I imagine the History Channel has made the word "alien" a curse word around these parts and I realize this may be a broad question, maybe its not, I truly don't know. But it seems like recently we're attributing everything from as-yet-to be explained phenomena to even ancient discoveries as being the work of extraterrestrials. It is my understanding that religion used to have that role. I.E. rising sea levels are attributed to a flood by an angry God, or a comet is said to be the "Jesus star" or whatever. Some of my more nutter friends, and seemingly a great number of people these days, seem to think that UFOs and aliens were a part of the human dialogue from the beginning. They site the fact that there are documented unexplained sightings going hundreds of years back. But until we know absolutely everything about the science of the universe, there will always be unexplainable things. I'm wondering if there is a measurable and documented "rise of the aliens" so to speak.
We can look back and see where a lot of beliefs rose from and in some ways "why." So where and when the hell did this idea come from? Basically I'm asking for the short-form version of the history of aliens as a human construct. Any and all help is appreciated.
the short-form version of the history of aliens as a human construct.
This can be taken a lot of different ways, depending on how you want to define “aliens,” but let’s go as short and limited as possible.
Aliens – in our current understanding – date back to the dawn of the Cold War, shortly after the first “flying saucers” were named as such (1947, Mt. Rainer, Kenneth Arnold sighting) and marveled over/inspired panic/intrigued citizen investigators (1947, New Mexico, Roswell Incident).
At that time, we were concerned about national security, air superiority, and the technology needed to keep our countries safe, so when pilots and soldiers started reporting seeing strange craft in the sky, thoughts naturally inclined toward who (or what) might be piloting them.
Things get immediately murky from there.
For one thing, people had been seeing strange things in the sky with creatures on board all the way back to Ezekiel (read Ezekiel 1 – it ain’t long – and picture the CGI we could use to get those fiery wheels flying on the big screen). That includes things that were mystic visions, non-specific “they came from the sky,” probably meteorites or other celestial phenomena, all the way up to things that were identified as mystery airships – technological constructions from before the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Although some people interacted with the mystery airship crews – and some crews claimed to be from Mars – they seemed to be ordinary-enough humans, and as much as there was a widespread belief about the airships, it was that these were the work of some crackpot inventor. (Jacques Vallee is the big expert on the long, long history of things-that-might-be-UFO-aliens; I’d recommend Passport to Magonia as an entry point.)
(Oh, and ditto the "Foo Fighters" spotted by Allied pilots in Germany and the South Pacific. They were weird... eerie... but not explicitly and definitively craft piloted by beings from another planet, not at the time. Nazi technology was the first assumption.)
For another thing, the late 1940s/early 1950s were a period when governments were becoming more and more paranoid (here in the States, Joseph McCarthy was in his ascendancy) and, at the same time, investigating this new discipline of psychology with regards to military or national security applications: PsyOps. One of the best sources following up this angle is Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, which chronicles different ways in which the U.S. and U.K. government (and other intelligence agencies around the world) took advantage of and even helped create the growing UFO subculture, in part to act as a screen for covert military projects.
Take the strange order of events around the Roswell Case, for instance – the military officially announced, “Something unknown crashed into the desert,” then immediately announced, “No, wait, sorry, nothing did,” and then, much more gradually, “Oh, yeah, no, weather balloon” at the same time stories started leaking out about all kinds of weird materials at the crash site and oh, pilots’ bodies that weren’t quite human…. Whatever happened out in the desert, if you’re in a group that wants to keep that stuff secret, it’s really convenient if it’s widely known as “weird” to start looking into it.
The most dramatic case delved into in Mirage Men is probably the tragedy of Paul Bennewitz, which came about 25 years later. He was an electronics contractor for NASA and the Air Force who’d seen some strange lights and intercepted some very strange radio transmissions. In all likelihood, he’d accidentally witnessed classified aircraft tests and tuned into an NSA (or other covert intelligence organization) coded channel. But he was already curious about UFOs and had a not terribly stable personality, so… according to the admissions of William Moore and Richard Doty, who (as far as we can tell) worked with Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)… he was fed a steady stream of disinformation that got progressively weirder and more fantastic, about captured aliens being held at an underground base in Dulce, experimenting on the general public, infiltrating public office, you name it. He, in turn, was spreading this… let’s call it mythology… out to a wider group of true believers (and, vital to any publicity-seeking enterprise, hard-core, passionate skeptics). Eventually, Bennewitz had a complete breakdown, helped along by officials who claimed to be giving him the “real facts” about aliens on Earth.
Some of the least controversial stuff Pilkington goes into includes the way UFOs were used to cover Operation Palladium radar-spoofing system tests over the UK. Suddenly, radar operators got these traces that were executing bizarre, impossible maneuvers... of course, aliens are testing your defenses. Scramble those jets!
For another another thing, we’ve also got the Betty & Barney Hill case (which I’ve talked about yonder) in 1961 that helped shape a lot of the specifics of how we imagine aliens to be. There are a whole lot of other encounter reports (and bits of fictional image-building) that went into the concept of aliens, but the Hills’ detailed descriptions and the science-y stuff (hypnotic regression!) around their report really hammered the look and feel of aliens down.
Note here that I'm not dismissing the idea that, for example, the Dogon got their astronomical info from [faraway friends](http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_dogon03.htm#the first) many thousands of years ago.
Just trying to illustrate where our idea of aliens emerged.