Live to Ride ... A UFO

I pulled into Roswell, NM after a long, hot day through Texas, but in spite of the temperature I was psyched. As a kid I grew up with aliens on the brain, what with The Outer Limits, My Favorite Martian, and The Three Stooges in Orbit on television and Devil Girls from Mars (!), Alien, and E.T. on the big screen, followed by early video games such as Space Invaders. For years I have read various accounts of Roswell and the 1947 UFO incident and of course Area 51 in Nevada. So this was a big moment, one planned for some time and I intended to make the best of it.

I tend to be a proponent of the theory that popular culture reflects current angst. With the rise of industrialism in the west came such novels as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which reflected fear and uncertainty about the reach of science and technology. This fear was revisited during the Great Depression, as filmmakers put their own technological twist on the gothic novels of the 19th century, demonstrating again the uncertainties of technological utopia when faced with the vagueries of climate and the greedy financial manipulations of man. Western's filled the movies houses during the period of World War II and immediately after, when we ardently desired the US Cavalry to ride to our rescue, and of course the 1950's saw peak in the alien invasion genre, the spectre of the Cold War and those "godless Commies" who were out there and going to get us. Crime dramas filled the airways during the chaos of the '60's and today we see that genre, in combination with new horror/alien movies, returning as fear mongers stir up in us the threat of a new invasion of aliens.

I don't pretend to understand what the so-called "reality shows" reflect. Years of serious drug and alcohol abuse, maybe?

All of this comes to mind because of the newspaper headline "Ex-military officers: UFOs real" in my newspaper the other day. The upshot is that a group of former Air Force officers has asserted that UFOs visited their bases and that the government is covering it up. We are just certain that some unknown someone out there is going to travel a bazillion miles to snatch away from us Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and of course the government itself is involved in the conspiracy!

Or maybe not a bazillion miles ... maybe just across the border. But "they" are going to get us, none the less and "government" can be depended upon to help snatch our freedoms. We never get tired of this stuff, do we?!

Anyway, I pulled into my motel, got settled and started making the rounds. I loved the International UFO Museum and Research Center, where they sure do put together a convincing case for the veracity of the Roswell Incident and government cover-up. I chatted with locals and with visitors, some of whom were delightful and others who were clearly nuts ... but fun none-the-less. Some were sceptics, some were believers, and some were just like me: interested in learning more.

We live in a time when we are very afraid of aliens ... a sadly typical response to times of economic uncertainty when we look for scapegoats upon which to heap our fear and anger. We become afraid of that with which we are unfamiliar; having been steeped for a lifetime in an Enlightenment worldview which says that we can control everything, when the reality of post-Modern chaos strikes we seek to place the blame somewhere, to imagine that if we just get control of this one thing, then the world will resume turning on it's proper axis. And right now taht someone is the "aliens" among us. I wish the world were that simple.

The truth is that we do not have an immigration problem and we do not have a political problem, we have an economic problem. And come to think of it, maybe we don't really have an economic problem, but rather a moral problem: greed. I think maybe it is greed that is the true Alien germinating inside of us, just like that slimey critter inside the crew of the Nostromo which, under orders from their corporate masters, had stopped to pick up this horror. They were unwitting slaves considered to be expendable by those in power, motivated only by corporate profit.

That there are aliens I have no doubt; the question is do they come from within, or from without?