UFOs: Why We Believe in Them
There’s been a lot of attention around UFOs lately, or, as they’re now more often referred to, UAPs. n interesting change in terms in and of itself. Modern cultural expressions around UFOs largely began in the late 1940’s with the Roswell incident. Some suggest UFOs sightings and alien interventions go back thousands of years.
Why do we want to believe in UFOs so much? Why so much interest now? Why is this important to society?
This is an anthropologists view of why we believe in UFOs or UAPs, whatever we want to call them. It is not a criticism of those who believe or meant to be disparaging. It is a viewpoint on why we have these beliefs and their cultural significance.
Why We Want to Believe in Aliens and UFOs
Most of my work as a digital anthropologist looks at how humans use culture to create, use and engage with digital technologies. All of this comes from a background of cultural anthropology. So I’m stepping out a bit from where I normally focus.
But this is relevant because UFOs naturally tie in with technology. And culture.
We Have Long Wanted a Saviour
Human societies have long had a belief in a saviour, in Christianity this would be Jesus, in Islam Mahdi. Krishna in Hinduism. Indra in Tibetan cultures and so on. In anthropology, this is referred to as Messianism.
Saviours play an important role in religions because they are an abstract being that can help people deal with guilt, espouse certain truths and influence social behaviours. They provide a sense of psychological comfort.
Perhaps in a non-religious context, some see aliens as potential saviours of an earth that is in trouble. The concept of Vulcans in Star Trek, a science-fiction series, is that they came to Earth to save us and lead us into an inter-galactic federation. They were saviours.
Our world today is going through a bit of a rough patch; climate change, various conflicts and wars, economic uncertainty, rapid technological advancements moving faster than culture can adapt to. The idea of “someone else” coming to save us is a powerful coping mechanism.
The Role of Mythologies in Aliens & UFO Beliefs
Stories are a universal aspect of human societies and play a key role in shaping our cultures. They have been a feature of humanity for thousands upon thousands of years. We are likely the only animals that tell stories. One type of story is myths along with narratives and fairy tales.
Myths help us place our world into context, the explain things we cannot easily explain. As science advances, myths can often be debunked. Sometimes, even when they are, we prefer the myth for the comfort it gives us psychologically.
Many myths and stories around aliens involve the idea of some form of federation of alien societies, and that humanity isn’t ready to join them (see above around Vulcans.) Telling such myths provides comfort, but also helps us put some context around why we haven’t found them yet. Comprehending the fact that we may be the only social species in existence is very hard to wrap ones head around.
This may be exacerbated by the current state of technologies such as social media that are leaving us feeling more disconnected and alone. The opposite of their intended outcome.
We Don’t Like Being Alone
We are inherently social animals. We have spent a lot of time trying to differentiate ourselves from other animals, denying that we are, in fact, primates; animals. We see our ability to form strong social groups as part of this, along with language and technology use.
The thing is, we can’t survive as a species being alone. So perhaps we want to believe there are other alien species out there because we just don’t want to be alone.
We Like Social Order
Related to not wanting to be alone, humans and some of our related species like Denisovans and Neanderthals, understood that we we stood a better chance of surviving together, than apart. One of the reasons we developed religion, aside from providing context to what we didn’t understand, was to create social order.
We have been exploring various means of social organisation for hundreds of thousands of years, from when we were foragers and nomads up to today. We continue to try various forms of social order, such as political and economic systems. They are elements of culture.
Believing in alien societies satisfies our desire to bring structure not just to our world, but the universe as a whole. We like to feel we are part of something bigger, such an idea of other societies helps us feel we are part of something.
The Role of Alien and UAP Beliefs in Society
A significant change of recent has been the change in language around UFOs. We’ve gone from Unidentified Flying Objects to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This reflects two things of cultural important.
First is that UFOs and the culture that surrounds them have long been seen as a cultural phenomena that is outside cultural norms. Those who believe in UFOs got a bad rap. Woo woo stuff. The second reason is technological advancement. We have tools now that help us perceive and understand the world around us in more detailed ways.
Infrared sensors, advances in radar and other sensing technologies has helped us explore anomalies we don’t understand in better definition. As governments begin to explore what we cannot yet understand, we needed to reframe the narrative around UFOs to fit in with our advancing technological aspects and societal changes as our knowledge of reality increases.
My personal view, or bias, is that we don’t have enough evidence either way. Perhaps it will always be so. Perhaps the mythologies of aliens and UFOs will be with us forever, an important cultural artefact that gives us some form of comfort to deal with what we cannot explain, to entertain at one at level, to give us a form of global social hope and to help give some people a form of psychological safety.
Our current interest levels will likely fade again, as they have before. We will create a lot of content in the short term. Especially with AI tools that mean we can create some pretty amazing visualizations through images and videos.
But eventually, our interest will wane for a while, perhaps when our currently chaotic world settles down for a bit. When we enter another period of social change, perhaps we will resurface aliens and UFOs (sorry, UAPs) again
