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Why Doesn�t Anyone Care About Aliens
by Michael Auerbach
� One would think that with the recent revelations of the first known interstellar object to
pass through our solar system, the �asteroid� Oumuamua, a long, narrow object that appears
to be coated with organic material; a Pentagon program that spent $22 million to study UFOs;
an accompanying cockpit video of a Navy jet tracking a pill-shaped UFO; and the news that
the government had stored exotic �non-terrestrial� metals from UFO crash sites in a Nevada warehouse,
the public would be in a frenzy to know more about the UFO and extraterrestrial presence.
� So, why doesn�t anyone seem to care? � The writer blames President Trump. According
to the writer, the day to day activities of Donald Trump has dominated every news cycle
to the point that if a story is not about him, the public figures it must not be newsworthy.
� Trump has made everyday reality seem so alien to so many of us that news pertaining
to actual aliens doesn�t seem nearly as wild as it would have in another era. Our
ability to be shocked is exhausted. It feels as though ET himself could step out of a flying
saucer in Times Square and half a day later the news cycle would move on to Trump�s
latest tweetstorm. � Ultimately, we cannot afford to let the
extraordinary become ordinary � not in culture, not in politics, and certainly not in science.
We cannot abandon our ability to dream and think big, to approach the world with a sense
of wonder. Such an abandonment would be a betrayal of our children and the children
we once were. Our reality may be distorted right now, but the truth is still out there.
When I was a kid, I dreamed of aliens. Not literally � I didn�t hallucinate in the
middle of the night about being abducted and probed or anything like that. But I imagined
with spine-tingling wonder what it might be like if humanity made contact with alien life,
what it would mean for the world and for me.
That�s why it came as such a shock last week to see an article in the New York Times
declaring that a small, ultra-secretive group at the Pentagon is actually, in real life,
investigating UFOs. They have videos, one published in the Times, that beggar explanation.
They have facilities in Nevada that had to be retrofitted to accommodate exotic metals
from crash sites, materials which researchers deemed did not appear to originate from any
country, and technology against which the program�s director said the United States
could not defend itself.
Again, this is not being reported on some fly-by-night blog. This is the New York Times.
Couple this information with the discovery of the first known interstellar object, Oumuamua,
passing through our solar system � a long, narrow asteroid that appears to be coated
with organic material � and it�s got me wondering: Why doesn�t anyone else seem
to care? When I was growing up, or even a few years ago for that matter, these kinds
of reality-bending revelations would have sparked massive public conversation and dominated
media coverage. Now they pass without a blip.
What�s the deal?
To be sure, some of the explanation is probably as simple as public fatigue around these types
of stories from less reputable sources. After decades of conspiracy theories and X-Files
reruns, the threshold for credulity is extra high. And as a skeptically minded person myself,
I think that�s a good thing. But when a publication like the New York Times stands
behind this kind of story and people treat it with less interest than the latest Robert
Mueller shoe-drop or the new tax law, it makes me think that something deeper is afoot � and
as with so many things, I think the issue ties back to Donald Trump.
Since he rode down that golden escalator two and a half years ago (really, it�s only
been two and a half years), Trump has occupied an outsized role in the psyche of America
and, to a lesser degree, the world. After his shocking election in 2016, he�s dominated
every corner of public discourse, reaching far beyond politics into sports, film, television,
business, and so on. Every story seems to be about him, whether it�s intended to be
or not.
A corollary of Trump�s refraction of reality, then, is that things which can�t in any
way be related back to him seem inherently less important. He�s the protagonist of
our cultural subconscious, no matter how much we might not want him to be, and his presence
permeates our world so overwhelmingly that news which doesn�t in any way connect to
him feels ancillary at best and irrelevant at worst � even if that news involves the
possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Indeed, Trump has made everyday reality seem so alien to so many of us that news pertaining
to actual aliens doesn�t seem nearly as wild as it would have in another era. Our
ability to be shocked is exhausted. It feels as though ET himself could step out of a flying
saucer in Times Square and half a day later the news cycle would move on to Trump�s
latest tweetstorm.