“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.
