The Spectacular Nope

Look away! Look away! Look away!

Every year or so an article comes out like 2021’s “Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding” from Scientific American, in which Loeb explains that Oumuamua, an interstellar object that passed Earth, “had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence” of a kind that we can neither explain nor even begin to understand how to communicate with. Common sarcastic reactions to posts like this on Twitter welcome the alien apocalypse because things are so dire here or assume that these extraterrestrials will pretty quickly see what a mess humans have made and turn right around. Whereas a decade or two ago, popular culture consumed UFO/alien fiction and nonfiction¹ in part due to a kind of fascination with its conspiratorial implications in works like The X-Files and as demonstrated by the swift invasion of the History Channel through shows like UFO Hunters and Ancient Aliens, the institutional distrust behind the gravitation toward these fringe topics has become mainstream in not just media but often the people running said institutions. A typical X-Files mythology episode might end with Mulder trying to convince Scully that the higher ups in the FBI are . . . lying about something. A musical sting would lead into a commercial break and viewers would sit in suspense and shock. News as a concept now has absorbed a level of spectacle and distrust where it’s unclear that media coverage of an ongoing alien invasion would or could convince a significant portion of the population that A) anything is actually happening or B) that it is something to worry about.