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

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's always nice to have old friends back on the show, especially hard-headed ones like today's guest, Adam Kirsch. He's been on the show a couple of times before, bringing his hard-headed wisdom to all sorts of interesting things. He was on back in January of 19... not 19, January of 2023, talking about the revolt against humanity. His book was called The Revolt Against Humanity, and it's an attempt to expose some of the absurdities of the transhumanist movement. And he was on a year later talking about what he at least calls the nonsense of settler colonialism. He had a book out back then, a rather controversial one called On Settler Colonialism, Ideology, Violence and Justice. And now he's back with another controversial book and subject. We Want To Believe, How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters. It's Adam Hirsch's hard-headed tape, on why we seem to be obsessed these days with UFOs. He's joining us from the Upper East Side of New York City. Adam, are there any aliens up there on the Upper East Side?

Adam Kirsch (1:48)

None have been spotted so far. I mean, you never know, but I'm not aware of any.

Andrew Keen (1:52)

So is this a trilogy, Adam, your hard-headed attempt to undermine some of the rather childish assumptions and visions of some Americans?

Adam Kirsch (2:05)

You know, when you put it that way, there is some similarity between these three books. For one thing, they're all fairly short books, and they're all looking at popular ideas. I think that the difference is that with UFOs, I think it's still the majority belief that UFOs are not real, do not exist. But there are a substantial sort of minority of people who think that they do exist and that maybe the government is hiding the evidence, knows more than it's letting on. And in particular, I think that idea got a lot more mainstream over the last 10 years than it used to be. There have always been people who claim to believe in UFOs who said that they had seen one or maybe even been on board one. But then in 2017, I think something really shifted in the way that the mainstream media, the government talked about these claims. And that's what the book starts from.

That's what it's about initially and then sort of broadens out.

Andrew Keen (2:57)

Yeah. And you talk about 2017 I know there was a piece in the New York Times entitled Glowing Auras and Black Money, The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program. Does it really matter though, Adam? I mean, some of it seems to me to be slightly childish.

But compared to transhumanism and certainly AI and settler colonialism, Israel and the United States, is this slightly frivolous or does it actually have an impact on the world?

Adam Kirsch (3:28)

Well, it's an interesting subject to think about. I enjoy thinking about it because in a way, the fact that UFOs don't exist and aren't real makes it a pure thought experiment. It allows us to think in a very almost consequence-free way about things like, who decides what's real? Whose authority do we trust?

Why is it important for people to believe in aliens? What kind of impulses does that satisfy? I think that this change in the way that we think and talk about it has coincided with a revolt against all kinds of scientific expertise of government authority.

It comes at a populist moment when the consensus on a lot of things that are more practically important like vaccines, for example, public health, a lot of economic and political ideas that once seemed like common sense are increasingly contested and a lot of ideas that people once thought were outlandish and that no one would take seriously are now taken very seriously. So all of that, I think, can be approached through the lens of why do we want to believe? Why do we want to believe in things that all the experts, all the scientists tell us there have been no UFOs here? If people continue to want to believe in UFOs, why is that and how can you respond to a claim like that?

Andrew Keen (4:42)

Do all the experts reject it? A few years ago, we had the Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, on the show.

He talked about, he asked whether extraterrestrials were social distancing from us, because that was at the height of COVID. He's had a couple of best sellers on this subject, Interstellar and Extraterrestrial. So it's not just non-scientists who have been, so to speak, infected with these ideas, is it Adam?