No sooner had 31-year-old California teacher Cole Allen been named early on Sunday morning as the alleged shooter at the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC than the conspiracy theorists got to work. It was, they said – as they always do – staring us in the face.
In 2014, Allen was a summer undergraduate research fellowship student at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California. If you have been following the (ludicrously flimsy) story of the “missing scientists” – at the time of writing, 12 individuals apparently linked to US nuclear or space programmes who have died or disappeared since 2022 – you may know that three of them worked at that very facility.
By which logic, Allen was more likely to be a target than an assassin – or so you’d think, right? How wrong you are. Apparently (and we’re just kicking the tyres on this) he was recruited from Nasa by a covert agency as an “MKUltra” brainwashed killer.
And now that Donald Trump has promised to release thousands of classified UFO files, this particular Manchurian candidate was – according to X’s finest minds – activated and sent into the Washington Hilton to thwart the disclosure of the US government’s research into extraterrestrial life and technology.
To be honest, I take all this personally. As the great American stand-up Doug Stanhope has observed, everyone needs their own “stupid”: the thing that enables them to switch off and relax completely. Stanhope’s “stupid” is NFL games on a Sunday. Mine is – or was – UFO documentaries.
After a long day ploughing through Tucker Carlson podcasts, reading the latest 500-page book on the global polycrisis and listening to electoral reformers insist that the D’Hondt formula is all we need to stop the populist right, I do like to watch something seriously silly.
When it comes to empty-carb, hilarious entertainment, nothing can beat a new Netflix “investigation” called something like UFOs: The Ultimate Dossier, in which toothless Appalachians claim to have been abducted by a “Grey” called Marie-Lou-Beth and taken to Venus; or a Brazilian airman, shown in silhouette (of course), explains how US Navy Seals seized the debris of an alien craft from a base in São Paulo.
At the apex of this subgenre lie manifestly ridiculous claims involving US presidents. Either in February 1954 at Edwards Air Force Base, California, or in February 1955 at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico – the story is never quite clear – Dwight D Eisenhower is alleged to have held interplanetary talks with alien ambassadors.
Even better: in February 1973, Richard Nixon is supposed to have knocked on the door of comedian Jackie Gleason and whisked him off to Homestead AFB in Florida (or possibly MacDill) to see the biological remains of alien visitors. I hope you’ll agree that this makes a lot of sense: at the height of the Watergate scandal, what could have been more important to the embattled president than to ask Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners what he made of the extraterrestrial enigma?
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It’s all remarkably soothing. In a separate but related silo, I have always loved high-quality alien contact movies, like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022). And I am still looking forward very much to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, which will be released on June 12.
But, in a terrible confusion of day-job and wind-down ritual, UFOs (or UAPs – “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”, as they are known these days) have now landed squarely in the very mainstream of US politics. On February 19 – furious that Barack Obama had stolen a march on him by claiming on a podcast that aliens were “real” – Trump announced on Truth Social that he had instructed “the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.”
On April 17, the president used a speech at a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix, Arizona to tease the files’ imminent release. “We found many very interesting documents, I must say,” he declared. “And the first releases will begin very, very soon.”
On the same day, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that “[i]n light of the recent and legitimate questions” about the allegedly missing scientists “the White House is actively working with all relevant agencies and the FBI to holistically review all of the cases together.”
The whole thing invites a terrible reflection. Can you imagine what Trump’s first Truth Social post would be like, immediately after first official contact with an alien civilisation? “WOW. What a great day for America and Zeta Reticuli. The Mekon – what an amazing guy! He’s done an incredible job. We have a terrific relationship. Would never have done a deal with “Sleepy” Joe Biden. Only Donald J Trump could Make the Galaxy Great Again! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.” And on and on.
All this has naturally encouraged the handful of US lawmakers who have long been obsessed by the issue. Leading the pack is Republican congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee who has become hard to avoid on the podcast circuit and right wing cable news channels.
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In an interview with NewsNation’s Joe Khalil on April 17, Burchett said he had had a 14-minute conversation with Trump about UFO disclosure, that the deep state had long thwarted such declassification (“these lifetime career people are in there and for whatever reason they’re not releasing anything”), and that alien technology that ought to be in public hands had been foolishly “farmed out” to shadowy corporations.
Perhaps the most revealing sub-plot is that the two principal contenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028 have now engaged directly with this previously fringe debate. In Dan Farah’s The Age of Disclosure (2025), Marco Rubio – still a senator at the time of the interview, now secretary of state and national security adviser – warned that presidents had been kept in the dark about the government’s most secret UFO programmes.
“I think there’s this assumption,” he said, “that presidents can walk in the Oval Office on day one and say, ‘All right, take me to Roswell [an alleged legendary site of alleged alien craft crash in 1947], show me the alien bodies. I want to see the video, the autopsy. I want to see the whole thing, open it up’. I think that really is naive understanding of how our government works, operating on a need-to-know basis.”
By heavy implication, all that would change under President Rubio. The movie was a streaming hit – Prime Video’s highest-grossing documentary ever – and vindicated the undoubted political risk that the ambitious Florida senator was taking by lending his name to the project.
Which meant, of course, that sooner or later JD Vance would have to see Rubio and raise him. In an interview in March with podcaster Benny Johnson, the vice-president claimed that he was “obsessed with this. I’ve already had a couple of times where I’m like, ‘All right, we’re going to Area 51. We’re going out to New Mexico. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.’ And then the timing of the trip just didn’t work out. But trust me… I’m more curious than anybody. And I’ve got three years at the very tippy-top of the classification. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
‘Trump claimed Obama was born outside the US; basked in the nonsense of QAnon; embraced the lies of “stop the steal”; and spread falsehoods about January 6. The only conspiracy theory he doesn’t like to talk about – the Epstein files – is the one that’s true’
Doesn’t “tippy-top” just scream “next president”? Anyway, Vance wasn’t finished. “I don’t think they’re aliens,” he added. “I think they’re demons… I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people – I think the desire to describe everything celestial, everything otherworldly, to describe it as aliens – I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there and there are things that are very difficult to explain.”
See what JD did there? He made a pitch for the old-school X-Files, “the truth is out there” vote; but also, cunningly, grafted it on to his Christian nationalism and appeal to the MAGA evangelical base. This, as it happens, aligns with Carlson’s long-held position, which is, as he explained to Joe Rogan in April 2024, that “there’s no evidence [the alien beings] are from another planet. I mean, I think that’s the op, that’s the lie – that they’re from Mars… they’ve been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And it’s pretty clear to me that they’re spiritual entities.”
As always, it is essential to remember how differently such assertions land in the US than they would if, say, Keir Starmer made them (presumably leading with the implications of alien contact for international law). According to YouGov polling, 47% of Americans believe that aliens have visited the Earth (well ahead of 32% in the UK). No less relevant: 70% believe in angels and only 20% believe in natural evolution. These are the metaphysical waters in which US politicians swim.
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This general predisposition has been turbo-charged in the hypermodern era. First, Vance and Carlson are definitely on to something in their reading of the social runes. You can tell a lot about the state of a culture by what it says and fears about UFOs. After Roswell nearly 80 years ago, the initial wave of fevered speculation was mobilised by the terrors of the atomic age, the cold war and the fear of invasion.
In the era of psychotherapy and sexual liberation, on the other hand, the emphasis shifted to abduction, medical experiments and human-alien hybrid breeding (a claim recently revived by Trump’s first pick for attorney-general, Matt Gaetz).
In the 2020s, popular belief in UFOs has become inextricable with a more general quest for maps of meaning and a religiosity that is not confined to the pew and the pulpit. As so often, Carl Jung was ahead of the game. In his 1959 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, he argued that what we call a UFO is better described as a “technological angel” and that reports of alien visitation are “symbolical rumours” reflecting the spiritual needs of the collective unconscious.
More recently, serious religious and philosophical scholars such as DW Pasulka in American Cosmic (2019) have advanced the claim that alleged alien technology is “a sacred medium, as well as the sacred object, of this new religiosity”.
The so-called “Invisible College” of experts that guards this information is a 21st-century priesthood that protects the secretum secretorum. Sightings, abductions and visitations are simply the latest manifestation of humanity’s ancestral yearning for miracles, supernatural intervention and godlike power.
Of even greater significance is the speed with which the conspiracist mindset has become absolutely conventional. When Richard Hofstadter published his classic essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics in 1964, he described the “paranoid spokesman” as “always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.” Hofstadter’s principal targets were the hard right represented by Barry Goldwater, the John Birch Society and post-McCarthyite extremists. But the sensibility he immortalised is now lodged in mainstream populist culture.
What every claim made about UFOs to date has in common is an absence of evidence, a reliance upon hearsay and an indifference to the scientific principle of falsifiability. For more on this, check out the excellent debunking work of Mick West on Metabunk.org or Michael Shermer for The Skeptics Society.
The trouble is that the market for evidence-based scepticism and scientific methodology is fast declining. For 20 years, trust in traditional institutions, media and expertise has been cratering. Why bother with Occam’s razor when you can deploy the conspiracist’s cosh?
One of the best scenes in Men in Black (1997) has Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) explain to Agent J (Will Smith) that the only reliable news is to be found in supermarket tabloids, or “the hot sheets” as he calls them: “Best investigative reporting on the planet.”
It’s still funny – but it’s also close to the bone. The lies, conspiracies and Twilight Zone fabrications that populate the pages of the National Enquirer are now the stuff of accepted public discourse. It’s not so much that the claims made about extraterrestrials have suddenly become more plausible; more that political culture has gone insane.
There’s a symmetry, really, in Trump embracing and exploiting the cult of UFOs. Way back in 2011, he launched his political career with the “Birther” conspiracist claim that Obama had been born outside the US; went on to bask in the nonsense of QAnon; embraced the lies of “stop the steal”; and spread falsehoods about the January 6 insurrection being whipped up by the Feds. In fact, the only conspiracy theory that he doesn’t like to talk about – the one described in the Epstein files – is the one that’s true.
A grand cosmic, extraterrestrial fantasy that is unfalsifiable, a positive fusion reactor of popular emotion and, like a television franchise that never ends, always generating fresh content for our debased attention economy: what could possibly suit Trump better?
It’s just another thing he’s ruined. Meanwhile: I suppose I’ll have to make do with Bigfoot.
