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Friday, 5 November 2021

The government is keeping the truth about aliens from us

Welcome, ET. For those with a passion for conspiracy and a palate for the paranormal, alien conspiracies provide the best of both worlds. From sightings, to abductions and government cover ups, the possibility of the existence of technologically advanced aliens has continued to tickle the imagination of conspiracy theorists the world over.

Aliens built the pyramids: It’s true that no one knows definitively how they were built or why they supposedly align with the stars in Orion’s belt, but the conspiracy theory that aliens built the pyramids has stood the test of time. For some conspiracy theorists, attributing the inexplicable to the paranormal or extraterrestrial is more comforting than accepting that we do not know exactly how some of the ancient world’s most impressive monuments were built, with sites like Stonehenge, Teotihuacán, the Pyramids of Giza, and the maoi of Easter Island, to name a few, being labelled (in part) the work of aliens.

The first reported sightings: Although the earliest recorded example of human curiosity about alien life appears in 200 AD, in modern memory, it is the American imagination that has been on the frontier of fascination with extraterrestrial life. Between 1947 and 1954, a wave of “sightings'' of unexplained flying objects (UFOs) were reported across America, and the FBI and US Air Force worked closely to investigate the sightings (the results of the investigation are available online). In fact, so many sightings were reported that FBI agents routinely destroyed reports due to a lack of filing space.

How Hollywood’s abduction stories came to life: While the US Space Program kicked off in 1958, it was aliens in the movies that stoked the public’s imagination (and paranoia) about life beyond earth with sci-fi flicks like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars. Many of these movies were remade in the 1980s and 1990s when interest in the extraterrestrial surged once again. In 1959, the American anthology television series The Twilight Zone aired for the first time, bringing the paranormal (and occasional extra-terrestrial) into the homes of Americans. Is it any coincidence then that the first publicized account of a couple abducted by aliens took place in 1961? Or that their description of their abductors closely resembled scenes from Invaders from Mars?

UFOs are real, and the US government is covering it up: But alien abductions and UFOs are not just a thing of the 1950s: According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, one-third of American adults believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft visiting Earth. And a series of unidentified aerial sightings by military pilots and the US Navy between 2004 and 2017 led to a serious government enquiry in the United States, the results of which were released in a report in June of this year. The report provided no clear conclusion on whether or not the sightings are connected to extraterrestrial life. Which leads us to another kind of alien conspiracy theorist: those that believe that the US government is hiding the truth about extraterrestrial life from us.

A special shoutout goes to: Ancient Aliens, a History Channel production that put forward some 17 seasons of conspiracy theories purporting that aliens have been visiting earth for millenia, claiming that they were responsible for everything from the extinction of dinosaurs to the outcome of WWII.

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