From War of the Worlds to UAP Disclosures: Culture, Policy, and the Question of Contact
To the point
Aliens captivate us because pop culture and official inquiry feed each other, a point Fraser Sherman makes as cinema and ideas about extraterrestrials stay in dialogue, spanning Steven Spielberg’s trailer, Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast, The X-Files, and Roswell myths, with Pentagon disinformation noted, and Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary—soon a film with Ryan Gosling—promoting empathy and science as the basis for friendship, while Avi Loeb and others warn that contact would be a Copernican shift for humanity and raise religious questions about souls.
