Whatever happened to UFOs?

William Grosso @ September 12, 2006

Unidentified Flying Objects were all the rage during the early years of the cold war. Starting sometime after Orson Welle’s classic War of the Worlds (which capitalized on the sense of creeping menace in the pre-WWII years) to roughly 1980, there were thousands of UFO sightings. And the idea of UFO’s made it into the popular discourse.

These days? Unless you listen to late night talk radio, you don’t hear much about UFO’s any more.

I think the weight of the evidence is clear: the saucers weren’t real.

In a now classic work, Jung speculated that the UFO sightings were, essentially, mass visions caused by the tensions of the times (not just the cold war, but more general trends as well– from atomic weaponry to overpopulation and so on).
But have those pressures abated? The cold war is over, to be sure. But the current troubles afoot in the world seem, to my eye, to be far more dangerous (more actors, more weaponry, deeper emotions. It’s all bad). Overpopulation is still an issue. We’ve also got global warming and our aging population to worry about.

So, if anything, I’d expect people to be less sanguine than in 1960.
Which leads to the question: what are our UFOs?

The best I can come up with is “Paris Hilton.” But that’s not an entirely serious suggestion.

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