Coronavirus and the UFO – An Interview with Martin Brossman

(My friend Martin Brossman and I have just recorded, via Zoom, a video interview on “Coronavirus and the UFO”–two subjects we don’t often think to connect.  As soon as the video goes live, I’ll post the link to it here.  In the meantime, here’s the gist of what we said to one another:)

Martin:  This country and the world are now confronted with the crisis of the coronavirus.  Is there a UFO connection?

David:  Yes, I think there is, and we’re starting to see it emerge.  Belgium has been experiencing a rash of UFO sightings, the biggest in that country since the great UFO wave of 1989-90.  But let me be clear: I do not believe that the coronavirus was brought to earth by space aliens or anything like that.  The connection I have in mind is something quite different.

For me, UFOs are a myth, by which I don’t mean “bunk” or “nonsense” but a kind of collective dream.  As a dream, they come bearing a meaning for us.  I think their central meaning is death, the ultimate alien that’s also—the title of my book—the most intimate alien.  This is why the best-known UFO story is that of the crash at Roswell, whose essential message is death, mortality.

 Martin:  We’ve talked about Roswell in another conversation [to which the link will be posted as soon as it goes live].

David:  Yes.  And the Roswell story is set in the summer of 1947.  That’s when the UFO era began, when they first burst into our collective consciousness.  It’s also when the Doomsday Clock first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  When we became aware that a new kind of death had entered the world, the nuclear extinction of our whole species.  We projected that awareness into the sky; it appeared to us as flying saucers.

Now fast-forward.  Over the past few years we’ve seen an amazing renascence of the UFOs, not so much in terms of number of sightings but of public respectability.  Last June, 2019, The Week magazine had a cover story: Taking UFOs seriously.  The New York Times is now unabashedly pro-UFO—an amazing reversal of the position they’ve always taken.  [See here and here and here.]  Also the Washington Post …

 Martin:  Which just did a very nice review of your Intimate Alien.

David:  Yes, together with two related books [Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers; Keith Cooper, The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence].  The review was headlined: “What UFOs can tell us about life on Earth,” and it said that the current crop of UFO books was the most interesting there’d ever been.  This new respectability has all happened since the 2016 election, and I think there’s a connection.

It seems to me mostly the liberal East Coast media that are waving the banner for UFOs.  A few years ago, New York Magazine remarked that “Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET versus Trump.”  A joke, but I think it’s hit on the truth.  It’s those who dislike Donald Trump, who are uneasy with the things he’s done—like withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change—who are opening themselves to UFOs.  Because the UFOs represent another kind of collective death, just emerging into our consciousness.

 Martin:  You mean global warming?

David:  Yes, which it’s mostly the liberal end of the political spectrum that sees as a threat to human survival, as nuclear war has been since 1947.  And where this seems to be our reality, we’re going to project it into the sky and see it as an alien invader.

And now there’s coronavirus, which is an alien invader.  Nature turned savage, hostile, killing, as many expect global warming to be a few years down the road.  And it makes sense we’re going to look into the sky and see the invader mirrored there.  Which is what’s now happening in Belgium.

What are those Belgian UFOs?  The reports, as described in Micah Hanks’s post on the “Mysterious Universe” website, are of “a row of moving lights flying from west to east.”  As Micah points out, this exactly describes the Starlink Satellite array.  So there’s no mystery about what’s actually, physically, up there in the sky.  But that people are looking at it and seeing UFOs—that’s the big news.  Without the coronavirus, would they react this way?  I doubt it.

So I expect the UFO myth, the UFO experience, to take on new shapes in the months to come.  What will those shapes be?  Let’s watch and see.

by David Halperin
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