A Golden Age — of Belief in Extraterrestrials

Curiosity about aliens goes back farther than you might think

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Belief in extraterrestrials feels like a distinctly recent phenomenon. Some of the earliest flying saucer “sightings” date back to 1947, the same year the “Roswell incident” — which seems to have been the crash of a government weather balloon — took place. Interest in UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) peaked during the early days of the space race, and then again in the late 1970s as skepticism of the U.S. government grew after Watergate and Vietnam.

Each of these waves of interest waned after some of the most prominent “alien encounters” were debunked. In the last few years, the Pentagon has admitted to having a program that studies Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs, the government’s preferred term) and released video taken by Air Force pilots. We may be entering a new period of interest in the possibility of life on other planets.

Pop culture interest in aliens also seems to be mostly an artifact of the last 75 years —modern movies and books are littered with extraterrestrials — but in fact, interest in life on other planets goes back much farther. Many of the most distinguished thinkers of the Enlightenment era had a great interest in the possibility of alien life and wrote extensively about it. The 1700s was…