The film is a remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 release, Save the Green Planet!, which delivered a giddy masterclass in slasher comedy. The original featured a bulimic beekeeper on a mission to abduct a pharmaceutical CEO who he believes is an alien from the planet Andromeda, and thus save the world from apocalypse before a band of idiotic cops — led by a detective with a hyperactive sense of smell — can get to him. It’s the kind of wack-cinema in which the wild-eyed protagonist prepares to torture his victim by coating a white-hot, foot-long steel dildo with gobs of lube — that is, utterly off the hook. This sort of macabre just desserts for the 1% was no doubt satisfying to a South Korean audience 20 years ago, embittered by class disparity, and thirsting for some lavish, if elusive, revenge.

In Jooh-hwan’s zany bricolage of dungeons, electrodes and death by killer bees, the cardboard-cutout characters are no more than vehicles for violence against long-standing power imbalances, and to their credit, Lanthimos and Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy were smart enough not to delve too deeply into the psyches of their revamped dramatis personae. These aren’t characters so much as caricatures, each standing for sociological mega-tropes of America’s decline and fall — the corporate CEO, the basement-dwelling extremist, and he who no longer has the capacity to process what the hell is going on. Each seeks to negotiate their way through a senseless world beset by maniacal irrationality.

It’s clear from the remake that comedy has become passé. A farce, even one drenched in buckets of blood, cannot serve as an adequate response to the plague of anxieties in today’s United States — from pharmaceutical poisons and school shootings to the National Guard knocking down doors to arrest housekeepers and hairdressers. The tragic message of the remake is inescapable: the conspiracy theorists have seized the day.

Lanthimos updates Joon-hwan’s characters by switching the gender of Green Planet’s evil CEO. Instead of a pharma bro, we get a pharma babe. Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, graces the cover of Forbes. She knows Michelle Obama and spends a great deal of time perfecting the nuances of her social media feed. She is also dedicated to cardio, which means she can beat the living crap out of any incel with bad intent, even in those black Louboutins.

That doesn’t stop her from being abducted by Teddy, the scuzzy conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemons (aka “Meth Damon” from Breaking Bad) and his cousin and sidekick, the extraordinarily disheveled Aidan Delbis, whose real-life neurodivergence delivers striking pathos. And if there’s any doubt that Michelle is from a galaxy far, far away, our anti-hero Teddy points out her narrow feet, her cuticles, the cute overbite, and the fact that he has discerned “Andromeda code on her Instagram” — a phrase that in and of itself should garner Tracy a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Shorn of her luxurious locks so that she cannot “be tracked” by her allies who are orbiting the earth in their spaceship, as Teddy patiently explains to Donny, Fuller languishes in chains, a gender-switched Samson awaiting the inevitable return of her powers. As Michelle schemes her escape, the losers ride their rusted bikes through the blight of exurbia. As Teddy tells Donny: “No one on earth gives a single fuck about us.” Perhaps they should.

The plot of Bugonia is virtually identical to Save the Green Planet!, which may be because the warped and damaged men of the digital dystopia are really not so different from the warped and damaged males of any age, shape or time, all of whom might relish the sadism of sticking a girlboss like Fuller with a syringe full of sedatives and locking her up in the dark. The only difference between the original and the remake is the absence of that white-hot dildo, for the boys of Bugonia have chemically castrated themselves so as not to be tempted by womanly wiles.

And yet, despite a two-decade-old plot that leans into every horror cliché in the book, Bugonia is very much a film for our time. The popular motif of alien invasion has taken on a new profile since the release of Save the Green Planet!, as the comic contrail-counters have matured into power players. “Doing the research” has transformed into US public policy, with the tin-foil-clad brigade now holding Cabinet-level positions in the Trump administration, advocating against Tylenol and seriously considering whether or not there is any gold at Fort Knox.

Then there is the dialog that lacks the essential give and take of, well, dialog. Even a power-pill plutocrat like Michelle, supremely confident in her ability to sway opinion with endless streams of public relations sophistry, can make no headway against Teddy in the bizarre dinner-table discussion that serves as the intellectual core of film (while Donny squirms in his seat, complaining that he has to pee). Here, it becomes clear that Michelle’s corporate doublespeak and Teddy’s “resistance” gibberish are two sides of the same irrational coin. There is no middle ground, no solution.

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It therefore comes as no surprise that when a handcuffed and bloody Emma Stone eventually inquires, “Can we have a dialog?”, the answer is a straightforward no. Michelle may inform Teddy that his theories have no basis for his truth, that he has lost himself in an internet echo chamber, but it’s all in vain. He simply takes an axe to her knee.

The implications of all this are so unsettling that the film has left the critics desperately trying to evade articulating — or perhaps even contemplating — the obvious point. In their reviews, they earnestly discuss whether the film is about corporate duplicity and greed, or perhaps an allegory of Covid, or a musty rehearsal of Antifa versus tech. That is, anything but America’s descent into irrationality and violence.

Lanthimos has said that before he begins shooting a new film, he makes a habit of re-watching The Red and the White, a Hungarian pièce-de-résistance from 1967, directed by Miklós Jancsó. Banned for many years in the Soviet Union, it delivers a stunning condemnation of the senseless evils of war, as soldier after soldier is lined up and executed, only for the next brigade to arrive, and the shooter himself to be shot. History repeats itself: Hungary in the grips of Soviet Communism, South Korea in the shadow of Kim Jong-Un’s atomic arsenal, and now, the United States in the grips of unreason that has now threatens to undo the very foundations of this country. This is a director who understands the chaos and absurdism of our age.

Of course, it’s clear from the start of Bugonia that skeevy vapers and gamers like Teddy and Donny don’t stand a chance. But as it turns out, neither do the slick CEOs. No homo sapien can escape the mess of being human. When the cosmic joke of the film is eventually revealed, it’s a reminder that not only have Teddy and Donny and Michelle lost the thread, so has everyone else. We can’t blame it on pharmaceuticals, the economy, or the internet. As Teddy has understood, our propensities towards self-destruction are programmed into human psyches. “Your core,” he tells Michelle, “has already been infected.”

It was funny 20 years ago. Today, not so much.

We were in the belly of a Forties-era warship, USS Salem, nicknamed the “Sea Witch”. I had splashed out $53 to see a well-known ghost-hunting group, the Greater Boston Paranormal Associates, in action.

When the time came to initiate contact with the spirits of deceased sailors, we were herded through dark corridors towards the rear of the ship. GBPA cofounder Don DeCristofaro, who had a bushy white beard and walked with a limp, supervised as Lou and the others set up their numerous ghost-hunting gadgets — K2 meters, Paralights, a Static Dome, a cylindrical Rem Pod.

Don and Lou stood in the center of the room.

“Is there anyone here with us?” asked Don.

There was a pregnant pause. Then one of the devices exploded into a spectacular light show, cycling through a quick pattern of red, blue, and green, indicating different electromagnetic frequencies — and therefore, according to the modern ghost-hunting canon, the presence of a ghost.

“Is that you, Chief?” asked Don. Again, the device responded with a light show.

Beeeeeyeeeep.

This was my introduction to the world of paratourism — once, a fringe scene; now, a highly commercialized industry. Before TV shows popularized ghost hunting, the money was negligible. But things have changed, and quickly, according to Amelia Childs Schwartzman, who used to run a haunted vegan crepe restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (By which I mean the restaurant was haunted. The crepes were fine.) The ghost-hunting landscape is highly competitive, she tells me, with authors, TikTok influencers, tour hosts, hoteliers, and barkeepers all trying to build their audiences. “There’s a lot of ego involved. You want to be billed as a big name.”

“It’s not just something stoners in high school would do, breaking into an abandoned building to try to find a ghost,” Childs Schwartzman adds. “There’s high end, specialized equipment. The financial cost can get really high. You get really into it.”

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No one knows the true worth of the entire paranormal industry — mediums, ghost-hunting gadgets, books and all — though some suggest it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise in America alone. What we do know is that tens of millions of Americans spend more than $300 million annually to visit haunted sites. There’s currently a waiting list for people to pay $380 to visit Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden murdered her parents with an axe in 1892. Tourists can even sleep in her room. “The money behind ghost hunting is growing,” explains Dr Michele Hanks, a New York University anthropologist.

In a vast unregulated landscape, any ghost-hunting yahoo can claim that a site is haunted, which means it’s a great money-spinner for struggling towns. Civic leaders in Waco, Texas, crafted an economic development plan to breathe new life into a sagging neighborhood. The centerpiece of the plan was turning an old bottling plant into the Dr Pepper Museum, which would allow visitors to interact with the spirits of bottlers past. And soon enough, to boost its value, it declared itself officially haunted.

But there’s a dark side: not the ghouls, but the sensationalism of local history. One particularly troubling example of this can be found in the former slaver states of the American South, where financially struggling plantations increasingly rely on funds from ghost tours. In order to attract tourists, the plantations spin lurid tales that hinge on the misery of enslaved people. However, as MacArthur Fellow Tiya Miles found in researching her book, Tales from the Haunted South, many of the stories told are either grossly inaccurate, or wholly made up, often portraying the slave owners in far too sympathetic a light. In thousands of tourist spots all over America, history is being rewritten — for profit.

Yet for many, ghosts are more than just valuable assets. Surveys suggest that nearly two thirds of Americans hold supernatural beliefs, and my fellow tourists on the USS Salem seemed to run the gamut, ranging from the secretly skeptical, to the open-minded and curious, to the heavily attuned. I overheard one young woman talking to her boyfriend about a tightness in her chest. “I love this stuff, but at the same time, sometimes I hate what it does to me,” she told him. I struck up a conversation with her. She was 22, and had been in a nine-year relationship with a child ghost who was perpetually five years old. She told me that her boyfriend was fine with her spiritual sensitivity. “He knew that I could see dead people when we started going out, and he said it didn’t matter.” Her boyfriend didn’t respond.

Then there were the ghost-hunters themselves, members of the GBPA, who I became convinced were acting in good faith. When it came to interacting with the spirits aboard the ship — a soap-opera-style conversation about which spirit had previously scratched Zach, a young paratourist — things were too disorganized and too spontaneous to be carefully choreographed. If they were playacting, it was world class.

Besides, the rise of paratourism is part of a wider nationwide trend. Homegrown experts in ghost hunting and other paranormal pursuits — mediums, energy healers, cryptozoologists and UFOlogists, among others — have attained new levels of prominence and power in the United States over the last 20 years, buoyed by a surge in public interest in supernatural phenomena.

There are several reasons for this development. The emergence of bias-affirming digital information bubbles is one; another is the rise of political instability. The annual Chapman University survey of American fears found that paranormal beliefs of all sorts spiked in the years following Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Between 2016 and 2018, Americans became approximately 10 percentage points more likely to believe that aliens have visited the Earth in modern times; 7 percentage points more likely to believe in Bigfoot; and 11 percentage points more likely to believe in haunted houses. Christopher Bader, the author of the study, put this down to a shift in the nature of trust, with faith in individual experience replacing faith in institutions.

This heralds a dramatic sea change in the way Americans think about traditional power structures. Already distrust is corroding institutions: the underutilization of science-based medicine in America’s rural areas, for instance, contributed to the closure of 136 hospitals between 2010 and 2021. And a devaluing of higher education has contributed to the closure of thousands of campuses. Now, a distrustful public has re-elected Donald Trump, a man who in 2017 attempted to appoint a ghost hunter as a federal judge. The President has since escalated his war on science and expertise by pledging a wholesale dismantling of government agencies, as well as academic and science research institutions and journals. He has purged scientists from the Federal payroll, cut the budgets of science-directed agencies, and throttled the funding from vital research projects. And he’s being cheered on by Americans who have completely rejected the value of science and see Trump as the heroic disruptor of a corrupt system.

The role that the paranormal plays in this is under-appreciated. Those who believe they have encountered a spirit are faced with a mystery: why does the scientific establishment dismiss the existence of something that seems self-evident to a majority of Americans? The common assumption is that science is either a poor tool to understand the universe, or that mainstream scientists are engaged in a massive cover-up. This sets the stage for various conspiracy theories; one poll showed that the percentage of New Hampshire residents who trust the Federal government is slightly less than the percentage of Americans who think their government is run by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

The danger is that American institutions cannot survive this era of widespread disbelief. They’ve kicked too many people out of the tent. And they can’t simply debunk their way out of this crisis. Unless they take imaginative steps to rebuild public trust, science may become just another disembodied voice haunting the minds of a credulous public.

***

This is an edited excerpt from Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s latest book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science.

In other words: the universe has been around for some time, and is a very big place. Human life has only existed for a fraction of that time, and only on one planet. Given the vastness of time and space, then, it seems more than likely that we’re not the only intelligent beings in the universe. So why haven’t we found any evidence of others? This question has led some to conclude that extra-terrestrial intelligent life doesn’t exist, and others to speculate — as in the long-running sci-fi show The X Files — that aliens do exist, but that their existence is covered up by mysterious government agencies.

Recently, The X Files seems to have escaped into real life. US Congress was reported last week to have received a secret briefing on UFOs — or, as they are known these days, UAPs: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. This follows revelations last year from David Grusch, a former US Intelligence official turned whistleblower, who alleged that the USA is in possession of “partially intact” alien vehicles and other evidence of extra-terrestrial life.

According to Grusch, governments have, since 1945, been engaged in a sub rosa technological race to reverse engineer alien technology. In the wake of the media storm this caused, pressure has mounted on US authorities to reveal the truth. What, then, is going on? Are aliens trying to make contact? If not, why are they creeping into the public consciousness now?

I suspect the truth may be less “out there” than in here. That is, the phenomena we have for some time called “aliens” were always real, and what’s changing is our shared relationship to reality. When I suggest “the aliens were always real”, I don’t mean little green men in spaceships. I mean that the world has always been stranger than the dominant Enlightenment-style scientific paradigm allows.

The scientists and researchers of the Age of Reason, which began with Francis Bacon and reached its high point in the 19th century, imagined the universe as a kind of giant clockwork mechanism. Its inner workings could, they postulated, be made intelligible, if dismantled and analysed. But as it turned out, once you dismantle things to the smallest possible level, it all goes weird.

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Since splitting the atom, theoretical physics has got progressively less intelligible, and more — to laypeople, at least — mystical-sounding: an arcane place of multiple parallel dimensions, space-collapsing quantum entanglement, and things that aren’t real until they are measured. I don’t pretend to grasp any of these concepts at any level beyond pop-science. But the aggregate takeaway, for the casual observer, is surely that the fabric of reality is much more mysterious than Newton or Descartes imagined.

Given that actual physicists largely abandoned Newtonian physics a long time ago, perhaps this shouldn’t be shocking. But despite these (albeit not widely understood) scientific advances, Fermi’s question remains unanswered. Where is everybody? Why haven’t we encountered other intelligent life?

But here, the most obvious answer is surely: we have. We’re just looking at it wrongly. If, as some theoretical physicists now argue, there are not four dimensions but at least 10, that’s six we can’t perceive directly, but that might well be populated by intelligent life of some kind unimaginable within our familiar dimensions.

Should such hypothetical entities ever intrude into the human field of perception, you’d expect us to struggle to make sense of the experience. You’d also expect such an encounter to be interpreted in whichever terms give the best account of it, according to the perceiver’s culture and mental framework — interpretations that would vary a great deal over time. In other words: what if “aliens” is simply one of many conceptual frameworks humans have adopted, over time, to talk about encounters that happen too frequently to be dismissed as delusion, but that are too strange to be explained away in terms of everyday life?

Such encounters recur throughout recorded history: an Egyptian stele from 1450BC, for example, describes a “star” that “shot” at the enemies of Thutmose III. The Roman historian Livy recounts “phantom ships gleaming in the sky” during the Second Punic War in 218BC. And in 1566, citizens of Basel reported “celestial phenomena” overhead, as black and red balls “fought” in front of the rising sun. But Livy glosses these as religious experiences — as does the 1566 pamphlet about the Basel incidents, which enjoins readers to pray for divine assistance against the Turks.

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Even relatively modern strange encounters are more likely to be interpreted in mystical or religious terms, when experienced by those outside secular, Anglophone scientific culture. This is evident from the testimonies assembled by the artist Susan Hiller for Witness, a 2000 installation that compiled accounts of UFO sightings from around the world. A priest from Puerto Rico, for example, describes repeated encounters with nonhuman beings who “explain complicated ideas of space and time”. He asserts that “teachers of Light came to our planet from other planets, from other systems, even from other galaxies and realms known to us as the non-physical or supernatural realms of existence”. An Indian teacher explains a strange encounter with a glowing, airborne object as simply one of many mysterious happenings, in a place sacred to the 15th-century Bengali saint Mahaprabhu.

From this perspective, it would make sense that accounts of alien encounters seem to have intensified as religious faith has waned: a map showing UFO reports over time shows their prevalence rising over the 20th century, and clustering most strongly in the secular Anglosphere. And while we could just interpret this as meaning that Anglophone cultures are peculiarly susceptible to delusion, if we entertain even hypothetically the possibility that at least some of these reports were genuine encounters with something, there are two obvious alternative readings. One: that aliens are for some reason especially partial to British and American people; or, two, that British and American people lack any framework other than “aliens” to make sense of otherworldly encounters.

If this were all true, and government agencies know it, that would suggest the real X Files cover-up is not of aliens as such, but a broader and more disorienting insight: how much stranger the world really is than in the official narrative. But why hide this? Perhaps there are good practical reasons, not least that we’ve built an immensely complex and high-tech civilisation upon technologies premised on a mechanistic view of the universe; if that clockwork model is at best an over-simplification, if not outright false, what would happen if everyone knew? Could the masses still be relied upon to act as though the dead, mechanistic universe is all there is? And if not, would we still be able to keep the lights on? If there were even the faintest possibility that the answer to this is “no”, I can perhaps understand why leaders might deem it in the public interest to contain the truth.

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And if that truth seems recently to be leaking out, I suspect this is because our faith in the mechanistic nature of the universe is now very visibly slipping, UFOs or no UFOs. We are demonstrably losing interest in the world of atoms. Public debate is fracturing, online, into competing and often only tenuously reality-based filter bubbles; conspiracies flourish; there’s been a genuine resurgence in flat-Earth theories. In brief, no one views facts or logic as slam-dunk debate-enders anymore. “Lived experience” and “personal truth” trump statistics, which in any case are viewed (often accurately) as merely another tool for politicised storytelling. Even matters once simply deemed simply self-evident, such as human sexual dimorphism, have receded in importance relative to the push and pull of competing moral narratives.

And if mass public debate has come unmoored from the material, so too has leadership. It’s hard to think of more concrete evidence than the top-down imposition of policies predicated on a belief that inner identity takes precedence over sexed physiology. Yet this shift manifests well beyond identity politics. Leaders across the political spectrum grandstand on the moral issue of the day while announcing new policies half of which never exist beyond the press release, all while salami-slicing basic, real-world services such as bin collection and road maintenance.

Meanwhile, if complex systems such as air traffic control appear to be seizing up in a concatenating competence crisis, this is not, as recent discourse has averred, the fault of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures — or not exactly. Rather, the shift away from hiring practices based on merit and competence, in favour of those based on supposed moral attributes, is an effect of our leaders losing interest in the material world. It’s only because of this that hiring criteria irrelevant to competence are able to creep in at all. You could apply a completely different set of moral attributes to air traffic control recruitment, that had nothing to do with race, gender and so on, and the result would be just as deleterious compared to competence-based hiring.

What, then, are these sunlit esoteric uplands, for which so many now seem willing to exchange the previous era’s scientific and technological achievements? What, or who, if anything, has been visiting us while Fermi wasn’t looking? “I want to believe so badly in a truth beyond our own,” says Fox Mulder, in the X Files episode that spawned the famous slogan. Our collective turning-away from the world of atoms, and the complex systems we built there, suggests that we do, as well.

But no one from the Congress briefing seems willing to spill the beans. Perhaps the fear is that the truth really is too uncanny to be assimilated, in a public conversation already fractiously weird. Or the hope is that, for as long as the rest of us remain in the dark, we may be able to keep the lights of the Enlightenment on a little longer.

The first reason for scepticism is, simply, the tremendous distance involved in any voyage from even the nearest habitable exoplanet (Proxima Centauri, about 4.25 light-years away). If such a distance can be traversed, this is almost certainly not going to happen by a means of transportation that bears any resemblance, or evolutionary connection, to the horse-cart or the school bus, as our own space shuttles still do, and as virtually all reported UFO descriptions do as well. It would simply not be fit for interstellar travel.

Even if these UFOs are often said to be operating according to mechanical principles we do not yet understand — veering off suddenly in a different direction with no apparent acceleration period, for example — they remain conventional vehicles, containers built to transport the living bodies inside them. But when it comes to traversing distances measured in light-years, it is vastly more likely that any intelligent beings that figure out how to do so will not be relying on vehicular motion as we understand it, but on the exploitation of some physical principle, such as wormholes, or some information-theoretical principle, such as one that allows them to dematerialise the unique patterns that constitute their identity, and to “beam” them across galaxies for rematerialisation elsewhere. If there are aliens among us, in short, they almost certainly didn’t come here in spaceships.

And whether they come through wormholes, or teletransportation, or some other means, it is most probable that what will count for them as “arrival” will not be an arrival in an organically embodied form. Indeed, the idea that alien visitors would come in biological bodies such as ours is, I contend, even less plausible than that they would come in artificial contraptions. Organic substrates, as the philosopher and xenobiologist Susan Schneider has argued, may well turn out to be a relatively short-lived host for intelligence whenever and wherever it emerges in the universe, soon to be replaced, wherever a technologically advanced species appears in the cosmos, by robots.

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If intelligent beings are smart enough to get here, they are almost certainly smart enough to get here without dragging their bodies along. They could get around this hitch by transferring their consciousness or personal identity (whatever that is) into some more durable physical substrate — either a technological device of their own making, or, more intriguingly, a pre-existing physical system or process in the universe into which they figure out how to integrate themselves. To be clear, I have no clue how this would work. But neither you nor I have any idea how you could sit your living body down and fly a school-bus-like shuttle across interstellar distances — so the modal operator at work in both cases is not concrete feasibility, but only conceptual possibility.

Our alien visitors could also pull off such an impressive feat simply by means of what we, with our limited technological imagination, would classify as “simulations”. For us, when a high-powered telescope or an unmanned probe sends back images of objects in space, we consider that we are “seeing” and “experiencing” these objects only in a downgraded better-than-nothing sense, as mediated representations. But this may only be because our technologies of representation are still in a primitive stage, while another race of intelligent beings might well succeed in improving these technologies to the point where technologically mediated representation might count for them as “the real thing”. It might be both easier and more desirable for them to avail themselves of such representations than physically to travel and to experience that thing unmediated in a way that we ourselves, in our present technological condition, would consider “real”.

To imagine that one must go to another part of the universe, in one’s own organic body, in order to truthfully claim that one has been there, may turn out to be somewhat like supposing, circa 1920, that in order to participate in a conference with colleagues in Paris, one must actually go to Paris, rather than joining them by Zoom — a possibility that would only come onto the horizon a century or so later.

But let us suppose just for a moment that alien beings did set themselves the goal of making an “actual” voyage to Earth in their standard-issue, carbon-based, biologically evolved bodies. And let us suppose they succeeded. What might these bodies look like? There are at least some compelling arguments that any technologically advanced race of beings is likely to share certain anatomical traits with us: appendages that grasp, for example, or adaptations facilitating gravity-bound terrestrial locomotion. I have even heard it argued that space-travelling aliens would probably be equipped with exactly two eyes, and as with us, these would be found in the front of their faces, facilitating binocular vision.

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We know from convergent evolution in widely different phylogenies on Earth that different species can come to have similar appearances (e.g., placental wolves in the northern hemisphere and marsupial “wolves” in Australia), and in principle, it is possible that xenobiological evolution could yield up bipedal, two-handed beings with eyes in the front of their heads. But wolves and “wolves” started from a common mammalian ancestor, and what you could not expect to find in any interstellar convergence of organic Baupläne is a being such as the one purportedly discovered of late in Mexico, which clearly has not just hands, feet, and a face, but also a ribcage, a spinal column, and an unmistakable pelvis. On Earth only about 3% of all animal species are vertebrates; how strange it would be if our first extraterrestrial visitors turned out to be vertebrates too!

But the really interesting question is why, in the first place, we started thinking about the beings that inhabit the world “up there” (call it the heavens, or the celestial spheres, or outer space, according to the conventions of your era) as similar to us in their bodily conformation, which is to say as organic beings.

This habit of ours has a very precise starting point in history. We could probably find some earlier examples if we tried, but I tend to date the birth of aliens, as we know them today, to 1609, the year Johannes Kepler wrote his Somnium (which would only be published posthumously in 1634). This is a peculiar work, both a proto-science-fiction reverie, as the Latin title suggests, and a work of properly modern relativistic astronomy, in which the author attempts to describe how the orbits of the other celestial bodies would appear if one were observing them from the moon. In the dream-like part of the work, Kepler relates the story not only of the transit of his hero Duracotus to our nearest satellite (evidently with the assistance of some psychoactive plants), but also the various animal-like beings he finds once he arrives there, including some creeping and slithering reptiles, and some sort of giant camel. Some decades later, in his Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil of 1662, the French author Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac would describe the different species of birds that inhabit the surface of the sun.

Why are we beginning to find birds, snakes, and camels in a region of the cosmos where previously we could have expected to find only spirituous beings, divinities, and angels? During this same period, natural philosophers such as René Descartes and G.W. Leibniz were intent on arguing for the uniformity of nature. The new mechanical philosophy required its adherents to accept the principle that, as Leibniz would put it: “Always and everywhere, it’s the same as it is here.”

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For Descartes, it made no sense to divide the cosmos into different ontological realms, as the Aristotelians had previously done, where different laws apply to each. On the Aristotelian model, the most significant boundary in the physical universe is the one traced by the orbit of the moon: everything below it is a “sublunar” being, subject to generation and corruption (i.e. birth and death), while everything above it is immortal. In the new Cartesian physics, by contrast, the laws that govern the motions of bodies here on Earth, from the arc of a projectile shot from a cannon, to the rising and lowering of the tides, to the generation of a foetus, are exactly the same as the laws that govern the formation of other star systems, and presumably also of the planets and of the beings inhabiting them.

In other words, the key theoretical innovations of the scientific revolution positively require that, if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they are like us. Specifically, this would mean that they depend for their existence not on some fine homogeneous ether or quintessence (as the celestial beings were often conceived in premodern cosmology), but rather on a specific arrangement of internal organs constituting a fragile and perishable organic body. In short, the homogenisation of the physical universe, which had been such a key part of the new mechanical physics, caused a corollary reconceptualisation of the inhabitants of the world “up there”, from quasi-divine beings that were either immaterial or ethereal, to ordinary reptiles or humanoids such as those that have remained the staples of science fiction, and of tabloid claims of alien sightings, to the present day.

Nearly all the great Enlightenment philosophers presupposed that other worlds must be inhabited by organically embodied intelligent beings like us. Thus Immanuel Kant declares in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781: “I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life), that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.” Kant’s sometimes-adversary, the significantly less rigorous Emanuel Swedenborg, wrote extensively of his own purported voyages to Jupiter and Saturn, where he learned a great deal about the inhabitants’ agricultural methods, the techniques they employ for yoking their beasts of burden, and so on. For more than 200 years, for serious and unhinged thinkers alike, outer space was teeming with a very familiar variety of life, not so different from the sort we know here on Earth.

By the late 19th century, just at the dawn of the era of rocket science, with actual space exploration finally within reach (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would publish his “ideal rocket equation” in 1903), institutional science entered a sort of “alien winter”. I deploy this term in conscious allusion to the “consciousness winter” that hung over brain science for the better part of a century, scaring researchers away from any acknowledgement of the self-evident reality of internal subjective states of the mind.

In the same fashion, for most of the 20th century — notwithstanding Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm and the small budgets allocated for programmes like SETI — sober-minded experts placed a high premium on the public expression of scepticism about non-terrestrial intelligent life. Naysaying became part of the system of values and presuppositions by which the public identity of an expert was confirmed. In the same period, preoccupation with aliens mostly became the monopoly of fantasists of various sorts, either the creators of fictional entertainments or people who were unbothered by the social stigma of holding beliefs perceived to be “fringe”.

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Why exactly this “winter” set in when it did has much to do with the broader cultural history of science and of the perception of expertise, and indeed seems not entirely separate from the long banishment of consciousness as a category of inquiry. Throughout the 20th century, for the most part, excessive interest in extraterrestrials was the telltale mark of a crank. This attitude had much to do with the reigning positivism of the scientific community, and the general consensus that speculation about things happening beyond the sphere of direct observability is ipso facto unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

But this era has decidedly come to an end in the past decade or so, as vast social, economic, and technological transformations have fundamentally realigned the public’s perception of expertise, and of who gets to claim to have it. After the crisis of epistemic authority that experts brought upon themselves throughout the Covid pandemic, and after the replacement of our old media ecosystem by one in which authoritativeness has become more than ever a sort of popularity contest, we are now in a period of history in which extraterrestrials are important if the masses of internet users think they are important, scientific consensus be damned. Under these conditions, the 20th century’s “alien winter” comes to look to many like a government cover-up. The truth is far more banal.

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically in the 21st century, both as a result of changes in the cultural position of science, but also as a result of real and promising scientific breakthroughs. Notably, since the Nineties, there has been a tremendous revolution in the way we observe, catalogue, and estimate the number of habitable exoplanets, and significant discoveries have also been made in astrochemistry, favouring the theory of so-called “soft panspermia”, according to which the chemical compounds that brought about the first life-forms on earth are by no means rare in the cosmos. Given these scientific advances, and given our new information ecosystem, it is safe to say that we will be hearing a lot more about aliens in the coming years. But we would be foolish to believe that this is the result of an actual uptick in sightings, or that our own most recent cultural representations of intelligent life beyond Earth get something uniquely right about the heavens that our ancestors failed to notice.

If there is an infinity of universes, as some scientists speculate, the cosmos may contain an infinite number of Russell Brands. It follows that if there is a God, he must surely be a malevolent one. There is, however, an upside to this nightmare. Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.

Doubling has its comic aspects. If a monstrously fat man in pink tights and a sombrero crosses a stage, and a moment later another monstrously fat, similarly dressed man does the same, the audience are likely to laugh. In Freudian terms, they can avoid the mental labour of coping with difference, and by economising on psychical energy in this way they can release it in the form of laughter. Most humour involves a sense of incongruity, and in this case, ironically, it is sameness which is incongruous in the sense of out of step with the way things usually are.

If this were to happen in real life, however, it would probably be more eerie than funny. I was once on a flight to Sydney, waiting for the aircraft to take off, when an enormously tall Japanese man, not a common sight, entered the plane. He was followed almost immediately by another Japanese man well over six foot tall, and he by another, and so on until fifteen or so of them had lumbered down the aisle. This was pretty spooky until I discovered that it was the Japanese basketball team en route to the Australian Olympics.

Pure repetition is unnerving. Exact identities don’t happen in everyday life, which is why Nietzsche thought that words such as “leaf” were fictional because they implied that all leaves are the same. It’s also why identical twins have a sacred status in some cultures, “sacred” meaning both blessed and cursed. The fact that the alien children in John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos all look the same is part of what makes them so sinister. We are speaking of the uncanny, which means something both strange and familiar — familiar because it’s exactly like something else we know, but strange because this repetition is creepy.

One reason we enjoy rhythms and rhymes is that they combine difference and repetition, thus avoiding a monotonous thud on the one hand and a disorientating diversity on the other. “Baa baa black sheep” is fine, but “Baa baa black bull” has a surfeit of sameness. Pure identity is tedious, while pure difference would be unintelligible. Hell is traditionally thought to be less agonising than boring. It has the eternal sameness of shit.

It’s much the same with aliens, who are never very alien. They may have weird eyes, but at least they have eyes. If they were entirely different from us it’s hard to know how we could be aware of them. Perhaps a couple of them are sitting in your lap right now. Aliens may be tiny and greenish and stink of sulphur, but otherwise they look much like Jonathan Ross. More to the point, they bear a remarkable resemblance to both William Hague and Dominic Cummings. In fact, there are people for whom aliens, who touch down on Earth occasionally, are the only acceptable kind of immigrants, given that they presumably don’t intend to take our jobs, houses, primary school places or PhDs.

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An interplay of sameness and difference can be found everywhere you look these days, and its technical name is narcissism. To be besotted with yourself is clearly an example of sameness or self-identity, but it also involves treating yourself as though you were someone else, and thus a degree of difference or self-alienation. You treat yourself and your body with exquisite care, as though you were carrying a precious but sickeningly fragile vase in your hands. Putting items in this brittle container, an activity traditionally known as eating, is a particularly fraught affair. There has probably been no civilisation for which food was simply food, but it’s rare to find one like our own where it’s scarcely food at all but invasion, potential poison, crime against non-humanity (eating meat), moral blackmail, emotional manipulation or a slavish surrender to patriarchal demands.

The opposite of treating yourself as Other is treating the Other as oneself. In ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate other is the monster, some deformed creature which civilisation needs to shut out in order to preserve its sanity and stability. The monster in Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus seems to be the Sphinx, but in the end it turns out to be the blinded, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus himself, the king who is driven out of society and reduced to a homeless beggar. Shakespeare’s Lear is a later version of this tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, it is the hideous Furies who threaten to subvert social order, while in Euripides’s Bacchae it is the god of orgies and erotic love, Dionysus.

In all these cases, society can only survive if it has the courage to recognise something of itself in the monstrous Other which confronts it. It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released. The social order must recognise that its stability rests on the violent repression of these life-giving, death-dealing forces; only then can it be truly secure. When you meet your double, so legend has it, you die; but it might also be the occasion for a transformed existence.

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary; and if Wolf reads the work, as of course she will, and runs into Klein with a knife conveniently to hand, one fears that the legend might turn out to be true. Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism, while Wolf was once a liberal feminist and darling of the Democrats who groomed Al Gore in how to give a convincing imitation of a human being.

She is now a conspiracy theorist who has a cavalier way with the facts, has compared Barack Obama to Hitler and thinks that people who are vaccinated against Covid don’t really feel human. She appears regularly on podcasts with Steve Bannon, who is said to have expressed disapproval of his children going to school with Jews (Wolf is Jewish). One of the two Naomis, then, embraces a paranoid form of politics, while the other does not. As Samuel Beckett remarked of one of the two thieves on Calvary being saved, it’s a reasonable percentage.

Nobody’s afraid of Naomi Wolf, but what she stands for these days is deeply alarming. The real Naomi, i.e. Klein, is regularly confused with the unreal Naomi, i.e. Wolf, and her book is among other things an exorcising of this embarrassment. A similar situation used to exist in Britain, where there was a real Stuart Hall, a Left-wing cultural theorist from Jamaica, and an unreal Stuart Hall, a slick TV performer and fawner on royalty who ended up in prison.

Why do so many conspiracy theories originate in the United States? One answer lies in the vast size of the place. This means that Americans are accustomed to a fair amount of personal space, and are particularly sensitive about that space being “invaded”. An American might say “Excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the citizens of Beijing. Smoking is taboo not only because it can kill you, but because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one hygienically sealed body and another. The model of human contact is infection. Rather as smoke becomes invisible but remains all-pervasive, these apparently separate bodies are caught up in some terrifying web of secret powers, and thus by no means as free and autonomous as they think.

Conspiracy theorists, for whom (like the paranoid) nothing happens by accident, are out to give a name to this system, whether you call it the political state or the work of a bunch of paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy. In doing so, you have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent, so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame.

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You can also combat the sealed-off bodies syndrome with new forms of bonding and brotherhood like the Proud Boys. When a pandemic breaks out in this situation, it isn’t the virus which a lot of citizens regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipresent, but the state which seeks to protect them from it. At a time when bodies need to be hygienically sealed off from each other in order to survive, they cast off their masks, demand liberty or death and sometimes end up with both. They insist on the right to breathe together, which is the literal meaning of the word “conspiracy”.

In Dostoevesky’s chilling tale The Double, a timorous clerk called Golaydkin is persecuted by a smirking, malicious doppelganger whom he finally kisses in a despairing attempt at reconciliation. In doing so, however, he merely seals his doom, as he is driven away in a coach by a fearful coachman who is no less than Death itself. The real Golyadkin is destroyed by his phantom double.

No observer of the current American scene can doubt that this may happen there too. The Left, after all, is accustomed to defeat: our adversaries have more tanks than we do, not to speak of a lot more money and control of the means by which they can propagate their lies. What the big bad Wolf represents may trump what the real Naomi stands for in every sense of the word. But Klein has one monumental advantage: what she says, give or take a bit, is true. So you must either prove her wrong or create a world in which truth doesn’t matter anyway. That project is already far advanced.

Most professional commentators are far more interested in the question of whether a US government department has been lying to congress than in whether aliens actually exist. In a recent column, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat questioned the credibility of a long-standing conspiracy, noting that the scope and depth of the secrets involved would be too vast to withhold. For most online commentators, meanwhile, this congressional hearing is simply entertainment. Even if either camp thinks it’s proper that the US government is looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life, neither seems inclined to ask: what if they find it? Those who ask “are there aliens?” rarely seem to ask “so what if there are aliens?”.

It’s easy to see why we might not take seriously the idea that alien spacecraft have crashed on Earth, not least because the Pentagon released its much-hyped and long-awaited report on UFOs last year, maintaining that there is no definitive evidence that aliens have set foot here. But if a government department really has been withholding information, we might question the validity of that report. Still, even the late-night radio hosts who speculate about various alien species — “grays”, “reptilians”  — are more interested in the question of whether aliens exist than how we should react if they do. Should we make plans? Should we think about it in the same way as, say, the possible deceleration of the pivotal North Atlantic current system that shapes our global climate? Should we be scared?

Unlike climate change, the possibility of an alien apocalypse doesn’t seem to inspire much fear. Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds caused a minor stir — nothing like the nationwide panic that some would later claim — and Ray Santilli’s 1995 film allegedly depicting an autopsy of an alien from the infamous 1947 Roswell crash invoked curiosity but was also debunked. Indeed, the ways in which our culture has imagined aliens are more likely to reveal human anxieties than genuine curiosity about what might exist beyond Earth. Popular dramas such as The X-Files, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival often revolve around conspiracies or hoaxes of human origin — until the revelation of extraterrestrial life serves as a deus ex machina, subsequently obscured or left unexplained.

These narratives are often less about the aliens themselves and more about illuminating societal fears, challenging authority and questioning institutional integrity. Even Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris — perhaps the most “realistic” depiction of humans reacting to an unusual planetary life form — doesn’t examine the long-term implications of our global society merging with that of another species. Introspection is easier than imagining something totally unprecedented.

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The trouble is, the more knowledgeable we’ve become as a species, the less humble we’ve become about our ignorance. We too often assume that things we haven’t yet found don’t exist, and don’t take seriously the alternative. Here, we might benefit from emulating the wisdom of Epicurean philosophers. Democritus, and Epicurus himself, considered the existence and even the potential habitation of other worlds a likely outcome of the random collision of the atoms that they believed had formed the universe. Metrodorus of Lampsacus, a disciple of Epicurus, compared the idea of our world being the only one to “a single ear of wheat growing on a vast plain“, emphasising the unlikelihood of such a scenario. And the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius proclaimed: “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beasts.” Even though these ancient philosophers brought forth the concept of other worlds, they too did not directly grapple with the “so what?” aspect of the idea. Their wisdom primarily lay in recognising the limitlessness of the universe, acknowledging rather than truly grappling with the existence of the unknown.  

However, then as now, such claims failed to shake the foundations of the dominant philosophy. Unlike the Epicureans, Aristotle and his followers were fundamentally empirical in their approach, focusing on what could be observed, studied and understood through our senses. One of Aristotle’s central doctrines was the principle of noncontradiction; the existence of multiple worlds, especially inhabited ones, would have introduced paradoxes and ambiguities that his philosophy was not prepared to accept. Today, our natural inclinations lead us towards the Aristotelian perspective. We gravitate to the observable, the testable and the verifiable. Perhaps this is a constant throughout history, though — an immutable human instinct: this near-inability to engage with the truly abstract and unobservable, the preference to focus on the immediate and tangible.

It was not Christianity that robbed us of our humility in the face of other worlds. Whereas now, belief in aliens’ existence is seen as fringe, it used to be expostulated by the most elite thinkers, who were usually theological authorities. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and the French priest Jean Buridan in the 14th century both addressed the potential existence of other worlds, suggesting that denying their existence would limit the omnipotence of God. Giordano Bruno, an Italian Dominican Friar in the 16th century, further expanded on this idea in a somewhat heretical vein, stating, “I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the earth… half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions.”

In recent years, high-ranking members of the Catholic Church, including the directors of the Vatican Observatory, have grappled with the theological implications of extraterrestrial life, questioning how the concepts of sin and redemption would apply to them. In this, they are perhaps more prepared for the arrival of UFOs than most governments. Pope Francis has even stated that space aliens could seek baptism — a benevolent thought, to be sure, but an anthropocentric one. Human theology won’t neatly adapt to beings that are out of this world.

So, the concept of extraterrestrial life brings us face-to-face with an immense intellectual challenge. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s famous proof of God’s existence — the concept of a being “of which nothing greater can be thought” — has its bounds tied to human thought. What if these extraterrestrials exist in a realm that is beyond our cognitive reach, a realm where our laws of physics and logic hold no sway? Extraterrestrial life, should it exist, may be so fundamentally different from our life on Earth that we might not even recognise it as “life” at all. We may not be sure if it appears among us.

There is also a practical question to consider: would we even be able to interact meaningfully with extraterrestrial life? Would it even be possible to communicate with them? There might be no shared basis for understanding — a possibility that Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Tarkovsky considered in their presentation of the sentient planet in Solaris. The living place interacts with human explorers by materialising their memories and deepest psychology, creating “visitors”. These ineffable interactions are barely understood by humans, representing a form of communication so alien to our ways of knowing that it remains ultimately inexplicable.

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The appearance of UFOs or the confirmed existence of extraterrestrial life would likely push us into uncharted cognitive territory. Or, these beings could exist on such a scale and in such a manner that it might be completely incomprehensible to us — we couldn’t alter our worldviews because we wouldn’t even begin to know where to start.

Maybe that’s why, when we think about aliens, we think about hoaxes, created by humans, or stories of alien invasions, more often than not about human failure. Maybe that’s why it’s funny, listening to extraterrestrial life being forced into the technical, administrative language of the US government. Maybe the sheer abstraction and complexity of extraterrestrial life exceeds our cognitive abilities.

For now, we humour David Grusch, as he expostulates about a massive UFO cover-up — because we don’t know how to answer the question of: If he’s right, what then?

In an interview with Florence Read, he explains his theory of the objects’ origin, why they were sent here, and how we should interact with aliens if we find them.

Florence Read: When was the first unidentified interstellar object detected in our solar system?

Professor Avi Loeb: It was spotted in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii. It was given the name ‘Oumuamua, which means “the scout”. And at first, of course, everyone thought it was a rock from another star that just happened to pass by.

The more we learned about it, the more it looked weird. It was tumbling every eight hours and the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of ten as it was tumbling. So that meant that it had a very extreme shape. The best fit for the variation of reflected sunlight was that of a flat object, pancake-like, which is quite unusual.

And then, this object didn’t show any cometary tail — there was no evaporation from it visible — yet it exhibited an excess push away from the sun, by some mysterious force. I suggested that since the force is not the rocket effect of evaporating gases, it could be being pushed by the reflection of sunlight. But for that to be the case, the object had to be very thin, sort of like a sail being pushed by light. And, of course, if it happens to be that way, then it could be artificial in origin.

Nature doesn’t make sails that are propelled by reflecting light. In fact, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another object which exhibited the same qualities as ‘Oumuamua: it was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight, and had no cometary tail. And within a few weeks, the astronomers realised it was actually a rocket booster that was launched in 1966 by NASA, as part of a lunar lander mission. It was made of stainless steel, so it didn’t evaporate. It had thin walls, and that’s why it was pushed away by reflecting sunlight. Here’s an example of an object we know is artificial, because we made it. The question is: who made ‘Oumuamua?

FR: And your answer was: potentially extraterrestrial life?

AL: It’s a possibility. We don’t have conclusive evidence. My book, Extraterrestrial, describes the anomalies of ‘Oumuamua. But it didn’t come close enough to Earth for our telescopes and even radars to resolve it. We don’t know what, exactly, it looks like.

About a year and a half ago, I established the Galileo Project. One of the goals is to design a space mission that will come close to the next ‘Oumuamua. We have a “dating app” — the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile — that will start operations within a year. It has a camera of 3.2 billion pixels, 1,000 times as many pixels than you have in your cell phone. It will survey the southern sky every four days, and has a good chance of finding more objects like ‘Oumuamua. We can review them, and swipe most of them to the left on this “dating app” — but if we decide that one of them looks like ‘Oumuamua, we might come close to it and take a close-up photograph. And if we see that it’s a rock, so be it — but it could also show some bolts and screws on its surface, and even a label, made on an exoplanet.

I should say that almost four years before ‘Oumuamua was discovered, the very first interstellar object was discovered, in the form of a meteor. ‘Oumuamua was the size of a football field, but in 2014 an object roughly half a metre in size exploded in the lower atmosphere of the Earth. The US Space Command confirmed that this object is interstellar. The data indicates that this object survived all the way down to the lower atmosphere of the Earth, where it was subjected to very extreme stress — it was tougher than iron meteorites. In fact, it’s 10 times tougher than all meteors ever identified in the same catalogue.

So the question is: was it from some unusual source very different from the solar system? Or was it artificial in origin? Maybe it was made of stainless steel, and was a spacecraft from another civilisation. We’re going to find out the composition — we are going to the Pacific Ocean this summer to look for the fragments leftover from this meteor. By collecting them from the ocean floor, we hope to figure out their composition and tell whether they were just a rock or part of a spacecraft.

FR: If it’s artificial, where might it come from?

AL: Freeman Dyson — a British-born scientist, very well-known about 60 years ago — suggested that a very advanced scientific civilisation would not just rely on the amount of energy coming from its star to the surface of its planet, but would surround the star with a megastructure that would harvest the energy of the star. It is called the “Dyson sphere”: it’s a huge engineering project to imagine. It could be made of tiles that are hovering above the star, just like very thin sails. But there would be very high stresses on the construction, and therefore it would be made of very tough material. Once the civilisation loses interest in the Dyson sphere, it might not maintain it, and then asteroids would hit it quite frequently and could destroy it within a billion years. So the pieces of a broken Dyson Sphere could float in interstellar space and they could account for the materials that we found in the interstellar meteor.

FR: But your theory about ‘Oumuamua is different — in your report you argue: “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth.”

AL: A very good approach, to probe a large region of space, is to release many small probes — like a dandelion seeding its environment. If you have a probe visiting the habitable zone of a star like the Sun, the probe itself might be too big and move too fast to land on a particular planet. If you want to probe a lot of regions and a lot of planets, you might just spread dandelion seeds. In fact, just this year, we founded a new space corporation with my colleague, Dr Frank Laukien, that aims to use this approach for the Moon and Mars, instead of the traditional approach of using just one big probe and visiting one location.

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FR: How do they propel themselves?

AL: It depends on the nature of the engine. The only type of engine that we employ so far for interstellar probes are chemical rockets that can push a probe up to about a thousandth of the speed of light. But there could be much better schemes. For example, a very distinguished British cosmologist named Hermann Bondi wrote a paper in 1957, suggesting that if you have a negative mass — we are used to positive masses, but a negative mass in principle is possible to construct — then the negative mass will push away, if you put the positive mass next to it. And the positive mass will pull the negative mass with it. So together, they would accelerate indefinitely up to the speed of light. That is a type of engine that we have never constructed, and could potentially be engineered, if we developed the physics behind it.

FR: So should we assume that an alien species could have far more sophisticated technology than we do?

AL: Yes, and the way I think of it, it’s just like going on a date. You can learn from the other person. We should look at it as an opportunity; we shouldn’t be fearful of it. We are probably not sophisticated enough to be a threat to whatever comes to visit us. But we can make money from it — if we learn how to replicate [the technology] here on Earth. We can get a leap into our future.

As for what they might be hoping to accomplish — if you stay on your planet, then you might be annihilated or destroyed by a single-point catastrophe — we will not know until we observe them. I don’t think it makes sense to establish a committee of experts, and decide what the protocol is for responding to visitors. We should just try and figure out what they’re seeking. I spoke to Henry Kissinger just last year, and I asked him — because he negotiated with other nations, where the culture is very different — what is the realpolitik of interstellar communication? And he said that first you want to learn what the other side is seeking, and only then develop a dialogue with them.

FR: Is there any evidence from observatories or telescopes that these probes are actually entering our solar system?

AL: The Government collects data as a result of national security concerns and the sensors the government is using are classified. If there is high-quality data, it’s not being released to the public. But an extraterrestrial technological object has nothing to do with national security. It doesn’t adhere to national borders, and therefore any knowledge about it should be shared by all humans. It shouldn’t be the privilege of the President of the United States. We know that we are not at the centre of the universe; we know that there are billions of other Earth-Sun systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We are not at the centre of the stage, and we just came to the cosmic play at the end ,over the past few million years. The play is not about us.

FR: Tell me what it’s like being an expert in aliens. It must be quite an odd field to choose as your specialism.

AL: The way to think of me is as a farm boy. I’m connected to nature more than people. I have no social media. I don’t care how many likes I get. I’m just trying to do what sounds like common sense — something today which is not that common (especially in academia). There are many of my colleagues working on extra dimensions of the multiverse who do fancy mathematics — and it’s their way of showing off that they are smart. But if there is an object from another civilisation that could change the future of humanity, it may not take fancy maths to realise that it’s not a rock. When there is data about something unusual, we’re supposed to be curious. There is uncertainty. You can be wrong. That’s part of the job description.

FR: What if you are a young junior professor, at a university like Harvard, when stepping outside the bounds of what’s considered acceptable science is too risky?

AL: If you look at the career of Pablo Picasso, you will find that early on, he was a realist. He tried to draw in the style of traditional painting. After he mastered that, he invented cubism, which was disruptive. So as a young scientist, you don’t want to disrupt the system. You want to learn first of all the basic principles of physics, and apply them along the themes that are defined by senior people in academia, so that you can get a postdoc position after your PhD. Eventually you’re promoted to tenure.

But what happens after people get tenure is they are even more obsessed with their ego. They want to get honours, awards — to be recognised by their peers — and they conform to the beaten path. I say that the road not taken is the most interesting thing to take, because it may have low-hanging fruit. So I advise young scholars: if you’re interested in innovation, once you get tenure, start to be creative: innovate, because that’s the whole purpose of academia. Betray the slogan of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984, “ignorance is strength”. That’s what academia should be about.

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But unfortunately, it’s not. I heard, a few days ago, a very distinguished scientist, who said: “I don’t really want to know whether Covid-19 came from a lab leak, or the wet market in Wuhan.” Why would he say that? Because he doesn’t want the image of science to be tarnished, if it came from a lab leak. This is similar to arguing that “ignorance is strength”. Knowledge is strength, and the same is true about the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena, the nature of dark matter. Everything should be driven by our ambition to be knowledgeable, because then we can adapt even if reality doesn’t look as pretty as it should be. Let us see it.

FR: There is a genuine cohort of your colleagues who would say that there is 0% probability that aliens do exist. What do you think the probability is of life beyond Earth?

AL: Galileo was placed under house arrest just for suggesting that maybe the Earth moves around the Sun, and today he would have been cancelled on social media. If you were to ask those theologians, they would say there is zero probability that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe. Now, why would they say that? Because the church wanted to control people. There are always ulterior motives. I bet you that if we find a piece of technological equipment from another civilisation, people will say: “Of course, this was talked about for decades. There is nothing really new — we knew it all along.”

But if I had to guess, I would say not only that we are not alone, but that there were many technological civilisations before us that reached greater heights. We are probably not even close to the top half of their advances. They would have technologies that look like magic to us — like miracles in religious texts. It’s possible that that civilisation could create life in its laboratories. It would bring the concept of God, or something very capable, into reality — it will unify science and religion in some sense. I think it’s very likely that they were out there billions of years ago, maybe not right now. But they existed, and the only question is, when will we find the conclusive evidence beyond any doubt? And for that, we need to search. If there are objects of technological origin, we will find them.

***

This transcript has been lightly edited.

I think aliens might just be visiting earth — and I reckon there is an intriguing psychological link with Covid-19.

Before you click off this website, and permanently erase it from your memory, let me explain with some context, and some history.

First, the aliens. Next month, the Pentagon will deliver an eagerly awaited report, detailing all its observations of UFOs over decades. Excitement has been building for a while, but in recent days it has become feverish. Serious people are taking this seriously.

Could they really be right? I think: yes, it is just possible — and this is where you need the history.

In January 2020 I was writing a book in Bangkok, Thailand. The sun was hot, the beers were cold; life was pretty good. Then the first rumours began to swirl: of a fatal respiratory virus, running out of control in China. As I was spending much of my Bangkok time in air-conditioned bars, alongside happy Chinese tourists, I paid some attention.

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I paid even more attention when I flew back to London, at the end of January, and developed an odd, persistent “flu”. It was nasty, yet it fluctuated. I then gave it to my wife, who coughed so badly on the Tube she nearly fainted (sorry, London). At this point I genuinely started to wonder, and so I called Public Health England to recount my symptoms, just in case.

To my surprise they went bananas. They ordered me to a hospital for isolation, and said I maybe had coronavirus or “Avian Flu”. I googled Avian Flu and found that it has a mortality rate of 50%. After drinking an entire bottle of wine in 15 minutes I rushed to the hospital, where there was much confusion: this was very early in the pandemic. The promised testing didn’t happen, and in time the “flu” abated.

My illness remains a mystery, but it did have one definite consequence: I immediately became obsessed with the new pestilence. Over the following week I read every scholarly article I could find; I watched the videos of Chinese people being welded into apartments. By mid-February my mental job was done. I knew we were headed for a global plague, because the exponential logic of pandemics is relentless. So I bought my first masks, and stocked up on tuna — and then I tried to warn my friends.

This, it turned out, was a hopeless task. No matter how many graphs, extrapolations, and gory Tweets I showed them, nothing worked. They laughed, they scoffed, they made bets against my maths. Some were kind of resentful.

It was an unexpected response, so I did more research. Pretty swiftly I discovered that I was butting up against a known mental block. It is called Normalcy Bias, and it describes the common human disposition to reject appalling information, and to presume that extraordinarily bizarre or terrible things never happen.

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Normalcy Bias explains, it is thought, why the people of Pompeii simply stared at the eruption of Vesuvius, for hours, instead of fleeing. Normalcy Bias could also explain the workers who sat in the Twin Towers and carried on typing, even as the second plane crumpled into the glass.

And this is where the aliens come in. As happened with coronavirus, I have become modestly obsessed by the new alien story. I have watched all the videos: of the black blob hovering near to the USS Omaha, of the “Tic Tac” UFO disobeying the laws of physics. I’ve read the eye-witness reports from pilots, I’ve listened to baffled Pentagon experts. Most of all I’ve gazed on, boggle eyed, as much of the US journalistic and political Establishment, from Fox News to the New York Times, from Senator Mario Rubio to Former President Barack Obama, have all lined up behind the hypothesis that Yes, there might be aliens.

To give you a flavour of these mind-bending analyses, here’s one, from the foreign policy expert Tom Rogan on the conservative Washington Examiner.

First he examines the “less dramatic” explanations for the UAPs (ie: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a new initialism invented to take away the “stigma” of “seeing UFOs”). He wonders if the UFOs are secret, advanced American tech, and the US is spooking itself or others. Or perhaps this is Chinese technology, and Beijing has developed aircraft that can fly at 15,000mph, without anyone really noticing.

Then Rogan addresses the other hypothesis — which he believes should be put to Congress. “The most compelling UFOs, those UFOs which lack conventional alternative explanation after exhaustive investigation, give credible indication of being highly advanced, intelligently controlled vehicles… beyond the understood technical capacity of any Earth nation.”

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He goes on: “This sounds extraordinary, and it is. But even if not offered formally in writing, it is also the truth recognised by those who have worked intimately on this issue. After all, these most compelling UFOs evince means of non-jet propulsion-based hypersonic travel in the air and in space, and of 100 knots-plus speeds underwater. Some UFOs also show apparent anti-gravity capabilities, reflected by their instantaneous acceleration and deceleration…”

If you’re like me, you’ll have read these sentences, written by a mainstream US journalist, with mounting incredulity. Is he really saying alien craft are cruising our skies? Surely not. There are so many unanswered questions. How did the aliens get here? What’s their fascination with nukes? Why are all the photos and videos so grainy? If they can fly faster than light, why can’t they hide properly? I scoff at these ideas, I laugh at them and I kind of resent the stupidity.

And that’s the point, I am actively averse to this news story, in the same peculiar way my friends reacted to my prophesies of plague back in early 2020. To me this UFO flap feels like a religious spasm, a fearsome portent in the sky: not unknown during plagues. But is it? How do I know I am not exhibiting Normalcy Bias? How can I be sure I am not standing in the piazza in Pompeii, munching a panino, even as the volcano blows?

I don’t have an answer, but I remember Early Covid, and how I overcame Normalcy Bias back then. A pivotal moment came as I watched the mighty quarantine efforts in China, sealing off 60m people. It dawned on me that the Chinese authorities would only take these horrific steps, so damaging to their own economy, if they saw something deeply troubling. I began to sense the danger. I went to buy my tuna.

And now I am watching, once again: as half of the American elite, which is closer to this UAP narrative than everyone else, reacts with quite surreal alarm. What are they seeing that I can’t? What explains this crazy over-reaction? And so I go back to the UFO videos, and those gyrating blobs of grainy light, calmly looking back at us across the swaying Pacific waves.