Tag: gore vidal

by David Halperin

1.

Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?”  It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is.  “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest.  UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years.  They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed.  Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard.  What?

This is the real “UFO mystery.”  It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in.  I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject.  Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.”  I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space.  I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →

by David Halperin

1.

Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?”  It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is.  “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest.  UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years.  They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed.  Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard.  What?

This is the real “UFO mystery.”  It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in.  I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject.  Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.”  I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space.  I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →