Why Aliens Love America

I always knew this would happen. Exactly how I pictured it. On the eve of a large event, an apparition disrupts the sky’s still blueness. Its foreignness expressed in its shape, beyond geometry, above our comprehension. All gathered at the stadium, watching two teams fight for a grand trophy. Invasions are always inconvenient. Aliens know nothing of our traditions.

“When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square, when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine.”

It’s been happening. The above is what John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, recorded on March 1st, 1639, in his diary. He recounted how, earlier that year, English Puritan settlers encountered a “great light in the night sky” which flashed back and forth between Boston and Charlestown. The light even “transported” three boatmen a mile upstream. From its inception, aliens have kept a watchful eye on America, making frequent short apparitions like a deadbeat theurgical God-figure.

This is one of my favorite maps. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the raw dataset behind it, though it was published by ESRI. Nonetheless, it is astonishing how many more sightings occur in the United States. Which begs the question: why do Aliens love America?

I have three hypotheses: the Other, Societal Trauma and Decentering.

Aliens as the manifestation of the fear of the Other

From their advent in popular culture, Aliens represented an unknowable exterior force that penetrated American society. It was the ultimate Other which sought to overtake America, God’s chosen Nation. It is hard not to draw parallels between the political fears of the American government and military industrial complex, and the uptick in reported alien activity. Many skeptics believe that the reported aerial sightings are, in fact, tests done by the US military for new top-secret aircrafts. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, the seminal 1956 film, which set the trend for alien depiction in media, can be read as a direct response to the fear of loss of personal autonomy and individualism seen in the Soviet Union and communist countries. The Body Snatchers come from space to assail America’s essence, its Freedom.

Aliens’ growing prominence can also be understood as response to American exceptionalism, the belief that America is inherently superior to other nations. Wouldn’t an exceptional nation be subject to adversaries? When things go well for a long time, people expect something bad will occur. UFO sightings accelerate around 1947, the year of Roswell incident, which coincides with America’s post-war hey-day and renewed Cold War tensions with the USSR, America’s othered enemy for decades.

1947 was dubbed the year of the “Flying Disc Craze”, a mass psychogenic event, which engendered sightings of saucers all over the country, as if the apparitions were infectious. According to reports published 50 years later by the US Air Force, the “saucer” which crashed in Roswell in 1947 was just a “weather ballon”. The Flying Disc Craze speaks to the ability for new alternate frames of reality to emerge based on communal belief. This sort of mimetic phenomenon which is incredible pre-internet considering distribution limitations.

Before 9/11, the United States had rarely been attacked by a foreign power due to its geographical location and its size. Logically, one could wager that the enemy would come from above as a land or naval attack would be highly difficult. The exception, the 9/11 attacks, did come from the sky. 9/11 itself spawned a new Other which became the central focus of the American military industrial complex. This fear of the Other is even present in American political language which qualifies immigrants as “illegal aliens”. Fear grows into paranoia, which could explain the UFO sightings as mass hallucinations of a nation that has been unscathed for too long.

Aliens as a trauma response

In his novel “Slaughterhouse V”, Kurt Vonnegut describes how the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, returning from war, becomes “stuck in time” after an alien encounter. The novel can be understood as a psychological attempt of the narrator to deal with the ineffable trauma of war. When imprisoned, he escapes to another place and time, a behavior psychologists would now call dissociation, which often occurs in response to highly traumatic events.

Another novel which illuminates the relationship between aliens and trauma is “Mysterious Skin” by Scott Heim, which was later turned into the homonymous Gregg Araki film. There, faced with sexual abuse, the protagonist’s counterpart develops a belief that at the time of the traumatic event he had been abducted, instead of the truth, he had been assaulted by a sports coach.

What then could the American nation hold in its heart? What horrors and trauma lie beneath tales of exceptionalism? Would not the wretchedness of the Middle Passage and slavery be enough to make America spiral into post-traumatic hallucinations? Perhaps only on the day of acknowledgement and reparations will the extraterrestrial demons will disappear? Perhaps only then will America sleep peacefully? Until then, nightmares!

Aliens as a potential subversion of an anthropocentric political hegemony

What are the philosophical implications of aliens? Would not the existence of a super-powerful extra-terrestrial force put in question the power of the current hegemonies on Earth? A lot of our current geopolitics is predicated on a philosophical assumption of anthropocentricism. We, humans, are special and therefore get to rule the Earth. 

In Genesis 9, God speaks into existence the Covenant of the Rainbow which provides to humans dominion over all living things. “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.’

America’s position as the world’s superpower hinges on this very fundamental notion that power should be human-held. The existence of extraterrestrials bring that notion into question which could alter our understanding of hegemony and delegitimize our existing political power structures. The existence of extraterrestrial beings de-centers Man as the unique supreme intelligent life-form. Who has more to lose but those in power? Who but America?

I always knew this would happen. This is exactly how I pictured it. Tonight, as men ape war on a field, chanting “Go Birds Go”, time will stand still. Airspaces will be locked as millions of balloons and saucers appear. The culmination of mass paranoia, the UFO, the ultimate hyperstitious object, by definition unidentified, will make itself known, once and for all. The Other will interrupt our grand ceremony, rupture the Covenant and remind us that we are not untouchable, that something larger than us is out there. There, above. Look. Three giant shapes hover above us all. A great light in the night sky shaped like a bird’s shadow. It’s a sign. Go Birds Go.