Forget E.T.; Phone Home for Reality Check

Aliens--the extraterrestrial sort--are haunting the popular imagination. They’re everywhere: on TV, in the movies, on the Web and featured in a spate of books and magazine articles. The image of the alien, in fact, is so ubiquitous in popular culture that it doesn’t really matter whether extraterrestrials exist or not: What matters is what this all says about the state of American consciousness.

I had an interesting experience involving aliens recently--well, really a couple of people who thought they might be looking at one--that illustrates the situation. I was careening down the long slope from Calabasas Peak into Red Rock Canyon State Park on my mountain bike when two hikers called out to me to ask if I could see the strange-looking figure they had been watching on a distant outcropping. Was it human, they wondered? An alien, perhaps?

Eager to oblige, I stopped to have a look, and, sure enough, I could make out a darkly clad figure silhouetted against the horizon, striding back and forth while waving some sort of object. It just looked like some guy to me, but I was curious about what he was up to, so I allowed myself to be persuaded by the hikers to bicycle back up the mountain for a closer inspection.

Here’s where reality gets disappointing. I had misjudged the location of the outcropping and so could only get close enough to verify that it was, indeed, just some guy, but I couldn’t determine what he was waving around. I guess I’ll never know. What is significant is the fact that the two hikers at least half-seriously wondered whether they might be having some sort of close encounter of the third kind. And, after all, why not? Even scientists, waiting patiently beside their radio telescopes, believe in the possibility that someday someone will beam a signal back in response to their own “we’re over here” broadcasts. Indeed, it seems to be an almost rational thing to wonder whether contact hasn’t already been made.

Personally, I remain skeptical, but that may soon be a marginal position. Because from the signals that popular culture has been beaming to me, it appears that belief in extraterrestrials is no longer such a fringe phenomenon. We smile at those poor souls who panicked in 1938 when Orson Welles made his notorious broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” but imagine what might happen were such a broadcast to occur today. This time a lot of people might not believe the whole thing was just a prank.

That’s what I find to be of more significance than the growing belief in the existence of extraterrestrials: the shrinking belief in anything that the authorities have to tell us about any subject whatsoever. Isn’t that at least half the appeal of “The X-Files,” whose credits open with the image of a flying saucer alongside a headline banner reading “Government Denies All Knowledge”? Once, only a small fringe of Americans seriously believed that the U.S. government is engaged in a conspiratorial cover-up of what it knows about the infamous Roswell incident or the John F. Kennedy assassination. Now, more and more people are skeptical about everything their government tells them, while being inclined to believe the most fantastic governmental conspiracy theories.

Frankly, I don’t blame people for being skeptical. The legacy of the Vietnam War, not to mention Watergate and other instances where our government had eventually to concede that it was lying to us, has done nothing to improve governmental credibility. But, unfortunately, skepticism can backfire, because the growing legions of Americans who are more inclined to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials than in the words of their leaders are also withdrawing from participation in such activities as voting and community service.

All of which introduces a different kind of alien into the picture, the “alien” that lies at the root of the word “alienation.” For what we have here is yet another example of the way in which cultural behavior hangs together. People who don’t trust their government to tell them the truth often become both politically and socially alienated. Thus, it is no small thing to encourage skepticism, as shows like “The X-Files” and its imitators do every week. Certainly public officials need to do more to deserve our trust, but a blanket skepticism toward all government is self-defeating. A society, after all, is founded on trust.

So although it is amusing to imagine what it would be like to have an actual encounter with an alien, let’s keep our feet on the ground. The truth is not “out there”; it’s right here.