Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
The report was issued on behalf of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), headed up until last December by a physicist and former CIA man named Sean Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the man habitually known by the media as ‘the Pentagon’s UFO chief’, in the limited sense that, whenever a journalist wanted to ask the U.S. Government whether there was any definite proof aliens had landed on Planet Earth yet, it was his job to say “No, please stop asking us”.
Nonetheless, the term UFO means just that – Unidentified Flying Object, and there have certainly been plenty of those buzzing American airspace of late, although whether they are actually extraterrestrial in nature, or simply invasive drone-like tech from an enemy nation like China or wherever is a moot point, as Kirkpatrick himself has explained.
Alien Worldviews
Yet, besides making such perfectly reasonable apolitical points, Kitkpatrick also appears to possess a certain fondness for making a few rather less reasonable overtly politicised ones too. In early February, Kirkpatrick gave an interview to politics website Politico, expressing his grave expert opinion that the authorities should be much more forthcoming in revealing details about such mysterious phenomena to the general public: hence the release of the Pentagon’s new debunking report, I suppose.
His reasons for advising this course of future action were rather interesting. Noting it was AARO’s job to investigate potential military or terrorist threats to U.S. airspace, not “to go and find extraterrestrials”, Kirkpatrick argued that “If there is a void in the information space, it will be filled with the imagination of the public Right and [their] conspiracies”.
Yes, that’s right: only conservatives ever subscribe to mad conspiracy theories of any kind. A rash of media stories in recent years have tried to link (in fact wholly unrepresentative) Right-wing American movements like QAnon and January 6th rioters to belief in UFO-related conspiracies, often with the self-evident aim of smearing anyone non-Lefty as a David Icke-style, lizard-loving loon (which rather ignores the fact Mr. Icke was once in the U.K Green Party).
As someone who has written two books exposing the fake contemporary online legend of Nazi UFOs, I would fully admit that the subject can indeed occasionally be used as a front for fascism or a handy far-Right recruitment tool. But, on the other hand, as someone who has also written another book substantially dealing with how the subject can equally sometimes be used as a front for far-Left Marxist recruitment purposes too, I can see how an honest accusation of this nature could actually go both ways. Honest accusations, however, are no longer terribly in fashion.
Obviously, with their God-given contemporary right to define precisely what counts as ‘misinformation’ in the public sphere, today’s all-wise and all-knowing Leftists hold a total and complete monopoly upon objective truth, and would never stoop so low as to begin making bizarre politically motivated claims about what are popularly dismissed as disreputable fringe topics like UFOs and alien beings. Or would they…?
The Dry Canals on Mars
Speaking to the media back in 2011, Venezuela’s former quasi-Marxist Dictator, Hugo Chávez, was very firmly of the opinion that, many years ago, there used to be life on Mars, now an utterly barren and dead globe, but that native Martian forms of capitalism had killed it off wholesale.
“I have always heard that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet,” Chávez said in a speech to mark World Water Day in March 2011, whilst himself ostentatiously sipping from a glass of H2O as if to mock the tragically dehydrated Martian dead.
“Careful!” Hugo added. “Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts.” And why? All because of climate change, caused by rapacious Western capitalism, El Presidente cautioned. (Awkward note: Venezuela is a principal member of OPEC, has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and fossil fuels provide the backbone of its entire economy – or at least they did until Chávistas began wrecking it all like Mars with their blessed planet-loving socialism.)
That sounds uncannily like a Left-wing ET-related conspiracy to me. But then, Chávez always was a noted nut. Maybe he was just an unfortunate, unrepresentative progressive one-off? Sadly not. I have written before in the Daily Sceptic about Left-wing astronomers trying to contact PC ETs (see here and here), and in my regular Takimag column this week have detailed some barely believable current attempts of queer activists to contact races of homosexual ‘gayliens’. But the rival Left-wing trope of trying to spuriously relate extraterrestrial life and flying saucers to climate change is even more surprisingly widespread in today’s wokery-ridden academic and media worlds.
Guardian Readers of the Universe
In 2019, the New York Times (America’s rough equivalent of the Guardian, but even worse) ran a thought-experiment by op-ed columnist Farhad Manjoo entitled ‘Pretend It’s Aliens’. Here, Manjoo spoke of how, as Westerners today lived in a world of absurd Right-wing illusions conjured by wicked populist politicians – specifically, “full-grown adults who maintain, against all evidence, that immigration poses an existential threat to the United States”, no less – why shouldn’t Leftists like him just “perform the same sleight of hand” with causes close to their own bleeding hearts?
Some sceptics may argue they have done so already, with their hyperbolically exaggerated talk about ‘global boiling’ etc., but Mr. Manjoo proposed extending such lies even further by proposing the idea that evil extraterrestrials were actually behind our planet’s imminent eco-doom, by spreading ludicrous tweets like this:
Manjoo’s logic, such as it is, ran as follows:
This [combatting climate change] will be a long-term existential battle that will require remaking every part of society… that may involve costly and politically unpopular changes to our way of life for years to come, and will necessarily make some people [but not Manjoo himself, probably] worse off than if we did nothing. But that will be justified, because we understand the stakes: we are fighting murderous aliens… If the aliens attacked, we’d do better. I’m sure of it. We would understand the stakes in the battle ahead. We would apprehend the necessity of sacrifice and perseverance. We would be able to perceive what is happening to our planet and our species as what it plainly is: a war for survival.
Manjoo meant the public should be brainwashed to adopt this millenarian mindset as a dramatic internal motivational tool, rather than as a literal belief, much as an Olympic runner might be able to sprint faster by imagining he is being chased by an endangered Bengal Tiger. Yet there are other people out there who apparently believe such things rather more literally. And some of them, unlike humble NYT columnists, are actual scientists.
The Goonhilly Goon Show
I don’t know if you happen somehow to have missed it – and really, how could you? – but October 2022 saw the advent of something annual called ‘World Space Week’, the theme of which for that particular year was ‘Space and Sustainability’ (this year’s is ‘Space and Climate Change’; I can see a pattern developing here). Considering that, as far back as 1852, Lord Kelvin had already theorised the ultimate heat-death of the universe, it could be argued that, in the long-run, even outer space itself is not actually fully sustainable at all, but never mind.
As part of the whole pointless shindig, astronomers from METI International (METI = Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) based at Cornwall’s Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, planned to beam out a message towards the far-distant star-system of Trappist-1, which is deemed a likely spot for potentially inhabited Earth-like planets to be located. And what would this radio-signal say? Naturally, it would tell the ETs all about our planet’s currently ongoing climate crisis.
“The great challenge of interstellar communication is to establish a common ground for understanding” between humans and aliens, the men from METI explained. Traditionally, this may have meant sending them signals based upon mathematics, reasonably guessed to be a universal language all across the cosmos, as two plus two equals four even on Alpha Centauri (although certain lettuce-headed Left-wing U.S. academics like Rochelle Gutierrez might disagree). METI preferred to send the aliens transcripts of the Periodic Table, however, hoping this may prove the initial basis for interstellar symposia about how industrialised capitalism would cause severe and damaging chemical changes in any planet’s atmosphere and environment, not just Earth’s own.
The hope was that the ETs would be a much older civilisation than ours; if so, they would surely have long passed through their foolish planet-polluting phase aeons ago, and thus have worked out how to solve the catastrophe of global warming entirely. Otherwise, how would they still be here to talk to mankind? Wouldn’t they all just have been burned to a crisp? Once the Trappist-1 aliens realised we comparatively primitive humans were facing a climate crisis too, they would surely be able to help, METI hoped, beaming us back down advice on what to do next in return.
But what if the ETs replied to say: “Ignore the whole thing – it’s a total mad alarmist cult movement, just put gags on George Monbiot and Swampy and you’ll all be quite, quite fine”? I would guess, in that alarming eventuality, METI might conveniently ‘forget’ to pass the unwanted message in question on to mankind at large, or else ‘accidentally’ wipe it from their recording systems. Appropriately enough, the cult-busting ETs from Trappist-1 would be forced to remain every bit as silent as their monkish human counterparts traditionally are down here on terra firma. Either that, or Michael Mann would just sue them, like he did with Mark Steyn.
Little Green Men
And what happens if the aliens turn out not to be quite as benign as METI might hope? Anyone who has read Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy series of books will know it makes perfect military sense for any alien civilisation to immediately wipe out any other currently less-advanced intelligent societies elsewhere in the galaxy as soon as they become aware of them, lest their far-off interplanetary rivals one day grow strong enough to do the same to them, a bit like if the US had nuked Moscow back in 1945 to prevent the entire Cold War ever taking place at all.
A 2011 report from a group of NASA-affiliated scientists from Pennsylvania State University, ‘Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis’, argued that just such a situation really could occur, should any alien intellects “vast and cool and unsympathetic”, as H.G. Wells once put it, detect that Earth was currently undergoing climate change due to rapid post-WWII-era industrialisation.
As the ever-onwards expansion of borderless international capitalism uncaringly pushes other disposable species like rhinos, polar bears and white people to looming extinction here on Earth, so wary ET military scouts might fear the same fate being imposed upon the flora and fauna of other innocent planets, should the evil imperialist Earthlings ever advance far enough to begin colonising them too. In this case, the aliens could just blow our entire planet up with death-rays, to nip the danger in the bud, like a time-traveller killing Hitler at birth to avert his future invasion of Poland. Alternatively, they may be a race of exoplanetary Chris Packhams from the Planet PETA and decide to land on Earth and just destroy all the nasty naked ape humans, thereby to save the trees, whales and great crested newts, whose lives they may deem to be innately more significant.
According to the report’s distinctly doom-mongering authors:
Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ET because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions… These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.
To be fair, the full written assessment as a whole did consider a range of possible other scenarios, and did specifically deem the above detailed outcomes to be rather unlikely – but guess which specific possibility the Guardian picked out when reporting on the paper? That’s right: its chosen headline was ‘Rising greenhouse gas emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report’. The Guardian’s story was bylined as being by someone named Ian Sample, but given its basic methodology and outlook, it may as well have been written by Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.
All this is daft enough, but it gets much worse. In part two of this short series, we shall see how clever scientists have now also managed to model the basic path of climate catastrophes endured by other planets – other planets that do not even exist. Why was the entire world in Dune nothing more than one gigantic, globe-spanning desert? Hugo Chávez knew. And so, it would seem, do his contemporary academic counterparts: the answer is capitalism!
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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