The Last Humans: Alexander Wendt on UFOs, Global Security and the Threat to State Sovereignty

Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt, argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time.

While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all.

Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state because they keep us safe. Spacecraft that the Pentagon cannot identify, in airspace the Pentagon can’t defend, would leave that contract in tatters. What follows is not war with aliens but Hobbes’s great fear of a return to his dreaded state of nature.

So, as Wendt notes, “the threat of UFOs is not them. It’s actually us.” Rather than a new religion, they represent an old nightmare. Beam me up, Thomas Hobbes.

FURTHER READING

•   Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, out 15 October 2026)

•   Adam Kirsch on We Want to Believe — the case that this is a religion, not a security problem: listen or watch

•   Wendt’s 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”, the piece that launched constructivism, and his Social Theory of International Politics — both listed at his Mershon Center page

•   The June 2021 Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the report that, on Wendt’s account, changed the game

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. His thesis is that the danger is on our side of the encounter. He separates the craft from the question of who is flying them, and says the Defense Department has settled the first — after seventy-five years of denial it changed its mind, which he finds significant. On the second he is agnostic but unworried about attack: anything capable of getting here could have destroyed us long ago, when we were far weaker. The threat he describes is political. Our civilisation is organised around the assumption that we are alone, and the discovery that we are not would expose a state that cannot identify these objects, cannot stop them entering its airspace, and cannot protect anyone from them. That is the emperor with no clothes, and what it threatens is allegiance.

2. What he actually fears is Hobbes, not invasion. Once the news is out, people will disagree about what to do — shoot them down, worship them, ignore them — and there is no way to settle the argument, because nobody can get inside the craft to find out who is r