A report on unidentified flying objects from a special Pentagon task force landed on earth Friday with a distinct lack of conclusions. Concerning those weird videos you’ve seen taken by naval pilots, the committee looked at over 140 such cases and could only find an explanation for one of them. Regarding the others, investigators found no evidence that the recordings documented secret military technology from Russia or China, or, perhaps more fantastically, visitors from elsewhere in the galaxy. But the report didn’t state it wasn’t any of that, either.
Naturally, this was enough to set off ufologists, conspiracy theorists, and people just looking to crack a joke online.
Beaming down with equal measures of common sense and wet blanketism was someone who knows a thing or two about obsessing over alien encounters: X-Files creator Chris Carter. His op-ed in the New York Times, which published the same day the report was disclosed, begins with something of an olive branch to people eager to find proof of visitors from a distant star.
He put the “I Want To Believe” poster in David Duchovny’s office, he writes, noting that “the universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it.” Ever since the series debuted in 1993 he’s been, as he puts it, a magnet for people (not all of them kooks!) professing faith in alien life. Still, despite having been privy to more material than most of us, and having an innate, child-of-Watergate era distrust of government, he urges restraint in looking too deeply at the new report for hidden clues.
“We are living in times of uncertainty, where truth may be unknowable,” he writes, pointing out that this has led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories. He signals alarm at those who think the recent coronavirus pandemic is all a plan and more out-there theories like we’re all living in a warped reality created by the Large Hadron Collider. (Memo to Chris: rent A Glitch In The Matrix, if you really want to get weird.)
Clearly, there’s a bit of a mea culpa vibe happening here. Carter cites catchphrases from his own show — “The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything” — but goes on to say, basically, that the 1990s were different. Back then, pre-QAnon, “we had a relatively shared reality.”
“The slogans,” he continues, “are now a fact of life.”
To prove he still has some of the old fire within him, Carter did ask some conspiracy-minded questions, like why this report was essentially a secret for 10 years and why a project with such vast implications was only given a budget of, as only a television producer would put it, “three episodes of the Netflix series Stranger Things.”
Nevertheless, the lack of any concrete proof by now isn’t something that should be ignored, Carter says. Perhaps, the current dysfunction of our collective conversation so bedeviled by partisanship is more important, he argues. “A planet that can’t come together on climate change or a global pandemic might not pay much attention even if wreckage or an alien corpse is discovered,” he writes. “The culture wars alone might eclipse it, so rabidly are we in their grips.”
Though our fiction is rife with examples of an alien encounter uniting the planet, Carter is skeptical of even that. Yet, he insists he does still want to believe.
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