What our continued fascination with UFOs says about us

In September 2018, at 11 o’clock at night, as I strolled with my wife and daughter along the edge of the lagoon in Venice, Italy, I witnessed what is formally known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

A dozen bright lights flew in tight formation high in the starry night, then started twirling around each other in an impossibly playful way, and finally disappeared in a flash over the horizon. Not a sound was heard. Nothing I know could have moved like that. These weren’t drones or planes.

So what did I see?

I grew up reading Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and watching the original “Star Trek” series on television. I therefore took it for granted that the universe teemed with other sentient species.

Back then, these came in two kinds: Bug-Eyed Monsters, or BEMs, who looked like giant versions of Kermit the Frog and made modern-music sounds; and Highly Evolved Minds, or HEMs, who had traded their physical bodies for the enviable capacity to play tricks on Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Both varieties conformed to old archetypes. There were once monsters in the dark. There were spirits in the woods and the clouds.

We may have driven these mythical entities from our planet, but why couldn’t they endure in outer space?

In the war-torn 20^th century, Martians were the stuff of horror and adventure. Flash Gordon kept stopping Ming the Merciless – a dead ringer for Genghis Khan – from destroying Earth. Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” taught us that the best planetary defense was the common cold.

Even “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” supposedly a benevolent vision, left the future of humanity in the hands of robots that pretended to be pacifists but seemed happy to pulverize anything they disapproved of.

With the success, later in the century, of “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,” a third archetype achieved dominance over popular culture: space aliens, it turned out, were Just Like Us, only cuter – and somehow able to make bicycles fly through the air.

They still looked like Kermit the Frog, but in a good way.

In “E.T.,” the eponymous alien was a plot device, used to separate good humans from bad humans. Good humans embraced the Other. Bad humans tried to dissect the Other, just to see what was inside.

This moralistic touch sometimes made for a good story – see, for example, “Starman” – but more often, as in “E.T.” itself, it was a dreary bore that left us longing for the return of Ming the Merciless.

A case can be made that “E.T.” was the illegitimate offspring of TV scientist Carl Sagan, begat on Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood. Given his unblinking stare and weird mannerisms, Sagan had something of the extraterrestrial in him – he seemed uncomfortable impersonating a human.

In 1980, two years before “E.T.” was released, he made the following pronouncement: “In the vastness of space, there must be other civilizations.”

Who knows? Maybe he had inside knowledge.

But with that, acceptance of hyper-civilized aliens, once the sole possession of sci-fi nuts like me, began its long march to respectability. By 2024, 87 percent of scientists and 86.6 percent of astrobiologists, by one measure, believed in the likelihood of life in other planets.

For some, the existence of aliens is an act of faith, almost of desperation – what William James labelled the “will to believe,” translated from religion to science.

The thought of being alone in the “vastness of space” induces a kind of cosmic vertigo.

The universe must be filled with creatures Just Like Us, or preferably Slightly Better Than Us, and they must be here, close by, watching, judging, endowing every human action with a certain weight of importance.

We crave recognition, and in a performative age that can only come from the existence of a secret audience.

At the extremes of obsession, we get the Richard Dreyfuss character in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” who forsakes family and society to seek the aliens, imitating St. Francis in the latter’s search for God.

At some point, there will be contact.

Not unreasonably, we used to worry about being discovered by slimy galactic psychopaths, as in “Alien” and “Independence Day.”

With a modesty typical of the 21^st century, we now prefer to believe that a race of space therapists will be happy to cross millions of light-years of the trackless void just so they can talk to us about ourselves.

We know from “Arrival” that the session goes well.

Human self-esteem, shaken since the inexplicable rise of Taylor Swift, is restored. Our place in the scheme of things, we will be told, is moderately significant, which is better than nothing.

To the sound of chords in a minor key, the nations will remain eternally at peace – just like in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” only without the terrifying nanny-bots.

Since a lot of this is shameless wish-fulfillment, we should take a deep breath and ask a few pertinent questions.

What is the hard evidence for life outside this lonely planet? There is none.

How likely is a super-civilization to emerge in another world? Well, Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, while our civilization first touched outer space 68 years ago. That makes for a probability of 1 over 0.00000001.

Why would massively intelligent beings embark on an epic interstellar journey, only to play hide-and-seek like human five-year-olds once they get to their destination? I can think of no reason.

Wait, though, what about those scientists who endorsed E.T.? Scientists, just like nonscientists, will say whatever they think will make them sound cool.

We do have the UAPs. I can attest to them personally.

After years of increasingly preposterous explanations, the federal government has given up on blaming swamp gas.

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, has confessed her belief in aliens.

Dr. Eric Davis, physicist, has briefed Congress on the existence of four alien species: “Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians.”

That would explain why Scandinavians tend to be so nice to us Earthlings.

Yet the government could be wrong again. It’s possible.

Trapped in the new conventional wisdom, DNI Gabbard and Dr. Davis could have toggled to the opposite error from that of the perpetrators of the Swamp Gas Hypothesis.

What, after all, did I see above the lagoon in Venice?

I saw fantastic twirling lights. To posit a superior civilization of people-watchers from that data point seems a bit extreme.

Centuries ago, the lights might have become the Virgin Mary. A magnificent basilica would be erected on the site.

Ignore Hollywood – it’s always the smart thing to do. So far as we know, we are alone.

Ours may be the only minds in the enormity of Einsteinian spacetime – our thoughts may be the only thoughts to be had anywhere.

The notion feels slightly shocking, and not just because of the claustrophobic loneliness it evokes.

If the universe attains self-awareness solely in the human race, what kind of burden does that place on our shoulders?

Shouldn’t we dream on an infinite scale? Shouldn’t our intellects span deep and wide?

That won’t happen, of course. Human thoughts tend to be homely and small. The mental content of those who get paid to think big can be summarized in three words:

“Trump! Trump!! TRUMP!!!”

This, however, is a sterile line of reasoning – what might be termed the ecologist’s fallacy. Nobody gets to speak on behalf of the universe.

Whatever burden we assume because of our place in it is human-made and derived from human need rather than cosmic imposition.

The universe keeps its own counsel.

And as for life in other planets, we only know that we don’t know much.

That cuts both ways. Without fear of contradiction, I’m perfectly free to retain my teenage faith that the galaxies swarm with trillions of BEMs and HEMs.

For me, the most inspired vision of a pan-galactic encounter takes place in the most famous scene of the most popular science fiction movie.

The cantina in the “Star Wars” world of Tatooine is filled with outlandish organisms, all of them surly and seedy-looking. Alien music screeches danger. Without warning, a fight erupts.

The human hero outdraws the challenger, who falls dead to the floor – and suddenly we realize where we are.

It’s the Wild West. It’s the final frontier. Americans have been here before, and whatever facts we come to learn about alien species, we can be there again if we so decide.