These events might appear only loosely related. Some — like Trump’s X-Files-style memes or Johnson’s obsession with scientifically optimizing his girlfriend’s reproductive health — elicit uncomfortable laughter. Others, especially Anthropic’s claims, have an undeniably disquieting aspect. But all are expressions of a much deeper shift, one that most of us aren’t acknowledging, much less discussing (even if we all feel it): we’re living through a series of stochastic ontological shocks that amount to a Second Copernican Revolution. And we’re far less prepared to meet its demands than the earlier generations who met the first.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life, the expansion of human habitation into outer space, the prospect of enhancing the body and expanding its life span, and the stupendous achievements of artificial intelligence call into question our privileged sense of mastery and belonging in the world. 

Our age, in other words, is witnessing the dramatic second phase of the scientific, technological, and philosophical shift that launched modernity beginning roughly half a millennium ago with the discovery that the Earth isn’t at the center of an orderly “chain of being.”

Suggested Reading

Asset-hoarding Boomers rob the young  

By Matthew Gasda

The First Copernican Revolution suggested that, far from being orderly, the cosmos is constitutively antagonistic: roiled by blind, competing forces indifferent to human ends. In doing so, the revolutionaries radically de-centered humanity, dislodging man from his former place of honor in the cosmos.

The ontological picture did not improve with time. Darwin showed that the Homo sapiens is just another species, sharing origins with all others in the relentless struggle to survive and reproduce. Marx suggested that the beliefs we hold dear form the ideological superstructure upholding modes and relations of production that are historically determined; history, in other words, conditions belief. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud, who famously called his discovery of the unconscious a new Copernican revolution, revealed the irrational appetites and unconscious drives churning just beneath our polite conventions. Psychoanalysis purported to reveal a picture of the soul that was not unified, rational, or fully conscious — but instead propelled by a hydraulic system of psychic energies formed by the libidinal dynamics of the family; Freud’s theories demolished the Victorian understanding of what it meant to be human. 

Freud’s theories of the mind were novel in that they not only stripped away another layer of dignity from the philosophical account of man, but also in registering and taking account of ontological shocks that preceded his thinking: widespread industrialization, globalized capital, the disintegration of the large multinational empires.

Yet the First Copernican Revolution was incomplete, and not nearly as radical as some of its protagonists claimed. Psychoanalysis, for example, rested upon a surprisingly old-fashioned, moralistic account of human personality, leading the later analytic thinker Erich Fromm to conclude that for Freud, “health and virtue are really the same.” Then, too, the First Copernican Revolution coincided with the age of mass literacy, which made it possible for culture to reflect on itself and for individuals to nurture a sense of interiority — “the birth of the subject” was one of the great and few consolations that accompanied the great dislocations of modernity. 

In the high-modernist works of Joyce and Proust, to cite canonical examples, the individual psyche is represented variously as polymorphously perverse, anxious, and existential; Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Proust’s narrator, for instance, are each obsessional, with a fractured sense of time and anthropological belonging; by 1922, the year Ulysses was published, to map the human meant to map the troubling disruptions, distortions, and dislocations that attended human experience and cognition. Modernism, which includes psychoanalysis, is, by these lights, a formal attempt to symbolically bridge the ultra-new with a longer humanistic tradition in which the brain was a soul, and man had a central place in the story of the cosmos. It was perhaps the last secular attempt to do so (though perhaps Carl Sagan would like a word).

“Copernican” revolutions are moments when civilizations acquire new knowledge and new means of mastery, which simultaneously empower what Freud would call the “illusions” that uphold those civilizations. They are naturally fraught. 

The shocks that are upon us, in other words, are displacing the human even further from the cosmological story. If there is no singular event like the Napoleonic Wars or World War I which reorients our inner lives, there are and have been a series of fractured crises: the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, coupled with the sci-fi horizon of aliens, artificial general intelligence, robots. Esoteric or fringe ideas are now normal for social media scrollers or Tucker Carlson viewers; part of being alive in 2026 means wondering seriously if our species is the result of an alien genetics experiment; if AGI will rule the world; or whether biotech will enable lives as long as Methuselah. The normality, even the banality, of these discourses, is a sign that we’ve moved beyond the retrenchments of the literary modernists or the midcentury existentialists, who tried to provide intellectual structures for human beings to make sense of themselves in the wake of centuries of rapid scientific and intellectual revolution. If one or any of the possibilities on the horizon of 2026 are true, or come true, then everything is different forever.

The ontological shocks of the present are the most extreme to date because they threaten to alter the species itself; previous ontological shocks changed the explanatory framework around man, in this decade, and especially this year, narratives are changing, but so is the material of mind and body, and the aspirational trajectory of mankind. ‘Ontological influencers’ like Bryan Johnson urge followers to pursue immortal life. In the old humanistic framework of the West, it was sensible for Odysseus to reject immortality with the demi-goddess Calypso and return home to his aged wife, dog, and son; this wisdom does not seem like it will prevail into the next decade.

Suggested Reading

Pope Leo’s unfashionable universalism

By Sohrab Ahmari

Humanistic intellectuals, or anyone who ascribes dignity to the human condition, can’t assume they will prevail unless they take seriously how weird things have become, and will continue to become. Writers, artists, philosophers, undergraduates at coffeeshops, whoever is interested in building a new kind of bridge (like modernism) between the future and the past must be audacious relative to the scale of the manifold transformations at hand.

So, where are the new vocabularies, new concepts, new art forms to help humanity process Year Zero, an ontological revolution that may usher in Biblical lifespans, UFO disclosure, cyborgs, Butlerian jihads et al.? Where are the prophets? For the first time, humanism seems to have failed to catch up to changes in the human. The imminent transformation of the foundations of mind and body, and potentially of our understanding of history (if it turns out we are not the only intelligent life form in the galaxy), has not produced great art or thought, only slop and deferral. 

A culture that is preoccupied with dating mores and the manosphere, with the political trends and the lives of pop stars and reality stars and streamers, is derelict both of ambition and duty; rather than acknowledging ontological shock, we are numbing ourselves to it. As a civilization, as a species, and as a global population, we are destitute of secular palliatives, of modes of care and of thought to handle the onslaught of the future. Rather than diluted therapy-speak, we need a new Freud, or new Freuds (or new Marshall McLuhans): new thinker-prophets, to build intellectual bridges to a future that has already commenced.

The comfortable center risks letting the future be defined by technologists with platforms who are invested, literally, in a certain version of the future coming to pass, and by government bureaucrats who may be more interested in controlling unrest than in ameliorating its causes.

And this is a shame. Heightened awareness, new forms of interiority and self-articulation, new means of self-making are traditionally the beneficent byproduct of sudden breaks in the linear unfolding of history. (When we say Shakespeare was early modern, for instance, what we really mean is that the Bard was drawing on intensely new energy that was flowing through London in the wake of intense religious warfare and technological and philosophical change. Ditto Cervantes, ditto Montaigne.)

New ways of life should give rise to new thoughts and new expressions of meaning. Ontological shock can be more than an unpleasant sensation. It can be a provocation, an imperative to reform the ranks and battle a science-fiction future into a dignified truce.

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.

Suggested Reading

The Harvard professor who thinks aliens exist

By Flo Read

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.

Suggested Reading

The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

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.”

Suggested Reading

Conspiracies are the price of freedom

By Terry Eagleton

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”.

Suggested Reading

Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

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.

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.

More from this author

Why I became a time lord

By Oliver Bateman

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.

Suggested reading

Humanism is a heresy

By Tom Holland

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?

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.

Suggested reading

Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

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.

Suggested reading

The nerds who saw the dangers of Covid

By Tom Chivers

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.”

Suggested reading

Cancel culture rarely survives a plague

By Sean Thomas

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.