To the State, What Belongs to the State; To the Masses, What Belongs to the Masses — UFOs, Secrecy, Governments and the Mythology of Extraterrestrial Visitations (III)

The real question is not whether governments always tell the truth. History settled that matter long ago. The essential issue is whether distrust of authority inevitably leads us to accept every alternative narrative as truth. If the demonization of the state is accompanied by the canonization of the masses, then we merely replace one dogma with another. And the pursuit of truth remains just as distant.

The occasion for choosing today’s topic, the third installment in this series whose first part bore the title “The Demonization of the State and the Canonization of the Masses,” was the news of Steven Spielberg’s new film, which once again brings UFOs, conspiracy theories, and questions about what governments know regarding the vast issue of extraterrestrial life back into the spotlight.

It is evident that the accomplished director, whose cinematic career includes several genuinely significant works, returns with his new film to follow in the footsteps of many colleagues who have previously explored the same subject matter. He, too, joins the discussion so beloved by the masses: the arrival of extraterrestrials on Earth, with a particular preference, as always, for American soil. (Apparently, not only is Earth the center of the boundless Universe, but America is also the center of the terrestrial world.) And so, the dance goes on.

Authorities are capable of every kind of crime. Above all, they excel in “secrets and lies.” We received a reminder of this—not that we did not already know it—a few years ago, when thousands of documents exposing the immorality of the global system of governance, and especially that of the United States, came to light through the revelations of the heroic founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

And, naturally, power always shelters behind its unshakable alibi: that all authority exists either by the grace of God or by the will of the people. (“For the sacred cause of Democracy, damn it!”)

Trump, in fact, ventured even further. He presents himself as the chosen instrument of both his God and his people—the people of the nationalist Right—destined to make America great again after it had allegedly been diminished by those incompetent predecessors who lacked divine favor. Yet self-glorification, when it ceases to be a virtue, becomes a serious affliction.

But let us return to our line of thought.

No government, therefore, would hesitate to conceal any truth if it possessed sufficient reasons or interests for doing so. That much is beyond dispute. Yet when it comes to extraterrestrial life—and especially to the claim that beings from elsewhere have visited our planet—the argument that governments have systematically hidden the truth appears considerably less convincing.

The reason is both simple and understandable.

If extraterrestrials have been arriving on Earth, whether frequently or sporadically, the very possibility of such journeys demonstrates that our visitors possess technological capabilities vastly superior to our own. Humanity still struggles to extend its interplanetary ambitions beyond the Moon—and only marginally farther. The conclusion is self-evident and requires little elaboration.

Let us assume, then, that they came. And let us further assume that they, too, selected America as the destination of their exploratory excursion—the acknowledged center of the human world.

Naturally, the Americans, ever vigilant, would have immediately detected these “intruders” violating their airspace (most likely over California, itself the global capital of spectacle and, no doubt, known as such even to extraterrestrials). They would have tracked them, shot down a few spacecraft, captured the occupants, photographed them, fingerprinted them, interrogated them, extracted—or failed to extract—the desired information, and then, as a model nation of civil liberties, brought them before a closed-door tribunal.

Following due process, they would either have sentenced them to death in the beloved electric chair or consigned them to decay in some hidden Guantánamo-style facility. One thing is certain: after committing the unforgivable crime of violating the supposedly inviolable borders of the superpower, the visitors would hardly have been allowed to depart unmolested.

Yet there exists another scenario.

Perhaps the extraterrestrial visitors themselves, without anyone detecting their presence, arrived discreetly and unexpectedly at an American military installation—less likely at NASA—and requested an audience with the Base Commander or, in a more extravagant exercise of screenwriting imagination, with President Obama himself.

What exactly was discussed with the Commander—or with the President—is, according to the mythology of conspiracy, precisely the information that American governments and state agencies have carefully concealed from the public. It is these hidden conversations, presumably, that the indefatigable Spielberg now intends to reveal through cinematic fiction.

From this point onward, however, the truly significant questions emerge.

And it is those questions that we shall examine in tomorrow’s continuation.