Page 14 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - February 2023 Edition

14 UFO Mania Is Out Of Control

UFO Mania Is Out of

Control.

Please Stop.

Sorry to disappoint you, this

science writer says, but there’s
zero evidence of aliens.

By Joel Achenbach

Fiends and colleagues have urged me to

write something about UFOs, because the
topic is hot again and I’m sort of the
space alien reporter on staff. This refers
not to where I’m from, but to the kind of
stuff I used to write about. I wrote a book
(“Captured by Aliens,” 1999) that was
primarily about the scientific search for made a disastrous marketing mistake by Navy pilots: “[T]here is footage and
extraterrestrial life and included a long not including any aliens in the story, records of objects in the skies that we
section on UFO mythology. I’ve been to focusing instead on people who believe don’t know exactly what they are.” But

Roswell. I wrote about the mass suicide in aliens. Thus it was a major Obama could have gone further: We
of the 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists who disappointment for readers who bought a don’t know where they are.
thought they would be transported to a copy after finding it in the “Occult”
spaceship trailing comet Hale-Bopp. I’ve section at Barnes & Noble. The classic UFO narrative — the
interviewed people who think their interesting conjecture, the one with
bodies have become inhabited by aliens Over the years I have found less joy in extraterrestrial beings in it — involves a
from the Pleiades. telling the believers that what they ziggurat of unknowns and unknowables.
believe is not true. It gets old, always We’re talking about elusive spacecraft
But I’m wary of returning to that strange telling people to stop reading the piloted by unknown beings, of unknown
universe, because anything I write is horoscope. We all rely on our beliefs to biology, using unknown technologies.
guaranteed to be unsatisfying for get through the day. They are our Whose motives are unknown. And who
everyone involved. My strong suspicion handrails on a shaky planet. People don’t come from … somewhere. And who right

is that the number of UFO sightings that need someone with a fanatical desire to now are … hiding? Watching us? Their
involve actual alien beings, from deep be correct to come along and pry their location cannot be discerned because
space, with the tentacles and the antennae fingers loose. they have special cloaking technologies.
and so on, is zero. I would put the But which mercifully are not perfect, thus
likelihood at 0.0000 and then add some Make no mistake: I want to be the allowing military pilots to see them,
more zeros, before eventually, reporter who goes out on a limb and sometimes, and even capture them on
begrudgingly — because I’m so breaks the space aliens story. I want my poor-quality videos.
intellectually flexible — putting in a little name on a front-page story with a 72-

1 out there somewhere to the right, a point headline saying THEY’RE HERE. (Continued on Page 15)
lonely sentinel, because who knows? That would be a great, career-making
(Yes, I’m saying there’s a chance.) story. But the aliens never deliver. It
doesn’t matter how many front-page
This skeptical take, however, is the stories there are about UFO sightings, or
boring take. A better story would be that, that the Pentagon acknowledged it had an
after all these decades as a skeptic, I’ve in-house UFO-probing office, or that
converted, because the recent rash of some government officials think UFOs
UFO sightings has persuaded me that might be aliens. None of that means
these are, in actual fact, spaceships from they’re here.
somewhere else in the universe, or There are practical, mechanical reasons
perhaps from the future, and could even for being reluctant to engage on this. To

be future humans, such as grad students do any kind of UFO story requires a
getting their PhDs in paleoanthropology. descent into the rabbit hole of ufology,
Much better story. and that hole is bottomless. And this isn’t
Science journalists regularly disappoint the kind of story where you can do a lot
people by refusing to confirm really cool of fieldwork. Earlier this year, in an
things like UFOs, past-life recall, astral appearance with late-night host James
projection, telekinesis, clairvoyance and Corden, former president Barack Obama
so on. When I wrote my aliens book I spoke about videos of UFOs shot by