The US Department of Defense released the first batch of its UFO files last week at the direction of the president, Donald Trump, who promised to make them public “based on the tremendous interest shown”.
Trump’s right, of course. Nearly half of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth, and many believe that the government is hoarding the evidence in some shadowy laboratory or military base. This conspiracy began in 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico, when the Roswell army airfield issued a news release about the crash of a “flying disc”, and has never truly gone away.
But why now? The release of these files is partly due to a decade of sustained pressure by a group of dubious UFO lobbyists, such as “whistleblower” Luis Elizondo, Jeremy Corbell and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge, who have tapped into the US’s bedrock of unreality and made a fortune in book deals, History Channel “documentaries” and speaking gigs.
The UFO conspiracy also happens to be perfect for Trump. Releasing the files fits neatly into his playbook. Ever since descending the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, the president has positioned himself as a political outsider who will expose the dark hand of the deep state that pulls the strings from the shadows.
Conspiracy theories are closed feedback loops and offer convenient get-out clauses. If the files contain proof that the men from Ork are with us, Trump emerges as the hero. But when these files inevitably don’t provide the smoking raygun, he can claim that the deep state is so deep it can even hide information from the president.
The UFO conspiracy also pleases his cronies. The vice-president, JD Vance, said he has an “obsession” with UFOs, but he doesn’t think their pilots are little green men – he thinks they are demons. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, suggested in a UFO documentary that the government could be in possession of alien tech. The flying saucers also provide a decent hiding spot for Trump, a galactically unpopular president who is suffocating in scandal and calamity. These files are a great distraction from his unlawful actions in Venezuela and Iran.
And if the first government release is anything to go by, then ufologists worldwide are going to be very disappointed. So far, the files have produced a rather underwhelming collection of unsubstantiated close encounters, images and videos featuring grainy blobs and blurs that don’t come close to evidence of an alien invasion.
Some of these videos were debunked by eagle-eyed online sleuths almost as soon as they were released. One featuring a star-shaped UFO is almost certainly a flare attached to a parachute. Another recording appears to show a red orb eerily weaving between turbines on a windfarm, but the orb is probably a red balloon. Actually, scratch that. It is a red balloon.
I used to think that little green men could be behind all these sightings. I was originally swayed by the modern UFO wave when the New York Times revealed in 2017 that the Pentagon had a secret UFO programme. The subsequent UFO hearings, featuring whistleblowers making outlandish claims about stowed spaceships and their “non-human” pilots, convinced me to travel across the US chasing aliens. By the end of my journey I had learned far more about human beings, especially those from the US, than about extraterrestrials.
Far from being a cosmic visitor, ET represents a giant slice of Americana. It began shortly after the second world war, when the US emerged as the world’s superpower. Such a position creates a paradox. When you’re at your most powerful, you’re at your most vulnerable. Ask any alpha lion in the savannah.
The postwar US was a place of fear, witch-hunts, blacklists and red scares followed by decades of scandal – think the JFK assassination, Vietnam and Watergate. The Hollywood sci-fi boom overlaid this terror of the other, of shadowy puppeteers. All of this history explains why aliens permeate the American mind.
Even the most sophisticated and credentialed UFO enthusiasts appear to be influenced by their imagination and emotions rather than evidence. When I spoke to the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who once speculated that a comet passing through the solar system could be debris from an alien spaceship, he envisioned aliens as enlightened sages who will descend on us with omniscient wisdom and shepherd us to a utopia. This struck me as a materialist version of god. Religion dressed in a white coat.
This is not to say that conspiracies don’t exist. They do. But they usually take place right in the open. Believe it or not, the US government does not need to screw you behind your back. It does it straight to your face. In 2008, greedy Wall Street bankers wilfully broke the economy, the government bailed them out and people paid for it. It has spent most of the past two decades tearing up the social contract, and pointing the finger at minorities and migrants.
When the perpetrators of this injustice say something I agree with, it can be difficult to swallow. For instance, I scarcely agree with a single word that spills from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lips, but after the first tranche of files was published on Friday, she posted something that had been coursing through my mind for the last 10 years: “I’m so sick of the ‘look at the shiny object’ propaganda.”
Greene is right: Americans should stop thinking about what their government might be hiding in the shadows and get angry about what it is actually doing under their noses. The truth is out there – it’s right in front of you.
Daniel Lavelle’s new book, Chasing Aliens, was published on 30 April (Viking, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Daniel Lavelle is a freelance journalist