Yahoo Finance Why are we so obsessed with UFOs? Here’s how aliens invaded (and conquered) pop culture
Are alien UFOs real?
It's a question oft debated by conspiracy theorists and sci-fi nerds alike — and one that's picked up major steam in the midst of a highly-anticipated government report on the subject. Though the report is expected to be released as soon as Friday by top intelligence and military officials, The New York Times and CNN have reported that officials familiar with the report said the government has not found evidence that unexplained aerial phenomena observed by Navy pilots were alien spacecraft. But they didn't rule out the possibility.
Though the origins of unidentified flying objects remain a mystery, science-fiction experts say there might be a more pressing question: Why do we care about them so much?
"Everybody, I think, would agree that we're living in a period when science fiction and alien invasion is just everywhere," says Peter Balestrieri, curator of the University of Iowa's science fiction and popular culture collection. "It's around us all the time. It's on TV. It's in films. It's everywhere."
From classic flicks like 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to more modern invasions like 1996's "Independence Day" and 2016's "Arrival," here's a look at how UFOs invaded and conquered our cultural imagination — and what they may reveal about our society.
Why are we so obsessed with UFOs?
According to science-fiction scholars, UFOs are more than just round, shiny things bearing alien friends or foes.
Lisa Yaszek, a regents professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, says UFOs, whether real or imagined, have long served as "funhouse mirrors to ourselves as humans."
"They represent both the familiar and the unfamiliar," she says. "When we speculate about UFOs, we're also speculating about our hopes and fears, about our best and our worst selves and our society and even our species."
Though UFOs have long dominated pop culture, Ed Finn, director of Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, says they're still relevant symbols for things that cause us anxiety — and they aren't going away any time soon.
"I think UFOs will still be a kind of blank projection screen for all the other stuff that we're worried about," he says. "They'll be a way for us to talk about our anxiety of the moment, from misinformation and political turmoil to climate change and migration — all the big issues."
Balestrieri expects the government's looming report to only bolster pop culture's alien craze.
"This idea that the government knows and won't tell us, it's an essential part of the UFO narrative," he says. "Either people are going to accept it wholesale, or they're going to say, 'You know, they're still covering it up.' "
How did UFOs become so popular?
Artists have used unidentified flying objects to explore the human condition for over a century, Yaszek says, with the classic depiction of UFOs as flying saucers emerging in the '40s and continuing to boom through the '50s and '60s.
Eric Rabkin, professor emeritus of English language and literature at the University of Michigan, says the explosion of UFO stories during this era sprung from fears about the Cold War.
"The UFO myth, specifically in terms of flying saucers, arises almost directly after the explosion of the atomic bomb in World War II," he says. "This sense of impending crisis, which we now retrospectively call the Cold War, is symbolized by an arms race."
But UFOs in these stories didn't always spell bad news for humans, he says. Sometimes, the aliens really did come in peace, like in the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Famed psychiatrist Carl Jung theorized this positive spin on UFOs had to do with religion's inability to ease people's fears about nuclear war, Rabkin says.
"When you don't believe in religion anymore, and you know things are going to hell in a handbasket, you need something to be able to believe in," he says. "They want to believe that there is this greater power in the universe. There's something out there that could maybe set matters right, even if it's going to try to impose itself on us."
But as time marched on, people grew bored of the same old alien invasion narratives, says Finn, so UFO stories became more nuanced. The 2016 film "Arrival," which follows a linguist's quest to decode an alien language, is an example of this.
“It's not new anymore, so it doesn't have that sense of other-worldly surprise in the same way that it used to," he says. "So we start to imagine the lives of these aliens, and we start to go, 'Well, what if we're the aliens? What if we're going to try to communicate with these aliens in a meaningful way?’ ”
What do UFOs mean to us now?
The Cold War may be over, but the alien craze hasn't died down. That's because, according to Yaszek, Americans are still grappling with issues and fears that can be powerfully symbolized by UFOs.
"We are seeing some pretty radical shifts in political alliances and a lot of talk about what are the next stages of democracy, for instance," she says. "UFO stories have always been containers for thinking about how do we deal with alien others, whether they're across the galaxy or next door. As we as Americans rethink our relationship to each other and to people across the world, that's a great moment for UFO stories."
It's this handy way of confronting pressing issues in new and exciting ways, Yaszek says, that inspires us to keep UFOs alive in pop culture, no matter what the latest government report may say.
"We don't want the story to end," she says. "We don't want to have some sort of definitive proof that UFOs are or aren't out there, because this is such a useful way for us to look at ourselves from a new angle and from new perspectives."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UFOs in pop culture: What our alien obsession says about us
