Is That Really a Flying Saucer? Adam Kirsch on Why We Want to Believe in Aliens

About this episode

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe , Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact. The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that…