Encouraged by the conspiracy theory of a youtubertwo cousins kidnap a top executive of a pharmaceutical company believing he is an alien who has come from Andromeda to destroy human life. Two scientists who have transformed the encrypted message of an extraterrestrial signal into a virus will cause an epidemic of goodness in which all minds will connect in unison, a harmony against which a woman immune to that viral global happiness will fight. The Chilean Asteroid Impact Alert System (ATLAS) observatory detects the third interstellar object in history and the Internet enters, for several months, into a collective delirium believing that what is approaching Earth is an alien ship.
In the previous paragraph only the story of the viral madness with the alleged ship was true. alien of 3I/ATLAS. The alien abductor cousins are the co-stars of BugoniaYorgos Lanthimos’ latest film in theaters, an alien satire that actually talks about the political alienation of a population lost between distrust in the system, conspiracy and fake news. And the woman immune to the Martian happiness virus that transformed the world’s population does not exist, but in the series she is played by Reha Seehorn. Pluribus, the new project from the creator of breaking Bad and screenwriter of The X-FilesVince Gilligan, who had the original idea a few years ago without the intervention of aliens: during filming Better call Saulo He imagined what would happen if, suddenly, the rest of the world was incredibly kind to just one person. Gilligan’s series is much more about us than about what’s happening out there.
You have to forget the I want to believe (I want to believe) of the iconic poster that Agent Mulder had hung in his office The X-Files. The new fairy tales about extraterrestrial life are no longer like those that hypnotized the last century. Although they continue to be used in emojis as well, those silver saucers seen on clear nights no longer live in the imagination. The narrative mutation makes sense: if our fears will no longer be the same, extraterrestrial paranoia will also be different.
“People see something, but we don’t know what it is,” clarified psychiatrist Carl Jung during the publication A modern myth about things seen in the sky in 1958, where he explored the symbolic nature of extraterrestrial encounters. For the psychologist, the UFO fable, at any time, should not be interpreted literally, but rather as symbolic expressions of the collective unconscious and individual psyche. For Jung, extraterrestrial contact is actually a manifestation of the shadow and darker aspects of the individual’s personality, such as fear of the unknown or the tendency to project. Several recent books and essays also reinforce this theory. What has changed now?
With Franco they were better
Why did Franco’s censorship coexist placidly and without addressing all the news about flying saucer sightings in Spain? Because they suited him. This is what Ana Fernández-Cebrián, doctor of Philosophy and professor at Columbia University, develops in her thesis. In Development fables: capitalism and social imaginaries in Spain (1950-1970)an investigation that was published in English and will soon be published in Spanish, contextualizes why the Franco regime did not invent UFOs, but took advantage of the proliferation of stories because they suited its propaganda interests. They were interesting because they strengthened the alliance with the United States, created imaginaries of progress and modernity, served as a social distraction, allowed collective fears and desires to be channeled without politicizing them, and were well integrated into the providential rhetoric of the State.
With Franco (the dishes) seemed better. And Fernández-Cebrián is proof of this: they have monopolized the covers of newspapers like Empire (JONS Spanish Phalanx Zamora’s Diary)their stories were common on radio programs such as Diego Valore from Cadena Ser or similar films The magnifying glass (1955). At the height of the Cold War, flying saucers were our distorting mirror, an imaginary laboratory for a society subjected to censorship, crossed by nuclear fears and fascinated by technological modernization.
Another group that connected the dots between alien fascination and social repression was Wu Ming in the novel UFO78translated by Juan Manuel Salmerón Arjona for Anagrama. In this fiction written under the pseudonym of a group of Italian narrators, we explore why in their country in 1978, the year in which Aldo Moro was assassinated and the state of emergency took over the streets devastated by heroin while three popes followed one another in the Vatican, what was known as the “Great Wave” occurred. UFO sightings have flooded the news and conversations across the country.
A mass phenomenon that was also echoed in this newspaper in a report by Juan Arias: “In Italy, at this moment, people of all categories see luminous discs: entire schools with their parents, truck drivers not prone to hysteria, fishermen who do not know fear and who are well prepared for any surprise. They have seen them in airport control towers and, especially in recent days, countless police officers have been protagonists of this disc fever”, he writes. In UFO78 That episode is remembered with imaginary and real characters, analyzing how the saucers functioned as a symbolic projection of fear, a way to give external form to widespread threats.
Tell me another conspiracy
While authors such as Dan Schreiber now analyze the so-called panspermia, the theory according to which the origin of life on Earth was already extraterrestrial, in essays such as The theory of everything else (with translation by Francisco J. Ramos Mena for Captain Swing), other texts try to redefine the conspiracy theory that surrounds us.
“Fables about aliens usually have to do with the anxiety we feel when faced with the unexpected and unwanted effects of technological progress,” recalls philosopher Pepe Tesoro, who published the essay in 2024, in an email exchange. The same bad guys as always. A theory of conspiracy theoriesa text that brought the profile of the conspiracy theorist out of the margins and in which he analyzes modern conspiracy theories as social symptoms when the present harasses us. “Although in the 1980s a more benevolent version of aliens spread than in the 1950s, marked by the Cold War’s terror of annihilation, it seems that today that conflictual relationship with space has returned,” he clarifies.
For Tesoro, current times have brought alien fairy tales back into vogue, but to symbolize our isolationism. “With this enormous technological acceleration and political instability, characters like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, companies like Palantir, the climate crisis and the genocide in Gaza have brought back to our imagination the darkest side of technical progress. It is natural that alien fairy tales return, but the human species is no longer represented as a heroic and unitary collective subject to be saved. It does not even address the alien the handsome and competent detective, like Fox Mulder in The X-Files. Today the subject is directly represented alone, distraught and abandoned.” Therefore, he clarifies, it is in all these new series and films that “the isolation, confusion and anxious condition of the individual are the starting point.” The meeting, if it happens, will be because the human being feels more alone than ever in the universe.
