The search for life “out there” increases as negative social mood deepens down here
15 minutes after he took office as 47th U.S. President, Donald Trump was asked about the 800-pound drone in the room: thousands of reported sightings of unmanned aerial phenomenon over the eastern seaboard since November, prompting waves of panic and suspicions of alien surveillance. Read:
“Drones are not human? Viral video sparks UFO fears, reports of clock-tampering across New Jersey” (Dec. 16 Times of India).
President Trump gave his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles the task of solving the mystery.
This was no group-chat in a corner of the dark web. This was the inaugural White House press conference. Which begs the question: Has society jumped the shark of sanity?
Our new, February 2025 Socionomist has a probing answer: researcher Chuck Thompson’s Part II of his “Flying Saucer Mania” study, puts the current “watershed moment” of accepting alien life into its clear socionomic context.
Indeed, that moment has everything to do with social mood. From “Flying Saucer Mania, Part II”:
In part 1 … we explained that when social moods shifts from positive to negative, society shifts from practical thinking to magical thinking. Practical thinking involves philosophical defenses of reason and thought processes that are pragmatic and coherent. Magical thinking is characterized by philosophical attacks on reason and thought processes that are nebulous and conspiratorial.

The Economist published a list of “Ten implausible-sounding scenarios for 2025,” it included the following: “Evidence of alien life is detected.” It said that searching for aliens, once viewed as a fringe activity, has “become part of mainstream research, and more scientists are now engaged in it than at any time in the past” (November 18, 2024).
You can read Chuck’s full, seven-page report in the February Socionomist, including a hard-hitting cover story on the historic correlation between concussion scandals in American football and negative social mood – today – with a single-issue purchase.
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OR – enjoy the complete Socionomist package, which includes access to the entire “Best-Of” archive of issues dating back to 2004! Click on the link to begin.