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I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.
This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.
There was a guy on 90 Day Fiancée who explicitly said to his very religious fiancée that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he does believe in aliens.
Apologies for the Facebook link, couldn’t find it elsewhere: https://facebook.com/90DayFiance/videos/children-to-aliens-90-day-fiance-season-8/414612926588272/
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My experience is that a pretty big part of the Christian left(which I was raised adjacent to) gets very into aliens as a replacement for doctrine. Now obviously ancient aliens are stupid in a not-even-pro social way, but they’re a fairly common replacement for taking certain passages in genesis literally.
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I think they have. Aliens are given either by technology or by psychic powers the abilities of former polytheistic gods. They can create wonders in the heavens, they can gift us ideas and technology and revelations. And because they have an aura of the scientific about them, even things that we know make little sense get brushed aside because they’re advanced.
And like everything else, it’s used by people with something to gain from the belief. Space agencies and astronomers and astrophysicists use aliens to get funding. The military uses them to hide black projects. History channel gets views by claiming that every weird text in sacred books is really about aliens. It’s a cheap trick but it works where credulous talk of angels, gods, demons, fairies, and orcs would be mocked and dismissed as crazy talk. I find it rather instructive to mentally substitute “angels” in places where people are talking about aliens. Most of the time the story sounds insane at that point, almost exactly like a religion.
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