“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch
First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe, Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact.
The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that has fed off both the crisis of traditional authority and the suspicion that the people in power know more than they’re letting on. Elites, in other words, know nothing and everything. Simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
Underneath this silliness, Kirsch notes, is something more substantial. Perhaps religion itself. Where people once saw miracles or demons, they now see little green-headed creatures packed into flying saucers. In other words, they provide a vocabulary for experiences that we can’t explain, as well as a community with which we can share that mystery.
So what happens when the aliens finally show up? As I suggested, maybe these transcendental creatures arrived. We’ve built them ourselves in the form of artificial intelligence. Kirsch agreed, seeing AI as a kind of nonhuman mind that doesn’t experience the world as we do. Such a Copernican moment is “very imaginable,” the sceptic concedes. Disclosure Day. Starring Adam Kirsch.
Five Takeaways
• A Pure Thought Experiment. UFOs don’t exist — which makes them the perfect consequence-free laboratory for the populist age’s biggest question: who decides what’s real, and whose authority do we trust?
• ’Oumuamua’s Wager. Avi Loeb reworks Pascal: believe, because an open mind costs little. Kirsch answers with Sagan: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the real mystery stands — where are all the other Earths?
• The Archetype of Conspiracy. The disclosure paradigm — the people in power know more than they’re letting on — was rehearsed on Roswell for eighty years before COVID and the Epstein files. From the Condon Report to AATIP.
• A Religious Impulse. Where medieval villagers saw miracles or demons, we see aliens: a vocabulary for the inexplicable, and a community to believe with. The aliens we imagine are always mirrors of ourselves.
• The Aliens We Invented. “We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for” — AI as the nonhuman mind. And the hard-headed skeptic concedes: a Copernican moment is “very imaginable.”
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Buy We Want to Believe: citylights.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: the hard-headed trilogy
00:02:07 A minority belief goes mainstream
00:02:59 2017: glowing auras and black money
00:03:30 A pure thought experiment in trust
00:04:45 Avi Loeb and ‘Oumuamua’s wager
00:06:55 The Sagan standard
00:08:48 Believer or opportunist?
00:09:16 The real conundrum: where is everybody?
00:11:11 Where are all the other Earths?
00:13:26 Star Trek as metaphysics
00:15:29 Spielberg’s Disclosure Day: fan service and secret truths
00:17:24 The archetype of conspiracy: from Roswell to the Epstein files
00:19:59 Book encounters: a vocabulary for the unexplainable
00:22:24 A religious impulse: Jacques Vallée and the levels beyond
00:24:29 The big X: aliens at the intersection of science and belief
00:27:20 From the Condon Report to AATIP: the government files
00:31:24 Strangelovian skies: how fiction shaped the saucers
00:32:56 From Wells’s microbes to Musk’s Mars
00:35:13 The aliens we invented: AI enters the story
00:37:29 A Copernican moment? Egg on skeptical faces
00:38:46 The poet’s view: a practical problem now
00:39:50 Independence Day: would discovery unite us?
00:41:04 The Three-Body Problem: is disclosure particularly American?