We are far stranger than aliens

You may have missed it amid all the other news of the last few days, but the aliens have apparently landed. In fact, they’ve been landing – or more commonly crashing, the clumsy green scatterbrains – for decades. And just like in the movies, secret military departments around the world have been scooping up the bits of their super advanced technology, figuring out what makes it go, and using it to improve our earthly weapons and gadgets. 

How do we know this? Because David Grusch, formerly of the US UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) task force, has blown the whistle on it to Congress and to the media. Look a little bit harder though (the details are buried in a very long read in tech news site The Debrief). It seems what he’s saying is that the UAP team were denied access to a military crash retrieval programme, which some other people told him was chock-full of extra-terrestrial treats. ‘Mr Grusch has not seen the alleged material himself,’ the Telegraph summed up tartly. He has handed over ‘hundreds of pages’ to Congress, we are told. Hundreds of pages of what?

What I found most interesting about this story was not the story itself, but the reaction. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and the newly untethered Tucker Carlson both went for it in a very big way, with Carlson linking it to Ukraine and even JFK, somehow. It was very peculiar to see people who are rightly sceptical, for example, of claims about the efficacy of lockdowns or that people can change sex, running happily towards our friends from Alpha Centauri. I think they’ve confused the modus operandi of the establishment Western media for conspiracy, and mistaken poor and incurious journalism for lying. That leads you into thinking that the media must be wrong about everything. 

The news might be rubbish, but often it might be rubbish that’s more accurate than not. It’s more effective to cover up the truth if you’re mostly straight on a basic, nuts-and-bolts level. It’s perfectly possible for these organisations and institutions to be awful and duplicitous – to have suppressed the lab leak theory for example – and for Russia to have blown up the Nova Kakhovka Dam. 

Walsh talks on his YouTube show about plentiful evidence of alien encounters going back decades. And indeed there is plentiful evidence: plentiful evidence that some people say they have seen spooky lights and creepy creatures, in the same way that some people said that they saw elves, fairies, gods and monsters throughout history. In the age of the HD smartphone we really should’ve got some better pictures by now. 

The public sphere is so full of bizarre and tenuous rubbish that it’s tempting to believe it is all planned to distract and control us, because how could things be so crazy? But this is where Walsh and Carlson are overlooking a major factor. We are crazy.

The sheer weirdness here is not of alien origin. It is human weirdness. We are far stranger than aliens. Look at some of those big recent news stories. Penny Mordaunt vaulting the Tory popularity poll because she held a sword up like She-Ra for a couple of hours on television. A former Prime Minister resigning as an MP because he was in the same room as a slice of cake that he forbade the rest of the country to eat. As I write, the House of Commons is debating whether men can change into women. Is this a serious and rational species?

In his nifty recent satire In The Beginning, novelist Simon Edge has created a fictional popular lunacy – saying that Earth is millions of years old is offensive – to expose exactly how such human madnesses occur. The book effectively boils it down to a combination of social conformist bubbles and powerful, bad-but-attractive, ideas. 

This is what humans do. We attach importance to unimportant things and vice versa, we ignore real threats for imaginary ones that we’d prefer to posture about, we don’t believe anybody could sincerely hold opinions different to ours without being actively malign. This is because we are wearing human goggles that it’s often almost impossible to take off. 

Back to Walsh and Carlson, who – along with many other commentators from across the political spectrum – regularly point the finger at the blundering awfulness of the state. When it comes to UFOs, they seem to have forgotten that. Either it is obvious when politicians and the military are lying and blatant when the media goes along with it all, or these very same people are capable of a covert multinational operation lasting almost a century. Which is it? 

The idea that Kamala Harris or Donald Trump are keeping back the biggest news in human history is scarcely credible. Biden would’ve blurted it out by now while mistaking Boise, Idaho for the planet Venus. Or perhaps I’ve been instructed to write this column by the Men In Black. You decide.