In the 70s, 80s and especially the 90s UFOs were huge business. This extended into the early 2000s but over the past few years I’ve noticed fewer people seem to care about or believe in alien abductions, Roswell and so on.
Why do you think this is? I think one reason is that conspiracy theories about GMOs, the new world order etc have taken a lot of their thunder. UFOs are largely connected to the Cold War and now it’s all about the global economy and they no longer fit our folklore.
Also the advent of YouTube and videophones from 2005 onward hasn’t brought out any smoking gun UFO case, which to me is arguably a case of absence of evidence being evidence of absence.
The passing of the 2012 date which was largely associated with aliens seems in general to have killed a lot of interest in the paranormal too including my own. I actually became a hardcore skeptic after the Mayan Calendar date passed and nothing at all happened.
The last I heard of it, ufology had morphed from flying saucers and LGM to ethereal contacts from alternate planes and the like. But I think the saucer watchers are still out there.
If I feel optimistic, the reason is that people realize that in a world where a meteor descending gets filmed by multiple people, a real alien craft flying by would have more than one smudgy picture documenting it.
If I’m feeling pessimistic it is because we haven’t had any popular saucer movies which have tended to drive sightings in the past.
I suspect it’s a combination of things, including trend cycles. Aliens went out and vampires and zombies came in.
A couple of developments since the late '90s may have contributed to the change in fashion:
9/11 - Humans did it, and suddenly human monsters were scarier than aliens. Vampires and zombies are human monsters, so they resonated more deeply than they did pre-9/11, leading to a surge in popularity.
The unsatisfactory ending of The X-Files - There was no truth out there. Just a confused mess of bad storytelling. Aliens just weren’t as much fun any more.
I’ve heard that the mix of cameraphones and the internet letting people do more in depth investigations has made it harder to find UFO sightings that can stand up to investigation.
^ This. With the explosion of easy and cheap imaging, everything gets photographed. That old bug-a-boo evidence is getting harder to find, because the poor photography of the past has been solved.
There was the thing on UFO’s by Penn and Teller and it basically made all the UFO people just look like a bunch of new age freaks and snake oil salesmen. There is almost no serious science in it.
I think that’s pretty much what the vast opinion is anymore. Its been examined to death and nothing substantial was ever found.
Times change, technology changes, and along with it–people change their attittudes: Their attitudes about evidence, and–most importantly— their attitudes about being stupid.
Think about it for a minute: suppose your best friend in the world, somebody you really trust, told you he saw a UFO.
Your reaction twenty years ago:–“wow…that’s hard to believe, but he’s such a good,trustworthy guy, maybe I should listen to him carefully.”
His explanation twenty years ago:" this is going to be hard to believe, but I know I really saw something."
Your reaction today: “show me the pics”.
His reaction today: "I’d look really stupid if I make silly claims and don’t have any proof. So I won’t let my imagination go wild like I could have done 20 years ago–Because I’d look really, really stupid, and people will laugh at me. Everybody knows you have to have pics, or it didn’t happen.*
*off topic, but it’s an interesting question: when did the phrase “pics, or it didn’t happen” enter our vocabulary?
Yeah, there’s a difference between movie aliens and real aliens. Movie aliens compete with vampires and zombies, real aliens compete what whatever bullshit people actually believe at the moment. (Which I’m not sure what is, except that religion seems to never completely go out of fashion.)
There are Haitian slaves who have been drugged to fake their deaths, and the drug destroyed their minds so they can’t think for themselves anymore. This by the way, is the original zombie.
While the word “zombie” is derived from Haitian Vodou practices, the idea that they’re real, and caused by exposure to some sort of mind-altering chemical, does not have a lot of factual support.
If it was to do with plausibility then homeopathy wouldn’t be in an upswing. UFOlogy has always been cyclical. The Scareships in the 1890s, the Shaver mystery between the wars, the foo fighters during the war, flying saucers after the war, contactees in the fifties, abductees and Roswell in the eighties and nineties.
Part of the problem for UFO enthusiasts is that they currently face so much competition from other sources of lunacy.
People who formerly would have gravitated to spaceships and alien abduction are now focused on chemtrails, Morgellons’ disease, 9/11 revelations and additional conspiracy-drenched forms of entertainment.
These have always fascinated me because they could have been real - some advanced experimenter or group messing with dirigibles or blimps just a decade or two ahead of more successful attempts. Has a decent investigation of them ever been published?