Is That Really a Flying Saucer? Adam Kirsch on Why We Want to Believe in Aliens

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch

 

First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe, Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact.

 

The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that has fed off both the crisis of traditional authority and the suspicion that the people in power know more than they’re letting on. Elites, in other words, know nothing and everything. Simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

 

Underneath this silliness, Kirsch notes, is something more substantial. Perhaps religion itself. Where people once saw miracles or demons, they now see little green-headed creatures packed into flying saucers. In other words, they provide a vocabulary for experiences that we can’t explain, as well as a community with which we can share that mystery.

 

So what happens when the aliens finally show up? As I suggested, maybe these transcendental creatures arrived. We’ve built them ourselves in the form of artificial intelligence. Kirsch agreed, seeing AI as a kind of nonhuman mind that doesn’t experience the world as we do. Such a Copernican moment is “very imaginable,” the sceptic concedes. Disclosure Day. Starring Adam Kirsch.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Pure Thought Experiment. The trilogy’s logic, completed: three short books on popular ideas, this one distinguished by the fact that its subject doesn’t exist — which is precisely its value. UFOs, Kirsch argues, let us think “in a very sort of almost consequence-free way” about who decides what’s real, whose authority we trust, and why people need to believe — the defining questions of a populist moment in which vaccines, public health, and yesterday’s common sense are all contested. The hinge was 2017: the New York Times’s “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” exposé revealed the Pentagon’s AATIP program, and the paper of record saying the government knows more than it admits took UFOs from niche conspiracy to mainstream issue. Kirsch himself started paying attention — smoke that might lead to fire. “Unfortunately, in the years since then, no fire has been discovered.” What he learned instead: how easy it is to be misled, and what scientific evidence actually is.

•       ’Oumuamua’s Wager. The book’s treatment of past guest Avi Loeb is a study in the seduction of credentials: an astrophysicist of unimpeachable standing willing to entertain what colleagues won’t — that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been a broken light sail from an alien probe — “kindles the imagination,” Kirsch’s included. But the metal globs from the Pacific floor and the fresh candidates each year breed suspicion, and the standard remains Carl Sagan’s: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Loeb’s reply reworks Pascal — ‘Oumuamua’s wager: believe, because the benefits of an open mind outweigh the cost of being wrong. Kirsch’s honesty cuts through: “I would love to believe in UFOs.” Nothing would be more exciting. Which sharpens the genuine scientific conundrum — the space age promised a galaxy teeming with signals and delivered silence: “