The Cosmic Watergate and Possibility Thinking

Conspiracy theories and flying saucers—the two seem inextricably bound together. From the very first sightings in the late 1940s, UFOs have been linked to secrets and cover-ups. Today, UFOlogy takes it as an absolute that Government—particularly the United States government—knows far more than it is telling. A contemporary term which has been applied to this is Cosmic Watergate, not in the sense of extra-terrestrial burglary, but as a set of secrets centered on the Oval Office. Indeed, several Presidents are said to have met aliens, and a whole carapace of covert administration is claimed to exist, all controlled by a secret committee known as “Majestic 12.” A Secret History is said to have dominated the latter part of the 20th century, with its founding event the crash of a flying saucer in July, 1947, outside Roswell, New Mexico, and the recovery of the wrecked (or intact) craft and its dead (or alive) occupants by the U.S. military.

What the various fringe UFO groups think is important in itself, but it is unlikely to lead to actual political consequences—no one is likely to bomb the White House because of these fantasies. Equally, it is difficult to imagine that populist demagogues can exploit these beliefs. Nevertheless, the extent to which an acceptance of the possibility of a UFO cover-up conspiracy has become widespread in our culture, far outside the ranks of the true believers, is clear. Opinion polls vary, with different surveys claiming that anywhere between 40 percent and 80 percent of the public think that the government is hiding evidence of extra-terrestrial contact. Whatever the numbers, it is clear that a general free-floating belief in a cover-up is out there. Contemporary culture is saturated with images combining contact with the secret and the alien, and in the 1990s dozens of popular movies and television series were premised on this, with only the most famous being The X-Files. The general notion uniting them all was that extra-terrestrial contact was not something that was about to take place, but something that had already taken place and been suppressed. So, as one short-lived television show, “Dark Skies,” put it: “History is an illusion.”

It was the secret messages from UFOs received in 1952 by one Orfeo Angelucci that fascinated Carl Jung and led him in 1958 to publish Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. In it, Jung argued that the phenomenon represented archetypes taken from a collective unconscious which expressed contemporary concerns about the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and McCarthyism. This formulation, he wrote, “leaves the question of seeing open.” This question of seeing (and believing) remains central to the UFO phenomenon.

Why, almost 50 years later, should such a paranoid possibility have assumed this general place of possibility? One often cited reason is the often alleged “dumbing down” of America. The late Carl Sagan wrote an entire book, The Demon Haunted World (1997), decrying the decline of science and rationality in the contemporary United States, citing belief in UFOs as one of the prime indices of the malaise. Journals such as The Skeptic (U.K.) and The Skeptical Inquirer (U.S.) likewise seek to combat the credulity of the public. But it is necessary to perceive that a double-edged scepticism is actually at work in contemporary culture. There is the rationalist scepticism which Sagan eloquently fought for, but there is also a popular, even populist, scepticism at large, which is doubtful and mistrusting about government, about authority, and about official statements on events. The real point to note about the “Cosmic Watergate” is not that many people think it is true, but that many people suspect that it might be—it does not seem impossible.

What is the reason for this, and why should it have the de-politicized UFO phenomenon as one of its meaningful centers? First of all, a decline of the public trust is almost the hallmark of contemporary political culture. As Joseph Nye notes, in 1964 three-quarters of the American public said that they trusted the Federal government; today three-quarters don’t trust it (Joseph Nye, et al, eds., Why People Don’t Trust Government, 1997). Doubt extends beyond government to almost all authority—law, business, the media, and science—all are regarded with scepticism. The source for this is not difficult to find—the history of the last 35 years has been dominated by revelations of wrongdoing: Kennedy’s links to the mafia, the

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Vietnam War, Watergate, Three Mile Island, CIA dirty tricks, and secret radiation and germ warfare experiments. But these are all actual conspiracies, and while they, too, have given rise to paranoid speculations such as those of the patriot-militias about the New World Order, they are nevertheless firmly based in the here and now. Why should UFOs have taken a key place in the popular doubt?

There are three interesting reasons. One is that the history of the Cold War gave rise to a national security culture of secrets, of so-called “Black Projects.” Hence the speculations about Roswell, captured alien technology, and secret bases such as Area 51 in Nevada represent a logical continuum in a post-Cold War world.

Secondly, there is a particular component to contemporary UFO imaginings, the so-called “alien abductions.” The scenario that thousands of Americans are being kidnapped and subjected to genetic experimentation is frightening enough, but what is often missed is that the rationale asserted for this is that our genetic essence is being given away in trade by our government in return for alien technology. In a post-Cold War world in which the defining ideology of the United States has evaporated with victory, and been replaced by the entanglements of NAFTA, GATT, and WTO, it is not surprising that such barter can be fearfully imagined. This is particularly true of a fear which simultaneously re-asserts the value of the individual while reducing him or her to a commodity in the global economy, one in which clear distinctions between enemies within and without are lost. It is a fearful possibility to imagine.

Finally, if we are to think of post-Cold War doubt, mistrust, secrets, and the frisson of possibility, then what bigger cover-up might there be, than of the fact that we are not alone?

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