdog] You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Believe in Aliens

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You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Believe in Aliens

Inter Press Service
10-JUN-98

NEW YORK, (June 9) IPS - Aliens are everywhere, at least in the United
States --
where the number of people who believe in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)
outnumbers those who voted for Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton. 

In fact, according to the Gallup polling organization, 27 percent of all
Americans
believe that space aliens have already visited Earth. Even more telling is
a Time/CNN
poll suggesting that some 80 percent of all respondents believe in a
government
cover-up of the existence of aliens. 

Hollywood has benefitted from such strong belief in aliens, with dozens of
movies in
recent years catering to the notion that aliens actually dwell on this
planet -- but that
their existence is carefully obscured by, of course, the U.S. government. 

The 1996 movies "Independence Day" and "Mars Attacks!" both offered slightly
tongue-in-cheek renditions of alien invasions of Earth, with the former
supporting the
popular myth that the government concealed the crash of a UFO in Roswell, New
Mexico in 1947. In 1997, the hit movie of the year, "Men in Black," took a
comedic
look at a secret government agency which watches over "illegal aliens" -- not
immigrants, but extraterrestrials. 

Hollywood's alien fever shows no sign of abating. This month,
writer-director Chris
Carter is delivering the first movie version of his popular Fox-TV
television series,
"The X-Files," perhaps the most paranoid of the recent alien fictions. The
show and
film revolve around the exploits of two Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) agents
whose search for aliens lead them to uncover vast government conspiracies. 

Amid all the hype about aliens, however, more than a few observers are
wondering:
what does this obsession say about the sanity of U.S. popular culture? At
least one,
Jodi Dean -- author of a new book, 'Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures
from
 Outer Space to Cyberspace' (Cornell Press) -- finds some of the UFO mania
healthy. 

"During times of uncertainty and instability, people blame distinct
groups," Dean, a
professor at New York's Hobart and William Smith Colleges, argues. "Aliens
are a
safe outlet for a lot of anger and fear." 

In Dean's view, the frustrations and fears of modern U.S. life are
manifested in the
conspiratorial mindset that believes the government is hiding the existence
of aliens.
With the loss of faith in such quintessentially American concepts as the
'final frontier'
of U.S. dominion -- from Manifest Destiny to the space program -- Americans
have
turned instead to the belief in aliens among them, she argues. 

Of course, there may be simpler reasons for the popularity of aliens. As some
Hollywood executives have noted puckishly, aliens don't get upset at the
way they
are depicted in films. Also, many of the plots -- aliens attack, humans
unite to defeat
them -- are simple stories which have been fodder for movie-goers since the
1950s. 

The first alien films, however, were very clearly metaphors for the Cold
War: Many
times, they would concern trusting Americans who would be confronted by an
alien
force that initially seemed friendly -- but would ultimately be exposed as
a cruel,
totalitarian threat to the American way of life. The parallels with U.S.
government
propaganda about the Soviet Union never needed to be spelled out. 

In the more cynical era of the 1990s, alien movies are more about distrust
of the
government than about 'Us vs. Them' Cold War confrontations. In 'Men in
Black,'
the heroes learn to get their information from garish tabloids that feature
stories on
alien abductions; as the chief agent, played by Tommy Lee Jones, explains,
they are
the only source of accurate news -- unlike the propaganda of The New York
Times. 

Similarly, 'X-Files' agents Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David
Duchovny)
acquire far more useful information from the marginal figures of society --
computer
hackers, conspiracy theorists and the like -- than they do from (generally
untrustworthy) government officials. 


Copyright © 1998 Cable News Network, Inc. A Time Warner Company
                                     ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Five days a week, my body is a temple. The other two days, it's an
amusement park.

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