Those Magnificent Aliens

In Their Unidentified Flying Machines

Saucers have been flying. Again.

(Sorry for taking so long to write something; my health hasn’t been great lately. I’d appreciate your prayers, solitary reader. Thanks in advance)

The word “alien” is a contraction of “alienigena”, Latin for “generated elsewhere”. In other words, an alien is a stranger, and a stranger is an alien. Now strangers are strange, indeed. Stranger-ness, alien-ness, is otherness exemplified. That is why aliens are such a wonderful theme: they are a blank canvas on which a society can project what it sees as strange, as different, as peculiar. The alien is, in a certain way, what we are not. On the other hand, nobody can project utter foreignness; we can only project onto the alien what we can perceive, our own way of seeing the world, our prejudices, and our contradictions.

That is why the Greeks called non-Greek-speaking people “barbarians”. Their alien speech sounded like they could only make “bar-bar-bar” noises. It was not “real” speech, because it could not be understood. It was noise (and the same noise, regardless of what language was actually spoken by the individual barbarian) because it made no sense in Greek, and the Greek, just like any of us to a certain degree, could only see it as opposed to “proper” speech, not as a different kind of speech. It was not a language; it was just not-Greek.

Likewise, stories about headless people who had faces on their chests, or people with one single huge foot that could be used as an umbrella, were quite common while it was possible to believe them. These monsters were no more than caricatural reconstructions of regular human beings, with well-known elements displaced and rearranged. Some myths would go further in that sense, trying to add some more otherness — the Brazilian myth of the “mula-sem-cabeça”, a headless mule that threw flames out of its nostrils, is a good example; it had no head, but somehow it had nostrils —, but not much further. It is indeed impossible to invent a form of otherness that does not start and end with references to what is known, to what is not alien. That is why aliens are such a rich theme: their alien-ness is a glimpse of the elements of what is familiar, sometimes too familiar to admit. What a Greek said about barbarians can tell us much more about what it meant to be Greek than about the barbarians themselves.

In modern pop culture, we can see a lot about each small period of time, each decade, each moment in the history of late modernity, in what was believed about aliens in general. The first point of inquiry, of course, must be who was the alien. As Modernity had universal pretensions, it was necessary, in the beginning, to dehumanize those who would not fit into the Modern narrative. So the first modern aliens were the colonized peoples, those whose idiocy made them the white man’s burden to carry. They were too dumb, too primitive, too enslaved by their own passions and superstitions. They needed to be treated like children for Modernity to advance into the lands they occupied. They had to be enslaved in order to be freed from their enslavement. They needed to be dehumanized in order to be raised to the condition of being fully human. The whole Modern colonial project was the first version of a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, in which the aliens were inferior to the triumphant European colonizer.

The white man’s burden

The apex of this view was in the half-century that ended just before WWII. One of the most interesting corollaries of this myth is that — as the alien is the European’s inferior — the European can pass for an alien, but not the opposite. In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1900), for instance, the (secretly European) main character can become any kind of Indian, but the Indian spy Hurree Babu’s desire to be recognized as a true scientist is seen as pathetic. (Great book, by the way. The man could write a good story!) The same general scheme can be seen in Hergé’s Tintin (1929), whose adventures all over the colonial world depict the young European reporter as the evident superior of all aliens, capable of disguising himself as one of them and outmaneuvering them at every turn. The trope of the superior European man who becomes a god or a king of the child-like colonized peoples (and/or jungle animals; the inferior man is seen as just slightly above the brutes, and these can be metaphors for him) is a (quite small) variation on the same theme: Lee Falk’s The Phantom (1936), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan (1912), and so on.

But the World Wars threw a monkey wrench on that megalomaniac view of (the civilized Western) man as incontested superior of all he could see. Nobody could dispute the “civilized” status of the Germans (well, Chesterton did, but in another sense), and they proved themselves the worst kind of barbarians. (Well, carpet-bombing among Westerners was something unheard-of, too) Their “inferior” Japanese allies, even if in a way Westerners saw as barbaric, proved their mettle in battle, eventually “requiring” the use against them of the atomic bomb, the most barbaric weapon ever conceived. The Modern illusion of moral and civilizational supremacy was completely shattered.

And that is how — having realized the West was not, after all, that civilized — the “alien” thing turned on its head, simultaneously with the migration of the Western core to the United States. While the Europeans lost their colonies, the United States became the most powerful country in the world, and the Cold War began. Their adversary, the Soviet Union, became the Other, the alien. But that alien was no longer a poor child-like wretch. It was — or was perceived as being — the US’ equal, although deeply different.

Unlike WWII's open (and openly barbaric) violent ways, the Cold War was primarily a technological race; a competition of possibilities, not deeds. The atomic bombings of Japan, at the same time the last statement of Western superiority and its own confession of barbarism, substituted technological competition for the open battlefield confrontation.

Thus was born the new alien myth, in which the West saw (and sees; it’s become quite fashionable again) itself as Aztecs, Tokugawa Japanese, Australian aboriginals, or Hottentots on the beach, witnessing the arrival of strange hi-tech ships from elsewhere. The main points of the new alien myth are that, first, they are the superiors, and, second, their superiority is technological. These are corollaries of a realization akin to the end of a cocaine trip, when the suddenly sober user realizes he is definitely not a super-man, and by the way that headache is killing him. All illusions of Western moral superiority, of a permanent triumph of Enlightenment values, of the evolutionary emergence of a new Modern Man were shattered. Tech, and tech only, won the war. And tech, and tech only, would win the next wars.

But technology, unlike morality (wokeism notwithstanding), has no final form. Today’s higher technology is tomorrow’s ludicrously outdated dinosaur. Furthermore, technology supposedly obeys the pop-culture version of Darwinism and gets necessarily better with time. It is therefore enough for some alien race to have had more time for their technology to be better than ours. When one realizes that human beings can barely reach the moon, any extraterrestrial who arrived here would be proving to have vastly superior technology.

This reasoning is full of non-examined assumptions, of which the most evident is that the aliens would come from outer space. From another planet. From elsewhere, from another Darwinian evolutionary chain, perhaps from another galaxy. But unlike the comic-book Superman (1938), created while the civilizational cocaine high made the Modern West believe itself superior to all else, the new aliens wouldn’t give a fig about “truth, justice, and the American Way”, just like Commodore Perry couldn’t care less about “Shinto, the Emperor, and the Japanese Way” in 1853 when he forced entry in a Japanese harbor with his gunship and threatened to bomb the capital if the natives did not accede to his demands.

Now, it’s interesting to notice at this juncture that this vision of technology as all-defining and pop-Darwinianly perpetually improving is very recent. There is an urban legend attributing to a US Patents Commissioner at the turn of the XIX-XXth Centuries the statement that "everything that can be invented has been invented." While the story is apocryphal, the triumphalist sense of having arrived at the zenith of human evolution by that time was strong enough to make the tale seem possible. This supposedly magnificent position, though, at the time was certainly not defined by technology, which was seen as the (less noble) application of the true divinity: Science. And Science, by that time, was supposed to consist of permanent and definitive discoveries; it could grow, but not change. To our present sensitivities, it sounds funny, but even the supposed channeling of spirits in séances was treated as Science (with a capital “S”!) by Allan Kardec (still popular in Brazil, where bad French ideas come to die) and Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

When one realizes that modern science started as a branch of Renaissance magical practices, that combined curiosity about mystical meanings of matter and practical goals (such as transforming lead into gold; it is a symbol of betterment, but also a get-rich-quick scheme), the latter-days emphasis on technology makes some sense. Projecting this novel fetish, still less than a century old, onto supposed alien civilizations, on the other hand, makes absolutely no sense.

(I’ve been working now and then on a short story about the arrival of a “flying saucer” bringing aliens that cannot perceive matter and have no concept of technology, being — like us — both corporeal and spiritual, but the precise opposite of humans in their perceptions and interests.)

Now back to the part of the myth that deals with the physical origins of mysterious flying objects and their occupants. As I said, it is completely arbitrary to presume they’d be from outer space. Conceding for the sake of the argument that there are consistent objects behind the UFO tales (which, after all, have at their core the fact that one is talking about flying objects that are not identified!), plenty of other theories about their origins are less improbable. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, saw them as projections of the (oh-so-human) collective unconscious. There is also a very interesting French-American author, Jacques Vallée, who after spending decades studying the phenomenon, concluded that all that is said to happen around UFOs has also been said to occur around different (and non-technological) beings in different cultures. Simply put, everything that is now attributed to technological wizards from outer space has already been told about fairies, demons, gods, djinn, kami, gnomes, whatever; “aliens” would be both real and natives of this very same little blue planet, but existing on a different plane of reality (or dimension), with the ability to come and go between their dimension and ours. Why not? It certainly makes more sense than the pitiful depiction of extraterrestrials as glorious versions of MIT postgraduates in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.

The theories of Erich von Däniken and his many followers, according to which anything ancient that looks hard to make would have been made by aliens, all gods would be aliens, and so on, is much closer to Sagan’s than to Vallée’s. Von Däniken’s aliens, like Sagan’s, are just like us, but with better tech. They are the civilized and we humans are the savages, waiting for a civilized being to worship. We are not able to build grandiose stuff, for we are just mud-hut-dwelling primitives; therefore, aliens built all that great stuff. Pyramids? Aliens. Nazca lines? Aliens. Teotihuacan? Aliens. Those who accuse him of racism miss his point. He doesn’t say that brown-skinned Egyptians are not competent enough to build the pyramids; he accuses all of us humans of being unable to build them. He doesn’t try to depict, say, Viking huts as the product of aliens, but Stonehenge seems to be hard enough to build to be attributed to them. The problem for him is not the color of one’s skin, but one’s very humanity, one’s very inferiority-proving low tech.

The myths of aliens hidden among us, passing as humans, are the perfect mirror image of the Kims and Tintins of colonial times. Their superiority allows them to pretend they are like us, for the greater can pretend to be the lesser but not the opposite.

The fact — at least the sociological fact — is that while human testimony is prone to catastrophic failure (as proved by the famous gorilla experiment) there are people who really believe they have seen flying objects maneuvering in ways that would be physically impossible, as well as people who really believe they have seen weird non-human beings, and there is indeed some consistency in what they state to have seen. According to Vallée, however, this consistency applies to all ages and all cultures; the differences would only be in the cultural explanations of what would have been seen. He goes further still: according to him, there would also be a strong consistency in a kind of trickster behavior on the part of the “aliens”, who would tell contactees enough truthful predictions to gain their trust, only to come up with a big lie later. Jung would probably remind us that the trickster is an archetypal character, present in all mythologies and cultures!

It is also a very human trait to dream of knights in shining armor riding white horses, and the present assumption of the superiority of “aliens” oftentimes veers into a completely different territory, again reminding one of the very origins of the Science-as-goddess myth. There is where come many UFO cults, that project onto “aliens” the desire for a deus salvans, a “saving god” that would grant his “divine” approval for the taboos and superstitions of that particular group of cultists: veganism, free sex, radical environmentalism, whatever. It is absolutely not surprising that all supposed revelations and requirements of worshiped “aliens” are already a part of the culture or subculture of their devotees; the “aliens” are a blank screen, both reflecting back and giving an aura of divinity to what was already known and desired.

Likewise, in science fiction, the alien is often a (quite transparent) vehicle for real-life societal conflicts, with alien “species” substituting for different peoples, nations, and, of course, “races”. During the Cold War, it was a very common trope to have a collectivist alien “race” bent on destroying individual differences (the Borg, the Dalek…), evidently standing for Communism. Aliens are a very practical way of constructing an “Other” that is more of a “not-us” than a proper being. After all, they are aliens; all they have is their alienness, their quality of being strangers to us.

It is not surprising that, in a moment of societal crisis and government weakness, UFOs and aliens make such a comeback. They are a great way of changing the subject. What is, in context, surprising is that nowadays — when everybody has a hi-tech camera in one’s pocket, when everybody is able to film and take GPS-tagged still pictures, often with real-time streaming and uploading — both the quantity and the quality of supposed UFO pics harks back to those of 50 or 60 years ago. We have plenty of pictures and movies of everything under the sun, we have (or rather there are) satellites with cameras of absurd zooming power, and yet the best images one gets are such as this:

In a way, it is indeed pretty ironic that the stupendous technological “advance” that gives us such high-powered cameras (that last much less than a cheap and bare-bones Kodak Instamatic shooting 110 film, but that’s another story) cannot help spread further the narrative of ultra-high-tech flying saucers from outer space.

But, hey, they are the ones with the really good technology; our poor 4k cameras get shy around them…