CINEMA-USA: You Don’t Have to be Crazy to Believe in Aliens

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 9 1998 (IPS) - Aliens are everywhere, at least in the United States – where the number of people who believe in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) outnumbers those who voted for Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton.

In fact, according to the Gallup polling organisation, 27 percent of all Americans believe that space aliens have already visited Earth. Even more telling is that a Time/CNN poll suggested that some 80 percent of all respondents believe in a government cover-up of the existence of aliens.

Hollywood has benefitted from such rampant alien belief, with dozens of movies in recent years catering to the notion that aliens actually live on this planet – but that their existence is carefully being hidden by, of course, the U.S. government.

The 1996 movies ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Mars Attacks!’ both offered slightly tongue-in-cheek renditions of alien invasions of Earth, with the former offering support to the popular myth that the government concealed the crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In 1997, the biggest hit movie of the year – ‘Men in Black’ – was a comedic look at a secret government agency which keeps track of “illegal aliens” – not immigrants, but extraterrestrials.

Hollywood’s alien fever shows no sign of abating. This month, writer-director Chris Carter is delivering the first movie version of his popular Fox-TV television series, ‘The X-Files,’ perhaps the most paranoid of the recent alien fictions. The show and film revolve around the exploits of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents whose search for aliens lead them to uncover vast government conspiracies.

Amid all the hype about aliens, however, more than a few observers are wondering: what does this obsession say about the sanity of the U.S. populace? At least one, Jodi Dean – author of a new book, ‘Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outer Space to Cyberspace’ (Cornell Press, 15.95 dollars) – finds some of the UFO mania healthy.

“During times of uncertainty and instability, people blame distinct groups,” Dean, a professor at New York’s Hobart and William Smith Colleges, argues. “Aliens are a safe outlet for a lot of anger and fear.”

In Dean’s view, the frustrations and fears of modern U.S. life are manifested in the conspiratorial mindset that believes the government is hiding the existence of aliens. With the loss of faith in such quintessentially American concepts as the ‘final frontier’ of U.S. dominion – from Manifest Destiny to the space programme – Americans have turned instead to the belief in aliens among them, she argues.

Of course, there may be simpler reasons for the popularity of aliens. As some Hollywood executives have noted puckishly, aliens don’t get upset at the way they are depicted in films. Also, many of the plots – aliens attack, humans unite to defeat them – are simple stories which have been fodder for movie-goers since the 1950s.

The first alien films, however, were very clearly metaphors for the Cold War: Many times, they would concern trusting Americans who would be confronted by an alien force that initially seemed friendly – but ultimately stood exposed as a cruel, totalitarian threat to the American way of life which had to be destroyed. The parallels with U.S. government propaganda about the Soviet Union never needed to be spelled out.

In the more cynical era of the 1990s, alien movies are more about distrust of the government than about ‘Us vs. Them’ Cold War confrontations. In ‘Men in Black’, the heroes learn to get their information from garish tabloids that feature stories on alien abductions; as the chief agent, played by Tommy Lee Jones, explains, they are the only accurate news – unlike propaganda like The New York Times.

Similarly, ‘X-Files’ agents Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) acquire far more useful information from the marginal figures of society – computer hackers, conspiracy theorists and the like – than they do from (generally untrustworthy) government officials.

Ironically enough, films and shows about flawed politicians – such as the recent ‘Primary Colours’ – are never as successful as those about UFOs. Perhaps if Bill Clinton were revealed to be an alien, rather than a typical example of U.S. politics, the American public might start caring about government again.