Extraterrestrials, American Exceptionalism, and the Left-Right Gap (Dems tend to believe in ET)

It’s no surprise that liberals and conservatives see our world in starkly different terms, but they also display contrasting views toward other worlds, generally disagreeing about the possibilities of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

These clashing opinions on extraterrestrials amount to more than a trivial split on an arcane topic; they connect, in fact, both logically and emotionally to big conflicts over worldview, culture, politics and America’s role in history.

In Colorado, these conflicts erupted in a recent battle over a proposed Denver commission to investigate visitations from alien life forms. Initiative 300 won enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November 2010 but lost in a landslide, with conservatives leading the derision of the “ET Initiative,” as a loony waste of taxpayer money. The chief support for “greater transparency” regarding sightings and encounters came from the city’s Bohemian left, with advocates proudly citing the interest in flying saucers from liberal icons like Jimmy Carter and John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff.

Polls show that Americans remain closely divided on attitudes toward extraterrestrials, with a 2008 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll reporting 56% who believe it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that intelligent life has developed in other worlds. Self-described Democrats (according to the same survey) are far more likely to say they have personally seen “visitors from another world” than are their Republican counterparts, who remain distinctly skeptical.

These differences stem in part from religious convictions, with conservatives far more likely to uphold traditional approaches to the Bible and organized faith. While nothing in Scripture explicitly denies the possibility of life in distant galaxies, the Biblical account of directed creation makes it far easier to accept the notion that this small, inhabited planet is alone in the universe.

Liberals, on the other hand, profess wider acceptance of the idea that earthly life emerged through random forces and happy accidents; therefore, the existence of stars and potential planets into the billions suggests that that similar coincidences would produce advanced life forms somewhere else.

The differing views on extraterrestrial intelligence stem from a core argument about the presence (or absence) of higher purpose, of supernatural direction in our existence on earth.

That same dispute divides liberals and conservatives regarding the rise and the role of the United States. On the right, there’s a much stronger tendency to credit the notion of America as a “heaven rescued land” (in the words of The Star Spangled Banner), and to see evidence of Divine favor in the emergence of the world’s most powerful civilization in a corner of North America which, a mere 400 years ago, counted as perhaps the least developed portion of the planet.

For liberals, however, the idea that God decreed prosperity and prominence for the United States smacks of swaggering jingoism, and imperialist arrogance. They are far more likely to see America’s success as the result of good luck, or even rapacity and ruthlessness, rather than the consequence of Providential intervention.

One of the moment’s most emotional debates centers on the related notion of “American exceptionalism”: does our country represent a uniquely blessed, beneficial development in human history, or a flawed nation state like many others, displaying a maddening mix of admirable and appalling characteristics? A recent Gallup poll asked respondents whether other nations of the world should follow America’s example: Republicans overwhelming said “yes” while Democrats split evenly on the proposition.

Conservatives felt outraged when President Obama declared that he believes in American exceptionalism only in the same sense “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As Sarah Palin sneers in her new book, America By Heart, “Which is to say, he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism at all. He seems to think it is just a kind of irrational prejudice in favor of our way of life.”

While neither Obama nor Palin has ever provided definitive discourse on their view of life on other worlds, it’s easy to imagine the president maintaining a more open attitude than the former Alaska governor. If you believe that the United States is utterly unique in human history, an unprecedented and potently purposeful experiment under higher power protection, then it follows that earth itself enjoys similarly singular status, freakishly favored within a lonely universe. On the other hand, the suspicion that America counts as only the latest in a long succession of rising and falling world powers can easily co-exist with assumptions that our planet joins countless other centers of intelligent life in a teeming cosmos.

A liberal slant in politics or policy doesn’t make you an automatic believer in extraterrestrial visitors, any more than a conservative worldview compels the insistence that human beings will never discover other-worldly counterparts. But an impassioned affirmation of American exceptionalism naturally connects to comparable assumptions of earthly exceptionalism, and helps define one of the most significant but least noted divisions defining the current gulf between right and left.

Questions for a UFO Expert: Bruce Maccabee on the Real X-Files, Roswell and His Own UFO Sighting.

As scientific disciplines go, UFOlogy (pronounced you-FOL-oh-gee)—the study of understanding unidentified flying objects—does not get the level of respect that’s accorded to, say, physics. Dr. Bruce Maccabee has a foot in both fields. He was an optical physicist for the U.S. Navy, now retired, and doubles as a dedicated ufologist. PM talked to Maccabee this week about his work.

Bruce Maccabee traces his involvement with UFOlogy to a lecture he attended by an UFO hunting organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. At the time, he was earning his doctorate in physics at American University in Washington, D.C., and soon after the lecture, he signed up to volunteer for the Committee’s office. Maccabee has since gone on to investigate dozens of UFO incidents including the Trent Farm incident of 1950, and he has written more than a hundred papers as one of the preeminent voices in the formal science of removing the “un” from “unidentified flying objects.”

PM: What is the FBI’s “flying-disc file”?
Maccabee: The FBI’s flying-disc file began in the summer of 1947 after sightings of what we now call UFOs began in earnest. A sighting in Mount Rainer, Washington, was the first such event to be publicized in national newspapers in the United States. Kenneth Arnold, the witness and an experienced pilot, talked about semicircular craft traveling at great speed and flipping and flashing as they bounced along. He said it was somewhat like skipping a saucer on the water, which led to some clever newsman coining “flying saucers.” A barrage of flying saucer sightings followed, including reports from Air Force officers seeing unknown things fly over their bases. On July 10, top Air Force intelligence generals asked the FBI if they would investigate to see if Communist sympathizers were generating spurious, false stories about craft with extreme dynamic capabilities to scare the American people into thinking that the Soviet Union had gotten far ahead of us. That was considered subversive activity, and of course the FBI was hot on subversion at the time. The FBI investigated for two months, interviewing a dozen or so witnesses, and some of the case reports were filed under—believe it or not—”Security Matter X.” So we’re talking about the real X-Files.

What is in these X-Files?
Amid the interoffice memoranda and newspaper clippings, I realized there was some pretty hot-potato stuff. For example, it was the first time that there was any public knowledge of the FBI’s involvement with UFO investigations. J. Edgar Hoover [the long-time FBI Director] had lied in the 1960s about that. Though the FBI found no evidence of pro-Communist subversion, this arrangement opened a doorway for the Air Force to contact the FBI and send more UFO information. From then on the FBI acted like a black hole—stuff would go in, but nothing would come out. Basically, the Air Force continued telling things about UFOs to the FBI that they did not share with the American public. In 1998, the X-Files were posted on the FBI’s website, and you can read more in my book called The UFO/FBI Connection.

What about the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of July 7, 1947, when a flying saucer allegedly crashed in the desert?
I think Roswell was covered up to the extent that people in Air Force intelligence didn’t even know about it. The FBI is involved in a piece of it, too—a document notes that telephonic conversation between Air Force people indicated that the crash remains did not fully meet the description of a weather balloon (the official explanation). For those of us on the outside, we have no hard evidence. The case for Roswell actually started in 1979 when Jesse Marcel, the Army Major who played a role in the recovery of the crash debris, started publicly saying how he thought it was an alien spaceship. Until then, Roswell had totally dropped out of UFO history.

What was your own UFO sighting like?
It was September 16, 1991, in Gulf Breeze, Florida. In November 1990 they started having nightly reports of this red light thing in the sky that very often would burst into flashes and go out. Sometimes it went from white to red or back. Mostly it was one object, but sometimes there were multiple ones. News crews went down there several times, and from as far away as Japan and Germany. It was thought that these sightings might be gas bag balloons with flares attached—a hoax. But triangulation of an object showed that it moved at 30 miles per hour crosswind, which can only be done if you have a powered device. So if it was a hoax, you’d have to have a blimp or perhaps an unmanned aerial vehicle that carried one or more complex pyrotechnic display devices. It couldn’t just be a regular road flare given the color changes and flashing. If this is a hoax, it’s a major one. I thought I had better go. So one night we’re out there at the south end of the Pensacola Bay Bridge and a lady yelled, “There it is!” I looked up in the sky and saw a spot of lights. Then through my binoculars—the standard necklace for night-watching—I saw the image resolve itself into eight tiny white lights with a yellow tinge. I went ahead and tried to do my measurements. I had brought with me a “big ear,” which is a sensitive microphone for listening at a distance. I couldn’t hear a thing. The UFO moved somewhat and then disappeared. I didn’t call the guys in white coats to take me away because 30 other people saw the same thing. We got a lot of pictures of these sightings, which allowed for analysis. By knowing how big the image is on film, you can calculate its angular size out to a distance of a mile or two or 10. In this instance, it got to the point where it was like turning on a chandelier, tens of feet in diameter, at an altitude of a mile—now how the hell do you do that?

In the early evening of November 7, 1978 - election day - my twelve year old son and I hopped into my pick-up truck and went "shining" deer (it was just before deer hunting season in Wisconsin) on one of the rural roads in our area. There was a clear moonlit sky and snow on the ground, so it wasn't murky dark out at all. As we crested the top of a knoll, my son hollered for me to stop. He was shining out to our right, east, and had spotted deer in an adjacent field. I stopped the truck and watched a bit, but got distracted by a light off to our northwest and about a quarter mile away. At first I thought it was a yardlight near a farmhouse. Then I noticed the real yardlight and the houselights.

The light that had caught my attention looked almost like a flame in the sky, directly above the farmhouse. Puzzled the hell out of me. My son kept watching his deer, so I grabbed the binoculars and looked through them at the strange light. Couldn't make out anything else. I could see lights at a nearby farmhouse a little ways ahead of us and a little to our right. Everything looked normal there. I shut the truck and headlights off and kept watching the light over the far farmhouse. It was about 4-5 house heights above and seemingly directly over the house. I rolled down my window and listened, but heard not a sound. I watched for several minutes.

Suddenly the light went out. A moment later a spotlight began shining down from that spot in the sky. It was being played slowly around and around in the fields near the farmhouse, as if in search of something. Almost like my son and me, but from a stationary spot just above the house. I figured if you were in the house you'd be able to see the light playing across the fields but would be unable to see the source. I asked my son to take a look and tell me what he thought. He was just as puzzled as I was.

I told him to shut off our shining light and we'd drive over to the far farm for a closer look. He shut off the light and I started the pick-up and turned on my headlights. That seemed to elicit a response from whatever was above the farmhouse. The searchlight went out and all went dark. As I slowly eased down the road and around the sharp left at the turn-off to the nearby farm, I saw a light from the mystery area heading our way. I stopped, a little confused and nervous. We then watched in amazement as the light came closer.

It was two lights. Two headlights shining straight out ahead of some sort of small craft, with no wings nor propellers nor rotors nor gasbag. It had no obvious means of being up where it was. My first thought was, "What is a snowmobile doing up there?" But it was a little bigger than a snowmobile, yet smaller than a full-size car. It was maybe 6 feet wide and 10-12 feet long and 3-4 feet high. It had red, green, and white running lights, but it was shaped more like a boat than any aircraft I have ever seen. It definitely looked too cramped to hold a sitting adult human, although there would be sufficient space for a person if he were lying down. We could see the underside quite clearly and could see no wheels, just what may have been skids.

It was traveling slowly in a straight line just above the treetops and passed between us and the nearby farmhouse, which was about a hundred or so feet away. It was moving at about 15-20 mph. As it got close to us we could hear what sounded like the low throbbing of a turbine engine, but what the engine was doing I have not a clue. Whatever the engine was, it must have been the source of the craft's levitation and propulsion. It was like nothing I have seen or read about before or since. Not a saucer, but a boat-like craft with headlights like a car and with no visible means of flight or maneuvering. And too small for humans to be at all comfortable. I just craned my head around and watched as it kinda ambled in a straight and level line till it was out of sight.

At the time, my son said he should have lit it up with our 200,000 candlepower shining light (an aircraft landing light I had rigged to our battery), but I'm damn glad he didn't. Woulda lit that thing up bigtime, and drawn attention to us bigtime. No thanks. There had been a recent article in the paper about an Australian guy disappearing just after reporting a light pacing his small airplane on an evening flight near the coast of Australia. I thought of that and also conjectured that the craft occupants might have been searching for cattle. There had also been an outbreak of the mysterious cattle mutilations reported in the news.

Suffice it to say I wanted no part of whatever was behind this strange craft. I'm certain it wasn't anything human. My son and I hustled back to town and told my wife, then I went over to my folks' house and told them. My wife was skeptical but urged me to contact the county sheriff's department. My mother was openminded but my dad was downright insulting with his remarks. I decided there was nothing the sheriff's department could do, and I needed no more of being scoffed at. Don't care so much about the scoffing, anymore. Just want to put the incident down in writing to leave it for others to think about. Maybe somewhere, somebody has seen something similar and will be reassured he is not alone.

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