How the belief in alien life forms has (b)reached the oval office
“Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth” was the subject of a U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on November 13, to determine whether covert government agents have suppressed evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. The two-and-a-half hour long hearing was livestreamed for the general public. It would’ve made Mulder and Skully’s jaws drop.
Witnesses included a retired U.S. Navy admiral, a former official of both the Pentagon and NASA, and a recognized journalist; they all testified under oath about their own first-hand encounters with unidentified airborne objects, and about sanctioned efforts to erase any evidence of said phenomena. One witness submitted a 214-page “whistleblower” document of UAP sightings between 1974 and 2023.
Their testimony also included such comments as “We are not alone in the cosmos,” and, “Let me be clear: UAP are real.”
This hearing is the most recent in a long line of developments which broadly consider the question, “Do aliens exist?” The conversations have ranged from dark web chat rooms to sci-fi book clubs to the White House.
How did we get here?
The October 2024 Socionomist cover story “Flying Saucer Mania” reveals how shifts in social mood drive public fascination with extraterrestrials:
Unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, became a fixture of American pop culture in the 1940s, when what might have been a passing fad was turned into a “cultural craze with staying power” (Medium, May 22, 2023).
Social mood at the time was trending negatively. The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior observed that when social mood shifts from positive to negative, society switches from practical thinking to magical thinking. Practical thinking manifests itself in philosophic defenses of reason. Magical thinking is characterized by philosophic attacks on reason.
The March 2023 issue of The European Financial Forecast further observed that bear markets are characterized by “nebulous, conspiratorial thinking” versus the “pragmatic, coherent thought processes that produce beneficial outcomes” in bull markets.
As this two-part series will show, negative mood has been the impetus behind America’s fascination with UAPs, extraterrestrials, and the government’s efforts to investigate them.
Tales of Lizards and Martians
America’s UAP craze began during Supercycle wave IV, from 1929 to 1949. (See Figure 1.) During this period, the U.S. experienced two of the most ruinous expressions of negative mood in its history: the Great Depression and World War II.
It’s no surprise that the early years of Supercycle Wave IV saw people begin to believe shape-shifting lizards lived on earth, masqueraded as humans and planned to take over the planet. The October 2023 issue of The Socionomist traced this belief to a 1929 novelette titled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which described a race of Serpent Men with the ability to disguise themselves and “covertly control the levers of power.”
Flash ahead to the year 2024, and the reptilian conspiracy train looms ever larger. From the New York Times, Oct. 24, 2024:
I Work in Data Security. Is It a Problem That My Boss Believes in Lizard People?
Once again, the October 2024 Socionomist:
In 1960, as the U.S. entered a brief recession, astronomer Frank Drake pioneered the use of radio telescopes in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, often referred to as “SETI.” (See Figure 1.) Drake looked for signs of civilization around the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, some 10 to 12 light years from Earth.
In 1961, scientists from around the world came to the U.S. to meet with Drake. The group determined that across the Milky Way, there were probably “somewhere between one thousand and one hundred million advanced extraterrestrial civilizations” (Graff).
In the downturn that followed a January 1966 market top, another major government effort to investigate UAPs began. In March of that year, dozens of witnesses on the campus of Hillsdale College in Michigan reported a “mysterious, multicolored, football-shaped object” in the campus arboretum (National Review, April 21, 2022).
Michigan was the home state of House Republican leader Gerald Ford, who became the U.S. president after the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon. Ford and another Michigan congressman, Weston Vivian, called on the Armed Services Committee to open the first-ever hearing on UAPs.
It’s been five decades since the first-ever Congressional hearing on UAPs. The Nov. 13, 2024 hearing picks up right where it (and many more) left off. The thing they have in common is the negative grip of social mood.
As the Bible said: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Thanks to socionomics, we can understand why these all-too-recognizable patterns reappear across decades.
Get access to the full, October 2024 Socionomist cover story “Flying Saucer Mania” with a single-issue membership today.
Or – subscribe to the Socionomist and get access to the entire archival library of publications going back to 2004.
See for yourself how social mood drives historic trend changes in the social, cultural, and political landscapes.