UFOs, Flying Saucers and Aliens

by Manuel Carballal

             The alien invasion is upon us regardless of the passionate and impassioned debate regarding the existence--or non-existence--of life beyond our own world. Even beyond the confrontations between ufologists, naysayers and believers, and completely beyond what astronomy, exobiology and even ufology may have to say about the matter...we have already been invaded by aliens.

            The ranks of contactee cults have swelled in an inverse proportion to the disenchanted faithful who leave Catholic or Protestant churches. The Star Trek, Star Wars or Starman sagas are hits at the box-office, with audience shares rivalled only by Mulder and Scully on the small screen. Records by UFO or the Foo Fighters are on top of the record sales lists, while ET replaces Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse in the minds of our children. The number of UFO publications increases year after year while new editions of hit books on aliens and extraterrestrials appear on the stands.

            It's inevitable. If our parents' generation was raised on the Ripaldan Catechism, songs by Joselito, and the movie Marcelino Pan y Vino, our children are being raised amid the bombardment of the extraterrestrial myth. It isn't strange, therefore, that more and more sociologists should aim their doctoral dissertations toward the increasing presence of extraterestrialism in Western culture.

            This sociological perspective of the extraterrestrial myth,

firmly implanted in our culture, has nothing to do with the search for extraterrestrial life undertaken by radio telescopes all over the world. Nor does it have anything to do with the flying wings, circular-winged vehicles, hybrid dirigibles and many other "flying saucers" and disk-shaped craft which have been born since the dawn of the twentieth century, on the drafting tables of German, American, Japanese and other aeronautical engineers.

            Nor is there any relationship between the extraterrestrial myth as a cultural phenomenon and the vast array of aerial phenomena of a meteorological, astronomical or physical type, seen in the skies by so many thousands of people unable to identify their nature: lenticular clouds, atmospheric electricity, temperature inversions, planetary alignments, meteorites, etc.

            Amid this universe of false synonyms, socio-cultural myths, unconventional aeronautics, and unknown aerial phenomena, there's this odd thing called "ufology".

            Bastard children of Science, heretics of religion and cultural malcontents, ufologists have tried to turn the study of unexplained aerial phenomena into a legitimate discipline. However, there are too many hidden interests seeking to maintain the veil of obscurantism which surrounds the UFO phenomenon.

            Renowned thinker and linguist Noam Chomsky inadvertently defined the problem that bedevils ufology in his book Necessary Illusions when it came to enunciating such concepts as "the contention of the debate". This clever power strategy consists in limiting the focus upon a given phenomena, thus containing the debate's arguments and by logical extension, the "sensitive" information which might eventually reach the public's opinion. Let me explain. While all ufological forums limit themselves to heated debates with naysayers and skeptics, rehashing the Manichean and absurd question of whether UFOs are or are not alien spacecraft, the powers-that-be continue to conceal, behind those selfsame UFOs, its secret weapons, psychosocial experiments, ideological trends, new cult movements and a lengthy etcetera.

            It is for this reason that those who construct History continue to conceal the truth, or I should say, the different "truths" that are hidden behind some of those UFOs, restricting information or simply intoxicating it, since information is Power, and Power is never shared with the people.