Emboldened by a YouTuber’s conspiracy theory, two cousins kidnap a pharmaceutical company executive, believing he is an alien from Andromeda sent to destroy human life.
Two scientists who transformed the encrypted message of an extraterrestrial signal into a virus will unleash an epidemic of kindness in which all minds will connect in unison – a harmony that a woman immune to this viral global happiness will fight against.
The Chilean ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) observatory detects the third interstellar object in history and the Internet spends several months in a collective delirium, convinced that what is approaching Earth is an alien spacecraft.
Of these three stories, only the one regarding the furor over the alleged alien ship 3I/ATLAS was true. To which the alien abductor cousins belong BugoniaYorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, a satire on extraterrestrials that actually talks about the political alienation of a population lost between distrust in the system, conspiracy thinking and fake news.
And the woman immune to the Martian happiness virus that has transformed the world’s population is not real, but rather a character played by Reha Seehorn in Pluribusthe new series of breaking Bad creator and The X-Files writer Vince Gilligan. Gilligan came up with the original idea years ago while filming Better call Saulo. I imagined what would happen if, suddenly, the rest of the world became incredibly kind to just one person. Gilligan’s series says much more about us than anything that might be happening out there.
We must forget the “I Want to Believe” poster that Agent Mulder had hung in his office The X-Files. Today’s new fairy tales about extraterrestrial life are no longer like those that enchanted the last century. Although they still appear in emojis, those silver saucers spotted on clear nights no longer live in our collective imagination. The change in narrative conventions makes sense: if our fears are no longer the same, our extraterrestrial paranoia will be different too.
Carl Jung said this clearly in 1958 when he published it Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies: “You see something, but you don’t know what.” In that book, the psychiatrist explored the symbolic nature of extraterrestrial encounters. For Jung, the UFO myth – regardless of the era – should not be read literally but as a symbolic expression of the collective unconscious and individual psyche. The alleged contact with extraterrestrials, he argued, is actually a projection of the shadow: the darkest aspects of the human personality, such as the fear of the unknown and the impulse to project internal conflict outward. Several recent books and essays have taken up and strengthened this idea. So, what have you changed now?
UFOs were easier to spot under Franco
Why did Franco’s dictatorship, known for its harsh censorship, allow, and even welcome, reports of flying saucer sightings throughout Spain? Because they served their purposes. This is what Ana Fernández-Cebrián, philosopher and professor at Columbia University, claims in her book Fables of development: capitalism and social imaginaries in Spain (1950-1970). She shows that, although the Franco dictatorship did not invent UFOs, it nevertheless capitalized on the wave of sightings because they aligned perfectly with the regime’s propaganda interests.
The UFO stories were useful: they strengthened Spain’s alliance with the United States, projected images of progress and modernity, offered a form of social distraction, channeled collective fears and desires without politicizing them, and fit comfortably into how the regime framed political and social developments as ordained by God.
Under Franco it was easier to spot a flying saucer. Fernández-Cebrián provides numerous proofs: they dominated the front pages of newspapers such as Empire (Zamora’s Falangist newspaper), appeared regularly on radio programs such as the Cadena radio network SER’s Diego Valoreand they also made their way into films like The magnifying glass (1955). At the height of the Cold War, flying saucers became a distorted mirror for Spanish society – a space for imaginative experimentation in a country subject to censorship, gripped by nuclear anxieties and fascinated by technological modernization.
Another group that connected the dots between alien fascination and social repression is Wu Ming, in the novel UFO78. This work, published under the collective pseudonym of a group of Italian writers, explores why Italy experienced what became known as the “Great Wave” in 1978 – the year in which Prime Minister Aldo Moro was assassinated, a state of emergency hit heroin-ravaged streets, and the Vatican saw three different priests. UFO sightings have flooded the news and daily conversations across the country.
Such a mass phenomenon that even EL PAÍS talked about it in a report by Juan Arias: “In Italy, at this moment, people from all walks of life are seeing flying saucers: entire schools with their parents, truck drivers not prone to hysteria, fishermen who know no fear and are well prepared for any surprise. They have been spotted by airport control towers and, especially in recent days, countless police officers have become protagonists of this flying saucer fever”, he writes.
UFO78 brings that episode to life through fictional and real characters, examining how flying saucers functioned as a symbolic projection of fear – a way of giving external form to vague, inarticulate threats.
Tell me another conspiracy theory
While authors like Dan Schreiber now analyze so-called panspermia – the theory that life on Earth was extraterrestrial in origin – in books like The theory of everything elseother texts try to reinterpret the conspiratorial mentality that surrounds us.
“Fables about aliens often refer to the anxiety we feel about the unexpected and unwanted effects of technological progress,” recalls philosopher Pepe Tesoro in an email exchange.
In 2024 Tesoro published the book The same bad guys as always. A theory of conspiracy theories (The same bad guys as always: a theory of conspiracy theories), a work that brought the conspiracy theorist out of the shadows and into public discussion. The book analyzed modern conspiracy theories as social symptoms in times when the present seems hostile. “Although a more benign version of aliens became popular in the 1980s compared to the Cold War-era fear of annihilation in the 1950s, it seems this adversarial relationship with space has returned today,” he explains.
For Tesoro, contemporary times have brought alien fairy tales back into vogue, but now they symbolize our isolationism. “This enormous technological acceleration and political instability, figures like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, companies like Palantir, the climate crisis and the genocide in Gaza have brought the darker side of technological progress back to our imagination,” he explains.
“It is natural that fairy tales about aliens are making a comeback, but the human species is no longer represented as a heroic and unified collective subject worth saving,” he continues. “He’s not even the handsome, competent detective, like Fox Mulder The X-Fileswho faces the alien. Today the individual is simply depicted as alone, distracted and abandoned.”
Therefore, Tesoro explains, in all these new series and films, “the isolation, confusion and anxious condition of the individual are the starting point”. Any encounter with aliens, if it occurs, will be due to the fact that humans feel more alone than ever in the universe.
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